The H.G. Wells Reader (33 page)

I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vague affirmatives. “I want help” I said hoarsely. “I want to get some stuff up the beach—stuff I can't very well leave about.” I became aware of three other pleasant looking young men with towels and blazers and straw hats coming down the sand towards me. Evidently the early bathing section of this Littlestone.

“Help!” said the young man; “rather!” He became vaguely active. “What particularly do you want done?” He turned round and gesticulated. The three young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me plying me with questions I was disinclined to answer. “I'll tell all that later,” I said. “I'm dead beat. I'm a rag.”

“Come up to the hotel,” said the foremost little man. “We'll look after that thing there.”

I hesitated. “I can't,” I said. “In that sphere there's two big bars of gold.”

They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in and presently they had the Selenites' crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like kittens round a beetle. They didn't know what to do with the stuff. The fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars and then dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.

“It's lead or gold!' said one.

“Oh, it's gold!” said another.

“Gold right enough,” said the third.

Then they all stared at me and then they all stared at the ship lying at anchor.

“I say!” cried the little man. “But where did you get that?”

I was too tired to keep up a lie. “I got it in the moon.”

I saw them stare at one another.

“Look here!” said I, “I'm not going to argue now. Help me carry these lumps of gold up to the hotel—I guess with rests two of you can manage one and I'll trail this chain thing—and I'll tell you more when I've had some food.”

“And how about that thing?'

“It won't hurt there,” I said. “Anyhow—confound it!—it must stop there now. If the tide comes up, it will float all right.”

And in a state of enormous wonderment these young men most obediently hoisted my treasures on their shoulders, and with limbs that felt like lead I headed a procession towards that distant fragment of “sea-front.” Halfway there we were reinforced by two awe-stricken little girls with spades, and later appeared a lean little boy with a penetrating sniff. He was, I remember, wheeling a bicycle and he accompanies us at a distance of about a hundred yards on our right flank and then I suppose gave us up as uninteresting, mounted his bicycle and rode off over the level sands in the direction of the sphere.

I glanced back after him.

“He won't touch it,” said the stout young man reassuringly, and I was only too willing to be reassured.

At first something of the gray of the morning was in my mind, but presently the sun disengage itself from the level clouds of the horizon and lit the world and turned the leaden sea to glittering waters. My spirits rose. A sense of the vast importance of the things I had done and had yet to do came with the sunlight into my mind. I laughed aloud as the foremost man staggered under my gold. When indeed I took my place in the world, how amazed the world would be!

If it had not been for my inordinate fatigue the landlord of the Littlestone hotel would have been amusing as he hesitated between my gold and my respectable company on one hand and my filthy appearance on the other. But at last I found myself in a terrestrial bathroom once more; had warm water to wash myself with and a change of raiment, preposterously small indeed, but clean, that the genial little man had lent me. He lent me a razor, too, but I could not screw up my resolution to attack even the outposts of the bristling beard that covered my face.

I sat down to an English breakfast and ate with a sort of languid appetite, an appetite many weeks old and very decrepit and stirred myself to answer the questions of the four young men. And I told them the truth.

“Well,” said I, “as you press me—I got it in the moon.”

“The moon?”

“Yes, the moon in the sky.”

“But how do you mean?”

“What I say, confound it!”

“That you have just come from the moon?”

“Exactly! Through space—in that ball.” And I took a delicious mouthful of egg. I made a private note that when I went back to the moon I would take a box of eggs.

I could see clearly that they did not believe one word of what I told them, but evidently they considered me the most respectable liar they had ever met. They glanced at one another and then concentrated the fire of their eyes on me. I fancy they expected a clue to me in the way I helped myself to salt. They seemed to find something significant in my peppering my egg. Those strangely shaped masses of gold they had
staggered under held their minds. There the lumps lay in front of me, each worth thousand of pounds and as impossible for anyone to steal as a house or a piece of land. As I looked at their curious faces over my coffee cup I realized something of the enormous wilderness of explanations into which I should have to wander to render myself comprehensible again.

“You don't really mean,” began the youngest young man in the tone of one who speaks to an obstinate child.

“Just pass me the toast rack,” I said, and shut him up completely.

“But look here, I say,” began one of the others. “We're not going to believe that, you know.”

“Ah, well,” said I, and shrugged my shoulders.

“He doesn't want to tell us,” said the youngest young man in a stage voice aside, and then with an appearance of great
sang-friod:
“You don't mind if I have a cigarette?”

I waved him a cordial assent, and proceeded with my breakfast. Two of the others went and looked out of the farther window and talked inaudibly. I was struck by a thought. “The tide,” I said, “is running out?”

There was a pause as to who should answer me. “It's near the ebb,” said the little fat man.

“Well, anyhow,” I said, “it won't float far.”

I decapitated my third egg and began a little speech. “Look here,” I said. “Please don't imagine I'm surly or telling you uncivil lies or anything of that sort. I'm forced almost to be a little short and mysterious. I can quite understand this is as queer as it can be and that your imaginations must be going it. I can assure you, you're in at a memorable time. But I can't make it clear to you now—it's impossible. I give you my word of honor I've come from the moon, and that's all I can tell you. . . . All the same I'm tremendously obliged to you, you know, tremendously. I hope that my manner hasn't in any way given you offence.”

“Oh no, not in the least!” said the youngest young man affably. “We can quite understand,” and staring hard at me all the time he heeled his chair back until it very nearly upset, and recovered with some exertion. “Not a bit of it,” said the fat young man. “Don't you imagine that!” and they all got up and dispersed and walked about and lit cigarettes and generally tried to show they were perfectly amiable and disengaged and entirely free from the slightest curiosity about me and the sphere. “I'm going to keep an eye on that ship out there all the same,” I heard on of them remarking in an undertone. If only they could have forced themselves to it they would, I believe, even have gone out and left me. I went on with my third egg.

“The weather,” the fat little man remarked presently, “has been immense, has it not? I don't know when we have had such a summer . . .”

Phoo-whizz! Like a tremendous rocket!

And somewhere a window was broken.

“What's that?” said I.

“It isn't—?” cried the little man and rushed to the corner window.

All the others rushed to the window likewise. I sat staring at them.

Suddenly I leaped up, knocked over my third egg, and rushed for the window also. I had just thought of something. “Nothing to be seen there,” cried the little man rushing for the door.

“It's that boy!” I cried, bawling in hoarse fury; “it's that accursed boy!” and turning about I pushed the waiter aside—he was just bringing me some more toast—and rushed violently out of the room and down and out upon the queer little esplanade in front of the hotel.

The sea, which had been smooth, was rough now with hurrying cat's-paws, and all about where the sphere had been was tumbled water like the wake of a ship. Above, a little puff of cloud whirled like dispersing smoke, and the three or four people on the beach were staring up with interrogative faces towards the point of that unexpected report. And that was all! Boots and waiter and the four young men in blazers came rushing out behind me. Shouts came from windows and doors and all sorts of worrying people came into sight—agape.

For a time I stood there too overwhelmed by this new development to think of the people. At first I was too stunned to see the thing as any definite disaster—I was just stunned as a man is by some accidental violent blow. It is only afterwards he begins to appreciate his specific injury.

“Good Lord!”

I felt as though somebody was pouring funk out of a can down the back of my neck. My legs became feeble. I had got the first intimation of what the disaster meant for me. There was that confounded boy—sky high! I was utterly “left.” There was the gold in the coffee room, my only possession on earth. How would it all work out? The general effect was of a gigantic unmanageable confusion.

“I say,” said the voice of the little man behind, “I say, you know.”

I wheeled about and there were twenty or thirty people all bombarding me with dumb interrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt that compulsion of their eyes intolerably. I groaned aloud.

“I
can't
,” I shouted. “I tell you, I can't! I'm not equal to it! You must puzzle and—and be damned to you!”

I gesticulated convulsively. He receded a step as though I had threatened him. I made a bolt through them into the hotel. I charged back into the coffee-room, rang the bell furiously. I gripped the waiter as he entered. “D'y hear?” I shouted. “Get help and carry these bars up to my room right away.”

He failed to understand me and I shouted and raved at him. A scared looking little old man in a green apron appeared and two of the young men in flannels. I made a dash at them and commandeered their services. As soon as the gold was in my room I felt free to quarrel. “Now get out,” I shouted; “all o' you get out if you don't want to see man go mad before your eyes!” And I helped the waiter by the
shoulder as he hesitated in the doorway. And then as soon as I had the door locked on them all I tore off the little man's clothes again, shied them right and left and got into bed forthwith. And there I lay swearing and panting and cooling for a long time.

At last I was calm enough to get out of bed and ring up the round-eyed waiter for a flannel nightshirt, a soda and whisky and some good cigars. And these things being procured after an exasperating delay that drove me several times to the bell, I locked the door again and proceeded very deliberately to look the entire situation in the face.

The net result of the great experiment presented itself as an absolute failure. It was a rout and I was the sole survivor. It was an absolute collapse and this was the final disaster. There was nothing for it but to save myself, and as much as I could in the way of prospects from our
débacle
. At one fatal crowning blow all my vague resolutions of return and recovery had vanished. My intention of going back to the moon, of getting a sphereful of gold and afterwards of having a fragment of Cavorite analyzed and so recovering the great secret, perhaps finally even of recovering Cavor's body, all these ideas vanished altogether.

I was the sole survivor, and that was all.

I think that going to bed was one of the luckiest ideas I have ever had in an emergency. I really believe I should either have got looseheaded or done some fatal, indiscreet thing. But there, locked in and secure from all interruption I could think out the position in all its bearings and make my arrangements at leisure.

Of course what had happened to the boy was quite clear to me. He had crawled into the sphere, meddled with the studs, shut the Cavorite windows and gone up. It was highly improbable he had screwed in the manhole stopper, and even if he had the chances were a thousand to one against his getting back. It was fairly evident that he would gravitate with my bales to somewhere near the middle of the sphere and remain there and so cease to be a legitimate terrestrial interest however remarkable he might seem to the inhabitants of some remote quarter of space. I very speedily convinced myself on that point. And as for any responsibility I might have in the matter, the more I reflected the clearer it became that if only I kept quiet, I need not trouble myself about that. If I was faced by sorrowing parents demanding their lost boy, I had merely to demand my lost sphere—or ask them what they meant. At first I had had a vision of weeping parents and guardians and all sorts of complications, but now I saw that I simply had to keep my mouth shut and nothing in that way could arise. And indeed the more I lay and smoked and thought the more evident became the wisdom of impenetrability.

It is within the right to every British citizen, provided he does not commit damage nor indecorum, to appear suddenly wherever he please and as ragged and filthy as he please, and with whatever amount of virgin gold he sees fit to encumber
himself, and no one has any right at all to hinder and retain him in this procedure. I formulated that at last to myself and repeated it over as a sort of private Magna Charta of my liberty.

Once I had put that issue on one side I could take up and consider in an equable manner certain considerations I had scarcely dared think of before, namely, those arising out of the circumstances of my bankruptcy. But now looking at this matter calmly and at leisure, I could see that if only I suppressed my identity by a temporary assumption of some less well-known name, and retained my two months' beard, the risks of any annoyance from the spiteful creditors to whom I have already alluded became very small indeed. From that to a definite course of rational wordly action was plain sailing. It was all amazingly petty, no doubt, but what was there remaining for me to do? Whatever I did I was resolved that I would keep myself level and right side up.