Philip Van Doren Stern (ed)

by Travelers In Time

  Pages of description cannot make any clearer this instant flash that overwhelmed me with complete conviction. I know what I witnessed, and I know that this certainty of positive knowledge lay in me. No surprise accompanied it, no touch of criticism, as in a dream I accepted it merely as true and possible. There was in me, perhaps, a momentary extension of consciousness, a change of consciousness, that involved some sudden awareness of a changed, extended universe. It went as quickly as it came. I had, in any case, no instant for reflection. The figures vanished. Round the door that was standing ajar, peering at us, fingers gripping the edge, I saw the face of Sydney Mantravers. Vronski saw it too, though whether he had seen de Frasne or not I did not know, and, feeling me shrink back involuntarily, he pulled me sharply, even violently forward, so that together we took half a dozen rapid steps in the direction of the face. I saw the hand that gripped the edge of the door advance; it pushed out; an arm came next; the face, with shoulders behind it, followed; the entire figure pushed into full view. There was a blaze.

  "Hold out your hand," Vronski whispered. "Say something. A welcome."

  As in a nightmare, I made the effort. My own hand moved out. My voice spoke, made a sound at any rate, a hoarse whisper, half choked with terror: "Here I am, Sydney. Come on—come back to me—back to us."

  It seemed to me my mind and senses were registering only certain things of limited kind, and that a whole world of other occurrences going on at the same time about me now passed entirely unrecognised. While aware of their existence, I could not perceive them.

  The full-length figure then drove forward at what seemed terrific speed through the now wide-open door. There was a rush, a roar too, I believe, as though a comet swept through space, and I felt my hand grasped in a clutch of ice, while a tremendous blow seemed to strike me, not in the face and chest alone and not outward only, but over my whole body, and somehow inside as well, knocking me backwards as with some gigantic energy behind it. I reeled at the shock. I lost my balance. As I fell against the wall at my back, I saw the face and figure of Mantravers come rushing at me with the speed and power as of some awful projectile. I cannot over-emphasise this impression of appalling speed and power. In the flash of a second it happened. Memory and consciousness then collapsed together simultaneously, but before the darkness swept over me, I caught the laughter of both men on the tail of broken sentences.

  ". . . too much for him, but I'm here again . . . he's got me out . . . damned idiot to come . . . just going back into sleep once more . . . de Frasne refused . . . enjoying his boyhood too much. . . ."

  The words roared past me like a clap of thunder, but the heavy thump I heard was evidently my own body as it reached the floor.

  "Hold on—for God's sake don't forget—grip your memory—hold

  on to that—tell us all you can---- " I just caught in Vronski's voice as

  I sank into oblivion.

  Memory, apparently, is but a clumsy, ineffective process. No man can recall accurately the details of the accident that knocked him out. People who claim to remember past lives usually have blank minds about what happened a month ago. At any rate, to remember in a calm moment what occurred in a time of violent stress seems quite impossible. The chief detail I recalled clearly of this amazing scene was that Mantravers looked exactly the same as when I had last seen him four years before, but that his face had a brilliant whiteness and that he was thin to emaciation. Against the surrounding darkness of the landing he looked radiant, he shone, he rushed at me like a stTeam of lightning. And hence, of course, the blaze already mentioned.

  His words, the words of Vronski too, held equally clear and definite, audible memories being perhaps more vividly impressed than visual ones. His return to our three-dimensional conditions he regarded thus as a limitation of life and an idiotic one, for it was "falling into sleep again." The glimpse accorded me, moreover, of the conditions he had left, conditions possible to an extended consciousness, were "too much" for me, while de Frasne, being in different time, could choose his period at will, and preferred his "boyhood" years to anything to be found in our world. Yet of those few pregnant words I caught, it was the word "here" that impressed me most. My cousin said "here" as though he had never left or gone away.

  It was later that I was able to note and label other changes. . . .

  If his clothing betrayed no passage of the years, there were alterations in his appearance that impressed me profoundly. These testified to something, though what this something was I leave to others cleverer than myself. He looked no older, I can swear to that. He still wore, indeed, that air of mighty resistance to the years already mentioned before he vanished, that extraordinary retention of youth, as though the usual decay had hardly touched him for a generation, as though this natural process had been arrested in his physical being. And this resistance to time, even with these four years added, was what struck me as his radiant face rushed at me in that empty house. I have thought later, if a good deal later, that in earlier experiments with Vronski, he had so outdistanced his companion, left him so far behind, that intelligible communication between the two had blocked. Myself, ignorant, untrained, sympathetic and open-minded, he could make contact with, while Vronski, stopped at a certain point, lay out of his reach. . . .

  Yet, if he looked no older, he certainly did look different. Different is the word, though to analyse this difference precisely puzzles me completely. Things had passed over him, he had enjoyed, suffered, worn, while it was not, I swear, the physical envelope that had worn, and his body at sixty-four looked forty still. There lay the imprint of signatures on his soul perhaps, of vigils due to an intensity of experience ordinary humans cannot know. I say "perhaps," for it is imagination that interprets such strange markings, and I cannot expect the report of my imagination to pass as evidence. Were I forced to find strictly truthful terms, I should say that Mantravers, during this four years' interlude which left him physically untouched, had inwardly endured things we may hardly guess at, much less define, things possible only to an altered consciousness in altered conditions of space and time, and whether in the body or out of the body, to borrow from an expert, we need not dare to fathom, since they are not knowable to our three-dimensional faculties. Personally, I phrased it thus—that he had been out of the cage we know as life and living. He had escaped.

  The fact remains that, of outward physical signs, his face and skin alone at first betrayed him—their incalculable, sweet, fiery radiance. It was this effect of light that had struck me so vividly, even with a burst of horror, before, an instant later, I lost consciousness.

  This momentary weakness in myself I have always bitterly regretted, for it robbed me of witnessing any coherent interchange of words and action between Vronski and himself. Its duration was brief, yet long enough for several minutes to have passed, during which we all three reached the hall below. Vronski was chafing my hands. I opened my eyes. "I'm going to find a taxi," he said clearly, as soon as he saw I was all right. "Wait here with your cousin." He placed the hand of Mantravers in my own, and the front door closed behind him with a bang, leaving us together, sitting side by side on two wooden chairs.

  Some wholesome magic lay perhaps in that word "taxi," for a measure of control came back to me, though of those next minutes I remember only one thing clearly: that while I searched feverishly, frantically even, for something to say, or rather to ask, a thousand questions boiling in me, Mantravers spoke himself. In the gloom of that dreary hall, lit only by a gleam through the narrow windows from the street, he turned his radiant face towards me. The blaze had dimmed, but it still shone as with an interior lamp.

  "I have been awake," he said quietly, sadly, "but I am now falling back into sleep again. I have been elsewhere'and otherwise, but time now separates things idiotically here. I've been out of the cage. . . ."

  He said much more, his words, each like a great eagle on the wing, rushing past me, into some region where I could not follow. For understanding left me
, even while something just beyond reason beckoned dangerously. With those shining eyes fixed on my own, I felt myself caught up, rapt away, ravished into something beyond experience. Only the feeblest flash of his meaning came—namely, that our earthly consciousness, even at its best and highest, is so limited that it is little better than a state of dream, and that his return to it was like falling into sleep. But before I could frame a single question, much less utter an intelligible comment, the front door had opened again, and I heard Vronski's rather harsh voice calling: "The taxi's here. Come on!"

  Mantravers was legally dead; in the eyes of authority he had no existence; he could neither be taxed, fined, nor arrested and imprisoned. He lived—went to bed, rather, and stayed there—in Dr. Vronski's house in Westminster, and to me, ignorant, stupid, scared, but "open-minded," was allotted by Vronski the task of watching over him. "He'll talk to you, at least he may," said Vronski, emphasising "you" and "may," "if he talks at all. Not," he added bluntly, resentfully a trifle too, "because you know anything, or will even understand what he says, but because you're a link of sorts, a'link with his dream-existence here, you see, before he left."

  I was too uneasy to feel flattered, as I listened, but it did occur to me to ask why he, Vronski, couldn't be that link himself. His reply only set my mind going in whirls and whorls. He couldn't, he explained, because he, Vronski, was still in the state of sleep—what most people called life—whereas Mantravers had been "awake for a long time, for twenty-five years or more. I woke up for moments, but I never could hold it. I dropped back again into—into this," and he waved his arms over London, as it were. "He left me more than a quarter of a century ago, a whole generation. But you," he looked hard at me with a bitter envy in both voice and eyes, "though you don't know it"—he hesitated a moment—"are more awake than I— for longer periods anyhow." He turned away with a half angry shrug. "Anyhow, he may talk to you, and if he does, treasure his words like gold. I can't get a syllable out of him."

  He gazed at me with that horrible envy in his eyes. It made me shiver to hear him, and though I longed to ask him about those twenty-five years, missing years as it were, I could not bring myself to do so.

  "You have," he went on more quietly, "an amazing privilege—a chance in a thousand million. Think of it—a man, a human, who has tasted other time and space. You may hear something about existence outside our categories altogether. Make a note of—of everything, especially of what you don't understand. The more it contradicts our logic and experience, the more valuable it may be. Nonsense, sheer nonsense, here will be right, remember. . . ."

  Much more in similar vein he impressed upon me, as he installed me in the dressing-room leading out of the "sick man's" chamber in his luxurious house, the very house, I knew, where he and my cousin had carried on their audacious experiments of years ago. I listened, listened closely, saying hardly anything myself, while in my mind, or in some part of me that somehow remained aloof, unfrightened, the calmest of calm spectators, I was perfectly aware that Vronski and I were talking in a dream, and that our three-dimensional consciousness was little better than a dream-state. The journey in the taxi, to go back a bit, left few clear impressions in me; I was too scared, too utterly nonplussed at the moment, to focus attention or reflection. Mantravers, emaciated, limp and so strangely shining, lay back in his comer beside his former friend. He rarely spoke a word. I watched him as I might have watched a nightmare figure. This dream-texture wove itself through the whole journey.

  The taxi, I remember, drove dangerously fast, so that, as in the cinema stunt-pictures, crashes which seemed unavoidable were just avoided by a hair's breadth and the stream of vehicles rushed past us in a dreadful sequence. I was clutching for safety at everything within reach, when my cousin spoke. "Why doesn't the man start?" he asked impatiently. "He's got three directions to choose from, hasn't he, and the house can't come to us—down here, at any rate, it can't. I'm there already anyhow, if he only knew it." He gave a queer little gulp of laughter, turning to me with a look that set my shivers going again. "I knew it, knew it perfectly, you see, before I came back into this, but I'm losing it now, it's going again." His piercing, fiery eyes were full upon me; he drew a profound sigh of weariness, of disgust, of pity. "The cage is about me, the stupid, futile cage. It's time that does it, it's your childish linear time, time in a single line. In such a limited state it's not even being awake,

  just trivial dreaming, almost death---- " and the voice died off into

  a whisper. He closed his eyes, leaning back into his comer.

  I saw Vronski clutch him. "Remember," Vronski shouted, "try to remember! You're back in three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time now—and with me. I'm Vronski—Nicholas Vronski— your old friend. You remember our talks, our speculations, our experiments!"

  There was no response, not even a turn of the head. But one of those flashes I had actually no right to came to me, and I understood that Mantravers, back now in conditions he had long escaped, found himself so caged and limited that he felt helpless. After the intensity, the difference, the power and liberty he had known, the experiences of our existence were as the unreal phantasmagoria of a dream. "It's all leaving me," he murmured once. "I'm forgetting, forgetting. It's awful, awful. It was always difficult to hold it. I can't hold it now. Yet I had a flash, a minute—four years, as you think it here."

  The taxi, escaping a hundred deaths, stopped suddenly, and then Vronski, grabbing my arm painfully hard as we got out, whispered something about "get all he says, make notes, remember every word, hold on to him," and somehow we were, all three, inside the house.

  Such is my brief recollection, half hazy, half vivid, of that frightful journey. So perturbed and upset I was that I only vaguely recall that Vronski provided a meal of sorts, put Mantravers to bed, and fixed me up in the dressing-room with only a door between. It all happened with the rapidity of that cinema stunt-picture almost; these little details of preparation, eating a meal, providing me with pyjamas, paper and pencil, and a dozen other necessary matters, all went past with extraordinary swiftness, as though, perhaps, I hardly noticed them attentively enough to take them in. It seemed but a few minutes, when he stood at the door, giving me final injunctions before he left me alone for the night. "I'm best out of sight, in the background anyhow," he whispered. "Ring for all you want. My manservant is used to anything at any hour. I must go now. I must notify the authorities, of course, for one thing. Keep your door ajar, and watch and listen. Be ready. Your position, your privilege, your duty . . ." The words poured out feverishly jumbled, there was so much he wanted to say. He shrugged his shoulders, and adding that he would look in again at midnight, he was gone.

  He did come back at midnight, a couple of hours later, and entering my room on tiptoe, seemed relieved to hear that there had been no waking yet, hardly a movement of the sleeping body even. "He may sleep for hours," he told me, "for days, even for weeks, like others before him. But I doubt it. His case is not of that sort. He'll wake up right enough before too long, and you must be the first person he sees."

  My shudder was noticeable evidently. He eyed me keenly, alive to my exhaustion. "You—you will stick it, won't you?" he asked, almost piteously.

  I looked into those beseeching eyes. The pallid face, wasted with intense desire, distraught, scarred by experiments of nameless kind, the face of a man who had not spared himself in the search for what he deemed knowledge, made an almost violent appeal. The pain, too, was there, the sense of loss, the anguish due to being robbed of refreshment poignantly expected, earned—robbed by another whom, moreover, he considered, at the least, unworthy.

  I asked a few questions. He answered them. It all still seemed to me a dream of marvellous, even supernatural, sort, a dream I could only partially recover. It seems so to-day, indeed, more than ever.

  "I'm scared," I whispered.

  "You well may be," he whispered back.

  I gave my promise, if fearfully, yet at the same ti
me eagerly as well.

  "Scared," that little trivial word, was the one that hung echoing in the air during the hours of my long vigil. I dreaded the awakening, yet longed for it. My mind was a turmoil. Contradictions raged in me. Mantravers, they said, had of course been in hiding all these years —yet his very clothes, hanging over the chair, denied it. It was all a tricky hallucination of my own mind—my recent war experiences denied that still more decisively. The alternative was staggering, more than my faculties could hold or deal with—that my cousin, sleeping calmly in that bed, had left our space and time for a period of four years, and that before this complete disappearance, as' a preliminary to it, by way of training possibly, he had escaped our time, while still occupying our space, for a far longer period, for some twenty-five years, an entire generation. When he woke up in that bed across the floor, woke out of this interval of readjustment which was an earthly sleep, he might tell me something, things of unexampled, fearful interest—me, because though ignorant I was open-minded, not knowing enough even to have prejudices. . . .

  With books I could not read, with pencil and writing-pad in hand, I sat peering through the half-open door. I could easily see the emaciated, shining face, the collar of blue pyjamas round the neck, the nose buried in the pillow, the counterpane rising and falling with the steady breathing. No other movement came, no sound, no gentle snoring even; he might pass his life away, it seemed to me, dying in his sleep. He looked as if he could never wake, as if he did not mean to, certainly did not want to, wake. What dying might mean to him, I dared not think. Once I crept in on tiptoe, and looked closer, standing within two feet of the bed. God—that strange radiance! Even the transparent eyelids glowed, as though the eyeballs underneath looked through at me. I felt "seen through," my very soul examined. I returned again and again, stealthily, as though irresistibly attracted, fascinated. I hoped he would never wake, I hoped he would. I sat with nerves on edge, with senses painfully alert, too frightened to feel fear.