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Seen from that height, it has something the effect of a Dutch landscape, it all looks so amazingly tidy. Away to the left I looked over Stoke-Underhill. Ailesworth was a blur in the hollow, but I could distinguish the high fence of the County Ground. I sat all the morning on Deane Hill, musing and smoking, thinking of such things as Ginger Stott, and the match with Surrey.
Stoke-Underhill lies in the flat of the valley that separates the Hampden from the Quainton Hills. The main road from London to Ailesworth does not pass through Stoke, but from the highway you can see the ascent of the bridge over the railway, down the vista of a straight mile of side road; and, beyond, a glimpse of scattered cottages.
In July, however, affairs took me to Ailesworth, and the associations of the place naturally led me to wonder how Stott's marriage had turned out, and whether the much-desired son had been born to him. When my business in Ailesworth was done, I decided to walk out to Stoke-Underhill. The road passes the County Ground, and a match was in progress, but I walked by without stopping.
The attraction which Stoke-Underhill held for Stott, lay not in its seclusion or its picturesqueness but in its nearness to the County Ground. Stott could ride the two flat miles which separated him from the scene of his work in ten minutes, and Ailesworth station is only a mile beyond.
He found Challis at his house in Eaton Square the next morning, but it became evident from the outset that the plan of confounding Grossmann did not appeal to the magnate of Stoke-Underhill. Challis frowned and prevaricated. "It's a thousand to one, the child won't condescend to answer," was his chief evasion.
And with that expression he put all thought of Victor Stott away from him, and sat down to write an exhaustive article on the necessity for a broader basis in primary education. Challis called at the rectory of Stoke-Underhill on the way back to his own house.
"I'm not going to kid myself," he said, "I know. But I'm going to find a youngster and learn 'im. On'y he must be young. "No 'abits, you know," he explained. The next time I met Stott was in November. I ran up against him, literally, one Friday afternoon in Ailesworth. When he recognised me he asked me if I would care to walk out to Stoke-Underhill with him.
As a result of this clerical intrigue he was vilely marooned on the savage island of Stoke-Underhill, where he might preach as much science as he would to the natives, for there was no fear of their comprehending him. Fifteen years of Stoke had brought about a reaction. Nature had made him a feeble fanatic, and he was now as ardent an opponent of science as he had once been a defender.
I was wool-gathering. I was not thinking of the man I was going to see, or I should have turned in at the County Ground, where he would inevitably have been found. Instead, I was thinking of the abnormal child I had seen in the train that day; uselessly speculating and wondering. When I reached Stoke-Underhill I found the cottage which Stott had shown me.
There was a phrase I had coined as I had walked out from Ailesworth to Stoke-Underhill; a chapter I had roughed out the day I went to see Ginger Stott at Pym. It seemed to me that the whole conception of the book was associated in some way with that neighbourhood.
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