The Greatest Short Stories of H. G. Wells: 70+ Titles in One Edition. Герберт Уэллс
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magnificent figures of heroic, worshipful, and mysterious womanhood naturally appeal to her—Cleopatra, Messalina, Beatrice, the Madonna, and so forth.”
“And she is writing—”
“No, she is acting. That is the real poetry of women and children. A platonic Cleopatra of infinite variety, spotless reputation, and a large following. Her make-believe is wonderful. She would use FalstafF for Romeo without a twinge, if no one else was at hand. She could exert her self to break the heart of a soldier. I assure you, Bellows—”
I heard her dress rustle behind me.
“I want some more tea,” he said to her. “You misunderstood me about the collecting Millie.”
“What were you saying about Cleopatra?” she said, trying, I think, to look sternly at him.
“Scandal,” he said. “But about the collecting, Bellows—”
“You must come to this bazaar,” she interrupted.
“I shall be delighted,” I said, boldly. “Where is it, and when?”
“About this collecting,” he began.
“It is in aid of that delightful orphanage at Wimblingham,” she explained, and gave me an animated account of the charity. He emptied his second cup of tea. “May I have a third cup?” he said.
The two girls signalled departure, and her attention was distracted. “She collects—and I will confess she does it with extraordinary skill—the surreptitious addresses—”
“John,” she said over her shoulder, “I wish you would tell Miss Smithers all those interesting things about Argon.” He gulped down his third cup, and rose with the easy obedience of the trained husband. Presently she returned to the tea-things. “Cannot I fill your cup?” she asked
“I really hope John was not telling you his queer notions about me. He says the most remarkable things. Quite lately he has got it into his head that he has a formula for my character.”
“I wish I had,” I said with a sigh.
“And he goes about explaining me to people as if I was a mechanism. ‘Scalp collector,’ I think is the favourite phrase. Did he tell you? Don’t you think it perfectly horrid of him?”
“But he doesn’t understand you,” I said, not grasping his meaning quite at the minute.
She sighed.
“You have,” I said with infinite meaning, “my sincere sympathy—” I hesistated—“my whole sympathy.”
“Thank you so much,” she said quite as meaningly. I rose forthwith, and we clasped hands, like souls who strike a compact.
Yet, thinking over what he said afterwards, I was troublcd by a fancy that there was the faintest suggestion of a smile of triumph aboat her lips and mouth. Possibly it was only an honourable pride. I suppose he has poisoned my mind a little. Of course, I should not like to think of myself as one of a fortuitously selected multitude strung neatly together (if one may use the vulgarism) on a pece of string,—a stringful like a boy’s string of chestnuts,—nice old gentlemen, nice boys, sympathetic and humorous men of thirty, kind fellows, gifted dreamers, and dashing blades, all trailing after her. It is confoundedly bad form of him, anyhow, to guy her visitors. She certainly took it like a saint. Of course, I shall see her again soon, and we shall talk to one another about one another. Something or other cropped up and prevented my going there on her last Tuesday.
POLLOCK AND THE PORROH MAN
Fist published in The New Budget, May 23, 1895
It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that Pollock’s first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that country are famous for their good looks—they are Gallinas with a dash of European blood that dates from the days of Vasco de Gama and the English slave-traders, and the Porroh man too, was possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian taint in his composition. (It’s a curious thing to think that some of us may have distant cousins eating men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At anyrate, the Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been a mere low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock, using his revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at his deltoid muscle, sent the iron dagger flying, and firing, hit the man in the hand.
He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wall of the hut. The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under his arm at Pollock. Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in the sunlight, and then the Englishman was alone, sick and trembling with the excitement of the affair, in the twilight of the place. It had all happened in less time than it takes to read about it.
The woman was quite dead, and having ascertained this, Pollock went to the entrance of the hut and looked out. Things outside were dazzling bright. Half a dozen of the porters of the expedition were standing up in a group near the green huts they occupied, and staring towards him, wondering what the shots might signify. Behind the little group of men was the broad stretch of black fetid mud by the river, a green carpet of rafts of papyrus and water-grass, and then the leaden water. The mangroves beyond the stream loomed indistinctly through the blue haze. There were no signs of excitement in the squat village, whose fence was just visible above the cane-grass.
Pollock came out of the hut cautiously and walked towards the river, looking over his shoulder at intervals. But the Porroh man had vanished Pollock clutched his revolver nervously in his hand.
One of his men came to meet him, and as he came, pointed to the bushes behind the hut in which the Porroh man had disappeared. Pollock had an irritating persuasion of having made an absolute fool of himself; he felt bitter, savage, at the turn things had taken. At the same time, he would have to tell Waterhouse—the moral, exemplary, cautious Waterhouse—who would inevitably take the matter seriously. Pollock cursed bitterly at his luck, at Waterhouse, and especially at the West Coast of Africa. He felt consummately sick of the expedition. And in the back of his mind all the time was a speculative doubt where precisely within the visible horizon the Porroh man might be.
It is perhaps rather shocking, but he was not at all upset by the murder that had just happened. He had seen so much brutality during the last three months, so many dead women, burnt huts, drying skeletons, up the Kittam River in the wake of the Sofa cavalry, that his senses were blunted. What disturbed him was the persuasion that this business was only beginning.
He swore savagely at the black, who ventured to ask a question, and went on into the tent under the orange-trees where Waterhouse was lying, feeling exasperatingly like a boy going into the headmaster’s study.
Waterhouse was still sleeping off the effects of his last dose of chlorodyne, and Pollock sat down on a packing-case beside him, and lighting his pipe, waited for him to awake. About him were scattered the pots and weapons Waterhouse had collected from the Mendi people, and which he had been repacking for the canoe voyage to Sulyma.
Presently Waterhouse woke up, and after judicial stretching, decided he was all right again. Pollock got him some tea. Over the tea, the incidents of the afternoon were described by Pollock, after some preliminary beating about the bush. Waterhouse took the matter even more seriously than Pollock had anticipated. He did not simply disapprove, he scolded, he insulted.
“You’re one of those infernal fools who think a black man isn’t a human being,” he said. “I can’t be ill a day without you must get into some dirty scrape or other. This is the third time in a month that you have come crossways-on with a native, and this time you’re in for it with a vengance. Porroh, too! They’re down upon you enough as it is, about that idol you wrote your silly name on. And they’re the most vindictive devils on earth! You make a man ashamed of civilisation. To think you come of a decent family! If ever I cumber myself