by Mike Ashley
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 though 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 d
ocuments. 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 –’’
Joe Smith smiled. “I’m an old man, sir. I want you to publish the truth, and damn those in power. They wouldn’t harm a citizen nearing ninety-six, would they?”
I felt my throat constrict. His faith in the honour of the ruling regime was at once terribly innocent and dangerously optimistic.
“I wouldn’t publish anything while you might suffer the consequences,” I said.
Joe poured me another whisky and we talked for a further hour.
“The other evening,” he said, “I was attempting to list the benefits that might have come from the war. I could think only of the improved transportation system!”
I smiled. “There have been medical advances, too. The cure of tuberculosis has saved many a civilian life, as well as those of soldiers returning from the war.”
I turned my attention to his bookshelves, stocked with the leather-bound volumes of Dickens and Trollope.
He noticed my interest. “I like a good novel, sir. Have you by any chance written a . . . ?”
I interrupted. “I have many a good idea,” I said, “but hardly time to commit them to paper. Perhaps one day, when the war is over . . .”
I noticed Palgrave’s Golden Treasury on his shelf, among other volumes. “You enjoy poetry too?”
“It is one of the consolations of old age,” Joe said. “My favourites are the War Poets, Owen, Graves, Sassoon, all dead now, alas.” He indicated a dozen back numbers of the Adelphi. “I enjoyed your poems, too, until the government closed down the magazine.”
“The dabbling of an amateur,” I said, “though I rather think I will be writing more verse at the front.”
Joe Smith looked shocked. “You’ve been called up?”
“I volunteered. I join my regiment in the morning.” I paused, and felt an explanation was due. “People often mistake patriotism for nationalism, Joe. I love England, but hate what she is becoming. I believe that we are facing a terrible evil in the new Germany that’s emerging from the old order, even if the war was originally based upon a lie. Mussolini is making pro-German noises, and the German minister of Foreign Affairs is an evil schemer called Hitler who’ll soon be in power. As reluctant as I am to pitch in my lot with the blimps in charge of this benighted land, Joe, I feel I must do my little bit.”
I finished my drink, consulted my watch, and made my excuses. “I have an early start . . .”
We stood and Joe showed me to the door. “It has been an honour talking to you, Mr Orwell,” he said.
“The honour has been mine, Joe.”
As I stepped out into the freezing night, Joe Smith quoted, “‘There may not always be scientists, but there will always be poets’ . . .”
I paused. “I don’t recognize the line.”
“From Six Weeks in a Balloon, sir.”
“Dr Fergusson wrote that?” I asked, surprised.
Joe Smith laughed. “The line is Jules Verne’s,” he said.
We shook hands, and I took my leave of the worthy Joe.
It was only a mile to the cheap hotel I used when in London, and I elected to walk. Turning my collar up against the wind, and murmuring to myself, “There will always be poets . . .” I squared my shoulders and set off into the dark and freezing night.
LONDRES AU XXIE SIÈCLE
James Lovegrove
One of the great discoveries in recent years was of a lost novel by Jules Verne. Not a latter-day, unpublished one, but an early one. Paris au XXe Siècle had been completed in 1863, so must have been his second novel, but was rejected by Hetzel partly because he believed the predictions would not be believed. Verne buried the manuscript in a safe and there it remained until discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. Here Verne really had let his imagination take free rein and his vision of the future is remarkably prescient. Perhaps it was because the work was rejected that Verne subsequently kept his stories within the close parameter of the plausible and as a consequence whilst we had more believable adventures we lost the true technological predictions. The book is as much a travelogue of the future as Verne’s later books became travelogues of the Earth in the present. As such it leaves itself open for satire, as the following story shows.
[Editor’s Note: With the discovery of Verne’s early “lost” novel of 1863, Paris au XXe siècle, came the simultaneous discovery of a hitherto unknown sequel, judged to have been written in 1904, toward the end of the writer’s life and career. The event aroused little excitement in Vernian circles simply because, whereas Paris . . . was an intact manuscript of some 200 pages (complete with margin notes by Verne’s regular editor Hetzel), the manuscript of the belated sequel was burned – in all likelihood by Verne’s son Michel – and survives only as a set of charred fragments. The title page itself has been lost but we may reasonably infer from the content that the novel is called Londres au XXIe siècle (London in the Twenty-First Century). Reinforcing this supposition is the fact that the story features the same protagonist as Paris . . . , Michel Jérôme Dufrénoy, still a poet but now an older and much sadder and wiser man than the self-martyring young firebrand of the previous novel. We present here the full extant text of Londres . . . , commending it to readers not only for its many startlingly accurate prognostications, so typical of Verne, but for its brevity, so untypical of Verne. ]
pp. 3–5
/“M Dufrénoy,” said Mr Smith the publisher, “I have run a thorough analysis of your verse collection on my totalizer and have been served with a statistical conclusion that backs to the hilt my professional instincts. The book has been subjected to every form of critical and linguistic computation available. Every word, every phrase, every rhyme, has been scrutinized by the machine and checked against the preferred standards. It is as if your poetry has been looked over by a thousand of the most median public minds, appraised by a thousand pairs of eyes that recognize what is ‘popular’, what will sell.”
“And t
he result?” said Dufrénoy, although the publisher’s tone of voice and down-turned lips had already given him his answer.
“Alas, the sales projections for the book are minimal. Indeed, the totalizer predicts that not only will we sell less than a dozen copies but those dozen copies will almost instantly find their way into second-hand bookshops, from where half of them will be sold again and half thrown away after sitting untouched on the shelves for a year. In effect, we will sell a negative number of copies, as it is predicted that the half-dozen volumes purchased from the secondhand shops will be bought by the very people who passed them on to the second-hand shops in the first place, forgetting they used to own this selfsame book a short while earlier. You see, the totalizer’s assessment of your poetry is that it neither captures the imagination nor lodges in the memory. Therefore, with regret, monsieur, I must tell you that Smith and Daughters respectfully decline to be your publisher.”
“But,” expostulated Dufrénoy, “you are saying that because your machine informs you my poetry will not sell, you are not prepared to attempt to sell it!?”
“Why does this come as a surprise to you?” replied Smith with a calm gesture. “You know that we in publishing are in a business, much as everyone is in a business these days. Who, in 2005, can not afford to be in a business? Thus we employ statistical projection methods to enable us to judge what books we should and shouldn’t put out. Our margins for error are fine. We cannot financially afford the least slipup.”
“So you will publish only something which you know beforehand people will buy?”
“Is this so strange?”
“But you base your judgements on a mechanized distillation of public taste.”
“Exactly!” said Smith, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. “The totalizer is programmed to reflect nothing but the essence of the average man’s and woman’s literary likes, that which the busy person will choose to flick through while speeding to the office by pneumotube or the holidaymaker will idly read while lazing beneath the sun-like arc lights at an indoor vacation lido. Which is not to say, M Dufrénoy, that your poetry is bad. On the contrary, in my opinion it is excellent. Beautiful, limpid, elegant, exquisitely expressed, and above all original. ‘Original’, however, is what we cannot afford. ‘Original’ is the last thing anyone needs. ‘Original’, to put it finely, is not a marketable commodity.”
