‘Confound it!’ I cried, ‘and if I am not Bedford, what am I?’
But in that direction no light was forthcoming, though the strangest fancies came drifting into my brain, queer remote suspicions like shadows seen from far away…. Do you know I had an idea that really I was something quite outside not only the world, but all worlds, and out of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was just a peephole through which I looked at life…
Bedford! However I disavowed him, there I was most certainly bound up with him, and I knew that wherever and whatever I might be I must needs feel the stress of his desires and sympathize with all his joys and sorrows until his life should end. And with the dying of Bedford – what then?…
Enough of this remarkable phase of my experiences. I tell it here simply to show how one's isolation and departure from this planet touched not only the functions and feeling of every organ of the body but indeed also the very fabric of the mind with strange and unanticipated disturbances. All through the major portion of that vast space-journey I hung thinking of such immaterial things, hung dissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalomaniac as it were, amidst the stars and planets in the void of space, and not only the world to which I was returning, but the blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, their helmet faces, their gigantic and wonderful machines, and the fate of Cavor, dragged helpless into that world, were facts infinitely minute and altogether trivial.
Until at last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon my being, drawing me back again to the life that is real for men. And then indeed it grew clearer and clearer to me that I was quite certainly Bedford after all, and returning after amazing adventures to this world of ours, and with a life that I was very likely to lose in this return. I set myself to puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to earth.
21
MR BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE
My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into the upper air. The temperature of the sphere began to rise forthwith. I knew it behoved me to drop at once. Far below me in a darkling twilight stretched a great expanse of sea. I opened every window I could and fell – out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening into night. Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, and the silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out to catch me. At last the world seemed no longer a sphere, but flat, and then concave. It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world of Man. I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window and dropped with a slackening velocity. The broadening water, now so near that I could see the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me. The sphere became very hot. I snapped the last strip of window and sat scowling and biting my knuckles waiting for the impact… .
The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent it fathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open. Down I went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressing against my feet and so drove up again as a bubble drives. And at the last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea and my journey in space was at an end.
The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pin-points far away showed the passing of a ship, and nearer was a red glare that came and went. Had not the electricity of my glow-lamp exhausted itself, I could have got picked up that night. In spite of the inordinate fatigue I was beginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful in a feverish, impatient way that so my travelling might end.
But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staring at a distant red light. It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking. My excitement passed. I realized I had yet to spend at least another night in the sphere. I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued. And so I fell asleep.
A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me. I peered through the refracting glass and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallow of sand. Far away I saw houses and trees, and seaward a curved vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.
I stood up and staggered. My one desire was to emerge. The manhole was upward and I wrestled with the screw. Slowly I opened the manhole. At last the air was singing in again as once it had sung out. But this time I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted. In another moment I had the weight of the window on my hands and it was open, wide open, to the old familiar sky of earth.
The air hit me on the chest so that I gasped. I dropped the glass screw. I cried out, put my hands to my chest and sat down. For a time I was in pain. Then I took deep breaths. At last I could rise and move about again.
I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolled over. It was as though something had lugged my head down as it emerged. I ducked back sharply or I should have been pinned face under water. After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out upon sand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.
I did not attempt to stand up. It seemed to me that my body must be suddenly changed to lead. Mother Earth had her grip on me now – no Cavorite intervening. I sat down heedless of the water that came over my feet.
It was dawn, a grey dawn, rather overcast but showing here and there a long patch of greenish grey. Some way out a ship was lying at anchor, a pale silhouette of a ship with one yellow light. The water came rippling in in long shallow waves. Away to the right curved the land, a shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailing mark and a point. Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here and there by pools of water and ending a mile away perhaps in a low shore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place was visible; a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest objects that I could see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange men can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do not know. There they are like pieces of Brighton1 lost in the waste.
For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face. At last I struggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. I stood up.
I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since our starvation in the crater I thought of earthly food. ‘Bacon,’ I whispered, ‘eggs. Good toast and good coffee…. And how the devil am I going to get all this stuff to Lympne?’ I wondered where I was. It was an east shore, anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.
I heard footsteps crunching in the sand and a little round-faced friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about his shoulders and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the beach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staring most intently at the sphere and me. He advanced, staring. I dare say I looked a ferocious savage enough – dirty, unkempt to an indescribable degree, but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at a distance of twenty yards. ‘Hul-lo, my man!’ he said doubtfully.
‘Hullo yourself!’ said I.
He advanced reassured by that. ‘What on earth is that thing?’ he asked.
‘Can you tell me where I am?’ I asked.
‘That's Littlestone2,’ he said, pointing to the houses; ‘and that's Dungeness! Have you just landed? What's that thing you've got? Some sort of machine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What is it?’
I meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man's appearance as he drew nearer. ‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘you've had a time of it! I thought you – Well – Where were you cast away? Is that a sort of floating thing for saving life?’
I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vague affirmatives. ‘I want help,’ I said hoarsely. ‘I want to get some stuff up the beach – stuff I can't very well leave about.’ I became aware of three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw hats coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing section of this Littlestone.
‘Help!’ said the young man; ‘rather!’ He became vaguely active. ‘What particularly do you want done?’ He turned round and gesticulated. The three young men accelerat
ed their pace. In a minute they were about me plying me with questions I was disinclined to answer. ‘I'll tell all that later,’ I said. ‘I'm dead beat. I'm a rag.’
‘Come up to the hotel,’ said the foremost little man. ‘We'll look after that thing there.’
I hesitated. ‘I can't,’ I said. ‘In that sphere there's two big bars of gold.’
They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they had the Selenites' crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like kittens round a beetle. They didn't know what to do with the stuff. The fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars and then dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.
‘It's lead or gold!’ said one.
‘Oh, it's gold!’ said another.
‘Gold right enough,’ said the third.
Then they all stared at me and then they all stared at the ship lying at anchor.
‘I say!’ cried the little man. ‘But where did you get that?’
I was too tired to keep up a lie. ‘I got it in the moon.’
I saw them stare at one another.
‘Look here!’ said I, ‘I'm not going to argue now. Help me carry these lumps of gold up to the hotel – I guess with rests two of you can manage one and I'll trail this chain thing – and I'll tell you more when I've had some food.’
‘And how about that thing?’
‘It won't hurt there,’ I said. ‘Anyhow – confound it! – it must stop there now. If the tide comes up, it will float all right.’
And in a state of enormous wonderment these young men most obediently hoisted my treasures on their shoulders, and with limbs that felt like lead I headed a procession towards that distant fragment of ‘sea-front’. Halfway there we were reinforced by two awe-stricken little girls with spades, and later appeared a lean little boy with a penetrating sniff. He was, I remember, wheeling a bicycle and he accompanied us at a distance of about a hundred yards on our right flank and then I suppose gave us up as uninteresting, mounted his bicycle and rode off over the level sands in the direction of the sphere.
I glanced back after him.
‘He won't touch it,’ said the stout young man reassuringly, and I was only too willing to be reassured.
At first something of the grey of the morning was in my mind, but presently the sun disengaged itself from the level clouds of the horizon and lit the world and turned the leaden sea to glittering waters. My spirits rose. A sense of the vast importance of the things I had done and had yet to do came with the sunlight into my mind. I laughed aloud as the foremost man staggered under my gold. When indeed I took my place in the world, how amazed the world would be!
If it had not been for my inordinate fatigue the landlord of the Littlestone hotel would have been amusing as he hesitated between my gold and my respectable company on the one hand, and my filthy appearance on the other. But at last I found myself in a terrestrial bathroom once more, with warm water to wash myself with and a change of raiment, preposterously small indeed, but clean, that the genial little man had lent me. He lent me a razor, too, but I could not screw up my resolution to attack even the outposts of the bristling beard that covered my face.
I sat down to an English breakfast and ate with a sort of languid appetite, an appetite many weeks old and very decrepit, and stirred myself to answer the questions of the four young men. And I told them the truth.
‘Well,’ said I, ‘as you press me, – I got it in the moon.’
‘The moon?’
‘Yes, the moon in the sky.’
‘But how do you mean?’
‘What I say, confound it!’
‘That you have just come from the moon?’
‘Exactly! through space – in that ball.’ And I took a delicious mouthful of egg. I made a private note that when I went back to the moon I would take a box of eggs.
I could see clearly that they did not believe one word of what I told them, but evidently they considered me the most respectable liar they had ever met. They glanced at one another and then concentrated the fire of their eyes on me. I fancy they expected a clue to me in the way I helped myself to salt. They seemed to find something significant in my peppering my egg. Those strangely shaped masses of gold they had staggered under held their minds. There the lumps lay in front of me, each worth thousands of pounds and as impossible for anyone to steal as a house or a piece of land. As I looked at their curious faces over my coffee cup I realized something of the enormous wilderness of explanations into which I should have to wander to render myself comprehensible again.
‘You don't really mean,’ began the youngest young man in the tone of one who speaks to an obstinate child.
‘Just pass me that toast rack,’ I said, and shut him up completely.
‘But look here, I say,’ began one of the others. ‘We're not going to believe that, you know.’
‘Ah, well,’ said I, and shrugged my shoulders.
‘He doesn't want to tell us,’ said the youngest young man in a stage voice aside, and then with an appearance of great sang-froid: 3 ‘You don't mind if I have a cigarette?’
I waved him a cordial assent, and proceeded with my breakfast. Two of the others went and looked out of the farther window and talked inaudibly. I was struck by a thought. ‘The tide,’ I said, ‘is running out?’
There was a pause as to who should answer me. ‘It's near the ebb,’ said the little fat man.
‘Well, anyhow,’ I said, ‘it won't float far.’
I decapitated my third egg and began a little speech. ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘Please don't imagine I'm surly or telling you uncivil lies or anything of that sort. I'm forced almost to be a little short and mysterious. I can quite understand this is as queer as it can be and that your imaginations must be going it. I can assure you, you're in at a memorable time. But I can't make it clear to you now, – it's impossible. I give you my word of honour I've come from the moon, and that's all I can tell you…. All the same I'm tremendously obliged to you, you know, tremendously. I hope that my manner hasn't in any way given you offence.’
‘Oh no, not in the least!’ said the youngest young man affably. ‘We can quite understand,’ and staring hard at me all the time he heeled his chair back until it very nearly upset, and recovered with some exertion. ‘Not a bit of it,’ said the fat young man. ‘Don't you imagine that!’ and they all got up and dispersed and walked about and lit cigarettes and generally tried to show they were perfectly amiable and disengaged and entirely free from the slightest curiosity about me and the sphere. ‘I'm going to keep an eye on that ship out there all the same,’ I heard one of them remarking in an undertone. If only they could have forced themselves to it they would, I believe, even have gone out and left me. I went on with my third egg.
‘The weather,’ the fat little man remarked presently, ‘has been immense, has it not? I don't know when we have had such a summer…’
Phoo-whizz! Like a tremendous rocket!
And somewhere a window was broken….
‘What's that?’ said I.
‘It isn't –?’ cried the little man and rushed to the corner window.
All the others rushed to the window likewise. I sat staring at them.
Suddenly I leapt up, knocked over my third egg, and rushed for the window also. I had just thought of something. ‘Nothing to be seen there,’ cried the little man, rushing for the door.
‘It's that boy!’ I cried, bawling in hoarse fury; ‘it's that accursed boy!’ and turning about I pushed the waiter aside – he was just bringing me some more toast – and rushed violently out of the room and down and out upon the queer little esplanade in front of the hotel.
The sea, which had been smooth, was rough now with hurrying cats‘-paws, and all about where the sphere had been was tumbled water like the wake of a ship. Above, a little puff of cloud whirled like dispersing smoke, and
the three or four people on the beach were staring up with interrogative faces towards the point of that unexpected report. And that was all! Boots4 and waiter and the four young men in blazers came rushing out behind me. Shouts came from windows and doors and all sorts of worrying people came into sight – agape.
For a time I stood there, too overwhelmed by this new development to think of the people. At first I was too stunned to see the thing as any definite disaster - I was just stunned as a man is by some accidental violent blow. It is only afterwards he begins to appreciate his specific injury.
‘Good Lord!’
I felt as though somebody was pouring funk out of a can down the back of my neck. My legs became feeble. I had got the first intimation of what the disaster meant for me. There was that confounded boy – sky high! I was utterly ‘left’. There was the gold in the coffee-room, my only possession on earth. How would it all work out? The general effect was of a gigantic unmanageable confusion.
‘I say,’ said the voice of the little man behind, ‘I say, you know.’
I wheeled about and there were twenty or thirty people all bombarding me with dumb interrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt the compulsion of their eyes intolerably. I groaned aloud.
H. G. Wells Page 19
