Selected Stories of H. G. Wells (37 page)
4
The little Author sat and listened to this tale of a wonder that never for a moment struck him as incredible. And outside his rain-lashed window the strung-out fishing smacks pitched and rolled on their way home to Folkestone harbour . . .
The Wild Asses escaped.
They got away to the world. And his superior officers took the poor herdsman and tried him and bullied him and passed this judgement upon him: that he must go to the earth and find the Wild Asses, and say to them that certain string of oaths that otherwise must never be repeated, and so control them and bring them back to hell. That—or else one pinch of salt on their tails. It did not matter which. One by one he must bring them back, driving them by spell and curse to the cattle-boat of the ferry. And until he had caught and brought them all back he might never return again to the warmth and comfort of his accustomed life. That was his sentence and punishment. And they put him into a shrapnel shell and fired him out among the stars, and when he had a little recovered he pulled himself together and made his way to the world.
But he never found his Wild Asses and after a little time he gave up trying.
He gave up trying because the Wild Asses, once they had got out of control, developed the most amazing gifts. They could, for instance, disguise themselves with any sort of human shape, and the only way in which they differed then from a normal human being was—according to the printed paper of instructions that had been given to their custodian when he was fired out—that “their general conduct remains that of a Wild Ass of the Devil.”
“And what interpretation can we put upon that?” he asked the listening Author.
And there was one night in the year—Walpurgis Night—when the Wild Asses became visibly great black wild asses and kicked up their hind legs and brayed. They had to. “But then, of course,” said the devil, “they would take care to shut themselves up somewhere when they felt that coming on.”
Like most weak characters, the stoker devil was intensely egotistical. He was anxious to dwell upon his own miseries and discomforts and difficulties and the general injustice of his treatment, and he was careless and casually indicative about the peculiarities of the Wild Asses, the matter which most excited and interested the Author. He bored on with his doleful story, and the Author had to interrupt with questions again and again in order to get any clear idea of the situation.
The devil’s main excuse for his nervelessness was his profound ignorance of human nature. “So far as I can see,” he said, “they might all be Wild Asses. I tried it once—”
“Tried what?”
“The formula. You know.”
“Yes?”
“On a man named Sir Edward Carson.”
“Well?”
“Ugh!”
said the devil.
“Punishment?”
“Don’t speak of it. He was just a professional lawyer-politician who had lost his sense of values . . . How was
I
to know? . . . But our people certainly know how to hurt . . .”
After that it would seem this poor devil desisted absolutely from any attempt to recover his lost charges. He just tried to live for the moment and make his earthly existence as tolerable as possible. It was clear he hated the world. He found it cold, wet, draughty . . . “I can’t understand why everybody insists upon living outside of it,” he said. “If you went inside—”
He sought warmth and dryness. For a time he found a kind of contentment in charge of the upcast furnace of a mine, and then he was superseded by an electric-fan. While in this position he read a vivid account of the intense heat in the Red Sea, and he was struck by the idea that if he could get a job as stoker upon an Indian liner he might snatch some days of real happiness during that portion of the voyage. For some time his natural ineptitude prevented his realising this project, but at last, after some bitter experiences of homelessness during a London December, he had been able to ship on an Indiaward boat— only to get stranded in Folkestone in consequence of a propeller breakdown. And so here he was!
He paused.
“But about these Wild Asses?” said the Author.
The mournful, dark eyes looked at him hopelessly.
“Mightn’t they do a lot of mischief?” asked the Author.
“They’ll do no end of mischief,” said the despondent devil.
“Ultimately you’ll catch it for that?”
“Ugh!” said the stoker, trying not to think of it.
5
Now the spirit of romantic adventure slumbers in the most unexpected places, and I have already told you of our plump Author’s discontents. He had been like a smouldering bomb for some years. Now, he burst out. He suddenly became excited, energetic, stimulating, uplifting.
He stood over the drooping devil.
“But my dear chap!” he said. “You must pull yourself together. You must do better than this. These confounded brutes may be doing all sorts of mischief. While you—shirk . . .”
And so on. Real ginger.
“If I had some one to go with me. Some one who knew his way about.”
The Author took whisky in the excitement of the moment. He began to move very rapidly about his room and make short, sharp gestures. You know how this sort of emotion wells up at times. “We must work from some central place,” said the Author. “To begin with, London perhaps.”
It was not two hours later that they started, this Author and this devil he had taken to himself, upon a mission. They went out in overcoats and warm underclothing—the Author gave the devil a thorough outfit, a double lot of Jaeger’s extra thick—and they were resolved to find the Wild Asses of the Devil and send them back to hell, or at least the Author was, in the shortest possible time. In the picture you will see him with a field-glass slung under his arm, the better to watch suspected cases; in his pocket, wrapped in oiled paper, is a lot of salt to use if by chance he finds a Wild Ass when the devil and his string of oaths is not at hand. So he started. And when he had caught and done for the Wild Asses, then the Author supposed that he would come back to his nice little villa and his nice little wife, and to his little daughter who said the amusing things, and to his popularity, his large gilt-edged popularity, and—except for an added prestige—be just exactly the man he had always been. Little knowing that whosoever takes unto himself a devil and goes out upon a quest, goes out upon a quest from which there is no returning—
Nevermore.
ANSWER TO PRAYER
The Archbishop was perplexed by his own state of mind. Maybe the shadow of age was falling upon him, he thought, maybe he had been overworking, maybe the situation had been too complex for him and he was feeling the reality of a failure without seeing it plainly as a definable fact. But his nerve, which had never failed him hitherto, was failing him now. In small things as in important matters he no longer showed the quick decisiveness that had hitherto been the envy of his fellow-ecclesiastics and the admiration of his friends. He doubted now before he went upstairs or downstairs, with a curious feeling that he might find something unexpected on the landing. He hesitated before he rang a bell, with a vague uncertainty of who or what might appear. Before he took up the letters his secretary had opened for him he had a faint twinge of apprehension.
Had he after all done something wrong or acted in a mistaken spirit?
People who had always been nice to him showed a certain coolness, people from whom he would have least expected it. His secretaries, he knew, were keeping back “open letters” and grossly abusive comments. The reassurances and encouragements that flowed in to him were anything but reassuring, because their volume and their tone reflected what was hidden from him on the other side. Had he, at the end of his long, tortuous and hitherto quite dignified career, made a howler?
There was no one on earth to whom he could confide his trouble. He had always been a man who kept his own counsel. But now, if only he could find understanding, sympathy, endorsement! If he could really put things as he saw them, if he could simplify the whole confused affair down to essentials and make his stand plain and clear.
Prayer?
If anyone else had come to him in this sort of quandary, he would have told him at once to pray. If it was a woman he would have patted the shoulder gently, as an elderly man may do, and he would have said very softly in that rich kind voice of his, “Try Prayer, my dear. Try Prayer.”
Physician heal thyself. Why not try prayer?
He stood hesitatingly between his apartments and his little private oratory. He stood in what was his habitual children’s-service attitude with his hands together in front of him, his head a little on one side and something faintly bland and whimsical about him. It came to him that he himself had not made a personal and particular appeal to God for many years. It had seemed unnecessary. It had indeed been unnecessary. He had of course said his prayers with the utmost regularity, not only in the presence of others, but, being essentially an honest man, even when he was alone. He had never cheated about prayer. He had felt it was a purifying and beneficial process, no more to be missed than cleaning his teeth, but his sense of a definite hearer, listening at the other end of the telephone, so to speak, behind the veil, had always been a faint one. The reception away there was in the Absolute, in Eternity, beyond the stars. Which indeed left the church conveniently free to take an unembarrassed course of action . . .
But in this particular tangle, the Archbishop wanted something more definite. If for once, he did not trouble about style and manner . . .
If he put the case simply, quite simply, just as he saw it, and remained very still on his knees, wouldn’t he presently find this neuralgic fretting of his mind abating, and that assurance, that clear self-assurance that had hitherto been his strength, returning to him? He must not be in the least oily—they had actually been calling him oily—he must be perfectly direct and simple and fearless. He must pray straightforwardly to the silence as one mind to another.
It was a little like the practice of some Dissenters and Quakers, but maybe it would be none the less effective on that account.
Yes, he would pray.
Slowly he sank to his knees and put his hands together. He was touched by a sort of childish trustfulness in his own attitude. “Oh God,” he began, and paused.
He paused, and a sense of awful imminence, a monstrous awe, gripped him. And then he heard a voice.
It was not a harsh voice, but it was a clear strong voice. There was nothing about it still or small. It was neither friendly nor hostile; it was brisk.
“Yes,”
said the voice.
“What is it?”
They found His Grace in the morning. He had slipped off the steps on which he had been kneeling and lay, sprawling on the crimson carpet. Plainly his death had been instantaneous.
But instead of the serenity, the almost fatuous serenity, that was his habitual expression, his countenance, by some strange freak of nature, displayed an extremity of terror and dismay.
PART SIX
PSYCHO-SOCIAL SCIENCE FICTION
INTRODUCTION
I don’t like to describe these stories with such a fancy polysyllabic label, but I don’t know how else to highlight the amazing variety and originality of Wells’s genre writing. Invasions from Mars, time machines, voyages to the moon, invisible men, visions of war and cataclysm and of brave new worlds, all these are his well-known legacy to us. These last two stories enrich that legacy with a different wealth.
In “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper,” which was written in 1932, Wells meets the challenge of living through times of immense and rapid social and cultural change by exaggerating it—imagining a leap forty years into the future, and a tantalizing glimpse of that future.
Now, science fiction is always doing this, and always falling flat on its face, too. Science fiction that has “passed its date” should be unreadable, an object of pity and derision—how
could
they have thought the Cold War would go on forever? how
could
they have thought space-ship crews would all be white, male, and English-speaking? and so on. But the odd thing is, if a story has intelligence and passion, it can pass its date, have all its predictions belied, and yet lose nothing in interest. Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is a case in point that almost settles the issue by itself. The fact is, “the future” in science fiction is always more or less a metaphor for the writer’s present. What is fascinating now in a story like “Brownlow’s Newspaper” is the interplay between Wells’s present, which is our long past—Wells’s ingeniously imagined future, which is our more recent past—and our present, which we perceive, for a moment, as amazingly contingent. . . .
Moreover, the story has a delectable end-twist.
As for “The Country of the Blind,” I incline to think this is the best of all Wells’s short stories. I call it science fiction but it could be called fable or fantasy or, best of all, simply fiction. The theme of seeing, of vision, which runs so strong through this whole book, here again is the keynote. Wells published it first in 1904, and again in 1913; he reprinted it with a radically changed ending in 1939. The text given here, for most of the story, is that of the revision. As Wells said, “The two versions open with practically identical incidents, which I have never wished to alter; they run parallel until the distant mountain masses crack.” Both endings are given here, the older one first, then the revision; for though the revision is more powerful, the original remains valid, and the difference is both interesting and moving.
Omitting sentences that would give away the story, this is what Wells himself said, in his introduction to the 1939 edition, about why he rewrote it:
It has been changed because there has been a change in the atmosphere of life about us. In 1904 the stress is upon the spiritual isolation of those who see more keenly than their fellows and the tragedy of their incommunicable appreciation of life . . . In the later story vision becomes something altogether more tragic; it is no longer a story of disregarded loveliness and release; the visionary sees destruction sweeping down upon the whole blind world he has come to endure and even to love; he sees it plain, and he can do nothing to save it from its fate.
It is no wonder that between 1904 and 1939 the outlook of this visionary writer became more tragic. It is no wonder that in the year 1939, on the eve of Hitler’s war, Wells felt that to see destruction coming, to speak of it, to cry out warnings, might be as vain as trying to stop an avalanche with words. A hard lesson for an old man who had tried all his life to show people the danger of blind unreason, the worlds of promise and beauty they might see if they’d only open the eyes of their intelligence and their imagination.