The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories by H. G. Wells

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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

And Other Stories

H. G. WELLS

[Illustration: He stopped, and then made a dash to escape from their
closing ranks.]

INTRODUCTION

The enterprise of Messrs. T. Nelson & Sons and the friendly accommodation
of Messrs. Macmillan render possible this collection in one cover of all
the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again. Except for
the two series of linked incidents that make up the bulk of the book
called _Tales of Space and Time_, no short story of mine of the
slightest merit is excluded from this volume. Many of very questionable
merit find a place; it is an inclusive and not an exclusive gathering.
And the task of selection and revision brings home to me with something of
the effect of discovery that I was once an industrious writer of short
stories, and that I am no longer anything of the kind. I have not written
one now for quite a long time, and in the past five or six years I have
made scarcely one a year. The bulk of the fifty or sixty tales from which
this present three-and-thirty have been chosen dates from the last
century. This edition is more definitive than I supposed when first I
arranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive an ebb and cessation an
almost obituary manner seems justifiable.

I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have
restricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to
others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement
to continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbled
with short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, and
it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted my production.
It is rather, I think, a diversion of attention to more sustained and more
exacting forms. It was my friend Mr. C.L. Hind who set that spring going.
He urged me to write short stories for the _Pall Mall Budget_, and
persuaded me by his simple and buoyant conviction that I could do what he
desired. There existed at the time only the little sketch, "The Jilting of
Jane," included in this volume--at least, that is the only tolerable
fragment of fiction I find surviving from my pre-Lewis-Hind period. But I
set myself, so encouraged, to the experiment of inventing moving and
interesting things that could be given vividly in the little space of
eight or ten such pages as this, and for a time I found it a very
entertaining pursuit indeed. Mr. Hind's indicating finger had shown me an
amusing possibility of the mind. I found that, taking almost anything as a
starting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there would
presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some
absurd or vivid little incident more or less relevant to that initial
nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out
of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares;
violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban
gardens; I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds
ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our common sanity.

The 'nineties was a good and stimulating period for a short-story writer.
Mr. Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a series of little
blue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to reveal
the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr. Barrie had
demonstrated what could be done in a little space through the panes of his
_Window in Thrums_. The _National Observer_ was at the climax of
its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish,
and Mr. Frank Harris was not only printing good short stories by other
people, but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages of
the _Fortnightly Review. Longman's Magazine_, too, represented a
_clientele_ of appreciative short-story readers that is now
scattered. Then came the generous opportunities of the _Yellow Book_,
and the _National Observer_ died only to give birth to the _New
Review_. No short story of the slightest distinction went for long
unrecognised. The sixpenny popular magazines had still to deaden down the
conception of what a short story might be to the imaginative limitation of
the common reader--and a maximum length of six thousand words. Short
stories broke out everywhere. Kipling was writing short stories; Barrie,
Stevenson, Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, "The
Happy Hypocrite"; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent;
and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of jewels
drawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella
d'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin
Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison, Marriott Watson,
George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W.
W. Jacobs (who alone seems inexhaustible). I dare say I could recall as
many more names with a little effort. I may be succumbing to the
infirmities of middle age, but I do not think the present decade can
produce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that the
later achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time,
with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they
did before 1900. It seems to me this outburst of short stories came not
only as a phase in literary development, but also as a phase in the
development of the individual writers concerned.

It is now quite unusual to see any adequate criticism of short stories in
English. I do not know how far the decline in short-story writing may not
be due to that. Every sort of artist demands human responses, and few men
can contrive to write merely for a publisher's cheque and silence, however
reassuring that cheque may be. A mad millionaire who commissioned
masterpieces to burn would find it impossible to buy them. Scarcely any
artist will hesitate in the choice between money and attention; and it was
primarily for that last and better sort of pay that the short stories of
the 'nineties were written. People talked about them tremendously,
compared them, and ranked them. That was the thing that mattered.

It was not, of course, all good talk, and we suffered then, as now, from
the _a priori_ critic. Just as nowadays he goes about declaring that
the work of such-and-such a dramatist is all very amusing and delightful,
but "it isn't a Play," so we' had a great deal of talk about _the_
short story, and found ourselves measured by all kinds of arbitrary
standards. There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it was
as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any
one of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading or
so. It was either Mr. Edward Garnett or Mr. George Moore in a violently
anti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between the short story and
the anecdote. The short story was Maupassant; the anecdote was damnable.
It was a quite infernal comment in its way, because it permitted no
defence. Fools caught it up and used it freely. Nothing is so destructive
in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say
of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone can say
"Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously
monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is
closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt
hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease
and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred by
the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague and
inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and presently one shivered
and wanted to go indoors...It is the absurd fate of the imaginative writer
that he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric conditions.

But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I
will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of
art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the
instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired
man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain.
I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from
indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective
tendency towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically the
more abundant and irregular forms. But this world is not for the weary,
and in the long-run it is the new and variant that matter. I refuse
altogether to recognise any hard and fast type for the Short Story, any
more than I admit any limitation upon the liberties of the Small Picture.
The short story is a fiction that may be read in something under an hour,
and so that it is moving and delightful, it does not matter whether it is
as "trivial" as a Japanese print of insects seen closely between grass
stems, or as spacious as the prospect of the plain of Italy from Monte
Mottarone. It does not matter whether it is human or inhuman, or whether
it leaves you thinking deeply or radiantly but superficially pleased. Some
things are more easily done as short stories than others and more
abundantly done, but one of the many pleasures of short-story writing is
to achieve the impossible.

At any rate, that is the present writer's conception of the art of the
short story, as the jolly art of making something very bright and moving;
it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly
illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen
to fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest is just whatever invention
and imagination and the mood can give--a vision of buttered slides on a
busy day or of unprecedented worlds. In that spirit of miscellaneous
expectation these stories should be received. Each is intended to be a
thing by itself; and if it is not too ungrateful to kindly and
enterprising publishers, I would confess I would much prefer to see each
printed expensively alone, and left in a little brown-paper cover to lie
about a room against the needs of a quite casual curiosity. And I would
rather this volume were found in the bedrooms of convalescents and in
dentists' parlours and railway trains than in gentlemen's studies. I would
rather have it dipped in and dipped in again than read severely through.
Essentially it is a miscellany of inventions, many of which were very
pleasant to write; and its end is more than attained if some of them are
refreshing and agreeable to read. I have now re-read them all, and I am
glad to think I wrote them. I like them, but I cannot tell how much the
associations of old happinesses gives them a flavour for me. I make no
claims for them and no apology; they will be read as long as people read
them. Things written either live or die; unless it be for a place of
judgment upon Academic impostors, there is no apologetic intermediate
state.

I may add that I have tried to set a date to most of these stories, but
that they are not arranged in strictly chronological order.

H. G. WELLS.

CONTENTS.

I. THE JILTING OF JANE

II. THE CONE

III. THE STOLEN BACILLUS

IV. THE FLOWERING OF THE STRANGE ORCHID

V. THE AVU OBSERVATORY

VI. AEPYORNIS ISLAND

VII. THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON'S EYES.

VIII. THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS.

IX. THE MOTH

X. THE TREASURE IN THE FOREST

XI. THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM

XII. UNDER THE KNIFE

XIII. THE SEA RAIDERS

XIV. THE OBLITERATED MAN

XV. THE PLATTNER STORY

XVI. THE RED ROOM

XVII. THE PURPLE PILEUS

XVIII. A SLIP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

XIX. THE CRYSTAL EGG

XX. THE STAR

XXI. THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES

XXII. A VISION OF JUDGMENT

XXIII. JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD

XXIV. MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART

XXV. A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON

XXVI. THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS

XXVII. THE NEW ACCELERATOR

XXVIII. THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT

XXIX. THE MAGIC SHOP

XXX. THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS

XXXI. THE DOOR IN THE WALL

XXXII. THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

XXXIII. THE BEAUTIFUL SUIT

I.

THE JILTING OF JANE.

As I sit writing in my study, I can hear our Jane bumping her way
downstairs with a brush and dust-pan. She used in the old days to sing
hymn tunes, or the British national song for the time being, to these
instruments, but latterly she has been silent and even careful over her
work. Time was when I prayed with fervour for such silence, and my wife
with sighs for such care, but now they have come we are not so glad as we
might have anticipated we should be. Indeed, I would rejoice secretly,
though it may be unmanly weakness to admit it, even to hear Jane sing
"Daisy," or, by the fracture of any plate but one of Euphemia's best green
ones, to learn that the period of brooding has come to an end.

Yet how we longed to hear the last of Jane's young man before we heard the
last of him! Jane was always very free with her conversation to my wife,
and discoursed admirably in the kitchen on a variety of topics--so well,
indeed, that I sometimes left my study door open--our house is a small
one--to partake of it. But after William came, it was always William,
nothing but William; William this and William that; and when we thought
William was worked out and exhausted altogether, then William all over
again. The engagement lasted altogether three years; yet how she got
introduced to William, and so became thus saturated with him, was always a
secret. For my part, I believe it was at the street corner where the Rev.
Barnabas Baux used to hold an open-air service after evensong on Sundays.
Young Cupids were wont to flit like moths round the paraffin flare of that
centre of High Church hymn-singing. I fancy she stood singing hymns there,
out of memory and her imagination, instead of coming home to get supper,
and William came up beside her and said, "Hello!" "Hello yourself!" she
said; and etiquette being satisfied, they proceeded to talk together.

As Euphemia has a reprehensible way of letting her servants talk to her,
she soon heard of him. "He is _such_ a respectable young man, ma'am,"
said Jane, "you don't know." Ignoring the slur cast on her acquaintance,
my wife inquired further about this William.

"He is second porter at Maynard's, the draper's," said Jane, "and gets
eighteen shillings--nearly a pound--a week, m'm; and when the head porter
leaves he will be head porter. His relatives are quite superior people,
m'm. Not labouring people at all. His father was a greengrosher, m'm, and
had a churnor, and he was bankrup' twice. And one of his sisters is in a
Home for the Dying. It will be a very good match for me, m'm," said Jane,
"me being an orphan girl."

"Then you are engaged to him?" asked my wife.

"Not engaged, ma'am; but he is saving money to buy a ring--hammyfist."

"Well, Jane, when you are properly engaged to him you may ask him round
here on Sunday afternoons, and have tea with him in the kitchen;" for my
Euphemia has a motherly conception of her duty towards her maid-servants.
And presently the amethystine ring was being worn about the house, even
with ostentation, and Jane developed a new way of bringing in the joint so
that this gage was evident. The elder Miss Maitland was aggrieved by it,
and told my wife that servants ought not to wear rings. But my wife looked
it up in _Enquire Within_ and _Mrs. Motherly's Book of Household
Management_, and found no prohibition. So Jane remained with this
happiness added to her love.

The treasure of Jane's heart appeared to me to be what respectable people
call a very deserving young man. "William, ma'am," said Jane one day
suddenly, with ill-concealed complacency, as she counted out the beer
bottles, "William, ma'am, is a teetotaller. Yes, m'm; and he don't smoke.
Smoking, ma'am," said Jane, as one who reads the heart, "_do_ make
such a dust about. Beside the waste of money. _And_ the smell.
However, I suppose they got to do it--some of them..."

William was at first a rather shabby young man of the ready-made black
coat school of costume. He had watery gray eyes, and a complexion
appropriate to the brother of one in a Home for the Dying. Euphemia did
not fancy him very much, even at the beginning. His eminent respectability
was vouched for by an alpaca umbrella, from which he never allowed himself
to be parted.

"He goes to chapel," said Jane. "His papa, ma'am----"

"His _what_, Jane?"

"His papa, ma'am, was Church: but Mr. Maynard is a Plymouth Brother, and
William thinks it Policy, ma'am, to go there too. Mr. Maynard comes and
talks to him quite friendly when they ain't busy, about using up all the
ends of string, and about his soul. He takes a lot of notice, do Mr.
Maynard, of William, and the way he saves his soul, ma'am."

Presently we heard that the head porter at Maynard's had left, and that
William was head porter at twenty-three shillings a week. "He is really
kind of over the man who drives the van," said Jane, "and him married,
with three children." And she promised in the pride of her heart to make
interest for us with William to favour us so that we might get our parcels
of drapery from Maynard's with exceptional promptitude.

After this promotion a rapidly-increasing prosperity came upon Jane's
young man. One day we learned that Mr. Maynard had given William a book.
"'Smiles' 'Elp Yourself,' it's called," said Jane; "but it ain't comic. It
tells you how to get on in the world, and some what William read to me was
_lovely_, ma'am."

Euphemia told me of this, laughing, and then she became suddenly grave.
"Do you know, dear," she said, "Jane said one thing I did not like. She
had been quiet for a minute, and then she suddenly remarked, 'William is a
lot above me, ma'am, ain't he?'"

"I don't see anything in that," I said, though later my eyes were to be
opened.

One Sunday afternoon about that time I was sitting at my writing-desk--
possibly I was reading a good book--when a something went by the window. I
heard a startled exclamation behind me, and saw Euphemia with her hands
clasped together and her eyes dilated. "George," she said in an
awe-stricken whisper, "did you see?"

Then we both spoke to one another at the same moment, slowly and solemnly:
"_A silk hat! Yellow gloves! A new umbrella!_"

"It may be my fancy, dear," said Euphemia; "but his tie was very like
yours. I believe Jane keeps him in ties. She told me a little while ago,
in a way that implied volumes about the rest of your costume, 'The master
_do_ wear pretty ties, ma'am.' And he echoes all your novelties."

The young couple passed our window again on their way to their customary
walk. They were arm in arm. Jane looked exquisitely proud, happy, and
uncomfortable, with new white cotton gloves, and William, in the silk hat,
singularly genteel!

That was the culmination of Jane's happiness. When she returned, "Mr.
Maynard has been talking to William, ma'am," she said, "and he is to serve
customers, just like the young shop gentlemen, during the next sale. And
if he gets on, he is to be made an assistant, ma'am, at the first
opportunity. He has got to be as gentlemanly as he can, ma'am; and if he
ain't, ma'am, he says it won't be for want of trying. Mr. Maynard has took
a great fancy to him."

"He _is_ getting on, Jane," said my wife.

"Yes, ma'am," said Jane thoughtfully; "he _is_ getting on."

And she sighed.

That next Sunday as I drank my tea I interrogated my wife. "How is this
Sunday different from all other Sundays, little woman? What has happened?
Have you altered the curtains, or re-arranged the furniture, or where is
the indefinable difference of it? Are you wearing your hair in a new way
without warning me? I perceive a change clearly, and I cannot for the life
of me say what it is."

Then my wife answered in her most tragic voice, "George," she said, "that
William has not come near the place to-day! And Jane is crying her heart
out upstairs."

There followed a period of silence. Jane, as I have said, stopped singing
about the house, and began to care for our brittle possessions, which
struck my wife as being a very sad sign indeed. The next Sunday, and the
next, Jane asked to go out, "to walk with William," and my wife, who never
attempts to extort confidences, gave her permission, and asked no
questions. On each occasion Jane came back looking flushed and very
determined. At last one day she became communicative.

"William is being led away," she remarked abruptly, with a catching of the
breath, apropos of tablecloths. "Yes, m'm. She is a milliner, and she can
play on the piano."

"I thought," said my wife, "that you went out with him on Sunday."

"Not out with him, m'm--after him. I walked along by the side of them, and
told her he was engaged to me."

"Dear me, Jane, did you? What did they do?"

"Took no more notice of me than if I was dirt. So I told her she should
suffer for it."

"It could not have been a very agreeable walk, Jane."

"Not for no parties, ma'am."

"I wish," said Jane, "I could play the piano, ma'am. But anyhow, I don't
mean to let _her_ get him away from me. She's older than him, and her
hair ain't gold to the roots, ma'am."

It was on the August Bank Holiday that the crisis came. We do not clearly
know the details of the fray, but only such fragments as poor Jane let
fall. She came home dusty, excited, and with her heart hot within her.

The milliner's mother, the milliner, and William had made a party to the
Art Museum at South Kensington, I think. Anyhow, Jane had calmly but
firmly accosted them somewhere in the streets, and asserted her right to
what, in spite of the consensus of literature, she held to be her
inalienable property. She did, I think, go so far as to lay hands on him.
They dealt with her in a crushingly superior way. They "called a cab."
There was a "scene," William being pulled away into the four-wheeler by
his future wife and mother-in-law from the reluctant hands of our
discarded Jane. There were threats of giving her "in charge."

"My poor Jane!" said my wife, mincing veal as though she was mincing
William. "It's a shame of them. I would think no more of him. He is not
worthy of you."

"No, m'm," said Jane. "He _is_ weak.

"But it's that woman has done it," said Jane. She was never known to bring
herself to pronounce "that woman's" name or to admit her girlishness. "I
can't think what minds some women must have--to try and get a girl's young
man away from her. But there, it only hurts to talk about it," said Jane.

Thereafter our house rested from William. But there was something in the
manner of Jane's scrubbing the front doorstep or sweeping out the rooms, a
certain viciousness, that persuaded me that the story had not yet ended.

"Please, m'm, may I go and see a wedding tomorrow?" said Jane one day.

My wife knew by instinct whose wedding. "Do you think it is wise, Jane?"
she said.

"I would like to see the last of him," said Jane.

"My dear," said my wife, fluttering into my room about twenty minutes
after Jane had started, "Jane has been to the boot-hole and taken all the
left-off boots and shoes, and gone off to the wedding with them in a bag.
Surely she cannot mean--"

"Jane," I said, "is developing character. Let us hope for the best."

Jane came back with a pale, hard face. All the boots seemed to be still in
her bag, at which my wife heaved a premature sigh of relief. We heard her
go upstairs and replace the boots with considerable emphasis.

"Quite a crowd at the wedding, ma'am," she said presently, in a purely
conversational style, sitting in our little kitchen, and scrubbing the
potatoes; "and such a lovely day for them." She proceeded to numerous
other details, clearly avoiding some cardinal incident.

"It was all extremely respectable and nice, ma'am; but _her_ father
didn't wear a black coat, and looked quite out of place, ma'am. Mr.
Piddingquirk--"

"_Who_?"

"Mr. Piddingquirk--William that was, ma'am--had white gloves, and a coat
like a clergyman, and a lovely chrysanthemum. He looked so nice, ma'am.
And there was red carpet down, just like for gentlefolks. And they say he
gave the clerk four shillings, ma'am. It was a real kerridge they had--not
a fly. When they came out of church there was rice-throwing, and her two
little sisters dropping dead flowers. And someone threw a slipper, and
then I threw a boot--"

"Threw a _boot_, Jane!"

"Yes, ma'am. Aimed at her. But it hit _him_. Yes, ma'am, hard. Gev
him a black eye, I should think. I only threw that one. I hadn't the heart
to try again. All the little boys cheered when it hit him."

After an interval--"I am sorry the boot hit _him_."

Another pause. The potatoes were being scrubbed violently. "He always
_was_ a bit above me, you know, ma'am. And he was led away."

The potatoes were more than finished. Jane rose sharply with a sigh, and
rapped the basin down on the table.

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