Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  “We’ll have to hurry,” Escott said, swiftly, obviously intent on interrupting Hope’s anticipated eulogy. “The guard will be calling ‘All Aboard’ at any moment, and we’re in the carriage next to the guard’s van, right at the back. It was hardly worth the trouble of coming all the way up here, but I knew you’d be rooted to the spot, staring at the engine like some mesmerized somniloquist, and I knew that you’d be sure to miss the train if I didn’t shepherd you aboard.” He glanced at Michael as he added: “These starry-eyed optimists are all the same, Laurel. Heads in the clouds. No practicality. You’ll join us, of course?”

  “I only bought a second-class ticket,” Michael admitted, blushing deeply. “I’ll find a seat closer to the engine.”

  “Nonsense!” said Escott. “We have a spare seat in our reserved carriage—Sir Geoffrey Chatham has been detained in London, and won’t be able to make the party at all. Signor Monticarlo and his daughter are there, and Lady Phythian arrived half an hour in advance, as usual, but there’s one seat to spare now. We can’t offer it to Carp, even if we wanted to, because he’ll be traveling with his somniloquist.”

  “To be frank,” Hope put in, “you’d be doing us a favor—raising the intellectual average, so to speak. I say nothing against Monticarlo, mind; he’s a clever fellow, in his way, and his English is good when he plucks up the courage to use it, but he’s not a great conversationalist. Lady Phythian, on the other hand, is an utter wet blanket—always treats Escott and myself as if we were a pair of naughty boys squabbling over our toys. It’s a long way to York, and even a steam locomotive can’t do the trip in the blink of an eye. Besides, I’ve promised to indoctrinate you in the philosophy of progress, and there’s no better place to start than a railway carriage.”

  “And I can provide you with the necessary intellectual balance,” Escott said, “to make sure that you’re not blinded by the glare of Hope’s rose-tinted spectacles. But we have to hurry, Hope, or we’ll never get back to the carriage in time.”

  Michael was still hesitant, unsure as to what the rules of etiquette required or permitted him to say in response to the unexpected invitation.

  “I can make sure you sit next to the lovely Carmela, if you like,” Hope said. “She’s said to be very artistic, and she makes up for the fact that she’s reluctant to risk her English by smiling a lot.”

  Michael blushed yet again, this time in pure confusion. He had no idea whether Hope was simply trying to be kind, or whether he really did want the option of having someone else other than Escott to listen to him while he rode his favorite hobby-horse, but the one thing he did know was that he definitely did not want to arrive at Langstrade Hall in close company with a smiling Carmela Monticarlo, amid a drizzle of suggestive remarks about how well they had got on during the four-and-a-half-hour train journey and the subsequent ride in a hired diligence.

  “Hope’s right, for once in his life,” Escott put in, his voice full of urgency. “If we’re to have any decent conversation on the journey, we really do need a decent substitute for Chatham. Oblige us, please.”

  “But I only have a second-class ticket!” Michael protested, feebly, as Hope and Escott each took one of his arms and began to hustle him along the platform toward the rear of the train. “Won’t I get into trouble if the guard catches me in a first-class compartment?”

  “Not at all,” Hope assured him, accelerating his pace. “The entire compartment’s reserved; the seat’s booked and paid for. Lord Langstrade would never forgive us if we allowed one of his guests to travel second-class while we had a seat to spare.”

  “Even a painter,” Escott added, a trifle mischievously, as he lengthened his stride in order to keep pace with the scurrying optimist, “who’s only been invited to immortalize his Folly. I’ll wager that you’d rather be painting Miss Cecilia’s portrait!”

  Michael couldn’t help noticing that this off-hand remark provoked a sharp glance of disapproval from Quentin Hope. He suffered a momentary stab of panic as he wondered whether the renowned optimist might be entertaining hopes in regard to Lord Langstrade’s daughter.

  It was not impossible, Michael supposed, that Hope might take advantage of the weekend to ask Langstrade for Cecilia’s hand—and what Langstrade’s response might be was anybody’s guess, given that he had obviously inherited his father’s legendary eccentricity. Who else but a Langstrade, after all, would have invited a little-known portrait-painter all the way to the wilds of Yorkshire to paint a mock-Medieval Keep in the heart of a Maze, designed according to a plan that had supposedly been drawn up by Dedalus himself?

  “Isn’t Gregory Marlstone traveling on the train?” Michael asked, although he cursed himself silently as soon as the words had spilled from his mouth. For one thing, the remark was bound to sound somewhat ungrateful, in view of the two men’s generosity in offering to pluck him out of second-class chaos into first-class comfort, and the urgency with which they were exercising their invitation. For another, if there was the slightest possibility that Hope might be a rival for Cecilia’s hand—if not her affection—then he certainly ought to seize the opportunity to confirm or falsify the hypothesis.

  “Marlstone set off five days ago with six assistants and half a dozen carts,” Escott told him. He had to pause thereafter when the cry of “All aboard!” was raised and echoed all along the platform, accompanied by a blast on the station-manager’s whistle, but as soon as the thin man could make himself heard again, he continued: “Anyone else would have sent the equipment on ahead and followed at his leisure, but Marlstone won’t let the components of his precious time machine out of his sight, all the more so since the fiascos at Horton Lacey and Chatsworth. If all has gone well with the convoy, he’ll be there ahead of us, but my guess is that he’ll have got bogged down somewhere in the Midlands, and probably won’t arrive until Sunday. By the time he’s got his blessed machine set up, the rest of us will be on our way home.”

  In spite of the difficulties of shoving their way through the crowd, Hope and Escott had succeeded in reaching the carriage containing their reserved compartment without ever letting go of Michael’s captive arms. They literally lifted him off the ground in order to deposit him in the carriage, somewhat to the surprise and alarm of Lady Phythian, who had taken advantage of her early arrival to claim a window seat. The famous violinist Signor Monticarlo and his daughter Carmela had taken the two opposed seats on the far side of the carriage, next to the door to the corridor. Michael had been introduced to all of them at one time or another, but knew them even more slightly that he knew Hope and Escott.

  The virtuoso and the two ladies did not seem unduly surprised to see Michael, obviously having no inkling of the ignominy of the second-class ticket, but they did not seem unduly delighted either. They greeted him politely, but rather coolly; when Hope propelled him toward the vacant seat between the two ladies, both of them seemed to Michael’s anxious eyes to be a trifle disappointed that Hope had not taken the seat himself. In fact, the optimist took the spare window seat, while his meager companion took the seat opposite Michael.

  Now that the carriage was fully-loaded it seemed rather cramped, largely because the luggage racks were full to overflowing and several items of luggage had had to be accommodated on the floor or on the passengers’ laps. Signor Monticarlo, a short and delicate man with an abundance of sleek black hair and a moustache, was clutching one of his violin-cases. In spite of the capacious bandage she was sporting on her wrist, Carmela, who was a little taller and wirier than her father, was cradling another. Lady Phythian, who seemed rather large by comparison with the two Italians, had a proportionately enormous handbag on her lap. Michael had to maneuver his way to his seat with some skill, and felt that he was easing himself into a narrow gap as he sat down. Compared to conditions in a second-class compartment, however, the plushness and softness of the seats were sheer luxury.

  Mi
chael resolved to accept the inevitable with a good grace, sit back, and do his level best to enjoy the hectic journey to come.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY

  “Well,” said Quentin Hope, as the train drew away from the platform, while the crowd left behind cheered and waved, “here we are in the very bosom of a mechanical miracle, participating in the latest glory of English science. Long live the First Sea Lord and the President of the Academy!”

  “”If ever there were a Ship of Fools…,” Escott began, pitching straight in with evident relish—but he was immediately interrupted by Lady Phythian, who had obviously been present at more than one of Hope and Escott’s showpiece arguments and was nursing a faint hope of being able to derail this one.

  “I must be mad to have let young Langstrade talk me into this,” the dowager pronounced, striking a melodramatic pose. “At my age, given my delicate health, the excessive speed is sure to prove fatal!”

  Lady Phythian certainly did not seem to be in delicate health, in Michael’s non-expert opinion. She was short of stature, but her embonpoint was robust, and her lungs were obviously in very good order indeed. In truth, she was not so very old, although she gave an impression of antiquity. She was probably no more than sixty, if that, but widowhood had conferred a particular stamp of authority upon her attitude and manner as well as her perceived status. As daughters and wives, however rich or aristocratic, Englishwomen were necessarily subservient, but if and when they became widows they acquired an independent authority that was somehow beyond challenge. Michael’s mother had responded to her own widowhood by assuming an exaggerated concern for his well-being, but Lady Phythian had given birth to two sons and a daughter, and had married them all off successfully, so her widowhood had given her a far more general imperiousness reminiscent of the mythical Britannia in whose name the Admiralty ruled the waves.

  Michael knew, by virtue of society chatter, that Lady Phythian had been relatively humbly born, as Ariadne Potts, but that she took great pride in the facts that her grandmother had been an Asherson, and that her husband, the late Viscount Phythian, had been a cousin of the Lowthers—a family that included the Earls of Lonsdale as well as several baronets of no particular significance. She had once been the evident social superior of her close friend Millicent Houghton, although the latter had overtaken her when her husband, Harold Langstrade, had been elevated to the peerage as the first Earl of Langstrade, reconnecting his surname to the Yorkshire village from which his ancestors supposedly hailed, and whose ancient manor he had bought from the Lords Office. Michael was not at all surprised, therefore, that Lady Phythian seemed to be looking down at him as he sat by her side, even though he was a head taller than she was. There was no hostility or contempt in her gaze when she deigned to turn in his direction, though; she was evidently reserving her judgment as to whether he was to be placed in the same “naughty boy” category to which she had long ago consigned Hope and Escott.

  Michael guessed that the dowager’s objection to high-speed travel was more a matter of conformity to expectation than genuine terror. He knew that there were legions of diehard conservatives in the land, who swore that nothing on Earth would ever tempt them to step aboard a carriage pulled by a steam locomotive. Such people were wont to opine that the human body had not been designed—whether by God or Evolution—to withstand the stresses of movement at such terrifying velocities, and that, in any case, such a mode of transportation had none of the camaraderie, romance and history of a journey by road. No one in his right mind, such skeptics stoutly maintained, wanted to live life at such an insane pace that a journey that had always taken at least two days was now crammed into a mere four and a half hours. He suspected, however, that Lady Phythian was not of that company. There was a slight twinkle in her eye when she made her dramatic gesture, and she pronounced her complaint as if she were reciting a line in a play.

  “Reassure yourself, Lady Phythian,” said Hope, serenely. “Destiny is on our side. The Commonwealth has long enjoyed the Empire of the Oceans, and now it has the means to exercise the same authority on land. Just as John Dee’s telescope and Cornelius Drebbel’s submarine paved the way for England to rule the waves, Dick Trevithick’s Cornish Engines will make us masters of the Earth’s surface, and its bowels too!”

  Lady Phythian frowned at the use of the word “bowels” in a mixed carriage, but she was insufficiently quick off the mark to seize the initiative again by means of a further melodramatic pronouncement. Escott was not about to be forestalled for a second time.

  “Steam will be the nation’s ruin,” Hope’s rival stated, sententiously. “Using powerful engines to pump water out of mines will only encourage miners to dig deeper, so that the inevitable collapses will be all the more disastrous when they occur. Using those same engines to power mills has already thrown tens of thousands of craftsmen out of work, and reduced the remaining mill-workers to mere mechanical hands, rude slaves of machinery. The displaced and dispossessed will accumulate into a revolutionary rabble the likes of which England has not seen since the monarchy was toppled. Locomotives are direly dangerous even now, while they run on tracks and carry goods and innocent passengers, but when they’re adapted for use in war—their engines fitted with cannon and their carriages filled with artillerists—they’ll be so destructive that indiscriminate mechanized massacre will become routine. Enjoy your mechanical honeymoon, Hope—it can’t and won’t last.”

  “The days of warfare are numbered, Escott,” Hope affirmed, confidently. “The Pax Romana was a feeble affair compared to the Pax Anglica. The world has never seen an alliance like that between the First Sea Lord and the President of the Academy, and their association will make certain that social progress advances hand in hand with technological progress. We are privileged to be alive at the dawn of the Euchronian Era, and hands that are idle today, or reduced to mindlessly repetitive labor because their old skills have become redundant, will not need the Devil to find them clever work. The march of science will do that, infallibly and triumphantly. Future generations of laborers will not be akin to slaves, even in careless metaphor; they will be true collaborators with machinery, participating in a marvelous complementarity of skills. Steam is brute force, but electricity is art, and electricity will be the foundation of the next technological revolution—as witness the telegraphic systems that control the signals distributed along the railway.”

  Michael observed that the Monticarlos had already lost the thread of the argument; although they both spoke conversational English with commendable fluency, and hardly any accent, the terms in which Hope and Escott were pontificating were too esoteric to be easily comprehensible. Carmela whispered something to her father in Italian, as if to start up a second, rival conversation, but the violinist frowned at her and shook his head, instructing her not to be impolite.

  Having heard such exchanges a dozen times before, Lady Phythian obviously had no desire to listen to another, but it seemed that she had already despaired of any possibility of controlling such disobedient individuals. For the moment, she contented herself with making her disinterest in the argument manifest, turning away from Michael and Hope alike to gaze loftily out of the widow, as if she were indeed Britannia reviewing her estates.

  Michael was now convinced that Hope and Escott had only been eager to invite him to join them in their carriage in order that they might obtain a relatively fresh audience for their eternal quarrel rather than to invite any contribution to their discussion, but he did not hold it against them. The same chatter that had informed him so fully of Lady Phythian’s history and character had filled in their background for him. They had gone on from Eton to Balliol, and then—having come into their respective inheritances within a matter of months—had set out to make the Grand Tour together. Instead of following the customary route to Italy, however, they had decided to design their own itinerary, which would take
them to even remoter cradles of civilization: to Greece, to Egypt, and finally to Crete, where they had spent a full year exploring the ruins of Knossos, the ancient capital in the vicinity of Makro Teikho, whose recently-excavated remains had become a playground for the assiduous antiquarians of England and the German States. It was there that they had met the present Earl of Langstrade, who had then been known as “young Harry Langstrade” to distinguish him from his father—who had only recently become “Old Harry Langstrade of Langstrade” instead of mere “Old Harry Langstrade”—and who had not yet met his wife-to-be, Emily Hale.

  According to the gossip, it was the Grand Tour that had completed the opposition between the two traveling companions, perfecting its universality. It had been the three years of their “educational odyssey” that had extended Hope’s innate optimism into a wholehearted philosophy of progress, and Escott’s natural pessimism into quasi-apocalyptic gloom. It had also stretched Hope’s Whig sympathies into near-radical enthusiasm for political reform and Utopian—or, as he preferred to call it, Euchronian—social planning, while elaborating Escott’s Toryism into a near-mystical appreciation of the lost glories of the past. It had even been their years in and around the Mediterranean, so it was said, that had made Hope so plump and Escott so thin, because the former had thrived on native diets they had encountered there, whereas the latter had never been able to reconcile his stomach to their unfamiliarity.

  Some people professed surprised that the two men had remained friends once they had returned to England to enjoy life as consummate amateurs, but they had always represented themselves as inevitable dialectical elements of a greater unity, like the north and south poles of a magnet. Now that he was able to listen to them holding forth at close range, as it were, Michael was able to appreciate the truth of that judgment. Had only one of them been present, his ideas would have been mere philosophical pontifications, overblown and essentially tedious, but because they were together, their contrasted ideas obtained a kind of vibrancy from a cut-and-thrust combat that was almost akin to music in its rhythm and resonance. Instead of being tedious, they seemed alive and electric, spitting sparks at one another like the various kinds of apparatus that had been built and exhibited to demonstrate the telegraphic principle.