“I’d like to thank you again from the bottom of my heart,” said Charles, genuinely moved. “And you, too, Jane, for persuading the cab driver to hide down a side street and to tether the horse to the front gate while we pretended to intimidate your husband.” “You’ve nothing to thank me for either, Mr. Winslow, it was a pleasure. Although I’ll never forgive you for having instructed the actor to stab your cousin …” she chided, with the amused smile of someone gently scolding a naughty child.
“But everything was under control!” protested Charles, pretending to be shocked. “The actor is an expert with a knife. And besides, I can assure you that without that added bit of encouragement, Andrew would never have shot him. Not to mention that the scar it will leave on his shoulder will be a constant reminder he saved his beloved Marie’s life. Incidentally, I liked the idea of employing someone to play a guardian of time.” “Wasn’t that your doing?” declared Wells, taken aback.
“No,” said Charles. “I thought you’d arranged it …” “It wasn’t me …” replied Wells, perplexed.
“In that case, I think my cousin scared off a burglar. Or perhaps he was a real time traveler,” joked Charles.
“Yes, perhaps,” Wells laughed uneasily.
“Well, the main thing is it all turned out well,” concluded Charles. He congratulated them once again on their successful performances and gave a little bow as he said good-bye. “And now I really must go, otherwise my cousin will start to suspect something. It has been a pleasure meeting you. And remember, Mr. Wells, I shall always be one of your most devoted readers.” Wells thanked him with a modest smile that lingered on his face as Charles’s footsteps disappeared down the stairs. Then he heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction and, hands on hips, gazed at the time machine with the fierce affection of a father contemplating his firstborn child, before gently stroking the control panel.
Jane watched him, moved, aware that at that very moment her husband was being assailed by an emotion as intense as it was disturbing, for he was embracing a dream, a product of his own imagination that had stepped miraculously out of the pages of his book and become a reality.
“We might find some use for the seat, don’t you think?” Wells commented, turning towards her.
His wife shook her head, as though asking herself what the devil she was doing with such an insensitive fellow, and walked over to the window. The author went and stood beside her, a look of consternation on his face. He placed his arm round her shoulders, a gesture that finally softened her, so that she in turn laid her head against him. Her husband did not lavish her with so much affection that she was going to pass up this spontaneous gesture, which had taken her as much by surprise—or more—as if he had hurled himself from the window, arms akimbo, in order to confirm once and for all that he was unable fly. Thus entwined, they watched Charles climb into the cab, which then pulled away.
They watched it disappear down the end of the street beneath the orange-tinted dawn.
“Do you realize what you did tonight, Bertie?” Jane asked him.
“I nearly set fire to the attic.” She laughed.
“No, tonight you did something that will always make me feel proud of you,” she said, looking up at him with infinite tenderness. “You used your imagination to save a man’s life.”
PART TWO
If you enjoyed our journey into the past, dear reader, in the following installment of this exciting adventure you will be treated to an expedition into the future, to the year 2000, where you will witness the legendary battle between humans and automatons.
Be warned, however: this episode contains scenes of an extremely violent nature only to be expected of a battle of such enormous consequences for the future of the Human Race.
Mothers of sensitive children may wish to examine the contents and expurgate certain passages before entrusting it to their little ones.
18
Claire Haggerty would have gladly been born into another era if that meant she did not have to take piano lessons or wear insufferably tight dresses, or choose a husband from among an assortment of willing suitors, or carry round one of those silly little parasols she always ended up leaving in the most unexpected places. She had just celebrated her twenty-first birthday, and yet, if anyone had taken the trouble to ask her what she wanted from life, they would have heard her reply: nothing, simply to die. Naturally, this was not what you would expect to hear from the lips of a charming young lady who had scarcely embarked upon life, but I can assure you it is what Claire would have told you. As I have previously explained, I posses the faculty to see everything, including what no one else can see, and I have witnessed the endless self-questioning she puts herself through in her room before going to bed. While everyone imagines she is brushing her hair in front of the mirror like any normal girl, Claire is lost in contemplation of the dark night outside her window, wondering why she would sooner die than see another dawn. Not that she had suicidal tendencies, nor was she irresistibly drawn to the other side by the call of a siren, nor was the mere fact of being alive so unbearably distressing that she felt she must end it all forthwith. No. What it boiled down to was something far simpler: the world into which she had been born was not exciting enough for her, and it never would be, or at least that was the conclusion she reached during her nightly reflections. Hard as she tried, she was unable to discover anything about her life that was pleasurable, interesting, or stimulating. Even more tiresome was being compelled to pretend she was content with what she had. The time she lived in was dreary and uninspiring; it bored her to tears. And the fact that she could find no one around her who seemed to share her disenchantment made her feel very out of place and out of sorts. This profound inner unease, which inevitably isolated her socially, often made her irritable and sharp-tongued, and from time to time, regardless of whether the moon was full or not, she would lose control and turn into a mischievous creature who took delight in wreaking havoc at family gatherings.
Claire knew perfectly well that these fits of frustration, besides being self-indulgent and futile, did her no good at all, especially at such a crucial time in her life, when her main concern ought to have been finding a husband to support her and provide her with half a dozen offspring to show the world she was of good breeding stock. Her friend Lucy used to warn her she was gaining a reputation among her suitors for being unsociable, and some of them had abandoned their courtship after realizing that her offhanded manner made her an impregnable fortress. Nevertheless, Claire could not help reacting the way she did. Or could she? Sometimes she wondered whether she did everything in her power to overcome her gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, or whether on the contrary she derived a morbid pleasure from giving in to it. Why could she not accept the world as it was, like Lucy, who stoically endured the torments of the corset as though they were some sort of atonement aimed at purifying her soul, who did not mind not being allowed to study at Oxford, and who put up with being visited by her suitors in scrupulous succession, in the knowledge that sooner or later she must marry one of them? But Claire was not like Lucy: she loathed those corsets apparently designed by the devil himself, she longed to be able to use her brain the way any man could, and she was not the slightest bit interested in marrying any of the young men hovering around her. It was the idea of marriage she found most distressing—despite the great progress since her mother’s day, when a woman who married was immediately stripped of all her possessions, even the money she earned from paid employment, so that the law, like an ill-fated wind, blew straight into her husband’s grasping hands. At least if Claire were to marry now, she would keep her possessions and might even win custody of her children in the event of a divorce. Even so, she continued to consider marriage a form of legal prostitution, as Mary Wollstonecraft had stated in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—a work which to Claire was as sacred as the Bible. She admired the author’s determined struggle to restore women’s dignity, her insistence that women should stop being cons
idered the handmaidens of men, whom science deemed more intelligent because their skulls—and therefore their brains—were bigger, even though she had more than enough evidence to suggest that such enhanced proportions were only good for filling a larger hat. On the other hand, Claire knew that if she refused to place herself under a man’s tutelage, she would have no choice but to make her own living, to try to find employment in one of the few openings available to someone of her position: that is to say as a stenographer or nurse, both of which appealed to her even less than being buried alive with one of the elegant dandies who took it in turns to worship her.
But what could she do if marriage seemed such an unacceptable alternative? She felt she only could go through with it if she were truly to fall in love with a man—something she considered virtually impossible, for her indifference towards men was not confined to her dull crowd of admirers, but extended to every man on the planet, young or old, rich or poor, handsome or ugly.
The niceties were unimportant: she was firmly convinced she could never fall in love with any man from her own time, whoever he might be, for the simple reason that his idea of love would pale beside the romantic passion to which she longed to surrender herself. Claire yearned to be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable passion, a violent fervor that would scorch her very soul; she longed for a furious happiness to compel her to take fateful decisions that would allow her to gauge the strength of her feelings. And yet she longed without hope, for she knew that this type of love had gone out with frilly blouses. What else could she do? Resign herself to living without the one thing she imagined gave meaning to life? No, of course not.
And yet, a few days earlier something had happened which, to her amazement had roused her sleeping curiosity, encouraging her to believe that, despite first appearances, life was not completely devoid of surprises. Lucy had summoned her to her house with her usual urgency and, somewhat reluctantly, Claire had obeyed. Although she feared her friend had organized yet another of those tedious séances to which she was so partial. Lucy had joined in the latest craze to come out of America with the same zeal with which she followed the latest Paris fashions. Claire was not so much bothered by having to make believe she was conversing with spirits in a darkened room as she was by Eric Sanders, a skinny, arrogant young man who had set himself up as the official neighborhood medium, and who orchestrated the séances.
Sanders maintained he had special powers that allowed him to communicate with the dead, but Claire knew this was simply a ruse to gather half a dozen unmarried, impressionable young girls round a table, plunge them into an intimidating gloom, terrify them with a preposterously cavernous voice, and take advantage of their proximity to stroke their hands and even their shoulders with complete impunity. The crafty Sanders had read enough of The Spirits’ Book by Allan Kardec to be able to interrogate the dead with apparent ease and confidence, although he was evidently far too interested in the living to pay much attention to their responses. After the last séance when Claire had slapped him after she felt a spirit’s all too real hand caressing her ankles, Sanders had banned her from attending any further gatherings, insisting that her skeptical nature was too upsetting to the dead and hampered his communication with them. At first, her exclusion from Sanders’s supernatural gatherings came as a relief, but she ended up feeling disheartened: she was twenty-one and had fallen out not only with this world but with the world beyond.
However, Lucy had not organized any séances that evening.
She had a far more thrilling proposal, she explained to her friend, smiling excitedly and leading her by the hand to her room, where she told her to sit down on a small armchair and be patient. Then she began riffling through her desk drawer. Open on a lectern on top of the desk lay a copy of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.
The page showed an illustration of a kiwi bird, an extraordinary-looking creature that her friend was copying onto a piece of paper, perhaps because tracing its simple, rounded forms required no artistic ability. Claire could not helping wondering whether, besides looking at the pictures, her friend had troubled to read the book that had become a favorite amongst the middle classes.
Once she had found what she was looking for, Lucy shut the drawer and turned to her friend with an ecstatic smile. “What could Lucy possibly find more exciting than communicating with dead people?” Claire wondered. She discovered the answer on reading the leaflet her friend thrust into her hand: communicating with people who had not yet been born. The flier advertised a company called Murray’s Time Travel which offered journeys through time, to the year 2000, to be precise, to witness the battle between automatons and humans that would decide the fate of humanity. Still stunned, Claire reread the leaflet, then studied the crude illustrations that apparently depicted the aforementioned battle. Amid ruined buildings, automatons and humans battled for the future of the world with strange-looking weapons.
The figure leading the human army caught her eye. The artist had drawn him in a more heroic pose than the others, and, according to the caption below, the picture was meant to represent the brave Captain Derek Shackleton.
Without giving Claire time to collect herself, Lucy explained she had visited the premises of Murray’s Time Travel that very morning. They had informed her that seats were still available for the second expedition, organized after the success of the first, and she had not hesitated to sign both of them up for it. Claire looked a little put out, but Lucy did not even bother to apologize for not having asked her friend’s permission and went on to explain how they would go about traveling to the future without their respective parents finding out, because she knew that if they did they would doubtless forbid them to go, or worse insist on going with them, and Lucy wanted to enjoy the year 2000 without the bore of being chaperoned. She had it all worked out: money would be no object, as she had persuaded her wealthy grandmother Margaret to give her the amount they needed to cover the cost of both tickets—naturally without telling her what it was for. She had even enlisted her friend Florence Burnett’s help. For “a small fee,” the greedy Florence was willing to send them a pretend invitation to spend the following Thursday at her country house at Kirkby.
And so, if Claire was in agreement, on that day the two of them would travel to the year 2000 and be back in time for tea without anybody being any the wiser. After Lucy had finished her gabbled speech, she looked at her friend expectantly.
“Well?” she said, “Will you go with me?” And Claire could not, would not, did not know how to refuse.
The next four days had sped by in a whirl of excitement about the impending trip and the enjoyment of having to prepare for it in secret. And now, Claire and Lucy found themselves outside the picturesque premises of Murray’s Time Travel, wrinkling their noses at the stench exuding from the entrance. On noticing them, one of the employees, who was cleaning off what looked like excrement on the front of the building, hastened to apologize for the unpleasant smell and assured them if they ventured across the threshold with a handkerchief or scarf for protection, or holding their breath, they would be attended to in a manner befitting two such lovely ladies. Lucy dismissed the man with a desultory wave of the hand, annoyed that anyone should draw attention to an inconvenience she preferred to ignore so that nothing would detract from the thrill of the moment. She seized her friend’s arm, and Claire was unsure whether Lucy’s gesture was meant to bolster her courage or infect her with enthusiasm as she propelled her through the doors to the future. As they entered the building, out of the corner of her eye Claire glimpsed Lucy’s rapt expression, and smiled to herself. She knew the reason for her friend’s nervous impatience: Lucy was already anxious to come back and describe the future to her friends and family, who, whether out of fear or indifference, or because they had been unable to secure a seat, had stayed behind in the insipid present. Yes, for Lucy this was simply another adventure with which to regale people—like a picnic ruined by a cloudburst or an unexpectedly eventful crossing in a boat. Clair
e had agreed to accompany her friend on this trip, but for very different reasons. Lucy planned to visit the year 2000 in the same way she would go to a new store and be home in time for tea. Claire, on the other hand, had absolutely no intention of ever coming back.
A snooty assistant guided them to the hall where the thirty other privileged travelers to the year 2000 were chattering excitedly. There she told them a glass of punch would be served before Mr. Murray welcomed them, explained the itinerary of their trip to the future and the historic moment they were about to witness. When she had finished, she curtsied abruptly and left them to their own devices in the spacious room, which to judge by the boxes at the sides and the stage at one end had once been the stalls of the theater. Without the rows of seats and with only a few small tables and uncomfortable-looking couches, the room looked overly big. This impression was strengthened by the high ceilings, suspended from which were dozens of oil lamps. Seen from underneath, these lamps resembled a colony of sinister spiders living oblivious to the world below. Apart from a few octogenarians, who had difficulty standing because of their brittle bones, no one appeared to want to sit on the couches, perhaps because they found it easier to contain their excitement in an upright position. The only other pieces of furniture were a few tables where a couple of diligent serving girls had begun doling out punch, a wooden pulpit on the stage, and, of course, the imposing statue of Captain Shackleton beside the doorway, welcoming them as they walked in.
While Lucy scanned their fellow passengers, listing the names of those present in a way that clearly revealed her likes and dislikes, Claire gazed in awe at the marble figure of a man not yet born. The twice life-size statue of Derek Shackleton on his pedestal looked like some strange descendant of the Greek gods, fixed in a similarly heroic and gallant pose, except that the casual nudity usually flaunted by the Greeks was in this case concealed by something more substantial than a fig leaf. The captain wore a suit of elaborately riveted armor apparently designed to protect as much of his body as possible from the enemy, and which even included a sophisticated helmet that left only his jutting chin visible. Claire was disappointed by the headdress as she would have liked to see what the face of a savior of the human race looked like. She was convinced the ironclad visage could not possibly resemble anyone she knew. It had to be a face that did not yet exist, a face that only the future could produce. She imagined a noble, calm expression with eyes radiating confidence— not for nothing was he commanding an army—casually revealing, almost like a natural secretion, his proud, indomitable spirit. Although now and then the dark desolation surrounding him would cloud those handsome eyes with tears of nostalgia, for a vestige of sensitivity still survived in his warrior’s soul. Finally, giving in to her romantic nature, Claire also imagined a glimmer of yearning in his gaze, especially during those moments of intense loneliness that would assail him between battles. And what was the cause of his sorrow? Naturally, it could be none other than the absence of a beloved face to contemplate, a smile that would give him courage in moments of weakness, a name he could whisper in his sleep like a comforting prayer, an embrace to return to when the war was over. For a brief moment, Claire pictured that brave, indestructible man, so tough on the battlefield, murmuring her name at night like a helpless boy: “Claire, darling Claire …” She smiled to herself; it was only a silly fantasy, and yet she was surprised at the thrill she felt when she imagined being loved by that warrior of the future. How was it possible that a man who had not yet been born could stir her feelings more than any of the young dandies courting her? The answer was simple: she was projecting onto that faceless statue everything she yearned for and could not have. This Shackleton fellow was probably completely different from Claire’s imagined portrait. Furthermore, his way of thinking, acting, even of loving would be utterly incomprehensible and alien to her. The century between them was more than enough time for man’s values and concerns to have changed into something unrecognizable to anyone viewing them from the past. This was one of life’s laws. If only she could glimpse his face, she thought, she might find out whether she was right, if Shackleton’s soul was made of opaque glass through which she would never be able to see, or, on the contrary, whether the years between them were merely anecdotal, because there was something inside man, an essence that was rooted in his very being, which remained unchanged over the centuries: perhaps the very air God had breathed into his creatures to give them life. But there was no way of knowing this because of that blasted helmet. Claire would never glimpse his face. She must be content with the parts of him she was able to see, which were impressive enough: his warriorlike posture, his raised sword, his right leg flexed to reveal sculpted muscles, his left firmly planted on the ground, although with the heel slightly raised off the base, as though immortalizing him in the act of charging the enemy.