John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos

'H'm,' said Zellaby, on my return. 'So you are an honorary villager, are you? I rather thought you might be. Just remind me to tell Angela to let the cook know, there's a good fellow.'

At the same time that Zellaby and I were talking at Kyle Manor, more talk, similar in matter but different in manner, was going on at The Grange. Dr Torrance, feeling some sanction in the presence of Colonel Westcott, had endeavoured to answer the Chief Constable's questions more explicitly than before. A stage had been reached, however, when lack of coordination between the parties could no longer be disguised, and a noticeably off-beat query caused the doctor to say, a little forlornly:

'I am afraid I cannot have made the situation quite clear to you, Sir John.'

The Chief Constable grunted impatiently.

'Everybody keeps on telling me that, and I'm not denying it; nobody round here seems to be capable of making anything clear. Everybody keeps on telling me, too – and without producing a scrap of evidence that I can understand – that these infernal children are in some way responsible for last night's affair – even you, who I am given to understand are in charge of them. I agree that I do not understand a situation in which young children are allowed to get so thoroughly out of hand that they can cause a breach of the peace amounting to a riot. I don't see why I should be expected to understand it. It is as a Constable that I wish to see one of the ringleaders, and find out what he has to say about it.'

'But, Sir John, I have already explained to you that there are no ringleaders...'

'I know – I know. I heard you. Everyone is equal here, and all that all very well perhaps in theory, but you know as well as I do that in every group there are fellers that stand out, and that those are the chaps you've got to get hold of. Manage them, and you can manage the rest.' He paused expectantly.

Dr Torrance exchanged a helpless look with Colonel Westcott. Bernard gave a slight shrug, and the faintest of nods. Dr Torrance's look of unhappiness increased. He said uneasily:

'Very well, Sir John, since you make it virtually a police order I have no alternative, but I must ask you to watch your words carefully. The Children are very – er – sensitive.'

His choice of the final word was unfortunate. In his own vocabulary it had a somewhat technical meaning; in the Chief Constable's it was a word used by doting mothers about spoilt sons, and did nothing to make him feel more sympathetically disposed towards the Children. He made a vowelless sound of disapproval as Dr Torrance got up and left the room. Bernard half opened his mouth to reinforce the Doctor's warning, and then decided that it would only increase the Chief Constable's irritation, thus doing more harm than good. The cussedness of commonsense, Bernard reflected, was that, invaluable as it might be in the right soils, it could turn into a pestiferous kind of bind-weed in others. So the two waited in silence until the Doctor presently returned, bringing one of the boy-Children with him.

'This is Eric,' he said, by way of introduction. To the boy he added, 'Sir John Tenby wishes to ask you some questions. It is his duty as Chief Constable, you see, to make a report on the trouble last night.'

The boy nodded, and turned to look at Sir John. Dr Torrance resumed his seat at his desk, and watched the two of them intently, and uneasily.

The boy's regard was steady, careful, but quite neutral; it gave no trace of feeling. Sir John met it with equal steadiness. A healthy-looking boy, he thought. A bit thin – well, not exactly thin in the sense of being scraggy, slight would be a better word. It was difficult to make much of a judgement from the features; the face was good-looking, though without weakness which often accompanies male good looks; on the other hand, it did not show strength – the mouth, indeed, was a little small, though not petulant. There was not a lot to be learnt from the face as a whole. The eyes, however, were even more remarkable than he had been led to expect. He had been told of the curious golden colour of the irises, but no one had succeeded in conveying to him their striking lambency, their strange effect of being softly lit from within. For a moment it disquieted him, then he took himself in hand; reminded himself that he had some kind of freak to deal with; a boy only nine years old, yet looking every bit of sixteen, brought up, moreover, on some of these fiddle-faddling theories of self-expression, non-inhibition, and so on. He decided to treat the boy as if he were the age he looked, and constrained himself into that man-to-boy attitude that is represented by its practitioners as man-to-man.

'Serious business last night,' he observed. 'Our job to clear it up and find out what really happened – who was responsible for the trouble, and so forth. People keep on telling me that you and the others here were – now, what do you say to that?'

'No,' said the boy promptly.

The Chief Constable nodded. One would scarcely expect an immediate admission, in any case.

'What happened, exactly?' he asked.

'The village people came here to burn The Grange down,' said the boy.

'You're sure of that?'

'It was what they said, and there was no other reason to bring them here at that time,' said the boy.

'All right, we'll not go into the whys and wherefores just now. Let's take it from there. You say some of them came intending to burn the place. Then I suppose others came to stop them doing it, and the fighting started?'

'Yes,' agreed the boy, but less definitely.

'Then, in point of fact, you and your friends had nothing to do with it. You were just spectators?'

'No,' said the boy. 'We had to defend ourselves. It was necessary, or they would have burnt the house.'

'You mean you called out to some of them to stop the rest, something like that?'

'No,' the boy told him patiently. 'We made them fight one another. We could simply have sent them away, but if we had they would very likely have come back some other time. Now they will not, they understand it is better for them to leave us alone.'

The Chief Constable paused, a little nonplussed.

'You say you "made" them fight one another. How did you do that?'

'It is too difficult to explain. I don't think you could understand,' said the boy, judicially.

Sir John pinked a little.

'Nevertheless, I'd like to hear,' he said, with an air of generous restraint that was wasted.

'It wouldn't be any use,' the boy told him. He spoke simply, and without innuendo, as one stating a fact.

The Chief Constable's face became a deeper pink. Dr Torrance put in hurriedly:

'This is an extremely abstruse matter, Sir John, and one which all of us here have been trying to understand, with very little headway, for some years now. One can really get little nearer to it than to say that the Children "willed" the people in the crowd to attack one another.'

Sir John looked at him and then at the boy. He muttered, but held himself in check. Presently, after two or three deep breaths, he spoke to the boy again, but now with his tone a little ruffled.

'However it was done – and we'll have to go into that later – you are admitting that you were responsible for what happened?'

'We are responsible for defending ourselves,' the boy said.

'To the extent of four lives and thirteen serious injuries – when you could , you say, have simply sent them away.'

'They wanted to kill us,' the boy told him, indifferently.

The Chief Constable looked lengthily at him.

'I don't understand how you can have done it, but I take your word for it that you did, for the present; also your word that it was unnecessary.'

'They would have come again. It would have been necessary then,' replied the boy.