Philip Van Doren Stern (ed)

by Travelers In Time

  Mantravers, a distant cousin, was over sixty; I was a young officer of twenty-five. He had always been kind to me, I knew him fairly well, he had given me good tips in days gone by, we were friends of a kind, and his knowledge of life, as a rich, travelled, experienced bachelor, had often stood me in good stead. I respected, if rather dreaded, him, dreaded, that is, his strange high-brow theories, his attainments in higher physics, his amazing ideas about space and time and what not. Occasionally, he would pour something of all this into me, leaving me breathless, uneasy, perhaps a little scared. My main interests being horses, women, money and personal advancement, the dread of his intellectual attainments was understandable, but he declared he liked to talk to me because, if ignorant, I was what he called "open-minded and intelligent," while I think he twigged some secret curiosity in me at the same time. I used to think of those occasional talks as "trying it on the dog," but when once I mentioned this he shook his head. "No, no," he said, "it's not that. You happen to have an unusual mind, an original make-up. If you were trained a bit I could tell you more. You could do things. Your ignorance is to the good, for you would have nothing to un-learn."

  His greatest friend was a certain Dr. Vronski, whom I knew

  slightly too, another "advanced intellectual" whose experiments with glands, hypnotism, yoga, and other adventures into difficult fields brought him more than once into conflict with the Law. Vronski I saw rarely, he never favoured me with special talks, but he treated i nc with a certain courtesy, almost a touch of deference in his manner somewhere, as though I interested him as a specimen, or as someone with possibilities that must be watched, at any rate, not damaged, this attitude due, I felt sure, to things my cousin had said about me. I was, naturally, in the confidence of neither. I mention I his strange Dr. Vronski because of the role he inevitably played. Another odd thing I must mention too at this point—the astonishing lact that Mantravers, already over sixy, looked even younger than Vronski, who was forty perhaps. My cousin's youthful air, indeed, was a standing joke almost. Not looked merely—he was young. He had not aged for years; for a quarter of a century, the story ran, he had not changed. Yet, when I caught up with the tale and its undeniable evidence, I had the convinced intuition that this amazing preservation had its mysterious roots, not in any experiment with glands, but in some secret adventure or discovery that had been undertaken by this amazing pair, had failed in Vronski's case, yet succeeded with my cousin. Sydney Mantravers, to put it ridiculously, had arrested decay, I hat gradual decay which we call growing older, for something like a score of years.

  This was uppermost in my mind, even a rather dreadful barrier between us, each time we met and talked. Owing to my age, much of the evidence, of course, was hearsay. Yet his curious youthfulness at sixty never failed to rise in my mind, often to strike me in the lace with its uncanniness. He had somehow escaped a good twenty-live years of life. It was present in my mind when the Ultimatum came.

  In the club, then, that night of strain and tension, I chanced to he sitting with him when the news we had all been waiting for came in—that war had been declared. We were all "worked up" and above ourselves. Mantravers, too, was all worked up—but, as I suddenly discovered with a shock, not about the declaration of war. He was stirred and excited about quite another matter, a wholly personal matter.

  It was this difference of key that isolated him oddly from what all were feeling at the moment. While my mind was occupied entirely with questions about England, the Empire, our army and navy, with my own immediate prospects as a soldier as well, he kept asking me questions about some trivial personal matter. It got on my nerves a bit. Too excited to be puzzled, I felt first exasperated, then angry. He kept asking me if I remembered someone called Defrayne. But the name conveyed nothing to me. I had never heard it, and in any case what could it matter at such a time—unless, perhaps, this Defrayne had something to do with the war.

  "He was in the 9th, you know," said Mantravers, as though Defrayne did, after all, have something to say to the war. I hardly listened, I was barely polite, my interest was so entirely elsewhere. The only point I noticed as curious, and had been aware of, indeed, even before— though the excitement had prevented my paying special attention to it—was the colour of my cousin's face. His skin was dead white of rather a ghastly kind. "Try and remember," he urged. "Look back a bit. He was in your regiment. You must have heard of him." But I listened through a chorus of other voices, for we were all talking at once. . . .

  It was well after midnight, "God Save the King" already sung, when, to my surprise, Mantravers begged me to walk home with him, since it was on my own way, and when we reached his door asked, even insisted, that I should come in. He wished to tell me something. Once in his room, a drink before us, I remember that a sensation of discomfort, almost of alarm, came over me, and that I began to watch him more closely. My own preoccupation was still entirely with the war, of course. Literally, I could think of nothing else. Yet his first question, since I had naturally expected something about Germany at least, returned to his own personal affair: "You tell me," he began in a low and rather tense voice, "that you don't recall Defrayne?" I did not, and I told him so again bluntly enough, exasperation and impatience showing plainly. I had hoped for something very different.

  "Then—if you don't mind—I'll tell you something," he said, and there was a nervous hesitation, almost a demand for sympathy, in his manner that made me wonder. Tire pallor in his face again struck me sharply. "I must tell someone," he went on, "and you're the sort of listener I want. You're ignorant and simple, but you're openminded." He paused for a second or two. "It's about Defrayne and myself," he added, almost in a whisper, and for some reason I felt .1 sudden shiver run down my back. It was due, this shiver, I verily believe, to an abrupt realisation that he looked twenty-five years voimger than he was. I knew this in a general way, had wondered a I it often enough. I now realised it. I felt at any rate this passing shiver.

  2

  Let me say at once that this announcement both bored and half infuriated me, so that at first I listened perfunctorily—for what possible interest could Defrayne, whoever he was, have now?—but I hat later, if considerably later, my interest was so deeply caught that I lie war, with all it meant, slipped into the background.

  Strange, how many different things the mind can think of at the same time, how many different, even opposing, emotions it can hold simultaneously: the nearest approach to four-dimensional time and space we know, perhaps. The thing he had to tell was so literally beyond belief that had he told it a week, even twenty-four hours, before, it must have seemed wholly beyond belief, and I should have I bought him mad. Yet now, as I stared and listened, one ear cocked for the street where shouting, tumult and the National Anthem were si ill audible, I discovered that I did not entirely disbelieve. Nor did I, as must have been the case even the night before, regard my cousin as the victim of an elaborate hallucination, his mind deranged. On the contrary, I found myself listening to something that I felt was not necessarily impossible. And the idea dawned upon me, then, that Ibis shock of the war, which in my case was profound and real, had worked in me some swift curious change. I felt in some way older, more developed. Tire shock had matured me abruptly, as it were with a jump. A new understanding of Mantravers was bom in me. I understood, for instance, his reputation for giving "easy advice," for saying what the other fellow wanted to hear, rather than what he thought himself. His immense knowledge of life had always brought people in trouble to him, young people especially. "Go and ask Mantravers, he'll tell you what to do," was a commonplace, though it would have been more correct to say "he'll tell you what you want to hear." I now realised suddenly that this was no false friendliness in him, nor lack of principle exactly, but was due rather to his deep understanding sympathy. He put himself so completely in the other fellow's shoes that he thought the other fellow's thoughts instead of his own. It was his own power of imaginative sympathy that sent him wrong.


  As my preoccupation with the war now slipped further and further into the background it flashed upon me, too, that after all I did perhaps remember having heard of Defrayne. I did not know even how the name was spelled, when suddenly there leaped into my mind the word "de Frasne," and I dimly recalled that a young officer in my regiment, of that name pronounced Defrayne, had committed suicide a good many years ago. It was well before my time, but I had heard the case spoken of. In trouble about money, a woman, questions of personal honour involved, the young subaltern had put a bullet through his temple. But he had gone to see Mantravers first. As I listened to the tense, low-pitched voice in the chair opposite to mine, details filled in the story by degrees.

  A good many years before, it appeared, young de Frasne had come to ask his advice. The young fellow had involved himself in a terrible mess, yet without having done anything wrong actually. Appearances were hopelessly against him. In a tragic mood, the youngster expected, wanted, tragic advice, and Mantravers took up his case with his usual intense sympathy. He felt, that is, exactly what young de Frasne felt. "Some chaps," he had suggested, "placed as you are, might, of course, rank honour higher than life . . ." Young de Frasne went, white. "You mean . . . ?" he asked grimly. "There's always the emergency exit, isn't there?" Mantravers mentioned, lending himself fully to the other's theatrical state of mind. It never occurred to him, he swore, that the stricken youngster would take his advice seriously. "I really thought," he now told me in his flat, "that he'd go home feeling himself a stage hero—then think out another way. He would come back in the morning. But he did not come back next moming, nor any other morning."

  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 re-

  member 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 '.llll.

  "He sat at my table," he replied, "for I couldn't help myself." Mis 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 I ■ i 111 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, vcl 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 ime 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 things the unwelcome, half-recognised guest talked about. What did he 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 clo 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, he repeated more than once, was why he was able to come at all."

  He raised his glass again, bu
t 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."