The H.G. Wells Reader (9 page)

“So I traveled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the stable sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillock pinkish-white. There were fringes of ice along the south margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanse of that south ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset was still unfrozen.

“I looked about me to see if any trace of animal-life remained. A certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the time machine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The great slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little.

“Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this grow larger. For a minute perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that was creeping over the day, and then I realized that an eclipse was beginning. Either the moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the sun's disk. Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet passing very near to the earth.

“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum on insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.

“A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of sea. It was a round thing, the size of football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.

“So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible upon the machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom. The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed. The hands spun backward upon the dials. At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent humanity. These, too, changed and passed, and others came. Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I began to recognize our own petty and familiar architecture, the thousands hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very gently, now, I slowed the mechanism down.

* * * * *

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unspoiled Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge
reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual place by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of a man.

In the cheerful comedy
, The Wheels of Chance,
written immediately after
The Time Machine,
Wells gives a realistic and contemporary reading of the class differences that so much structure the middle part of the earlier novel. The naive and optimistic drapers assistant, Mr. Hoopdriver, represents a version of the man Wells would have become had his mother had her way. In the course of a bicycling holiday (Wells himself loved to tour the countryside on the newly invented bicycle) our hero meets an upper class young woman, Jessie Milton. She has become entangled with a scoundrel, Bechamel, who pretending to help her run away from her hated stepmother, actually intends to seduce her. Mr. Hoopdriver, infatuated with Jessie and acutely conscious of their social difference, tries to rescue her. Much of the comedy comes from the good-natured misunderstandings that these two young people have of each other. Jessie declares, “I am resolved to Live my Own Life,” and Mr. Hoopdriver, who from his youth has worked for a living, has no idea what she is talking about, though he admires her assurance. Jessie, on her side, misinterprets the fawning and deferential manners of a store clerk, which Mr. Hoopdriver cannot shake, as those of “a colonial.” The selection comes from the middle of the novel after Mr. Hoopdriver has ridden off with Jessie. They are traveling incognito as brother and sister. Mr. Hoopdriver, ashamed of his name, has given Jessie a false one, but he has also forgotten it
.

He caused his ‘sister' to be called repeatedly, and when she came down, explained with a humorous smile his legal relationship to the bicycle in the yard. ‘Might be disagreeable, y' know.' His anxiety was obvious enough. ‘Very well,' she said (quite friendly); ‘hurry breakfast, and we'll ride out. I want to talk things over with you.' The girl seemed more beautiful than ever after the night's sleep; her hair in comely dark waves from her forehead, her ungauntleted finger-tips pink and cool. And how decided she was! Breakfast was a nervous ceremony, conversation fraternal but thin; the waiter overawed him, and he was cowed by a multiplicity of forks. But she called him ‘Chris.' They discussed their route over his six-penny county map for the sake of talking, but avoided a decision in the presence of the attendant. The five-pound note was changed for the bill, and through Hoopdriver's determination to be quite the gentleman, the waiter and chambermaid got half a crown each, and the ostler a florin. “Olidays,' said the ostler to himself, without gratitude. The public mounting of the bicycles in the street was a moment of trepidation. A policeman actually stopped and watched them from the opposite kerb. Suppose him to come across and ask: ‘Is that your bicycle, sir?' Fight? Or drop and run?
It was time of bewildering apprehension, too, going through the streets of the town, so that a milk-cart barely escaped destruction under Mr. Hoopdriver's chancy wheel. That recalled him to a sense of erratic steering, and he pulled himself together. In the lanes he breathed freer, and a less formal conversation presently began.

‘You've ridden out of Chichester in a great hurry,' said Jessie.

‘Well, the fact of it is, I'm worried, just a little bit, about this machine.'

‘Of course,' she said. ‘I had forgotten that. But where are we going?'

‘Jest a turning or two more, if you don't mind,' said Hoopdriver. ‘Jest a mile or so. I have to think of you, you know. I should feel more easy. If we was locked up, you know—not that I should mind on my own account.'

They rode with a streaky, gray sea coming and going on their left hand. Every mile they put between themselves and Chichester Mr. Hoopdriver felt a little less conscience-striken, and a little more of the gallant desperado. Here he was riding on a splendid machine with a Slap-up girl beside him. What would they think of it in the Emporium if any of them were to see him? He imagined in detail the astonishment of Miss Isaacs and of Miss Howe. ‘Why! It's Mr. Hoopdriver,' Miss Isaacs would say. ‘
Never!
' emphatically from Miss Howe. Then he played with Briggs, and then tried the ‘G.V.' in a shay. 'Fancy introjuicing ‘em to her—my sister
pro tem
.' He was her brother Chris—Chris what? Confound it!—Harringon, Hartington—something like that. Have to keep off that topic until he could remember. Wish he'd told her the truth now—almost. He glanced at her. She was riding with her eyes straight ahead of her. Thinking. A little perplexed she seemed. He noticed how well she rode, and that she rode with her lips closed—a thing he could never manage.

Mr. Hoopdriver's mind came round to the future. What was she going to do? What were they both going to do? His thoughts took a graver color. He had rescued her. This was fine, manly rescue work he was engaged upon. She ought to go home, in spite of that stepmother. He must insist gravely but firmly upon that. She was the spirited sort, of course, but still—wonder if she had any money? Wonder what the second-class fare from Havant to London is? Of course he would have to pay that—it was the regular thing, he being a gentleman. Then should he take her home? He began to rough in a moving sketch of the return. The stepmother, repentant of her indescribable cruelties, would be present—even these rich people have their troubles—probably an uncle or two. The footman would announce, Mr.—bother that name!—and Miss Milton. Then two women weeping together, and a knightly figure in the background dressed in a handsome Norfolk jacket, still conspicuously new. He would conceal his feeling until the very end. Then, leaving, he would pause in the doorway in such an attitude as Mr. George Alexander might assume, and say, slowly and dwindlingly: ‘Be to kind to her—
be
kind to her,' and so depart, heartbroken to the meanest intelligence. But that was a matter for the future. He would have to begin discussing the return soon. There was no traffic along the road, and he came up beside her (he had fallen behind in his musing). She began to talk. ‘Mr. Denison,' she began, and then, doubtfully, ‘that
is
your name? I'm very stupid—'

‘It is,' said Mr. Hoopdriver. (Denison was it? Denison, Denison, Denison. What was she saying?)

‘I wonder how far you are willing to help me?'

Confoundedly hard to answer a question like that on the spur of the moment, without steering wildly. ‘You may rely,' said Mr. Hoopdriver, recovering from a violent wabble. ‘I can assure you—I want to help you very much. Don't consider me at all. Leastways, consider me entirely at your service.' (Nuisance not to be able to say this kind of thing right.)

‘You see, I am so awkwardly situated.'

‘If I can only help you—you will make me very happy—' There was a pause. Round a bend in the road they came upon a grassy space between hedge and road, set with yarrow and meadowsweet, where a felled tree lay among the green. There she dismounted, and propping her machine against a stone sat down. ‘Here we can talk,' she said.

‘Yes,' said Mr. Hoopdriver, expectant.

She answered after a little while, sitting, elbow on knee, with her chin in her hand, and looking straight in front of her. ‘I don't know—I am resolved to Live my Own Life.'

‘Of course,' said Mr. Hoopdriver. ‘Naturally.'

‘I want to Live, and I want to see what life means. I want to learn. Every one is hurrying me; everything is hurrying me; I want time to think.'

Mr. Hoopdriver was puzzled, but admiring. It was wonderful how clear and ready her words were. But then one might well speak well with a throat and lips like that. He knew he was inadequate, but he tried to meet the occasion. ‘If you let them rush you into anything you might repent of, of course you'd be very silly,' he said.