The Food of the Gods quotes

They were of course quite undistinguished looking men, as indeed all true scientists are.

There is more personal distinction about the mildest-mannered actor alive than there is about the entire Royal Society.

Mr. Bensington was short and very, very bald, and he stooped slightly; he wore gold-rimmed spectacles and cloth boots that were abundantly cut open because of his numerous corns, and Professor Redwood was entirely ordinary in his appearance.

He compared his unknown substance to oil in machinery. A growing animal was rather like an engine, he suggested, that can move a certain distance and must then be oiled before it can run again. (

“But why shouldn’t one oil the engine from without?”

said Mr. Bensington, when he read the paper.) And all this, said Redwood, with the delightful nervous inconsecutiveness of his class, might very probably be found to throw a light upon the mystery of certain of the ductless glands.

But, incidentally, we do set forces in operation—new forces. We mustn’t control them—and nobody else can. Practically, Redwood, the thing is out of our hands. We supply the material—”

“And they,” said Redwood, turning to the window, “get the experience.”

“So far as this trouble down in Kent goes I am not disposed to worry further.”

“

Pity they can’t shoot all these officials and get a new lot,

” remarked Cossar with a sigh.

“I wish to goodness you’d spend half an hour in my nursery when the Food’s a little late,” said Redwood, with a note of exasperation in his voice; “then you wouldn’t talk like that, Bensington. Besides—Fancy warning Winkles … No!

The tide of this thing has caught us unawares, and whether we’re frightened or whether we’re not⁠—we’ve got to swim!

”

“Redwood!” he said, to point the allusion, “make it so!”

There is, it seems, an upward limit to the pride of maternity

, and this in the case of Mrs. Redwood was reached when her offspring completed his sixth month of terrestrial existence, broke down his high-class bassinet-perambulator, and was brought home, bawling, in the milk-truck.

Then, “The place must be full of interest,” said Redwood. “

Interest is food for a child, and blankness torture and starvation.

He must have pictures galore.” There were no pictures hung about the room for any permanent service, however, but blank frames were provided into which new pictures would come and pass thence into a portfolio so soon as their fresh interest had passed.

Now what sort of books will he need? There is his imagination to be fed. That, after all, is the crown of every education. The crown—as sound habits of mind and conduct are the throne.

No imagination at all is brutality; a base imagination is lust and cowardice; but a noble imagination is God walking the earth again.

He must dream too of a dainty fairyland and of all the quaint little things of life, in due time. But he must feed chiefly on the splendid real;

The boy saw him vanish, and heard the splashing of his struggle in the water. The unfortunate man emerged again into the boy’s field of vision, hatless and streaming with water, and screaming!

Never before had the boy heard screams from a man.

This astonishing stranger appeared to be tearing at something on the side of his face. There appeared streaks of blood there.

… certainly came from an Anti-Boomfood meeting in Hyde Park organised by extremists of the Caterham party, but there seems no one in the world who actually first proposed, no one who ever first hinted a suggestion of the outrage at which so many people assisted.

It is a problem for M. Gustave le Bon⁠—a mystery in the psychology of crowds.

The fact emerges that about three o’clock on Sunday afternoon a remarkably big and ugly London crowd, entirely out of hand, came rolling down Thursday Street intent on Bensington’s exemplary death as a warning to all scientific investigators, and that it came nearer accomplishing its …

He made him take off his all too characteristic spectacles, and clapped the bonnet on his head. “

You might have been born an old woman,

” he said as he tied the strings. Then came the spring-side boots—a terrible wrench for corns—and the shawl, and the disguise was complete. “Up and down,” said Cossar, and Bensington obeyed.

That’s him!” it was not dissatisfaction that softened his mouth and gleamed for a moment in his eye.

This little figure, this minute little figure, launched the Food of the Gods upon the world!

One does not know which is the most amazing, the greatness or the littleness of these scientific and philosophical men. You figure him there on the Pantiles, in the overcoat trimmed with fur.

There were some strange and desperate struggles in obscure places.

The Food begot heroes in the cause of littleness⁠ ⁠…

And men took such happenings into their lives, and met them by the expedients of the moment, and told one another there was “no change in the essential order of things.”

The fussy pointless revolutions of the old time, a vast crowd of silly little people chasing some silly little monarch and the like, had indeed died out and passed away; but Change had not died out.

It was only Change that had changed.

The New was coming in its own fashion and beyond the common understanding of the world.

Thus the Vicar.

He loved a classical quotation subtly misapplied.

Below, Mrs. Skinner, inelegant but resolute, had involved herself curiously with Wilmerding’s stile.

Sloppet, I am glad to say, felt it—in his more thoughtful moments at any rate.

It was like sending a dog home when you start out for a walk, he told me.

But the intellectual and moral training of young Caddles, though fragmentary, was explicit. From the first, Vicar, mother, and all the world, combined to make it clear to him that his giant strength was not for use.

However, the truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it. Every time and always the Vicar got his imagination under. And he used always to address young Caddles stoutly in a good clear service tenor.

“Being a good boy, Albert Edward?”

And the young giant, edging closer to the wall and blushing deeply, would answer, “Yessir—trying.”

That law he never completely obeyed, because of the vast interest the highroad had for him. But it turned what had been his constant resort into a stolen pleasure. He was limited at last almost entirely to old pasture and the Downs.

I do not know what he would have done if it had not been for the Downs.

There there were spaces where he might wander for miles, and over these spaces he wandered.

“Even when it’s for their own comfort. Such a nice place we’d have made for them too.”

“They seem to spend their silly little lives getting in each other’s way,” said the eldest boy

, “Rights and laws and regulations and rascalities; it’s like a game of spellicans. … Well, anyhow, they’ll have to live in their grubby, dirty, silly little houses for a bit longer. It’s very evident we can’t go on with this.”

And the chains had been tightening upon them, and tightening with every year of growth. Each year they grew, and the Food spread and great things multiplied, each year the stress and tension rose.

The Food had been at first for the great mass of mankind a distant marvel, and now It was coming home to every threshold

, and threatening, pressing against and distorting the whole order of life. It blocked this, it overturned that; it changed natural products, and by changing natural products it stopped employments and threw men out of work by the hundred thousands;

So also will I. I am for Reaction—unstinted and fearless Reaction. Unless you mean to take this Food also, what else is there to do in all the world? We have trifled in the middle ways too long. You!

Trifling in the middle ways is your habit, your circle of existence, your space and time.

So, not I! I am against the Food, with all my strength and purpose against the Food.”

She moved among the chestnut trees, with the destined lover drawing near to her, unanticipated, unsuspected. She thrust her hands in among the branches, breaking them and gathering them. She was alone in the world. Then—

She looked up, and in that moment she was mated.

We must needs put our imaginations to his stature to see the beauty he saw. That unapproachable greatness that prevents our immediate sympathy with her did not exist for him.

The clock of the parish church struck twelve, and after an abyss of time—one.

They mocked him with lunch.

He ate a mouthful and tumbled the food about a little in order to get it taken away, drank freely of whisky, and then took a chair and went back to the window.

He ate a mouthful and tumbled the food about a little in order to get it taken away, drank freely of whisky, and then took a chair and went back to the window.

The minutes expanded into grey immensities, and for a time perhaps he slept.

…

No doubt they had got Cossar also?

Caterham was a religious man. Redwood clung to that.

The back of his mind was a black curtain, and on that curtain there came and went a word—a word written in letters of fire. He struggled perpetually against that word.

What most concerned his mind now was not the powers that held the fastness away there to the south, not defeat and death, but the effect of these things upon his Majority, the cardinal reality in his life.

He had to defeat the Giants or go under.

He was by no means absolutely despairful.

From that, with a steady unfaltering expansion, in spite of every effort of men to help and hinder, the Food had spread through the whole world of man. And now?

“Even if they kill them all,” Redwood whispered, “the thing is done.”

The secret of its making was known far and wide. That had been his own work. Plants, animals, a multitude of distressful growing children would conspire irresistibly to force the world to revert again to the Food, whatever happened in the present struggle.