Part 77

Then, in 1870, he bought that charming house, Mansfield, by the Thames, which he rechristened Marsfield; and which he--with the help of the Scatcherds and myself, for it became our hobby--made into one of the most delightful abodes in England. It was the real home for all of us; I really think it is one of the loveliest spots on earth. It was a bargain, but it cost a lot of money; altogether, never was money better spent--even as a mere investment. When I think of what it is worth now! Je suis homme d'affaires!

What a house-warming that was on the very day that France and Germany went to war; we little guessed what was to come for the country we all loved so dearly, or we should not have been so glad.

I am conscious that all this is rather dull reading. Alas! Merry England is a devilish dull place compared to foreign parts--and success, respectability, and domestic bliss are the dullest things to write--or read--about that I know--and with middle age to follow too!

It was during that first summer at Marsfield that Barty told me the extraordinary story of Martia, and I really thought he had gone mad. For I knew him to be the most truthful person alive.

Even now I hardly know what to think, nor did Leah--nor did Barty himself up to the day of his death.

He showed me all her letters, which I may deem it advisable to publish some day: not only the Blaze suggestions for his books, and all her corrections; things to occupy him for life--all, of course, in his own handwriting; but many letters about herself, also written in sleep and by his own hand; and the style is Barty's--not the style in which he wrote his books, and which is not to be matched; but that in which he wrote his Blaze letters to me.

If her story is true--and I never read a piece of documentary evidence more convincing--these letters constitute the most astonishing revelation ever yet vouchsafed to this earth.

But her story cannot be true!

That Barty's version of his relations with "The Martian" is absolutely sincere it is impossible to doubt. He was quite unconscious of the genesis of every book he ever wrote. His first hint of every one of them was the elaborately worked out suggestion he found by his bedside in the morning--written by himself in his sleep during the preceding night, with his eyes wide open, while more often than not his wife anxiously watched him at his unconscious work, careful not to wake or disturb him in any way.

Roughly epitomized, Martia's story was this:

For an immense time she had gone through countless incarnations, from the lowest form to the highest, in the cold and dreary planet we call Mars, the outermost of the four inhabited worlds of our system, where the sun seems no bigger than an orange, and which but for its moist, thin, rich atmosphere and peculiar magnetic conditions that differ from ours would be too cold above ground for human or animal or vegetable life. As it is, it is only inhabited now in the neighborhood of its equator, and even there during its long winter it is colder and more desolate than Cape Horn or Spitzbergen--except that the shallow, fresh-water sea does not freeze except for a few months at either pole.

All these incarnations were forgotten by her but the last; nothing remained of them all but a vague consciousness that they had once been, until their culmination in what would be in Mars the equivalent of a woman on our earth.

Man in Mars is, it appears, a very different being from what he is here. He is amphibious, and descends from no monkey, but from a small animal that seems to be something between our seal and our sea-lion.

According to Martia, his beauty is to that of the seal as that of the Theseus or Antinous to that of an orangoutang. His five senses are extraordinarily acute, even the sense of touch in his webbed fingers and toes; and in addition to these he possesses a sixth, that comes from his keen and unintermittent sense of the magnetic current, which is far stronger in Mars than on the earth, and far more complicated, and more thoroughly understood.

When any object is too delicate and minute to be examined by the sense of touch and sight, the Martian shuts his eyes and puts it against the pit of his stomach, and knows all about it, even its inside.

In the absolute dark, or with his eyes shut, and when he stops his ears, he is more intensely conscious of what immediately surrounds him than at any other time, except that all color-perception ceases; conscious not only of material objects, but of what is passing in his fellow-Martian's mind--and this for an area of many hundreds of cubic yards.

In the course of its evolutions this extraordinary faculty--which exists on earth in a rudimentary state, but only among some birds and fish and insects and in the lower forms of animal life--has developed the Martian mind in a direction very different from ours, since no inner life apart from the rest, no privacy, no concealment is possible except at a distance involving absolute isolation; not even thought is free; yet in some incomprehensible way there is, as a matter of fact, a really greater freedom of thought than is conceivable among ourselves: absolute liberty in absolute obedience to law, a paradox beyond our comprehension.

Their habits are as simple as those we attribute to the cave-dwellers during the prehistoric periods of the earth's existence. But their moral sense is so far in advance of ours that we haven't even a terminology by which to express it.

In comparison, the highest and best of us are monsters of iniquity and egoism, cruelty and corruption; and our planet (a very heaven for warmth and brilliancy and beauty, in spite of earthquakes and cyclones and tornadoes) is a very hell through the creatures that people it--a shambles, a place of torture, a grotesque and impure pandemonium.

These exemplary Martians wear no clothes but the exquisite fur with which nature has endowed them, and which constitutes a part of their immense beauty, according to Martia.

They feed exclusively on edible moss and roots and submarine seaweed, which they know how to grow and prepare and preserve. Except for heavy-winged bat-like birds, and big fish, which they have domesticated and use for their own purposes in an incredible manner (incarnating a portion of themselves and their consciousness at will in their bodies), they have cleared Mars of all useless and harmful and mutually destructive forms of animal life. A sorry fauna, the Martian--even at its best--and a flora beneath contempt, compared to ours.

They are great engineers and excavators, great irrigators, great workers in delicate metal, stone, marble, and precious gems (there is no wood to speak of); great sculptors and decorators of the beautiful caves, so fancifully and so intricately connected, in which they live, and which have taken thousands of years to design and excavate and ventilate and adorn, and which they warm and light up at will in a beautiful manner by means of the tremendous magnetic current.

This richly parti-colored light is part of their mental and moral life in a way it is not in us to apprehend, and has its exact equivalent in sound--and vice versa.

They have no language of words, and do not need it, since they can only be isolated in thought from each other by a distance greater than that which any vocal sound can traverse; but their organs of voice and hearing are far more complex and perfect than ours, and their atmosphere infinitely more conductive of phonal vibrations.

It seems that everything which can be apprehended by the eye or hand is capable of absolute sonorous translation: light, color, texture, shape in its three dimensions, weight, and density. The phonal expression and comprehension of all these are acquired by the Martian baby almost as soon as it knows how to swim or dive, or move upright and erect on dry land or beneath it; and the mechanical translation of such expression by means of wind and wire and sounding texture and curved surface of extraordinary elaboration is the principal business of the Martian life--an art by which all the combined past experience and future aspirations of the race receive the fullest utterance. Here again personal magnetism plays an enormous part.

And it is by means of this long and patiently evolved and highly trained faculty that the race is still developing towards perfection with constant strain and effort--although the planet is far advanced in its decadence and within measurable distance of its unfitness for life of any kind.

All is so evenly and harmoniously balanced, whether above ground or beneath, that existence is full of joy in spite of the tremendous strain of life, in spite also of a dreariness of outlook, on barren nature, which is not to be matched by the most inhospitable regions of the earth; and death is looked upon as the crowning joy of all, although life is prolonged by all the means in their power.

For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development, fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception; and the longer it has lived in Mars the better for its eternal life in the future.