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

But in this particular tangle, the Archbishop wanted something more definite. If for once, he did not trouble about style and manner…

If he put the case simply, quite simply, just as he saw it, and remained very still on his knees, wouldn’t he presently find this neuralgic fretting of his mind abating, and that assurance, that clear self-assurance that had hitherto been his strength, returning to him? He must not be in the least oily—they had actually been calling him oily—he must be perfectly direct and simple and fearless. He must pray straightforwardly to the silence as one mind to another.

It was a little like the practice of some Dissenters and Quakers, but maybe it would be none the less effective on that account.

Yes, he would pray.

Slowly he sank to his knees and put his hands together. He was touched by a sort of childish trustfulness in his own attitude. “Oh God,” he began, and paused.

He paused, and a sense of awful imminence, a monstrous awe, gripped him. And then he heard a voice.

It was not a harsh voice, but it was a clear strong voice. There was nothing about it still or small. It was neither friendly nor hostile; it was brisk.

“Yes,” said the voice. “What is it?”

They found His Grace in the morning. He had slipped off the steps on which he had been kneeling and lay, sprawling on the crimson carpet. Plainly his death had been instantaneous.

But instead of the serenity, the almost fatuous serenity, that was his habitual expression, his countenance, by some strange freak of nature, displayed an extremity of terror and dismay.

I don’t like to describe these stories with such a fancy polysyllabic label, but I don’t know how else to highlight the amazing variety and originality of Wells’s genre writing. Invasions from Mars, time machines, voyages to the moon, invisible men, visions of war and cataclysm and of brave new worlds, all these are his well-known legacy to us. These last two stories enrich that legacy with a different wealth.

In “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper,” which was written in 1932, Wells meets the challenge of living through times of immense and rapid social and cultural change by exaggerating it—imagining a leap forty years into the future, and a tantalizing glimpse of that future.

Now, science fiction is always doing this, and always falling flat on its face, too. Science fiction that has “passed its date” should be unreadable, an object of pity and derision—how could they have thought the Cold War would go on forever? how could they have thought space-ship crews would all be white, male, and English-speaking? and so on. But the odd thing is, if a story has intelligence and passion, it can pass its date, have all its predictions belied, and yet lose nothing in interest. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a case in point that almost settles the issue by itself. The fact is, “the future” in science fiction is always more or less a metaphor for the writer’s present. What is fascinating now in a story like “Brownlow’s Newspaper” is the interplay between Wells’s present, which is our long past—Wells’s ingeniously imagined future, which is our more recent past—and our present, which we perceive, for a moment, as amazingly contingent….

Moreover, the story has a delectable end-twist.

As for “The Country of the Blind,” I incline to think this is the best of all Wells’s short stories. I call it science fiction but it could be called fable or fantasy or, best of all, simply fiction. The theme of seeing, of vision, which runs so strong through this whole book, here again is the keynote. Wells published it first in 1904, and again in 1913; he reprinted it with a radically changed ending in 1939. The text given here, for most of the story, is that of the revision. As Wells said, “The two versions open with practically identical incidents, which I have never wished to alter; they run parallel until the distant mountain masses crack.” Both endings are given here, the older one first, then the revision; for though the revision is more powerful, the original remains valid, and the difference is both interesting and moving.

Omitting sentences that would give away the story, this is what Wells himself said, in his introduction to the 1939 edition, about why he rewrote it:

It has been changed because there has been a change in the atmosphere of life about us. In 1904 the stress is upon the spiritual isolation of those who see more keenly than their fellows and the tragedy of their incommunicable appreciation of life… In the later story vision becomes something altogether more tragic; it is no longer a story of disregarded loveliness and release; the visionary sees destruction sweeping down upon the whole blind world he has come to endure and even to love; he sees it plain, and he can do nothing to save it from its fate.

It is no wonder that between 1904 and 1939 the outlook of this visionary writer became more tragic. It is no wonder that in the year 1939, on the eve of Hitler’s war, Wells felt that to see destruction coming, to speak of it, to cry out warnings, might be as vain as trying to stop an avalanche with words. A hard lesson for an old man who had tried all his life to show people the danger of blind unreason, the worlds of promise and beauty they might see if they’d only open the eyes of their intelligence and their imagination.

I call this a Queer Story because it is a story without an explanation. When I first heard it, in scraps, from Brownlow I found it queer and incredible. But—it refuses to remain incredible. After resisting and then questioning and scrutinising and falling back before the evidence, after rejecting all his evidence as an elaborate mystification and refusing to hear any more about it, and then being drawn to reconsider it by an irresistible curiosity and so going through it all again, I have been forced to the conclusion that Brownlow, so far as he can tell the truth, has been telling the truth. But it remains queer truth, queer and exciting to the imagination. The more credible his story becomes the queerer it is. It troubles my mind. I am fevered by it, infected not with germs but with notes of interrogation and unsatisfied curiosity.

Brownlow, is, I admit, a cheerful spirit. I have known him tell lies. But I have never known him do anything so elaborate and sustained as this affair, if it is a mystification, would have to be. He is incapable of anything so elaborate and sustained. He is too lazy and easy-going for anything of the sort. And he would have laughed. At some stage he would have laughed and given the whole thing away. He has nothing to gain by keeping it up. His honour is not in the case either way. And after all there is his bit of newspaper in evidence—and the scrap of an addressed wrapper…

I realise it will damage this story for many readers that it opens with Brownlow in a state very definitely on the gayer side of sobriety. He was not in a mood for cool and calculated observation, much less for accurate record. He was seeing things in an exhilarated manner. He was disposed to see them and greet them cheerfully and let them slip by out of attention. The limitations of time and space lay lightly upon him. It was after midnight. He had been dining with friends.

I have inquired what friends—and satisfied myself upon one or two obvious possibilities of that dinner party. They were, he said to me, “just friends. They hadn’t anything to do with it.” I don’t usually push past an assurance of this sort, but I made an exception in this case. I watched my man and took a chance of repeating the question. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that dinner party, unless it was the fact that it was an unusually good dinner party. The host was Red-path Baynes, the solicitor, and the dinner was in his house in St. John’s Wood. Gifford, of the Evening Telegraph, whom I know slightly, was, I found, present, and from him I got all I wanted to know. There was much bright and discursive talk and Brownlow had been inspired to give an imitation of his aunt, Lady Clitherholme, reproving an inconsiderate plumber during some re-building operations at Clitherholme. This early memory had been received with considerable merriment— he was always very good about his aunt, Lady Clitherholme—and Brownlow had departed obviously elated by this little social success and the general geniality of the occasion. Had they talked, I asked, about the Future, or Einstein, or J. W. Dunne, or any such high and serious topic at that party? They had not. Had they discussed the modern newspaper? No. There had been nobody whom one could call a practical joker at this party, and Brownlow had gone off alone in a taxi. That is what I was most desirous of knowing. He had been duly delivered by his taxi at the main entrance to Sussex Court.