by Anthology
“Hah! Can we eat bowls?”
He raised his eyes heavenward and went wearily to bed.
“I saw Vanderkamp again about a fortnight later,” Harrigan went on. “Ran into him in a tavern on the Bowery. He recognized me and came over.
“ ‘That was some story you did,’ he said.
“ ‘Been bothered by cranks?’ I asked.
“ ‘Hell, yes! Not too badly, though. They want to ride off somewhere just to get away. I get that feeling myself sometimes. But, tell me, have you seen the morning papers?’
“Now, by coincidence, the papers that morning had carried a story from some local nuclear physicist about the increasing probability that the atom would be smashed. I told him I’d seen it.
“ ‘What did I tell you?’ he said.
“I just smiled and asked where he’d been lately. He didn’t hesitate to talk, perhaps because his sister had been giving him a hard time with her nagging. So I listened. It appeared, to hear him tell it, that he had been off visiting the Dutch in New Amsterdam. You could almost believe what he said, listening to him, except for that wild look he had. Anyway, he’d been in New Amsterdam about 1650, and he’d brought back a few trifling souvenirs of the trips. Would I like to see them? I said I would.
“I figured he’d got his hands on some nice antiques and wanted an appreciative audience. His sister wasn’t home; so he took me around and showed me his pieces, one by one—a bowl, a pair of wooden candlesticks, wooden shoes, and more, all in all a fine collection. He even had a chair that looked pretty authentic, and I wondered where he’d dug up so many nice things of the New Amsterdam period—though, of course, I had to take his word as to where they belonged historically; I didn’t know. But I imagine he got them somewhere in the city or perhaps up in the Catskill country.
“Well, after a while I got another look at his contraption. It didn’t appear to have been moved at all; it was still sitting where it had been before, without a sign to say that it had been used to go anywhere, least of all into past time.
“ ‘Tell me,’ I said to him at last, ‘when you go back in time do you get younger?’
“ ‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’
“It wasn’t obvious to me, but I couldn’t get any more than that out of him. The thing I couldn’t figure out was the reason for his claim. He wasn’t trying to sell anything to anybody, as far as I could see; he wasn’t anxious to tell the world about his time-machine, either. He didn’t mind talking in his oblique fashion about his trips. He did talk about New Amsterdam as if he had a pretty good acquaintance with the place. But then, he was known as a minor authority on the customs of the Dutch colony.
“He was touched, obviously. Just the same, he challenged me, in a way. I wanted to know something more about him, how his machine worked, how he took off, and so on. I made up my mind the next time I was in the neighborhood to look him up, hoping he wouldn’t be home.
“When I made it, his sister was alone, and in fine fettle, as cantankerous as a flea-bitten mastiff.
“ ‘He’s gone again,’ she complained bitterly.
“Clearly the two of them were at odds. I asked her whether she had seen him go. She hadn’t; he had just marched out to his shop and that was an end to him as far as she was concerned.
“I haggled around quite a lot and finally got her permission to go out and see what I could see for myself. Of course, the shop was locked. I had counted on that and had brought along a handy little skeleton key. I was inside in no time. The machine wasn’t there. Not a sign of it, or of Vanderkamp either.
“Now, I looked around all over, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he could have taken it out of that place; it was too big for doors or windows, and the walls and roof were solid and immovable. I figured that he couldn’t have got such a large machine away without his sister’s seeing him; so I locked the place up and went back to the house.
“But she was immovable; she hadn’t seen a thing. If he had taken anything larger than pocket-size out of that shop of his, she had missed it. I could hardly doubt her sincerity. There was nothing to be had from that source; so I had no alternative but to wait for him another time.”
Anna Van Tromp, considerably chastened, watched her strange suitor—she looked upon all men as suitors, without exception; for so her father had conditioned her to do—as he reached into his sack and brought out another wonder.
“Now this,” said Vanderkamp, “is an alarm clock. You wind it up like this, you see; set it, and off it goes. Listen to it ring! That will wake you up in the morning.”
“More magic,” she cried doubtfully.
“No, no,” he explained patiently. “It is an everyday thing in my country. Perhaps some day you would like to join me in a little visit there, Anna?”
“Ja, maybe,” she agreed, looking out the window to his weird and frightening carriage, which had no animal to draw it and which vanished so strangely, fading away into the air, whenever Vanderkamp went into it. “This clothes-washing machine you talk about,” she admitted. “This I would like to see.”
“I must go now,” said Vanderkamp, gazing at her with well-simulated coyness. “I’ll leave these things here with you, and I’ll just take along that bench over there.”
“Ja, ja,” said Anna, blushing.
“Six of one and half a dozen of the other,” muttered Vanderkamp, comparing Anna with his sister.
He got into his time-machine and set out for home in the twentieth century. There was some reluctance in his going. Here all was somnolent peace and quiet, despite the rigors of living; in his own time there were wars and turmoil and the ultimate threat of the greatest war of all. New Amsterdam had one drawback, however—the presence of Anna Von Tromp. She had grown fond of him, undeniably, perhaps because he was so much more interested in her circumstances than in herself. What was a man to do? Julie at one end, Anna at the other. But even getting rid of Julie would not allow him to escape the warfare to come.
He thought deeply of his problem all the way home.
When he got back, he found his sister waiting up, as usual, ready to deliver the customary diatribe.
He forestalled her. “I’ve been thinking things over, Julie. I believe you’d be much happier if you were living with brother Carl. I’ll give you as much money as you need, and you can pack your things and I’ll take you down to Louisiana.”
“Take me!” she exclaimed. “How? In that crazy contraption of yours?”
“Precisely.”
“Oh no!” she said. “You don’t get me into that machine! How do I know what it will do to me? It’s a time machine, isn’t it? It might make an old hag of me—or a baby!”
“You said that you wanted to be young again, didn’t you?” he said softly. “You said you’d like another chance . . .”
A faraway look came into her eyes. “Oh, if I only could! If I only could be a girl again, with a chance to get married . . .”
“Pack your things,” Vanderkamp said quietly.
“It must have been all of a month before I saw Vanderkamp again,” Harrigan continued, waving for another scotch and soda. “I was down in the vicinity on an assignment and I took a run over to his place.
“He was home this time. He came to the door, which he had chained on the inside. He recognized me, and it was plain at the same time that he had no intention of letting me in.
“I came right out with the first question I had in mind. ‘The thing that bothers me,’ I said to him, ‘is how you get that time machine of yours in and out of that shed.’
“ ‘Mr. Harrigan,’ he answered, ‘newspaper reporters ought to have at least elementary scientific knowledge. You don’t. How in hell could even a time machine be in two places at once, I ask you? If I take that machine back three centuries, that’s where it is—not here. And three centuries ago that shop wasn’t standing there. So you don’t go in or out; you don’t move at all, remember? It’s time that moves.’
�
� ‘I called the other day,’ I went on. ‘Your sister spoke to me. Give her my regards.’
“ ‘My sister’s left me,’ he said shortly, ‘to stew, as you might say, in my own time machine.’
“ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Just what do you have in mind to do next?’
“ ‘Let me ask you something, Mr. Harrigan,’ he answered. ‘Would you sit around here waiting for an atomic war if you could get away?’
“ ‘Certainly not,’ I answered.
“ ‘Well, then, I don’t intend to, either.’
“All this while he was standing at the door, refusing to open it any wider or to let me in. He was making it pretty plain that there wasn’t much he had to say to me. And he seemed to be in a hurry.
“ ‘Remember me to the inquiring public thirty years hence, Mr. Harrigan,’ he said at last, and closed the door.
“That was the last I saw of him.”
Harrigan finished his scotch and soda appreciatively and looked around for the bartender.
“Did he take off then?” I asked.
“Like a rocket,” said Harrigan. “Queerest thing was that there wasn’t a trace of him. The machine was gone, too—the same way as the last time, without a disturbance in the shop. He and his machine had simply vanished off the face of the earth and were never heard from again.
“Matter of fact, though,” Harrigan went on thoughtfully, “Vanderkamp’s disappearance wasn’t the really queer angle on the pitch. The other thing broke in the papers the week after he left. The neighbors got pretty worked up about it. They called the police to tell them that Vanderkamp’s sister Julie was back, only she was off her nut—and a good deal changed in appearance, too.
“Gal going blarmy was no news, of course, but that last bit about her appearance—they said she looked about twenty years older, all of a sudden—sort of rang a bell. So I went over there. It was Julie, all right; at least, she looked a hell of a lot like Julie had when I last saw her—provided you could grant that a woman could age twenty years in the few weeks it had been. And she was off her rocker, sure enough—or hysterical. Or at least madder than a wet hen. She made out like she couldn’t speak a word of English, and they finally had to get an interpreter to understand her. She wouldn’t speak anything but Dutch—and an old-fashioned kind, too.
“She made a lot of extravagant claims and kept insisting that she would bring the whole matter up in a complaint before Governor Stuyvesant. Said she wasn’t Julie Vanderkamp, by God, but was named Anna Van Tromp—which is an old Dutch name thereabouts—and claimed that she had been abducted from her home on the Bowery. We pointed out the Third Avenue El and told her that was the Bowery, but she just sniffed and looked at us as though we were crazy.”
I toyed with my drink. “You mean you actually listened to the poor girl’s story?” I asked.
“Sure,” Harrigan said. “Maybe she was as crazy as a bedbug, but I’ve listened to whackier stories from supposedly sane people. Sure, I listened to her.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment, then went on.
“She claimed that this fellow Vanderkamp had come to her house and filled her with a lot of guff about the wonderful country he lived in, and how she ought to let him take her to see it. Apparently he waxed especially eloquent about an automatic washing-machine and dryer, and that had fascinated her, for some reason. Then, she said, he’d brought a ten-year-old girl along—though where in the world old Vanderkamp could have picked up a tot like that is beyond me—and the kid had added her blandishments to the plot. Between them, they had managed to lure her into the old guy’s machine. From what she said, it was obviously the time machine she was talking about, and if she was Julie there was no reason why she shouldn’t know about it. But she talked as though it was a complete mystery to her, as though she’d no idea what the purpose of it was. Well, anyway, here she was—and very unhappy, too. Wanted to go back to old New Amsterdam, but bad.
“It was a beautiful act, even if she was nuts. The strange thing was, though, that there were some things even a gal going whacky couldn’t explain. For instance, the house was filled with what the experts said were priceless antiques from Dutch New Amsterdam, of the period just prior to the British siege. You’d think those things would make poor Julie feel more at home, seeing as she claimed to belong in that period, but apparently they just made her homesick. And, curiously enough, all the modern gadgets were gone. All those handy little items that make the twentieth century so livable had been taken away—including the washing-machine and dryer, by the way. Julie—or Anna, as she called herself—claimed that Vanderkamp had taken it back with him, wherever he’d gone to, after he’d brought her there.”
“Poor woman,” I said sympathetically. “They toted her off to the booby hatch, I suppose.”
“No . . .” Harrigan said slowly. “They didn’t, as a matter of fact. Since she was harmless, they let her stay in the house a while. Which was a mistake, it seems. Of course, she wasn’t from the seventeenth century. That’s impossible. All the same—.” He broke off abruptly and stared moodily into his glass.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“She was found one morning about two weeks after she got there,” he said. “Dead. Electrocuted. It seems she’d stuck her finger into a light socket while standing in a bathtub full of water. An accident, obviously. As the Medical Examiner said, it was an accident any six-year-old child would have known enough about electricity to avoid.
“That is,” Harrigan added, “a twentieth-century child . . .”
A VIEW FROM A HILL
M.R. James
How pleasant it can be, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station. You have a map open on your knee, and you pick out the villages that lie to right and left by their church towers. You marvel at the complete stillness that attends your stoppage at the stations, broken only by a footstep crunching the gravel. Yet perhaps that is best experienced after sundown, and the traveller I have in mind was making his leisurely progress on a sunny afternoon in the latter half of June.
He was in the depths of the country. I need not particularize further than to say that if you divided the map of England into four quarters, he would have been found in the south-western of them.
He was a man of academic pursuits, and his term was just over. He was on his way to meet a new friend, older than himself. The two of them had met first on an official inquiry in town, had found that they had many tastes and habits in common, liked each other, and the result was an invitation from Squire Richards to Mr. Fanshawe which was now taking effect.
The journey ended about five o’clock. Fanshawe was told by a cheerful country porter that the car from the Hall had been up to the station and left a message that something had to be fetched from half a mile farther on, and would the gentleman please to wait a few minutes till it came back? “But I see,” continued the porter, “as you’ve got your bysticle, and very like you’d find it pleasanter to ride up to the ‘All yourself. Straight up the road ‘ere, and then first turn to the left—it ain’t above two mile—and I’ll see as your things is put in the car for you. You’ll excuse me mentioning it, only I thought it were a nice evening for a ride. Yes, sir, very seasonable weather for the haymakers: let me see, I have your bike ticket. Thank you, sir; much obliged: you can’t miss your road, etc., etc.”
The two miles to the Hall were just what was needed, after the day in the train, to dispel somnolence and impart a wish for tea. The Hall, when sighted, also promised just what was needed in the way of a quiet resting-place after days of sitting on committees and college-meetings. It was neither excitingly old nor depressingly new. Plastered walls, sash-windows, old trees, smooth lawns, were the features which Fanshawe noticed as he came up the drive. Squire Richards, a burly man of sixty odd, was awaiting him in the porch with evident pleasure.
“Tea first,” he said, “o
r would you like a longer drink? No? All right, tea’s ready in the garden. Come along, they’ll put your machine away. I always have tea under the lime-tree by the stream on a day like this.”
Nor could you ask for a better place. Midsummer afternoon, shade and scent of a vast lime-tree, cool, swirling water within five yards. It was long before either of them suggested a move. But about six, Mr. Richards sat up, knocked out his pipe, and said: “Look here, it’s cool enough now to think of a stroll, if you’re inclined? All right: then what I suggest is that we walk up the park and get on to the hill-side, where we can look over the country. We’ll have a map, and I’ll show you where things are; and you can go off on your machine, or we can take the car, according as you want exercise or not. If you’re ready, we can start now and be back well before eight, taking it very easy.”
“I’m ready. I should like my stick, though, and have you got any field-glasses? I lent mine to a man a week ago, and he’s gone off Lord knows where and taken them with him.”
Mr. Richards pondered. “Yes,” he said, “I have, but they’re not things I use myself, and I don’t know whether the ones I have will suit you. They’re old-fashioned, and about twice as heavy as they make ‘em now. You’re welcome to have them, but I won’t carry them. By the way, what do you want to drink after dinner?”
Protestations that anything would do were overruled, and a satisfactory settlement was reached on the way to the front hall, where Mr. Fanshawe found his stick, and Mr. Richards, after thoughtful pinching of his lower lip, resorted to a drawer in the hall-table, extracted a key, crossed to a cupboard in the panelling, opened it, took a box from the shelf, and put it on the table. “The glasses are in there,” he said, “and there’s some dodge of opening it, but I’ve forgotten what it is. You try.” Mr. Fanshawe accordingly tried. There was no keyhole, and the box was solid, heavy and smooth: it seemed obvious that some part of it would have to be pressed before anything could happen. “The comers,” said he to himself, “are the likely places; and infernally sharp comers they are too,” he added, as he put his thumb in his mouth after exerting force on a lower comer.