Selected Stories of H. G. Wells

by H. G. Wells

  I am able to quote this particular article because as a matter of fact it lies before me as I write. It is indeed, as I will explain, all that remains of this remarkable newspaper. The rest has been destroyed and all we can ever know of it now is through Brownlow’s sound but not absolutely trustworthy memory.

  5

  My mind, as the days pass, hangs on to that Federal Board. Does that phrase mean, as just possibly it may mean, a world federation, a scientific control of all human life only forty years from now? I find that idea—staggering. I have always believed that the world was destined to unify—“Parliament of Mankind and Confederation of the World,” as Tennyson put it—but I have always supposed that the process would take centuries. But then my time sense is poor. My disposition has always been to underestimate the pace of change. I wrote in 1900 that there would be aeroplanes “in fifty years’ time.” And the confounded things were buzzing about everywhere and carrying passengers before 1920.

  Let me tell very briefly of the rest of that evening paper. There seemed to be a lot of sport and fashion; much about something called “Spectacle”—with pictures—a lot of illustrated criticism of decorative art and particularly of architecture. The architecture in the pictures he saw was “towering—kind of magnificent. Great blocks of building. New York, but more so and all run together”… Unfortunately he cannot sketch. There were sections devoted to something he couldn’t understand, but which he thinks was some sort of “radio programme stuff.”

  All that suggests a sort of advanced human life very much like the life we lead today, possibly rather brighter and better.

  But here is something—different.

  “The birth-rate,” said Brownlow, searching his mind, “was seven in the thousand.”

  I exclaimed. The lowest birth-rates in Europe now are sixteen or more per thousand. The Russian birth-rate is forty per thousand, and falling slowly.

  “It was seven,” said Brownlow. “Exactly seven. I noticed it. In a paragraph.”

  But what birth-rate, I asked. The British? The European?

  “It said the birth-rate,” said Brownlow. “Just that.”

  That I think is the most tantalising item in all this strange glimpse of the world of our grandchildren. A birth-rate of seven in the thousand does not mean a fixed world population; it means a population that is being reduced at a very rapid rate—unless the death-rate has gone still lower. Quite possibly people will not be dying so much then but living very much longer. On that Brownlow could throw no light. The people in the pictures did not look to him an “old lot.” There were plenty of children and young or young-looking people about.

  “But Brownlow,” I said, “wasn’t there any crime?”

  “Rather,” said Brownlow. “They had a big poisoning case on, but it was jolly hard to follow. You know how it is with these crimes. Unless you’ve read about it from the beginning, it’s hard to get the hang of the situation. No newspaper has found out that for every crime it ought to give a summary up-to-date every day—and forty years ahead, they hadn’t. Or they aren’t going to. Whichever way you like to put it.

  “There were several crimes and what newspaper men call stories,” he resumed; “personal stories. What struck me about it was that they seemed to be more sympathetic than our reporters, more concerned with the motives and less with just finding someone out. What you might call psychological—so to speak.”

  “Was there anything much about books?” I asked him.

  “I don’t remember anything about books,” he said…

  And that is all. Except for a few trifling details such as a possible thirteenth month inserted in the year, that is all. It is intolerably tantalising. That is the substance of Brownlow’s account of his newspaper. He read it—as one might read any newspaper. He was just in that state of alcoholic comfort when nothing is incredible and so nothing is really wonderful. He knew he was reading an evening newspaper of forty years ahead and he sat in front of his fire, and smoked and sipped his drink and was no more perturbed than he would have been if he had been reading an imaginative book about the future.

  Suddenly his little brass clock pinged two.

  He got up and yawned. He put that astounding, that miraculous newspaper down as he was wont to put any old newspaper down; he carried off his correspondence to the desk in his bureau, and with the swift laziness of a very tired man he dropped his clothes about his room anyhow and went to bed.

  But somewhen in the night he woke up feeling thirsty and grey-minded. He lay awake and it came to him that something very strange had occurred to him. His mind went back to the idea that he had been taken in by a very ingenious fabrication. He got up for a drink of Vichy water and a liver tabloid, he put his head in cold water and found himself sitting on his bed towelling his hair and doubting whether he had really seen those photographs in the very colours of reality itself, or whether he had imagined them. Also running through his mind was the thought that the approach of a world timber famine for 1985 was something likely to affect his investments and particularly a trust he was setting up on behalf of an infant in whom he was interested. It might be wise, he thought, to put more into timber.

  He went back down the corridor to his sitting-room. He sat there in his dressing-gown, turning over the marvellous sheets. There it was in his hands complete in every page, not a corner torn. Some sort of autohypnosis, he thought, might be at work, but certainly the pictures seemed as real as looking out of a window. After he had stared at them some time he went back to the timber paragraph. He felt he must keep that. I don’t know if you will understand how his mind worked—for my own part I can see at once how perfectly irrational and entirely natural it was—but he took this marvellous paper, creased the page in question, tore off this particular article and left the rest. He returned very drowsily to his bedroom, put the scrap of paper on his dressing-table, got into bed and dropped off to sleep at once.

  6

  When he awoke it was nine o’clock; his morning tea was untasted by his bedside and the room was full of sunshine. His parlourmaid-housekeeper had just re-entered the room.

  “You were sleeping so peacefully,” she said; “I couldn’t bear to wake you. Shall I get you a fresh cup of tea?”

  Brownlow did not answer. He was trying to think of something strange that had happened.

  She repeated her question.

  “No. I’ll come and have breakfast in my dressing-gown before my bath,” he said, and she went out of the room.

  Then he saw the scrap of paper.

  In a moment he was running down the corridor to the sitting-room. “I left a newspaper,” he said. “I left a newspaper.”

  She came in response to the commotion he made.

  “A newspaper?” she said. “It’s been gone this two hours, down the chute, with the dust and things.”

  Brownlow had a moment of extreme consternation.

  He invoked his God. “I wanted it kept!” he shouted. “I wanted it kept.”

  “But how was I to know you wanted it kept?”

  “But didn’t you notice it was a very extraordinary-looking newspaper?”

  “I’ve got none too much time to dust out this flat to be looking at newspapers,” she said. “I thought I saw some coloured photographs of bathing ladies and chorus girls in it, but that’s no concern of mine. It didn’t seem a proper newspaper to me. How was I to know you’d be wanting to look at them again this morning?”

  “I must get that newspaper back,” said Brownlow. “It’s—it’s vitally important… If all Sussex Court has to be held up I want that newspaper back.”

  “I’ve never known a thing come up that chute again,” said his housekeeper, “that’s once gone down it. But I’ll telephone down, sir, and see what can be done. Most of that stuff goes right into the hot-water furnace, they say…”

  It does. The newspaper had gone.

  Brownlow came near raving. By a vast effort of self-control he sat down and consumed his cooling b
reakfast. He kept on saying, “Oh, my God!” as he did so. In the midst of it he got up to recover the scrap of paper from his bedroom, and then found the wrapper addressed to Evan O’Hara among the overnight letters on his bureau. That seemed an almost maddening confirmation. The thing had happened.

  Presently after he had breakfasted, he rang me up to aid his baffled mind.

  I found him at his bureau with the two bits of paper before him. He did not speak. He made a solemn gesture.

  “What is it?” I asked, standing before him.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me. What are these objects? It’s serious. Either—” He left the sentence unfinished.

  I picked up the torn wrapper first and felt its texture. “Evan O’Hara, Mr.,” I read.

  “Yes. Sussex Court, 49. Eh?”

  “Right,” I agreed and stared at him.

  “That’s not hallucination, eh?”

  I shook my head.

  “And now this?” His hand trembled as he held out the cutting. I took it.

  “Odd,” I said. I stared at the black-green ink, the unfamiliar type, the little novelties in spelling. Then I turned the thing over. On the back was a piece of one of the illustrations; it was, I suppose, about a quarter of the photograph of that “Round-up of Brigands by Federal Police” I have already mentioned.

  When I saw it that morning it had not even begun to fade. It represented a mass of broken masonry in a sandy waste with bare-looking mountains in the distance. The cold, clear atmosphere, the glare of a cloudless afternoon were rendered perfectly. In the foreground were four masked men in a brown service uniform intent on working some little machine on wheels with a tube and a nozzle projecting a jet that went out to the left, where the fragment was torn off. I cannot imagine what the jet was doing. Brownlow says he thinks they were gassing some men in a hut. Never have I seen such realistic colour printing.

  “What on earth is this?” I asked.

  “It’s that,” said Brownlow. “I’m not mad, am I? It’s really that.”

  “But what the devil is it?”

  “It’s a piece of newspaper for November 10th, 1971.”

  “You had better explain,” I said, and sat down, with the scrap of paper in my hand, to hear his story. And, with as much elimination of questions and digressions and repetitions as possible, that is the story I have written here.

  I said at the beginning that it was a queer story and queer to my mind it remains, fantastically queer. I return to it at intervals, and it refuses to settle down in my mind as anything but an incongruity with all my experience and beliefs. If it were not for the two little bits of paper, one might dispose of it quite easily. One might say that Brownlow had had a vision, a dream of unparalleled vividness and consistency. Or that he had been hoaxed and his head turned by some elaborate mystification. Or, again, one might suppose he had really seen into the future with a sort of exaggeration of those previsions cited by Mr. J. W. Dunne in his remarkable “Experiment with Time.” But nothing Mr. Dunne has to advance can account for an actual evening paper being slapped through a letter-slit forty years in advance of its date.

  The wrapper has not altered in the least since I first saw it. But the scrap of paper with the article about afforestation is dissolving into a fine powder and the fragment of picture at the back of it is fading out; most of the colour has gone and the outlines have lost their sharpness. Some of the powder I have taken to my friend Ryder at the Royal College, whose work in micro-chemistry is so well known. He says the stuff is not paper at all, properly speaking. It is mostly aluminium fortified by admixture with some artificial resinous substance.

  7

  Though I offer no explanation whatever of this affair I think I will venture on one little prophesy. I have an obstinate persuasion that on November 10th, 1971, the name of the tenant of 49, Sussex Court, will be Mr. Evan O’Hara. (There is no tenant of that name now in Sussex Court and I find no evidence in the Telephone Directory, or the London Directory, that such a person exists anywhere in London.) And on that particular evening forty years ahead, he will not get his usual copy of the Even Standrd: instead he will get a copy of the Evening Standard of 1931. I have an incurable fancy that this will be so.

  There I may be right or wrong, but that Brownlow really got and for two remarkable hours, read, a real newspaper forty years ahead of time I am as convinced as I am convinced that my own name is Hubert G. Wells. Can I say anything stronger than that?

  THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

  Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador’s Andes, where the frost-and-sun-rotted rocks rise in vast pinnacles and cliffs above the snow, there was once a mysterious mountain valley, called the Country of the Blind. It was a legendary land, and until quite recently people doubted if it was anything more than a legend. Long years ago, ran the story, that valley lay so far open to the world that men, daring the incessant avalanches, might clamber at last through frightful gorges and over an icy pass into its equable meadows; and thither indeed men went and settled, a family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and tyranny of an evil Spanish ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days, and the water was boiling at Yaguachi and all the fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil; everywhere along the Pacific slopes there were landslips and swift thawings and sudden floods, and one whole side of the old Arauca crest slipped and came down in thunder, and cut off this Country of the Blind, as it seemed, for ever from the exploring feet of men.

  But, said the story, one of these early settlers had chanced to be on the hither side of the gorge when the world had so terribly shaken itself, and perforce he had to forget his wife and his child and all the friends and possessions he declared he had left up there, and begin life again in the lower world.

  He had a special reason to account for his return from that fastness, into which he had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of gear, when he was a child. The valley, he said, had in it all that the heart of man could desire—sweet water, pasture, an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent fruit, and on one side great hanging pine forests that held the avalanches high. Far overhead, a semi-circle of ice-capped precipices of grey-green rock brooded over that glowing garden; but the glacier stream flowed away by the farther slopes and only very rarely did an ice-fall reach the lower levels. In this valley it neither rained nor snowed, but the abundant springs gave a rich green pasture, that patient irrigation was spreading over all the valley space. The surplus water gathered at last in a little lake beneath the cirque and vanished with a roar into an unfathomable cavern. The settlers, he said, were doing very well indeed there. Their beasts did well and multiplied, and only one thing marred their happiness. Yet it was enough to mar it greatly; some sinister quality hidden in that sweet and bracing air. A strange disease had come upon them, and had made all the children born to them there—and indeed several older children also—blind. So that the whole valley seemed likely to become a valley of blind men.

  It was, he said, to seek some charm or antidote against this plague of blindness that with infinite fatigue, danger and difficulty he had returned down the gorge. In those days, in such cases, men did not think of germs and infections but of sins; and it seemed to him that the reason of this affliction must lie in the negligence of these priestless immigrants to set up a shrine so soon as they entered the valley. He wanted a shrine—a handsome, cheap, effectual shrine—to be set up in the valley; he wanted relics and suchlike potent things of faith, blessed objects and mysterious medals and prayers. In his wallet he had a bar of native silver for which he would not account; he insisted there was none in the valley, with something of the insistence of an inexpert liar. The settlers had all clubbed their money and ornaments together, having little need for such treasure up there, he said, to buy them holy help against their ill. I figur
e this young mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt and anxious, hat-brim clutched feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the lower world, telling this story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the great convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return with pious and infallible remedies against that trouble, and the infinite dismay with which he must have faced the tumbled and still monstrously crumbling vastness where the gorge had once come out. But the rest of his tale of mischances is lost to me, save that I know he died of punishment in the mines. His offence I do not know.

  But the idea of a valley of blind folk had just that appeal to the imagination that a legend requires if it is to live. It stimulates fantasy. It invents its own detail.

  And recently this story has been most remarkably confirmed. We know now the whole history of this Country of the Blind from that beginning to its recent and tragic end.

  We know now that amidst the little population of that now isolated and forgotten valley the contagion ran its course. Even the older children became groping and purblind, the young saw but dimly, and the children that were born to them never saw at all. But life was very easy in that snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world, with neither thorns nor briers, with food upon the bushes in its season, with no evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges by which they had come. The first generation had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noted their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters who followed them hither and thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out altogether among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightly touched with Spanish civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru and its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things; they devised many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came from became mythical in colour and uncertain. In all things save sight they were strong and able; and presently the chances of birth and heredity produced one who had an original mind and who could talk and persuade among them, and then afterwards another. These two passed, leaving their effects, and the little community grew in numbers and understanding, and met and settled all the social and economic problems that arose, sensibly and peaceably. There came a time when a child was born who was fifteen generations from that ancestor who went out of the valley with a bar of silver to seek God’s aid, and who never returned. Then it chanced that a man came into this community from the outer world and troubled their minds very greatly. He lived with them for many months, and escaped very narrowly from their final disaster.