Catherine Wells - A Short Story Collection

By Catherine Wells

Little information survives on Catherine’s life.

She was born Amy Catherine Robbins in 1872.

In about 1892 she was a student in a biology cramming class where the teacher was H G Wells. Though married he was quickly attracted to his student and within a short time they were living together in Woking, Surrey. He then divorced his first wife and married Catherine in October 1895 at St Pancras register office.

In the early years they were poor to the point that they could not afford to start a family. When they did they had two children; Philip in 1901 and Frank two years later.

For much of her life she seemed to pursue other interests, being a mother, a gardener, running much of her husband’s business affairs and this seemed to leave little time for her own literary pursuits. She published little during her lifetime apart from a few poems and some short stories. Indeed her prodigiously talented husband even referred to her as ‘Jane’ and soon all around her did too, her writing life seemingly in another personality far, far away.

By the mid 20’s she was ill with cancer and succumbed to its advance in 1927.

Wells, although wayward and promiscuous during much of the marriage, now attempted to put his wife’s literary merits into book form and published ‘The Book of Catherine Wells’, a collection of short stories and poems.

Index of Contents

May Afternoon,

In A Walled Garden,

The Ghost,

Fear,

The Oculist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miniature Masterpieces
• Release date: Jun 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803549545

Book preview

Catherine Wells - A Short Story Collection

An Introduction

Little information survives on Catherine’s life.

She was born Amy Catherine Robbins in 1872.

In about 1892 she was a student in a biology cramming class where the teacher was H G Wells.  Though married he was quickly attracted to his student and within a short time they were living together in Woking, Surrey.  He then divorced his first wife and married Catherine in October 1895 at St Pancras register office.

In the early years they were poor to the point that they could not afford to start a family.  When they did they had two children; Philip in 1901 and Frank two years later.

For much of her life she seemed to pursue other interests, being a mother, a gardener, running much of her husband’s business affairs and this seemed to leave little time for her own literary pursuits.  She published little during her lifetime apart from a few poems and some short stories.  Indeed her prodigiously talented husband even referred to her as ‘Jane’ and soon all around her did too, her writing life seemingly in another personality far, far away. 

By the mid 20’s she was ill with cancer and succumbed to its advance in 1927.

Wells, although wayward and promiscuous during much of the marriage, now attempted to put his wife’s literary merits into book form and published ‘The Book of Catherine Wells’, a collection of short stories and poems.   

Index of Contents

May Afternoon

In A Walled Garden

The Ghost

Fear

The Oculist

May Afternoon

A very personable young man in the flannels and straw hat that responded to the sudden summer heat, sat by one of the outer tea-tables in Kensington Gardens, his tea, ordered some half-hour since, neglected and bitter by his side. The tables had been crowded that afternoon, gaily dressed people had frothed up against them out of the Park, and broken into bright little groups that chattered and chinked cups and laughed, and presently passed away again into the outer greenery. Crawshay sat almost alone at last, with the gravel round his feet scored and criss-crossed by the idle patterns he had drawn and redrawn with his cane. Just in front of him he had jabbed some deeper holes.

Spring had come late; that year she had been sulky, the jade! and reluctant. Now at last she had been given notice to quit by the young summer and had rushed forth, hot and impetuous, spilling out flowers with prodigal hurry in the park, blistering the new green paint on the chairs with fierce sunshine, and turning the very sparrows silly with the sudden intoxication that she poured into the air. Crawshay had come into the park in search of some quiet corner where he supposed he might sit and think out his peculiar trouble. And before he noticed it, his feet had taken their habitual way northward in a direct line for Mrs. Lacey’s house, he had discovered himself all at once almost within sight of her terrace, had damned impatiently, and turned back to face a direction that was as empty of interest for him as a drained cup.

His acquaintance with the Laceys had begun when at eighteen he had been left to Lacey’s guardianship by the death of both his parents. His father and mother were elderly people who had spent their last ten years in the irresolute pursuit of sunshine about southern Europe, keeping him with them in his school holidays; and so it happened that at their death the Laceys were almost his only friends in England. On Lacey’s advice he had gone to Oxford, and he spent his vacations with parties of other young men, or at the Laceys’ house. He felt shy of both the Laceys then, although Mrs. Lacey was much younger than her husband, barely thirty at that time, and warmly kind and friendly. But Crawshay was of opinion that Lacey had out-grown any charm his father had found in him. He was an authoritative museum official, a heavy pipe-smoker, and tacitly autocratic in his home, with one of those richly inexpressive stammering minds that contain their learning like a shut

box. The most wonderful treasures of knowledge were known to be hoarded there, but the lock was rusty and the key seemed lost, and so in the end it really mattered very little if they were.

The lock, it is true, occasionally creaked a little. It was understood, for instance, that out of the continuum of Lacey’s slippered evenings there would some day exude a book. To the adolescent youth he had seemed as dull and unimportant as most middle-aged men.

But when he was one and twenty Crawshay had discovered that in one direction at any rate there was a streak of the adventurous in Lacey, and that he had been an astonishingly unconventional trustee. There were explanations, an encounter so uncomfortable to Crawshay that it ended to his own surprise in his practically