The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(103)
“Very well,” he agreed reluctantly. “Come back tomorrow morning and you’ll have your letter.”
30
The first thing Wells did when he was left alone in the sitting room while Jane accompanied the young man to the door was to place Gilliam Murray’s manuscript once more out of his field of vision. Although he had not let it show, he found the appalling manner in which Gilliam kept his masquerade going deeply disturbing. Naturally, he had to surround himself with people who could keep their mouths shut, and although he could have achieved this with incentives, threats seemed to work much better. The discovery that Gilliam resorted so casually to such gruesome methods sent a shiver down his spine; not for nothing was the man his adversary, or at least that was what his behavior seemed to indicate. He picked up the leaflet Gilliam sent him religiously every week and looked at it with distaste. Sickening though it was, Wells had to accept that it was all his fault. Yes, Murray’s Time Travel existed thanks to him, thanks to the decision he had made.
He had only had two meetings with Gilliam Murray, but for some men that was enough to establish an enmity. And Gilliam was one of those, as Wells soon discovered. Their first meeting had taken place in that very room one April afternoon, he recalled, glancing with horror at the wing chair into which Gilliam Murray had squeezed his bulky frame.
From the moment he had appeared in the doorway with his visiting card and his unctuous smile, Wells had been in awe of his huge oxlike body, although even more astonishing was the extraordinary weightlessness of his movements, as though his bones were hollow. Wells had sat down in the chair facing him, and while Jane served the tea, the two men had studied one another with polite discretion. When his wife had left the room, the stranger gave him an even broader syrupy smile, thanked him for agreeing to see him at such short notice, and, without pausing for breath, showered him with rapturous adulation for his novel The Time Machine. However, there are those who only admire a thing in order blow their own trumpet, to show off their own understanding and intelligence to others, and Gilliam Murray belonged to this group of men. He launched into a furious eulogy of the novel, extolling with lofty speech the symmetry of its structure, the power of its imagery, even the color of the suit he had chosen for his main character. Wells simply listened courteously and wondered why anyone would choose to waste their morning inundating him with praise when they could put it all in a polite letter like the rest of his admirers. He weathered the glowing tributes, nodding uneasily, as one caught in an irksome yet harmless shower of rain, praying that the tedious panegyric would soon end and he could go back to his work. However, he soon discovered it had been no more than a preamble aimed at smoothing the man’s way before he decided to reveal the real reason for his visit.
After finishing his fulsome speech, Gilliam plucked a voluminous manuscript from his briefcase and placed it delicately in Wells’s hands, as though he were handing over a sacred relic or a newborn infant. Captain Derek Shackleton: The True Story of a Brave Hero of the Future, Wells read, dumbfounded. He could no longer recall how they had agreed to meet again a week later, after the giant wheedled him into promising to read his novel, and if he liked it, to recommend it to Henley.
Wells embarked upon the task of ploughing through the manuscript that had unexpectedly come into his hands, like someone undergoing torture. He had no desire to read anything issuing from the imagination of that self-important braggart whom he considered absolutely incapable of interesting him, and he was not mistaken. The more he read of the pretentious prose, the more his mind became fogged with boredom, and he quickly made a conscious decision never again to meet any of his admirers. Gilliam had given him an overwritten, monotonous piece of tripe; a novel which, in common with the many that were swamping bookshop windows, had copied the one he had written speculated about the future. Such novels were brimming with mechanical artifacts, veritable paper depositories of junk, which, drawing inspiration from the growing impact of science, exhibited every type of outlandish machine aimed at satisfying man’s most secret longings. Wells had read none of them, but Henley had related many of their hilarious plots to him over a meal; such as those of the New Yorker Luis Senarens, whose main characters explore the planet’s far-flung territories in airships, abducting any indigenous tribe they happen across on the way. The one that had stuck in his mind was about a Jewish inventor who built a machine that made things grow bigger. The image of London attacked by an army of giant wood lice, which Henley had described to him with contempt, had actually terrified Wells.
The plot of Gilliam Murray’s novel was equally painful. The pompous title concealed the madcap visions of an unhinged mind. Gilliam argued that as the years went by, the automatons—those mechanical dolls sold in some Central London toy shops—would eventually come to life. Yes, incredible though it might seem, beneath their wooden skulls an almost human form of awareness would begin to stir, so human in fact that the astonished reader would soon discover that the automatons harbored a deep resentment towards man for the humiliating treatment they had endured as his slaves. Finally, under the leadership of Solomon, a steam-powered automaton soldier, they swiftly and mercilessly decided the fate of the human race: extermination.
Within a few decades the automatons had reduced the planet to a mound of rubble and mankind to a handful of frightened rats, from amongst whose ranks, however, arose the brave Captain Shackleton. After years of futile combat, Shackleton finally put an end to the automaton Solomon’s evil plans, defeating him in a ridiculous sword fight. In the final mind-boggling pages of his already preposterous tale, Gilliam had the temerity to draw an embarrassing moral from his story, with which he hoped to give the whole of England— or at any rate the toy manufacturers— something to think about: God would end up punishing man if he went on emulating him by creating life—if indeed these mechanical creations could be described as possessing such a thing, Wells reflected.