H G Wells Omnibus, page 728
‘You know, Mr.—I’ve forgotten your name again.’
Mr. Hoopdriver seemed lost in abstraction. ‘You can’t go back, of course, quite like that,’ he said thoughtfully. His ears were suddenly red and his cheeks flushed.
‘But what is your name?’
‘Name!’ said Mr. Hoopdriver. ‘Why!—Benson, of course.’
‘Mr. Benson—yes—it’s really very stupid of me. But I can never remember names. I must make a note on my cuff.’ She clicked a little silver pencil and wrote the name down. ‘If I could write to my friend, I believe she would be able to help me to an independent life. I could write to her—or telegraph. Write, I think. I could scarcely explain in a telegram. I know she would help me.’
Clearly there was only one course open to a gentleman under the circumstances. ‘In that case,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver, ‘if you don’t mind trusting yourself to a stranger, we might continue as we are perhaps—for a day or so; until you heard’ (Suppose thirty shillings a day, that gives four days, say four thirties is hun’ and twenty, six quid—well, three days, say; four ten.)
‘You are very good to me.’
His expression was eloquent.
‘Very well, then, and thank you. It’s wonderful—it’s more than I deserve that you—’ She dropped the theme abruptly. ‘What was our bill at Chichester?’
‘Eigh?’ said Mr. Hoopdriver, feigning a certain stupidity. There was a brief discussion. Secretly he was delighted at her insistence in paying. She carried her point. Their talk came round to their immediate plans for the day. They decided to ride easily, through Havant, and stop, perhaps, at Fareham or Southampton; for the previous day had tried them both. Holding the map extended on his knee, Mr. Hoopdriver’s eye fell by chance on the bicycle at his feet. ‘That bicycle,’ he remarked, quite irrelevantly, ‘wouldn’t look the same machine if I got a big double Elarum instead of that little bell.’
‘Why?’
‘Jest a thought.’ A pause.
‘Very well, then—Havant and lunch,’ said Jessie, rising.
‘I wish, somehow, we could have managed it without stealing that machine,’ said Hoopdriver. ‘Because it is stealing it, you know, come to think of it.’
‘Nonsense. If Mr. Bechamel troubles you—I will tell the world—if need be.’
‘I believe you would,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver, admiring her. ‘You’re plucky enough—goodness knows.’
Discovering suddenly that she was standing, he, too, rose, and picked up her machine. She took it and wheeled it into the road. Then he took his own. He paused, regarding it. ‘I say!’ said he. ‘How’d this bike look, now, if it was enameled gray?’
She looked over her shoulder at his grave face. ‘Why try and hide it in that way?’
‘It was jest a passing thought,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver airily.
As they were riding on to Havant it occurred to Mr. Hoopdriver in a transitory manner that the interview had been quite other than his expectation. But that was the way with everything in Mr. Hoopdriver’s experience. And though his Wisdom looked grave within him, and Caution was chinking coins, and an ancient prejudice in favor of Property shook her head, something else was there too, shouting in his mind to drown all these saner consideration, the intoxicating thought of riding beside Her all to-day, all to-morrow, perhaps for other days after that. Of talking to her familiarly, being brother of all her slender strength and freshness, of having a golden, real, and wonderful time beyond all his imaginings. His old familiar fancyings gave place to anticipations as impalpable and fluctuating and beautiful as the sunset of a summer day.
At Havant he took an opportunity to purchase, at a small hairdresser’s in the main street, a tooth-brush, a pair of nail scissors, and a little bottle of stuff to darken the moustache, an article the shop man introduced to his attention, recommended highly, and sold in the excitement of the occasion.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE UNEXPECTED ANECDOTE OF THE LION
They rode on to Cosham, and lunched lightly but expensively there. Jessie went out and posted her letter to her schoolmistress. Then the green height of Portsdown Hill tempted them, and leaving their machines in the village, they clambered up the slope to the silent red-brick fort that crowned it. Thence they had a view of Portsmouth and its cluster of sister towns, the crowded narrows of the harbor, the Solent, and the Isle of Wight like a blue cloud through the hot haze. Jessie by some miracle had become a skirted woman in the Cosham inn. Mr. Hoopdriver lounged gracefully on the turf, smoked a Red Herring cigarette, and lazily regarded the fortified town that spread like a map away there, the inner line of defense like toy fortifications, a mile off perhaps; and beyond that a few little fields and then the beginnings of Landport suburb and the smoky cluster of the multitudinous houses. To the right, at the head of the harbor shallows, the town of Porchester rose among the trees. Mr. Hoopdriver’s anxiety receded to some remote corner of his brain and that florid, half-voluntary imagination of his shared the stage with the image of Jessie. He began to speculate on the impression he was creating. He took stock of his suit optimistically again, and reviewed, with some complacency, his actions for the last four-and-twenty hours. Then he was dashed at the thought of her infinite perfections.
She had been observing him quietly, rather more closely during the last hour or so. She did not look at him directly, because he seemed always looking at her. Her own troubles had quieted down a little, and her curiosity about the chivalrous, worshipping, but singular gentleman in brown, was awakening. She had recalled, too, the curious incident of their first encounter. She found him hard to explain to herself. You must understand that her knowledge of the world was rather less than nothing, having been obtained entirely from books. You must not take a certain ignorance for foolishness.
She had begun with a few experiments. He did not know French except ‘sivverplay,’ a phrase he seemed to regard as a very good light table joke in itself. His English was uncertain, but not such as books informed her distinguished the lower classes. His manners seemed to her good on the whole, but a trifle over-respectful and out of fashion. He called her ‘Madam’ once. He seemed a person of means and leisure, but he knew nothing of recent concerts, theatres, or books. How did he spend his time? He was certainly chivalrous, and a trifle simple-minded. She fancied (so much is there in a change of costume) that she had never met with such a man before. What could he be?
‘Mr. Benson,’ she said, breaking a silence devoted to landscape.
He rolled over and regarded her, chin on knuckles, ‘At your service.’
‘Do you paint? Are you an artist?’
‘Well,’ Judicious pause. ‘I should hardly call myself a Nartist, you know. I do paint a little. And sketch, you know—skitty kind of things.’
He plucked and began to nibble a blade of grass. It was really not so much lying as his quick imagination that prompted him to add: ‘In Papers, you know, and all that.’
‘I see,’ said Jessie, looking at him thoughtfully. Artists were a very heterogeneous class certainly, and geniuses had a trick of being a little odd. He avoided her eye and bit his grass. ‘I don’t do much, you know.’
‘It’s not your profession?’
‘Oh no,’ said Hoopdriver, anxious now to hedge. ‘I don’t make a regular thing of it, you know. Jest now and then something comes into my head and down it goes. No—I’m not a regular artist.’
‘Then you don’t practice any regular profession?’
Mr. Hoopdriver looked into her eyes and saw their quiet unsuspicious regard. He had vague ideas of resuming the detective role. ‘It’s like this,’ he said, to gain time. ‘I have a sort of profession. Only there’s a kind of reason—nothing much, you know—’
‘I beg your pardon for cross-examining you.’
‘No trouble,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver. ‘Only I can’t very well—I leave it to you, you know. I don’t want to make any mystery of it, so far as that goes.’ Should he plunge boldly and be a barrister? That anyhow was something pretty good. But she might know about barristry.
‘I think I could guess what you are.’
‘Well—guess,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver.
“You come from one of the colonies?’
‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Hoopdriver, veering round to the new wind. ‘How did you find out that? (The man was born in a London suburb, dear Reader.)
‘I guessed,’ she said.
He lifted his eyebrows as one astonished, and clutched a new piece of grass.
‘You were educated up country.’
‘Good again,’ said Hoopdriver, rolling over again upon his elbow. ‘You’re a clairvoy ant.’ He bit at the grass, smiling. ‘Which colony was it?’
‘That I don’t know.’
‘You must guess,’ said Hoopdriver.
‘South Africa,’ she said ‘I strongly incline to South Africa.’
‘South Africa’s quite a large place,’ he said.
‘But South Africa is right?’
‘You’re warm,’ said Hoopdriver, ‘anyhow’; and the while his imagination was eagerly exploring this new province.
‘South Africa is right?’ she insisted.
He turned over again and nodded, smiling reassuringly into her eyes.
‘What made me think of South Africa was that novel of Olive Schreiner’s, you know—The Story of an African Farm. Gregory Rose is so like you.’
‘I never read The Story of an African Farm,’ said Hoopdriver. ‘I must. What’s he like?’
‘You must read the book. But it’s a wonderful place, with its mixture of races, and its brand-new civilization jostling the old savagery. Were you near Khama?’
‘He was a long way off from our place,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver. ‘We had a little ostrich farm, you know—just a few hundred of ’em, out Johannesburg way.’
‘On the Karroo—was it called?’
‘That’s the term. Some of it was freehold though. Luckily. We got along very well in the old days. But there’s no ostriches on that farm now.’ He had a diamond mine in his head, just at the moment, but he stopped and left a little to the girl’s imagination. Besides which it occurred to him with a kind of shock that he was lying.
‘What became of the ostriches?’
‘We sold ’em off, when we parted with the farm. Do you mind if I have another cigarette? That was when I was quite a little chap, you know, that we had this ostrich farm.’
‘Did you have blacks and Boers about you?’
‘Lots,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver, striking a match on his instep, and beginning to feel hot at the new responsibility he had brought upon himself.
‘How interesting! Do you know, I’ve never been out of England except to Paris and Mentone and Switzerland.’
‘One gets tired of traveling (puff) after a bit, of course.’
‘You must tell me about your farm in South Africa. It always stimulates my imagination to think of these places. I can fancy all the tall ostriches being driven out by a black herd to—graze, I suppose. How do ostriches feed?’
‘Well,’ said Hoopdriver. ‘That’s rather various. They have their fancies, you know. There’s fruit, of course, and that kind of thing; and chicken food, and so forth. You have to use judgment.’
‘Did you ever see a lion?’
‘They weren’t very common in our district,’ said Hoopdriver, quite modestly. ‘But I’ve seen them of course. Once or twice.’
‘Fancy seeing a lion! Weren’t you frightened?’
Mr. Hoopdriver was now thoroughly sorry he had accepted that offer of South Africa. He puffed his cigarette and regarded the Solent languidly as he settled the fate of that lion in his mind. ‘I scarcely had time,’ he said. ‘It all happened in a minute.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘I was going across the inner paddock where the fatted ostriches were.’
‘Did you eat ostriches, then? I did not know—’
‘Eat them! —often. Very nice they are too, properly stuffed. Well, we—I, rather—was going across this paddock, and I saw something standing up in the moonlight and looking at me.’ Mr. Hoopdriver was in a hot perspiration now. His invention seemed to have gone limp. ‘Luckily I had my father’s gun with me. I was scared, though, I can tell you. (Puff.) I just aimed at the end that I thought was the head. And let fly. (Puff.) And over it went, you know.’
‘Dead?’
‘As dead. It was one of the luckiest shots I ever fired. And I wasn’t much over nine at the time neither.’
‘I should have screamed and run away.’
‘There’s some things you can’t run away from,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver. ‘To run would have been Death.’
‘I don’t think I ever met a lion-killer before,’ she remarked, evidently with a heightened opinion of him.
There was pause. She seemed meditating further questions. Mr. Hoopdriver drew his watch hastily. ‘I say,’ said Mr. Hoopdriver, showing it to her, ‘don’t you think we ought to be getting on?’
His face was flushed, his ears bright red. She ascribed his confusion to modesty. He rose with a lion added to the burthens of his conscience, and held out his hand to assist her. They walked down into Cosham again, resumed their machines, and went on at a leisurely pace along the northern shore of the big harbor. But Mr. Hoopdriver was no longer happy. This horrible, this fulsome lie, stuck in his memory. Why had he done it! She did not ask for any more South African stories, happily—at least until Porchester was reached—but talked instead of Living One’s Own Life, and how custom hung on people like chains. She talked wonderfully, and set Hoopdriver’s mind fermenting. By the Castle, Mr. Hoopdriver caught several crabs in little shore pools. At Fareham they stopped for a second tea, and left the place towards the hour of sunset, under such invigorating circumstances as you shall in due course hear.
from The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
For some stretches The Island of Doctor Moreau is sheer horror story. It is also a meditation on evolution and on the nature of the human animal. By calling it a “theological grotesque,” and thereby drawing attention to how much Moreau takes on the creative possibilities of a god, Wells himself pointed to important thematic issues at play. Beyond the issues of Moreau’s science there lurk profound questions about Prendick’s, the narrator’s, own responsibility in this bizarre situation: how much has he compromised his own moral standing by going along with Moreau? The novel is told through the eyes of Prendick, a man who has been saved from shipwreck and then stranded on Moreau’s island by the vindictive captain. Prendick has slowly become aware that most of the “men” on the island are strange. At first he thinks they are humans whom Moreau has changed into beasts. The two brief selections come from the middle of the novel, as Prendick comes to a clearer understanding of the actual state of affairs on the island. The novel raises its thematic issues in an artful fashion. Humans may claim to speak for “the law,” but they are no more responsible or moral than the beast men with their recitations of “the law,” the obedience to which supposedly makes them human.
from CHAPTERS XII and XVI
THE SAYERS OF THE LAW
Then something cold touched my hand. I started violently, and saw close to me a dim pinkish thing, looking more like a flayed child than anything else in the world. The creature had exactly the mild but repulsive features of a sloth, the same low forehead and slow gestures. As the first shock of the change of light passed, I saw about me more distinctly. The little sloth-like creature was standing and staring at me. My conductor had vanished.
The place was a narrow passage between high walls of lava, a crack in its knotted flow and on either side interwoven heaps of sea-mat, palm fans and reeds leaning against the rock, formed rough and impenetrably dark dens. The winding way up the ravine between these was scarcely three yards wide, and was disfigured by lumps of decaying fruit pulp and other refuse which accounted for the disagreeable stench of the place.
The little pink sloth creature was still blinking at me when my Ape Man reappeared at the aperture of the nearest of these dens, and beckoned me in. As he did so a slouching monster wriggled out of one of the places further up this strange street, and stood up in featureless silhouette against the bright green beyond, staring at me. I hesitated—had half a mind to bolt the way I had come—and then, determined to go through with the adventure, gripped my nailed stick about the middle, and crawled into the little evil-smelling lean-to after my conductor.
It was a semicircular space, shaped like the half of a bee-hive, and against the rocky wall that formed the inner side of it was a pile of variegated fruits, cocoa-nuts and others. Some rough vessels of lava and wood stood about the floor, and one on a rough stool. There was no fire. In the darkest corner of the hut sat a shapeless mass of darkness that grunted “Hey!” as I came in, and my Ape Man stood in the dim light of the doorway and held out a spilt cocoa-nut to me as I crawled into the other corner and squatted down. I took it and began gnawing it, as serenely as possible in spite of my tense trepidation and the nearly intolerable closeness of the den. The little pink sloth creature stood in the aperture of the hut, and something else with a drab face and bright eyes came staring over its shoulder.
“Hey,” came out of the lump of mystery opposite. “It is a man! It is a man!” gabbled my conductor—”a man, a man, a live man, like me.”
“Shut up!’ said the voice from the dark, and grunted. I gnawed my cocoa-nut amid an impressive silence. I peered hard into the blackness, but could distinguish nothing. “It is a man,” the voice repeated. “He comes to live with us?” It was a thick voice with something in it, a kind of whistling overtone, that struck me as peculiar, but the English accent was strangely good.
The Ape Man looked at me as though he expected something. I perceived the pause was interrogative.
“He comes to live with you,” I said.
“It is a man. He must learn the Law.”
