by Anthology
They approached us, and bowed, hands folded, as Chinamen do. The taller said, “Ik wood stonden in yore grace.”
I blinked curtsied to cover my confusion.
Mary said, “Do you understand them? Is it not German?”
I replied, “I think it may be Dutch, for it is not German, though it sounds somewhat alike. I shall try to speak with them in German.” Whereupon I directed myself to the visitors saying, “Wilkommen meinen herren. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
The faeries looked at each other, and the smaller one said, “We knowen not thys spekyng.”
I turned to Mary. “Of all things most strange! I do believe they are talking Middle English!” In truth they were. As you know, I am a poor scholar, but we contrived a halting conversation. I said, “Ik clepe Sophie,” and they told me they were Zondliss (the larger) and Mica.
They said they were not faeries, but men, “even as yourselne,” from the far distant future, and they were journeying in time! They were most astonished to hear this was the year of our Lord 1849, for they had believed themselves in 1343 and were in great fear of being burned as witches. It took no little time to enlighten them, and I suspect there may have been some confusion with the Mohammedan system of counting years. They claim to come from over a million years in the future. I could scarcely credit it, but as Mary observed, “Consider how slowly the careful breeding of cattle does change their form. If these are indeed men, it would take many, many centuries for them to change so.”
“True,” I said. “And it seems unlikely that men will fly within a thousand years, much less travel in time.”
We were interrupted by the larger traveller bowing again. “Please your Ladyshyp, wir be enfamyned.” Seeing my lack of comprehension he continued, “Wir be soure dystressed deyen for lak of vitaille.”
“Oh Mary,” I cried, “they are starving!”
Mary hastened home and returned with bread cheese milk, but they will need far greater provision for a journey, especially should they lose their way again.
In short we are to meet them again on the morrow, bearing food for them. They must indeed have been sore afraid not to ask for succour here, there, yonder. Oh Joanne, shall I ask them for passage? My case is desperate, and we could not be followed, but how should I live in the future? And how should Julian? Besides, they are lost by five hundred years and their navigation is clearly not to be trusted.
Your loving sister,
Sophie
Windscour Farm,
Otley,
16th July, 1849, pre-dawn
My Dear Joanne,
I have lain awake most of the night, but I am finally decided. My situation is more desperate than even you know. I am no longer fleeing George, but rather justice, or at least the law of England.
Dearest Joanne, prepare yourself for a shock. George has been dead for nine days.
The day he fractured Julian’s skull he returned home after my letter was posted, announced he must travel for business, ordering Lucy to pack all Julian’s clothes; his own, but none of mine. He drank a vast deal of port over dinner, slurring his words before we had finished the fish course, and I was alarmed for the consequences for myself. In spite of this, when we retired for the night, I sought an explanation. George said he was “blue-devilled with my fawning on the child,” and the only way I would give him my “proper attention” was by sending our child away. He had found someone who would foster him cheaply enough, would leave Julian there on the first stage of his journey.
You may imagine my emotions. My heart’s Darling hidden away as though he were born out of wedlock! Do you know how many children so fostered do not survive to their fifth birthday? So many foster parents take the money and spend it on gin rather than food for their charges. I begged. I wept. Nothing availed. He knocked me to the floor.
And then I screamed as George forcibly asserted his marital rights over my body. I was still weeping when he fell into a drunken slumber. I still do not clearly recall what followed. I lost my wits entirely, or perhaps I finally found them. At all events, I untied George’s cravat and retied it in a noose which I then tightened around his neck, with fatal result. He never even awoke.
I remember only too clearly my struggle to get his mortal remains into his travelling trunk. In the morning I feigned normality, telling the servants that George had departed already, and ordered his trunk sent on. I invented the address, and hoped it would be quite some time before anyone opened it. I packed whatever jewellery and money I could find in haste, and we came here, a normal-seeming journey. My first plan was to flee from here to Bavaria, where I might hope to earn my bread by teaching English. Alas, we should be conspicuous, and I fear the law must eventually discover us. For myself, I no longer care, but I took comfort that Julian might be somewhat older by the time I was hanged.
My plan has changed. I have spent hours contriving an account of my troubles (but not my crime!) in Middle English, and I shall beg the time travellers to take me to the end of the millennium. The world should not have become unrecognizable in that time—men should scarcely be flying—but I shall escape.
You would, I am sure, urge caution, and you would be right. What do I know of these strange folk beyond their own account? They are clearly not to be trusted to find the year 2000 or any other. It grieves me to leave you alone. And yet what else am I to do? I pray that the strange woman in Lincoln was right, and that all will indeed turn out for the best. Certainly, I shall need courage, as she said.
I shall leave this letter in my room. If you receive it, you will know that I could not return to destroy it, and therefore I have gone to the future. Please burn this missive.
Good-bye forever, my heart.
Your loving sister,
Sophie
4 Rue des anemones,
Nantes, France
18th July, 1849
My Dear Joanne,
How shall I begin to explain? I fear my last letter will have distressed you greatly. Although you will receive my letters only two days apart, a score of years has passed for me. But I am well, and I am now forty-eight years old. If you believe I should pay for my crime, I will understand, but I misdoubt that you will find any to believe your tale.
You will have gathered from receiving it that the time travellers did indeed agree to convey us, but not to the destination I anticipated, nor in the manner.
Naturally my Middle English greatly improved with constant use. I shall tell you the whole as I finally understood it, and leave out the many misunderstandings misconceptions under which I long laboured.
Mica and Zondliss are historians, attempting to research witchcraft. They had a companion, Bordan, who sadly succumbed to the Black Death. I think Bordan must have been the practical member of the crew. Zondliss is pleasant natured hopelessly incompetent. Mica is sweetness itself and utterly impractical—which accounts for their unplanned detour to 1849. Do you remember Mr Cartlight, who knew everything about Babylon but could never open his own boiled egg without assistance, nor find his handkerchief, nor his spectacles? Mica is cut from the same cloth. They have a wondrous device aboard their time carriage which produces food from wood shavings. This had a cord ending in a curious six-pronged contrivance. Beside it on the wall was a curious six-hollowed depression. I fitted the prongs into the hollows and the contraption immediately began producing roast beef with potatoes carrots. Since nobody dared to adjust it, we continued with roast beef until Julian indulged his curiosity while none of us observed him, whereupon every meal became poached salmon with spinach. You may not credit it, but one can tire of such luxury, especially for breakfast.
Zondliss endeavoured to bring us to the year he Mica left, with remarkable incompetence. I was sent to inquire into the date on a number of occasions. You may imagine the reaction I obtained by approaching utter strangers in what they considered Carnival dress, and inquiring, please what year was this? Consequently I once spent a whole shilling on a newspaper to discover the year was 1970
. I still preserve the newspaper and it delights me. Flying machines horseless carriages men walking on the moon! Truly Joanne, the moon! And yet perhaps more wonderful to me was the situation of women: divorcing husbands, debating in Parliament and campaigning for equal pay with men. I seriously considered staying, but I could scarcely repay Mica Zondliss with abandonment.
At length we arrived in the far future where everyone looked like Mica Zondliss. I was confounded to discover that we were still one thousand years from Mica’s time, but then she obtained a competent coachman, and thus we reached her home year.
I declare my entire sojourn was one long perplexity bewilderment. I was sorely puzzled to distinguish one future-dweller from another, and they arrived with a “pop” from thin air and departed the same way. It gave me palpitations every time, although Julian chuckled with glee. We visited cities floating in the air, and an utterly vast hollow sphere around a sun. I cannot begin to make you understand the strangeness of it all, for I could not begin to understand it myself.
It was obvious that we could not live in such a time. Even had I learned to fit in, where would Julian find a wife? And yet, if we were returned to 1849 I should be hanged, and then what would become of Julian? Finally the notion occurred to me to return to before George’s murder, when there should be no hue cry. Accordingly I told them I came from 1829, and to 1829 they returned me. I pawned my jewels, and obtained a position as governess to a French family who originally came to Otley to escape Bonaparte. You do not need me to tell you of the trials of a governess’s life, being only too familiar with them yourself. The family regarded me as a servant, and the servants regarded me as a spy for the family.
And then the master’s younger brother visited. Truly Joanne, I did not set out to ensnare him. Having married once under the influence of Mammon, I should scarcely rush to repeat the experiment! I merely thought (and still think) François to be the most kind charming agreeable man I had ever met. It seemed extraordinary to me that he was unwed, notwithstanding his shyness. When at last I confided to him some of the truth of my first marriage, he declared that God gave men muscles to protect their families, and not to bully them. On another occasion he opined that a woman’s talents were no less than a man’s, merely distinct. Men have muscles while women have clever, sensitive fingers; men are able to concentrate on one thing with great energy, while a woman can attend to many things at once. Thus man woman were complete when together. That is how he makes me feel, Joanne, complete.
And so I became Madame Verne, at the cost of no small scandal, and we are still happy and complete together. We had another four children and all are well. At François’s suggestion, we changed Julian’s name to the French equivalent, Jules, to save him from cruel comments when he should begin his schooling.
I wrote my younger self a letter, warning against marriage to George, but I forbore to post it. If I never married George, what should become of Jules? Would he cease to exist? I could not bear to venture such a circumstance. I shudder to think what paradoxes I may have caused by my untruths already. Yet I have just returned from Lincoln where I talked to my younger self as I entered the coach. I remembered how the words gave a glimmer of hope in my darkest days, and I could not forbear.
Jules, of course, has no memory of his natural father, nor of our extraordinary adventures. How could he, at those tender years? And yet he writes the most extraordinary novels of the future.
Your loving sister,
Sophie
SECOND CHANCES
Jack Finney
I can’t tell you, I know, how I got to a time and place no one else in the world even remembers. But maybe I can tell you how I felt the morning I stood in an old barn off the county road, staring down at what was to take me there.
I paid out seventy-five dollars I’d worked hard for after classes last semester—I’m a senior at Poynt College in Hylesburg, Illinois, my home town—and the middle-aged farmer took it silently, watching me shrewdly, knowing I must be out of my mind. Then I stood looking down at the smashed, rusty, rat-gnawed, dust-covered, old wreck of an automobile lying on the wood floor where it had been hauled and dumped thirty-three years before—and that now belonged to me. And if you can remember the moment, whenever it was, when you finally got something you wanted so badly you dreamed about it—then maybe I’ve told you how I felt staring at the dusty mass of junk that was a genuine Jordan Playboy.
You’ve never heard of a Jordan Playboy, if you’re younger than forty, unless you’re like I am; one of those people who’d rather own a 1926 Mercer convertible sedan, or a 1931 Packard touring car, or a ’24 Wills Sainte Claire, or a ’31 air-cooled Franklin convertible—or a Jordan Playboy—then the newest, two-toned, ’56 model made; I was actually half sick with excitement.
And the excitement lasted; it took me four months to restore that car, and that’s fast. I went to classes till school ended for the summer, then I worked, clerking at J. C. Penney’s; and I had dates, saw an occasional movie, ate and slept. But all I really did—all that counted—was work on that car; from six to eight every morning, for half an hour at lunchtime, and from the moment I got home, most nights, till I stumbled to bed, worn out.
My folks live in the big old house my dad was born in; there’s a barn off at the back of the lot, and I’ve got a chain hoist in there, a workbench, and a full set of mechanic’s tools. I built hot rods there for three years, one after another; those charcoal-black mongrels with the rear ends up in the air. But I’m through with hot rods; I’ll leave those to the high-school set. I’m twenty years old now, and I’ve been living for the day when I could soak loose the body bolts with liniment, hoist the body aside, and start restoring my own classic. That’s what they’re called; those certain models of certain cars of certain years which have something that’s lasted, something today’s cars don’t have for us, and something worth bringing back.
But you don’t restore a classic by throwing in a new motor, hammering out the dents, replacing missing parts with anything handy, and painting it chartreuse. “Restore” means what it says, or ought to. My Jordan had been struck by a train, the man who sold it to me said—just grazed, but that was enough to flip it over, tumbling it across a field, and the thing was a wreck; the people in it were killed. So the right rear wheel and the spare were hopeless wads of wire spokes and twisted rims, and the body was caved in, with the metal actually split in places. The motor was a mess, though the block was sound. The upholstery was rat-gnawed, and almost gone. All the nickel plating was rusted and flaking off. And exterior parts were gone; nothing but screw holes to show they’d been there. But three of the wheels were intact, or almost, and none of the body was missing.
What you do is write letters, advertise in the magazines people like me read, ask around, prowl garages, junk heaps and barns, and you trade, and you bargain, and one way or another get together the parts you need. I traded a Winton name plate and hub caps, plus a Saxon hood, to a man in Wichita, Kansas, for two Playboy wheels, and they arrived crated in a wooden box—rusty, and some of the spokes bent and loose, but I could fix that. I bought my Jordan running-board mats and spare-wheel mount from a man in New Jersey. I bought two valve pushrods, and had the rest precision-made precisely like the others. And—well, I restored that car, that’s all.
The body shell, every dent and bump gone, every tear welded and burnished down, I painted a deep green, precisely matching what was left of the old paint before I sanded it off. Door handles, windshield rim, and every other nickel-plated part, were restored, re-nickeled, and replaced. I wrote eleven letters to leather supply houses all over the country, enclosing sample swatches of the cracked old upholstery before I found a place that could match it. Then I paid a hundred and twelve dollars to have my Playboy reupholstered, supplying old photographs to show just how it should be done. And at eight ten one Saturday evening in July, I finally finished; my last missing part, a Jordan radiator cap, for which I’d traded a Duesenberg floor mat, had come
from the nickel plater’s that afternoon. Just for the fun of it, I put the old plates back on then; Illinois license 11,206, for 1923. And even
the original ignition key, in its old leather case—oiled and worked supple again—was back where I’d found it, and now I switched it on, advanced the throttle and spark, got out with the crank, and started it up. And thirty-three years after it had bounced, rolled and crashed off a grade crossing, that Jordan Playboy was alive again.
I had a date, and knew I ought to get dressed; I was wearing stained dungarees and my dad’s navy blue, high-necked old sweater. I didn’t have any money with me; you lose it out of your pockets, working on a car. I was even out of cigarettes. But I couldn’t wait, I had to drive that car, and I just washed up at the old sink in the barn, then started down the cinder driveway in that beautiful car, feeling wonderful. It wouldn’t matter how I was dressed anyway, driving around in the Playboy tonight.
My mother waved at me tolerantly from a living room window, and called out to be careful, and I nodded; then I was out in the street, cruising along, and I wish you could have seen me—seen it, I mean. I don’t care whether you’ve ever given a thought to the wonderful old cars or not, you’d have seen why it was worth all I’d done. Draw yourself a mental picture of a simple, straight-lined, two-seater, open automobile with four big wire wheels fully exposed, and its spare on the back in plain sight; don’t put in a line that doesn’t belong there, and have a purpose. Make the two doors absolutely square; what other shape should a door be? Make the hood perfectly rounded, louvered at the sides because the motor needs that ventilation. But don’t add a single unnecessary curve, jiggle, squiggle, or porthole to that car—and picture the radiator, nothing concealing it and pretending it doesn’t exist. And now see that Playboy as I did cruising along, the late sun slanting down through the big old trees along the street, glancing off the bright nickel so that it hurt your eyes, the green of the body glowing like a jewel. It was beautiful, I tell you it was beautiful, and you’d think everyone would see that.