H G Wells Omnibus, page 540
The sudden return of movement and familiar noises, and our natural anxiety about ourselves (our clothes were still dreadfully hot, and the fronts of the thighs of Gibberne’s white trousers were scorched a drabbish brown), prevented the minute observations I should have liked to make on all these things. Indeed, I really made no observations of any scientific value on that return. The bee, of course, had gone. I looked for that cyclist, but he was already out of sight as we came into the Upper Sandgate Road or hidden from us by traffic; the char-à-banc, however, with its people now all alive and stirring, was clattering along at a spanking pace almost abreast of the nearer church.
We noted, however, that the window-sill on which we had stepped in getting out of the house was slightly singed, and that the impressions of our feet on the gravel of the path were unusually deep.
So it was I had my first experience of the New Accelerator. Practically we had been running about and saying and doing all sorts of things in the space of a second or so of time. We had lived half an hour while the band had played, perhaps, two bars. But the effect it had upon us was that the whole world had stopped for our convenient inspection. Considering all things, and particularly considering our rashness in venturing out of the house, the experience might certainly have been much more disagreeable than it was. It showed, no doubt, that Gibberne has still much to learn before his preparation is a manageable convenience, but its practicability it certainly demonstrated beyond all cavil.
Since that adventure he has been steadily bringing its use under control, and I have several times, and without the slightest bad result, taken measured doses under his direction; though I must confess I have not yet ventured abroad again while under its influence. I may mention, for example, that this story has been written at one sitting and without interruption, except for the nibbling of some chocolate, by its means. I began at 6.25, and my watch is now very nearly at the minute past the half-hour. The convenience of securing a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full of engagements cannot be exaggerated. Gibberne is now working at the quantitative handling of his preparation, with especial reference to its distinctive effects upon different types of constitution. He then hopes to find a Retarder, with which to dilute its present rather excessive potency. The Retarder will, of course, have the reverse effect to the Accelerator; used alone it should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time, and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings. The two things together must necessarily work an entire revolution in civilised existence. It is the beginning of our escape from that Time Garment of which Carlyle speaks. While this Accelerator will enable us to concentrate ourselves with tremendous impact upon any moment or occasion that demands our utmost sense and vigour, the Retarder will enable us to pass in passive tranquillity through infinite hardship and tedium. Perhaps I am a little optimistic about the Retarder, which has indeed still to be discovered, but about the Accelerator there is no possible sort of doubt whatever. Its appearance upon the market in a convenient, controllable, and assimilable form is a matter of the next few months. It will be obtainable of all chemists and druggists, in small green bottles, at a high but, considering its extraordinary qualities, by no means excessive price. Gibberne’s Nervous Accelerator it will be called, and he hopes to be able to supply it in three strengths: one in 200, one in 900, and one in 2000, distinguished by yellow, pink, and white labels respectively.
No doubt its use renders a great number of very extraordinary things possible; for, of course, the most remarkable and, possibly, even criminal proceedings may be effected with impunity by thus dodging, as it were, into the interstices of time. Like all potent preparations, it will be liable to abuse. We have, however, discussed this aspect of the question very thoroughly, and we have decided that this is purely a matter of medical jurisprudence and altogether outside our province. We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, and as for the consequences—we shall see.
XXVIII.
THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT.
He sits not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my shoulder I can see him. And if I catch his eye—and usually I catch his eye—it meets me with an expression——
It is mainly an imploring look—and yet with suspicion in it.
Confound his suspicion! If I wanted to tell on him I should have told long ago. I don’t tell and I don’t tell, and he ought to feel at his ease. As if anything so gross and fat as he could feel at ease! Who would believe me if I did tell?
Poor old Pyecraft! Great, uneasy jelly of substance! The fattest clubman in London.
He sits at one of the little club tables in the huge bay by the fire, stuffing. What is he stuffing? I glance judiciously, and catch him biting at a round of hot buttered teacake, with his eyes on me. Confound him! —with his eyes on me!
That settles it, Pyecraft! Since you will be abject, since you will behave as though I was not a man of honour, here, right under your embedded eyes, I write the thing down—the plain truth about Pyecraft. The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me by making my club unendurable, absolutely unendurable, with his liquid appeal, with the perpetual “don’t tell” of his looks.
And, besides, why does he keep on eternally eating?
Well, here goes for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!
Pyecraft——. I made the acquaintance of Pyecraft in this very smoking-room. I was a young, nervous new member, and he saw it. I was sitting all alone, wishing I knew more of the members, and suddenly he came, a great rolling front of chins and abdomina, towards me, and grunted and sat down in a chair close by me and wheezed for a space, and scraped for a space with a match and lit a cigar, and then addressed me. I forget what he said—something about the matches not lighting properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept stopping the waiters one by one as they went by, and telling them about the matches in that thin, fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it was in some such way we began our talking.
He talked about various things and came round to games. And thence to my figure and complexion. “You ought to be a good cricketer,” he said. I suppose I am slender, slender to what some people would call lean, and I suppose I am rather dark, still——I am not ashamed of having a Hindu great-grandmother, but, for all that, I don’t want casual strangers to see through me at a glance to her. So that I was set against Pyecraft from the beginning.
But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.
“I expect,” he said, “you take no more exercise than I do, and probably you eat no less.” (Like all excessively obese people he fancied he ate nothing.) “Yet”—and he smiled an oblique smile—“we differ.”
And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness; all he did for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness; what people had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had heard of people doing for fatness similar to his. “A priori,” he said, “one would think a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary and a question of assimilation by drugs.” It was stifling. It was dumpling talk. It made me feel swelled to hear him.
One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time came when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether too conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but he would come wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and gormandised round and about me while I had my lunch. He seemed at times almost to be clinging to me. He was a bore, but not so fearful a bore as to be limited to me and from the first there was something in his manner—almost as though he knew, almost as though he penetrated to the fact that I might—that there was a remote, exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.
“I’d give anything to get it down,” he would say—“anything,” and peer at me over his vast cheeks and pant. Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged; no doubt to order another buttered teacake!
He came to the actual thing one day. “Our Pharmacopoeia,” he said, “our
Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last word of medical science.
In the East, I’ve been told——”
He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.
I was quite suddenly angry with him. “Look here,” I said, “who told you about my great-grandmother’s recipes?”
“Well,” he fenced.
“Every time we’ve met for a week,” I said—“and we’ve met pretty often— you’ve given me a broad hint or so about that little secret of mine.”
“Well,” he said, “now the cat’s out of the bag, I’ll admit, yes, it is so.
I had it——”
“From Pattison?”
“Indirectly,” he said, which I believe was lying, “yes.”
“Pattison,” I said, “took that stuff at his own risk.” He pursed his mouth and bowed.
“My great-grandmother’s recipes,” I said, “are queer things to handle. My father was near making me promise——”
“He didn’t?”
“No. But he warned me. He himself used one—once.”
“Ah! … But do you think——? Suppose—suppose there did happen to be one——”
“The things are curious documents,” I said. “Even the smell of ‘em …
No!”
But after going so far Pyecraft was resolved I should go farther. I was always a little afraid if I tried his patience too much he would fall on me suddenly and smother me. I own I was weak. But I was also annoyed with Pyecraft. I had got to that state of feeling for him that disposed me to say, “Well, take the risk!” The little affair of Pattison to which I have alluded was a different matter altogether. What it was doesn’t concern us now, but I knew, anyhow, that the particular recipe I used then was safe. The rest I didn’t know so much about, and, on the whole, I was inclined to doubt their safety pretty completely.
Yet even if Pyecraft got poisoned——
I must confess the poisoning of Pyecraft struck me as an immense undertaking.
That evening I took that queer, odd-scented sandal-wood box out of my safe, and turned the rustling skins over. The gentleman who wrote the recipes for my great-grandmother evidently had a weakness for skins of a miscellaneous origin, and his handwriting was cramped to the last degree. Some of the things are quite unreadable to me—though my family, with its Indian Civil Service associations, has kept up a knowledge of Hindustani from generation to generation—and none are absolutely plain sailing. But I found the one that I knew was there soon enough, and sat on the floor by my safe for some time looking at it.
“Look here,” said I to Pyecraft next day, and snatched the slip away from his eager grasp.
“So far as I can make it out, this is a recipe for Loss of Weight. (“Ah!” said Pyecraft.) I’m not absolutely sure, but I think it’s that. And if you take my advice you’ll leave it alone. Because, you know—I blacken my blood in your interest, Pyecraft—my ancestors on that side were, so far as I can gather, a jolly queer lot. See?”
“Let me try it,” said Pyecraft.
I leant back in my chair. My imagination made one mighty effort and fell flat within me. “What in Heaven’s name, Pyecraft,” I asked, “do you think you’ll look like when you get thin?”
He was impervious to reason, I made him promise never to say a word to me about his disgusting fatness again whatever happened—never, and then I handed him that little piece of skin.
“It’s nasty stuff,” I said.
“No matter,” he said, and took it.
He goggled at it. “But—but—” he said
He had just discovered that it wasn’t English.
“To the best of my ability,” I said, “I will do you a translation.”
I did my best. After that we didn’t speak for a fortnight. Whenever he approached me I frowned and motioned him away, and he respected our compact, but at the end of the fortnight he was as fat as ever. And then he got a word in.
“I must speak,” he said, “It isn’t fair. There’s something wrong. It’s done me no good. You’re not doing your great-grandmother justice.”
“Where’s the recipe?”
He produced it gingerly from his pocket-book.
I ran my eye over the items. “Was the egg addled?” I asked.
“No. Ought it to have been?”
“That,” I said, “goes without saying in all my poor dear great-grandmother’s recipes. When condition or quality is not specified you must get the worst. She was drastic or nothing… And there’s one or two possible alternatives to some of these other things. You got fresh rattlesnake venom?”
“I got a rattlesnake from Jamrach’s. It cost—it cost——”
“That’s your affair anyhow. This last item——”
“I know a man who——”
“Yes. H’m. Well, I’ll write the alternatives down. So far as I know the language, the spelling of this recipe is particularly atrocious. By-the-by, dog here probably means pariah dog.”
For a month after that I saw Pyecraft constantly at the club and as fat and anxious as ever. He kept our treaty, but at times he broke the spirit of it by shaking his head despondently. Then one day in the cloakroom he said, “Your great-grandmother——”
“Not a word against her,” I said; and he held his peace.
I could have fancied he had desisted, and I saw him one day talking to three new members about his fatness as though he was in search of other recipes. And then, quite unexpectedly, his telegram came.
“Mr. Formalyn!” bawled a page-boy under my nose, and I took the telegram and opened it at once.
”For Heaven’s sake come.—Pyecraft.”
“H’m,” said I, and to tell the truth I was so pleased at the rehabilitation of my great-grandmother’s reputation this evidently promised that I made a most excellent lunch.
I got Pyecraft’s address from the hall porter. Pyecraft inhabited the upper half of a house in Bloomsbury, and I went there so soon as I had done my coffee and Trappistine. I did not wait to finish my cigar.
“Mr. Pyecraft?” said I, at the front door.
They believed he was ill; he hadn’t been out for two days.
“He expects me,” said I, and they sent me up.
I rang the bell at the lattice-door upon the landing.
“He shouldn’t have tried it, anyhow,” I said to myself. “A man who eats like a pig ought to look like a pig.”
An obviously worthy woman, with an anxious face and a carelessly placed cap, came and surveyed me through the lattice.
I gave my name and she let me in in a dubious fashion.
“Well?” said I, as we stood together inside Pyecraft’s piece of the landing.
“‘E said you was to come in if you came,” she said, and regarded me, making no motion to show me anywhere. And then, confidentially, “‘E’s locked in, sir.”
“Locked in?”
“Locked ‘imself in yesterday morning and ‘asn’t let any one in since, sir.
And ever and again swearing. Oh, my!”
I stared at the door she indicated by her glances. “In there?” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s up?”
She shook her head sadly. “‘E keeps on calling for vittles, sir. ‘Eavy vittles ‘e wants. I get ‘im what I can. Pork ‘e’s had, sooit puddin’, sossiges, noo bread. Everythink like that. Left outside, if you please, and me go away. ‘E’s eatin’, sir, somethink awful.”
There came a piping bawl from inside the door: “That Formalyn?”
“That you, Pyecraft?” I shouted, and went and banged the door.
“Tell her to go away.”
I did.
Then I could hear a curious pattering upon the door, almost like some one feeling for the handle in the dark, and Pyecraft’s familiar grunts.
“It’s all right,” I said, “she’s gone.”
But for a long time the door didn’t open.
I heard the key turn. Then Pyecraft’s voice said, “Come in.”
I turned the handle and opened the door. Naturally I expected to see
Pyecraft.
Well, you know, he wasn’t there!
I never had such a shock in my life. There was his sitting-room in a state of untidy disorder, plates and dishes among the books and writing things, and several chairs overturned, but Pyecraft——
“It’s all right, old man; shut the door,” he said, and then I discovered him.
There he was, right up close to the cornice in the corner by the door, as though some one had glued him to the ceiling. His face was anxious and angry. He panted and gesticulated. “Shut the door,” he said. “If that woman gets hold of it——”
I shut the door, and went and stood away from him and stared.
“If anything gives way and you tumble down,” I said, “you’ll break your neck, Pyecraft.”
“I wish I could,” he wheezed.
“A man of your age and weight getting up to kiddish gymnastics——”
“Don’t,” he said, and looked agonised.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, and gesticulated.
“How the deuce,” said I, “are you holding on up there?”
And then abruptly I realised that he was not holding on at all, that he was floating up there—just as a gas-filled bladder might have floated in the same position. He began a struggle to thrust himself away from the ceiling and to clamber down the wall to me. “It’s that prescription,” he panted, as he did so. “Your great-gran——”
He took hold of a framed engraving rather carelessly as he spoke and it gave way, and he flew back to the ceiling again, while the picture smashed on to the sofa. Bump he went against the ceiling, and I knew then why he was all over white on the more salient curves and angles of his person. He tried again more carefully, coming down by way of the mantel.
