The Map of Time (15 page)

After they had finished their tea, Merrick offered Wells a cigarette, which he courteously accepted. They rose from their seats and went over to the window to watch the sunset. For a few moments, the two men stood staring down at the street and at the façade of the church opposite, every inch of which Merrick must have been familiar with. People came and went, a peddler with a handcart hawked his wares, and carriages trundled over the uneven cobblestones strewn with foul-smelling dung from the hundreds of horses going by each day. Wells watched Merrick gazing at the frantic bustle with almost reverential awe. He appeared to be lost in thought.

“You know something, Mr. Wells?” he said finally, “I can’t help feeling sometimes that life is like a play in which I’ve been given no part. If you only knew how much I envy all those people …” “I can assure you, you have no reason to envy them, Mr. Merrick,” Wells replied abruptly. “Those people you see are specks of dust. Nobody will remember who they were or what they did after they die. You, however, will go down in history.” Merrick appeared to mull over his words for a moment as he studied his misshapen reflection in the distorted windowpane, like a bitter reminder of his condition.

“Do you think that gives me any comfort?” he asked mournfully.

“It ought to,” replied Wells, “for the time of the ancient Egyptians has long since passed, Mr. Merrick.” His host did not reply. He continued staring down at the street, but Wells found it impossible to judge from his expression, frozen by the disease into a look of permanent rage, what effect his words, a little blunt perhaps but necessary, had had on him.

He could not stand by while his host wallowed in his own tragedy. He was convinced Merrick’s only comfort could come from his deformity, which, although it had marginalized him, had also made him into a singular being and earned him a place in the annals of history.

“No doubt you are right, Mr. Wells,” Merrick said finally, continuing to gaze at his distorted reflection. “One should probably resign oneself to not expecting too much of this world we live in, where people fear anyone who is different. Sometimes I think that if an angel were to appear before a priest, he would probably shoot it.” “I suppose that is true,” observed Wells, the writer in him excited by the image his host had just evoked. And, seeing Merrick still caught up in his reflections, he decided to take his leave: “Thank you so much for the tea, Mr. Merrick.” “Wait,” replied Merrick. “There’s something I want to give you.” He walked over to a small closet and rummaged around inside it for a few moments until he found what he had been looking for.

Wells was puzzled to see him pull out a wicker basket.

“When I told Mrs. Kendal I had always dreamed of being a basket maker, she employed a man to come and teach me,” Merrick explained, cradling the object in his hands as though it were a newborn infant or a bird’s nest. “He was a kindly, mild-mannered fellow, who had a workshop on Pennington Street, near the London docks. From the very beginning he treated me as though my looks were no different to his. But when he saw my hands, he told me I could never manage delicate work like basket weaving. He was very sorry, but we would evidently both be wasting our time. And yet, striving to achieve a dream is never a waste of time, is it Mr. Wells? Show me,’ I told him, ‘only then will we know whether you are right or not.’ ” Wells contemplated the perfect piece of wickerwork Merrick was cupping in his deformed hands.

“I’ve made many more since then, and have given some away to my guests. But this one is special, because it is the first I ever made. I would like you to have it, Mr. Wells,” he said, presenting him with the basket, “to remind you that everything is a question of will.” “Thank you,” stammered Wells, touched. “I am honored, Mr. Merrick, truly honored.” He smiled warmly as he said good-bye and walked towards the door.

“One more question, Mr. Wells,” he heard Merrick say behind him.

Wells turned to look at him, hoping he was not going to ask for the accursed Nebogipfel’s address so that he could send him a basket, too.

“Do you believe that the same god made us both?” Merrick asked, with more frustration than regret.

Wells repressed a sigh of despair. What could he say to this? He was weighing up various possible replies when, all of a sudden, Merrick began emitting a strange sound, like a cough or a grunt that convulsed his body from head to foot, threatening to shake him apart at the seams. Wells listened, alarmed, as the loud hacking sound continued rising uncontrollably from his throat, until he realized what was happening. There was nothing seriously wrong with Merrick. He was simply laughing.

“It was a joke, Mr. Wells, only a joke,” he explained, cutting short his rasping chortle as he became aware of his guest’s startled response. “Whatever would become of me if I was unable to laugh at my own appearance?” Without waiting for Wells to reply, he walked towards his worktable, and sat down in front of the unfinished model of the church.

“Whatever would become of me?” Wells heard him mutter in a tone of profound melancholy. “Whatever would become of me?” Wells watched him concentrate on his clumsy hands sculpting the cardboard and was seized by a feeling of deep sympathy.

He found it impossible to believe Treves’s theory that this remarkably innocent, gentle creature invited public figures to tea in order to submit them to some sinister test. On the contrary, he was convinced that all Merrick wanted from this limited intimacy was a few meager crumbs of warmth and sympathy. It was far more likely that Treves had attributed those motives to him in order to unnerve guests to whom he took a dislike, or possibly to make allowances for Merrick’s extreme naïveté by crediting him with a guile he did not possess. Or perhaps, thought Wells, who had no illusions about the sincerity of man’s motives, the surgeon’s intentions were still more selfish and ambitious: perhaps he wanted to show people that he was the only one who understood the soul of this creature whom he clung to desperately to be guaranteed a place beside him in history.

Wells was irritated by the idea of Treves taking advantage of Merrick’s face being a terrifying mask he could never take off, a mask that could never express his true emotions, in order to attribute to him whatever motives he wished, knowing that no one but Merrick could ever refute them. And now that Wells had heard him laugh, he wondered whether the so-called Elephant Man had not in fact been smiling at him from the moment he stepped into the room, a warm, friendly smile intended to soothe the discomfort his appearance produced in his guests, a smile no one would ever see.

As he left the room, he felt a tear roll down his cheek.

13

This was how the wicker basket had come into Wells’s life, and with it he found that the winds of good fortune soon began to blow off the years of dust that had accumulated on his suit.

Shortly after the basket’s appearance, he obtained his degree in zoology with distinction, began giving courses in biology for the University of London External Programme, took up the post of editor-in-chief of The University Correspondent, and began writing the odd short article for the Educational Times. Thus, in a relatively short period of time he earned a large sum of money, which helped him recover from his disappointment over the lack of interest in his story and boosted his self-confidence. He got into the habit of venerating the basket every night, giving it long and loving looks, running his fingers over the tightly woven wicker. He carried out this simple ritual behind Jane’s back and found it encouraged him so much he felt invincible, strong enough to swim the Atlantic or wrestle a tiger to the ground with his bare hands.

But Wells scarcely had time to enjoy his achievements before the members of his tattered family discovered that little Bertie was on his way to becoming a man of means and entrusted him with the task of maintaining their fragile and threatened cohesion. Without taking the trouble to protest, Wells resigned himself to adopting the mantle of defender of the clan, knowing that none of its other members was up to the task. His father, having finally freed himself from the burden of the china shop, had moved to a cottage in Nyewood, a tiny village south of Rogate, where he had a view of Harting Down and the elms at Uppark, and life had gradually washed up the rest of the family in the tiny house. The first to arrive was Frank. He had left the bakery a few years earlier to become a traveling watch salesman, an occupation he had not been very successful in– a fact borne out by the two enormous trunks of unsold watches he brought with him, eating up even more space in the tiny dwelling in Nyewood.

The trunks gave off a loud, incessant whirring sound and rattled about like a colony of noisy mechanical spiders. Then came Fred, his trusting brother, who had been unceremoniously dismissed from the company where he worked as soon as the boss’s son was old enough to occupy the seat he had unknowingly been keeping warm for him. Finding themselves together again, and with a roof over their heads, his brothers devoted themselves to licking each others” wounds, and, infected by their father’s relaxed attitude to life, soon accepted this latest downturn with good cheer. The last to arrive was their mother, dismissed from her beloved paradise at Uppark because the sudden onset of deafness had rendered her useless and irritable. The only one who did not return to the fold was Frances, perhaps because she felt there would not be enough room for her little infant coffin. Even so, there were too many of them, and Wells had to make a superhuman effort to keep up his endless hours of teaching in order to protect that nest buzzing with the sound of Frank’s watches, that pesthouse of happy walking wounded reeking of snuff and stale beer, to the point where he ended up vomiting blood and collapsing on the steps of Charing Cross Station.

The diagnosis was clear: tuberculosis. And although he made a swift recovery, this attack was a warning to Wells to stop burning the midnight oil or the next onslaught would be more serious.

Wells accepted all this in a practical spirit. He knew that when the wind was favourable, he had plenty of ways to make a living, and so had no difficulty in drawing up a new life plan. He abandoned teaching and resolved to live solely from his writings. This would allow him to work at home, with no other timetables and pressures than those he chose to impose on himself. He would finally be able to live the peaceful life his fragile health required.

Thus he set about swamping the local newspapers with articles, penning the odd essay for the Fortnightly Review, and, after much persistence, managed to persuade the Pal Mal Gazette to offer him a column. Overjoyed by his success, and seeking out the fresh air indispensable to his sick lungs, the whole family moved to a country house in Sutton, near the North Downs, one of the few areas that had as yet escaped becoming a suburb of London.

For a while, Wells believed this quiet, secluded existence was to be his life, but once again he was mistaken, as this was an imaginary truce. Apparently chance considered him a most amusing toy, for it decided to change the course of his life again, although this time the new twist involved the pleasant, popular veneer of fated love.

In the classroom Wells had established friendly relations with a pupil of his, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he nicknamed Jane.

During the walk they happened to share to Charing Cross Station to catch their respective trains, Wells could not help mesmerizing the girl with his eloquent banter, which he indulged in with no other purpose than to allow himself to swell with pride at being able to impress such a beautiful, adorable girl with his words.

However, those friendly, innocent conversations ended up bearing unexpected fruit. His own wife, Isabel, alerted him to it on their return from a weekend in Putney, where they had been invited by Jane and her mother. It was she who assured him that whether or not he had intended it, the girl had fallen head over heels in love with him. Wells could only raise an eyebrow when his wife demanded he stop seeing his ex-pupil if he wanted their marriage to survive. The choice between the woman who refused his caresses and the cheerful and apparently uninhibited Jane was not difficult. And so Wells packed up his books, his furniture, and the wicker basket, and moved into a miserable hovel in Mornington Place in a run-down area of north London between Euston and Camden Town. He wished he could have abandoned the marital home spurred on by a violent passion, but he had to leave that to Jane. His real reasons for leaving were the playful curiosity he felt when he glimpsed her little body beneath her dress, and above all the chance to escape monotony and discover a new life, given that he could predict how the old one would turn out.

However, his first impression was that love had caused him to make a serious mistake: not only had he moved to the worst possible place for his tormented lungs—a neighborhood where the air was polluted by soot borne on the wind, fatally mixed with smoke from the locomotives passing through on their way north—but Jane’s mother, convinced her poor daughter had fallen into the clutches of a degenerate because Wells was still married to Isabel, had moved in with the couple. She seemed determined to undermine their patience with her endless, vociferous reproaches.

These unforeseen events, together with the additional worrying certainty that it would be impossible for him to run no less than three homes on the proceeds of his articles, compelled Wells to take the basket ,and shut himself in one of the cupboards in the house, the only place safe from Mrs. Robbins’s intrusive presence.

Hidden in amongst the coats and hats, he stroked the wicker for hours on end, like Aladdin trying to bring back the power of his magic lamp.

This may have seemed an absurd, desperate, or even pathetic strategy, but the fact is that the day after he performed this rubbing of the basket, Lewis Hind, the literary editor of the weekly supplement at the Gazette sent for him. He needed someone capable of writing stories with a scientific slant, short stories reflecting on and even predicting where the relentless onslaught of inventions bent on changing the face of that century would lead. Hind was convinced Wells was the ideal man for the job.

What he was proposing, in fact, was that he resurrect his childhood dream and have another stab at seeing whether he could become a writer. Wells accepted, and in a few days drafted a story entitled “The Stolen Bacillus,” which Hind was delighted with, and which earned Wells five guineas. The story also drew the attention of William Ernest Henley, editor of the National Observer, who promptly invited him to contribute to the pages of his journal, convinced the young man would be capable of producing far more ambitious stories if he had more room to experiment. Wells was delighted and terrified in equal measure at being given the chance to write for such a prestigious magazine, which at that time was publishing a serialized version of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” by his idol, Conrad. This was no longer writing news items, articles, or short stories. He was being offered the space for his imagination to run wild, the freedom to be a real writer of fiction.

Wells awaited his meeting with Henley in a state of nervous tension bordering on collapse. Since the editor of The National Observer had asked to see him, Wells had been rummaging through his large mental stockpile of ideas in search of a story original and striking enough to impress the veteran publisher, but none of them seemed to live up to his offer. The rendezvous was drawing near, and Wells still did not have a good story to show Henley. It was then that he turned to the basket and saw that, although it looked empty, it was actually brimming with novels, a cornucopia that only needed a gentle nudge in order to pour forth its torrent of ideas. This extravagant image was of course Wells’s way of wrapping up in poetic language what really happened when he saw the basket: inevitably he remembered his conversation with Merrick, and to his amazement, he discovered, like a nugget of gold lying at the bottom of a muddy stream, another idea that could be made into a novel. Whether deliberately or by accident, it was as though Merrick had supplied him with enough ideas and plots to last several years while they pretended they were only having tea. He recalled Merrick’s disappointment at Dr. Nebogipfel being so uninterested in traveling into the future, in venturing into the unknown world of tomorrow, and this omission appeared worth rectifying now that he had the experience of writing all those articles.

And so, without a second thought, he got rid of the unsavory Nebogipfel, replacing him with a respectable, anonymous scientist in whom any inventor could see himself portrayed, and who even embodied the archetypal scientist of the dawning new century. Endeavoring to create something more than just a naïve fantasy out of his idea of time travel, Wells gave it the same scientific veneer he had given the stories he wrote for Hind, making use of a theory he had developed in his earlier essays published in the Fortnightly Review: the idea that time was the fourth dimension in a universe that only appeared to be three-dimensional. The idea would be far more impressive if he used it to explain the workings of the contraption his character would use to travel through the time continuum. A few years earlier, an American medium called Henry Slade had been tried for criminal deception. Besides bragging of his ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead, he would drop knots, conches and snails” shells into his magician’s hat and then pull out identical versions, only with the spirals going in the other direction, as if he had plucked them out of a mirror. Slade maintained that hidden in his hat was a secret passageway to the fourth dimension, which explained the strange reversal the objects underwent. To many people’s astonishment, the magician was defended by a handful of eminent physicists, including Johann Zöllner, professor of physics and astronomy, all of whom argued that what might appear to be a fraud from a three-dimensional point of view was perfectly feasible in a four-dimensional universe. The whole of London was on tenterhooks during the trial. And this, together with the work of Charles Hinton, a mathematician who had come up with the idea of a hypercube, a cube out of phase with time that contained every single instant of its existence, all occurring at the same time—something that, naturally, man’s current obsolete three-dimensional vision prevented him from seeing—made Wells realize that the idea of the fourth dimension was in the air. No one was sure what it involved, but the words sounded so mysterious and evocative that society longed for, positively demanded it to be real. For most people, the known world was a tiresome, hostile place, but that was because they could only see part of it. Now, people were consoled by the notion that, just as a bland roast of meat is made tastier by seasoning, the universe improved if they imagined it was no longer reduced to what they were able to see, but contained a secret hidden component that could somehow make it bigger. The fourth dimension gave their dull planet a magical feel; it conjured up the existence of a different world, where desires that were impossible in the three-dimensional world might be realized. And these suspicions were backed up by concrete actions such as the recent founding of the Society for Psychic Research in London.

Wells was also forced to endure becoming embroiled almost every day in tiresome debates on the nature of time with his colleagues at the Faculty of Science. One thing led to another, as they say, and as every thinker was turning the fourth dimension into his private playground, Wells had no difficulty combining both ideas in order to develop his theory of time as another spatial dimension through which it was possible to travel in exactly the same way as the other three.

By the time he entered Henley’s office, he could visualize his novel with startling clarity, enabling him to relay it with a preacher’s conviction and zeal. The time traveler’s story would be divided into two parts. In the first he would explain the workings of his machine to a gathering of skeptical guests, to whom he had chosen to present his invention, and whom he must try to convince. This group would consist of a doctor, a mayor, a psychologist, and some other representative of the middle classes.

Unlike Jules Verne, who took up whole chapters with detailed explanations of how his contraptions worked—as though he himself doubted their credibility—Wells’s explanations would be straightforward and concise, using simple examples that would enable the reader to assimilate an idea that might otherwise seem too abstract. As you are aware, his inventor would observe, the three spatial dimensions (length, breadth, and thickness) are defined in reference to three planes, each of which is at right angles to the other. However, under normal circumstances, man’s movement through his three-dimensional universe was incomplete. He had no difficulty moving along its length and breadth, but was unable to overcome the laws of gravity in order to move up and down freely, except by using a hot-air balloon. Man was similarly trapped in the timeline, and could only move in time mentally— summoning up the past through memory, or visualizing the future by means of his imagination. However, he could free himself from this constraint if he had a machine, which, like the hot-air balloon, enabled him to triumph over the impossible, that is to say, to project himself physically into the future by speeding up time, or going back into the past by slowing it down. In order to help his guests understand the idea of this fourth dimension, the inventor used the example of mercury in a barometer: this moved up and down over a period of days, yet the line represented by its movement was drawn not in any recognized spatial dimension, but in the time dimension.