The H.G. Wells Reader (100 page)

He reflected.

“I set fire to a house—once.”

The fat woman started.

“I don't feel sorry for it. I don't believe it was a bad thing to do—any more than burning a toy like I did once when I was a baby. I nearly killed myself with a razor. Who hasn't?—anyhow gone as far as thinking of it? Most of my time I've been half dreaming. I married like a dream almost. I've never really planned my life or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It's so with everyone. Jim couldn't help himself. I shot at him and tried to kill him. I dropped the gun and he got it. He very nearly had me. I wasn't a second too soon—ducking. . . . Awkward—that night was. . . . M'mm. . . . But I don't blame him—come to that. Only I don't see what it's all up to. . . .

“Like children playing about in a nursery. Hurt themselves at times. . . .

“There's something that doesn't mind us,” he resumed presently. “It isn't what we try to get that we get, it isn't the good we think we do is good. What makes us happy isn't our trying, what makes others happy isn't our trying. There's a sort of character people like and stand up for and a sort they won't. You got to work it out and take the consequences. . . . Miriam was always trying.”

“Who was Miriam?” asked the fat woman.

“No one you know. But she used to go about with her brows knit trying not to do whatever she wanted to do—if ever she did want to do anything—”

He lost himself.

“You can't help being fat,” said the fat woman after a pause, trying to get up to his thoughts.

“
You
can't,” said Mr. Polly.

“It helps and it hinders.”

“Like my upside down way of talking.”

“The magistrates wouldn't 'ave kept on the license to me if I 'adn't been fat. . . .”

“Then what have we done,” said Mr. Polly, “to get an evening like this? Lord! look at it!” He sent his arm round the great curve of the sky.

“If I was a nigger or an Italian I should come out here and sing. I whistle sometimes, but bless you, it's singing I've got in my mind. Sometimes I think I live for sunsets.”

“I don't see that it does you any good always looking at sunsets like you do,” said the fat woman.

“Nor me. But I do. Sunsets and things I was made to like.”

“They don't 'elp you,” said the fat woman thoughtfully.

“Who cares?” said Mr. Polly.

A deeper strain had come to the fat woman. “You got to die some day,” she said.

“Some things I can't believe,” said Mr. Polly suddenly, “and one is your being a skeleton. . . .” He pointed his hand towards the neighbour's hedge. “Look at 'em—against the yellow—and they're just stingin' nettles. Nasty weeds—if you count things by their uses. And no help in the life hereafter. But just look at the look of them!”

“It isn't only looks,” said the fat woman.

“Whenever there's signs of a good sunset and I'm not too busy,” said Mr. Polly, “I'll come and sit out here.”

The fat woman looked at him with eyes in which contentment struggled with some obscure reluctant protest, and at last turned them slowly to the black nettle pagodas against the golden sky.

“I wish we could,” she said.

“I will.”

The fat woman's voice sank nearly to the inaudible.

“Not always,” she said.

Mr. Polly was some time before he replied. “Come here always when I'm a ghost,” he replied.

“Spoil the place for others,” said the fat woman, abandoning her moral solicitudes for a more congenial point of view.

“Not my sort of ghost wouldn't,” said Mr. Polly, emerging from another long pause. “I'd be a sort of diaphalous feeling—just mellowish and warmish like. . . .”

They said no more, but sat on in the warm twilight until at last they could scarcely distinguish each other's faces. They were not so much thinking as lost in a smooth, still quiet of the mind. A bat flitted by.

“Time we was going in, O' Party,” said Mr. Polly, standing up. “Supper to get. It's as you say, we can't sit here for ever.”

Wells's early work has been reprinted with some frequency. In 1924 Wells collected and edited much of what he had published up to that time in
The Atlantic Edition of the Works of H. G. Wells
, 28 Volumes (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924). He also collected his short stories in
The Short Stories of H. G. Wells
(London: Ernest Benn, 1926).

S
ELECTIONS
1–3
, “The Stolen Bacillus” (
Pall Mall Budget
, June 1894), “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” (
Pall Mall Gazette
, 1894), and “Æpornis Island” (
Pall Mall Budget
, December 1894) were collected with a dozen other short stories in
The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
(London: Methuen and Company, 1895).

S
ELECTION
4
, from
The Time Machine, The National Review
, January through June, 1895. The first book edition of
The Time Machine
(London: William Heinemann, 1895) does not contain the episode describing the kangaroo-like evolution between the year 802,701 and the dark vision of the end of life on earth.

S
ELECTION
5
, from
The Wheels of Chance
(London: J. M. Dent, 1896)

S
ELECTION
6
, from
The Island of Doctor Moreau
(London: William Heinemann, 1896).

S
ELECTION
7
, from
The Invisible Man
(London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1897)

S
ELECTION
8
, from
The War of the Worlds
(London: William Heinemann, 1898).

S
ELECTION
9
, from
The First Men in the Moon
(London: George Newnes, 1901).

S
ELECTION
10
, from
The Food of the Gods
(London: Macmillan, 1904).

S
ELECTION
11
, “The Country of the Blind,” was first published in
The Strand Magazine
, April 1904, and later included in
The Country of the Blind and Other Stories
(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1911).

S
ELECTION
12
, from
In The Days of the Comet
(London: Macmillan, 1906).

S
ELECTION
13
, from
Tono-Bungay
(London: Macmillan, 1909).

S
ELECTION
14
,
The History of Mr. Polly
(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1910).

Anderson, Linda R.
Bennett, Wells, and Conrad: Narrative in Transition
. New York: St. Martins Press, 1988.

Batchelor, John.
H. G. Wells
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Bergonzi, Bernard.
The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances
. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961.

——, ed.
H. G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays
. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976.

Crossley, Robert.
H. G. Wells
. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1986.

Draper, Michael.
H. G. Wells
. London: Macmillan Publishers, 1987.

Hammond, John, ed.
H. G. Wells: Interviews and Recollections
. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1980.

Huntington, John.
The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction
. New York; Columbia University Press, 1982.

——, ed.
Critical Essays on H. G. Wells
. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1991.

Kemp, Peter.
H. G. Wells and The Culminating Ape
. New York: St. Martins Press, 1982.

MacKenzie, Norman, and Jeanne Mackenzie.
H. G. Wells
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

McConnell, Frank.
The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Parrinder, Patrick.
H. G. Wells
. New York: Capricorn Books, 1970.

——.
H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage
. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

——.
Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophesy
. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Parrinder, Patrick, and Christopher Rolfe, eds.
Wells Under Revision: Proceedings of the International H. G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986
. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1990.

Reed, John.
The Natural History of H. G. Wells
. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982.

Smith, David.
Desperately Mortal
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Suvin, Darko, and Robert M. Philmus, eds.
H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction
. Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 1977.

West, Anthony.
H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life
. New York: Random House, 1984.