The Haunting of H. G. Wells

by Robert Masello

  Wells greeted him, too, and took the remaining chair. The office was a perfunctory affair, with wooden filing cabinets along one wall, a scuffed linoleum floor, and glaring overhead lights—as ordinary as the outside of the building was not.

  “In fact,” Churchill said, “it was my idea to bring you in.”

  “Should I be pleased?”

  “You shall soon find out,” Churchill said, deferring to Bryce, who cleared his throat, and passed to Wells a yellow copy of the Evening News, a halfpenny London paper whose color distinguished it from its more respectable full penny competitors. “I’m sure you saw this at the time it was first published.”

  Wells glanced at the section outlined in red pen and said, “Yes, of course.” It was a piece entitled “The Bowmen,” by Arthur Machen, a popular journalist and author of gothic tales. It told the incredible tale of some British soldiers, fighting a rear guard action at a key salient in the line, who were about to be overrun by a German assault. Just when they thought all was lost, one of them had called upon St. George, who had descended with a heavenly host of angelic archers, dressed in medieval garb, to come to their defense. Wells had thought it a workmanlike piece, though its placement in the paper had puzzled him; instead of appearing on the page where short stories and imaginative items were printed, it had shown up in the news section.

  When he mentioned that now, Colonel Bryce nodded his head purposefully, and Churchill said, “Precisely. The editor has since printed a retraction, but no one seems to notice, or care.”

  “It was all a mix-up at the paper,” the colonel put in, “but with unintended consequences.”

  “Such as?” Wells said.

  “A great upswelling of national pride. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it since Shackleton set sail for the Antarctic, just days before this war was declared.”

  It had been months now since any further word had been received from that expedition. Wells, like many, often wondered if the Endurance and its crew were still plowing through the icy seas, or had foundered on some barren shore. It was a pity that such a grand adventure should be subordinated to the exigencies of war.

  “This story of the bowmen has instilled a new sense of confidence,” Churchill added. “Preachers are assuring their flock that God is on our side. Children are clamoring for toy archers. St. George sausage rolls are being sold in Piccadilly.”

  Wells was still unsure about where all this was going or what it had to do with him.

  “To be blunt,” Bryce said, steepling his hands on the desk before him, “the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium was no match for the German war machine. We were out trained, out supplied, out gunned, and out maneuvered. Needless to say, that assessment goes no further than this room.”

  Wells nodded.

  “But that story, misplaced as it was,” Churchill said, leaning forward in his chair, “snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. What was an ignominious rout—to be even more blunt about it than the colonel here—became a story of steadfast English bravery, and something else even more important.”

  “An endorsement from on high,” Bryce said, finishing the thought. “Seven months ago, at a critical moment in the opening days of this war, when things were looking very bleak indeed, that story convinced a large part of the public that the patron saint of England would intervene, if necessary, in human affairs.”

  “But surely people realized it was just a story,” Wells said, “that it was simply a bit of folderol, however inspiring.”

  “Some did, but many did not.”

  “Which is what gave me the thought of publishing something real, but along similar lines,” Churchill said. “It’s not as if we’re out of the woods, after all. This war could go on for years.”

  That was a prognosis seldom heard; everyone had gone into the war thinking it would be a matter of weeks or months before the whole ugly episode was resolved and Europe could return to the status quo. Even Wells, a man whose work was characterized by its ability to see and predict the future, had thought so at first. He’d been beguiled by all the happy jingoistic fervor and the patriotic clamor in the streets; his heart had been rent by the propaganda depicting the systematic rape of their ally, Belgium. He had not foreseen, no one had, the trenches that would be dug—hundreds of miles of them already—or the scale of the carnage inflicted by modern weaponry. But sitting in the War Office now, looking at a scrap of blue sky through a smudged windowpane, he caught a glimmer of why he’d been summoned here.

  “What exactly is it that you’d like me to write?”

  Churchill and Bryce exchanged a look.

  “Something to lift the national spirit,” Churchill said.

  “Something to confirm what Mr. Machen’s story has already suggested,” the colonel said.

  “That God is our ally?”

  “That the English soldier is endowed with a nobility of spirit, and the English army with a moral purpose, which will assure us of victory in the end.”

  “You’re the only man who can do it,” Churchill urged.

  “I should think that Machen was. He got this ball rolling, after all.”

  “No, he’s too played out, too compromised.”

  “And he writes a lot of stories filled with occult mumbo jumbo,” the colonel said dismissively.

  “The Admiralty office thought I was overstepping my bounds,” Churchill said, “and that it was out of my official purview. That’s why I took the idea here.”

  “If you are willing,” Bryce said, gathering together some papers on his desk, “we would want you to travel to the Front—ideally somewhere near Mons, in the Ypres salient—and billet, for perhaps a week or two, with the officers of the regiment.”

  “The Front?” Wells had imagined concocting a story out of whole cloth, from the comfort and safe remove of his study.

  “Yes. It’s important that any dispatches or stories you send back have the seal of authenticity, that they come from the front lines. We want the country to know that our soldiers are in good spirits, and we want our soldiers to know that the country is foursquare behind them, every step of the way.”

  “We want fact from you, H. G., not fiction,” Churchill pointed out. “Make no mistake about that. But we want it told with your unmistakable flair for story and invention.”

  Could he do it? Wells thought. He was forty-nine years old, for God’s sake, and even in his prime had not been an especially vigorous specimen; he had always put it down to growing up in straitened circumstances, with a diet sorely lacking in wholesome foods. And he could only imagine the howls from Jane at the very thought of his placing himself so deliberately in harm’s way.

  “So what do you think, H. G.?” Churchill said. “Are you ready to do your bit for king and country?”

  Bryce gently slid the papers—official-looking documents, including a map—across the desk toward him. Wells could spot the empty signature line at the bottom of the form with the heading, all in red capitals, “TOP SECRET.”

  He drew the papers into his lap, and thought, How could he ever face his own young sons, both of them away at boarding school, if he shirked his duty now? How, for that matter, could he face himself?

  “I only wish I could accompany you,” Churchill said, and Wells knew that he meant it. Winston had always been one for derring-do.

  Finally, what would posterity make of it if he failed to come up to the mark? “May I borrow this?” he asked, taking the pen from the stand on Bryce’s desk. The colonel sat back in his chair, hands folded across his abdomen, and Churchill clapped Wells on the back the moment he had finished scrawling his name on the empty line at the bottom of the page.

  “Drinks at the club,” Churchill exclaimed, “and I won’t take no for an answer,” as Wells replaced the pen and wondered, What have I just done?

  CHAPTER SIX

  “You didn’t!” Winnie exclaimed.

  “The whole night?” Lettie asked.

  Rebecca nodded, watching he
r mother out of the corner of her eye; she was still sitting on the piano bench, where she’d been playing Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words—something she played whenever most perturbed—as Rebecca had come up the walk to the cottage.

  “And what was he like?” Lettie, her oldest sister, said. “Was he tall?”

  “No.”

  “Thin?” Winnie, the middle one, asked.

  “No.”

  “Fat?”

  “No, not that either. He looks rather like an unassuming, middle-aged solicitor.” She was aware that she was disappointing her audience. “But his eyes—they positively sparkle with intelligence and insight. They look as if they see farther, and more deeply, than anyone else’s.” She certainly felt as if they had peered more deeply into her than anyone else’s had ever done.

  Her sisters beamed, even as her mother’s scowl remained unchanged.

  “And his conversation is the most inspiring and surprising of any I have ever heard. You just want to remember every word of it. He throws off ideas like a pinwheel, until your head spins.”

  “I hope he didn’t turn your head too much,” her mother said. “The man has a reputation for doing just that with silly young girls.”

  Rebecca knew that she was referring to the scandal with Amber Reeves, an idealistic young Fabian with whom Wells had reputedly had an out-of-wedlock child. But she bridled at the word “silly.”

  “Nothing untoward occurred, I can assure you of that, Mother.”

  “Where was his wife?”

  “In the house, all night long. She was very kind and hospitable to me.”

  “And he accompanied you back to the city?”

  “He even paid the surcharge to make mine a first-class ticket.”

  “No doubt so you could sit together.”

  “There were others in the carriage. He behaved like a perfect gentleman.”

  “But did you behave like a perfect lady, Cissie?”

  It was her mother’s way of reminding her that she was Cicily in this house, and Rebecca only when she was swanning about in literary London, or getting herself into trouble at some street demonstration for the suffragette movement.

  “And now I’m not sure why you were summoned there in the first place,” Mrs. Fairfield continued. “Was it really to do with your work?”

  “First of all, I wasn’t summoned—I was invited—and yes, he had read my review of his novel and simply wanted to discuss it.”

  “No doubt a gushing review.”

  “Hardly, Mother. In fact, it was quite the opposite.”

  “Oh, yes, I read it, too,” Lettie put in, to draw off some of the fire. “And when I showed it to several of the women at the clinic, and admitted that its author was my little sister, they marveled at her audacity, taking on the great H. G. Wells.”

  “So long as this is the end of it,” Mrs. Fairfield declared. “I do not trust his motives.”

  “Then perhaps you should trust mine,” Rebecca replied. “I’m not some flibbertigibbet schoolgirl.”

  “Then be sure you don’t act like one.”

  Rebecca was about to retort when Winnie, always the peacemaker, put a hand on her arm and gave her a look that said, Let it go. She was right; Rebecca knew there was nothing to be gained from bickering. Her mother would never understand her. When their father had abandoned them all years before—for a mythical employment opportunity in Sierra Leone—it had fallen to her mother to somehow keep the household together and to provide for her three daughters. She had managed, but just barely, and her only dream ever since had been for security—for a solid base, and rectitude, and conformity to all the social norms that might provide protection for a female household of limited means. Rebecca wanted none of it; she wanted to break free and live her life exactly as she saw fit.

  “I’m going upstairs to change,” she said.

  “I’ll come, too,” her sisters said in unison.

  Rebecca knew that they wanted to hear more about her encounter with Wells. Their curiosity was only exceeded by that of her fellow writers and editors at the Freewoman, where Rebecca had perched on the edge of a desk, regaling them with details of the Wells household and, mindful of Wells’s admonition that their conversation remain off the record, an expurgated version of what had been said. When the editor in chief, Mrs. Marsden, had pressed her to write a piece about it, she had had to demur.

  “Are you mad?” Marsden had said, pushing the glasses back up to the bridge of her very long nose. “A private interview with H. G. Wells and you don’t wish to exploit it?”

  Rebecca knew it would be a great scoop and garner a lot of attention, but she felt already that this was one bridge she did not want to burn. Although Wells had entered her life unexpectedly, she was oddly confident that it would be some time before he exited it.

  “What did you have for dinner there?” Winnie asked now, trailing her up the stairs.

  “What was his library like?” Lettie asked, bringing up the rear.

  They continued to pepper her with questions as she changed out of her workaday clothes and into something more comfortable, and she did her best to recall every detail, from the books on the shelves to the herb garden in the yard. But all the while she felt something strange stirring within her, a kind of power that up until now she had allowed to remain latent, something for which she had never found a suitable outlet, or worthy counterpart.

  Now, she had. In Wells, she had more than met her match, and she was not about to wait another nineteen years for a similar opportunity to present itself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Wells stopped in front of the dilapidated lodging house in Notting Hill and consulted the paper in his hand again. Could this be the right address? But there it was, just as the young copy boy at the Evening News, to which Arthur Machen was a regular contributor, had written it: 23 Clarendon Road. “He’s all the way at the top,” the boy had said. “You’ll smell his flat long before you get there.”

  Wells hadn’t known exactly what he meant by that, but if this crumbling stoop and dirty brown brick facade were any indication, it did not bode well. The front door, though it had a lock, was propped open with a worn boot, and Wells started up the stairs with one hand on the rickety banister and the other holding the portfolio of material he’d received from the War Office. The only light came from small dirty windows on each landing, and the boy was right about the smell. Halfway up, Wells detected a strange and unpleasant aroma—a mixture of everything from incense to spoiled fish. At the top, the smell was much worse, and behind the scarred wooden door with a brass 8 hanging askew, he heard a low mumbling—chanting?—sound.

  Perhaps this was not such a good idea after all; he could simply leave word for Machen at the newspaper office and arrange for a meeting in some more congenial spot, like his club, for another day. But then, Wells had never been a man to put off till tomorrow what could just as easily be done today.

  He knocked on the door.

  The noise from within abruptly stopped, and a voice called out, “Just leave it!”

  Who did he take him for? “I’m afraid there’s nothing to leave.”

  Footsteps approached the door, which opened a crack. “Who’s that?” Machen said, peering out onto the gloomy landing. “You’re not the copy boy. What do you want?”

  “I wanted to talk to you, if I might. I’m sorry for the intrusion, but I was in London for the day, and—”

  “Good Christ, is that you, Wells?”

  “It is.” They had met once or twice, briefly, at literary events, and written, twenty years before, for a magazine called the Unicorn.

  “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

  “It’s not easy to explain through this crack in the door.”

  “Oh,” Machen said, “yes, of course.” The door swung wider, but not to its full extent. “The cats,” Machen said, toeing one back with the tip of his shoe, “can’t let them get out.”

  Wells slipped inside, where the full
impact of the sandalwood mingled with the scent of sour milk and stale cigarettes. The room was hard to take in at first, with a cluttered desk at one end and what might have been an altar to some saint at the other, where candles still burned in pewter dishes in front of a five-pointed iron star mounted on the wall.

  “Caught me performing one of my rituals,” Machen said, hastily moving to extinguish the candles, and throwing open the long red drapes to let what was left of the winter daylight into the room. “My God, I never expected to see you here.”

  The flat was in total disarray, with five or six cats roaming freely about—one languished on the mantelpiece, licking its paws, another was rubbing itself back and forth against Wells’s trouser leg—and it struck him, as it sometimes did, how truly fortunate he had been in his own career. This was how most writers, even ones as talented as Machen, wound up—living hand-to-mouth, in rented quarters, cranking out essays, articles, stories, whimsical columns, anything that might bring in a few pounds. Of course, Machen had had a couple of notable successes—his occult novel, The Great God Pan, had achieved a certain notoriety with its frank depiction of sex and magic and religion—but the kind of gothic fiction he had been known for had gone out of style in the 1890s, and anything otherwise controversial had suffered a setback after Oscar Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency. These days, with the war on, the nation was in no mood for such decadent tomfoolery. Wells made sure to cloak any of his own revolutionary sentiments in a sufficiently acceptable tale.

  “What can I get you? Tea?”

  “Oh, no, please don’t go to the trouble.”

  “A glass of sherry, then?” Machen said, ushering him to the office end of the room, where he whisked a cat off the sagging armchair that faced the desk. “I’m eager to know what’s brought you here.”

  Wells accepted the sherry out of courtesy, and once Machen had sat down behind the desk, said, “I was just at the War Office.” He indicated the portfolio, loosely tied, that he held in his lap.

  Before he could say another word, Machen snorted, and said, “Colonel Bryce?”