by Anthology
“What!”
“Yes. She never left us, you know, from the moment she met us, and she was very grateful for being rescued. Mind you, her cramp was only a momentary thing, and she was recovering as he got to her. And other Eloi were swimming up . . . He managed to win the credit, but only just. And she was impressed not just by the rescue, but by what he was—a benevolent giant, with wonderful powers and devices, so useful against the Morlocks. I think she expected to reward him in the obvious way, and was quite willing to do it. But he kept treating her as a child, so she—just cuddled him. I showed more willing, and that time we were alone near Bromley, coming down from the crest of the hill—she suddenly hugged me, and kissed me on the lips. She was grateful to me too, you see, and the view of the Uncountry and its Morlock machines had just frightened her. I didn’t let things go any further, then, out of loyalty to him. But God, Hillyer, she is sweet! By the bye, I’m pretty sure she has had lovers before. The Eloi don’t seem to have marriage. Life in Lanan is so easy, apart from the Morlocks, that a woman can easily bring up her children without the help of a man. And they do it: I saw always these units of mother-and-child, with never a possessive man about. But in the house-tribes, there is plenty of help to be had when needed, and the men are gentle with children. Eloi women are not very fertile, I think, so they make sure they have plenty of lovers. I—I think this will be the greatest problem with Wini—she won’t have any sense of what we call respectability.”
I whistled. “A Greek goddess indeed—with the morals of one . . . But she seems so nice.”
“She is, too. Her feelings go deeper than those of most Eloi. She may be casual about sex—but I’m sure she can also love. Affection . . . she has a strong affection for our learned friend. Let me give you one example. You know, he tried to repeat everything possible—so on our last morning there, he descended into that Morlock well, to take his flash pictures. He expected me to stay with Wini and console her. I was rather looking forward to that . . . But she didn’t stay. She started climbing down that well after him.”
“Good God! I thought they were terrified—”
“She was terrified. She cried out, ‘They will cut him!’ I’m sure she meant dissect him. The Eloi lived always with the possibility of being kidnapped one night, taken down a Morlock hole, and used in experiments. Yet she was going to risk the same fate, to save her friend. I rushed after her, stopped her, wrestled with her. It’s no joke, wrestling on the rungs of an iron ladder over a bottomless pit. Luckily, in the end I convinced her that he was in no real danger. This time he had a miner’s lamp . . . When he came out, we decided to evacuate at once. Just as well—the Morlocks were thoroughly alarmed, and that was when they came at us out of the Sphinx.” He mused. “Wini is not in the least stupid. The Eloi as a whole, on this time track, were brighter—decadent, yes, but not idiots. But of them all, Wini struck me as exceptional. The others were placid, never thinking that their lives could ever be different. But Wini had the instincts of a fighter: she was very curious, and restless. She had left her birthhouse, and now she knew many house-tribes—she’d been travelling between them—and during our days there, it was really she who was our leader. She realised that the Morlocks ought not to see us two. She made us avoid certain hillsides—‘The Molokoi will see’. I think she meant they had hides in there, with spyholes. Without her, I don’t think we’d have lasted that many days. As it was, we stayed one day fewer than we’d planned. She slept on his arm for only four nights, not five.”
“And you?”
“I watched while they slept. Then, when it was his watch, I slept close beside her. Not touching her, though I ached to, since he could see . . . I don’t know how deeply she feels for me. She is very fond of me—as she is of him. I don’t know if it goes beyond that. I expect she would sleep with me, given the opportunity. But I—I want more than that . . . But I do know one thing.”
“What?”
“I’m very glad we did not bring back Weena—his original Weena. Wini, Wiyeni—she’s an enormous improvement.”
“She’s also an enormous problem,” I said.
“Yes, but a delightful one. She seems to have a gift for language—she began imitating English sounds even in that world. So, as soon as she has enough vocabulary, I think we should tell her the whole truth. And then see what she does.”
“About Time Travel? Will she understand it? It was bad enough for us.”
He laughed. “Try her, and see. She is ignorant, but not stupid. And she’ll soon notice an oddity. It was midsummer in that Eloi world—now it’s autumn. You can’t keep the season a secret, not in England. And they must have had winters in the Eloi world, even if mild ones—short days and long nights. How long do you think it’ll take her to notice?”
It took her, in fact, about one more day. And by Saturday morning, she was quite sure. She had seen the fallen leaves, and from her south-facing window she had watched three sunrises and three sunsets. And now, on Saturday, at a joint lesson in the breakfast room facing the garden, she tackled Welles and myself. She looked very fetching now, in her nineteenth-century garb—all but the shoes: in the house, she preferred to go barefoot. She spoke to us in a mixture of English and Eloic (for the latter, Welles translated).
“Abio, Ilio,” she said, frowning with concentration, “how can it be, that it was hot time when we left my place Lanan—and now, in your great Eloi place, it is coming to the cold time? I thought it was just a few heartbeats, that wonder journey—but it must be many moons!”
“It is many moons—months,” said Welles. “But not quite in the way you think, Wini . . .”
She could already count very well, both in Eloic and in English, and now she mastered, from twelve months, the word year—and a flood of illumination followed.
Yes, she could count years. “I, Wiyeni—it is twenty and one years since I come out of my mother.”
Twenty-one! And Browne had thought her no more than eighteen . . .
“Yes, and my sister Isi is of thirty years, and my mother Mena is of fifty-and-three. My mother is tamana—great-house-mother—of the Oso House, far south near the Wall of the Uncountry. My mother, so, will die after seven years, and Isi will become Isa, and house-mother.”
“Your mother will die?” I cried. We had shown her a dead bird in the garden. No, there was no mistake. She mimed dying quite well. And confirmed it by translation: in Eloic, poi.
“She means it,” said Welles. “How do you know, Wini, that your mother will die in seven years’ time?”
“Because she is fifty-and-three. People die when they are sixty years old.” Suddenly she looked anxious. “O, Abio, Ilio! How old are you? Not fifty, not nearly sixty?”
I burst out laughing. “Do we look it? I am twenty-six; Abio is twenty-five.”
She looked at Welles with joy. “Then you will live, Abio, my dear, near as long as me: thirty-five more years.”
A little more questioning revealed the astounding truth: all Eloi, if they survived other hazards, died peaceful deaths at age sixty. Before that time, once they were full grown, they did not age visibly at all.
“That’s why they all looked young,” muttered Welles. “Not mass slaughter by Morlocks.”
“It sounds like the Golden Age indeed,” I said. “Like in Hesiod. ‘Death came to them as sleep’.”
But Welles was now greatly moved. He gripped her arm, her shoulder. “Wini—darling! You—at sixty . . .”
“Oh yes,” she said brightly. “But there is nothing to fear in that, Abio, my jewel, my friend. After some years, few or many, we come out again from some other woman. So they say in the Houses.”
“It is pleasant if you can believe that,” he said.
“But now, Abio, Ilio, tell me how that wonderful Machine moves through months . . .”
Then we told her—that the Machine had borne her, not forward a few months, but backward a great many years, to a time before there were any Morlocks in Britain. After a short while
, she grasped what we were saying—but could not at first believe it.
“I did not believe it at first either, Winnie,” I said. “But Periu is very clever—he made the Machine, and he has shown us that it does truly carry people forward and backward in time.”
A great light seemed to dawn in her face. “Then—then you are truly the Taweloi, those who are told of in the stories of our Houses—you who built the Houses! You are the men of our fore-mothers! O Abio, Ilio!”
And she slipped from her chair, knelt before us, and began kissing our feet. Welles hurriedly raised her. She laughed.
“Now I will find Mother Meri-a, and kiss her feet too. For she is a woman, and may be one of my foremothers, my mother’s mother’s foremother!”
“Wait,” I said. “Do you know, Winnie, how the Morlocks started?”
“No, Ilio . . .”
We told her. Her expression became one of horror. “People made Taweloi into Morlocks!”
“Taweloi like James, like Ellen,” I said.
“But Demu and Eleni are lovely people! Oh, that was bad, bad!”
“Is,” said Welles. “It is happening now, Wini. What should we do about it?”
“Stop it—stop it from happening! Do not let anyone be pushed down out of the Sun!” said Wiyeni indignantly.
“That’s exactly what we mean to do,” said Welles. “Will you help us, Wini?”
“Yes, yes, yes! All I can how!”
“I think you can a lot,” said Welles.
6
The secret of Winnie was confined, outside the household, to the four of us—Browne, Ellis, Welles and myself. I sent a note to the Editor saying that the Traveller’s second great journey had failed—he had not found Weena. Which, in a way, was true . . .
It was agreed among us and the Traveller that we could not go public for a long time. Not even his strange photographs could be displayed as yet. Debate continued as to whether we could ever go public with the whole truth of Time Travel. The Traveller himself was in two minds about that. He liked having the monopoly of the secret and the power—not even Welles understood how the essential trick was done—but on the other hand he knew that if he published, he would become more famous than Newton or Galileo.
“Or the inventor of dynamite,” said Welles at one of our conferences. “That’s the true analogy. In this world of wars and rumours of wars—can the world be trusted with such a power? Can Germany—or France—or Russia? There’d be a million revisions of history, for a start. Not that we’d know about it—but still . . . If anything can happen, or has happened, nothing remains interesting, there are no serious issues. And I don’t like the idea of armies suddenly appearing in our real future. Sir, you must not release your invention till the world has become a far more civilized place. Meanwhile, for a long time, some of us will be trying to make it so.”
That argument seemed to convince even the Traveller. Browne and Ellis began some urgent social projects. Meanwhile, all of us were helping to educate Winnie. And she made very rapid progress. By early November, she was able to go out shopping with Mrs Watchett, mostly to Richmond, but occasionally to the inner areas of London. Thus she learned the hard facts of the money economy, and saw poverty, ugliness, dirt and desperation. They shocked her profoundly; and dark basements and underground railways filled her with special horror. “You—you are half Morlocks!” she once whispered. Even the Richmond house had a basement kitchen, and she often lingered there, grieving, and trying to help Ellen with her drudgery. But her relations with Welles, and partly also with me, grew ever closer as she realised how much we too hated the existing situation. Under cover of our lessons, we preached socialism to her. But she was no simple disciple: she objected to our ideas of scale.
“The whole of this land cannot be one House,” she said. “It must be a friendship of many Houses—some small, some big. This House of ours, now—it is not big, but it could hold twenty people. Ellen will have children, I may have some, and we could invite a few more women, and their lovers.”
“You’re forgetting one thing, Winnie,” I said. “This house doesn’t belong to us—it belongs to Periu—as you call him.”
“That is bad,” she said, frowning. “Bad, bad! A House must not belong to one person—especially not to a man. It should belong to the people who live in it—all of them.”
“Don’t say anything like that to Periu,” said Welles. “Not yet, anyway.”
The Traveller was continuing to treat her as a child, or a very young woman. But she was fast outgrowing him. I sensed some uneasiness between him and Welles. Perturbed, I consulted Ellis.
“Rivalry?” he said. “Yes, there will be—of a kind. But don’t think our learned friend will ever propose marriage to her. He is not a very sexual being. Rather like Ruskin—or Dodgson the mathematical photographer. He likes girls to be young—very young. If it comes to a contest, Welles will win.”
By Christmas, Winnie’s English was nearly perfect, and Welles was beginning to teach her German. That would come in handy later, he said. I was teaching her to read and write. Both came easy to her, especially as I began to teach her letters using Eloic words, one letter to one sound.
At Christmas, also, she was introduced into society, as Miss Winifred Driver, the Traveller’s foreign-born cousin and ward. The Thursday dinner-parties were resumed. “Winifred” charmed everyone with her beauty, her delightful not-quite-perfect accent, and her semi-Socialist opinions. The Editor and Journalist suspected nothing, and Filby and the Mayor fell in love with her. But the Traveller became increasingly subdued. He did not really like House Socialism. And he was beginning to admit, even to himself, that this was not the first Weena he had loved and lost.
In spring 1892 came the crisis. Winnie wanted to go out more, especially to political meetings, and unchaperoned. The Traveller forbade that.
“Then I will go away,” she said calmly. “I love you, Periu, but no man tells me what I must or must not do. We did not live so in my country.”
Welles came to her rescue. He got her to marry him. At first that idea also outraged her, but he explained that only the form was necessary to make her respectable. “I won’t in fact own you, Wini. Of course you may love whom you like.”
“I should hope so!” she said.
“But I hope,” he said softly, “that I may mean a little more to you than all the rest.”
She kissed him fervently. “Abio—Bertie—you know you will always be my taleyeno and tapereno—best lover, best friend.”
So, after a brief civil ceremony, and now with a gold ring on her finger, she moved in with him, in his Putney lodging. There, at last, those two consummated their love.
It was in every sense a wonderful love; for both of them rich and strange. She found him gentle, but stronger and more serious than any Eloi man. She liked that. And he—he once confided: “Hillyer, she’s not quite human. But better!”
She was faithful to him, in her own fashion. He was certainly always her best friend, as he was, in our world, her first lover.
But not by any means the last . . . I, too, have held her lovely, perfect nakedness in my arms.
Not much now remains for me to record, except the triumphs of Winnie-Wiyeni, and how they affected our world.
During the summer of 1892 she began to be famous. She remained friends with the Traveller, and often visited him at Richmond; but she also gladdened the hearts of many other people—including William Morris, whose last years she cheered considerably. He liked to call her “Jane Welles”. But Jane Welles argued with him that Marxist Communism was a dreadfully bad idea. She was utterly opposed to class hatred, and she thought socialism could only work with very small-scale communes. “The workers must all be friends and lovers,” she insisted.
In late 1893, in circumstances I shall describe later, she did in fact set up a small commune, and it flourished. When I married, a year later, my wife and I moved in to the same establishment, and lived there very happily. People c
ame to call it “The Welles-Hillyer Place”. Many years later, we also bought an estate in Essex, which became our main headquarters. Within our House, and the Houses other people founded in imitation, sex was a matter of free choice. Winnie sometimes persuaded men to join by making love with them; but she never went to bed with a man she really disliked. By now, she realized that men and women of our time were much more possessive and jealous than the Eloi. She shrugged her little shoulders, and made allowances and adaptations. “A House can be as small as one woman and one man,” she said, “so long as it is friend to the other Houses.”
In 1895, of course, I published The Time Machine, which made me famous—especially, I think, the illustrated edition, which used the Traveller’s photographs. That book brought in plenty of money, and really launched our brand of socialism. Some people called us “the anti-Morlock movement”. The Marxists hated us, but many of the Fabians came over, and Chesterton was also very friendly.
The rest is history. “Winnie Welles” became a world figure—long before her husband won his Nobel prize for atomic physics. She charmed most of the influential men in Europe and America; and also went to bed with many of them. Among her conquests, reputedly, were the German Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas. The Kaiser launched a famous saying: “When is socialism not socialism? When it’s in bed with Winnie Welles!”
She was also very active in the feminist movement and the Federal Peace Movement. When the Pan-European Alliance was signed in Brussels, August 4, 1914, she was present as the guest of both the Kaiser and the Tsar. That was the same year that the Liberal government in Britain gave votes to women, and Home Rule to Ireland, and passed the second round of bills establishing the welfare state. At Christmas that year, Winnie said: “Bertie, George—I think we’ve done it. There won’t be any Morlocks in our future!” I am sure she will be proved right.