The Haunting of H. G. Wells

by Robert Masello

  “Here, just hand it to me,” Bryce said, when he saw that Wells was not sure where to deposit his jacket.

  “And are you right- or left-handed?” the nurse inquired.

  “Left.”

  “Then roll up your right sleeve, please, above the bicep.”

  Wells did so, all the while trying not to see the waiting syringe. Still, he caught a glimpse of it, its evil tip gleaming and wet, just before the nurse wiped a spot on his upper arm with iodine, gripped his elbow firmly, and jabbed the needle in. It seemed to Wells that she left it there, depressing the plunger, for far longer than was necessary, before withdrawing it, swabbing the spot once more, and flattening a bandage across the injection site. “You might experience some soreness or redness in the muscle for a day or two, but that should pass,” she said, before gathering up her medical kit and leaving the office.

  “Normally, you’d have had to line up in the barracks with a hundred other half-naked men for that,” the colonel said, as Wells rolled his sleeve back down and retrieved his jacket.

  “I’m forever in your debt.”

  Together, they went over his itinerary for the next day, along with his orders to report and, finally, the issuance of his uniform. Bryce opened a cabinet, the same one where he’d hung Wells’s overcoat, and took from a top shelf a neatly folded khaki uniform—wool tunic and riding breeches and peaked cap—and then a pair of regulation brown leather boots, which he plunked down on the edge of the desk with a thump. “All in the sizes you gave us.”

  “Thank you,” Wells said, the mission taking on greater reality with the arrival of each item. “Helmet?” he asked.

  Bryce laughed. “We’re outfitting you as a line officer, but good God, Wells, we’re not expecting you to lead a charge across no man’s land.” Then he grew serious. “Besides, when and if you need one, there are always plenty of them lying about.”

  Plenty of them lying about. Wells wondered if he would have to pry it literally from a dead man’s skull.

  “But you will have this,” Bryce said, returning to the cabinet to remove a webbed canvas belt with holster and gun attached. “Have you ever fired a Webley Mk?”

  “No.”

  “Chances are, you won’t have to,” he said, laying the revolver more gently on the pile of clothing. “But once you get there, have one of the men run through it with you. It’s got a bit of a jump when fired, but at close range, you’ll find it’s quite reliable.”

  Wells hoped to make no such discovery. He had no more use for the Boche than the next Englishman, but up until now he had never killed, or even tried to kill, a German, and wasn’t at all sure, should the occasion arise, if he would be capable of it.

  “You’ll be leaving from Waterloo Station at seven thirty tomorrow morning, accompanied by a Sergeant Stubb. He was supposed to be here today, but he had a medical appointment of his own. He’ll get you all the way to the Front, get you settled, and remain your liaison. So, any questions?”

  “I’m sure many will arise.”

  “Hence, Sergeant Stubb.”

  Bryce let a pause fall, before asking, “Now, is there anything you wish to tell me?”

  “Tell you?”

  “About your meeting with Mr. Machen?”

  “You know about that?”

  “We are the War Office, and we do have a branch called Military Intelligence.”

  Wells was suddenly made uncomfortable at the notion that he might have been trailed.

  “What did you make of him?” Bryce asked.

  “We’ve met before. A good-hearted chap, but admittedly on the eccentric side.”

  “To say the least,” Bryce said, with a chuckle. “He’s quite round the bend, if you ask me.”

  “But he did extend his help, and he meant it.”

  “That’s the kind of help we do not need,” the colonel said, laughing again. “No, not from that sort.” Wells suddenly took a disliking to him. That sort. Bryce reminded him of the upper-form boys at school, the hearty lads who mocked the less athletic and more scholarly boys, of which Wells had been one.

  “Well, then,” Bryce said, sticking out his hand, “it’s been an honor to know you, Mr. Wells, and I wish you much luck.”

  “Thank you,” Wells said, shaking his hand nonetheless and packing all his gear into the Gladstone bag he had been advised to bring.

  As he left, Bryce called out, “Oh, and do give my best to Captain Lillyfield—a capital fellow. We were at Harrow together.”

  Of course you were, Wells thought. Of course you were.

  On the way to St. James’s Court, Wells’s shoulder already began to ache, but he knew he would never be able to complain about it to Jane. She had seen him off tenderly the night before, but without taking back her strong disapproval of this entire enterprise.

  “If you get yourself killed, I will never forgive you,” she’d said, trying, without much success, to make light of the situation.

  “I’ll be quite peeved myself if that happens.”

  Tonight, he would stay at the flat, alone, and simply try to get a good night’s sleep. There was no telling when he’d get another. After failing to hail any available cab—at dusk, there was always a shortage—he elected to take the tube instead, where he happened to be seated across from a gawky young man, no more than seventeen or eighteen years old, so absorbed in a book that he was biting his fingernails while reading. Like any author, Wells was curious to know more about the book—could it be one of his own, or something by one of his many literary friends? At the next station, several passengers got off, but among those who got on were a pair of attractive girls, about the same age as the boy. They were laughing and talking to each other, and he noticed one of them, in the wide-brimmed hat, call her friend’s attention to the reader. Still standing as the train took off, they bent their heads together conspiratorially, and then approached the boy. Ah, Wells thought, the eternal and unchanging mating dance; if the fellow didn’t look up from his seat soon, he’d miss his chance!

  Although their backs were to him, and the roar from the train too loud for him to make out what they were saying, Wells could tell that they had asked him what he was reading, as he bashfully turned the book over to show them the cover. It was Ivanhoe, nothing Wells would ever have guessed. The classics endured. The boy, whose complexion was spotty to begin with, was blushing with confusion—two pretty girls hovering over him like this! Wells hoped he would not muff it. The girl in the fancy hat chuckled at something he said, and squeezed her friend’s arm. The boy looked as if he couldn’t follow. The girl bent lower, and appeared to be straightening the collar of his corduroy jacket, and then stood back to appraise her work. The boy was motionless.

  “There,” she said, patting the top of his head, “you’ve earned that,” and as the train slowed at the next platform, they turned on their heels, laughing. Looking very pleased with themselves, they sauntered off arm in arm.

  The boy looked paralyzed, his face flaming red with shame, only his eyes shifting down to take in the white feather that the girl had pinned to his lapel.

  My God, Wells thought.

  The boy glanced up, catching Wells’s gaze, then snatched the feather off and in his hurry to leave the car, dropped his copy of Ivanhoe.

  Wells picked it up, expecting him to come back for it, but he did not. The disgrace was too great—he had been given the mark of cowardice, the white feather that young women, many of them suffragettes, had taken to bestowing on men of fighting age who were not in uniform. That boy would never forget this episode; he would never forget the girls’ laughter, or seeing the man with the Gladstone bag between his feet looking back at him. What he would never know was there was no disapprobation, but only sympathy, in that man’s expression. And he would never again take pleasure in reading Ivanhoe.

  It was drizzling when Wells emerged from the underground station, and as soon as he got to his flat, he poured himself a healthy shot of whiskey and pulled on his old cardigan s
weater. No telling when he’d have another night like this. With his feet before the fire, and rain now pelting the windowpanes, he was settling in with the Evening News—the paper Machen wrote for—when the door knocker banged. Several times.

  Who could that be? Wells wondered. Almost no one knew that he would even be in London that night. The only people who knew were Jane, Winston, and, come to think of it . . . Rebecca.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I look a mess, I know,” Rebecca said, standing at the door with a broken umbrella in hand, “and I hope I’m not disturbing you.” Her wet hair was plastered to her head. She had so hoped to make a better impression, but there was nothing she could do about it now.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Come in, come in.”

  “Are you sure it’s all right?” she said, peering over his shoulder to see if Jane might be there, too.

  “I’m the only one home.”

  That was a relief, she thought. Leaving the twisted wreckage of her umbrella at the portico, she entered, shaking the rain from her thick brown mane, and when she turned, he was studying her in, if she were to be honest, a most gratifying way. Perhaps the dishevelment wasn’t such a bad thing, after all.

  “When I realized that tomorrow was the day you were scheduled to depart”—she wanted it to seem as if it had simply been a passing thought, and not a date with which she had been consumed ever since he had mentioned it in a note days before—“I couldn’t bear to not say goodbye.”

  “I do expect to return, you know,” he said, hanging her wet coat on a hook by the door, and ushering her toward the parlor, where the fire crackled in the grate. “But it’s lovely to see you.” He left the room briefly, and came back to her with a towel in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. “First dry, then drink.”

  She scrubbed her hair, then exchanged the towel for the glass. In the old sweater and scuffed shearling slippers, he looked more endearing than ever. Her eyes roamed the bookshelves, most of them still empty, lining the walls.

  “These need filling,” she said.

  “Yes, they do—I haven’t yet decided how to split up my library, between Easton Glebe and here. Inevitably, whatever book I need when I’m here turns out to be in the country, and vice versa.”

  “You’ll have to buy duplicates from now on.”

  “Not the worst idea.”

  For the next half hour or so, they made idle chitchat about books and writing routines—he mentioned that he had read with pleasure her piece about militancy among the suffragettes, which she’d sold to the Clarion, and she complimented him on a speech he’d given on socialism at the Guildhall.

  “You were there?” he said. “You should have come up afterward.”

  “I tried to,” she said, “but you were surrounded by acolytes, and before I could catch your attention, George Bernard Shaw had hustled you out a side door.”

  “Oh, yes,” Wells said with a laugh. “Shaw can’t bear to see anyone else being celebrated. But it’s hard to imagine that I might have missed you.”

  Rebecca did not miss the flirtatious note. They could easily have gone on talking in the same vein—about authors and editors and current events—but all the while she was as aware of the subtle, but rising, tension in the room as she was of the rain and wind at the windows. A man of Wells’s sensitivity, and with his reputation, could not have missed it, either. A beautiful young woman appears on your doorstep, unannounced, on a blustery night, when you are to leave for the Front in the morning? What reason could there be, other than the most obvious, if yet unspoken, one?

  But how to get there? Rebecca had imagined the scene many times—boldly proclaiming herself, initiating the affair, falling onto a divan in a tangle of limbs—but now that she was actually here, in the flat, the fire dwindling in the grate, she found her courage failing her. Would Wells take up the gauntlet?

  A church bell tolled in the distance, and on the last bong, she asked if he had already packed his kit for the journey. “If you haven’t, I’d be glad to help. I’m quite clever at things like that.” Anything to prolong the visit.

  He appeared to be mulling it over. “Jane usually does it for me—”

  Did he have to mention his wife?

  “—but it is indeed a skill I lack. Leave it to me to forget the essentials, and pack only the superfluous.”

  “Then let me help,” she said, clapping her hands together and bounding up from her chair. “Before he vanished into the ether, I used to help my father with his bags. It’s one of the few happy memories I have of him.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Quite! Where’s the bag?”

  It was, as she was fairly confident it would be, in the master bedroom—a battered but capacious brown suitcase, with colorful stickers from ports of call all over the world. Despite his less than rousing oratorical skills—those who were standing in the back, as Rebecca had been, at the Guildhall, could barely hear his reedy voice—Wells was a much sought-after speaker from Moscow to New York.

  “I was planning to get to this in the morning,” he said, opening the case atop the hand-quilted bedspread, which, Rebecca wondered, might have come from Jane’s own hand. She tried to put that out of her mind.

  “The trick is,” she said, “to start at the top and move down to the bottom, then pack everything in the reverse order. So, what have you got for your head?”

  “An army officer’s cap, which I shall be wearing.”

  “What else?”

  “What else do I need?”

  “Something warm.”

  He obligingly went to the dresser and removed a flannel sleeping cap.

  Rebecca smiled and said, “You mustn’t let the others see you in this. Now, shirts.”

  He handed her a fresh shirt, an undershirt, and a black necktie—“Will there be many formal dinners?” she asked, and he shrugged. And so it went, from sweater, to belt, to trousers, to socks, all of the items stacked beside the suitcase. The intimacy of the process—standing close beside each other, handling his clothing, next to the neatly made four-poster bed—wasn’t lost on either one of them, and Rebecca could all but feel the heat rising off of Wells. But could he sense her own desire? She had written about love, and lovemaking, in a frank and forthright manner, in essays and stories, but for all of her candor, she was in fact a virgin, as untutored in all of it as a child would be. She’d lyrically praised D. H. Lawrence’s work, and assumed the pose of someone more versed in sensuality than she actually was, when, in truth, the whole business remained murky and undefined. Even so, the back of her neck felt as if a warm wind were caressing the exposed skin.

  Once the stacks were complete, Rebecca went about putting them into the suitcase, the bulkier items on the bottom, carefully tucking everything in, smoothing out the wrinkles, but when Wells reached out to add another pair of socks—“I’ve read that trench foot is one of the most uncomfortable calamities to befall the troops”—their hands grazed each other, and Rebecca felt it as if it were an electric shock. The breath caught in her throat, and she turned her head to Wells. His eyes—that pale blue-gray—were staring into hers, and his expression was one of . . . expectancy? Indecision?

  Would she be the one to bridge the gap—those few inches that felt like miles—between the two of them?

  Wells opened his lips, as if to speak, but Rebecca didn’t dare to wait. What if it was something about his wife? she thought. What if it was a demurral? What if it was anything to destroy the moment? She closed her eyes, and kissed him.

  He neither resisted, nor complied, and in confusion she persisted, pressing her lips against his—though even at that, she was far less experienced than she let on. She felt the slight bristle of his brown mustache—she had never kissed a mustache before—and smelled the faint scent of bay rum from his shaved cheeks. Then, his arms, slipping around her waist, clutched her body to his, bending her like a willow . . . a willow that begged to be bent . . .

  She fell back
on the bed, the suitcase gaping beside her head, and he lay on top of her, returning her kiss with more passion than she had ever known in her life. Her hands went up to the nubby shoulders of his sweater, coursing across his back and shoulders, then up to the back of his head to hold it even more firmly, more ardently, in place. She wanted the embrace to go on forever, but she also wanted it to lead on . . . tonight she wanted to leave this room, this house, a changed woman, an adult woman, in every sense of that word. She wanted this night to be the Rubicon she had finally crossed, wrapped in the arms of the most eminent lover in the world . . .

  And that was when she felt it, like a cold wave, dashing her in the face. Wells had broken off the kiss; he had leaned back—looking intently down at her—and with a tormented sigh, disengaged. He stepped back from the bed, leaving her panting, feeling more naked than she’d have felt with her clothes completely stripped away.

  “What?” she breathed. “What is it?”

  He shook his head, and looked away. “I can’t.”

  “I want you to,” she said.

  “And so do I,” he murmured, straightening his clothes. “But I cannot do this to you.”

  “But I give my consent.”

  “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I’m a married man.”

  “I’m told that hasn’t stopped you before.”

  “And I’m twice your age.”

  “Nor has that.”

  The passionate encounter was quickly yielding to debate.

  “I see you’re aware of my scandalous past.”

  “All of London is.” She rose up onto her elbows, then brushed her damp hair from her eyes.

  “It simply wouldn’t be right,” he said, jamming his clenched hands into the pockets of his sweater.

  “A fine time,” she said, “to discover your scruples.”