Chapter 5 Chapter Five: The Retirement of Mr. Bensington

Just as the Royal "God Food" investigation team was preparing to report, the fear of Hercules really began to show the possibility of its escape.This second escape came so early and was therefore all the more unfortunate, at least from Cossar's point of view.For it is stated in the draft report which has survived that this questionnaire, in the most able member of its staff, Dr. Stephen Winkels (FRS, MD, FRCP, D. Doctor of Letters, etc.), has determined that accidental escape is impossible, and is also prepared to recommend that the preparation of "God Food" be entrusted to a competent committee (headed by Winkels), and Take full control of its sale; this will suffice to eliminate well-founded objections to its free spread.This committee will have an absolute monopoly.And the fact that the first and most frightening accident of this second escape happened within fifty yards of the cottage where Dr. A living irony.

There can now be no doubt that Redwood's refusal to inform Winkels of the ingredients in the Fear of Hercules No. 4 aroused in the gentleman a strange and strong desire for analytical chemistry.He was not a very good experimentalist, and therefore felt it inappropriate to do such a thing in the excellently equipped laboratories available in London, and without consulting anyone, even with a hint of secrecy, So I ran to the simple laboratory in the garden of Keston's residence and started it.In this quest he seemed to have manifested neither great energy nor great ability; in fact, it was learned that he had worked it off and on for a month before giving up the quest.

The laboratory in the garden where he works has very simple equipment. The water supply comes from an upright water pipe, and the sewage flows from a pipe to a remote corner of the public land outside the garden wall, and flows into a alder tree. A muddy pool overgrown with rushes.The pipes had cracked, and the remains of God's Food had escaped through the cracks and flowed into puddles among the rushes, just in time for spring. In this frothy little corner, life is actively growing.Frog eggs float on the surface, shaken by tadpoles that have just left the capsule; some tiny water snails crawl and move, and beneath a green rush stalk a large water beetle larva struggles to emerge from its egg shell.I doubt whether the reader knows (I do not know why) that the larvae of this beetle are called deidicas.It was a knobby, monstrous thing, very muscular, and moved with extreme suddenness, swimming upside down with its tail sticking out of the water; it was about as long as the top of a man's thumb, or longer—two Inch, that is to say of those who do not eat the god-food - two pointed jaws brought together at the front of the head - a tubular pointed jaw - through which it is wont to suck the blood of its victims.

Tadpoles and water snails were the first to eat the floating particles of godfood; especially the wriggling tadpoles, which eagerly ate once they got a taste of it.However, as soon as one of them starts to grow noticeably in that little world of tadpoles and starts taking one of its little brothers for meat, shoot!A water beetle larva plunged its curved blood-sucking fork into the tadpole's heart, and along with the bright red blood, the solution of Hercules' Fear IV flowed into the body of a new client.Only the rushes and the scum in the water and the weeds and saplings in the bottom sludge share with these monsters their divine food.Then a sweeping of the study sent a fresh torrent of god-food into the puddle, over it, and brought all these wicked growths into the puddle under the roots of the alder tree.

The first to discover this was Mr. Lucky Carrington, a specialist science teacher at the London Board of Education, and in his spare time an expert in freshwater algae, and his discovery certainly need not be envied.One day, he came to Keston Common to fill some specimen tubes for later investigation, a dozen or so stoppered tubes jingled slightly in his pocket, and holding a walking stick with a metal point, he crossed the sand dunes, Go to the pool. A young gardener who was standing on the top of the kitchen steps, trimming Dr. Winkles' hedges, saw him come to this remote corner, and found his doings inexplicable, yet interesting enough to be quite Observe carefully.

He saw Mr. Carrington stooping over the edge of the pool, looking into the water with his hands on the trunk of the old alder tree, but of course he could not understand that Mr. Carrington also saw the large round spots and strands of unfamiliar-looking algae on the bottom of the water. The surprise I felt.A tadpole was seen--they had all been wiped out by then--and Mr. Carrington seemed to see nothing out of the ordinary except for the gigantic algae.He rolled up his sleeves, leaned forward, and put his hands deep into the water to collect specimens.His hands reach down.Suddenly, something flashed out of the cool shadows under the roots of the tree—

Swish!It had bitten deeply into his arm—it was grotesque in shape, more than a foot long, brown and knobby, like a scorpion. It was so hideous and so startlingly wounded that Mr. Carrington couldn't keep his balance.He felt himself going to fall, and cried out loudly.With a crash, he fell face forward into the pool.The boy saw him disappear and heard him struggling in the water.The unfortunate man reappeared in the child's field of vision, capless, covered in water, screaming. The kid had never heard a man scream. The startled stranger seemed to be pulling something away from the side of his face.There was blood running down his face.He waved his hands in despair, jumped like a madman, ran ten or twelve yards wildly, fell to the ground, and rolled, rolled, and was out of sight again.

The boy immediately went down the steps and through the hedge—fortunately, he still had the gardener's shears in his hand.He said that when he walked through the gorse bushes, he had the heart to turn his head back. He was afraid that he would run into a madman, but the pair of scissors in his hand reassured him a little. "Anyway, I can poke out his eyeballs," he explained, and Mr. Carrington caught sight of him, and immediately behaved like a desperate but sane man.He struggled to stand up, staggered a few steps, stood still, and walked towards the boy. "Look!" he cried, "I can't get them off!"

With suspicion, the child saw three horrible larvae on Mr. Carrington's cheek, Guangchun's arm and thigh.Their limp, sinewy brown bodies writhed furiously, their huge jaws sinking deep into his flesh, sucking the precious life out of him.They bite as tight as a bulldog.Mr. Carrington tried to get the monster off his face, but all he could do was to tear the flesh where it had bitten, and get a bright red blood all over his neck and coat. "I'll cut it," cried the boy. "Hold on, sir." With the zeal of his age for the situation, he cut off Mr. Carrington's assailant from the head one by one. "Okay," a note fell in front of him, and the child's face twitched.Even so, they still bite so firmly and so tightly that the severed head is still sucking deeply into the flesh, and the blood rushes out from the back of its neck.The boy took a few more cuts before he stopped—one of the scissors wounded Mr. Carrington.

"I can't get them off!" repeated Mr. Carrington. Standing for a while, shaking, bleeding profusely.He gently rubbed the wound with his hands, inspecting his palms.Then he fell to his knees and fell headlong to the ground at the boy's feet, passing out between the still throbbing body of his vanquished foe. Luckily the boy didn't think of splashing water in his face--for there were more such horrible things in the water under the roots of the alder--and he walked across the pool to the garden to call for some help. There he met the gardener and coachman, who told him the whole situation.

When they came to Mr. Carrington he was sitting up, somewhat dizzy and weak, but able to warn them of the danger in the pool. In this way, the world got the first notice that the divine food escaped again.A week later, there was full-scale action on Keston Common, which naturalists call a dispersal center.This time there were no wasps or mice, no earwigs and nettles, but at least three water spiders, some dragonfly larvae now becoming dragonflies, dazzled all Kent with their soaring turquoise bodies. and a repulsive gelatinous scum rising up the pond's edge, from which sprung a mass of slender green grass stalks that undulated halfway up the garden path to Winkles' house. .There the rushes and some horsetails and things started to grow like crazy, and it wasn't over until the pool was drained. It soon became clear in the public mind that this time there was not just one center of diffusion, but a considerable number of centers.One in Yiling - there is no doubt about it - from where flies and red spiders proliferate; One of them, added to the world a rather dreadful species of cockroaches--in an old house in Bloomsbury lived these horrible things.Suddenly, people found themselves living through another Hickoryboro affair, this time instead of giant chickens, giant mice, and giant bees, all kinds of familiar things grew up into strange monsters.Each dispersal center explodes with its regional flora and fauna. Today we know that each of these centers was originally related to a patient of Dr. Winkles, but this was not possible to see at the time.Dr. Winkles was the least likely to be hated in this matter.Naturally, there was great panic—and great indignation; but the indignation was not against Dr. Winkles, but against the God Eater, and especially against the slaughtered Bensington, who was, from the very beginning, the public In my mind I insisted on identifying the only person responsible for this new substance. The ensuing attempt to lynch him was of the sort of explosive incident that looms large primarily in history, but in real life is nothing more than the most inconspicuous accident. The outbreak of the incident remains a mystery to this day. The core of the mob came largely from a Hyde Park rally organized by extremists of Caterham's group against "God Food".Yet no one seems to have actually moved the original motion, or even hinted at such a wild idea with so many people in the first place.This is a question that should be studied by M. Gustave Le Bon—the mystery of the psychology of crowds. It began at three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, in the midst of a rather large and hideous London crowd, which, completely out of control, thronged Thursday Street, intending to put Bensington to death as a tribute to all scientific explorers. It was a warning to the public, and indeed it came closer to its target than any London riot since the fall of the fence in Hyde Park in the far-off mid-Victorian era.So near did the mob come to its object, that for an hour or more a single word would have been enough to seal the fate of the unfortunate gentleman. His first awareness of the matter was the noise in the street. He went to the window to look around, but he didn't feel that disaster was imminent in the slightest.For more than a minute, he watched the seething crowd at the entrance of the house deal with a dozen or so policemen who couldn't stop them, before he fully realized his own importance in the affair.It dawned on him—this roaring, thronging crowd was out to get him. He was alone at home—perhaps, luckily—his sister Zhen had gone to drink tea with one of her mother's relatives in Yiling.He knew no more about how to deal with the situation than he did with the rituals of the Last Judgment. He dashed around the house, asking his furniture what to do with itself, locking and unlocking doors, rushing to doorways, windows, and bedrooms—and then the caretaker of the building came looking for him. "There's no time, sir," he said. "They've found your room number in the hall! They're coming up!" He dragged Bensington to the aisle, where the chaotic voices of approaching people could already be heard from the grand staircase.He locked the door, and with his key opened the door of the apartment opposite, and led Bensington in. "Now it's the only chance," he said. He pushed open a window, and outside the window was a ventilation duct. Iron hooks and nails were installed on the outer wall of the ventilation duct, forming the roughest and most dangerous ladder, which was used for the upper-floor residents to escape in case of fire.He shoved Mr. Bensington out of the window, told him how to hold on tight, made him climb up, and beat his leg with a bunch of keys whenever he stopped.Bensington sometimes felt that he had to climb up this vertical ladder endlessly forever.Above, the low wall of the terrace was so remote and inaccessible; perhaps a mile away; below—he dared not think of what was below. "Grab it!" The administrator grabbed his ankle bone. It was a terrible thing to be grabbed by the ankle bone like this. Bensington grabbed the iron hook on it like a drowning man, and screamed in fear. It turned out that the caretaker had broken a pane of glass, and then, he seemed to have jumped a considerable distance sideways, before hearing the window slide in its frame.What is he shouting. Mr. Bensington turned his head cautiously until he could see the administrator. "Go down to level six," the administrator ordered. It seemed silly to climb up and down like this, but Bensington slowly and carefully put one foot down. "Don't pull me!" cried Bensington, seeing that the caretaker was about to help him through the open window. Reaching the window from the ladder seemed to him an awe-inspiring feat even for a flying fox.When at last he did so, it was not so much with the hope of accomplishing the act that he had in mind an honorable suicide.The administrator pulled him in rather rudely. "You have to stay here," said the caretaker, "my key won't work here. It's an American lock. I'll go out, close the door, and find the caretaker of these buildings. Lock you in. As long as you don't Just go to the window. This is the most violent crowd I have ever seen, as long as they think you are not there, they will probably be content to smash your things "The sign on the door said I was home," Bensington said. "Damn it! Anyway, it's better not to let them find some—" He went out and slammed the door. Bensington was left alone again. He got under the bed. It was there that Cossar found him. When he was found, he was almost dead of fright, for Cossar had come across the passage and shouldered his way through the door. "Come out, Bensington," he said. "Don't be afraid, it's me. We've got to go. They set fire here. The stewards are out, and the servants are gone. I'm glad I found the man who knows where you are." "look at this!" Bensington, looking out from under the bed, saw some unidentifiable garments on Cossar's arms; besides, he was holding a black bonnet. "They're driving people out," Cossar said, "and if they don't set fire, they'll come here. The army won't be here in an hour. Fifty percent chance. There's a lot of rogues, The more you go to a rich man's house, the more it's going to be. It's obvious. They're going to throw the place out. Put on this skirt and bonnet, Bensington, and come out with me." "You mean?" Bensington poked his head out from under the bed like a turtle. "I mean, put it on and follow me! It's obvious." With sudden passion, he dragged Bensington out from under the bed and dressed him up like an old lady. Cossar rolled up Bensington's trousers, told him to kick off his slippers, tore off his collar, tie, and jacket, covered his head with a black dress, and dressed him in a red flannel corset and Vest.Cossar told him to take off the too characteristic glasses and press the millinery cap onto his head. "You're such a natural old lady," he said, tying it.Then came the elasticated boots—like a thresher's screwdriver—and the shawl.The make-up is complete. "Walk around," Cossar said. Bensington took two steps obediently. "Okay," Cossar said. Wearing this camouflage, always stepping awkwardly on unfamiliar skirts, begging prayers over his own head in an unnatural falsetto, to play his role properly.Amid roaring roars of lynching him, the discoverer of the Fear of Hercules IV walks the corridors of Chesterfield House and into the raging, chaotic crowd, completely out of the thread of our story. Disappeared. After this escape, he has not once again had anything to do with the astonishing development of the Food, and he was, of all those involved, the one who made the most important contribution in the beginning. The little man who made it all came out of our story, and after a time he was completely out of everything that could be seen or said.But since he started it all, it seems fitting to write a little more for him.Someone described what happened afterwards when he was recognized by the people of Tunbridge Wells.After a brief period of invisibility, realizing how ephemeral, idiosyncratic, and purposeless the mob's rage was, he reappeared in Tunbridge Wells.He had emerged under the wing of Sister Jane, healing his nerve shocks, disinterested in anything, and seemed to be sympathetic to the struggle that was raging at the time around the new diffusion center and the young children on God Food. They were completely indifferent. He stayed at the Mount Glory Spa Lodge, which had rather unusual bathing facilities, such as carbonation baths, carbolic acid baths, galvanic and induction electrotherapy, massage therapy, pine baths, starch and hemlock baths, radium baths, light baths, Baths of heather, of bran and needles, of pitch and bird feathers--baths of all kinds in short; not yet perfect.Sometimes he took a taxi, wore a seal-skin village jacket, or, when his feet allowed, walked to Pantel, where, under the supervision of Sister Jane, he pecked at the iron mineral water . His arched shoulders, his pink complexion, and his glittering spectacles were all Tunbridge Wells's.There was nothing one could dislike about him, in fact, the place and the hotel seemed honored by his presence.Nothing can take away his honor now.Although he would no longer follow the progress of his great invention in the daily papers, when he walked through the hotel lounge, or through Pantel, and heard people whisper "There he is! There he is!" Evidently it softened his mouth and lit up his eyes, which was by no means flattering. This little person, such a small person, actually distributed the divine food to the world!One really does not know what is more amazing, the greatness or the smallness of these men of science and philosophy.Imagine, in Pantel, wearing a coat lined with fur, standing under the china window where the fountain gushes out, sipping iron mineral water in his hand.Above the gilt rim of the cup, a bright eye stared at Sister Jane with an expression of impenetrable seriousness. "Hmm," he said, taking another sip. Thus, in memory of our discoverer for the last time, and having painted this portrait of our discoverer, let us now turn away from him--a small dot in the foreground--to the Huge scenes, turn to his God Food story, see how those giant boys grow up day by day, and how to enter a world too small for them, see the law woven by the "God Food" investigation team and how the web of rules closes on them as they grow older.until--