H.G. Wells Short Stories, page 1
This is a FLAME TREE Book
Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells
Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck
Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker
Thanks to Will Rough
Publisher’s Note: Due to the historical nature of the text, we’re aware that there may be some language used which has the potential to cause offence to the modern reader. However, wishing overall to preserve the integrity of Wells’ text, rather than imposing contemporary sensibilities, we have left it unaltered.
FLAME TREE PUBLISHING
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First published 2017
Copyright © 2017 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd
Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.
PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78664-464-0
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78755-252-4
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Contents
Foreword by Patrick Parrinder
Publisher’s Note
The Stolen Bacillus
The Hammerpond Park Burglary
The Flowering of the Strange Orchid
In the Avu Observatory
Aepyornis Island
The Time Machine
The Temptation of Harringay
The Moth
The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes
The Cone
The Reconciliation
Under the Knife
The Red Room
The Plattner Story
The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham
In the Abyss
The Apple
The Sea Raiders
The Crystal Egg
The Invisible Man
The Star
The Man who Could Work Miracles
The Stolen Body
A Story of the Days to Come
A Dream of Armageddon
The New Accelerator
The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost
The Valley of Spiders
The Magic Shop
The Land Ironclads
The Country of the Blind
The Empire of the Ants
The Door in the Wall
The Story of the Last Trump
The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper
Biographies & Sources
Foreword: H.G. Wells Short Stories
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent, a market town rapidly becoming a London suburb. He took a degree in science and worked as a biology teacher until ill-health forced him to try his luck as a professional writer. At first money was tight but, as he later recalled, ‘life bubbled with short stories’. Most of his short fiction was written between the ages of 25 and 35, long before he achieved fame as a political writer, a futurologist, and a campaigner for a peaceful and more rational world order. He was the pioneer of modern science fiction and of tales of future wars, the author of The Island of Doctor Moreau with its Beast Folk and The War of the Worlds with its Martians.
In the present collection, ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ and The Invisible Man point towards today’s world of terrorists and suicide bombers, while the giant crabs of The Time Machine and the cephalopods of ‘The Sea Raiders’ are forerunners of pulp fiction’s Bug-Eyed Monsters. But Wells wrote much else besides science fiction. His stories came out in weekly papers and monthly magazines at a time when radio and television had yet to be invented, and electric lighting was in its infancy. Dimly-lit interiors and flickering candles were not only ghost-story material but part of everyday life. Wells, a shopkeeper’s son, never forgot how as a young boy he would climb up the narrow stairs from the basement kitchen to a cramped bedroom under the eaves. Lurking in the shadows he saw phantoms uncannily like the fearsome gorilla (then a newly-discovered species) that he had found in the Reverend J.G. Wood’s Illustrated Natural History. Much else from his childhood reading stayed with him, including the tropical forests and deserts that he vividly recreated in ‘The Empire of the Ants’ and ‘The Valley of Spiders’, and the Andean snowfields of ‘The Country of the Blind’.
The valley of the blind people – like the far future of The Time Machine and the lost paradise in ‘The Door in the Wall’ – reveals Wells’s unique ability to take us into other worlds, worlds sometimes finer but always much stranger than our own. These ‘worlds outside the world’ may be accessed via the Fourth Dimension, through an after-death experience, or in a flash of inspiration in the midst of ordinary life. They testify to what the medical student in ‘The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham’ calls ‘man’s detachability from matter’. Yet hallucination and detachment are only part of the effect. Once the ‘magic trick’ had been done, Wells explained, the writer’s task was ‘to keep everything else human and real’.
This volume ends with ‘The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper’, an amusing (and remarkably optimistic) late-Wellsian prophecy of the supposedly real world of the near future. It is a world ruled by a global federation, busily exploiting geothermal energy, and in which the last gorilla has just died out. Wells himself died in London in 1946, at the end of a war that was fought with tanks, aeroplanes and, finally, the atomic bomb, all weapons that he had described in his fiction up to half a century earlier. Like the haunted railway traveller of ‘A Dream of Armageddon’, Wells had experienced ‘Nightmares, indeed!’ The nightmares captured in his stories and novels continue to fascinate readers today.
Patrick Parrinder
President, H.G. Wells Society
Publisher’s Note
We’re thrilled to announce the arrival of new companion titles to our existing Gothic Fantasy range: volumes featuring classic fiction from the masterful pens of some of our favourite authors. For this title we have chosen the founding father of science fiction himself, H.G. Wells. A man clearly deserving of a collection all to himself, Wells has created a rich universe of stories – from science experiments gone wrong, to haunted rooms, out of body experiences, lost civilizations, strange creatures and doors into other worlds. This anthology includes a couple of Wells’s seminal science fiction short novels, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, as well as lesser-known but equally fantastic tales such as ‘A Dream of Armageddon’, ‘The Country of the Blind’ and ‘The Land Ironclads’.
The Stolen Bacillus
“This again,” said the Bacteriologist, slipping a glass slide under the microscope, “is well – a preparation of the Bacillus of cholera – the cholera germ.”
The pale-faced man peered down the microscope. He was evidently not accustomed to that kind of thing, and held a limp white hand over his disengaged eye. “I see very little,” he said.
“Touch this screw,” said the Bacteriologist; “perhaps the microscope is out of focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a turn this way or that.”
“Ah! Now I see,” said the visitor. “Not so very much to see after all. Little streaks and shreds of pink. And yet those little particles, those mere atomies, might multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!”
He stood up, and releasing the glass slip from the microscope, held it in his hand towards the window. “Scarcely visible,” he said, scrutinising the preparation. He hesitated. “Are these – alive? Are they dangerous now?”
“Those have been stained and killed,” said the Bacteriologist. “I wish, for my own part, we could kill and stain every one of them in the universe.”
“I suppose,” the pale man said, with a slight smile, ‘that you scarcely care to have such things about you in the living – in the active state?”
“On the contrary, we are obliged to,” said the Bacteriologist. “Here, for instance –” He walked across the room and took up one of several sealed tubes. “Here is the living thing. This is a cultivation of the actual living disease bacteria.” He hesitated. “Bottled cholera, so to speak.”
A slight gleam of satisfaction appeared momentarily in the face of the pale man. “It’s a deadly thing to have in your possession,” he said, devouring the little tube with his eyes. The Bacteriologist watched the morbid pleasure in his visitor’s expression. This man, who had visited him that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank black hair and deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change from the phlegmatic deliberations of the ordinary scientific worker with whom the Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps natural, with a hearer evi
He held the tube in his hand thoughtfully. “Yes, here is the pestilence imprisoned. Only break such a little tube as this into a supply of drinking-water, say to these minute particles of life that one must needs stain and examine with the highest powers of the microscope even to see, and that one can neither smell nor taste – say to them, ‘Go forth, increase and multiply, and replenish the cisterns,’ and death – mysterious, untraceable death, death swift and terrible, death full of pain and indignity – would be released upon this city, and go hither and thither seeking his victims. Here he would take the husband from the wife, here the child from its mother, here the statesman from his duty, and here the toiler from his trouble. He would follow the water-mains, creeping along streets, picking out and punishing a house here and a house there where they did not boil their drinking-water, creeping into the wells of the mineral water makers, getting washed into salad, and lying dormant in ices. He would wait ready to be drunk in the horse-troughs, and by unwary children in the public fountains. He would soak into the soil, to reappear in springs and wells at a thousand unexpected places. Once start him at the water supply, and before we could ring him in, and catch him again, he would have decimated the metropolis.”
He stopped abruptly. He had been told rhetoric was his weakness.
“But he is quite safe here, you know – quite safe.”
The pale-faced man nodded. His eyes shone. He cleared his throat. “These Anarchist – rascals,” said he, “are fools, blind fools – to use bombs when this kind of thing is attainable. I think –”
A gentle rap, a mere light touch of the fingernails, was heard at the door. The Bacteriologist opened if. “Just a minute, dear,” whispered his wife.
When he re-entered the laboratory his visitor was looking at his watch. “I had no idea I had wasted an hour of your time,” he said. “Twelve minutes to four. I ought to have left here by half-past three. But your things were really too interesting. No, positively I cannot stop a moment longer. I have an engagement at four.”
He passed out of the room reiterating his thanks, and the Bacteriologist accompanied him to the door, and then returned thoughtfully along the passage to his laboratory. He was musing on the ethnology of his visitor. Certainly the man was not a Teutonic type nor a common Latin one. “A morbid product, anyhow, I am afraid,” said the Bacteriologist to himself. “How he gloated over those cultivations of disease germs!” A disturbing thought struck him. He turned to the bench by the vapour bath, and then very quickly to his writing-table. Then he felt hastily in his pockets and then rushed to the door. “I may have put it down on the hall table,” he said.
“Minnie!” he shouted hoarsely in the hall.
“Yes, dear,” came a remote voice.
“Had I anything in my hand when I spoke to you, dear, just now?”
Pause.
“Nothing, dear, because I remember –”
“Blue ruin!” cried the Bacteriologist, and incontinently ran to the front door and down the steps of his house to the street.
Minnie, hearing the door slam violently, ran in alarm to the window. Down the street a slender man was getting into a cab. The Bacteriologist, hatless, and in his carpet slippers, was running and gesticulating wildly towards this group. One slipper came off, but he did not wait for it. “He has gone mad!” said Minnie; “it’s that horrid science of his”; and, opening the window, would have called after him. The slender man, suddenly glancing round, seemed struck with the same idea of mental disorder. He pointed hastily to the Bacteriologist, said something to the cabman, the apron of the cab slammed, the whip swished, the horse’s feet clattered, and in a moment cab and Bacteriologist hotly in pursuit, had receded up the vista of the roadway and disappeared round the corner.
Minnie remained straining out of the window for a minute. Then she drew her head back into the room again. She was dumbfounded. “Of course he is eccentric,” she meditated. “But running about London – in the height of the season, too – in his socks!” A happy thought struck her. She hastily put her bonnet on, seized his shoes, went into the hall, took down his hat and light overcoat from the pegs, emerged upon the doorstep, and hailed a cab that opportunely crawled by. “Drive me up the road and round Havelock Crescent, and see if we can find a gentleman running about in a velveteen coat and no hat.”
“Velveteen coat, ma’am, and no ’at. Very good, ma’am.” And the cabman whipped up at once in the most matter-of-fact way, as if he drove to this address every day in his life.
Some few minutes later the little group of cabmen and loafers that collects round the cabman’s shelter at Haverstock Hill were startled by the passing of a cab with a ginger-coloured screw of a horse, driven furiously.
They were silent as it went by, and then as it receded –“That’s ’Arry ’Icks. Wot’s he got?” said the stout gentleman known as Old Tootles.
“He’s a-using his whip, he is, to rights,” said the ostler boy.
“Hullo!” said poor old Tommy Byles; “here’s another bloomin’ loonatic. Blowed if there ain’t.”
“It’s old George,” said Old Tootles, “and he’s drivin’ a loonatic, as you say. Ain’t he a-clawin’ out of the keb? Wonder if he’s after ’Arry ’Icks?”
The group round the cabman’s shelter became animated. Chorus: “Go it, George!” “It’s a race.” “You’ll ketch ’em!” “Whip up!”
“She’s a goer, she is!” said the ostler boy.
“Strike me giddy!” cried Old Tootles. “Here! I’m a-goin’ to begin in a minute. Here’s another comin’. If all the cabs in Hampstead ain’t gone mad this morning!”
“It’s a fieldmale this time,” said the ostler boy.
“She’s a-followin’ him,” said Old Tootles. “Usually the other way about.”
“What’s she got in her ’and?”
“Looks like a ’igh ’at.”
“What a bloomin’ lark it is! Three to one on old George,” said the ostler boy. “Next!”
Minnie went by in a perfect roar of applause. She did not like it, but she felt that she was doing her duty, and whirled on down Haverstock Hill and Camden Town High Street with her eyes ever intent on the animated back view of old George, who was driving her vagrant husband so incomprehensibly away from her.
The man in the foremost cab sat crouched in the corner, his arms tightly folded, and the little tube that contained such vast possibilities of destruction gripped in his hand. His mood was a singular mixture of fear and exultation. Chiefly he was afraid of being caught before he could accomplish his purpose, but behind this was a vaguer but larger fear of the awfulness of his crime. But his exultation far exceeded his fear. No Anarchist before him had ever approached this conception of his. Ravachol, Vaillant, all those distinguished persons whose fame he had envied dwindled into insignificance beside him. He had only to make sure of the water supply, and break the little tube into a reservoir. How brilliantly he had planned it, forged the letter of introduction and got into the laboratory, and how brilliantly he had seized his opportunity! The world should hear of him at last. All those people who had sneered at him, neglected him, preferred other people to him, found his company undesirable, should consider him at last. Death, death, death! They had always treated him as a man of no importance. All the world had been in a conspiracy to keep him under. He would teach them yet what it is to isolate a man. What was this familiar street? Great Saint Andrew’s Street, of course! How fared the chase? He craned out of the cab. The Bacteriologist was scarcely fifty yards behind. That was bad. He would be caught and stopped yet. He felt in his pocket for money, and found half a sovereign. This he thrust up through the trap in the top of the cab into the man’s face. “More,” he shouted, “if only we get away.”
The money was snatched out of his hand. “Right you are,” said the cabman, and the trap slammed, and the lash lay along the glistening side of the horse. The cab swayed, and the Anarchist, half-standing under the trap, put the hand containing the little glass tube upon the apron to preserve his balance. He felt the brittle thing crack, and the broken half of it rang upon the floor of the cab. He fell back into the seat with a curse, and stared dismally at the two or three drops of moisture on the apron.
