PART TWO (Continued). THE WONDER AMONG BOOKS
CHAPTER IX. HIS PASSAGE THROUGH THE PRISON OF KNOWLEDGE
I
Challis led the way to the library; Lewes, petulant and mutinous, hung in the rear.
The Wonder toddled forward, unabashed, to enter his new world. On the threshold, however, he paused. His comprehensive stare took in a sweeping picture of enclosing walls of books, and beyond was a vista of further rooms, of more walls all lined from floor to ceiling with records of human discovery, endeavour, doubt, and hope.
The Wonder stayed and stared. Then he took two faltering steps into the room and stopped again, and, finally, he looked up at Challis with doubt and question; his gaze no longer quelling and authoritative, but hesitating, compliant, perhaps a little child-like.
"'Ave you read all these?" he asked.
It was a curious picture. The tall figure of Challis, stooping, as always, slightly forward; Challis, with his seaman's eyes and scholar's head, his hands loosely clasped together behind his back, paying such scrupulous attention to that grotesque representative of a higher intellectuality, clothed in the dress of a villager, a patched cricket-cap drawn down over his globular skull, his little arms hanging loosely at his sides; who, nevertheless, even in this new, strange aspect of unwonted humility bore on his face the promise of some ultimate development which differentiated him from all other humanity, as the face of humanity is differentiated from the face of its prognathous ancestor.
The scene is set in a world of books, and in the background lingers the athletic figure and fair head of Lewes, the young Cambridge undergraduate, the disciple of science, hardly yet across the threshold which divides him from the knowledge of his own ignorance.
"'Ave you read all these?" asked the Wonder.
"A greater part of them—in effect," replied Challis. "There is much repetition, you understand, and much record of experiment which becomes, in a sense, worthless when the conclusions are either finally accepted or rejected."
The eyes of the Wonder shifted and their expression became abstracted; he seemed to lose consciousness of the outer world; he wore the look which you may see in the eyes of Jakob Schlesinger's portrait of the mature Hegel, a look of profound introspection and analysis.
There was an interval of silence, and then the Wonder unknowingly gave expression to a quotation from Hamlet. "Words," he whispered reflectively, and then again "words."