by Anthology
“These are also meaningful words in Eloic,” Welles smiled. “Abio means ‘coloured glass’ or ‘jewel’ and ilio means ‘clear glass’.”
“Charming,” I said.
Weena also could not manage “Mrs Watchett”, but took to calling her, from her first name, Meri or sometimes Meri-a.
“The a-ending is honorific,” said Welles. “From the way Mrs Watchett is bossing her, I think she imagines she is the head of things here.”
Weena now laughed, pointing to each of us in turn, beginning with the women. “Meri-a na Eleni . . . na Periu na Abio na Ilio . . . na Baranu na Demu. Oli perenoi, sa?”
“She asks if we are all friends,” said Welles. He turned to her. “Sa, Wini—oli perenoi.”
The Traveller coughed. “Really, Welles! No Socialism now, please!”
“Well, Sir, we’re not enemies, are we? We’re as much perenoi to each other as all the Eloi are—nearly. We don’t eat, dissect or enslave each other.”
“Oli laii, laii Taweloi!” exclaimed Weena.
“She says we are all good people,” said Welles. “And Taweloi—that means, Big or Great Eloi.”
The only thing Weena disliked about us was—our clothes. These she thought ogo—ugly. She was asking, evidently, why we wore such things—so sombre, so heavy. To that there was no answer. I noticed that though she was very lightly clad, and the day was not warm, she did not feel the cold. Mrs Watchett remarked on that.
“Oh,” said Welles cheerfully, “in Transylvania, Mrs Watchett, they bring up children not to mind the cold. You’d be surprised how little the young ones wear.”
The Traveller frowned. But at that moment, Weena kissed Mrs Watchett again.
“Oh, the darling little pet!” cried Mrs Watchett. “Oh, I do beg your pardon, Sir—”
“That’s all right,” said the Traveller. “See, it’s exactly what I told you all before—she’s just like a child.”
As the servants left the room, Browne said: “A child of what age?”
“That we still don’t know,” said the Traveller. “Probably she won’t know herself. All the Eloi who are adult look about the same age—no visible ageing. She thought the lines on my forehead were wounds—scars. Their youthfulness—there’s probably a sinister reason for that—which we can all guess.”
I shuddered, looking at lovely white-and-gold Weena. She had won all our hearts, and I was very glad that the Traveller had, after all, succeeded in saving his little girl-woman from the horrible Morlocks. Moreover, she struck me now as not altogether mindless. I had feared, from the Traveller’s first tale, that we might have a sweet idiot on our hands. Not so: she was obviously full of curiosity about “Beriten”—and many of her sentences were longer than just two words.
At the cold luncheon which followed, things went on like that. According to the Traveller’s custom, no servants waited at table—Browne had laid out vegetarian dishes for Weena, and we other carnivores had bread, cheese and discreetly cut up bits of ham. Weena quite liked her food. Of course, she ate at first with her hands; she laughed in astonishment when she saw us plying forks. And then she began to learn that trick too: rapidly she began impaling sections of her apple.
“It’s just a game to her,” said the Traveller.
“But a game she’s good at,” said Welles. He sat next to her, on the other side from the Traveller, and helped her to place her fingers correctly on the fork and knife. “See—we’ll soon be able to pass her off as an English lady!”
Then Weena rapidly kissed him on the cheek. I laughed. “Not if she does things like that!”
“Just a child,” said the Traveller. But he frowned; and Welles was flushing.
“Come now!” I said. “Your adventures in the Far Future! Surely they couldn’t have been exactly the same as the first time?”
“Well, not exactly,” the Traveller admitted. “The thunderstorm on our second day—corresponding to my first day, the other time—that was a very mild affair—no hail, just a little rain. And we roamed to a few different places.”
“And I,” said Welles, “I had to shoot a Morlock just as we were escaping. We had to wheel the machine out on to the lawn in front of the Sphinx—so as to arrive just in the laboratory—and it was broad daylight, and the Morlocks erupted out of the base of the Sphinx, wearing black goggles and shooting metal arrows at us . . . And there were—other differences.”
“But not in Weena,” said the Traveller. “And that’s all that matters.”
After that, he became rather uncommunicative; and Welles, noticing his mood, also remained silent.
When the meal was over, Browne lingered to help with arrangements; but Welles and I had our own affairs to attend to—some of them recently rather neglected. So we took our leave, Welles making it clear to Weena that he would return the next day. She gave him a fervent hug—he had difficulty getting away.
Since our lodgings were close together, in Putney, Welles and I shared a cab home. As soon as we were clip-clopping on our way, Welles leaned towards me.
“Hillyer—he is deceiving himself!”
“What do you mean?” I said
“Two things. First, she is not a child: I have spent enough time with her to know that. She is a bit puzzled by the way he treats her—by the things he doesn’t do, if you take my meaning.”
“I do take it, Welles. And I’ve known you long enough to know you would know. Well, what’s the other thing?”
“The other thing is possibly metaphysical. Across the parallel time lines, what does it mean when we say a person is ‘the same’ or ‘not the same’ ? But if you alter history—alter conditions noticeably, say, for the year 802,701—can a person in that altered year be ‘the same person’ ? He kept trying to convince himself, in that future world, that nothing important was different. But things were different. Some he might have failed to notice on his first journey, but certainly not all. Not all nonhuman mammals were extinct, for a start. There was a species of nocturnal deer: I saw it as I stood watch the fourth night, and the Morlocks were hunting it, with crossbows. And once in the distance, I saw beasts like large sheep . . . There would be no need in that world for the Morlocks to eat Eloi, and I suspect they didn’t—unless for the pleasure of revenge. The Eloi feared them, yes. In the Grey House, they told frightening stories . . . But the Eloi were not mindless. Each House had organization—with a head-woman, and orchards owned by particular Houses. And that Sphinx: even he agreed it was less dilapidated. And the language: the roots were the same, but I’m sure the structure was more complex. He is not a linguist, but I have good German—and in the end I was becoming more fluent than he. Nouns had plurals: singular Elo, plural Eloi. Similarly, Moloko and Molokoi. That means, of course, ‘Morlocks’—and the Eloi were not averse to discussing them. To me, she hinted things, once when he was not there: midnight kidnappings by Morlocks, medical examinations in the bowels of the earth, piercings. It sounded more like vivisection than cannibalism.”
I shuddered. “Just as horrible—worse!”
“Yes. But it shows intelligence—in both species. Those Morlocks were scientists—among other things. And in the far distance, the London area had a wall round it—like the Great Wall of China. The area inside, with the great Eloi Houses—she called that ‘Lanan’—the Land, maybe derived from ‘London’. Outside the Wall was ‘pulan’—the Uncountry. I think the Morlocks ruled there, on the surface. Once when he was tired, she led me up a hill near the Wall. I suppose it was near Croydon, and from the crest we saw beyond the Wall: I think, that was the area of our Bromley. The Morlocks had great machines there, mirrors collecting the sun’s rays, I presume for power. If any Eloi lived in the Uncountry, they were mere slaves of the Morlocks. I think we saw a few: they were naked and brown, herders of the big sheep-like animals. She called them ‘pu-Eloi’ or ‘poi-Eloi’—Unpeople, Dead People. Within the wall, the Eloi paradise was only a reservation—or a zoo. Oh yes, and the Morlock Uprising had happened not all that lon
g before. I gathered from her that it was only about ten lifetimes ago: there were traditions surviving from the time before ‘the Molokoi became great’.”
“Phew,” I said. “That’s a lot of stuff you’ve gathered in a few days from pretty little Weena.”
“She is not pretty,” he said, “she is beautiful. And her name is not Weena.”
“What!”
“No. It’s he who keeps calling her that, and she tolerates it—it’s a joke, for her, because the—a ending is honorific, it sounds as if he’s flattering her. Her real name is Wiyeni—or Wini. Most Eloi names mean something, and wiyeni means something like ‘female organizer’, or ‘junior leader of a House’—you might say, ‘princess’. But she likes it when I use the short form, Wini.”
“You’re in love with her,” I said.
“Yes,” said Welles.
5
The name problem, for our nymph, was luckily soon settled, or rather evaded. The Traveller decided that to mislead the curious she ought to have a proper English name. He chose Winifred. And he told Mrs Watchett that her full name was Winifred Jane Driver—she had been christened “Winifred Jane” by her late English father, albeit in Transylvania the name had become somewhat mangled. At times he still called her “Weena”, but to most other people she was “Winnie”. I called her that, too; but secretly I thought of her as Wiyeni—the Princess.
She had a wild, pagan quality, which did not really disappear, not even when Mrs Watchett clothed her in Victorian garb, first in things borrowed from Ellen. Wiyeni showed her mettle over that business! The lendings dismayed her—why underclothes? And then, when the tailored things appeared, she flatly refused to wear them. “Puio, ogo!” she cried. The things were bad, ugly. And corsets—no, never; did they want to kill her? And the shoes—she would rather go barefoot, and round the house she did. (She had very beautiful feet, which certainly did not deserve to have their toes cramped, or distorted by high heels.) In the end, the matter was compromised. The hemline was taken up, daringly revealing her ankles, so that she would not trip over; and less stylish but more comfortable shoes were ordered for her. The mode of bodice and collar for ladies, that year, was a little masculine. I thought, in the end, she looked like an angelic choirboy—or like Hebe come to earth, disguised as Ganymede.
The bedroom reserved for “Winnie” was another shock for her. The bed and the other furnishings were wonderful—she had been used to sleeping on bare stone floors—but what was this? Was she to sleep alone? She had never done such a thing in her life! It was too frightening! That first night, she stood at the door and argued with Mrs Watchett and the Traveller. Already she had a few words of English; with those, and gestures, and some Eloic, she made her meaning plain.
No Morlocks? Maybe—hard to believe—but maybe other dangers? “You, Periu—you—why not you sleep too?” And she pointed to the bed.
Mrs Watchett nearly had a fit. “Oh, Sir!”
“She means no harm, Mrs Watchett,” said the Traveller hastily. “She’s just a child—terrified of the dark. Transylvania was a dangerous country. There were—wolves . . .”
“Maybe, Sir. But she’ll have to learn. Go now, Sir—I’ll soothe her.”
She managed that, at last; and got the girl into a warm nightdress. Then she showed her how to lock and unlock the door. Winnie seemed delighted, and kept turning the key, one way and the other.
“Now,” said the housekeeper, “goodnight, Miss Winnie. And you lock now—yes?”
“Sa—yes—lock-a. Goo’ nigh’, Meri-a.” And as Mrs Watchett went out, she heard the key turn. Suspicious, she lingered a while; but the key did not turn back again. “Poor little thing,” she murmured. “Master’s right—an innocent baby.”
What followed after that, I heard much later, from Wiyeni’s own lips. Neither the Traveller nor Mrs Watchett breathed a word to anyone.
First, Wiyeni waited till Mrs Watchett’s steps could no longer be heard. Then she unlocked the door, and in her nightdress slipped into the Traveller’s room. He was on the point of undressing. She smiled. “Periu, dear, cannot I sleep with you here, dear friend?” But he went red in the face; he seized her arm, marched her back to her room, and made her lock herself in. Wiyeni turned from the door with a little sob.
It was dark in that bedroom: the house had electric light only in the laboratory, and they had not given her a lamp for fear of accidents. But by drawing back the curtains from her southfacing window, she let in some light from the eleven-day-old gibbous moon. The moon was high in the sky, and that surprised her: in the Eloi world it had been summer, and she knew that summer moons rode low. Still, the good light comforted her: she looked out over the strange and wonderful garden, and saw no prowling Morlocks. So she went to her lonely bed. But under the great pile of bedclothes, she felt too hot. And the nightdress, borrowed from Ellen, was coarse and scratchy. She stripped it off, and then, naked under the sheet, fell comfortably asleep.
Thursday began with a shock for Mrs Watchett.
She came about 7.30 A.M. with a tray of tea and toast to Winnie’s door, and knocked. She heard a light scamper of feet, the door was unlocked, and in the half-light of the room she saw a little white form topped by golden hair. At first she took the whiteness for Winnie’s nightdress. Then the rising sun emerged from a cloud, and Mrs Watchett realized that Winnie was naked.
She rushed in, almost upsetting her tray, and slammed the door shut behind her with her heel. “Oh, you naughty thing!” she cried.
It was a long time before Winnie could be made to understand her crime.
That same Thursday, just after breakfast, Ellis arrived. This was his second meeting with Wiyeni, and he found her fascinating. The psychology of a girl from the far future . . . Nearly as interesting, too, was the Traveller’s attitude to her.
As the morning was fine, they went for a walk in the garden. Almost all the plants and trees were new to Wiyeni—she kept darting about among the yellow fallen leaves, picking up strange items. And then suddenly, as he strolled from behind a tree-trunk, she met Mrs Watchett’s white cat, Tiger. Both cat and girl seemed equally startled (so Ellis told us later). She had never known a tame animal before.
“Tikuro!” she breathed—then said to the Traveller in Eloic, “Periu—this is a creature we have known, carved over the great door of one of our Houses. That House is named for the carving, House of Tikuro. I did not know they were real. Ah, Beriten is a land where old tales are true! But is it dangerous? Will it bite us?”
“Pu, pu,” laughed the Traveller. “No, Weena. He is a little friend. See!—Tiger, Tiger, Tiger . . . come here, puss!”
He now made them acquainted. Soon Wiyeni was kneeling, stroking Tiger and laughing, as Tiger purred.
“Isn’t she just a marvellous sweet child?” said the Traveller.
Ellis gave him a considering look. “Marvellous, yes . . .”
A similar thing happened when they came up to the hedge. Beyond, in a field, two horse were grazing.
“Osoi!” cried Wiyeni. “More carving-animals! I come from the House of the Oso. But, they are very great! Do they eat people?”
“No, Weena-child, only grass. And we ride on their backs, and they pull us in machines.” He translated for Ellis. “Imagine, she thought they might eat us!”
“A reasonable guess, in the circumstances,” said Ellis. “They might be omnivores—like us Great Eloi.”
“She’s a perfect child,” said the Traveller.
“Well, she’s not a perfect fool.”
Immediately after that, Browne arrived, with a middle-aged nurse. And now he got his wish. In her bedroom upstairs, he and the nurse examined Wiyeni. She had lost all fear of “Baranu,” and stripped naked without hesitation. Browne’s examination was not intrusive; but he noted her small breasts, her little fringe of golden pubic hair, her wide hips; and he felt her bones. He decided that she was probably about eighteen years old—and should have very little trouble when she came to bear chil
dren.
Those days, those next few weeks, we were continually in and out of the Traveller’s house, at many times of the day. The education of Wiyeni-Winnie was an urgent priority. Until she could pass for a nineteenth-century girl, if only a foreign one, she must remain a virtual prisoner in that house and garden, yet already she was eager to explore “Beriten”. I, as a literary man, was given the primary and very agreeable task of teaching her English. Welles undertook to explore her mental skills, especially in the direction of arithmetic.
On that first Thursday forenoon, I met Welles in Putney, and we took a cab for Richmond. “Come on,” I said, “now you must tell me everything. So far I’ve had only snippets. The Far Future! What was that like?”
His blue eyes twinkled, and he looked almost boyish. “Well, it was fun, you know. And some things will still be our future. Little bits of weather may change, but the climate is surely beyond human control, and the stars . . . It is a warm world, beyond all Ice Ages. The sea level is higher, the Thames wider. And the stars! All different! There are two Pole stars, bright blue ones which circle the actual pole like the hands of a clock . . . But he’s told you some of that already. As for the Eloi—some of the things were really the same on his first trip, only he was too prudish to mention them. For instance, nakedness. The Eloi all bathe naked, and think nothing of it. Wini was naked, you know, when he leapt into the river and rescued her.”
“Golly!”
“Yes, indeed. He was a bit embarrassed, bringing her to shore, and me there—especially as she was in no hurry to get dressed again. The Eloi are not in the least prudish. The young kids, up to about four years old, go stark naked all the time—I think it makes them very hardy against cold; and at night, when they huddle together in those Houses, most of them huddle naked. We three slept in a little side room of the Grey House, where we had the Machine chained to a pillar; and I’m sure Wini would have taken her tunic off if he had let her.”