In the Days of the Comet

I SAW a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing. He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed and left no light. The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen, a modern touch that prohibited any historical retrospection, and as he finished each sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing pile upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done sheets lay loose, partly covering others that were clipped together into fascicles.

English author Herbert George Wells wrote more than fifty novels and several short stories. He was born on 21 September 1866, in Bromley, Kent, and was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells. Wells married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells in 1891. In 1894 the couple got separated, and he fell in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, with whom he relocated to Woking, Surrey, in May 1895. Wells' greatest collection of work, which was lamented by younger authors he had influenced, was produced before the First World War. Wells passed away in his residence at 13 Hanover Terrace, which had an overlooked view of Regent's Park, in London on August 13, 1946, at the age of 79 due to unidentified causes. Wells was cremated at Golders Green Crematory, and his ashes were scattered into the English Channel at Old Harry Rocks, which is located in Dorset and approximately 3.5 miles from Swanage.