The Time Machine
very indistinct: the heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene
figures lurking in the shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to
come at me again! Then the match burnt down, and stung my fingers, and
fell, a wriggling red spot in the blackness.
“I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an
experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started
with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly
be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances. I had come
without arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke—at times I
missed tobacco frightfully!—even without enough matches. If only I had
thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld
in a second, and examined it at leisure. But, as it was, I stood there
with only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me
with—hands, feet, and teeth; these, and four safety-matches that still
remained to me.
“I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark,
and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my
store of matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that
moment that there was any need to economise them, and I had wasted
almost half the box in astonishing the Overworlders, to whom fire was a
novelty. Now, as I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark,
a hand touched mine, lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was
sensible of a peculiar unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the
breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me. I felt
the box of matches in my hand being gently disengaged, and other hands
behind me plucking at my clothing. The sense of these unseen creatures
examining me was indescribably unpleasant. The sudden realisation of my
ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very
vividly in the darkness. I shouted at them as loudly as I could. They
started away, and then I could feel them approaching me again. They
clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other. I
shivered violently, and shouted again—rather discordantly. This time
they were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer laughing
noise as they came back at me. I will confess I was horribly
frightened. I determined to strike another match and escape under the
protection of its glare. I did so, and eking out the flicker with a
scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow
tunnel. But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and
in the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among
leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.
“In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no
mistaking that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another
light, and waved it in their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how
nauseatingly inhuman they looked—those pale, chinless faces and great,
lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!—as they stared in their blindness and
bewilderment. But I did not stay to look, I promise you: I retreated
again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third. It had
almost burnt through when I reached the opening into the shaft. I lay
down on the edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy.
Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my
feet were grasped from behind, and I was violently tugged backward. I
lit my last match … and it incontinently went out. But I had my hand on
the climbing bars now, and, kicking violently, I disengaged myself from
the clutches of the Morlocks, and was speedily clambering up the shaft,
while they stayed peering and blinking up at me: all but one little
wretch who followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a
trophy.
“That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or thirty
feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest difficulty
in keeping my hold. The last few yards was a frightful struggle against
this faintness. Several times my head swam, and I felt all the
sensations of falling. At last, however, I got over the well-mouth
somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight. I
fell upon my face. Even the soil smelt sweet and clean. Then I remember
Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of others among the
Eloi. Then, for a time, I was insensible.
X.
When Night Came
“Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, except
during my night’s anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I had felt a
sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered by
these new discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by
the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown
forces which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an
altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks—a
something inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before, I
had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was
with the pit and how to get out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a
trap, whose enemy would come upon him soon.
“The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the new
moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible
remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult
problem to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was
on the wane: each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I
now understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of
the little Upperworld people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul
villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt
pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upperworld
people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks
their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The two
species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down
towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The
Eloi, like the Carlovignan kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful
futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the
Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to
find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their
garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs,
perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service. They did it as
a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals
in sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on
the organism. But, clearly, the old order was already in part reversed.
The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago,
thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the
ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back—changed!
Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were
becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there came into my head
the memory of the meat I had seen in the Underworld. It seemed odd how
it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the current of my
meditations, but coming in almost like a question from outside. I tried
to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar,
but I could not tell what it was at the time.
“Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their
mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this age
of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse
and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself.
Without further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness
where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this
strange world with some of that confidence I had lost in realising to
what creatures night by night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep
again until my bed was secure from them. I shuddered with horror to
think how they must already have examined me.
“I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but
found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the
buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous
climbers as the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the
tall pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain and the polished gleam
of its walls came back to my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena
like a child upon my shoulder, I went up the hills towards the
south-west. The distance, I had reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but
it must have been nearer eighteen. I had first seen the place on a
moist afternoon when distances are deceptively diminished. In addition,
the heel of one of my shoes was loose, and a nail was working through
the sole—they were comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors—so that I
was lame. And it was already long past sunset when I came in sight of
the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky.
“Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but after a
while she desired me to let her down, and ran along by the side of me,
occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my
pockets. My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had
concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vases for floral
decoration. At least she utilised them for that purpose. And that
reminds me! In changing my jacket I found…”
_The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently
placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon
the little table. Then he resumed his narrative._
“As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the
hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to
the house of grey stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the
Palace of Green Porcelain to her, and contrived to make her understand
that we were seeking a refuge there from her Fear. You know that great
pause that comes upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in
the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that
evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few
horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the
expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my
senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel
the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see
through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and
waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would
receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And why
had they taken my Time Machine?
“So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night. The
clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out.
The ground grew dim and the trees black. Weena’s fears and her fatigue
grew upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed
her. Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck,
and, closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So
we went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I
almost walked into a little river. This I waded, and went up the
opposite side of the valley, past a number of sleeping houses, and by a
statue—a Faun, or some such figure, _minus_ the head. Here too were
acacias. So far I had seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet
early in the night, and the darker hours before the old moon rose were
still to come.
“From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and
black before me. I hesitated at this. I could see no end to it, either
to the right or the left. Feeling tired—my feet, in particular, were