The War of the Wenuses by C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
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C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas >> The War of the Wenuses
"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 space 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 succumbed 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 title 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, passed 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-shell 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 snatches from a
pre-Wenusian opera.
These generous folk, though severely harassed 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
gratitude, 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, Cockspur 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 _Laocoon_, 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 passed 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 quantity of large tanks, stood the
Wenuses, blowing assiduously 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 lustre 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 passing 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.
I was startled. It was my wife, accompanied by Mrs. Elphinstone, my
cousin's man, my mother, the widow of the landlord of the "Dog and
Measles," Master Herodotus Tibbles in deep mourning, and the
Artillery-man's brother from Beauchamp's little livery stables.
I shot an appealing glance to the disappearing Wenus. She threw me a
kiss. I threw her another.
My wife took a step forward, and put her hand to my ear. I fell.
[Footnote 1: Cleaver in a subsequent Memoir [Sonnenschein, London, pp.
xiv., 954, 20 in. x 8-1/2, price L2 2s. net] has made out, reluctantly
and against the judgment of his firm, that the basic material of the
globules, the peculiar tenacity of which was due to some toughening
ingredient imported by the Wisitors from their planet, was undoubtedly
that indispensable domestic article which is alleged to "save rubbing."]
APPENDIX A.
APPENDIX A.
My mother, whose vigilance during the Wenuses' invasion has been
throughout of the greatest assistance to me, kept copies of the various
papers of importance which commented upon that event. From them I am
enabled, with my mother's consent, to supplement the allusions to
contemporary journalism in the body of my history with the following
extracts:--
The _Times_, or, as it is better known, the Thunder Child of Printing
House Square, said:
"The Duke of Curzon's statesmanlike reply in the House of Lords last
night to the inflammatory question or string of questions put by Lord
Ashmead with reference to our planetary visitors will go far to mitigate
the unreasoning panic which has laid hold of a certain section of the
community. As to the methods by which it has been proposed to confront
and repel the invaders, the Duke's remark, 'that the use of dynamite
violated the chivalrous instincts which were at the root of the British
Nature,' called forth loud applause. The Foreign Secretary, however,
showed that, while deprecating senseless panic, he was ready to take any
reasonable steps to allay the natural anxiety of the public, and rising
later on in the evening, he announced that a Royal Commission had been
appointed, on which Lord Ashmead, Dr. Joseph Parker (of the City
Temple), and Mr. Hall Caine, representing the Isle of Man, had consented
to serve, and would be dispatched without delay to Kensington Gardens to
inquire into the cause of the visit, and, if possible, to induce the new
comers to accept an invitation to tea on the Terrace. By way of
supplementing these tranquillizing assurances, we may add that we have
the authority of the best scientific experts, including Dr. Moreau,
Professor Sprudelkopf of Carlsbad, and Dr. Fountain Penn of
Philadelphia, for asserting that no animate beings could survive their
transference from the atmosphere of Venus to that of our planet for more
than fourteen days. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the members of
the Royal Commission may be successful in impressing upon our aerial
visitors the imperative necessity of a speedy return. In these
negotiations it is anticipated that the expressive pantomime of Dr.
Parker, and Mr. Hall Caine's mastery of the Manx dialect, will be of the
greatest possible assistance."
To the _Daily Telegraph_ Sir Edwin Arnold contributed a poem entitled
"Aphrodite Anadyomene; or, Venus at the Round Pond." My mother can
remember only the last stanza, which ran as follows:
"Though I fly to _Fushiyama_,
Steeped in opalescent _Karma_,
I shall ne'er forget my charmer,
My adorable _Khansamah_.
Though I fly to Tokio,
Where the sweet _chupatties_ blow,
I shall ne'er forget thee, no!
_Yamagata, daimio_."
A shilling testimonial to the Wenuses was also started by the same
journal, in accordance with the precedent furnished by the similar
treatment of the Graces, and an animated controversy raged in its
correspondence columns with reference to mixed bathing at Margate, and
its effect on the morality of the Wenuses.
A somewhat painful impression was created by the publication of an
interview with a well-known dramatic critic in the periodical known as
_Great Scott's Thoughts_. This eminent authority gave it as his
unhesitating opinion that the Wenuses were not fit persons to associate
with actors, actresses, or dramatic critics, and that if, as was
announced, they had been engaged at Covent Garden to lend realistic
verisimilitude to the Venusberg scene in _Tannhaeuser_, it was his firm
resolve to give up his long crusade against Ibsen, emigrate to Norway,
and change his name to that of John Gabriel Borkman. A prolonged sojourn
in Poppyland, however, resulted in the withdrawal of this dreadful
threat, and, some few weeks after the extinction of the Wenuses, his
reconciliation with the dramatic profession was celebrated at a public
meeting, where, after embracing all the actor-managers in turn, he was
presented by them with a magnificent silver butter-boat, filled to the
brim with melted butter ready for immediate use.
APPENDIX B.
APPENDIX B.
My mother has obtained permission from the Laureate's publishers to
reprint the following stanzas from "The Pale Pink Raid":--
"Wrong? O of coarse it's heinous,
But we're going, girls, you just bet!
Do they think that the Wars of Wenus
Can be stopped by an epithet?
When the henpecked Earth-men pray us
To join them at afternoon tea,
Not rhyme nor reason can stay us
From flying to set them free.
* * * * *
"When the men on that hapless planet,
Handsome and kind and true,
Cry out, 'Hurry up!' O hang it!
What else can a Wenus do?
I suppose it was rather bad form, girls,
But really we didn't care,
For our planet was growing too warm, girls,
And we wanted a change of air.
* * * * *
"Mrs. Grundy may go on snarling,
But still, at the Judgment Day,
The author of _England's Darling_
I think won't give us away.
We failed, but we chose to chance it,
And as one of the beaten side,
I'd rather have made that transit
Than written _Jameson's Ride!_"
THE END.
PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER