December 31, 1880
The ‘Diogenes’ Club
Pall Mall, London
The Times, both London and New York, held that the first year of the new decade had been a stunning success of human endeavor and triumph. Never mind that the decade technically began in 1881, their readers were less interested in such nit-picking than they were in finding reasons to celebrate. The Age of Invention was upon the civilized world and most people were relatively happy to brag about it but reluctant to allow such inventions to disrupt their daily routines.
The headlines had boasted that two Welshmen, Lewin and Llewellyn, had challenged both Prussian and French locomotion engineers to a race around the globe using the latest in propulsion development. It was absurd, and it had already been put off until next year due to technical difficulties faced by all the teams. Next, they would be claiming to be able to fly without gas-filled balloons to hold them aloft. The old men grumbled over and over about the nonsense, while standing outside the Club. Inside, they could neither speak nor make any offending noises as required by Club rules. And any opinion that considered progress a good thing would be offensive.
As with any time of radical changes, there would be some who felt that change was itself an evil.
One man in particular had concluded that humanity in flux was evil, tradition was evil, and the future held only one important concept: that mankind was capable and likely to destroy itself. Good riddance.
He sat quietly of course, wanting no company. His tall stature was renowned. Carefully cut, pale brown hair never crimped or bent under the constant wearing of his tall hat. His skin tended to be very pale since he spent little time out of doors. He was a manicured, tailored salute to the proper English gentleman. His hands had no signs of labor to them. His every movement spoke of British superiority. He never removed his gloves in public and kept his hat nearby as though he might leave at any moment, yet he stayed for hours at a time. He rarely changed in his daily habits, though now he was wearing a black armband.
No one spoke to him and he chose not to speak to any of them; and not only because of rules. Those members, who thought they had escaped him from the ‘other’ club, would glare at him from just over the tops of their papers or glance angrily over their shoulders during their silent card games.
The Diogenes Club was a place of refuge, where the slightest noise could get one expelled. Silence was far more than golden. Serving staff wore cork soled shoes to make certain that their individual footsteps were not disruptive. Members were required to change into slippers to achieve the same effect. Linen gloves were in profuse usage and newspapers carefully handled to avoid that distinctive crumpling noise.
After losing to that man, many of the transferred members had hoped to redeem their reputations as proper gentlemen by joining another well-established, though distinctly odd club. Thanks in no small part to that man, they were poorer in both money and person. Thanks to that man. He’d won the ‘Bet’: they’d lost. They had to abandon their old club for the sake of their reputations, if not their bank accounts. Embarrassment forced them to avoid fashionable restaurants and their tailors had taken to pestering them for unpaid bills for fear that they would not ever be able to pay them. It was beyond intolerable. And that man had followed them to the Diogenes. It was not to be borne, save for one tragic event.
Now they were gloating quietly. And they hated him as much as ever.
He had no use for them. He really had no use for the Diogenes Club either except that he couldn’t bring himself to spend any time at home. His old club had asked him to quietly and quickly resign. Diogenes was picky about three things: social status, money, and the ability to be quiet. He was admirable in all three areas.
And, it was blissfully quiet, but so too would be a grave. He’d spent too much time in the cemetery. He should raze both the old club and his house and any other offending edifice to the ground: burning every effigy of his misery. That would offer some satisfaction.
Those who had lost the bet to him believed themselves to be the very best of humanity, the height of civilized mankind. They were fools, idiots, worthless. But to his mind, they did indeed represent what mankind had become. Cold. Vicious. Greedy. Willfully stupid. If he needed proof, the headline of the Times announced that someone had planted a flag at the top of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as though claiming it for himself. A huge black flag, with a giant gold sun and scattering of stars. No nation had such a flag. As if no one had found that flag planting worthy of notice, the same someone had announced it with a blare of trumpets just in case. The arrogant man who did this was certainly clever if not brilliant, but wasted his genius planting a flag … a flag. Such a man was able to get to the top of the Great Pyramid without notice, without sound, without a trace of footstep or equipment. For a flag?
Was this all that mankind was capable of? Mankind was incapable of evolving as rapidly as the technology. And he had had enough of it all. Mankind was not headed to Hell, it was the Devil and was home already. Mankind needed to disappear into the mists of time, extinct and forgotten.
Thus he sat alone in his club, still dressed in prescribed mourning attire long after a husband’s required period of grief had passed, contemplating how this decade would be the Age of … nothing. The ‘Last’ Age. And that suited him just fine. He continually checked his watch. This was a habit his wife had tried to break him of, and now that she was gone he did it twice as much. It was comforting. There was connection to the flow of life by noting every precise minute and hour.
Looking at the window, blocked by deep velvet fabric closed against the freezing cold, through a small parting between the curtains, he could see the blackened snow falling. Heavy, industrially mutated flakes cast shadows on the window that were too big be hidden from view. Ghostly waves of light and dark fell down the inside of the drapery. This was what mankind provided to the world. Industrial outrages that changed the very nature of London’s weather. So-called advances that caused more damage than they solved. Ugliness: nothing but ugliness wherever humanity interfered.
Yet humanity could be damned lucky and despite its horrific behavior it survived.
Perhaps the Last Age needed assistance? He didn’t believe in the Second Coming of Christ or any of the fairytales of the Apocalypse, but he liked the idea of them.
He would have to change. P. Fogg was a wreck and a relic, unnecessary for the tasks to come. First he’d need to die; certainly as far as anyone was concerned. Then he’d come back in a new guise, one that no one would recognize. He’d have his own Second Coming, but no one would want it, pray for it, or think of it as a gift from God. He quietly set down his paper, looked around the room, checked his watch and bid it a hateful farewell.
The Club Steward found a black armband lying on the floor, just under the reading table, where it had been discarded.