The army therefore waited.
The heat became intense. My wife and her soldiers began to feel the necessity for refreshment. My wife is accustomed to regular meals. The sun grew in strength as the time went on, and my wife gave the order to sit at ease, which was signalled to my mother. My mother tells me that she was never so pleased in her life.
One o"clock struck; two o"clock; three o"clock; and still no Wenuses.
Faint sounds were now audible from the crockery department, and then a hissing, which pa.s.sed by degrees into a humming, a long, loud droning noise. It resembled as nearly as anything the boiling of an urn at a tea-meeting, and awoke in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of my wife and her army an intense and unconquerable longing for tea, which was accentuated as four o"clock was reached. Still no Wenuses. Another hour dragged wearily on, and the craving for tea had become positively excruciating when five o"clock rang out.
At that moment, the gla.s.s doors of the crockery department were flung open, and out poured a procession of Wenuses smiling, said my mother, with the utmost friendliness, dressed as A.B.C. girls, and bearing trays studded with cups and saucers.
With the most seductive and ingratiating charm, a cup was handed to my wife. What to do she did not for the moment know. "Could such a gift be guileless?" she asked herself. "No." And yet the Wenuses looked friendly. Finally her martial spirit prevailed and my wife repulsed the cup, adjuring the rank and file to do the same. But in vain. Every member of my wife"s wing of that fainting army greedily grasped a cup.
Alas! what could they know of the deadly Tea-Tray of the Wenuses?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, such is the disgraceful neglect of science in our schools and colleges. And so they drank and were consumed.
Meanwhile my mother, at the head of the south wing of the army, which had been entirely overlooked by the Wenuses, stood watching the destruction of my wife"s host--a figure petrified with alarm and astonishment. One by one she watched her sisters in arms succ.u.mb to the awful Tea-Tray.
Then it was that this intrepid woman rose to her greatest height.
"Come!" she cried to her Amazons. "Come! They have no more tea left. Now is the moment ripe."
With these spirited words, my mother and her troops proceeded to charge down Queen"s Road upon the unsuspecting Wenuses.
But they had reckoned without the enemy.
The tumult of the advancing host caught the ear of the Wonderful Wisitors, and in an instant they had extracted glittering cases of their crimson cigarettes from their pockets, and lighting them in the strange fashion I have described elsewhere, they proceeded to puff the smoke luxuriously into the faces of my mother and her comrades.
Alas! little did these gallant females know of the horrible properties of the Red Weed. How could they, with our science-teaching in such a wretched state?
The smoke grew in volume and density, spread and spread, and in a few minutes the south wing of my wife"s army was as supine as the north.
How my wife and mother escaped I shall not say. I make a point of never explaining the escape of my wife, whether from Martians or Wenuses; but that night, as Commander-in-Chief, she issued this cataleptic despatch:
"The Wenuses are able to paralyse all but strong-minded women with their deadly Tea-Tray. Also they burn a Red Weed, the smoke of which has smothered our troops in Westbourne Grove. No sooner have they despoiled Whiteley"s than they will advance upon Jay"s and Marshall and Snelgrove"s. It is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Tea-Tray and the Red Weed but in instant flight."
That night the world was again lit by a pale pink flash of light. It was the Fifth Crinoline.
IV.
WRECKAGE.
The general stampede that ensued on the publication of my wife"s despatch is no fit subject for the pen of a coherent scientific writer.
Suffice it to say, that in the s.p.a.ce of twenty-four hours London was practically empty, with the exception of the freaks at Barnum"s, the staff of _The Undertakers" Gazette_, and Mrs. Elphinstone (for that, _pace_ Wilkie Collins, was the name of the Woman in White), who would listen to no reasoning, but kept calling upon "George," for that was the name of my cousin"s man, who had been in the service of Lord Garrick, the Chief Justice, who had succ.u.mbed to dipsomania in the previous invasion.
Meantime the Wenuses, flushed with their success in Westbourne Grove, had carried their devastating course in a south-easterly direction, looting Marshall and Snelgrove"s, bearing away the entire stock of driving-gloves from Sleep"s and subjecting Redfern"s to the asphyxiating fumes of the Red Weed.
It is calculated that they spent nearly two days in Jay"s, trying on all the costumes in that establishment, and a week in Peter Robinson"s.
During these days I never quitted Uxbridge Road Station, for just as I was preparing to leave, my eye caught the t.i.tle on the bookstall of Grant Allen"s work, _The Idea of Evolution!_ and I could not stir from the platform until I had skimmed it from cover to cover.
Wearily mounting the stairs, I then turned my face westward. At the corner of Royal Crescent, just by the cabstand, I found a man lying in the roadway. His face was stained with the Red Weed, and his language was quite unfit for the columns of _Nature_.
I applied a limp lettuce to his fevered brow, took his temperature with my theodolite, and pressing a copy of _Home Chat_ into his unresisting hand, pa.s.sed on with a sigh. I think I should have stayed with him but for the abnormal obtusity of his facial angle.
Turning up Clarendon Road, I heard the faint words of the Wenusberg music by Wagner from a pianoforte in the second story of No. 34. I stepped quickly into a jeweller"s shop across the road, carried off eighteen immature carats from a tray on the counter, and pitched them through the open window at the invisible pianist. The music ceased suddenly.
It was when I began to ascend Notting Hill that I first heard the hooting. It reminded me at first of a Siren, and then of the top note of my maiden aunt, in her day a notorious soprano vocalist. She subsequently emigrated to France, and entered a nunnery under the religious name of Soeur Marie Jeanne. "Tul-ulla-lulla-liety," wailed the Voice in a sort of superhuman jodel, coming, as it seemed to me, from the region of Westminster Bridge.
The persistent ululation began to get upon my nerves. I found, moreover, that I was again extremely hungry and thirsty. It was already noon. Why was I wandering alone in this derelict city, clad in my wife"s skirt and my cook"s Sunday bonnet?
Grotesque and foolish as it may seem to the scientific reader, I was entirely unable to answer this simple conundrum. My mind reverted to my school days. I found myself declining _musa_. Curious to relate, I had entirely forgotten the genitive of _ego_.... With infinite trouble I managed to break into a vegetarian restaurant, and made a meal off some precocious haricot beans, a brace of Welsh rabbits, and ten bottles of botanic beer.
Working back into Holland Park Avenue and thence keeping steadily along High Street, Notting Hill Gate, I determined to make my way to the Marble Arch, in the hopes of finding some fresh materials for my studies in the Stone Age.
In Bark Place, where the Ladies" Kennel Club had made their vast grand-stand, were a number of pitiful vestiges of the Waterloo of women-kind. There was a shattered Elswick bicycle, about sixteen yards and a half of nun"s veiling, and fifty-three tortoise-sh.e.l.l side-combs.
I gazed on the _debris_ with apathy mingled with contempt. My movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I knew that I wished to avoid my wife, but had no clear idea how the avoiding was to be done.
V.
BUBBLES.
From Orme Square, a lean-faced, unkempt and haggard waif, I drifted to Great Orme"s Head and back again. Senile dementia had already laid its spectral clutch upon my wizened cerebellum when I was rescued by some kindly people, who tell me that they found me scorching down Hays Hill on a cushion-tired ordinary. They have since told me that I was singing "My name is John Wellington Wells, Hurrah!" and other s.n.a.t.c.hes from a pre-Wenusian opera.
These generous folk, though severely hara.s.sed by their own anxieties, took me in and cared for me. I was a lonely man and a sad one, and they bored me. In spite of my desire to give public expression to my grat.i.tude, they have refused to allow their names to appear in these pages, and they consequently enjoy the proud prerogative of being the only anonymous persons in this book. I stayed with them at the Bath Club for four days, and with tears parted from them on the spring-board. They would have kept me for ever, but that would have interfered with my literary plans. Besides, I had a morbid desire to gaze on the Wenuses once more.
And so I went out into the streets again, guided by the weird Voice, and _via_ Grafton Street, Albemarle Street, the Royal Arcade, Bond Street, Burlington Gardens, Vigo Street and Sackville Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Pall Mall East, c.o.c.kspur Street and Whitehall, steadily wheeled my way across Westminster Bridge.
There were few people about and their skins were all yellow. Lessing, presumably in his _Laoc.o.o.n_, has attributed this to the effects of sheer panic; but Carver"s explanation, which attributes the ochre-like tint to the hypodermic operation of the Mash-Glance, seems far more plausible.
For myself I abstain from casting the weight of my support in either scale, because my particular province is speculative philosophy and not comparative dermatology.
As I pa.s.sed St. Thomas"s Hospital, the tullululation grew ever louder and louder. At last the source of the sound could no longer be disguised. It proceeded without doubt from the interior of some soap works just opposite Doulton"s. The gate was open and a faint saponaceous exhalation struck upon my dilated nostrils. I have always been peculiarly susceptible to odours, though my particular province is not Osmetics but speculative philosophy, and I at once resolved to enter.
Leaning my bicycle against the wall of the archway, I walked in, and was immediately confronted by the object of my long search.
There, grouped picturesquely round a quant.i.ty of large tanks, stood the Wenuses, blowing a.s.siduously through pellucid pipettes and simultaneously chanting in tones of unearthly gravity a strain poignantly suggestive of baffled hopes, thwarted aspirations and impending departure. So absorbed were they in their strange preparations, that they were entirely unconscious of my presence.
Grotesque and foolish as this may seem to the infatuated reader, it is absolutely true.
Gradually from out the troubled surface of the tanks there rose a succession of transparent iridescent globules, steadily waxing in bulk until they had attained a diameter of about sixteen feet. The Wenuses then desisted from their labours of inflation, and suddenly plunging into the tanks, reappeared _inside_ these opalescent globules. I can only repeat that speculative philosophy, and not sapoleaginous hydro-dynamics, is my particular forte, and would refer doubtful readers, in search of further information, to the luminous hypothesis advanced by Professor Cleaver of Washington to account for the imbullification of the Wenuses.[1]
Never shall I forget the touching scene that now unfolded itself before my bewildered eyes. Against a back ground of lemon-coloured sky, with the stars shedding their spiritual l.u.s.tre through the purple twilight, these gorgeous creatures, each ensphered in her beatific bubble, floated tremulously upward on the balmy breeze. In a moment it all flashed upon me. They were pa.s.sing away from the scene of their brief triumph, and I, a lonely and dejected scientist, saw myself doomed to expiate a moment"s madness in long years of ineffectual speculation on the probable development of Moral Ideas.
My mind reverted to my abandoned arguments, embodied in the article which lay beneath the selenite paperweight in my study in Campden Hill Gardens. Frenzied with despair, I shot out an arm to arrest the upward transit of the nearest Wenus, when a strange thing occurred.
"At last!" said a voice.