Philip Van Doren Stern (ed)
Page 1
Travelers In Time
Strange tales
of man's journeyings into the past
and the future
Edited, with an introduction by
PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN
Garden City,
COPYRIGHT, 1947, BY PHILIP VAN DÖREN STERN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."
"If you knew Time as well as I do," said the Hatter, "you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him. ... I dare say you never even spoke to Time.'"
"Perhaps not," Alice cautiously replied; "but I know J have to beat time when I learn music."
"Ah! That accounts for it" said the Hatter. "He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling.' Half-past one, time for dinner.'"
"That would be grand, certainly," Alice said thoughtfully; "but then—I shouldn't be hungry for it, you know."
"Not at first, perhaps," said the Hatter. "But you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked."
"Is that the way you manage?" Alice asked.
The Hatter shook his head mournfully. "Not I.'" he replied. "We quarreled last March. . . . And ever since that, he won't do a thing I ask! It's always six o'clock now."
Contents
INTRODUCTION by Philip Van Doien Stern xiii
THROUGH THE CLOCK
THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells 3
"A machine that shall travel ... in any direction of Space and Time. . . ."
ELSEWHERE AND OTHERWISE by Algernon Blackwood 79
"I saw him go, I also saw him return. . . . This was my unsought, "unwelcome privilege."
ENOCH SOAMES by Max Beerbohm 125
"A hundred years hence! ... If I could come back to life then—just for a few hours . . ."
BETWEEN THE MINUTE AND THE HOUR by A. M. Burrage 153
"A moment later, and he was looking out upon an altered world."
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
THE ROCKING-HORSE WINNER by D. H. Lawrence 169
"The voices in the house trilled and screamed: 'There must be more money!' "
ON THE STADXCASE by Katharine FuIIerton GerouJd 185
"Since the 'ghosts' we saw were not of the past they must be of the future. . . ."
AUGUST HEAT by William Fryer Harvey 209
" 'And the dates?' 'I can only answer for one of them, and that's correct.'"
THE ANTICIPATOR by Morley Robeits 215
"He received a note from the editor: 'Burford sent me a tale with the same motive weeks ago . . ."'
THE OLD MAN by Holloway Horn 221
" 'Will you buy a paper? It is not an ordinary paper, I assure you.' "
THE TAIPAN by W. Somerset Maugham 229
"They could say what they liked, but he had seen the grave."
THE ROUSING OF MR. BRADEGAR by H. F. Heard 237
"It seemed ... as though you were looking down the wrong end of a telescope."
THE PAST REVISITED
"THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD" by Rudyard Kipling 249
"Looking . . . where man had never been permitted to look with'full knowledge since Time began."
ETCHED IN MOONLIGHT by James Stephens 277
"In an instant of that time I could have had a dream; and . . . the adventures of twenty or forty years could take place. . . ."
A VIEW FROM A HILL by M. R. James 309
"Yet when I take the glass away there's nothing."
A FRIEND TO ALEXANDER by James Thurber 327
"I've taken to dreaming about Aaron Burr. . . ."
THE SILVER MIRROR by A. Conan Doyle 337
". . . that strange woolly cloud deep in the heart of the old mirror."
WHEN TIME STOOD STILL
No SHIPS PASS by Lady Eleanor Smith 349
"There's no death on this island. We're here for all eternity!"
THE CLOCK by A. E. W. Mason 373
"For a while it would tick almost imperceptibly, and then . . ."
OPENING THE DOOR by Arthur Machen 393
"This flower . . . was still in my hand six weeks later. But it was quite fresh."
TIME OUT OF JOINT
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON by F. Scott Fitzgerald 409 "Crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man. . . ."
THE ALTERNATIVE by Maurice Baring 435
"Supposing you were to eliminate the great men of history. . . ."
VISITORS FROM OUT OF TIME
MR. STRENBERRY'S TALE by ƒ. B. Priestley 451
"He was trying to get out, to escape from his own time. . . ."
PHANTAS by Oliver Onions 461
"He knew her, this ship of the future, as if God's finger had bitten her lines into his brain."
THE HOMELESS ONE by A. E. Coppard 477
"It was there upon the earth again after centuries of voyaging beyond unknown offings."
Introduction
By PHILIP VAN DOREN STERN
MAN, WHO HAS CONQUERED TERRESTRIAL SPACE, IS HELPLESS IN THE time dimension. The onward-rushing hour hand cuts down his numbered days, for the clock is a dreadful instrument, the impartial ruler of the brief span of consciousness which lies between the warm darkness of the womb and the cold everlasting night of the grave. Yet we surround ourselves with clocks, place them on towers high above our cities, mount them as the guardians of our streets and highways, and even bring them into our homes, where their sharp, brisk ticking marks the passage of the fleeting seconds with which we a'2 all too meagerly endowed.
But the abstract image of the clockface, with its hands racing around a fixed course, is less a reminder of mortality than the cruder instrument it replaced, for the hourglass, in which the tangible representation of life could be seen draining away, was a symbol terrible enough to make any thoughtful person shudder. Perhaps man was driven to invent the clock in order to get away from having to watch the hourglass. Its running sand was too direct a memento mori.
The instruments that measure time have about them a fascination which far transcends their mechanical ingenuity. Throughout the ages, scientists have made them more and more precise; artists have lavished their skill upon them to make them beautiful; and mechanics have constructed them lovingly out of fine metals and precious jewels.
But every device for measuring time, from the primitive clepsydra to the electric chronometer, has only one purpose: to tell man that it is not only later than he thinks, but that even as he thinks so, it has become later still.
For the present cannot be grasped; as one attempts to seize it, it is gone, transferred instantaneously from the future to the past. Time never stands still. It rushes by us at terrifying speed, forever converting the unforeseeable future into the irrecoverable past, and leaving the mind that tries to comprehend the process isolated upon the non-existent point we call the present. Yet common sense makes us refuse to admit that time does not exist; we sense intuitively that it does. We know that there is some kind of time, but we can never fasten it down long enough to examine it. The future is the black womb from which all things come, but we do not know what they are until they are upon us; then they flash by and are gone to be buried in the yawning grave of the past where there is only decay and forget-fulness. We cannot recapture our yesterdays and relive them at will, and the shadowy images we call memory are only ghosts, insubstantial, impalpable, and taunti
ng simulacra that must perish with the brain cells that give them brief refuge from oblivion.
Man lives in an exceedingly tenuous universe, but in everyday life he must refuse to believe so. The harsh facts of reality are at least as real as any philosophical concept, and they are always with us. Even reality, however, must exist within the space-time continuum, for all matter must have both physical extension and duration. The dance of the atoms requires space, while time beats the controlling rhythms.
Perhaps it is because our bodies occupy an appreciable amount of space that spatial relationships do not seem so mysterious. But time is a concept beyond man's limited understanding, an idea his cunning but inadequate brain cannot quite grasp. And there is one question about the nature of time that is eternally baffling: what was there before time began, and what will there be after it ends?
In the new physics, time is regarded as finite, but this is of little help to most of us. We have to live with our time as it is; we are its prisoners and cannot ordinarily escape. Henri Poincare once said that if the world expanded—or shrank—a thousandfold overnight, no one would notice the difference, and life would go on just as it had before,
for all things would change alike and preserve exactly the same relationship to one another. And so it is with time. Slow down our universe, so that we take what used to be a century to walk across a room, or speed it up, so that we live out a full life span in what used to be a few seconds, and it would not matter in the least to us! Time would seem to be just what it seemed before. There is no absolute space, no absolute time. We are all of us made out of nothingness, mere composites of whirling ether, the figments of an electronic dream.
The ancient Hindus sensed this. They conceived of the universe as a dream of Vishnu, a dream in which the giant figure of the god lies sleeping, half submerged in an endless ocean. "There is no one to behold him, no one to comprehend him; there is no knowledge of him, except within himself. ... It is on a serpent ocean of his own immortal substance that the Cosmic Man passes the universal night. Inside the god is the cosmos. . . . Though without him there exists only darkness, within the divine dreamer an ideal vision thrives of what the universe should be."1
Most of us lead our little lives in a rut of our own making, dug so deep that we do not even try to see over its walls from one year to another. Yet the most unthinking of men are sometimes seized with the desire to escape from the trap of time, to turn back the clock to some happier moment, or to peer through its inscrutable dial in the hope of catching a glimpse of what the future holds in store for him. To conquer time is the dearest of men's wishes. Fortunetellers and historians alike make their living out of that irrepressible desire. To foresee the future ... to revisit the past ... to escape from the here and now into the there and then. . . . Can it be done?
Perhaps it has been done; perhaps it is being done every day. It may even be that you yourself have done so—and yet did not know that you had. . . .
In 1911 there was published a remarkable little book entitled An Adventure.2 It was written by two Englishwomen as a factual
'HeinrichZimmer. Myths and Symbols in IndianArt and Civilization. New York: Pantheon Books, 1946.
"ElizabethMorison and Frances Lamont (pseudonyms for C. Anne E. Moberly and Eleanor F. Jourdain). An Adventure. London: Macmillan, 1911.
account of something odd that had taken place during their visit to the Petit Trianon at Versailles ten years earlier. Neither of them knew much about French history, and they were looking forward to their expedition as a rather dull affair which they were undertaking as part of their duty as teachers embarked on an instructive journey. It was a warm, overcast day in August, 1901, when they strolled through the famous gardens, searching rather halfheartedly for the miniature palace that will always be associated with Marie Antoinette's name. They noticed a strange atmosphere about the park, an atmosphere so disturbing that one of them, writing about their joint experience afterward, said: "An extraordinary depression had come over me, which, in spite of every effort to shake it off, steadily deepened. . . . Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees . . . seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still."
That was the beginning of what was perhaps the most astonishing adventure that has ever befallen any two members of the human race, for without knowing it, they had wandered back through time and were in Versailles as it had been in 1789!
They had no idea of what had happened to them as they wandered on through the gardens. They encountered several people who seemed oddly dressed, but they thought that perhaps the masquerade-like costumes they saw were ordinarily worn by twentieth-century attendants attached to the historic gardens. A young man whose style of hairdress made him "look like an old picture" came running up to them, speaking excitedly in French. They had difficulty understanding what he was trying to tell them, but, finally comprehending, they followed his directions meekly, changed their course, and crossed a little bridge over a ravine. Then one of them (and, oddly enough, only one) noticed a rather attractive woman sitting on a low stool, sketching the landscape. After that they walked along a terrace, where a young man came out of the door of a chapel and directed them to the cour d'honneur. They went on by themselves; when they reached the entrance to the palace itself, they found themselves back in the twentieth century.
It was a simple tale they had to tell—convincingly simple, for they had witnessed no sensational events, nor had they seen anything that might not have been observed by a casual visitor to Versailles during the summer of 1789, when the public was admitted to the royal gardens for the first time in history. Several points confirm their story. The bridge over the ravine and the ravine itself were not in existence in 1901, nor did La Motte's map of the royal gardens, engraved in 1783, give any indication of them. But in 1903 a manuscript map, the original from which La Motte's plan had been rather carelessly reproduced, was found in the chimney of an old house in Montmorency. It showed the ravine and the bridge. The terrace on which the young man had appeared was no longer there in 1901, and the door from the chapel had been sealed up for years. But research proved that there had been such a terrace in 1789 and that the door had then been in use. In 1902 the time-traveling teacher who had seen the woman sketching on the lawn was shown Wertmuller's portrait of Marie Antoinette. The face seemed familiar; then, in 1908, she read the Journal of the Queen's modiste, which described the summer costume made for Marie Antoinette during the fateful year 1789. It was the costume the sketching woman had been wearing.
There are many other corroborating points, all indicating that their experience in revisiting the past was authentic. If it was, it stands as a true example of involuntary time travel. If such a thing could happen once,3 it conceivably might happen again. It may indeed have happened to others. Suppose, for instance, that a child walking along a country road in New England caught sight of a troop of painted Indians moving through the forest. . . . No one would believe him. It would be put down to childish imagination. Or suppose that a wandering cowhand in the Southwest saw a body of men in Spanish armor marching through the hills ... or that a guard sleeping in Mount Vernon woke up and beheld the house aglow with candlelight and peopled with men and women in silks and satins. . . . It would be said that these adult observers had been drunk or dreaming. No one would believe them. Still, if two otherwise very ordinary English schoolteachers can wander back through time and find themselves in the court of Versailles as it was in 1789—anything can happen. Perhaps the past can be revisited, perhaps even the future can be foreseen.
'Miss"Lamont" made a subsequent visit to Versailles, where she had another experience in time travel, but it was less interesting than the first occasion.
Nearly fifty years ago, J. W. Dunne, English scientist and aeronautical engineer, first began to notice that several of his dreams were followed by actual eve
nts which had been more or less clearly foreseen in the dream state. During the spring of 1902, for instance, he dreamt of the imminence of a volcanic eruption on a French island where 4,000 inhabitants were in danger of losing their lives. Dunne was then in South Africa; some weeks after his vivid dream he received the London newspapers announcing a volcanic disaster on the French West Indian island of Martinique, where the eruption of Mt. Pelee had killed 40,000 people.
After several such "coincidental" dreams, Dunne decided to keep careful records of his dream experiences, noting down, immediately upon waking, as much as he could recall of them. Some of the results were striking. One is of particular interest, for it shows how easy it is to forget what we have dreamed, even after making a 'written record. Dunne says:
I was out shooting over some rough country . . . and presently found myself on land where, I realized, I might have no right to be. ... I heard two men shouting at me. . . . They seemed, moreover, to be urging on a furiously barking dog. I made tracks for the nearest gate . . . and managed to slip through before the pursuers came into view. On reading over my [dream] records that evening, I, at first, noticed nothing; and was just going to close the book, when my eye caught, written rather more faintly, right at the end: "Hunted by two men and a dog." And the amazing thing about it was that I had completely forgotten having had any such dream. I could not even recall having written it down.