H. Wells - Selected Stories of H. G. Wells

Towards nightfall the wind fell. The sun set in a calm serenity, and the man who had once possessed the silver bridle came at last very cautiously and by an easy slope out of the ravine again; but now he led the white horse that once belonged to the little man. He would have gone back to his horse to get his silver-mounted bridle again, but he feared night and a quickening breeze might still find him in the valley, and besides he disliked greatly to think he might discover his horse all swathed in cobwebs and perhaps unpleasantly eaten.

And as he thought of those cobwebs and of all the dangers he had been through, and the manner in which he had been preserved that day, his hand sought a little reliquary that hung about his neck, and he clasped it for a moment with heartfelt gratitude. As he did so his eyes went across the valley.

“I was hot with passion,” he said, “and now she has met her reward. They also, no doubt—”

And behold! Far away out of the wooded slopes across the valley, but in the clearness of the sunset distinct and unmistakable, he saw a little spire of smoke.

At that his expression of serene resignation changed to an amazed anger. Smoke? He turned the head of the white horse about, and hesitated. And as he did so a little rustle of air went through the grass about him. Far away upon some reeds swayed a tattered sheet of grey. He looked at the cobwebs; he looked at the smoke.

“Perhaps, after all, it is not them,” he said at last.

But he knew better.

After he had stared at the smoke for some time, he mounted the white horse.

As he rode, he picked his way amidst stranded masses of web. For some reason there were many dead spiders on the ground, and those that lived feasted guiltily on their fellows. At the sound of his horse’s hoofs they fled.

Their time had passed. From the ground, without either a wind to carry them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could do him no evil.

He flicked with his belt at those he fancied came too near. Once, where a number ran together over a bare place, he was minded to dismount and trample them with his boots, but this impulse he overcame. Ever and again he returned in his saddle, and looked back at the smoke.

“Spiders,” he muttered over and over again. “Spiders! Well, well… The next time I must spin a web.”

Fantasy is the aged aunt, science fiction is the up-to-date nephew who shows Auntie how to do email. Science fiction explains its wonders, rationalizes them, and shows effect following from cause, because its daddy is Realism. Aunt Fantasy doesn’t give a hoot. For all she cares, cause follows from effect. She tells her impossible tales shamelessly, knowing she has reasons that reason knows not of.

Young H. G. Wells took the nephew around town, got to know him well, and in fact showed him the ropes and gave him a good start in life. But Wells was familiar also with Auntie and her great old house set in its immense garden, which you enter by a door in a wall, and whose forking paths lead back and back through time to the world outside time.

Five of the six fantasies in this section can be related to old tales or traditions of folklore and myth, the stories we tell over and over in every language, changing their clothes and props as the ages change.

Fantasy of course includes ghosts and nightmares of all kinds. “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham” might well have gone with the Horror Stories, but I put it here because its aim seems less to gross out the reader than to explore metaphorically a fear we all have, a horror that happens to everybody. Its relation to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray is interesting and probably purely coincidental.

Wells called “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” a “Pantoum in Prose.” A pantoum is a highly repetitive poetic form that ends up, in a sense, where it began, which gives us the cue. Otherwise, this funny romp of a story is a kind of cosmic enlargement of the folktale about the man who gets three wishes, and wishes for sausages, and his wife scolds him so hard for wasting a wish on something so stupid that he wishes the sausages were stuck on the end of her nose, and then…

“The Magic Shop” is an endearing story told in a rather gentler tone than Wells mostly used. How many fantasies have their beginning in a shop, a little shop, with an odd shopkeeper, and something odd for sale? It is almost a genre in itself.

The tale of Mr. Skelmersdale is a riff on the ballad of Tam Lin, the man stolen away by the Fair Folk, a story that seems to lie very deep in the English imagination. Told lamely and inarticulately by the ordinary young man who keeps the general store in a village, it gains a particular poignancy, showing a deep strangeness in the heart of the commonplace, glimpsed, and irrecoverably lost.

The yearning for another world, barely seen and then lost, comes up again and again in Wells’s fiction, never more explicitly than in “The Door in the Wall.” Is that other, sweeter world real or unreal? Is it unattainable, or just on the other side of a door we can open if we choose?

The last story of this group, “The Presence by the Fire,” is a kind of antifantasy or lament for the death of a fantasy. It draws, briefly and with the simplest means, a vivid picture of grief and the loss of consolation.

I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but, if possible, to prepare a way of escape for the next victim. He perhaps may profit by my misfortune. My own case, I know, is hopeless, and I am now in some measure prepared to meet my fate.

My name is Edward George Eden. I was born at Trentham, in Staffordshire, my father being employed in the gardens there. I lost my mother when I was three years old and my father when I was five, my uncle, George Eden, then adopting me as his own son. He was a single man, self-educated, and well-known in Birmingham as an enterprising journalist; he educated me generously, fired my ambition to succeed in the world, and at his death, which happened four years ago, left me his entire fortune, a matter of about five hundred pounds after all outgoing charges were paid. I was then eighteen. He advised me in his will to expend the money in completing my education. I had already chosen the profession of medicine, and through his posthumous generosity, and my good fortune in a scholarship competition, I became a medical student at University College, London. At the time of the beginning of my story I lodged at 11A University Street, in a little upper room, very shabbily furnished, and draughty, overlooking the back of Shoolbred’s premises. I used this little room both to live in and sleep in, because I was anxious to eke out my means to the very last shillingsworth.

I was taking a pair of shoes to be mended at a shop in the Tottenham Court Road when I first encountered the little old man with the yellow face, with whom my life has now become so inextricably entangled. He was standing on the kerb, and staring at the number on the door in a doubtful way, as I opened it. His eyes—they were dull grey eyes, and reddish under the rims—fell to my face, and his countenance immediately assumed an expression of corrugated amiability.

“You come,” he said, “apt to the moment. I had forgotten the number of your house. How do you do, Mr. Eden?”

I was a little astonished at his familiar address, for I had never set eyes on the man before. I was annoyed, too, at his catching me with my boots under my arm. He noticed my lack of cordiality.

“Wonder who the deuce I am, eh? A friend, let me assure you. I have seen you before, though you haven’t seen me. Is there anywhere where I can talk to you?”