The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(52)
When the novel finally came out under the title The Time Machine, it caused a sensation. By August, Heinemann had already printed six thousand paperbacks and one thousand five hundred hardbacks. Everyone was talking about it, though not because of its shocking content. Wells had been at pains to present a metaphorical but devastating vision of the ultimate price of a rigidly capitalistic society. Who would not see in the Morlocks the evolutionary result of the working class, brutalized by appalling conditions and exhausting hours working from dawn until dusk, a class which society slowly and discreetly began to move below ground, while the surface of the earth was reserved for the wealthy classes to parade about in? With the aim of stirring his readers” consciences, Wells had even inverted the social roles: the Eloi— futile and decorative as the Carolingian kings—were fodder for the Morlocks, who, despite their ugliness and barbarism, were at the top of the food chain. However, to Wells’s astonishment, all his attempts to raise society’s awareness paled before the excitement his notion of time travel stirred in people.
One thing was clear: whatever the reasons, this novel written under such adverse conditions, and which at little more than forty thousand words had even required padding out with a publicity booklet, had secured him a place in the hall of fame, or had at least brought him to its threshold. And this was far more than he had ever expected when he began penning the first of those forty thousand words.
Like a murderer removing all trace of his crime, the first thing Wells did on becoming a successful author was to burn as many copies he could find of that childish drivel The Chronic Argonauts. He did not want anyone to discover that the excellence they attributed to The Time Machine was the end result of such lengthy fumbling and had not emerged in its finished state from his apparently brilliant mind. After that, he tried to enjoy his fame, although this did not prove easy. There was no doubting he was a successful author, but one with an extended family to support.
And while Jane and he had married and moved to a house with a garden in Woking (the basket sticking out like a sore thumb among Jane’s hatboxes), Wells had to take care not to let down his guard. There was no question of him stopping for a rest. He must carry on writing, it did not matter what, anything to take advantage of his popularity in the bookshops.
This was not a problem for Wells, of course. He only had to turn to the basket. Like a magician rummaging in his hat, Wells pulled out another novel called The Wonderful Visit. This told the story of how one balmy August night an angel fell out of the sky and landed in the marshes of a little village called Sidderford.
When the local vicar, an amateur ornithologist, heard about the arrival of this exotic bird, he went out to hunt it with his shotgun and succeeded in destroying the angel’s beautiful plumage before taking pity on it and carrying it to the vicarage where he nursed it back to health. Through this close contact, the vicar realized that, although different, the angel was an admirable and gentle creature from which he had much to learn.
The idea for the novel, like the plot of The Island of Dr. Moreau, which he would write some months later, was not his. Yet Wells tried not to see this as stealing, rather as his own special tribute to the memory of a remarkable man. Joseph Merrick died in the horrible way Treves had predicted two years after the unforgettable invitation to tea. And as tributes went, he considered his far more respectful than the surgeon’s own, for, according to what he had heard, Treves was exhibiting Merrick’s deformed skeleton in a museum he had opened in the London Hospital. As Wells had said to him that afternoon, Merrick had gone down in history.
And who could say, that The Time Machine, which owed so much to him, would do the same for Wells. In the meantime, it had brought him more than one surprise, he said to himself, remembering the time machine, identical to the one he had written about in his novel, that was hidden in his attic.
Dusk had begun to submerge the world in a coppery light that lent an air of distinction to everything, including Wells who, sitting quietly in his kitchen, looked like a sculpture of himself made out of flour. He shook his head, banishing the doubts stirred up by the harsh review in the Speaker, and picked up the envelope that had appeared in his postbox that afternoon. He hoped it was not a letter from yet another newspaper asking him to predict the future. Ever since The Time Machine had been published, the press had held him up as an official oracle and kept encouraging him to display his supposed powers of divination in their pages.
But when he tore the envelope open he discovered he was not being asked to predict anything. Instead, he found himself holding a publicity leaflet from Murray’s Time Travel, together with a card in which Gilliam Murray invited him to take part in the third expedition to the year 2000. Wells clenched his teeth to stop himself from unleashing a stream of oaths, scrunched up the leaflet, and hurled it across the room, as he had the magazine moments before.
The ball of paper flew precariously through the air until it hit the face of a young man who should not have been there. Wells stared with alarm at the intruder who had just walked into his kitchen. He was a well-dressed young man, now rubbing his cheek where the ball of paper had made a direct hit, and shaking his head with a sigh, as though chastising a mischievous child.
Just behind him was a second man, whose features so resembled those of the first they must be related. The author studied the man nearest to him, unable to decide whether he ought to apologize for having hit him with the ball of paper or ask what the devil he was doing in his kitchen. But he had no time to do either, for the man responded first.