Philip Van Doren Stern (ed)

by Travelers In Time

  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 mc 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. . . .

  Half an hour later I stood on the outer steps again in the evening air, the street now draped with dusk turning towards night. I decided I must find Dr. Vronski. I must see him at once, without delay. He, rather than the police, was the one to be informed. But at my rooms I found peremptory orders that admitted of no delay or compromise. I left England a few hours later, the key still in my pocket, the door it belonged to unlocked. There had just been time for me to send a hasty letter to Dr. Vronski giving the facts as I knew them, and for a word of reply to reach me: "No cause for anxiety. I've heard from S. M. Do your job—but don't forget him." With this measure of relief —for I should otherwise have thought that Mantravers had shot himself or leaped from a window to his death—I crossed the Channel, an insignificant unit in that heroic B.E.F. Since Vronski had "heard from him," he was still alive—somewhere.

  What happened to men's minds during those four years lies, of course, beyond easy understanding—by those who never experienced the strains and stresses they were subject to. Any man capable of going over the edge went over it. For myself, I cannot say. After a year's anguish, tension, suffering that I swear lie beyond human expression in words, I was taken prisoner, and for the next three years I languished in a German prison camp. Nothing can extenuate or excuse the inhuman horror of a bad German prison camp. My own was of the worst. Any prisoner who survived the process that stunned, stupefied, brutalised his soul had in him something unusual. The life taught him to search the very marrow of his soul's bones to find relief from daily and nightly torture of excruciating kind.

  My point here is that, while I could not honestly find myself unusual in any way, I did find relief; and I found a good deal of this relief in speculating about escape—but I mean escape in space and time. Any real relief inside that barbed wire had to be of mental or spiritual kind, imaginative if you will. The point is that I found it to some extent in speculating about the wild ideas of Vronski and Man-travers. My mind, quite possibly, went a bit over the edge, as I called it above, though I cannot judge of that.

  My speculations, such as they were, began after a letter I received from Dr. Vronski: "You will like to know about your cousin," it ran briefly, also disconnectedly, since the censor's attentions had maimed it badly. "The police gave up the search long ago. The Courts have given leave now to assume him dead. But I know he is . . . not dead . . . conceivably within reach even. He is not unhappy, nor is he happy, for he is different. I am not in communication with him, but I know . . . alive and well . . . will come back when you come back . . . you, so to speak, the point in our space and time . . . point he left at . . . Shown the way by de Frasne into other conditions. He is, for the moment, elsewhere and otherwise ... for him literally for a moment only. If this reaches you, do not worry . . . think about it only ... no help from you needed, but sympathetic thought of most concentrated kind can keep open . . ." and the letter closed thus abruptly as though the censor rather late in the day imagined a code.

  I had years of "sympathetic thought," stimulated by fierce mental and physical anguish of distinctly "concentrated" kind.

  Let us leave it at that. . . .

  Mantravers had disappeared, leaving not a wrack behind. Hi presto! and the fellow was gone. He vanished—into ,an empty and unfurnished house. He was just over sixty when he went, and he was just over sixty when he returned. I was present when he returned and I can testify. I knew him before and after. The clothes he went in were the clothes he came back in—an everyday tweed suit with a blue bow tie. He had been away for over four years. He came into view again, re-emerged into our ordinary three-dimensional categories, into our ordinary life and world that is,"precisely and exactly as he left it— almost. Changes of a kind there were, but to describe them here would be to anticipate unduly. They shall be told in their proper place and sequence. . . .

  Other letters from Vronski reached me in my prison camp, though most of them, since they dealt with "escape," were too censored to be intelligible. A book or two came as well, articles and pamphlets, undoubtedly sent by him. My mind, whether "over the edge" or not, being neither mathematical nor metaphysical, made little headway with them, though I read—waded through them rather—with undeniable interest and excitement. Other cases of "total disappearance" were discussed and analysed, and such cases, apparently, were not so rare as I had imagined. There were certain places, certain spots of loneliness on the world's surface, regions of wild and hostile desolation, regions avoided rather by commonplace humanity, where such queer "vanishings" had occurred too frequently to be normally explained, and my mind, "ignorant but open," simple certainly, struggled with these strange and semi-marvellous accounts, accounts, moreover, painfully documented with names and dates and other evidence we usually accept as honest.

  Such disappearances, however, hardly applied, I felt, to a Bayswater street and a dwelling-house plastered with agents' boards. It was the deeper, more philosophical articles that held my interest chiefly, the writers who suggested that "escape" from the limited life we know was possible, desirable as well. Life, declared one writer, was nothing but a prison-house, cage, and we were wise to admit frankly that it was horrible. We were prisoners in it, slaves, caught helplessly by the bars of space and time which were our ghastly limitations. Yet a way of escape, "though few there be that find it," offered, the A B C of this way being to "go against nature," since nature kept us stupefied within our bars. The great majority, of course, dominated by the herd-instinct, obeyed the shibboleths of the herd. These never could, because they never wanted to, escape. Only the few who resisted the stunning, deadening influence of the herd, of nature, need ever dare to make the attempt. . . .

  A strange new world of possibilities opened before me. I did not close
my mind against them, but merely wondered, dreamed, and speculated. Did I actually make practical attempts, following the guarded hints and clues, attempts to practise in my own being the amazing rules laid down? I had these awful, bitter hours to fill as best I could. Physical efforts were not available, I must fill my life mentally, imaginatively, or else, as we described it among ourselves, and as I saw happening daily, hourly, among my fellow-prisoners, "go potty." My long sleepless nights, my days of endless anguish, sought what alleviation they could find. . . .

  Another dimension in space was easier to conceive, I found, than another dimension in time. Moreover, among my fellow-prisoners, was a Professor of sorts, a Russian, to whom I talked a good deal, and he tried to explain the space business to me with at least a glimmering of success. He showed me how a fellow could be in two places at once, in London, say, and Calcutta. Taking a sheet of paper from some old letter, he marked Calcutta at one end and London at the other. He told me to imagine people living on the surface of this sheet, people who knew only length and breadth—a world of two dimensions. "Of height, remember," he warned me in his broken English, "they know nothing. They have no perception of height—cannot even think of it. They are two-dimensional beings in a two-dimensional world." Well, I understood that all right.

  "A fellow in their world," he explained, "can be in London or in Calcutta, but he cannot be in both." It was obvious enough.

  Then he bent the sheet of paper. He doubled it together, so that the spot of London and the spot of Calcutta lay cheek by jowl. They coincided.

  "In bending the sheet," he added, "I have made it pass through height, of course." I agreed.

  "Yet, in the result, Calcutta and London lie together. The man in Calcutta is in London too. He is in two places at once."