The Revolutions

by Gilman, Felix

  “Moina,” Josephine said. “Please: Where is Arthur Shaw? What have you done with him?”

  “How did you return? How did you return, when Atwood didn’t? When Sun didn’t? What did you see?”

  “Horrors,” said Vaz.

  Jupiter rounded on him. “What horrors, Mr Vaz? Explain yourself. Did you see Mars?”

  “Yes,” Josephine said. It seemed to her that Jupiter required very careful handling. “We saw Mars. After you left me—after that night, I saw the moons of Mars. There was an ivory moon and a red moon, and men and women with wings; and we saw Mars, too.”

  Jupiter closed her eyes as if in prayer. Then she opened them again and stared intently at Josephine. “What happened to Lord Atwood?”

  “He fell.”

  “I see. And then the two of you woke as one.”

  “We did; but it was a struggle to wake, Moina. And I’m afraid Mr Shaw was not strong enough. There was a—there was a struggle.”

  “Yes. Atwood went in summer; and you began to wake when he died; isn’t that so? I’ve sat over you long enough—I’ve listened to the beating of your heart, the fluttering of your breath. I listened to Atwood whispering. Oh God, I listened! It was by his will that you remained. It was with the cessation of his will that you were released.”

  She clutched at her necklace as if she meant to tear it off and hurl it into a corner of the room. “It was delusion all along. Don’t you see, Miss Bradman? The fact of your waking proves it. You saw nothing but Atwood’s dream. It was all for nothing.”

  “Nothing? Less than nothing, if Arthur … What did you hope for, Moina?”

  “Or perhaps I only prayed it was a delusion. What horrors did you see, Miss Bradman? Mr Vaz?”

  “It was a dead world.”

  “And?”

  “Please, Moina: Where is Mr Shaw?”

  Jupiter went to her desk and began removing papers from a drawer. “I see. I see. I knew it. I knew, when the nightmares began. When I sat by Atwood’s bedside. I should always have known. Addington was right, damn him. That horrible eye. Did you see them—the Masters of that place—are they real, then, after all?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Ah—Atwood has damned us all—I knew it! And now he’s gone. What are their intentions, Josephine?”

  “I don’t know; how could I know? They do not mean us well. You should have seen that place.”

  Vaz sat by the door, stretching his leg. He glanced up. “You should be afraid, madam.”

  “You deserve to be afraid,” Josephine said.

  “I see.” Jupiter’s face went white. “I see. And is that all you can say? Well. Your faces say enough. If only Sun had come back. Ah! Look what we’ve come to.”

  She hurried to the door. Vaz stumbled out of her way. Josephine cried out and stretched a hand toward the door on the other side of the room; and she gathered up her will; and the door slammed shut in Jupiter’s face.

  Both women were equally amazed.

  Josephine leaned forward in her chair, heart pounding. “Where—”

  “Dead! Gone! Mr Shaw has been gone for months.”

  “When, Moina?”

  “Months. A few days after Atwood died. I don’t know.”

  “Then perhaps he still lives. Perhaps he was lost on the way, and perhaps his soul still lives, in the void, lost as I was.”

  “I don’t know, Miss Bradman. I don’t know! Yes, no; he might, he might not. What do I know of the condition of his soul? What do I know of the heavens? Nothing. Everything I thought I knew was lies. For God’s sake, get out of London. Get out of England. I intend to.”

  Jupiter pulled the door open and rushed out into the hall. Her footsteps clattered down the stairs, and the front door opened and closed.

  They hobbled down the stairs after her. When they stepped onto the street, passers-by—giving them odd looks—informed them that the woman in the black dress had run off that way, and pointed towards the spires of the bridge.

  The bridge’s towers had undergone construction since she’d seen them last. The spired peaks were taller; yet more scaffolding had sprouted, like the tendrilled flowers of the moon. A year had passed in one night.

  Josephine sat down in the street.

  * * *

  Mr Vaz struck his forehead and said, “Mr Shaw!”

  For a moment Josephine thought he’d seen him walking down the street.

  “He made arrangements, madam—with a lawyer. Before he left. In Gravesend. I promised him I would remember the name of the fellow, in the event that you and I ever spoke, and he…”

  “Arrangements?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It was a Mr Harvey, or Harold, or some name of the sort. I expect if we walk up and down the High Street we will find him soon enough.”

  She shook. She was starting to feel the cold.

  “We can hardly travel to Gravesend dressed as we are, Mr Vaz.”

  “Miss Bradman, it seems to me that there is nothing on Earth I cannot do, now that I have gone and come back. I can hardly keep my feet on the ground! Doesn’t everything look frightfully thin and pale, madam? After—that place—doesn’t London look very small?”

  * * *

  Arthur’s arrangement turned out to be two thousand pounds, in cash. The solicitor, Mr Harvey, didn’t know where Arthur had got two thousand pounds. Mr Vaz believed it to have been siphoned from the operations of the Company of the Spheres, and put aside for her care.

  No letter. Two thousand pounds, but no letter. That was entirely like him.

  She began to cry. It made Mr Harvey very uncomfortable.

  Outside the office on the High Street, she gave half of the money to Mr Vaz.

  “I have done nothing to earn this,” he said.

  “Nor have I, Mr Vaz. Nor has anyone. You’ll need it to flee London.”

  He took her hand very solemnly, and for a moment she thought he might kiss it. Then she thought he might ask her what it had been like; what she’d seen on the white moon. Instead, he simply wished her good luck, and turned and walked away.

  * * *

  Mr Vaz remained in Gravesend a little while longer, asking around until he had obtained directions to an enterprise outside town that sounded very much like Mr Gracewell’s Engine. It had closed at the end of summer, ejecting a mass of unsavoury young men and questionable young women: London riff-raff, who’d swiftly succumbed to the gravity of the metropolis, and drifted away overnight.

  Whistling, he set off through the woods. Try as he might, Vaz couldn’t quite rid himself of the sensation that his left shoe was coming off, causing him to limp the whole way. On the other hand, the sun and the breeze were blissful, and every speck of green in the bare winter woods was more beautiful to him than diamonds or gold. He wasn’t cold. He thought that he might never be cold again, no matter where on Earth he went. Not a bad thing for a sailor.

  In a clearing he found the Engine, little more now than a maze of empty rooms and broken windows. He gathered up every scrap of writing he could find, and made a bonfire.

  After that, he left England at the first opportunity. He changed his name, and set about turning his thousand pounds into a much larger fortune. By the early years of the new century he had become a prominent importer and exporter, with offices in Chennai and in London, and interests in more than one ship. His alias was emblazoned on packages and crates on shelves on two continents, and on a large stone water fountain in Hyde Park—though he never returned to London himself. He had six sons, who inherited their father’s cleverness with numbers but not his minor gifts for fortune-telling and magic. They were strongly discouraged from taking an interest in astronomy, fanciful novels, or the games of the English aristocracy.

  * * *

  The magical war that the Company had started continued for many years. Both Josephine and Mr Vaz were afraid for a long time that Atwood’s enemies might track them down—or, for that matter, his friends; it was hard to say which was worse. Fortunatel
y, it seemed that the magical war was keeping everyone busy. Hints of the conflict occasionally made the newspapers—odd events, strange lights, wolves in the city streets, mysterious deaths of aristocratic eccentrics in Paris, Berlin, London, and New York. By the early years of the new century, most of those who’d been personally involved in the events of ’94 and ’95 were dead, or mad, or had retired from magic and taken an interest in art, or gardening, or religion. One Lord Podmore lost a fortune on some bad investments in 1901, and in 1902 there was labour unrest among the printers in his employ, and in 1903 he was reported (in a rival newspaper) to have been discovered drowned in a vat of ink. True or not, he vanished. In 1909, in Panama City, Josephine saw Jupiter’s photograph in a six-month-old copy of The Times, in a story about campaigners for Indian Home Rule in Calcutta. When Josephine inquired further with the Embassy, she was told that the troublesome woman in question had gone missing.

  There were a few rumours about the occultist Martin Atwood’s mysterious disappearance. He was widely suspected to have killed himself.

  It seemed to Josephine that the new generation of occultists were mostly frauds. And then, of course, the War—the real War—absorbed everyone’s attention for a time, and kept a lot of brave and clever young men busy killing and dying and writing poetry. After it was over, and the smoke had cleared from the battlefields and the guns had begun to rust and the poppies grew in the wasteland, and so on and so forth—after that the whole business of magic felt absurdly old-fashioned and nineteenth-century.

  The War rather passed her by. By the time hostilities broke out in Europe, she was living in South America, writing stories about Mars.

  1937

  She passed on in September 1937. She’d changed her name more than once by then, and had lived in most places on Earth; she travelled restlessly through the United States, and South America, and India, and parts of Africa—though she was never able to get into Tibet. She spent most of 1911 on a series of steamships, drifting from port to port. She said that the best place in all the world to see the stars was from the deck of a boat. She said that the important thing was to keep moving, that to be everywhere and nowhere at once and always moving was the essence of the modern condition. It was hard for her to be still. She had a very strange way of thinking, which people generally put down to her being artistic. She married an Australian financier whom she met on board a ship between somewhere and somewhere else. He said that she lived as if she were running from something, or to something, which was charming but also exhausting. They had no children. Her accent became unplaceable. She struck people as rather grand, but of uncertain background. The Australian financier died in 1919, of influenza. He left her money; but she’d already made a small fortune of her own in the early years of the century, writing stories of Martian heroism and adventure, of alien princesses and chivalry and savagery. The Wings of Mars was something of a best-seller in America in 1908, and Captain Syme and the Queen of Mars outsold it in 1909, and The Vaults of Mars was serialised in the Strand in London in 1910. She wrote most of her novels on ships or trains. She was quite mercenary about it. She wrote under a pen-name, and many people thought she was a man. She never returned to London, though she was frequently invited there to speak or to meet with publishers. Once she confessed to an interviewer from Life magazine that her first husband died young, after an accident; subsequently, every interviewer tried to ferret out the facts of her tragic youth. She stopped granting interviews. Her books, beginning with 1915’s The Libraries of the Moon, took an occult turn which was by that time rather unfashionable. 1917’s Tiphareth of Venus was a commercial disaster. It didn’t matter; she was already as rich as she needed to be. She spent 1918 learning to fly planes, then gave it up.

  In 1921 she settled outside Flagstaff, Arizona. She had a house constructed in the middle of more land than she knew what to do with. Solitude made for good neighbours, she said. She became a local eccentric—not quite a recluse. She discouraged admirers of her books from visiting, but she was friendly with a couple of local lawyers who handled her affairs. She read the newspapers out of London and Berlin and New York and half a dozen other cities very closely. She kept up with the latest astronomical discoveries. She built a rather imposing library of exotic volumes in Greek and in Latin. She wrote poetry; she had no interest whatsoever in publishing it. She learned Hebrew, and Chinese. She studied mathematics. She could afford to bring the best tutors to Flagstaff. In 1924 she began a correspondence with a few occult figures in parts of Europe. She didn’t give them her true name, but by certain signs and words she let them know that she was a woman of occult learning. She dropped Atwood’s name, and Jupiter’s; there were people who still remembered them. She was generous with her money, and that usually got their attention if all else failed.

  In the spring of 1927 she was diagnosed with cancer. In the winter of that year she invited an eccentric crowd to Flagstaff, for a sort of party, as she called it. It more closely resembled a pagan jamboree. It made the local newspapers. There were reports of strange bonfires out on the low hill at the southern part of her land, and chanting and dancing and the taking of Indian drugs and a lot of un-Christian carrying-on. Nobody in town much liked it, but she was rich, and bloody-minded. She was still alive in 1928, so she did it again. The police were called, but no obvious law-breaking was discovered. She was small and frail and by now silver-haired, but she had a way of speaking that could make a Chief of Police go pale and stare at his feet.

  She continued to sicken, but still didn’t die. She liked to say that she knew a thing or two about death, and would not be going anywhere until she was quite sure that the destination was to her liking. Her winter jamborees were repeated in ’29 through ’33, regular as clockwork or Christmas, newspaper outrage and visit from the police and all.

  She ended them in ’33. Her young friend (and occasional lawyer) Mr Merriweather asked why, and she said, as if it were obvious, that she’d already learned all there was to learn that way. He didn’t know quite what she meant, but that was all right. He rarely did. He was relieved, as her occasional lawyer, not to have to deal with the Chief of Police yelling at him anymore.

  A round and pleasant and baby-faced fellow of twenty-seven, Merriweather had grown up reading The Wings of Mars and The Vaults of Mars and Captain Syme’s other adventurers, and rather idolised their author. He said that in his opinion she was far superior to Edgar Rice Burroughs, who’d stolen all his best ideas from her anyhow, and he’d fight any man who said different if it came to it, which it never did. He considered her a kind of grand English dame. He was pretty sure she was English; she was certainly grand.

  In ’35 a Hollywood man came to town and Merriweather got to talking to him at the bar of his hotel. Merriweather was also a big admirer of the moving pictures.

  “You know what,” Merriweather said. “We got a famous author right here in town. What I wouldn’t give to see Mars in the moving pictures, just the way she writes it—you should talk to her. I happen to know her as well as anyone.”

  The Hollywood man shook his head. “What do you think brings me to town? Your Madam Grand and Famous Author doesn’t believe in telephones, I guess. Well, I don’t mind sweet-talking the old lady a little. But she’s crazy, you know that? She’s crazy. Maybe she’s sick, I don’t know. She says she doesn’t care for the money. Worse—I swear—she believes every word of it. They’ve had moving pictures on Mars for a thousand years, she says. Crazy. More trouble than it’s worth.”

  “Listen, friend—there’s no call for that sort of talk.”

  Merriweather had been thinking of buying the Hollywood man a drink and trying to talk business. Instead he picked up his hat and walked away.

  * * *

  In ’36 Merriweather was permitted to visit the author’s study, to discuss her will. By that late date she’d become something of a hermit. He dressed up in honour of the solemn occasion. There were heaps and drifts of paper in the study, pages densely covere
d with the author’s handwriting. At a single furtive glance it was clear that they concerned Mars, but not the Mars of Captain Syme, but a Mars of white moons and red, and flowers. The author informed Merriweather that they were written in a trance. He took that to be a figure of speech. When he tried to read more, the author rapped his knuckles—by God, she was still quicker than she looked—and advised him in a croak not to pry into secrets that did not concern him.

  He reported to his wife that night that the author was at work on one last story. He waited anxiously for further news. The old woman was clearly on her last legs. Terrible to think she might die with her last work undone. He invented excuses to write and call, but the author had ceased to answer her mail, and rarely answered her telephone. She’d never liked telephones. She said they were too lonely.

  He drove out past the author’s house a few times but got no answer at the door. On one of the rare occasions when the author did answer the telephone, she apologised and said that she’d been travelling. Merriweather took that for a joke. She was too ill to go anywhere these days.

  He asked after the progress of the book.

  “Oh, that. I think I’ve written quite enough books, Mr Merriweather.”

  “Not in my opinion, ma’am.”

  “God bless you; but everything must end, and there comes a time when one must turn one’s thoughts to what comes after.”

  “Oh, ma’am, I don’t know about that.”

  “You remind me of him sometimes, Mr Merriweather.”

  He took her to be referring to her first husband, the lost love of her youth—the one who’d died in an accident, or of an illness, or whatever the sad story was. In another country, and before the War. She talked about him more often these days.