Tales Before Narnia

by Douglas A. Anderson

  “Were there any people in that country?” enquired Tommy.

  The traveller paused to reflect for a moment; then he nodded and said:

  “Yes; but of course wherever there are people there are troubles. You couldn’t expect all the people in the Blue Country to get on with each other very well. Naturally there was a crack regiment called the Prussian Blues. Unfortunately there was also a very energetic semi-naval brigade called French Ultramarines. You can imagine the consequence.” He paused again for a moment and then said: “I met one person who made rather an impression on me. I came upon him in a place of great gardens shaped in a crescent like the moon, and in the centre above a fringe of bluegum trees there rose a great blue lustrous dome, like the Mosque of Omar. And I heard a great and terrible voice that seemed to toss the trees to and fro; and there came out between them a tremendously tall man, with a crown of huge sapphires round his turban; and his beard was quite blue. I need not explain that he was Bluebeard.”

  “You must have been frightened,” said the little boy.

  “At first perhaps,” replied the stranger, “but I came to the conclusion that Bluebeard is not so black—or perhaps so blue—as he is painted. I had a little confidential talk with him, and really there was something to be said on his side of the case. Living where he did, he naturally married wives who were all blue-stockings.”

  “What are blue-stockings?” asked Tommy.

  “Naturally you don’t know,” replied the other. “If you did, you would sympathise more with Bluebeard. They were ladies who were always reading books. They even read them aloud.”

  “What sort of books were they?”

  “Blue-books, of course,” replied the traveller. “They are the only kind of book allowed there. That is why I decided to leave. With the assistance of my friend the Wizard I obtained a passport to cross the frontier, which was a very vague and shadowy one, like the fine shade between two tints of the rainbow. I only felt that I was passing over peacock-coloured seas and meadows and the world was growing greener and greener till I knew I was in a Green Country. You would think that was more restful, and so it was, up to a point. The point was when I met the celebrated Green Man, who has given his name for so many excellent public houses. And then there is always a certain amount of limitation in the work and trade of these beautiful harmonious landscapes. Have you ever lived in a country where all the people were green-grocers? I think not. After all, I asked myself, why should all grocers be green? I felt myself longing to look at a yellow grocer. I saw rise up before me the glowing image of a red grocer. It was just about this time that I floated insensibly into the Yellow Country; but I did not stay there very long. At first it was very splendid; a radiant scene of sunflowers and golden crowns; but I soon found it was almost entirely filled with Yellow Fever and the Yellow Press discussing the Yellow Peril. Of the three I preferred the Yellow Fever; but I could not get any real peace or happiness even out of that. So I faded through an orange haze until I came to the Red Country, and it was there that I really found out the truth of the matter.”

  “What did you find out?” asked Tommy, who was beginning to listen much more attentively.

  “You may have heard,” said the young man, “a very vulgar expression about painting the town red. It is more probable that you have heard the same thought put in a more refined form by a very scholarly poet who wrote about a rose-red city, half as old as time. Well, do you know, it is a curious fact that in a rose-red city you cannot really see any roses. Everything is a great deal too red. Your eyes are tired until it might just as well all be brown. After I had been walking for ten minutes on scarlet grass under a scarlet sky and scarlet trees, I called out in a loud voice, ‘Oh, this is all a mistake.’ And the moment I had said that the whole red vision vanished; and I found myself standing in quite a different sort of place; and opposite me was my old friend the Wizard, whose face and long rolling beard were all one sort of colourless colour like ivory, but his eyes of a colourless blinding brilliance like diamonds.

  “‘Well,’ he said, ‘you don’t seem very easy to please. If you can’t put up with any of these countries, or any of these colours, you shall jolly well make a country of your own.’

  “And then I looked round me at the place to which he had brought me; and a very curious place it was. It lay in great ranges of mountains, in layers of different colours; and it looked something like sunset clouds turned solid and something like those maps that mark geological soils, grown gigantic. And all along the terraces of the hills they were trenched and hollowed into great quarries; and I think I understood without being told that this was the great original place from which all the colours came, like the paint-box of creation. But the most curious thing of all was that right in front of me there was a huge chasm in the hills that opened into sheer blank daylight. At least sometimes I thought it was a blank and sometimes a sort of wall made of frozen light or air and sometimes a sort of tank or tower of clear water; but anyhow the curious thing about it was that if you splashed some of the coloured earths upon it, they remained where you had thrown them, as a bird hangs in the air. And there the Wizard told me, rather impatiently, to make what sort of world I liked for myself, for he was sick of my grumbling at everything.

  “So I set to work very carefully; first blocking in a great deal of blue, because I thought it would throw up a sort of square of white in the middle; and then I thought a fringe of a sort of dead gold would look well along the top of the white; and I spilt some green at the bottom of it. As for red, I had already found out the secret about red. You have to have a very little of it to make a lot of it. So I just made a row of little blobs of bright red on the white just above the green; and as I went on working at the details, I slowly discovered what I was doing; which is what very few people ever discover in this world. I found I had put back, bit by bit, the whole of that picture over there in front of us. I had made that white cottage with the thatch and that summer sky behind it and that green lawn below; and the row of the red flowers just as you see them now. That is how they come to be there. I thought you might be interested to know it.”

  And with that he turned so sharply that Tommy had not time to turn and see him jump over the hedge; for Tommy remained staring at the cottage, with a new look in his eyes.

  THE MAN WHO LIVED BACKWARDS

  by Charles F. Hall

  * * *

  In the preface to The Great Divorce, Lewis wrote: “I must acknowledge my debt to a writer whose name I have forgotten and whom I read several years ago in a highly coloured American magazine of what they call ‘scientifiction’. The unbendable and unbreakable quality of my heavenly matter was suggested to me by him, though he used the fancy for a different and most ingenious purpose. His hero traveled into the past and there very properly found raindrops that would pierce him like bullets and sandwiches that no strength would bite because, of course, nothing in the past can be altered. I, with less originality, but I hope with equal propriety, have transferred this to the eternal. If the writer of that story ever reads these lines I ask him to accept my grateful acknowledgement.”

  Lewis was wrong about the piece appearing in an American magazine. It in fact appeared in a short-lived, highly colored British magazine, Tales of Wonder. The story is “The Man Who Lived Backwards” by Charles F. Hall, and it appeared in issue 3, summer 1938. It was Hall’s first published story, followed only by one other, another time story, “The Time-Drug” in issue 5, winter 1938. After the publication of these two promising stories in the manner of H. G. Wells, Hall disappeared without a trace.

  * * *

  THE DISAPPEARANCE

  The case of Nicolai Rostof was bewildering enough in its confirmed facts, without taking into account his personal narrative. With regard to the latter, the public immediately hailed him as a modern Baron Münchhausen, news reporters as a heaven-sent opportunity for a farcical write-up, and scientists as a maundering lunatic.

  That is where I think
the little man was done a grave injustice. For the Press, seizing on his story as an incredible explanation of an even more incredible situation, wrote it up in the way it always does in such cases—as a huge joke. The public, gulping its morning coffee and bacon, shuffled blindly after the leader-writers’ pipings and started a great big laugh that echoed from Peckham to Kamschatka; and that, of course, made any scientist who might have thought of starting a serious investigation shy clear of the whole affair like a frightened horse.

  I am not a scientist—not in the physics line, at any rate; but I have had twenty years’ experience as a practising psychologist, and I will stake my life on this: Rostof believed every word of his account was true, believed that the whole amazing sequence of events had actually happened to him, no matter what other explanation may be offered.

  If we stop to consider his story logically and dispassionately, together with the known facts, instead of indulging in mere cachinnation, the disquieting thought comes to us that there is no known law which says it could not have happened. You may assert that Rostof cannot prove his story, but at least you can’t disprove it.

  Let us start with the known facts. The beginning (or the end of the affair, whichever way you choose to regard it) had plenty of witnesses.

  Nicolai Rostof, dark, inoffensive and five-foot-six, was physics and chemistry master at Gayling Grammar School. He had no relations in England, but he had two friends, one Hans Schouten, a Dutchman, and the other Harold Matheson, history-master at the Grammar School. These three had a common interest which brought them together at leisure-time in a hut on some waste land on the outskirts of Gayling.

  They were all interested in modern experimental physics, and had got together a rough, but fairly efficient laboratory in which they were trying to duplicate and extend some of Lord Rutherford’s experiments in the transmutation of elements. In connection with this, at the time, they were studying the effect of high-frequency, high-voltage electrical discharges—“miniature lightning flashes of a million volts,” to use Rostof’s words.

  On Tuesday, January 20th, at 3 p.m., Rostof was on the platform of his classroom in the Grammar School taking the third form. He was standing in full view away from his desk; he did not seem in any way unusual in manner or state of mind. There was not the slightest warning that anything out of the ordinary was about to occur. Yet, as he was tapping the blackboard with his pointer, demonstrating some point, something happened to him which startled his politely blank-faced class far more than if he had stood on his head and screamed.

  He disappeared.

  No sound; no flash—nothing…. Only thirty-two round-eyed, open-mouthed boys staring at an empty platform.

  It says much for the impression which the incident made upon them that they sat in silence for fully three minutes before one or two older boys made a tentative search, and finally went for the head-master.

  But the most painstaking scrutiny by a combined force of masters and prefects revealed only one thing: that the science-master had vanished in a split second from Gayling Grammar School.

  The third form meanwhile found its voice and discussed the miracle from every conceivable angle, though the only explanation meeting with almost general agreement came from a golden-haired infant who darkly hinted that the devil had claimed his own.

  To suggest that the whole of these thirty-two witnesses were hypnotised is going a little too far. Besides, the masters were certainly not hypnotised; and as Matheson confided to me when talking over the case afterwards, “Anyone who thinks he can hypnotise those young devils had never had any experience of Gayling Grammar scholars.”

  ROSTOF’S STORY

  As you know, that wasn’t the last that was seen of Rostof on that amazing Tuesday afternoon. For at precisely the same instant that he disappeared from his classroom platform, or as nearly as can be ascertained, he appeared out of the air in the grounds of Mrs. Van der Rorvik’s stately house, approximately a mile and a half away from the Grammar School.

  A minor detail is that he had no slightest vestige of clothing on him.

  The only witness to his coming in this case was the head gardener, a simple-minded man by the name of Curle, although the postman, in response to Curle’s shout, caught sight of him about two minutes afterwards.

  To see a man pop up out of nothingness in the middle of an empty lawn is not exactly a sedative for the nerves. Curle had been looking across the lawn toward the house, presumably turning over in his mind some manner of begonias or seedling stocks, when—flick! There was a naked man, staggering slightly, hair dishevelled, eyes staring wildly, a red scar on the whiteness of his shoulder and blood on his arm.

  The gardener’s natural alarm was increased by Rostof’s first action which was to run towards him shouting the strange words: “Thank God it’s stopped! You’re moving right; you’re moving right!”

  Curle admits frankly that he thought he had to deal with a lunatic, and reached hurriedly for a spade, at the same time calling to the postman whom he had seen passing down the drive. Rostof, however, made no hostile act, but simply kept shaking the gardener’s hand and babbling incoherently. On seeing him at closer quarters, Curle realised that the man was weak and exhausted; he had a two days’ stubble of beard on his cheeks and his eyes were bloodshot.

  With the arrival of the postman, Curle recovered some measure of his wits and took off his coat to drape about Rostof. Then together the two men led him to the doctor’s house, which was fortunately only two doors away. As they went, Curle described the stranger’s sudden appearance to the incredulous postman, as best he could, and both agreed that he must be some mentally deranged person, though the manner of his appearance they could not explain.

  Doctor Seebohm had the intelligence to see that Rostof was suffering from a severe shock and physical exhaustion, administered some restoratives and arranged for him to have two or three days in hospital. Not until then did he listen to Curle, and to Rostof’s incoherent story.

  As luck would have it, a Gayling Guardian reporter who was friendly with Seebohm was on the spot and scented a hot story. He took full notes, and the minute Rostof disappeared into the ambulance, acted swiftly. The result was that the morning papers trumpeted the whole story, although it was not until the next evening that it was connected with the Gayling Grammar School affair.

  Those first accounts of Rostof’s amazing experience were garbled in the extreme, and for the sake of clearness I will set down here, not the first disjointed recital, but the story as Rostof told it to me later, soberly and earnestly. It began with him being in the laboratory on the outskirts of Gayling at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 22nd.

  It was here that the public drew breath and let out its first great whoop of laughter. For on the Wednesday morning when the story appeared, Thursday simply hadn’t been. It was to-morrow; it was the misty future; it was a dream more transient than a bursting bubble; and it smashed Rostof’s reputation as a truthful man at the very start. But try to keep an open mind and listen to his story as he told it.

  For he swore that on Tuesday, he had conducted his class without the slightest untoward incident. On Wednesday he had got up, shaved, breakfasted, gone through a normal school day, witnessed a fire at the Elite cinema at night, gone to bed; and so on again through Thursday until, at that fateful moment of half-past six, he was in the laboratory which he shared with Schouten and Matheson.

  The other two were also there, in the main work-room, getting ready for a discharge which was to take place at seven. Schouten, who had no professional ties, had been there since three p.m., attending to the generators that were building up the charge in the great copper cone which hung four feet above the ground-plate.

  The discharge gap acted very much in the same manner as an ordinary simple spark-circuit works, with certain modifications due to size. A condenser, in which was stored the charge built up by the generators an enormous flat-ribbed inductance, and the gap itself, formed the major parts of the circuit
. The breakdown voltage across the gap was in the neighbourhood of 1,000,000 volts, and when the flash took place the condenser would empty and re-charge some thousands of times per second, in tune with the high-frequency oscillations.

  THE OTHER ROSTOF

  Rostof said that on the Thursday evening he had been in the small cubby-hole adjacent to the main room, where he had some short-wave radio apparatus. He had been listening-in for some twenty minutes, but got only poor results, due to very bad atmospherics, when he became aware that a freak thunderstorm was approaching outside. It was very unusual for the time of year, but there had been a spell of mild weather previously.

  Anyhow, he gave up the radio as a bad job, got up and went into the next room. He had intended to hang his head-phones on their hook, and he pulled the terminals from their sockets for that purpose, but instead of bothering to go to the rack at that moment, kept them on his head and slung the dangling leads over his shoulder.

  He was surprised to find how dark it had grown when he entered the main laboratory, and realised that the storm must be much nearer than he had thought. He crossed toward the discharge gap with the intention of taking a look at the meters, and remembers Schouten making some warning remark about not touching the negative cone; though, of course, he new well enough himself not to touch any of the charged apparatus.

  He went to take a look at the main volt-meter, and to see it behind its mica covering in the poor light he had to lean sideways and peer closely. The strain in the condensers and across the gap would then be roughly 850,000 volts.