Time Travel Omnibus, page 163
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 Mantravers. 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.”
We glared at one another. “It is only an analogy, of course,” he reminded me, “and it has the fallacy that all analogies must hold.”
I got an inkling of what he meant, but when he talked in similar fashion about time, I could not follow him. It gave me a sick headache merely.
From the books I read and the thoughts I thought, I gathered anyhow that brains, tongues and pens have speculated freely enough about these very rare “total disappearances.” I gathered likewise that such speculations were somewhat negligible, and that only a mere handful who had made practical experiments—among them undoubtedly Vronski and my cousin—could offer anything of tangible value. Among the sparse elect, none the less, I caught strange whispers. A notion grew in the deepest part of me that another dimension in space could explain this wiping out of a physical body, and that such a one, dropping away into a direction at right angles to the three we know so Well, drops obviously and naturally clean out of sight. He passes into a region no sense of ours can ever plumb. Out of our known, familiar space he has dropped elsewhere—and otherwise as well, since a new direction in space involves necessarily a new dimension in time.
Time, as we know it, runs forward only in a line; but in two dimensions it would run backwards, or parallel as well. Not only could he be in two places at once, but he could be also in two times at once. He could do two things—two things otherwise mutually self-exclusive—at once.
“At any given moment,” said my fellow-prisoner, “you have a choice of doing several things. Of these you choose one. Actually, you might choose any of the others. You select one, however, and do it. That one thing actualises.”
I nodded, as much as my approaching headache allowed.
“Now, listen: In time of more than one dimension you could choose more than one thing. You could do several things at once—and they all would actualise . . .”
At which point my sick headache usually developed suddenly, so that my friend continued to talk without my understanding.
I acquired, at any rate, a sort of smattering of comprehension.
“Anyone escaping into other time and space,” he finished later, “would come back, you see, at the point he left, even if years of our time had passed meanwhile—years or a few minutes only . . .”
Such explanations, I found, supported themselves, loosely enough, with the jargon of Relativity. Einstein, the magician thinker, was called in to help. To me it remained a “line of speculation,” than which the sober mind would say no more.
Mantravers, at any rate, disappeared . . . and since he vanished when war was declared, and reappeared shortly after the Armistice, there were those who sneered that he had been in hiding. This was untrue, absurd as well. No more patriotic Englishman ever lived. Nor was his courage questionable. The date of his going and returning had nothing to do with the War. The Great War, indeed, was almost a trivial item in his strange experience, and his disappearance, I incline to think, was enforced, and singularly enforced.
It was January 1919 when I found myself in London again. My intention, backed by a deep instinct, was to go back to the house where Sydney Mantravers had left me standing on the steps: to enter the building, if still unoccupied; to walk through all its rooms and passages again. I wished to do this alone, and to do it before I had spoken with Dr. Vronski, or even seen him. Vronski’s talk and information could come later. I kept my return secret from him.
If I never quite explained or justified this deep instinct even to myself, I recognised that no mere morbid curiosity lay in it anywhere. Clearest in my mind was the desire to make this visit and inspection before I became immersed again in the world of ordinary everyday affairs, that is, before some inner mood or attitude acquired in my years of solitude had dissipated. During those prison years of introspection, thought, speculation, even of experiment as well, something had come to life in me that contact with the bustling outer world, I knew, must smash to pieces. It was as though I had dreamed of another order of existence, had even fringed the perception of entirely new categories. Two sets of values, at any rate, appeared in some depth of my being that was only accessible to me with the greatest difficulty and effort. I was aware of them, no more than that; the slightest mistake, of clumsiness or stupidity, on my part would send them plunging forever beyond my reach. This extremely delicate balance I perceived. The disappearance of Mantravers was concerned with the set of values I had dreamed of, possibly just begun to understand, to acquire even, in my bitter years of prison life. My instinct was to visit the house while this still remained and before its fading, already in progress, resulted in complete forgetfulness.
Did I expect to see him too, actually to see some figure or outline of the man who had disappeared over four years ago and was now legally dead? I cannot truthfully say, although I believe some uncanny, rather awful hope lurked deep down in me.
. . . I reached London at noon, my return to England, my presence in town, a well-kept secret; not wasting a minute, I was walking up the Bayswater side-street by the afternoon, the January daylight already fading, and it must have been close on four o’clock when the house came into view, plastered, I noticed, still with agents’ boards, and therefore unlet, unoccupied. The stained and dirty window-panes had no blinds, the patchy walls showed no signs of recent paint, the air of neglect and disuse were the same as before, only more marked. The key, in case of need, the very key my cousin had handed to me himself, was in my pocket, kept carefully all these years. In the pocket of my mackintosh my fingers gripped it tightly, even a trifle feverishly, as though it might somehow melt away and defeat my purpose. I kept feeling it over, indeed, as a man might finger bank-notes to make quite sure he still had them safely.
A definite realisation, moreover, came to me as I walked up the steps—that I was both exhilarated and frightened, and that while the exhilaration contained an immense, a biting curiosity, the fear was partly due to a sudden wave of depression that had come upon me. Was this depression, this lowering of vitality, I remember asking myself, similar to what the two ladies experienced just as they passed the threshold into their unique otherworldly Adventure in Versailles? The vivid detail rose up from my reading in my prison camp. It was certainly not a physical fear, it was perhaps a mental, a spiritual hint of terror, as best I could diagnose it, for the idea appeared that my ordinary equipment of mind and body contained no weapon to help me in what might be coming. Yet a touch of horror I had known before “going over the top” seemed in it too. My hand, at any rate, was trembling as I took the big key and began to fit it into the lock of the front door—at which very moment a noise of tapping on glass somewhere above me made me pause. It sounded like fingers drumming or tapping faintly on a window-pane. Startled, I looked up quickly, and there, at a window on the second floor, two storeys above, I saw a face peering down at me through the dusty pane, a face I recognised, the face of my cousin, Sydney Mantravers. Looking over his shoulder, and also staring down at me, was the outline of a second face, but a face that was wholly strange to me. I had just time to note that it wore a small moustache, when both the faces withdrew sharply backwards from the window so that they were no longer visible, and it was in this same instant that my fingers, fumbling with the key automatically, discovered that the door was not locked at all but was indeed already open into the hall.
