The Martian: A Novel

by George Du Maurier

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.