The H.G. Wells Reader (5 page)

“Put on my coat on this hot day! Why? Because we might meet Mrs. Jabber. My dear, Mrs. Jabber is not a draught. But why should I wear a coat on a hot day because of Mrs.—? Oh!
Very
well.”

In “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist,” one of his very first published stories, Wells announces himself in simple and elegant terms: the Taxidermist, like the poor young man with a scientific degree but no profession, is a marginal and disreputable figure. He is an interloper, barely respectable in his shabby shop, his greasy clothes, and his leering, comic drunkenness. His pure joy in artistic fraud is at a deeper level a reveling in the success of his gamble about acceptance. He calls into question the legitimacy of the field he works in:
“one of the genuine
great auks
was made by me.”
He also represents a frightening picture of poverty and self-delusion, a future that, while it has its secret victories, is of depressing inconsequence. As one can tell from the Taxidermist's response to untranscribed questions near the beginning, the outrageous and offensive claims about stuffing humans clearly alarm Bellows, the interviewer. Here Wells, while placing the Taxidermist outside all social decorum, at the same time intimates his own uneasiness about the morals and motives of such an art. It is a disturbing little vignette, full of dangerous possibilities and ambiguous to the very bottom
.

Here are some of the secrets of taxidermy. They were told me by the Taxidermist in a mood of elation. He told me them in the time between the first glass of whisky and the fourth, when a man is no longer cautious and yet not drunk. We sat in his den together; his library it was, his sitting and his eating-room—separated by a bead curtain, so far as the sense of sight went, from the noisome den where he plied his trade.

He sat on a deck chair, and when he was not tapping refractory bits of coal with them, he kept his feet—on which he wore, after the manner of sandals, the holy relics of a pair of carpet slippers—out of the way upon the mantelpiece, among the glass eyes. And his trousers, by-the-by—though they have nothing to do with his triumphs—were a most horrible yellow plaid, such as they made when our fathers wore side-whiskers and there were crinolines in the land. Further, his hair was black, his face rosy, and his eye a fiery brown; and his coat was chiefly of grease upon a basis of velveteen. And his pipe had a bowl of china showing the Graces, and his spectacles were always askew, the left eye glaring naked, at you, small and penetrating; the right, seen through a glass darkly, magnified and mild. Thus his discourse ran: “There never was a man who could stuff like me, Bellows, never. I have stuffed elephants and I have stuffed moths, and the things have looked all the livelier and better for it. And I have stuffed human beings—chiefly amateur ornithologists. But I stuffed a nigger once.

“No, there is no law against it. I made him with all his fingers out, and used him as a hat-rack, but that fool Homersby got up a quarrel with him late one night and
spoilt him. That was before your time. It is hard to get skins, or I would have another.

“Unpleasant? I don't see it. Seems to me taxidermy is a promising third course to burial or cremation. You could keep all your dear ones by you. Bric-a-brac of that sort stuck about the house would be as good as most company and much less expensive. You might have them fitted up with clockwork to do things.

“Of course they would have to be varnished, but they need not shine more than lots of people do naturally. Old Manningtree's bald head . . . Anyhow, you could talk to them without interruption. Even aunts. There is a great future before taxidermy, depend upon it. There is fossils again . . .”

He suddenly became silent.

“No, I don't think I ought to tell you that.” He sucked at his pipe thoughtfully. “Thanks, yes. Not too much water.

“Of course, what I tell you now will go no further. You know I have made some dodos and a great auk? No! evidently you are an amateur at taxidermy. My dear fellow, half the great auks in the world are about as genuine as the handkerchief of Saint Veronica, as the Holy Coat of Treves. We make 'em of grebes' feathers and the like. And the great auk's eggs too!”

“Good heavens!”

“Yes, we make them out of fine porcelain. I tell you it is worth while. They fetch—one fetched £300 only the other day. That one was really genuine, I believe, but of course one is never certain. It is very fine work, and afterwards you have to get them dusty, for no one who owns one of these precious eggs has ever the temerity to clean the thing. That's the beauty of the business. Even if they suspect an egg they do not like to examine it too closely. It's such brittle capital at the best.

“You did not know that taxidermy rose to heights like that. My boy, it has risen higher. I have rivaled the hands of Nature herself. One of the
genuine
great auks”—his voice fell to a whisper—”one of the
genuine
great auks
was made by me
.”

“No. You must study ornithology, and find out which it is yourself. And what is more, I have been approached by a syndicate of dealers to stock one of the unexplored skerries to the north of Iceland with specimens. I may—some day. But I have another little thing in hand just now. Ever heard of the dinornis?

“It is one of those big birds recently extinct in New Zealand. ‘Moa' is its common name, so called because extinct: there is no moa now. See? Well, they have got bones of it, and from some of the marshes even feathers and dried bits of skin. Now, I am going to—well, there is no need to make any bones about it—going to
forge
a complete stuffed moa. I know a chap out there who will pretend to make the find in a kind of antiseptic swamp, and say he stuffed it at once, as it threatened to fall to pieces. The feathers are peculiar, but I have got simply lovely way of dodging up singed bits of ostrich plume. Yes, that is the new smell you noticed. They can only discover the fraud with a microscope, and they will hardly care to pull a nice specimen to bits for that.

“In this way, you see, I give my little push in the advancement of science.”

“But all this is merely imitating Nature. I have done more than that in my time. I have—beaten her.”

He took his feet down from the mantel-board, and leant over confidentially towards me. “I have
created
birds,” he said in a low voice. “
New
birds. Improvements. Like no birds that was ever seen before.”

He resumed his attitude during an impressive silence.

“Enrich the universe;
rath
-er. Some of the birds I made were new kinds of humming birds, and very beautiful little things, but some of them were simply rum. The rummest, I think, was the
Anomalopteryx Jejuna. Jejenus-a-um
—empty—so called because there was really nothing in it; a thoroughly empty bird—except for stuffing. Old Javvers has the things now, and I suppose he is almost as proud of it as I am. It is a masterpiece, Bellows. It has all the silly clumsiness of your pelican, all the solemn want of dignity of your parrot, all the gaunt ungainliness of a flamingo, with all the extravagant chromatic conflict of a mandarin duck.
Such
a bird. I made it out of the skeletons of a stork and a toucan and a job lot of feathers. Taxidermy of that kind is just pure joy, Bellows, to a real artist in the art.

“How did I come to make it? Simple enough, as all great inventions are. One of those young genii who write us Science Notes in the papers got hold of a German pamphlet about the birds of New Zealand, and translated some of it by means of a dictionary and his mother-wit—he must have been one of a very large family with a small mother—and he got mixed between the living apteryx and the extinct anomalopteryx; talked about a bird five feet high, living in the jungles of the North Island, rare, shy, specimens difficult to obtain, and so on. Javvers, who even for a collector, is a miraculously ignorant man, read these paragraphs, and swore he would have the thing at an price. Raided the dealers with enquiries. It shows what a man can do by persistence—will-power. Here was a bird collector swearing he would have a specimen of a bird that did not exist, that never existed, and which for very shame of its own profane ungainliness, probably would not exist now if it could help itself. And he got it.
He got it
.

“Have some more whisky, Bellow?” said the Taxidermist, rousing himself from a transient contemplation of the mysteries of will-power and the collecting turn of mind. And, replenished, he proceeded to tell me of how he concocted a most attractive mermaid, and how an itinerant preacher, who could not get an audience because of it, smashed it because it was idolatry, or worse, at Buslem Wakes. But as the conversation of all the parties to this transaction, creator, would-be preserver, and destroyer, was uniformly unfit for publication, this cheerful incident must still remain unprinted.

The reader unacquainted with the dark ways of the collector may perhaps be incline to doubt my taxidermist, but so far as great auks' eggs, and the bogus stuffed birds are concerned, I find that he has the confirmation of distinguished ornithological writers. And the note about the New Zealand bird certainly appeared in a morning paper of unblemished reputation, for the Taxidermist keeps a copy and has shown it to me.

See the introduction for an extended analysis of “Æpornis Island.” Putting it next to “Triumphs of a Taxidermist,” we can see further Wells's interest in the nearness of science and deception. He cannot help but admire the scam even as he teaches us to suspect it. Ornithology in particular—so important to Darwin's invention of the theory of evolution and yet so traditionally the province of amateurs—is prone to such deceptions
.

The man with the scarred face leant over the table and looked at my bundle.

“Orchids?” he asked.

“A few,” I said.

“Cypripediums,” he said.

“Chiefly,” said I.

“Anything new? I thought not. I did these islands twenty-five–twenty-seven years ago. If you find anything new here—well, it's brand new. I didn't leave much.”

“I'm not a collector,” said I.

“I was young then,” he went on. “Lord! How I used to fly round.” He seemed to take my measure. “I was in the East Indies two years and in Brazil seven. Then I went to Madagascar.”

“I know a few explorers by name,” I said, anticipating a yarn. “Whom did you collect for?”

“Dawsons'. I wonder if you've heard the name of Butcher ever?”

“Butcher—Butcher?” The name seemed vaguely present in my memory; then I recalled
Butcher v. Dawson
. “Why!” said I, “you are the man who sued them for four years' salary—got cast away on a desert island. . . .”

“Your servant,” said the man with the scar, bowing. “Funny case, wasn't it? Here was me, making a little fortune on that island, doing nothing for it neither, and them quite unable to give me notice. It often used to amuse me thinking over it while I was there. I did calculations of it—big—all over the blessed atoll in ornamental figuring.”

“How did it happen?” said I. “I don't rightly remember the case.”

“Well. . . . You've heard of the Æpyornis?”

“Rather; Andrews was telling me of a new species he was working on only a month or so ago. Just before I sailed. They've got a thigh-bone, it seems, nearly a yard long. Monster the thing must have been!”

“I believe you,” said the man with the scar. “It
was
a monster. Sindbad's roc was just a legend of 'em. But when did they find these bones?”

“Three or four years ago—'91, I fancy. Why?”

“Why? Because I found them—Lord!—it's nearly twenty years ago. If Dawsons' hadn't been silly about that salary they might have made a perfect ring in 'em. . . . I couldn't help the infernal boat going adrift.”

He paused. “I suppose it's the same place. A kind of swamp about ninety miles north of Antananarivo. Do you happen to know? You have to go to it along the coast by boats. You don't happen to remember, perhaps?”

“I don't. I fancy Andrews said something about a swamp.”

“It must be the same. It's on the east coast. And somehow there's something in the water that keeps things from decaying. Like creosote it smells. It reminded me of Trinidad. Did they get any more eggs? Some of the eggs I found were a foot and a half long. The swamp goes circling round, you know, and cuts off this bit. It's mostly salt, too. Well . . . What a time I had of it! I found the things quite by accident. We went for eggs, me and two native chaps, in one of those rum canoes all tied together, and found the bones at the same time. We had a tent and provisions for four days, and we pitched on one of the firmer places. To think of it brings that odd tarry smell back even now. It's funny work. You go probing into the mud with iron rods, you know. Usually the egg gets smashed. I wonder how long it is since these Æpyornises really lived. The missionaries say the native have legends about when they were alive, but I never heard any such stories myself. But certainly those eggs we got were as fresh as if they had been new laid. Fresh! Carrying them down to the boat one of my nigger chaps dropped one on a rock and it smashed. How I lamed in on the beggar! But sweet it was, as if it was new laid, not even smelly, and its mother dead these four hundred years, perhaps. Said a centipede had bit him. However, I'm getting off the straight with the story. It had taken us all day to dig into the slush and get these eggs out unbroken, and we were all covered with beastly black mud, and naturally I was cross. So far as I knew they were the only eggs that have ever been got out not even cracked. I went afterwards to see the ones they have at the Natural History Museum in London; all of them were cracked and just stuck together like a mosaic, and bits missing. Mine were perfect, and I meant to blow them when I got back. Naturally I was annoyed at the silly duffer dropping three hours' work just on account of a centipede. I hit him about rather.”