H G Wells Omnibus, page 305
This intimation, breaking through his resistances, evoked first the dread of an abnormal child, prematurely wise, macrocephalic, with dreadful tentacular hands… . So his essential humanity presented the thing. If the thing was a monster, what should he do?
He thought of doing some very dreadful things.
Such nightmare ideas haunted him more and more distressingly until the birth of his child. The immediate advent of that event filled him with almost uncontrollable terror. By an immense effort he concealed it and behaved himself.
He was amazed—even Dr. Holdman Stedding was amazed—to have the young man brought into the world after a labour of less than an hour. No monstrous struggle. No frightful crisis. No Caesarean operation.
‘Is he—is he all right?‘ he asked incredulous.
‘Fit as a fiddle,’ said Dr. Holdman Stedding almost boisterously. Because he had found something contagious in the father’s uneasiness.
‘No malformations? No strangeness?’
‘On my honour, Mr. Davis, you don’t deserve such a child! You don’t. When they’ve done a little washing you shall see it. I’m not often enthusiastic. I’ve seen too many of ‘em.’
And it looked indeed a perfect little creature. When they put it into his parental arms a great wave of instinctive tenderness surged up in the heart of Joseph Davis. Like endless fathers in his position before him, he was overcome by the wonderful fact that the creature’s little hands had perfact nails and fingers.
Why had he ever been afraid?
‘I feel I’d like to see her,’ he said.
‘Not just yet. A little while yet. Though she’s doing splendidly.’ Whereupon Dr. Holdman Stedding said a slightly unfortunate thing: ‘There’s not a painted Madonna in all the world with a lovelier bambino than hers.’
Mr. Joseph Davis’s expression became thoughtful.
Silently he handed back his precious burden to the hovering nurse.
He was minded to go out and not to see Mary for a time.
Then by a great effort he overcame this impulse and stayed indoors in his study downstairs, and presently he was taken in to her, and when he saw her, tired but flushed and triumphant, with the child laid close to her, some long-standing restraint seemed to break between them and he called her his darling and knelt down beside her, weeping.
‘Dear Joe!’ she said, and her hand crept out and ruffled his hair gently. ‘Queer Joe!’
3.
After that his ideas about the quality of the Martians’ influences and purposes began to change. After all, the two streams of realization came together in his mind gently and naturally, and he felt with the completest assurance and with no lingering trace of horror that both his wife and his child belonged to this new order of human beings that was appearing upon the planet.
After that it was that his researches, which at the beginning had been directed mainly to Poor Law institutions for defective and malformed children, asylums, wonder children, and the more grotesque arcana of gynaecology, turned rather to schools and universities and the ascertainable characteristics of exceptional and gifted people. He passed from a hunt for monsters to an investigation of outstanding endowment, to the detection and analysis of what is called genius in every field of human activity. He brooded over the picture riddles of Durer, he read the notebooks of Leonard. He found a new interest in symbolic art and in whatever moody and inexplicable decoration from remote times and places came to his attention. Were these enigmas like cries in the dark, the struggling intimations of novel reactions and novel attitudes on the part of Martian pioneers towards the customs and traditions of our world?
He had never told any one, least of all would he have told Dr. Holdman Stedding, that dreams about Martians were becoming rather frequent with him. They were extremely consistent dreams or at least they were pervaded with a sense of consistency. These dream-Martians were no longer repulsive creatures, grotesques and caricatures, and yet their visible appearance was not human. They had steadfast, dark eyes, very widely separated, and their mouths were still and resolute. Their broad brows and round heads made him think of the smooth wise-looking heads of seals and cats, and he could not distinguish clearly whether they had shadowy hand and arms or tentacles. There was always a lens-like effect about his vision, as though he saw them through the eyepiece of some huge optical instrument. Ripples passed across the lens and increased the indistinctness, and ever and again flickering bunches of what he assumed were cosmic rays exploded from nothingness across the picture and flashed out radiating to the periphery and vanished. He felt that his dreams were taking him into a world where our ideas of form and process, of space and time, are no longer valid. In his dreams it was not as if he went across space to Mars, it was as if a veil became translucent.
Once or twice in the daytime he had tried to make sketches of these watchers, but their physical forms had always eluded his pencil. He had never been able to draw very well, but also he had a feeling that even for a skilled artist there would have been difficulties about the planes and dimensions of these beings.
Moreover, not only was he finding this difficulty in determining a Martian form but he was finding a parallel difficulty in fixing any common characteristics for the earthly types he was beginning to distinguish as ‘Martianized’. All that they had in common was that they were ‘different’ and that this difference involved a certain detachment from common reactions. They lived apart. They thought after their own fashion. He was not sure whether they were actually insusceptible to mass emotions; he may have expected them to be, and that with him would have been half-way to thinking them so.
4.
On this visit to Gorpel he pursued what was becoming his usual technique. It was at once subtle and a trifle crazy. There was a streak of masochism about it. He had written all his books so far to appeal to the heroic common humanity in all of us. And now he was using the same stuff to eliminate, so to speak, common humanity. He was looking for minds that did not respond.
He had brought down a lecture that had always proved extremely successful with ordinary schoolboys, ‘The Grandeur That Was Rome.’ In this he unfolded his tale of the heroic patriots who stud the Latin tradition, from Horatius defending the Bridge, to Caesar crowning the great task of the Republic by annexing it to British history, Octavius creating the Empire and Justinian giving us Roman law. It was a procession of statuesque figures, more or less clean-shaven and for the most part in togas, evoking as they passed a fungoid growth of unnecessary aqueducts, corpulent amphitheatres, and Corinthian columns, and conferring on the whole world the blessings of the Pax Romana. The Punic Wars, with a faint flavouring of Anti-Semitism, too faint to be disagreeable, he presented as a gigantic necessary struggle between noble north-side soldiers and revengeful, obdurate, but extremely competent south-side loanmongers. He ignored every reality of hate, suspicion, greed, panic, and brutish cruelty that characterized that monstrous mutual destruction of the Mediterranean civilizations, the Punic Wars, and still less did he let those essential features of the mighty Pax, the omnipresent cross for rebels and the omnipresent tax-collector for every one, peep out from behind those glorious Roman arches. As he orated this familiar discourse he watched the boys. A few, incapable of attention, were inattentive, but the discipline of the school was good and their inattention was passive. The majority were responsive. They drank in the mighty fable. Their eyes betrayed their imaginative excitement. Their faces became nobler, stern. They became conquering generals subduing barbarians, pro-consuls assuaging the bickerings of subject races.
It was an answer to trumpets that stirred in them. It was what he had heard someone call the ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ reaction.
With all that Davis was familiar. But now he was looking for scepticism and intelligent dissent.
There was one little fellow sitting up near the corner who from the start he felt assured was Martianized. He had untidy hair and a shrewd faintly humorous white face, and he listened throughout, cheek on hand, very attentively and with a questioning expression. He heard, untouched. The real Martian quality.
‘That’s my boy here,’ said Davis and inquired about him afterwards.
‘A queer little chap,’ said the headmaster. ‘A queer little chap. Behaves pretty well, but he’s somehow disappointing. Doesn’t throw himself into things. A streak of something very nearly amounting to—well, scepticism. Yet his people are quite decent people and the Dean of Clumps is his uncle. He asks questions no other boy would think of. The other day he asked, what is spiritual?
‘Well,’ said Mr. Davis after a thoughtful pause, ‘what is spiritual?’
‘But need I tell you of all people?’
‘What did you tell him? I’m finding a sort of difficulty in putting this in a chapter I am writing about the saintly life.’
The headmaster of Gorpel did not answer the question immediately. Instead he went on to say in a slightly offended voice: ‘I find all my normal boys understand the word without discussion, take it for granted. Spiritual-Material, a natural opposition. One ascends, the other gravitates. There it is, plain as a pikestaff. No need to discuss it’
‘Unless some little—toad, like that, asks the question point-blank.’
‘He refuses to see. Why, he said, should we make a sort of extract of reality and call it spirituality and pretend the two things are primary opposites?’
‘He said that! Rather—subtle.’
‘Too subtle for a boy of his age. Unwholesome.’
‘But spirit isn’t an extract, is it?’
‘So I said to him. “Life,” he said, “seems to me just one, Sir. I can’t think of it in any other way. Sorry, Sir, I’ve tried.”’
‘He said that—that he couldn’t think in any other way? That’s very interesting. How did you meet that?’
‘In his particular case I explained by means of illustrations.’
‘And he was satisfied?’
‘Not in the least. He criticized my illustrations. Rather penetratingly, I admit. He wanted me to define. But you see, Mr. Davis, the fundamental things of life cannot be defined. He made me realize that more clearly than I have ever done before. All the great fundamentals, Deity, Eternity—Faith in What?—it is as if there was a sort of holy of holies beyond the reach of exact definitions. So it seems to me. It is useless, I find, to argue about them. It robs our attitudes of dignity … robs them of dignity… . We are reduced to logic chopping. Quibbles… . We understand by intuition what we mean and what other people mean. Best to leave it at that.’
‘And you told him if he didn’t understand what spiritual meant, not to go on thinking about it yet but wait.’
‘And pray,’ said the headmaster of Gorpel.
‘In effect I said that. In effect. Not exactly. Not too definitely. One must go carefully. Afterwards I made him learn Corinthians One Thirteen by heart - not as if it was exactly an answer but as if it threw a light - and I hope it did him good.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I don’t know. These are elusive matters, Mr. Davis. A boy who wants to argue must not be indulged too far. There are limits.’
‘I wonder,’ said Mr. Davis, feeling his way carefully, ‘if perhaps types—types like this youngster may really be something more than merely obstinate. Whether by some instinctive necessity, by some difference in themselves, they may not find something—some inacceptable lack of fineness, some lack of clearness, in various distinctions we assume, distinctions we have assumed and which we make by habit… .’
‘I can’t entertain thoughts like that,’ said the headmaster abruptly. ‘I cannot conduct the work of this great school and prepare my regiment of youngsters year by year for their attack on life and responsibility, if I am also to carry on an examination of the fundamental values we set on things.’
‘But if presently instead of one inassimilable boy you find half a dozen of him turning up—or a score?’
The headmaster looked at his visitor. ‘I devoutly hope not, Mr. Davis,’ he said. ‘I devoutly hope not. You are giving me food—not for thought—no!—for nightmares… .’
‘Now here, now there,’ said Mr. Davis as he stood on the headmaster’s doorstep. ‘Certainly that boy is one of them. They don’t see life as we see it. They can’t think of it in our way. And they make us begin to doubt that we see it ourselves as we have always imagined we did.’
Chapter 7
The World Begins to Hear about the Martians
1.
It is almost impossible to trace how this realization that mankind, under the spur of the cosmic rays, was launched upon a career of genetic change, seeped from the minds of the first discoverers, Laidlaw, that rufous man in the Planetarium Club (to whom it seemed no more than a passing freak of fancy), Mr. Davis (who was first to take it seriously), Dr. Holdman Stedding, and Professor Ernest Keppel, into the general consciousness. But a few weeks after the birth of Mary’s child, an article appeared in the Weekly Refresher from the pen of that admirable scientific popularizer, Harold Rigamey, in which, as Professor Keppel rather inelegantly put it, he ‘completely spilt the beans.’
It is possible that Rigamey got the thing at second or third hand from Dr. Holdman Stedding, who oddly enough seems to have been the least discreet of all that primary group. Dr. Stedding may have described it to one or two fellow-practitioners as an example of the extreme intellectual elaboration that may appear in a case of delusional insanity. There is no evidence that Laidlaw, after his first imaginative outbreak, ever gave the matter a second thought until he got the echo in the newspapers. But he may very well have repeated his fantasy on some after-dinner occasion. He was the last survivor of the old Bob Stevenson, York Powell, school of talk, a gorgeous talker.
Harold Rigamey was a peculiarly constituted being, he had a mind that did not so much act as react. He was a born ultra-heretic. He disbelieved everything and then doubled back on his disbelief. From a sound historical and literary training he had recoiled in a state of unsympathetic curiosity to science and had achieved a very respectable position on the literary side of journalism by writing about science in a manner that caused the greatest discomfort and perplexity to men of science. He found wonders for them when they saw nothing wonderful and incredible triumphs of paradox in their simplest statements. He mated them to the strangest associates.
He had an infuriating openmindedness to every unorthodox extravagance. He hated dogma and he was full of faith. He was always reconciling science and religion, spiritualism and behaviourism, medicine and Christian Science, and this reconciling disposition won him quite a large following of readers eager to keep their mental peace amidst the vast, the incongruous, alarming, and sometimes far too urgent suggestions of our modern world.
They were all a little uneasy with him and that was a part of his charm. There were stimulants in all his sedatives. When he asked his readers to come and meet spiritual worth, they were never quite sure whether that meant the dear Archbishop of Canterbury, all clean and scented with his pretty purple-and-red evening clothes, his pretty lace cuffs, his pretty episcopal ring, and his general vacuous urbanity, or whether it meant a rather repellent, though no doubt equally edifying, encounter with some unsanitarily pure and indecently stark fakir on a bed of nails; and when he remarked upon the stern veracities of science, whether it would be a fresh explosion in the mathematical engine-room, a vitamin of incredible potency, or a breathing exercise from America that at once confirmed and completed the remarkable inhalations of ancient Tibet, he had in mind. For some time Harold Rigamey had been working out in his own mind some sort of linkage of interplanetary communications with the all too neglected science of astrology; he thought he might make something quite exciting out of it, and this weird idea of Laidlaw’s came to him like the voice of the Lord to a Hebrew prophet.
For some time he had been feeling that his characteristic methods of popularizing science were no longer growing in popular favour. Men of science are a peculiar, an almost ungracious, class, and very often the more you popularize them the less they like it. Maybe it was a public realization of their lack of appreciation for Harold Rigamey’s services, or maybe it was just a surfeit of subtle but occasionally very incomprehensible wonders, that was affecting the first abundant public response to Harold Rigamey; at any rate he felt that his popularity was dimmer than it used to be. A really new and exciting topic, that only needed a little care and thought in the handling to go far and wide, was just the tonic he had been requiring.
Mindful of the faint elements of insecurity in his own credit he set about the subject with considerable skill and discretion. He first informed his public through a couple of articles, called ‘The Voice of the Stars,’ of a ‘growing realization’ that ‘extra-terrestrial forces of some unknown kind’ were ‘indubitably’ attempting to establish communication with our planet. He invoked almost every known authority upon extra-terrestrial radiations, produced in a skilfully clipped form some rare unguarded statements by eminent professors, promoted one or two rash speculations by obscure people in remote parts of the earth to a distinguished scientific standing, and invented a few anonymous scientists of his own. (Some day Nature will have to publish a list of otherwise non-existent scientists, available for public controversy.)
‘Scientists tell us’ was a very favourite phrase with Harold Rigamey. He wrote of ‘numerous efforts’ which he said had been made to ‘discover codes’ in these extra-terrestrial radiations and of the growing conviction of ‘scientists’ of all sorts and shades and sizes of the existence of these persistent attempts to attract our attention from outside our world.
