The Map of Time
Page 13
However, once William had succeeded in the difficult task of convincing him that his sophisticated seat was not as essential to the Empire as he had imagined, they found themselves back at square one, without a single decent idea to their name.
Desperate, they concentrated on the flow of merchandise coming in from the colonies. What products had not yet been imported? What unfulfilled needs did the English have? They looked around carefully, but it seemed nothing was wanting. Her Majesty, with her tentacular grasp, was already divesting the world of everything her subjects needed. Of course, there was one thing they lacked, but this was a necessity no one dared to mention.
They discovered it one day whilst strolling through the commercial district of New York, where they had gone in search of inspiration. They were preparing to return to the hotel and soak their aching feet in a basin of saltwater, when their eyes fell on the product displayed in a shop window. Behind the glass was a stack of strange-looking packets containing fifty sheets of moisturized paper. Printed on the back were the words: “Gayetty’s Medicated Paper.” What the devil was this for, they wondered? They soon discovered this from the instructions pasted in the window, which without a hint of embarrassment depicted a hand applying the product to the most intimate area of a posterior. This fellow Gayetty had obviously decided that corncobs and parish news-letters were a thing of the past. Once they had recovered from their surprise, William and Sydney looked at each other meaningfully. This was it! It did not take a genius to imagine the warm reception thousands of British backsides raw from being rubbed with rough newspaper would give this heavensent gift. At fifty cents a packet, they would soon make their fortune. They purchased enough stock to furnish a small shop they acquired in one of London’s busiest streets, filled the window display with their product, put up a poster illustrating its correct usage, and waited behind the counter for customers to flock in and snatch this wonderful, timely invention from their hands. But not a single soul walked through the door the day the shop opened, or in the days that followed, which soon turned into weeks.
It took William and Sydney three months finally to admit defeat. Their dreams of wealth had been cruelly dashed at the outset, although they had enough medicated paper never to need worry about procuring another Sears catalogue in their lives.
However, at times society obeys its own twisted logic, and the moment they closed their disastrous shop, their business suddenly took off. In the dark corners of inns, in alleyway entrances, in their own homes during the early hours, William and Sydney were assailed by a variety of individuals, who, in hushed tones and glancing furtively about them, ordered packets of their miraculous paper before disappearing back into the gloom. Surprised at first by the cloak-and-dagger aspect they were obliged to adopt, the two young entrepreneurs soon became accustomed to tramping the streets at the dead of night, one limping along, the other puffing and panting, to make their clandestine deliveries far from prying eyes. They soon grew used to depositing their embarrassing product in house doorways, or signaling with a tap of their cane on windowpanes, or tossing packets off bridges onto barges passing noiselessly below, slipping into deserted parks and retrieving wads of pound notes stashed under a bench, whistling like a couple of songbirds through mansion railings. Everyone in London wanted to use Gayetty’s wonderful paper without their neighbor finding out, a fact William slyly took advantage of, increasing the price of his product to what would eventually become an outrageous sum, one which most customers were nevertheless willing to pay.
Within a couple of years, they were able to purchase two luxurious dwellings in the Brompton Road area, from where they soon upped sticks for Kensington. For in addition to his collection of expensive canes, William measured his success by this ability to acquire ever larger houses. Amazed that the reckless act of placing his entire savings at his brother-in-law’s disposal had provided him with a fine mansion in Queen’s Gate, from whose balcony he could survey the most elegant side of London, Sydney resolved to enjoy what he had, giving himself over to the pleasures of family life so extolled by the clergy. He filled his house with children, books, paintings by promising artists, took on a couple of servants, and, feeling at a safe distance from them now, cultivated the disdain he claimed he had always felt towards the lower classes to such an extent it became complete contempt. In brief, he quietly adapted to his new life of affluence without minding that it was all based on the ignoble business of selling toilet paper. But William was different. His proud, inquisitive nature made it impossible for him to be satisfied with that. He needed public recognition, to be respected by society. In other words, he wanted the great and the good of London to invite him foxhunting, to treat him as an equal. But, much as he paraded through London’s smoking rooms doling out his card, this did not happen. Faced with a situation he was powerless to change, he could not help building up a bitter resentment towards the wealthy elite, who subjected him to the most abysmal ostracism while wiping their distinguished backsides with the soft tissue paper he provided. During one of the rare gatherings the two of them were invited to, his anger boiled over when in a drunken repartee some wag bestowed on them the title Official Wipers to the Queen. Before anyone could so much as laugh, William Harrington hurled himself on the insolent dandy, breaking his nose with the pommel of his cane before Sydney managed to drag him away.
The gathering proved a turning point in their lives. William Harrington learned from it a harsh but valuable lesson: the medicinal paper to which he owed everything, and which had generated so much wealth, was a disgrace that would stain his life forever unless he did something about it. And so, spurred on by his overwhelming contempt, he began investing part of his earnings in less disreputable businesses, such as the burgeoning railway industry. In a matter of months, he became the majority shareholder in several locomotive repair shops. His next step was to buy up a failing shipping company called Fellowship, inject new blood into it, and turn it into the most profitable of any oceangoing concern.
Through his tiny empire of successful businesses, which Sydney managed with the easy elegance of an orchestra conductor, in less than two years William was able to dissociate his name forever from medicinal paper, canceling the final shipment and leaving the whole of London plunged into silent, mournful despair. In the spring of 1872, Annesley Hall invited him to his first hunt gathering on his Newstead estate, which was attended by all of London’s great and good who eagerly applauded William’s extraordinary achievements, and where the witty young man who had made a joke at his expense at that party long ago regrettably perished.
According to the newspaper account, the ill-fated youth accidentally shot himself in the foot with his own shotgun. It was around that time when William Harrington dusted off his old uniform and commissioned a portrait of himself bursting out of it, smiling as though his unadorned chest were plastered with medals, and greeting all who entered his mansion.
This, and no other, is the secret that their fathers so jealously guarded and whose air of light entertainment I considered appropriate for this rather wearisome journey. But I am afraid we have reached the end of our story too soon. Total silence still reigns in the cab and is likely to do so for some time, because, when he is in the mood, Andrew is capable of daydreaming for hours, unless prodded with a red-hot poker or doused in boiling oil, things Charles is not in the habit of carrying around with him. Therefore, I have no other choice but to take flight again so that we reach their destination, Mr. Wells’s house, more quickly than they do. Not only, as you will have gathered from some of my commentaries, am I not subject to the cab’s tortuous pace, but I can travel at the speed of light, so that— voilà!— in the blink of an eye, or faster still, we find ourselves in Woking, floating above the roof of a modest three-storey house with a garden overrun by brambles and silver birch, whose frail façade trembles slightly as the trains to Lynton roar past.
11
Iimmediately realize I have picked an inopportune moment to intrude
upon Herbert George Wells’s life. In order to inconvenience him as little as possible, I could quickly pass over the description of his physical appearance by saying no more than that the celebrated author was a pale, skinny young man who had seen better days. However, of all the characters swimming around like fish in this story, Wells is the one who appears most frequently, no doubt to his regret, and this compels me to be a little more precise in my depiction of him. Besides being painfully thin and having a deathly pallor, Wells sported a fashionable moustache, straight with downward-pointed ends that seemed too big and bushy for his childish face.
The moustache hung like a dark cloud over an exquisite, rather feminine mouth, which, together with his blue eyes, would have lent him an almost angelic air were it not for the roguish smile playing on his lips. In brief, Wells looked like a porcelain doll with twinkling eyes behind which roamed a lively, penetrating intellect. For lovers of detail, or those lacking in imagination, I shall go on to say that he weighed little more than eight stone, used a size eight and a half shoe, and wore his hair neatly parted on the left. His body odor, usually pleasant, smelled slightly of stale sweat that day, as some hours earlier he had been for a ride with his new wife through the surrounding Surrey roads astride their tandem bicycle, the latest invention that had instantly won the couple over because it needed no food or shelter and never strayed from the place where you left it. There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.
At that very moment, he was seated at the kitchen table, where he usually did his writing, a magazine in his hands. His stiff body, bolt upright in his chair, betrayed his inner turmoil.
For while it might have seemed as though Wells were simply letting himself be slowly enveloped by the pretty pattern of rippling shadows cast by the afternoon sun shining on the tree in the garden, he was in fact trying hard to contain his simmering rage. He took a deep breath, followed by another, then another, in a desperate effort to summon up a soothing calm. Evidently this did not work, for he ended up taking the journal he had been reading and hurling it against the kitchen door. The magazine fluttered gracelessly through the air like a wounded pigeon and landed a few yards from his feet. Wells gazed at it from his chair with slight regret, then sighed and shook his head, before finally standing up to retrieve it from the floor, scolding himself for this outburst of rage unworthy of a civilized person. He put the magazine back on the table and sat down in front of it again with the resigned expression of one who knows that accepting reversals of fortune with good grace is a sign of courage and intelligence.
The magazine in question was an edition of The Speaker, which had published a devastating review of his most recent novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, another popular work of science fiction beneath the surface of which lurked one of his pet themes: the visionary destroyed by his own dreams. The main protagonist of the novel is a man called Prendick who is shipwrecked and has the misfortune to be washed up on an uncharted island that turns out to be the domain of a mad scientist exiled from England because of his brutal experiments on animals. On that remote island, the eponymous doctor has become like a primitive god to a tribe made up of the freakish creations of his unhinged imagination, the monstrous spawn of his efforts to turn wild animals into men. The work was an attempt to go one step further than Darwin by having his deranged doctor attempt to modify life by speeding up the naturally slow process of evolution. It was also a tribute to Jonathan Swift, his favorite author.
The scene where Prendick returns to England to tell the world about the phantasmagorical Eden he has escaped from is almost identical to the chapter in which Gulliver describes the land of the houyhnhnm. And although Wells had not been very satisfied with his book, which had evolved almost in fits and starts out of the rather haphazard juxtaposition of more or less powerful images, and had been prepared for a possible slaying by the critics, the truth is it stung all the same. The first blow had taken him by surprise, as it came from his own wife, who considered the doctor perishing at the hands of the deformed puma he had tried to transform into a woman as a jibe at the women’s movement.
How could Jane possibly have thought that? The next jab came from The Saturday Review, a journal he had hitherto found favorable in its judgments. To his further annoyance, the objectionable article was written by Peter Chalmers Mitchell, a young, talented zoologist who had been a fellow pupil of his at the Normal School of Science, and who, betraying their once friendly relations, now declared bluntly that Wells’s intention was simply to shock. The critic in The Speaker went still further, accusing the author of being morally corrupt for insinuating that anyone succeeding through experimentation in giving animals a human appearance would logically go on to engage in sexual relations with them. “Mr. Wells uses his undoubted talent to shameless effect,” declared the reviewer. Wells asked himself whether his or the critic’s mind was polluted by immoral thoughts.
Wells was only too aware that unfavorable reviews, while tiresome and bad for the morale, were like storms in a teacup that would scarcely affect the book’s fortunes. The one before him, glibly referring to his novel as a depraved fantasy, might even boost sales, further smoothing the way for his subsequent books.
However, the wounds inflicted on an author’s self-esteem could have fatal consequences in the long term. For a writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius. Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavours were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning. But they would not get the better of him. Certainly not.
They would not confound him, for he had the basket.
He contemplated the wicker basket sitting on one of the kitchen shelves, and immediately felt his spirits lift again, rebellious and defiant. The basket’s effect on him was instantaneous.
As a result, he was never parted from it, lugging it around from pillar to post, despite the suspicions this aroused in his nearest and dearest. Wells had never believed in lucky charms or magical objects, but the curious way it had come into his life, and the string of positive events that had occurred since then, compelled him to make an exception in the case of the basket. He noticed that Jane had filled it with vegetables. Far from irritating him, this amused him, as by allocating it that dull domestic function, his wife had at once disguised its magical nature and rendered it doubly useful: not only did the basket bring good fortune and boost his self-confidence, not only did it embody the spirit of personal triumph by evoking the extraordinary person who had made it, it was also just a basket.
Feeling a lot calmer, Wells closed the magazine. He would not allow anyone to put down his achievements, of which he had reason to feel proud. He was thirty years old and, after a long and painful period of battling against the elements, his life had finally taken shape. The sword had been tempered, and of all the forms it might have taken, had acquired the appearance it would have for life. All that was needed now was to keep it honed, to learn how to wield it, and if necessary, allow it to taste blood occasionally.
Of all the things he could have been, it seemed clear he would be a writer—he was one already. His three published novels testified to this. A writer. It had a pleasant ring to it. And it was an occupation that he was not averse to, as ever since childhood it had been his second choice, after that of being a teacher. He had always wanted to stand on a podium and stir people’s consciences, but he could also do that from a shop window, and perhaps in a simpler and more far-reaching way.
Once he had succeeded in calming down, Wells cast a satisfied eye over his surroundings; the home that literature had provided him with. It was a modest dwelling, but one that would nevertheless have been far beyond his means a few years before, when he was barely scraping a living from the articles he managed to publish in local newspapers and the exhausting classes he gave, when only the basket kept him going in the face of despair. He could not help comparing it with the house in Bromley where he had grown up, that miserable hovel reeking of the paraffin his father used to douse the wooden floors in to kill off the armies of cockroaches they were obliged to live with. He recalled with revulsion the dreadful kitchen in the basement with its awkwardly placed coal stove, and the back garden with the shed containing the foul-smelling outside toilet, a hole in the ground at the bottom of a trodden earth path his mother was embarrassed to go down each time she wanted to empty her bladder. She imagined the employees of Mr. Cooper, the tailor next door, were watching her comings and goings. He remembered the creeper on the back wall, which he used to climb in order to spy on Mr. Covell, the butcher, who was in the habit of strolling around his garden, forearms covered in blood, like a weary assassin casually holding a dripping knife fresh from the slaughter. And in the distance, above the rooftops, the parish church and its graveyard crammed with decaying moss-covered headstones, below one of which lay the tiny body of his baby sister Frances, who his mother maintained had been poisoned by their evil neighbor Mr. Munday during a macabre tea party.