The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (10 page)

I tossed aside the rag
and pulled from the inside pocket of my coat the letter which was one of the
reasons for my journey south.

Dear Sir, Ever since
reading your piece on the war and its evil in the
New
Statesman,
I have considered writing you this letter. A very long while ago now
I was involved in a series of events which became famous after being published
in a book by my master, Dr Samuel Fergusson. You will know this book as
Six
Weeks in a Balloon,
published in 1863. It is these events about which I wish
to speak to you. Such is the nature of things at the moment — and I am sure I
need not spell out my meaning — that I feel constrained from revealing my
thoughts herein, but if you were able to make the trip to London I would most
gratefully receive you and apprise you of my story.

Signed, Joe Smith.

The letter was
intriguing in itself. Why might Joe Smith wish to tell me, a lowly journalist,
about his balloon adventures in Africa? I had read the book — who had not? —
and was aware of it as another piece of Imperialist propaganda, all the more
obnoxious for its xenophobia.

I was also aware of its
influence on events at the time, and the significance it had played in
exaggerating Anglo-German enmity ever since.

I was more than
intrigued by the line in his letter,
Such is the nature of things at the
moment — and I am sure I need not spell out my meaning — that I feel
constrained from revealing my thoughts herein.
What heretical inside story
might the loyal manservant have to tell me of that famous balloon journey taken
nearly seventy years ago?

I witnessed an ugly
incident as I stepped from the London depot. Night had fallen and with it the
temperature, and I

was one among hundreds
of citizens who, bundled up in their winter wear, departed the station and
hurried into Baker Street. Most were so intent on thoughts of home that they
failed to notice the fracas across the street, either that or they effected not
to notice.

Six militiamen had
arrested a pamphleteer and were giving him a beating for his troubles. At one
point the man fell to the ground, and a militiaman stamped upon his face, again
and again. I made to cross the road, if not to intervene physically, then to
register my vocal protest, when I felt a hand grip my upper arm like a
tourniquet.

“Caution, Comrade. There’s
nothing you can do but get yourself arrested, and we need men with conscience
for the coming fight.” And before I could catch a glance at my interlocutor, he
thrust a pamphlet into my hand and became one with the flowing commuters.

The militiamen were
carrying their victim, dripping blood now, to a waiting black Mariah. I stood,
buffeted by the crowd, and glanced at the pamphlet.
Revolution!
It
proclaimed:
Workers must Unite . . .

The pamphlet was the
crude propaganda of the British Communist Party, and I dropped the paper and
hurried south through the darkened London streets.

As I walked, I despaired
at the plight of my country, gripped as it was between rapacious capitalists on
one hand and on the other the heedless lackeys of Stalinist Russia.

I had given no thought
to Smith’s Kensington address when I received his letter. Now, as I turned into
the wide, affluent street and paused outside the three-storey Georgian town
house, I wondered for the first time how Fergusson’s manservant had found
himself elevated to such palatial accommodation. He would be well past
retirement age now, and so presumably was not still ‘in service’. My curiosity
was piqued.

The bell was answered by
a middle-aged housekeeper who, when I introduced myself, said that Mr Smith was
expecting me.

I was escorted up a
flight of wide stairs to a mahogany door on the first floor. I must have looked
out of place, in my stained overcoat and farm boots, amid such bourgeois
decadence.

The housekeeper opened
the door, announced me, and invited me to enter.

After the February chill
of London, the heat of a blazing log fire hit me in a wave. The second thing
that struck me was what filled the room. Maps and navigational charts covered
all four walls, between bookshelves stocked with bound journals and atlases.
Occasional tables and bureaux held globes and scale models of balloons and
dirigibles.

Last of all I noticed my
host, who rose from an armchair beside the fire and advanced with a smile and
an outstretched hand.

Joe Smith, the
trustworthy servant of Dr Samuel Fergusson, who more than once risked his life
for that of his master — and how I had scoffed at that upon reading the book in
my youth! — was a short, square, thickset man of ninety-five, but with the
vigour of someone thirty years his junior.

“Glad you could make it,
sir!” he beamed. “Can I get you a drink?”

“A whisky — and please,
call me George,” I said, a request he later ignored.

He poured me a whisky.
Joe Smith’s speech, I noted, was true to his working class roots. I had feared
from the tone of his letter that I might find someone affecting the mannerisms
of the class he had spent so much of his life serving.

Glass in hand, I admired
the room, or rather the models of balloons, dirigibles, and all manner of
airships that filled it.

Joe stood beside me,
hardly reaching my shoulder. “Quite a collection,” I murmured.

He smiled. “Dr Fergusson’s,”
he said, “like everything else in the house. I didn’t have the heart to get rid
of anything when he passed on.”

I recalled the extended
news coverage of Dr Samuel Fergusson’s death, of heart failure at the age of
eighty, some twenty years ago. I had not mourned his passing.

“I still find it hard to
think that he won’t walk through the door at dinner-time and demand his first
whisky of the evening.”

“Dr Fergusson left the
house to you?” I asked.

“The house and
everything in it, as well as almost half his fortune.”

“And you couldn’t bring
yourself to move out?”

He smiled, and murmured
something about this being his home.

I was overcome by the
urge to tell the feisty retainer that his loyalty was no more than a Pavlovian
response to his extended slavery. I managed to hold my tongue.

Joe Smith talked me
through the collection of flying machines, each replica lovingly reproduced in
the tiniest detail.

The journalist in me,
recalling my summons here, took over. “Have you any doubt at all that the
technological progress in the seventies and eighties, the development of
airships from balloons to navigable dirigibles, was largely down to the
popularity of Fergusson’s book?”

“No doubt about it at
all!” Joe Smith said. “You should have seen all the hullabaloo after the book
was published! Of course, you’re too young to have been around then. My word,
the commotion! The house was besieged by pressmen and well-wishers and all!
What a sight! And the lectures! Dr Fergusson was booked up two years solid with
appointments at this institute and that, all the way from Brighton to Aberdeen.”

We took our seats before
the roaring fire, and Joe Smith went on, “And scientists and inventors — they
beat a path to Dr Fergusson’s door. Later he even sank some of his own money
into a company manufacturing the early steerable balloons.”

I shook my head. “All
from the publication of a single book,” I said, hoping to direct Joe back to
the reason for his summons.

My words seemed to have
the desired effect. He reached out to a bookshelf beside his armchair and
withdrew a calf-bound volume of
Six Weeks in a Balloon.

I said, “Do you agree
that what Fergusson wrote also contributed to the deterioration in relations
between Germany and Britain at the time . . . ?” And in consequence, though I
did not add this, to the present chaotic state of world affairs?

Joe had been leafing
through the volume, a reminiscent smile playing on his lips, and he looked up
at me almost sadly.

“That is true, sir.
Little did I realize at the time that the adventure of crossing Africa might
have such far-reaching consequences.” He paused. “Of course, if the telling of
our momentous journey had concentrated
only
on our crossing, then the
world might not now be at war.”

I took the book from him
and leafed through the pages, stopping at Chapter Seventeen:
The Germans
Attack
—
Kennedy Injured
—
Treachery!
—
A Close Shave
—
We Escape the Hun!

A colour plate showed
the
Victoria,
and its intrepid crew of Dr Samuel Fergusson, his friend
Dick Kennedy, and loyal manservant Joe, under attack from German guns.

I wondered if chapter
seventeen, and a later account of German bellicosity in chapter twenty-five,
might have been the most incendiary words ever written on the subject of
Anglo-German relations.

“You should have been
around to witness the scenes, sir! The cabinet was recalled, if I remember
rightly. The German ambassador to London was summoned to Downing Street.”

“But the Germans denied
all responsibility,” I said. “They even claimed that they didn’t have troops in
that part of Africa.”

Joe looked at me, his
gaze steady. At last he nodded. “And they were right, sir.”

I lay my whisky aside. “What?”

Joe cleared his throat. “That,
sir, is what I wanted to see you about. I have had it on my conscience for a
long time now.” He laughed to himself, but without humour. “Can you imagine
what it has been like, to live with the knowledge of the terrible lie for
almost seventy years?”

“The terrible lie . . .”
I repeated.

“We crossed Africa, sir,
from Zanzibar to Senegal, and in all that time we came upon but one serious
attack, and that by the Arabs in the southern Sahara.”

“But chapter seventeen,
all the detail . . .”

“All lies, sir. The
Germans did not have an expeditionary force on the banks of the Nile, still
less did they attack us.”

“And chapter
twenty-five? Where Fergusson reported watching a platoon of German infantry
attack a Berber encampment, and then turn their attack upon the
Victoria . .
.”

“Again, sir, a
fabrication, inserted into the book with the express intention of inflaming
nationalistic passions and creating enmity against the German state.”

“It certainly worked,” I
murmured. As a direct result of the passion provoked by German hostility
reported in
Six Weeks in a Balloon,
and subsequent press reports of
German atrocities in the continent, British positions in Western Africa were
strengthened. This precipitated the strained relations between the two nations
for the rest of the 1800s, which in turn brought about the eventual war, which
began in 1908 and had been going on ever since.

Joe Smith rose and
crossed the room to a small Sheraton bureau, from which he withdrew a sheath of
documents. He carried them back to the fire and laid his cargo upon the table.

“The original manuscript
of
Six Weeks in a Balloon,
sir, the first typescript, and the second
script which included the inserted fictional chapters. I discovered these among
my master’s papers shortly after his death.”

I picked up the
hand-written manuscript and turned a couple of pages. I looked up at Joe. “But
they’re in French.”

Joe nodded. “Dr
Fergusson was acquainted with a French writer at the time, one Jules Verne, who
he employed to write up a rough account of our adventures.”

I shook my head. “I’m
not aware of the name.”

“Verne wrote three or
four science-based adventure stories for boys, before his death from typhoid in
1870.”

I turned my attention to
the typescripts. The first, I took it, was a direct translation from the
French. I leafed through the pages until I found Chapter Seventeen, which
recounted the balloonists’ flight over that region of Africa known as the
Mountains of the Moon.

I picked up the second,
bulkier script. Chapter seventeen was headed with the familiar:
The Germans
Attack,
etc.

Joe Smith said, “When
Verne handed in the first draft, Dr Fergusson consulted General Gordon, and
several ministers in the cabinet. Only then did he rewrite chapters seventeen
and twenty-five.” Joe Smith looked up at me, almost shamefacedly. “He swore me
to secrecy. He said he was changing the story for the good of the Empire . . .
And who was I, an uneducated manservant, to object?”

“I wouldn’t blame
yourself, Joe. You were a dupe in the power of evil forces.”

“Lately, sir, I’ve been
thinking, and looking at the state of the world, and I came to realize that
what Dr Fergusson did was wrong.” He shook his head. “It’s too late to make
reparations, sir, but the least I could do was ensure that the truth was known
before I passed on.”

“The promulgation of
truth is always honourable.”

“I’ve read your
journalism. It strikes a chord. You write with
^-
integrity. I knew
you were the man to approach.” “I’m flattered —”