The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(139)
Others believed the phantom had been invented by neighbors to explain the bloodcurdling screams of a demented brother a previous tenant kept locked up in one of its rooms and fed through a trapdoor owing to his violent behavior. There were also those—and this was Wells’s favorite theory—who maintained the origin of the ghost was a man named Myers, who, finding it impossible to sleep after being jilted on the eve of his wedding, spent his nights desperately traipsing round the house bearing a candle. But during the past decade there had been no further reports of any disturbances in the house, from which it was not unreasonable to assume that the ghost had descended to hell again, bored perhaps by all these young bucks eager to prove their manliness. However, the ghost was the least of Wells’s concerns. He had too many earthly cares to worry about creatures from the other world.
He glanced up and down the street, but there was not a soul in sight, and as the moon was in the last quarter, it was absolutely dark, and the night seemed to have taken on that sticky consistency so often described in Gothic novels. Since no time was specified on the map, Wells had decided to go there at eight o’clock in the evening because it was the hour mentioned in the second passage. He hoped he was right and would not be the only one to turn up to meet the time traveler. As a precaution, he had come armed, although as he did not have a gun, he had brought his carving knife instead. He had hung it on his back by a piece of string, so that if the traveler decided to frisk him he would not notice the sharp utensil. He had bid Jane farewell like the hero in a novel, with a lingering, unexpected kiss that had startled her at first, but which she had finally accepted with gentle abandon.
Wells crossed the street without further delay, and after taking a deep breath, as though rather than enter the house he were about to plunge into the Thames, he pushed open the door, which yielded with surprising ease. He instantly discovered he was not the first to arrive. Standing in the middle of the hallway with his hands in the pockets of his immaculate suit as he admired the stairway vanishing into the gloom of the upper floor, was a plump, balding man of about fifty.
Seeing him come in, the stranger turned to Wells and held out his hand, introducing himself as Henry James. So, this elegant fellow was James. Wells did not know him personally, for he was not in the habit of frequenting the sort of club or literary salon which were James’s preserve and where, according to what Wells had heard, this prudish man of private means sniffed out the secret passions of his fellow members in order to commit them to paper in a prose as refined as his manners.
The difficulty in meeting him did not cause Wells to lose any sleep. Besides, after reading The Aspern Papers and The Bostonians, Wells felt almost comforted to know that James lived in a world far from his own, for, after ploughing laboriously through the two works, Wells concluded the only thing he and James had in common was that they both spent their lives tapping away on typewriters, and this was only because he was unaware that his fellow author was too fastidious to perform such a laborious mechanical task, preferring instead to dictate his work to a stenographer. If Wells recognized any merit in James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. And James must have felt the same disdain for Wells’s work as he felt for James’s world of lace handkerchiefs and indolent ladies tormented by unmentionable secrets, because his colleague could not help pulling a face when he introduced himself as H. G. Wells. A number of seconds passed by, during which the two men confined themselves to looking suspiciously at one another until James obviously decided they were about to infringe some obscure law of etiquette and hastened to break the awkward silence.
“Apparently we have arrived at the correct time. Our host was clearly expecting us this evening,” he said, gesturing towards the various candelabra distributed around the room, which although they did not completely disperse the shadows, at least cast a circle of light in the center of the hall, where the meeting was meant to take place.
“It would seem so,” Wells acknowledged.
Both men began gazing up at the coffered ceiling, the only thing there was to admire in the empty hallway. But luckily this tense silence did not last long, because almost at once a creaking door announced the arrival of the third author.
The man opening it with the timid caution of someone entering a crypt was also in his fifties. He had a shock of flaming red hair and a neatly clipped beard that accentuated his jaw. Wells recognized him at once. It was Bram Stoker, the Irishman who ran the Lyceum Theatre, although he was better known in the London clubs as the agent and lapdog of the famous actor, Henry Irving. Seeing him creep in, Wells could not help also recalling the rumors that Stoker belonged to the Golden Dawn, an occult society of which other fellow writers such as the Welsh author Arthur Machen or the poet W. B. Yeats were members.
The three writers shook hands in the circle of light before lapsing into a deep, uneasy silence. James had retreated into his precious haughtiness, while beside him Stoker was fidgeting nervously. Wells was enjoying this awkward meeting of three individuals who apparently had little or nothing to say to one another, despite all three of them, in their own separate ways, devoting their time to the same activity: dredging up their lives on paper.
“I’m so glad to see you’re all here, gentlemen.” The voice came from above. As one, the three writers glanced towards the staircase, down which the supposed time traveler was slowly descending, as though relishing the suppleness of his movements.