The Map of Time and The Turn of the Screw

‘Do you think that gives me any comfort?’ he asked mournfully.

‘It ought to,’ replied Wells, ‘for the time of the ancient Egyptians has long since passed, Mr Merrick.’

His host did not reply. He continued staring down at the street, but Wells found it impossible to judge from his expression, frozen by the disease into a look of permanent rage, what effect his words, a little blunt perhaps but necessary, had had on him. He could not stand by while the other wallowed in his own tragedy. He was convinced Merrick’s only comfort could come from his deformity, which, although it had marginalised him, had also made him a singular being.

‘No doubt you are right, Mr Wells,’ Merrick said, continuing to gaze at his reflection. ‘One should probably resign oneself to not expecting too much of this world we live in, where people fear anyone who is different. Sometimes I think that if an angel were to appear before a priest he would probably shoot it.’

‘I suppose that is true,’ observed Wells, the writer in him excited by the image his host had just evoked. And, seeing Merrick still caught up in his reflections, he decided to take his leave. ‘Thank you so much for the tea, Mr Merrick.’

‘Wait,’ replied Merrick. ‘There’s something I want to give you.’ He shuffled over to a small cupboard and rummaged around inside it for a few moments until he found what he had been looking for. Wells was puzzled to see him pull out a wicker basket. ‘When I told Mrs Kendall I had always dreamed of being a basket-maker, she employed a man to come and teach me,’ Merrick explained, cradling the object in his hands as though it were a new-born infant, or a bird’s nest. ‘He was a kindly, mild-mannered fellow, who had a workshop on Pennington Street, near the London docks. From the very beginning he treated me as though my looks were no different from his. But when he saw my hands, he told me I could never manage delicate work like basket-weaving. He was very sorry, but we would evidently be wasting our time. Yet striving to achieve a dream is never a waste of time, is it, Mr Wells? “Show me,” I told him. “Only then will we know whether you are right or not.”’

Wells contemplated the perfect piece of wickerwork Merrick was cupping in his deformed hands.

‘I’ve made many more since then, and have given some away to my guests. But this one is special, because it is the first I ever made. I would like you to have it, Mr Wells,’ he said, presenting him with the basket, ‘to remind you that everything is a question of will.’

‘Thank you,’ stammered Wells, touched. ‘I am honoured, Mr Merrick, truly honoured.’

He smiled warmly as he said goodbye, and walked towards the door.

‘One more question, Mr Wells,’ he heard Merrick say behind him.

Wells turned to look at him, hoping he was not going to ask for the accursed Nebogipfel’s address so that he could send him a basket, too.

‘Do you believe that the same God made us both?’ Merrick asked, with more frustration than regret.

Wells repressed a sigh of despair. What could he say to this? He was weighing up various possible replies when, all of a sudden, Merrick emitted a strange sound, as if a cough or grunt had convulsed his body from head to foot, threatening to shake him apart at the seams. Wells listened, alarmed, as the loud, hacking sound continued to rise uncontrollably from his throat, until he realised what was happening. There was nothing seriously wrong with Merrick: he was laughing.

‘It was a joke, Mr Wells, only a joke,’ he explained, cutting short his rasping chortle as he became aware of his guest’s startled response. ‘Whatever would become of me if I was unable to laugh at my own appearance?’

Without waiting for Wells to reply, he walked towards his work table, and sat in front of the model of the church.

‘Whatever would become of me?’ Wells heard him mutter, in a tone of profound melancholy. ‘Whatever would become of me?’

Wells watched him concentrate on his clumsy hands sculpting the cardboard and was seized by a feeling of deep sympathy. He found it impossible to believe Treves’s theory that this remarkably innocent, gentle creature invited public figures to tea to submit them to some sinister test. On the contrary, he was convinced that all Merrick wanted from this limited intimacy was a few meagre crumbs of warmth and sympathy. It was far more likely that Trêves had attributed him with those motives to unnerve guests to whom he took a dislike, or possibly to make allowances for Merrick’s extreme naivety by crediting him with a guile he did not possess. Or perhaps, thought Wells, who had no illusions about the sincerity of man’s motives, the surgeon’s intentions were still more selfish and ambitious: perhaps he wanted to show people that he was the only one who understood the soul of the creature to whom he clung desperately in the knowledge that he would be guaranteed a place beside him in history.

Wells was irritated by the idea of Trêves taking advantage of Merrick’s face being a terrifying mask he could never take off, a mask that could never express his true emotions, in order to attribute to him whatever motives he wished, in the knowledge that no one but Merrick could ever refute them. And now that Wells had heard him laugh, he wondered whether the so-called Elephant Man had not in fact been smiling at him from the moment he stepped into the room, a warm, friendly smile intended to soothe the discomfort his appearance produced in his guests, a smile no one would ever see.

As he left the room, he felt a tear roll down his cheek.

Chapter XIII

That was how the wicker basket had come into Wells’s life, and with it he found that the winds of good fortune soon began to blow off the years of accumulated dust. Shortly after the basket’s arrival, he obtained his degree in zoology with distinction, began giving courses in biology for the University of London External Programme, took up the post of editor-in-chief of the University Correspondent and began writing the odd short article for the Educational Times. Thus, in a relatively short period of time, he earned a large sum of money, which helped him recover from his disappointment over the lack of interest in his story, and boosted his self-confidence. He got into the habit of venerating the basket every night, giving it long, loving looks, running his fingers over the tightly woven wicker. He carried out this simple ritual behind Jane’s back, and found it encouraged him so much he felt invincible, strong enough to swim the Atlantic or wrestle a tiger to the ground with his bare hands.

But Wells scarcely had time to enjoy his achievements before the members of his tattered family discovered that little Bertie was on his way to becoming a man of means, and entrusted him with the task of maintaining their fragile and threatened cohesion. Without protest, Wells resigned himself to taking on the mantle of clan defender, knowing that none of its other members was up to the task. His father, having finally freed himself from the burden of the china shop, had moved to a cottage in Nyewood, a tiny village south of Rogate, where he had a view of Harting Down and the elms at Uppark. Life had gradually washed up the rest of the family in the tiny house.

The first to arrive was Frank. He had left the bakery a few years earlier to become a travelling watch salesman, an occupation in which he had not been very successful – a fact borne out by the two enormous trunks of unsold watches he brought with him. They gave off a loud, incessant whirring sound and rattled like a colony of mechanical spiders. Then came Fred, his trusting brother, who had been unceremoniously dismissed from the company where he worked as soon as the boss’s son was old enough to occupy the seat he had unknowingly kept warm for him. Finding themselves together again, and with a roof over their heads, Bertie’s brothers devoted themselves to licking each other’s wounds and, infected by their father’s relaxed attitude to life, soon accepted this latest downturn with good cheer.

The last to arrive was their mother, dismissed from her beloved paradise at Uppark because the onset of deafness had rendered her useless and irritable. The only one who did not return to the fold was Frances, perhaps because she felt there would not be enough room for her infant coffin. Even so, there were too many of them, and Wells had to make a superhuman effort to keep up his endless hours of teaching to protect that nest, buzzing with the sound of Frank’s watches, that pesthouse of happy walking-wounded reeking of snuff and stale beer, to the point at which he ended up vomiting blood and collapsing on the steps of Charing Cross station.

The diagnosis was clear: tuberculosis. And although he made a swift recovery, this attack was a warning to Wells to stop burning the midnight oil or the next onslaught would be more serious. He accepted this in a practical spirit. He knew that, when the wind was favourable, he had plenty of ways to make a living, so had no difficulty in drawing up a new life plan. He abandoned teaching and resolved to live solely from his writings. This would allow him to work at home, with no timetables and pressures than those he chose to impose on himself. He would finally be able to live the peaceful life his fragile health required.

Thus he set about swamping the local newspapers with articles, penning the odd essay for the Fortnightly Review and, after much persistence, managed to persuade the Pall Mall Gazette to offer him a column. Overjoyed by his success, and seeking the fresh air indispensable to his sick lungs, the whole family moved to a country house in Sutton, near the North Downs, one of the few areas that had as yet escaped becoming a suburb of London. For a while, Wells believed his quiet seclusion was to be his life, but once again he was mistaken: this was an imaginary truce. Apparently chance considered him a most amusing toy, for it decided to change the course of his life again, although this time the twist involved the pleasant, popular veneer of fated love.

In the classroom Wells had established friendly relations with a pupil of his, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he nicknamed Jane, and during the walk they happened to share to Charing Cross station to catch their respective trains, he could not help mesmerising the girl with his eloquent banter. He indulged in it with no other purpose than to allow himself to swell with pride at being able to impress such a beautiful, adorable girl with his words. However, those innocent conversations bore unexpected fruit. His wife, Isabel, alerted him to it on their return from a weekend in Putney, where they had been invited by Jane and her mother. She it was who assured him that, whether or not he had intended it, the girl had fallen head over heels in love with him. Wells could only raise an eyebrow when his wife demanded he stop seeing his former pupil if he wished their marriage to survive.

It was not difficult to choose between the woman who refused his caresses and the cheerful, apparently uninhibited Jane. Wells packed up his books, his furniture and the wicker basket, and moved into a miserable hovel in Mornington Place in a rundown area of north London between Euston and Camden Town. He wished he could have abandoned the marital home spurred on by a violent passion, but he had to leave that to Jane. His real reasons for leaving were the playful curiosity he felt when he glimpsed her little body beneath her dress and, above all, the chance to escape monotony and discover a new life, given that he could predict how the old one would turn out.

However, his first impression was that love had caused him to make a serious mistake: not only had he moved to the worst possible place for his tormented lungs – a neighbourhood in which the air was polluted by soot borne on the wind and mixed with smoke from the locomotives passing through on their way north – but Jane’s mother, convinced her poor daughter had fallen into the clutches of a degenerate because Wells was still married to Isabel, had moved in with the couple. She seemed determined to undermine their patience with her endless, vociferous reproaches.

These unforeseen events, with the additional worrying certainty that it would be impossible for him to run no less than three homes on the proceeds of his articles, compelled Wells to take the basket and shut himself into a cupboard, the only place safe from Mrs Robbins’s intrusive presence. Hidden among the coats and hats, he stroked the wicker for hours on end, like Aladdin trying to bring back the power of his magic lamp.

This may have seemed an absurd, desperate, or even pathetic strategy, but the day after he performed this rubbing of the basket, Lewis Hind, the literary editor of the Gazette’s weekly supplement sent for him. He needed someone capable of writing stories with a scientific slant, short stories reflecting on and even predicting where the relentless onslaught of inventions bent on changing the face of that century would lead. Hind was convinced Wells was the ideal man for the job. What he was proposing, in fact, was that he resurrect his childhood dream, and have another stab at becoming a writer.

Wells accepted, and in a few days drafted a story entitled ‘The Stolen Bacillus’, which delighted Hind and earned Wells five guineas. The story also drew the attention of William Ernest Henley, editor of the National Observer, who promptly invited him to contribute to the pages of his journal, convinced the young man would produce far more ambitious stories if he had room to experiment. Wells was delighted and terrified in equal measure at being given the chance to write for such a prestigious magazine, which at that time was publishing a serialised version of The Nigger of the Narcissus by his idol Joseph Conrad. This was no longer writing news items, articles or short stories. He was being offered the space for his imagination to run wild, the freedom to be a real writer of fiction.

Wells awaited his meeting with Henley in a state of nervous tension bordering on collapse. Since the editor of the National Observer had asked to see him, Wells had been rummaging through his large mental stockpile of ideas in search of a story original and striking enough to impress the veteran publisher. None seemed to live up to his offer. The rendezvous was drawing near, and Wells still did not have a good story to show Henley. It was then that he turned to the basket and saw that, although it looked empty, it was actually brimming with novels, a cornucopia that needed only a gentle nudge to pour forth its torrent of ideas. This extravagant image was, of course, Wells’s way of expressing in poetic language what really happened when he saw the basket: inevitably he remembered his conversation with Merrick and, to his amazement, each time he recalled it he discovered, like a nugget of gold hidden on the bed of a stream, another idea that could be made into a novel. Whether deliberately or by accident, it was as though Merrick had supplied him with enough plots to last several years while he and Wells had pretended they were having tea. He recalled Merrick’s disappointment at Dr Nebogipfel being so uninterested in venturing into the unknown world of tomorrow, and this omission appeared worth rectifying now that he had the experience of writing all those articles.

Without a second thought, he got rid of the unsavoury Nebogipfel, replacing him with a respectable, anonymous scientist in whom any inventor could see himself portrayed, and who even embodied the archetypal scientist of the dawning new century. Endeavouring to create something more than just a naïve fantasy from his idea of time travel, Wells gave it the same scientific veneer he had given the stories he wrote for Hind, making use of a theory he had developed in his earlier essays published in the Fortnightly Review: the idea that time was the fourth dimension in a universe that appeared to be three-dimensional. The idea would be far more impressive if he used it to explain the workings of the contraption his character would use to travel through the time continuum.

A few years earlier, an American medium called Henry Slade had been tried for criminal deception. Besides bragging of his ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead, he would drop knots, conches and snails’ shells into his magician’s hat, then pull out identical versions, but with the spirals going in the other direction. Slade maintained that a secret passageway to the fourth dimension was hidden in his hat, which explained the reversal the objects underwent. To many people’s astonishment, the magician was defended by a handful of eminent physicists, including Johann Zöllner, professor of physics and astronomy, all of whom argued that what might appear to be a fraud from a three-dimensional point of view was perfectly feasible in a four-dimensional universe. The whole of London was on tenterhooks during the trial.

This, with the work of Charles Hinton, a mathematician who had come up with the hypercube, a cube out of phase with time that contained every single instant of its existence, all occurring at the same time – which man’s current three-dimensional vision prevented him seeing – made Wells realise that the idea of the fourth dimension was in the air. No one was sure what it involved, but the words sounded so mysterious and evocative that society longed for, positively demanded it to be real.

For most people, the known world was a tiresome, hostile place, but that was because they could see only part of it. Now they were consoled by the notion that, just as bland roast meat is made tastier with seasoning, the universe improved if they imagined it was no longer reduced to what they could see, but contained a hidden component that could somehow make it bigger. The fourth dimension gave their dull planet a magical feel; it conjured up the existence of a different world in which desires that were impossible in the three-dimensional one might be realised. These suspicions were backed up by concrete actions, such as the recent founding of the Society for Psychic Research in London.

Wells was also forced to endure becoming embroiled almost every day in tiresome debates on the nature of time with his colleagues at the Faculty of Science. One thing led to another, as they say, and as every thinker was turning the fourth dimension into his private playground, Wells had no difficulty combining both ideas to develop his theory of time as another spatial dimension through which it was possible to travel in exactly the same way as it was through the other three.

By the time he entered Henley’s office he could visualise his novel with startling clarity, enabling him to relay it with a preacher’s conviction and zeal. The time traveller’s story would be divided into two parts. In the first he would explain the workings of his machine to a gathering of sceptical guests, to whom he had chosen to present his invention and whom he must try to convince. This group would consist of a doctor, a mayor, a psychologist and some other representative of the middle classes. Unlike Jules Verne, who took up whole chapters with detailed explanations of how his contraptions worked – as though he himself doubted their credibility – Wells’s explanations would be straightforward and concise, using simple examples that would enable the reader to assimilate an idea that might otherwise seem too abstract. ‘As you are aware,’ his inventor would observe, ‘the three spatial dimensions (length, breadth, and thickness) are defined in reference to three planes, each of which is at right angles to the other.’

However, under normal circumstances, man’s movement through his three-dimensional universe was incomplete. He had no difficulty in moving along its length and breadth, but was unable to overcome the laws of gravity in order to move up and down freely, except by using a hot-air balloon. Man was similarly trapped in the time line, and could only move in time mentally – summoning up the past through memory, or visualising the future by means of his imagination. He could free himself from this constraint if he had a machine that, like the hot-air balloon, enabled him to triumph over the impossible, that is to say, to project himself physically into the future by speeding up time, or going back into the past by slowing it down. In order to help his guests understand the idea of this fourth dimension, the inventor referred to the mercury in a barometer: it moved up and down over a period of days, yet the line represented by its movement was drawn not in any recognised spatial dimension but in that of time.

The second part of the novel would describe the journey that his main character would undertake to put his machine to the test once his guests had left. As a tribute to Merrick’s memory, he would set off towards the unfathomable oceans of the future, a future that Wells outlined briefly but eloquently to the editor of the National Observer.

Henley, an enormous fellow, virtually a giant, condemned to walk with a crutch because of a botched childhood operation, and on whom Stevenson claimed to have based his idea for Long John Silver, pulled an incredulous face. Talking about the future was dangerous. It was rumoured in literary circles that Verne had portrayed tomorrow’s world in a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century, but that his editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, had refused to publish it, considering naïve and pessimistic his vision of 1960, when criminals were executed by electric shock, and a system of ‘photographic telegraphs’ made it possible to send copies of documents anywhere in the world. And it seemed Verne had not been the only author to envisage the future. Many others had tried and failed in the same way.

But Wells did not let Henley’s words discourage him. Leaning forwards in his seat, he stood up for himself, assuring Henley that people were eager to read about the future, and that someone should take the risk and publish the first novel about it.

And so it was that, in 1893, The Time Machine came out in serial form in the prestigious National Observer. However, to Wells’s understandable despair, before the novel could be published in its entirety the owners of the magazine sold it. The new board of directors carried out the usual purges, putting an end to Henley and his publishing projects. Happily, Wells scarcely had time to wallow in his misfortune for Henley, like his Stevensonian alter ego, was a hard nut to crack. He immediately took over at the helm of the New Review, where he offered to continue serialising the story of the time traveller, and even convinced the stubborn William Heinemann to publish the novel.

Encouraged by Henley’s doggedness, Wells resolved to complete his unfinished novel. However, as was becoming the custom, this turned out to be a difficult undertaking, hampered by the usual impediments, although this time of a far more humiliating nature. At the insistence of his doctors, Wells had once again moved to the country with Jane, to a modest boarding-house in Sevenoaks. But along with the wicker basket and a stream of boxes and trunks came Mrs Robbins, like a piece of junk no one dared throw out. By this time, Jane’s mother had gone to unspeakable lengths in her role of leech, reducing her daughter to little more than a pale, worn-out shell with her constant complaints. Mrs Robbins had no need of reinforcements in her war of attrition against Wells. She found an ally in the boarding-house landlady, once she had discovered that it was not a marriage being consummated each night in her house but the sinful cohabitation of a shy young girl and a depraved defendant in a divorce suit.

Battling on two fronts, Wells was scarcely able to concentrate sufficiently to make any headway with his novel. His only consolation was that the section of the plot – the time traveller’s journey – to which he was giving shape interested him far more than the part he had already written: it enabled him to steer the novel towards the domain of social allegory, where he could deal with the political questions simmering inside him.

Convinced that in the distant future mankind would have succeeded in evolving fully on a scientific as well as a spiritual level, the time traveller rode across the plains of time on his machine until he reached the year 802,701, a date chosen at random, and sufficiently far off in the future for Wells to be able to verify his predictions in situ. By the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, terrorised by the landlady’s threats, Wells related, in fits and starts, his inventor’s foray into a world that resembled a huge enchanted garden. To complete the enchantment, this Garden of Eden was inhabited by the beautiful slender Eloi, the exquisite result of a human evolution that had not only corrected the weaknesses of the species, but had rid it of ugliness, coarseness and other unprepossessing features. From what the traveller was able to observe, the delicate Eloi lived a peaceful life, in harmony with nature, without laws or government, free from ill-health, financial troubles, or any other kind of difficulty that would make survival a struggle. Neither did they appear to have any notion of private property: everything was shared in that almost Utopian society, which personified the Enlightenment’s most hopeful predictions about the future of civilisation.

Like a benevolent, somewhat romantic creator, Wells even had his inventor establish a friendly relationship with a female Eloi named Weena, who insisted on following him around after he had saved her from drowning in a river, captivated like a child by the charm the stranger exuded. Whenever the inventor’s back was turned Weena, fragile and slender as a porcelain doll, would garland him with flowers or fill his pockets with blossoms, gestures that conveyed the gratitude she was unable to express through her language, which, although mellow and sweet, remained dishearteningly impenetrable to his ear.

Once Wells had painted this idyllic picture, he proceeded to destroy it with merciless, satirical precision. A couple of hours with the Eloi was enough for the traveller to understand that things were not as perfect as they seemed: these were indolent creatures, with no cultural interests or any drive towards self-improvement, incapable of higher feelings, a bunch of idlers imbued with a hedonism bordering on simple-mindedness. Freed from the dangers that stir courage in men’s hearts, the human race had culminated in these lazy, sensual creatures, because intelligence could not thrive where there was no change, and no necessity for it. As if that were not enough, the sudden disappearance of his time machine aroused the inventor’s suspicions that the Eloi were not alone in that world. Clearly they shared it with other inhabitants who had the strength to move the machine from where he had left it and hide it inside a gigantic sphinx dominating the landscape.