We spoke sadly of our poor friend and neighbor, Crane [Stephen Crane, the American novelist], whose untimely death last week we both lament. His short life was chaotic and his disregard for his own health was virtually criminal; but The Red Badge of Courage, I believe, will surely long outlive him. I wonder what other magnificent works were still in him when he died.
We talk of paying calls the next day on some of our other literary friends who live nearby, Conrad, perhaps, or young Hueffer, or even Kipling up at Burwash. What a den of novelists these few counties possess!
A fine dinner and splendid talk afterward.
Early to bed for me; Wells, I suppose, will stay awake far into the night, writing, writing, writing.
June 15, Spade House, Sandgate. In mid-morning after a generous late breakfast Wells is just at the point of composing a note to Conrad proposing an impromptu visit—Conrad is still despondently toiling at his interminable Lord Jim and no doubt would welcome an interruption, Wells says—when a young fellow whom Wells knows comes riding up, all out of breath, with news that a falling star has been seen crossing the skies in the night, rushing high overhead, inscribing a line of flame visible from Winchester eastward, and that—no doubt as a consequence of that event—something strange has dropped from the heavens and landed in Wells’s old town of Woking, over Surrey way. It is a tangible thunderbolt, a meteor, some kind of shaft flung by the hand of Zeus, at any rate.
So, instanter, all is up with our visit to Conrad. Wells’s scientific curiosity takes full hold of him. He must go to Woking this very moment to inspect this gift of the gods; and, willy-nilly, I am to accompany him. “You must come, you must!” he cries, voice disappearing upward into an octave extraordinary even for him. I ask him why, and he will only say that there will be revelations of an earthshaking kind, of planetary dimensions. “To what are you fantastically alluding?” I demand, but he will only smile enigmatically. And, shortly afterward, off we go.
June 15, much later, Woking. Utterly extraordinary! We make the lengthy journey over from Sandgate by pony-carriage, Wells and I, two literary gentleman out for an excursion on this bright and extravagantly warm morning in late spring. I am garbed as though for a bicycle journey, my usual knickerbockers and my exiguous jacket of black and white stripes and my peaked cap; I feel ill at ease in these regalia but I have brought nothing else with me suitable for this outing. We arrive at Woking by late afternoon and plunge at once into—what other word can I use?—into madness.
The object from on high, we immediately learn, landed with an evidently violent impact in the common between Woking, Horsell, and Ottershaw, burying itself deep in the ground. The heat and fury of its impact have hurled sand and gravel in every direction and set the surrounding heather ablaze, though the fires were quickly enough extinguished. But what has fallen is no meteorite. The top of an immense metallic cylinder, perhaps thirty yards across, can be seen protruding from the pit.
Early this morning Ogilvy, the astronomer, hastened to inspect the site; and, he tells us now, he was able despite the heat emanating from the cylinder’s surface to get close enough to perceive that the top of the thing had begun to rotate—as though, so he declares, there were creatures within attempting to get out!
“What we have here is a visitation from the denizens of Mars, I would hazard,” says Wells without hesitation, in a tone of amazing calmness and assurance.
“Exactly so!” cries Ogilvy. “Exactly so!”
These are both men of science, and I am but a litterateur. I stare in bewilderment from one to the other. “How can you be so certain?” I ask them, finally.
To which Wells replies, “The peculiar bursts of light we have observed on the face of that world in recent years have aroused much curiosity, as I am sure you are aware. And then, some time ago, the sight of jets of flame leaping up night after night from the red planet, as if some great gun were being repeatedly fired—in direct consequence of which, let me propose, there eventually came the streak of light in the sky late last night, which I noticed from my study window—betokening, I would argue, the arrival here of this projectile—why, what else can it all mean, James, other than that travelers from our neighbor world lie embedded here before us on Horsell Common!”
“It can be nothing else,” Ogilvy cries enthusiastically. “Travelers from Mars! But are they suffering, I wonder? Has their passage through our atmosphere engendered heat too great for them to endure?”
A flush of sorrow and compassion rushes through me at that. It awes and flutters me to think that the red planet holds sentient life, and that an intrepid band of Martians has ventured to cross the great sea of space that separates their world from ours. To have come such an immense and to me unimaginable distance—only to perish in the attempt—! Can it be, as Ogilvy suggests, that this brave interplanetary venture will end in tragedy for the brave voyagers? I am racked briefly by the deepest concern.
How ironic, I suppose, in view of the dark and violent later events of this day, that I should expend such pity upon our visitors. But we could tell nothing, then, nor for some little while thereafter. Crowds of curiosity-seekers came and went, as they have done all day; workmen with digging tools now began to attempt to excavate the cylinder, which had cooled considerably since the morning; their attempts to complete the unscrewing of the top were wholly unsuccessful. Wells could not take his eyes from the pit. He seemed utterly possessed by a fierce joy that had been kindled in him by the possibility that the cylinder held actual Martians. It was, he told me several times, almost as though one of his own scientific fantasy-books were turning to reality before his eyes; and Wells confessed that he had indeed sketched out the outline of a novel about an invasion from Mars, intending to write it some two or three years hence, but of course now that scheme has been overtaken by actual events and he shall have to abandon it. He evidences little regret at this; he appears wholly delighted, precisely as a small boy might be, that the Martians are here. I dare say that he would have regarded the intrusion of a furious horde of dinosaurs into the Surrey countryside with equal pleasure.
But I must admit that I am somewhat excited as well. Travelers from Mars! How extraordinary! Quel phénomène! And what vistas open to the mind of the intrepid seeker after novelty! I have traveled somewhat myself, of course, to the Continent, at least, if not to Africa or China, but I have not ruled such farther journeys completely out, and now the prospect of an even farther one becomes possible. To make the Grand Tour of Mars! To see its great monuments and temples, and perhaps have an audience at the court of the Great Martian Cham! It is a beguiling thought, if not a completely serious one. See, see, I am becoming a fantasist worthy of Wells!
(Later. The hour of sunset.) The cylinder is open. To our immense awe we find ourselves staring at a Martian. Did I expect them to be essentially human in form? Well, then, I was foolish in my expectations. What we see is a bulky ungainly thing; two huge eyes, great as saucers; tentacles of some sort; a strange quivering mouth—yes, yes, an alien being senza dubbio, preternaturally other.
Wells, unexpectedly, is appalled. “Disgusting...dreadful,” he mutters. “That oily skin! Those frightful eyes! What a hideous devil it is!” Where has his scientific objectivity gone? For my part I am altogether fascinated. I tell him that I see rare beauty in the Martian’s strangeness, not the beauty of a Greek vase or of a ceiling by Tiepolo, of course, but beauty of a distinct kind all the same. In this, I think, my perceptions are the superior of Wells’s. There is beauty in the squirming octopus dangling from the hand of some grinning fisherman at the shore of Capri; there is beauty in the terrifiant bas-reliefs of winged bulls from the palaces of Nineveh; and there is beauty of a sort, I maintain, in this Martian also.