The Map of Time (16 page)

The second part of the novel would describe the journey that his main character would undertake in order to put his machine to the test once his guests had left. As a tribute to Merrick’s memory, he would set off towards the unfathomable oceans of the future, a future Wells outlined briefly but eloquently to the editor of the National Observer. Henley, an enormous fellow, virtually a giant, condemned to walk with a crutch because of a botched childhood operation, and on whom Stevenson claimed to have based his idea for Long John Silver, pulled an incredulous face. Talking about the future was dangerous. It was rumored in literary circles that Verne himself had portrayed tomorrow’s world in a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century, but that his editor, Jules Hetzel, had refused to publish it, considering naïve and pessimistic his vision of 1960, when criminals were executed by electric shock and a system of “photographic telegraphs” made it possible to send copies of documents anywhere in the world. And it seemed Verne had not been the only author to envisage the future. Many others had tried and failed in the same way. But Wells did not let Henley’s words discourage him. Leaning forwards in his seat, he stood up for himself, assuring Henley that people were eager to read about the future, and that someone should take the risk and publish the first novel about it.

And so it was that, in 1893, The Time Machine came out in serial form in the prestigious National Observer. However, to Wells’s understandable despair, before the novel could be published in its entirety, the owners of the magazine sold it. The new board of directors carried out the usual purges, putting an end to Henley and his publishing projects. Happily, Wells scarcely had time to wallow in his misfortune, for Henley, like his Stevensonian alter ego, was a hard nut to crack, and immediately took over at the helm of the New Review, where he offered to continue serializing the story of the time traveler, and even convincing the stubborn William Heinemann to publish the novel.

Encouraged by Henley’s doggedness, Wells resolved to complete his unfinished novel. However, as was becoming the custom, this turned out to be a difficult undertaking, hampered by the usual impediments, although this time of a far more humiliating nature. At the insistence of his doctors, Wells had once again moved to the country with Jane, to a modest boardinghouse in Sevenoaks. But along with the wicker basket and a stream of boxes and trunks, came Mrs. Robbins, like a piece of junk no one dared throw out. By this time, Jane’s mother had gone to unspeakable lengths in her role of leech, reducing her daughter to little more than a pale worn-out shell with her constant complaints. Mrs. Robbins had no need of reinforcements in her war of attrition against Wells but found an unexpected ally in the boardinghouse landlady once she discovered that it was not a marriage being consummated each night in her house, but the sinful cohabitation of a shy young girl and a depraved defendant in a divorce suit. Battling on two fronts, Wells was scarcely able to concentrate sufficiently to make any headway with his novel.

His only consolation was that the section of the plot—the time traveler’s journey—to which he was doing his best to give shape, interested him far more than the part he had already written, as it enabled him to steer the novel towards the domain of social allegory, where he could deal with the political questions simmering inside him.

Convinced that in the distant future mankind would have succeeded in evolving fully on a scientific as well as a spiritual level, the time traveler rode across the plains of time on his machine until he reached the year 802,701, a date chosen at random, and sufficiently far off in the future for him to be able to verify his predictions in situ. By the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, terrorized by the landlady’s threats filtering through his window on the August breeze, Wells related, in fits and starts, his inventor’s foray into a world that resembled a huge enchanted garden.

To complete the enchantment, this Garden of Eden was inhabited by the extremely beautiful slender Eloi, the exquisite result of a human evolution that had not only corrected the weaknesses of the species, but had taken the opportunity of ridding it along the way of ugliness, coarseness, and other unprepossessing features. From what the traveler was able to observe once he was amongst them, these delicate Eloi lived a peaceful life, in harmony with nature, without laws or government, and free from ill health, financial troubles, or any other kind of difficulty that would make survival a struggle. Nor did they appear to have any notion of private property: everything was shared in that almost utopic society which personified the Enlightenment’s most hopeful predictions about the future of civilization. Like a benevolent, somewhat romantic creator, Wells even had his inventor establish a friendly relationship with a female Eloi named Weena, who insisted on following him around everywhere after he saved her from drowning in a river, captivated like a child by the charm the stranger exuded. Whenever the inventor’s back was turned, Weena, fragile and slender as a porcelain doll, would garland him with flowers or fill his pockets with blossoms, gestures that conveyed the gratitude she was unable to express through her language, which although mellow and sweet, remained dishearteningly impenetrable to the inventor’s ear.

Once Wells had painted this idyllic picture, he proceeded to destroy it with merciless, satirical precision. A couple of hours with the Eloi was enough for the traveler to understand that things were not as perfect as they seemed: these were indolent creatures, with no cultural interests or any drive towards self-improvement, incapable of higher feelings, a bunch of idlers imbued with a hedonism bordering on simplemindedness. Freed from the dangers that stir courage in men’s hearts, the human race had culminated in these lazy, sensual creatures, because intelligence could not thrive where there was no change and no necessity for change. As if that were not enough, the sudden disappearance of his time machine aroused the inventor’s suspicions that the Eloi were not alone in that world. Clearly they shared it with other inhabitants who had the strength to move the machine from where he had left it and hide it inside a gigantic sphinx dominating the landscape. He was not mistaken: beneath the make-believe paradise dwelled the Morlocks, a simian race afraid of daylight, who he would soon discover to his horror had regressed to a state of savage cannibalism. It was the Morlocks who fed the Eloi, fattening their neighbors who lived above ground before gorging on them in their subterranean world.

Their reprehensible eating habits notwithstanding, the traveler was forced to acknowledge that the last vestiges of human intelligence and reason survived in that brutal race, which their need to be able to operate the network of machinery in their underground tunnels helped preserve.

Afraid of remaining trapped in the future, with no means of traveling back to his own time, the inventor had no alternative but to follow in the footsteps of Aeneas, Orpheus, and Hercules and descend into the underworld, into the realm of the Morlocks, to retrieve his machine. Having done so, he made a frenzied escape through time, traveling deep into the future, until he arrived at a strange beach stretching out beneath a shadowy sky. He could see from a swift glance at this new future, whose rarefied air made his lungs smart, that life had divided into two species: a variety of giant, screeching white butterfly, and a terrifying crab with enormous pincers which he was glad to get away from. No longer curious about what had befallen mankind, which had apparently become completely extinct, but about the Earth itself, the inventor continued his journey in great strides of a thousand years. At his next stop, more than thirty million years from his own time, he discovered a desolate planet, an orb that had almost stopped rotating, like a tired spinning top feebly illuminated by a dying sun. A scant snowfall struggled to spread its white veil over a place where there was no sound of life. The twitter of birds, the bleating of sheep, the buzz of insects, and the barking of dogs that made up the music of life were no more than a flicker in the traveler’s memory. Then he noticed a bizarre creature with tentacles splashing around in the reddish sea before him, and his profound grief gave way to a nameless dread that compelled him to clamber back onto his machine. Back in the seat, at the helm of time, he felt a dreadful emptiness. He felt no curiosity about the ominous landscapes awaiting him further into the future, nor did he wish to go back in time, now he knew that all men’s achievements had been futile endeavors. He decided the moment had come for him to go back to his own time, to where he truly belonged. On the way back he ended by closing his eyes, for now that the journey in reverse made extinction into a false resurrection, he could not bear to see the world around him grow verdant, the sun recover its stifled splendor, the houses and buildings spring up again, testaments to the progress and trends in human architecture. He only opened his eyes again when he felt himself surrounded by the familiar four walls of his laboratory. Then he pulled the lever and the world stopped being a nebulous cloud and took on its old consistency again.

Once he had arrived back in his own time, he heard voices and the noise of plates in the dining room, and discovered he had stopped his machine the Thursday after his departure. After pausing for a few moments to catch his breath, the inventor appeared before his guests, not so much out of a desire to share his experiences with them, but because he was attracted by the delicious smell of roast meat, which, after the diet of fruit he had been forced to live on in the future, was an irresistible temptation. After sating his appetite voraciously in front of his astonished guests, who gaped in awe at his ghastly pallor, his scratched face, and the peculiar stains on his jacket, the traveler finally recounted his adventure. Naturally, no one believed his fantastic voyage, even though he showed them his pockets still filled with strange blossoms or the sorry state of his time machine. In the novel’s epilogue, Wells had the narrator, who was one of the traveler’s guests, finger the exotic flowers, reflecting with optimism that even when physical strength and intelligence has died out, gratitude will live on in men’s hearts.

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.