The War of the Wenuses | Page 7

greedily of the unfamiliar beverage, and feeling refreshed and thoroughly kinetic, settled down once more to an exhaustive exposure of the dishonest off-handedness of the external Examiners at University College. I may add that I had taken the bread-knife (by Mappin) from the pantry, as it promised to be useful in the case of unforeseen Clerical emergencies. I should have preferred the meat-chopper with which the curate had been despatched in The War of the Worlds, but it was deposited in the South Kensington Museum along with other mementoes of the Martian invasion. Besides, my wife and I had both become Wegetarians.
The evening was still, and though distracted at times by recollections of the Wenuses, I made good progress with my indictment. Suddenly I was conscious of a pale pink glow which suffused my writing-pad, and I heard a soft but unmistakable thud as of a pinguid body falling in the immediate vicinity.
Taking off my boots, I stole gently down to the scullery and applied the spectroscope to the keyhole. To my mingled amazement and ecstasy, I perceived a large dome-shaped fabric blocking up the entire back garden. Roughly speaking, it seemed to be about the size of a full-grown sperm whale. A faint heaving was perceptible in the mass, and further evidences of vitality were forthcoming in a gentle but pathetic crooning, as of an immature chim?ra booming in the void. The truth flashed upon me in a moment. The Second Crinoline had fallen in my back garden.
My mind was instantly made up. To expose myself unarmed to the fascination of the Wonderful Wisitors would have irreparably prejudiced the best interests of scientific research. My only hope lay in a complete disguise which should enable me to pursue my investigations of the Wenuses with the minimum amount of risk. A student of the humanities would have adopted a different method, but my standpoint has always been dispassionate, anti-sentimental. My feelings towards the Wenuses were, incredible as it may seem, purely Platonic. I recognised their transcendental attractions, but had no desire to succumb to them. Strange as it may seem, the man who succumbs rarely if ever is victorious in the long run. To disguise my sex and identity--for it was a priori almost impossible that the inhabitants of Wenus had never heard of Pozzuoli--would guard me from the jellifying Mash-Glance of the Wenuses. Arrayed in feminine garb I could remain immune to their malignant influences.
With me, to think is to act; so I hastily ran upstairs, shaved off my moustache, donned my wife's bicycle-skirt, threw her sortie de bal round my shoulders, borrowed the cook's Sunday bonnet from the servants' bedroom, and hastened back to my post of observation at the scullery door.
Inserting a pipette through the keyhole and cautiously applying my eye, I saw to my delight that the Crinoline had been elevated on a series of steel rods about six feet high, and that the five Wenuses who had descended in it were partaking of a light but sumptuous repast beneath its iridescent canopy. They were seated round a tripod imbibing a brown beverage from small vessels resembling the half of a hollow sphere, and eating with incredible velocity a quantity of tiny round coloured objects--closely related, as I subsequently had occasion to ascertain, to the Bellaria angelica,--which they raised to their mouths with astonishing and unerring aim in the complex Handling-Machines, or Tenticklers, which form part of their wonderful organism.
Belonging as they undoubtedly do to the order of the Tunicates, their exquisitely appropriate and elegant costume may be safely allowed to speak for itself. It is enough, however, to note the curious fact that there are no buttons in Wenus, and that their mechanical system is remarkable, incredible as it may seem, for having developed the eye to the rarest point of perfection while dispensing entirely with the hook. The bare idea of this is no doubt terribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think we should remember how indescribably repulsive our sartorial habits must seem to an intelligent armadillo.
Of the peculiar coralline tint of the Wenuses' complexion, I think I have already spoken. That it was developed by their indulgence in the Red Weed has been, I think, satisfactorily proved by the researches of Dr. Moreau, who also shows that the visual range of their eyes was much the same as ours, except that blue and yellow were alike to them. Moreau established this by a very pretty experiment with a Yellow Book and a Blue Book, each of which elicited exactly the same remark, a curious hooting sound, strangely resembling the ut de poitrine of one of Professor Garner's gorillas.
After concluding their repast, the Wenuses, still unaware of my patient scrutiny, extracted, with the aid of their glittering tintackles, a large