Olaf Stapledon - Odd John

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The Xenolite Press ~Electro~Book~ of Olaf Stapledon's Odd John

ODD JOHN

A STORY BETWEEN JEST AND EARNEST BY

OLAF STAPLEDON

Contents

I John and the Author

II The First Phase

III Enfant Terrible

IV John and His Elders

V Thought and Action

VI Many Inventions

VII Financial Ventures

VIIIScandalous Adolescence

IX Methods of a Young Anthropologist

X The World's Plight

XI Strange Encounters

XII John in the Wilderness

XIII John Seeks His Kind

XIV Engineering Problems

XV Jacqueline

XVI Adian

XVII Ng-Gunko and Lo

XVIII The Skid's First Voyage

XIX The Colony Is Founded

XX The Colony in Being

XXI The Beginning of the End

XXII The End

CHAPTER I

JOHN AND THE AUTHOR

WHEN I told John that I intended to write his biography, he laughed. "My dear man!" he said,

"But of course it was inevitable." The word "man" on John's lips was often equivalent to "fool."

"Well," I protested, "a cat may look at a king."

He replied, "Yes, but can it really see the king? Can you, puss, really see me?"

This from a queer child to a full-grown man.

John was right. Though I had known him since he was a baby, and was in a sense intimate

with him, I knew almost nothing of the inner, the real John. To this day I know little but the

amazing facts of his career. I know that he never walked till he was six, that before he was ten he

committed several burglaries and killed a policeman, that at eighteen, when he still looked a

young boy, he founded his preposterous colony in the South Seas, and that at twenty-three, in

appearance but little altered, he outwitted the six warships that six Great Powers had sent to seize

him. I know also how John and all his followers died.

Such facts I know; and even at the risk of destruction by one or other of the six Great Powers,

I shall tell the world all that I can remember.

Something else I know, which will be very difficult to explain. In a confused way I know why

he founded his colony. I know too that although he gave his whole energy to this task, he never

seriously expected to succeed. He was convinced that sooner or later the world would find him

out and destroy his work. "Our chance," he once said, "is not as much as one in a million." And

then he laughed.

John's laugh was strangely disturbing. It was a low, rapid, crisp chuckle. It reminded me of

that whispered crackling prelude which sometimes precedes a really great crash of thunder. But

no thunder followed it, only a moment's silence; and for his hearers an odd tingling of the scalp.

I believe that this inhuman, this ruthless but never malicious laugh of John's contained the key

to all that baffles me in his character. Again and again I asked myself why he laughed just then,

what precisely was he laughing at, what did his laughter really mean, was that strange noise

really laughter at all, or some emotional reaction incomprehensible to my kind? Why, for

instance, did the infant John laugh through his tears when he had upset a kettle and was badly

scalded? I was not present at his death, but I feel sure that, when his end came, his last breath

spent itself in zestful laughter. Why?

In failing to answer these questions, I fail to understand the essential John. His laughter, I am

convinced, sprang from some aspect of his experience entirely beyond my vision. I am therefore,

of course, as John affirmed, a very incompetent biographer. But if I keep silence, the facts of his

unique career will be lost for ever. In spite of my incompetence, I must record all that I can, in the

hope that, if these pages fall into the hands of some being of John's own stature, he may

imaginatively see through them to the strange but glorious spirit of John himself.

That others of his kind, or approximately of his kind, are now alive, and that yet others will

appear, is at least probable. But as John himself discovered, the great majority of these very rare

supernormals, whom John sometimes called "wide-awakes," are either so delicate physically or

so unbalanced mentally that they leave no considerable mark on the world. How pathetically one-

sided the supernormal development may be is revealed in Mr. J. D. Beresford's account of the

unhappy Victor Stott. I hope that the following brief record will at least suggest a mind at once

more strikingly "superhuman" and more broadly human.

That the reader may look for something more than an intellectual prodigy I will here at the

outset try to give an impression of John's appearance in his twenty-third and last summer.

He was indeed far more like a boy than a man, though in some moods his youthful face would

assume a curiously experienced and even patriarchal expression. Slender, long limbed, and with

that unfinished coltish look characteristic of puberty, he had also a curiously finished grace all his

own. Indeed to those who had come to know him he seemed a creature of ever-novel beauty. But

strangers were often revolted by his uncouth proportions. They called him spiderish. His body,

they complained, was so insignificant, his legs and arms so long and lithe, his head all eye and

brow.

Now that I have set down these characters I cannot conceive how they might make for beauty.

But in John they did, at least for those of us who could look at him without preconceptions

derived from Greek gods, or film stars. With characteristic lack of false modesty, John once said

to me, "My looks are a rough test of people. If they don't begin to see me beautiful when they

have had a chance to learn, I know they're dead inside, and dangerous."

But let me complete the description. Like his fellow-colonists, John mostly went naked. His

maleness, thus revealed, was immature in spite of his twenty-three years. His skin, burnt by the

Polynesian sun, was of a grey, almost a green, brown, warming to a ruddier tint in the cheeks. His

hands were extremely large and sinewy. Somehow they seemed more mature than the rest of his

body. "Spiderish" seemed appropriate in this connexion also. His head was certainly large but not

out of proportion to his long limbs. Evidently the unique development of his brain depended more

on manifold convolutions than on sheer bulk. All the same his was a much larger head than it

looked, for its visible bulk was scarcely at all occupied by the hair, which was but a close skull-

cap, a mere superficies of negroid but almost white wool. His nose was small but broad, rather

Mongolian perhaps. His lips, large but definite, were always active. They expressed a kind of

running commentary on his thoughts and feelings. Yet many a time I have seen those lips harden

into granitic stubbornness. John's eyes were indeed, according to ordinary standards, much too

big for his face, which acquired thus a strangely cat-like or falcon-like expression. This was

emphasized by the low and level eyebrows, but often completely abolished by a thoroughly

boyish and even mischievous smile. The whites of John's eyes were almost invisible. The pupils

were immense. The oddly green irises were as a rule mere filaments. But in tropical sunshine the

pupils narrowed to mere pinpricks. Altogether, his eyes were the most obviously "queer" part of

him. His glance, however, had none of that weirdly compelling power recorded in the case of

Victor Stott. Or rather, to feel their magic, one needed to have already learnt something of the

formidable spirit that used them.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST PHASE

JOHN'S father, Thomas Wainwright, had reason to believe that Spaniards and Moroccans had

long ago contributed to his making. There was indeed something of the Latin, even perhaps of the

Arab, in his nature. Every one admitted that he had a certain brilliance; but he was odd, and was

generally regarded as a failure. A medical practice in a North-country suburb gave little scope for

his powers, and many opportunities of rubbing people up the wrong way. Several remarkable

cures stood to his credit; but he had no bedside manner, and his patients never accorded him the

trust which is so necessary for a doctor's success.

His wife was no less a mongrel than her husband, but one of a very different kind. She was of

Swedish extraction. Finns and Lapps were also among her ancestors. Scandinavian in appearance,

she was a great sluggish blonde, who even as a matron dazzled the young male eye. It was

originally through her attraction that I became the youthful friend of her husband, and later the

slave of her more than brilliant son. Some said she was "just a magnificent female animal," and

so dull as to be subnormal. Certainly conversation with her was sometimes almost as one-sided as

conversation with a cow. Yet she was no fool. Her house was always in good order, though she

seemed to spend no thought upon it. With the same absent-minded skill she managed her rather

difficult husband. He called her "Pax." "So peaceful," he would explain. Curiously her children

also adopted this name for her. Their father they called invariably "Doc." The two elder, girl and

boy, affected to smile at their mother's ignorance of the world; but they counted on her advice.

John, the youngest by four years, once said something which suggested that we had all misjudged

her. Some one had remarked on her extraordinary dumbness. Out flashed John's disconcerting

laugh, and then, "No one notices the things that interest Pax, and so she just doesn't talk."

John's birth had put the great maternal animal to a severe strain. She carried her burden for

eleven months, till the doctors decided that at all costs she must be relieved. Yet when the baby

was at last brought to light, it had the grotesque appearance of a seven-months fetus. Only with

great difficulty was it kept alive in an incubator. Not till a year after the forced birth was this

artificial womb deemed no longer necessary.

I saw John frequently during his first year, for between me and the father, though he was

many years my senior, there had by now grown up a curious intimacy based on common

intellectual interests, and perhaps partly on a common admiration for Pax.

I can remember my shock of disgust when I first saw the thing they had called John. It

seemed impossible that such an inert and pulpy bit of flesh could ever develop into a human

being. It was like some obscene fruit, more vegetable than animal, save for an occasional

incongruous spasm of activity.

When John was a year old, however, he looked almost like a normal new-born infant, save

that his eyes were shut. At eighteen months he opened them; and it was as though a sleeping city

had suddenly leapt into life. Formidable eyes they were for a baby, eyes seen under a magnifying

glass, each great pupil like the mouth of a cave, the iris a mere rim, an edging of bright emerald.

Strange how two black holes can gleam with life! It was shortly after his eyes had opened that

Pax began to call her strange son "Odd John." She gave the words a particular and subtle intona-

tion which, though it scarcely varied, seemed to express sometimes merely affectionate apology

for the creature's oddity, but sometimes defiance, and sometimes triumph, and occasionally awe.

The adjective stuck to John throughout his life.

Henceforth John was definitely a person and a very wide-awake person, too. Week by week

he became more and more active and more and more interested. He was for ever busy with eyes

and ears and limbs.

During the next two years John's body developed precariously, but without disaster. There

were always difficulties over feeding, but when he had reached the age of three he was a

tolerably healthy child, though odd, and in appearance extremely backward. This backwardness

distressed Thomas. Pax, however, insisted that most babies grew too fast. "They don't give their

minds a chance to knit themselves properly," she declared. The unhappy father shook his head.

When John was in his fifth year I used to see him nearly every morning as I passed the

Wainwrights' house on my way to the railway station. He would be in his pram in the garden

rioting with limbs and voice. The din, I thought, had an odd quality. It differed indescribably

from the vocalization of any ordinary baby, as the call of one kind of monkey differs from that of

another species. It was a rich and subtle shindy, full of quaint modulations and variations. One

could scarcely believe that this was a backward child of four. Both behaviour and appearance

suggested an extremely bright six-months infant. He was too wide awake to be backward, too

backward to be four. It was not only that those prodigious eyes were so alert and penetrating.

Even his clumsy efforts to manipulate his toys seemed purposeful beyond his years. Though he

could not manage his fingers at all well, his mind seemed to be already setting them very definite

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摘要：

TheXenolitePress~Electro~Book~ofOlafStapledon'sOddJohnODDJOHNASTORYBETWEENJESTANDEARNESTBYOLAFSTAPLEDONContentsIJohnandtheAuthorIITheFirstPhaseIIIEnfantTerribleIVJohnandHisEldersVThoughtandActionVIManyInventionsVIIFinancialVenturesVIIIScandalousAdolescenceIXMethodsofaYoungAnthropologistXTheWorld'sPl...

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Olaf Stapledon - Odd John

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