The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (4 page)

“But to my surprise M.
Gyger, M. Venn’s sullen and uncommunicative companion, got out to the left.

“The carriages were
quite open and no obstruction to vision, and I could clearly see M. Gyger walk
up and down the northern track. He was joined by various lords, counts, bishops
and other worthies. I recognized only one of them, a portly man with a damaged
arm and gammy leg. This was William Huskisson, Member of Parliament, who had
been on hand to welcome the Prime Minister into Liverpool that morning.

“Both parties, on both
sides of the carriage, were drawn as if magnetised to the middle coach of the
three, which was the Prime Minister’s. I could see him clearly, that noble
nose, the upright bearing of a soldier! I fancy the heavy drapery around his
carriage rather baffled his hearing — for if not I imagine what transpired next
might have been quite different.

“Since I must describe
the death of a Human Being I will take care to relate what happened in
sequence.

“As I walked with the
Venns, I saw that M. Gyger prompted Mr Huskisson to call to the Prime Minister,
‘Oh, do step down, sir, if only for a minute! The gleam of the rail, the
billowing of the steam — quite the spectacle, sir!’ And so on. I fancy the
Prime Minister would rather have stayed in the comfort of his carriage. But
duty called, and he got up rather stiffly and prepared to descend towards Gyger
and Huskisson — that is, on to the northern rail.

“As he did so M. Gyger’s
face assumed a most curious expression. I saw it once when my father caught a
rascal who habitually skipped around our toll gate: an expression that said, ‘Got
you at last, my lad!’ And I saw M. Gyger step back, quite deliberately,
away
from the rail,
leaving Mr Huskisson standing there to assist the Prime
Minister to the ground. As I say I saw all this quite clearly, but I did not
understand it at the time.

“Suddenly I was
disturbed by a loud but distorted yell: `Get in! Get in!’

“I looked down the
track, back towards Liverpool, and saw to my horror that a second train was
racing down the northern line towards us. The sky-blue flag it carried told me
that the locomotive was none other than the Rocket, Stephenson’s famous victor
of the Rainhill trials. That cry came from the engineer who hailed us with a
speaking-trumpet, even as he struggled to apply his brakes. Though the Venns
and I were quite safe, those who foolishly wandered over the northern track
were in grave danger.

“And the Prime Minister
himself, his hearing perhaps baffled by the drapery, was about to step down
into the Rocket’s path! All this I saw in a second, and then a great fear
clamped down on me and I was unable to move.

“Fortunately M. Venn was
more courageous than I. With a muttered ‘
Parbleu!’
he stepped forward —
but though we were only feet from the carriage, it was too far for him to have
reached the Prime Minister in time. So M. Venn, thinking fast, called out: ‘Wellesley!’

“The Prime Minister
turned at the sound of his name. And M. Venn threw his small son through the
air, into the carriage and straight at the Prime Minister!

“Though he nearly lost
his own balance the Prime Minister twisted and neatly caught the boy in his
great hands, thus saving the child from a painful fall: the Prime Minister had
the reactions of a soldier, despite his age, and an instinct for the safety of
others. With the boy in his arms he stumbled backwards into his ottoman — but
he remained safely in the carriage.

“And then the Rocket
reached our train. I distinctly heard the Prime Minister call out, ‘Huskisson,
for God’s sake get to your place!’ But it was too late.

“Everybody else had
scrambled out of the way, off the track or behind the coaches — everybody but
poor Huskisson, who, hampered by a bad leg and general portliness, fell back on
to the track. The Rocket ran over Huskisson’s leg. I heard a dreadful crunch of
bone.

“When the train had
passed others rushed to help him. George Stephenson quickly took command. One
man began to tie his belt around the damaged leg, which pumped blood. Soon the
patient would be loaded aboard a single carriage behind the Northumbrian, and
hurried off to Manchester. Mr Huskisson, to his credit, did not cry out once,
though I heard him say, ‘I have met my death. God forgive me!’

“As for the Prime
Minister, he clambered down from the carriage at last, but to the right hand
side. The Venns and I still stood where we had been, I trembling with fear and
emotion.

“The Prime Minister
handed the little French boy back to his father. Then he bowed stiffly to M.
Venn. ‘Sir, your quick thinking preserved my life.’

“M. Venn was quite
modest. He ruffled little Julie’s hair. `Perhaps you should thank this small
fellow.’

“‘But I scarce thought
the day would ever come when I of all people owed my life to one French
gentleman, let alone two!’

“M. Venn said, ‘We are
no longer enemies, sir. And I for one would not see a countryman of mine commit
such a craven act as an assassination of this kind.’

“At that the Prime Minister’s formidable eyebrows rose, and I
could see that he was thinking through the events of the hour in quite a
different light — as was I. But of M. Gyger, who had tried to call the Prime
Minister into the path of the advancing Rocket, there was no sign.

“And little Julie Venn, who had that day ridden faster than any
small child in history,
and
saved the life of a Prime Minister, laughed
and laughed and laughed.”

I checked out some of
the details later. The Rocket, perhaps the most famous steam locomotive ever
built, really was running that day, alongside seven of her sister engines,
including the Northumbrian. And there really was a fatal accident, when William
Huskisson MP managed to step out in front of the speeding Rocket.

I’ve come across no
account of a Monsieur Gyger.

Albert couldn’t tell me
why anybody would have wanted to try to kill the Prime Minister that day,
French or otherwise. France and Britain were not, at that time, at war. It made
no sense — until it occurred to me to check who the Prime Minister actually
was.

Grand, aloof,
distrustful of new technology and the working people alike, it was Arthur
Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, victor over Napoleon at Waterloo just
fifteen years earlier — a man who many French people would surely have loved to
see in his grave.

The eye-witness accounts
of the day say nothing about the Prime Minister holding a small boy at the
time. On the other hand, they don’t say he wasn’t. Maybe the incident was
hushed up for the sake of international relations — or simply to save
Wellington embarrassment.

The rest of the day
rather fizzled out for Lily Ord. The mood was subdued after the accident. She rode
on with her companions to Manchester, but the Prime Minister was greeted by
boos and thrown stones; his government wasn’t popular with everybody, and nor
was the new railway, a “triumph of machinery”. Wellington wouldn’t travel by
rail again for thirteen years, and then only because Queen Victoria persuaded
him.

At Manchester Lily said her goodbyes to the “Venns”.

“Little Julie lifted our
spirits. In his mother’s arms he fairly bubbled with excitement, and he rattled
on with a high-speed gabbling, as if bursting to tell the story of his day, but
he was quite incomprehensible!

“M. Venn took my hand. ‘A
memorable day, Miss Ord,’ he said.

“‘Quite so. Sir, you
showed remarkable composure —-’

“For a Frenchman?’ He
smiled. ‘My dear, you must not allow the foolishness at Parkside to colour your
memories of the day. The railway is the thing — the railway! You British with
your relentless desire for trade, trade, trade, will take Mr Stephenson’s
marvellous invention and fling it around the world. When the whole of the globe
is wrapped up like a fly in an iron spider-web, Mr Stephenson’s locomotive will
carry us around the world in a hundred days, or less — ninety, eighty days!’

“Little Julie was
laughing and kicking; he would not be without imagination, I saw. But this was
one flight of fancy too much for me.

“And besides, M. Venn
was holding my hand a little too tightly, his gaze a little too warm. As I
looked into his eyes — just for a second, I confess it! — I saw another world
opening up, a world of possibility every bit as remarkable as a planet girdled
by railway tracks. But I knew it could not come to pass. I gently extricated my
hand.

“I said my
‘Au revoir’
to Mme. Venn and Julie, and looked for Miss —, who was arranging our
passage back to Liverpool . . .”

Albert only had that one
fragment of memoir. I’d like to know what became of Lily Ord, if she was happy
as she raised a family of her own in the Toll Gate Lodge.

And I’d love to know if
her tall tale held even a fragment of truth.

“Isn’t it at least
possible?” Albert said to me, earnest, wheezing slightly.
“Venn, Vairn —
she
wasn’t used to French accents — could she have misheard the name? Lily wrote
all this down long before he became famous, of course. And isn’t it possible
all this affected
him,
young as he was? The mighty steam engines — the
great metal road, the sense of speed, of plummeting into a new future — I’m
only telling you because you’ve started to write your own science fiction,
Stephen. No wonder he made up all those stories of his! And it all started
here.”

Albert died a few years
later. His family, always remote, took away his effects, and the old Toll Gate
Lodge was sold, passing out of the family’s hands after two centuries. I don’t
know what became of Lily’s manuscript.

Albert did leave a few
tokens to friends. I was sent a small envelope that contained a length of
silken streamer, imperial purple. One end was neatly hemmed, but the other had
been cut crudely, as if by a small set of scissors. And when I lifted the
ribbon to my face I could detect faint scents, almost vanished, of soot, and
rosewater.

Verne’s early stories are not immediately identifiable with the
advancement of science. Indeed his very first story, “The Mutineers” (1851) and
his third, “Martin Paz” (1852), were more inspired by the revolutionary zeal
that was flooding Europe. Only “Un voyage en ballon”, also known as “Drama in
the Air”, and probably inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax”, gave
thought to new technology. His fourth story, “Maitre Zacharius” (1854), also
known as “The Watch’s Soul”, saw a change in direction. Whilst Verne was
exploring technology — the desire to make the perfect watch — though in a
historical context,  this story is more fantastic than technological, drawing
more upon the works of Hoffman than on Poe. It concerned a master clock-maker
who, in creating a new mechanism for his watches, believed that he had imbued
the watch with something of himself — his soul. The locals, though, were suspicious
of Zacharius and Verne used the opportunity to consider mankind’s fear of
progress and how we need to embrace new technology not destroy it, a view that
Verne would modify in later years. Here, Brian Stableford revisits the story
and considers its aftermath.

The day had been clear
when Jehan Thun set off from the inn on the outskirts of the city of Geneva,
but the weather in the lake’s environs was far more capricious than the weather
in Paris. He had hoped that the sky might remain blue all day, but it was not
long after noon when grey cloud began spilling through the gaps in the
mountains, swallowing up the peaks and promising a downpour that would soak him
to the skin and render his path treacherous.

There were villages
scattered along the shore of the lake but he had no thought of asking for
shelter there. The time seemed to be long past when one could be confident of
receiving hospitality from any neighbour, and the people in Geneva who had
recognized his surname had looked at him strangely and suspiciously, although
none had actually challenged him. It would have been better, in retrospect, to
avoid Geneva altogether, since the Château of Andernatt was on the French side
of the lake and he could have followed the course of Rhone, but he had hoped to
find the city of his ancestors more welcoming by far than any other he had
passed through on his flight from Paris. At least the many repetitions of his
grandmother’s story had drummed the stages of the route that she and Aubert had
followed into Jehan’s mind: Bessange, Ermance, ford the Dranse; Chesset,
Colombay, Monthey, the hermitage of Notre-Dame-du-Sex.