by Anthology
Mantravers, forgetting all about the interview to which he had not attached much importance, went to India that same week. He never heard till he came back to England a year later, and then he only heard it casually, that the young fellow had put a bullet in his brain. The lad had passed from his memory. He forgot even what lie looked like. It gave him a horrid turn, he assured me, when he learned the truth, “for in a way, you see,” he explained, “I felt responsible.
“That was some years ago,” he was saying, my attention not yet wholly caught, “twenty or possibly twenty-five, and, as I’ve told you, I’d forgotten even what he looked like. My memory for faces is si locking. Last year in Dinard I talked and smoked, gambled too, with a delightful fellow whose face I remembered, but whose name, and where we had met, escaped me utterly, a fellow who knew me well too. He turned out to be the Italian barber in Regent Street who cuts my hair . . .”
“Yes, yes,” I put in, making a show of interest, “but I’m rather like that, too.”
He stared at me a moment. “Maybe,” he countered briefly. “But a week ago,” he went on, his face paler but his eyes oddly bright, “the same sort of thing happened to me again—at a party—and it turned out to be the last person in the world I expected.”
I had not been listening properly, my thoughts still running on the war and what was coming, but the way he said this gave me a jolt for some reason. I felt a crawling again at the roots of my hair. I asked what he meant exactly.
“I went,” he said in a lowered voice, “to an evening party, an At Home of sorts, and as usual I ran into all kinds of people who knew me, but whose names—and where I had met them—I could not for the life of me remember. Among them was a young chap whose face I certainly knew, knew it as well as I know yours. But his name, or where we had met before, escaped me utterly. He seemed uncommonly pleased to run across me. It was quite awkward. He didn’t say much, but what he did say was to the point. ‘You’ve forgotten me,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been waiting for this chance. I’ve got a debt I want to repay.’ Having forgotten who he was, yet ashamed to let him see it, I murmured something vague about dining together some night. To my great embarrassment, he jumped at it. I was in a fix, you see. He was so determined, so intense. No memory of any debt occurred to me. I gave him my restaurant address, an Italian place near Leicester Square, and when he asked for a date, I rashly said that I was there most nights and that he would be very welcome . . . and then, as I was edging off, hoping to escape him, I found instead that he had somehow escaped me. He just melted away. The crowd was pretty thick, a regular crush, and how he managed it so quickly and cleverly puzzled me. One minute he was at my side, touching actually, the next—he wasn’t—”
“He didn’t say any more, you mean? Not even good-bye?” My interest was caught and held increasingly now.
Mantravers shook his head. “Just that he’d be there—and he was gone,” came the reply. “And would you believe it,” he went on, his eyes fixed hard on mine, “the very next night in my Italian restaurant, who should walk in but this very fellow. He came straight to my table too—and there I was, not knowing his name, or where we had met before, or what I could say to him, or what he wanted. It was a hell of a fix, eh? I felt an acute discomfort. This talk of a debt he had to settle was part of it, for I had a horrid feeling that I ought to remember something.”
I watched my cousin more and more closely as my interest deepened, and the legend about his having somehow beaten time by twenty-five years came back to me sharply. Very forcibly, unpleasantly too, it struck me, not that he could have passed for forty instead of sixty, but that he literally was forty instead of sixty—as though decay had been arrested. I cannot say why this conviction came over me so overwhelmingly just at this particular moment, nor can I explain why the roots of my hair began to crawl again. I only knew that I was vividly aware of it, and that a faint, unpleasant touch of chill came with it.
“You know,” he went on, “how one.is sometimes aware of things, little, trivial things, I mean, without actually noticing them? Well,” he explained, “I noticed in this way one or two odd little details. Not important things, mind you. The important thing was to remember his name, where we had met, under what circumstances, but instead of that I noticed his old-fashioned dinner-jacket, the crease down the side of his trousers, his pumps—all of them details of dress no longer used. They had passed away—before your time, of course, but . . .”
“He dined with you? You dined together, I mean?” I brought him back. I was impatient. The cold I felt increased.
Mantravers shrugged his shoulders: his face seemed to grow paler.
“He sat at my table,” he replied, “for I couldn’t help myself.” His voice went lower than ever, and he looked over his shoulder. “I told the waiter to lay another place, and while that was being done we talked. He talked, rather.”
“Of course, you remembered then gradually? The talk brought you back?”
Again he shook his head. “That’s the odd part of it. The feeling if familiarity, of knowing him quite well, grew stronger and stronger, yet never fulfilled itself. It got no further. Something in my mind deliberately concealed him from me. Kept him hidden. You have guessed, of course, already. But I didn’t—till the end.” A perceptible shiver ran through his body. “All I knew was that while he talked I was longing and longing to get rid of him, hoping he would go, wondering what I could do to bring this about, but listening all the I time to what he said—as though I couldn’t help myself and had to listen.”
He stopped and took a gulp of his whisky. I asked what kind of tilings the unwelcome, half-recognised guest talked about. What did lie say? It was plain that my cousin wanted to keep this back, while eager at the same time to tell it. He betrayed a touch of embarrassment, of awkwardness, almost of shyness.
“Well, sort of personal things,” he brought it out at length hesitatingly, “said no one gave better advice than I did, it was a privilege to talk to me, that I had helped him once, and that now he could do the same for me—and owed it to me. That was what I disliked so—owed it to me—because—because our troubles were similar. That, lie repeated more than once, was why he was able to come at all.”
He raised his glass again, but did not drink.
“It was then,” he whispered almost, “that was the first time, I mean, I began to feel jumpy.”
“Jumpy!” To tell the truth, I felt jumpy myself as I listened.
The strange maturity, the sudden growth in myself already referred to, began to work in me, bringing a sharper, deeper insight with it, so that I knew, as with a flash of clairvoyance, that Mantravers himself was in some kind of personal trouble. Abruptly, this revelation came, a sense of discomfort with it, for I understood that he was both anxious to tell it and not to tell it. I waited. In the end, of course, he told it, and it involved a woman, money, honour, and all in a distinctly unpleasant way that heaped appearances—though he had done no dishonourable act—against him. Only the bare outline was given to me, the outline of a very nasty fix.
“To my utter astonishment,” Mantravers went on, “the fellow referred to this, as though he knew all about it. He did know all about it. It amazed me; I was flabbergasted. I felt as if hypnotised, for he had a dreadfully insistent way with him, so that I had to listen. And my eyes kept wandering to a dull red mark he had in his right temple. I had not noticed it before. It seemed to glow. It fascinated me, that mark, and from time to time the fellow’s hand, as he passed it across his forehead, let his fingers trail and linger over it, deliberately, I could have sworn. He saw my eye on it. ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for this,’ he said. ‘It was difficult to arrange, but now you’re in much the same boat I was in once; now I can give you advice so that you’ll understand.’ A sort of icy smile ran over his face. ‘You see,’ he added, ‘by rights I ought to have stayed here another twenty-five years. My life would have run to fifty-one.’ And with that he abruptly stood up to go. The red mark on
his temple glowed and spread a little. I got up too. ‘Meet me in my house to-morrow,’ he said, ‘meet me at six o’clock,’ a strange compelling power in his voice and fixed staring eyes. ‘I shall be there waiting for you.’ With that he turned, I saw the red mark flame out and die away, I saw him walk across the floor between the tables and go out of the restaurant.”
It was only at this final moment, my cousin assured me, his voice a whisper now, that he recognised de Frasne, as though the shutter that all this time had deliberately hidden him from memory was lifted, also deliberately. Yet no shock accompanied the revelation. His attention, rather, was drawn to quite normal things about him—the waiter, though he had laid a second cover, as bidden, was hovering near, saying something, asking, indeed, whether he should bring the soup since perhaps the expected gentleman was not coming after all, and a moment later serving the single plate and clearing away the second unwanted cover.
I sat silent for some minutes, finding nothing to say, wishing only that my cousin would remove his fixed stare from my face, and relieved when at last he did so and raised his glass and drank. Yet a lot of things crowded jostling in my mind during that brief silence. While resisting with all my might the shivers down my spine, my main I bought, the one that obsessed me chiefly, was, oddly enough, not the wild, forbidding story itself, but that other, almost equally sinister legend about my cousin’s personal appearance. His story bewildered me beyond anything I could understand, of course, but it was this point of his physical preservation that for some reason kept intruding (dominatingly, forcing its way past other thoughts and feelings. That lie actually looked, and was, a whole generation younger than he had I lie right to be, that he had evaded, as it were, the march and decay of something like twenty-five years, that those missing years lay in wait for him, ready to pounce, and that this period was just about what de Frasne would have lived had he not killed himself—it was impossible and outrageous ideas of this kind that whirled through my mind in such a torrent that I felt as though I were going mad. I made a violent effort to get myself in hand. Mantravers’ eyes were off me for a moment while he raised his glass, but as he drank, his stare fixed me again over the tumbler’s rim. I remember shaking myself free, shaking myself, as it were, mentally and physically, opening my mouth lo speak.
Mantravers was before me, however. “I’m going to the house,” he said quietly, his voice no longer whispering. “I shall keep the appointment. I must, you see.”
It gave me a shock to hear him, but his next words brought back another thing I dreaded more—the long cold shuddering down my spine.
“I want you to come with me—in case I go.”
It was the last word that made the shudder repeat itself, and so uncontrollably that my hand was trembling as I lifted my own glass. That “go” was for some reason awful, so that I dared not question even . . .
Mantravers had my promise before I left his flat, though it took him the best part of an hour to obtain it.
The turmoil in my young mind is understandable without detailed description. England was at war with Germany, I was in the Army, my regiment absorbed my thoughts . . . For a couple of hours Mantravers had torn my interest away to his own amazing story, but the moment I left him the war and its immediate personal claims returned. I cursed myself for having given that promise. At the same time I was gripped by the unusual tale. I had a deep respect for my cousin. If his reputation, with its semi-legendary atmosphere of suggesting the impossible and supernatural, made me uneasy in his presence, his personality impressed me to a point that made me feel he was not quite as other men are. He was un-ordinary in some peculiar way, extremely gifted, of course, as well; I knew his courage; I looked up to him. His invitation probably flattered me into the bargain . . . I was a little scared, to tell the truth, rather as a schoolboy might be scared, and the idea occurred to me to get in touch with Dr. Vronski, his friend and companion in adventure. I felt the need of advice. Time, however, made this out of the question. I expected to get my army orders any moment.
In the end I kept my promise, kept the appointment punctually.
And, once again, the first thing that impressed me when we met in the club was his uncommon, even uncanny, youthfulness. I swear he might have been my Captain. I mention this particularly because of what came later, if a good deal later, and that it should have struck me so vividly that at first it ousted my thoughts and fears of the adventure to follow is worth emphasis. Coming straight from a feverish, excited day full of thoughts about kit, orders, fighting, France, even about being killed, I found myself registering first this conviction, this positive certainty, that he had somehow managed to evade a long toll of years. His air and attitude, his very atmosphere, conveyed this ridiculous assurance in a way I cannot describe, though the unwelcome shiver it caused in my spine is easily told. A moment later, then, I found myself, instantly and unaccountably, swept up into his mood, into his stream of thought and feeling, so that this world’s affairs, even a war with Germany, seemed somehow of less account than what he had afoot. His face, curiously unlined and young, was also distinctly pale, there was a shrinking in his manner. Had I not known his courage, I should perhaps have credited him with what we youngsters called “cold feet.”
“I’m obliged to you,” he remarked quietly, “for being so punctual. But I knew you would not fail me. It’s rather out of your categories, you see,” he added after a slight hesitation, “this proposed visit of mine.” What he meant precisely, God only knows: I only know myself that I was aware of a queer pang as of something that both attracted and repelled me with a certain violence—by which I mean, perhaps, that I both understood yet did not understand. It was the part of me that understood that attracted me.
We set out on foot at once for a walk of a mile or two to de Frasne’s house in Bayswater. All these years it had remained empty, apparently neither sold nor rented. The region, prosaic and respectable, reassured me, for how could anything “unearthly” happen in Bayswater? He had the key, he mentioned. And the only other remark he made during that walk of ours over half an hour was a curious one, uttered with breaks and at intervals moreover, for I said nothing: “If what I think is true,” came in that low voice that again rather gave me the creeps, “young de Frasne . . . since his death . . . has been in other time and space . . . When he said that he had been waiting for me . . . it was really I who . . . had been waiting for him . . .” And then suddenly, as I made no comment, he raised his voice almost to a shout that made me start. “You follow me?” he cried. I managed a reply of sorts. I was following, of course. “I didn’t mean literally,” he explained, lowering his voice; “I meant—do you understand?” My face, doubtless, gave my answer clearly enough. “No, no, how could you?” he went on, half to himself. “You’ve never transcended human experience, so you couldn’t. Naturally, you couldn’t. You only know time in a line, as past, present, future. Vronski and I have known it . . . otherwise . . . in two dimensions, two at least . . . A changed consciousness—that’s the trick, you see—can function in different time . . . elsewhere and otherwise . . .”
A sudden flash came to me, so that I stopped him on the pavement.
“Living backwards or forwards, you mean?” I cried.
He stared at me with a kind of exultation. I remember the pallor of his skin, the brightness in his eyes. “I imagine parallel is the right, the better word,” he said, with a kind of odd breathlessness, and then he added quickly, “I felt sure—I always knew—you had it in you—somewhere. Death of unexpected kind, self-inflicted, before the natural moment, I mean . . . and I showed him the way . . . would make this possible probably . . .”
His voice died away into undistinguishable phrases mumbled below his breath. We hurried on. I grunted, stared, and mopped my face. There was only one horror in me—that he would explain more clearly what was in him. I went ahead of him, going faster and faster.
We reached the street, he found the number, we stopped outside an empty house
that showed distinct evidence of long neglect, smothered in boards and signs of house-agents. Mantravers went up the eight steps, I following him. He put the key in the door, opened it, then handed me the key.
He gave me a searching look, a sort of frozen smile on his lips, his pallor very marked. “You needn’t come in with me,” he whispered, “and you needn’t lock the door. Keep the key. I’m going in alone. I think I know what I’m in for,” he added, “but remember, if I’m right in my conjecture, no one need look for me. I shall, at any rate, be here.”
He looked me straight in the eyes, and his skin was white as linen. He was not frightened. He struck me as a man in a dream, but an awful, icy dream that shattered ordinary experience. The door banged behind him. I stuck my ear close and listened intently. I heard his footsteps clearly as they went across the carpetless hall, then up the wooden stairs, then along a landing, fainter and fainter, after which came silence. I found myself in a shudder, standing on the outer steps, trembling all over, excited beyond words, my heart positively thumping, my forehead wet with perspiration. I waited some fifteen minutes. There was not a sound from inside the house. The traffic went past noisily. It was already after sunset, the dusk falling. I decided to go in. I put in the key, pushed the door open and walked cautiously inside. I closed the door behind me.
Daylight still hung about in palish patches, but there were shadows too. The hall gaped as though about to utter, but no sound came. Peering into two large empty unfurnished rooms, I went slowly upstairs, the stairs he had trodden just before me, along the deserted landing, passing from failing light across little gulfs of shadow. Everything gaped, gaped with emptiness, dust lay all over, decay, neglect, cobwebs, silence, vacancy, motionless air and musty odours—otherwise nothing. All windows everywhere were closed and fastened. I felt my skin crawl with goose-flesh, and the hair moved on my scalp. I persisted. I searched every single room, even the attics and the kitchen and scullery below. I called aloud. I waited, listening. I stared and watched. Taking quick steps, I then paused, every sense alert, intent. I called again, but no answer came. No hint of a human presence was discoverable. I searched, as the saying is, from roof to cellar. That I found the courage to do so seems to me now the proof of my intensely alive curiosity, even of something in me that believed, and hoped, and perhaps expected—to find a clue . . .