Time Travel Omnibus, page 165
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 time 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.
The hours passed slowly. No sound penetrated from the London streets. It seemed the silence deepened to something beyond silence. Beneath the surface the turmoil in my mind ran helter-skelter among a thousand thoughts and pictures, playing pitch-and-toss with my years in the prison camp, with my reading, with my own strange experiments in escape . . . I wondered, wondered, for wonder seemed the single attitude that held calm and steady in me. For the hundredth time I went over my brief talk with Vronski just before he left, the few wild questions I had put, the startling replies. Incoherent and almost childish that exchange seemed now. Was there anything in particular I should look for, I had asked, apart from noting what my cousin might say? And Vronski, eyeing me hungrily, had hesitated a moment, as though reflecting deeply. “A change,” he had said at length, “an alteration—of unexpected kind—a sudden—possibly a very shocking one.” Into my mind leaped the idea of mania. “No, not that,” came the reply, reading my thoughts again. “I mean that its suddenness, its rapidity—you might find shocking.” It was nothing mental, I realised. “Oh, physical then?” I asked with a little gasp impossible to repress, and he had nodded, the expression on his face dreadful almost, because a queer superior smile lay mingled in it. “He might appear suddenly—rather—different,” his words came slowly. I guessed faintly at what his allusion meant perhaps. I recalled, all in a flash, the stories, my own casual observations in the past, the fact that for a generation Mantravers had not grown older, and the unnatural horror of it came back to me like ice. And Vronski’s slow words were still dropping from his lips in whispers. “The stresses and energies where he has been lie beyond anything we can know or imagine. Their removal here may result in abrupt collapse of even dreadful kind. The price must be paid—paid back!—in our time, of course.” His voice became almost inaudible. “It may be sudden,” I just caught, “what we call sudden.”
The talk ran in a ceaseless circle through my mind, round and round, till any meaning it might have held was lost, as I sat there watching the sleeper’s bed. My armchair was against the open door. The silence deepened, the cold increased, the city traffic lay dead, no birds awake, no wind astir. No hint of sleep came near me. If he wakened—should I dare to ask the thousand questions raging in my mind, dare to frame a single one of them? He did not stir an inch, he did not turn over, trunk and head and limbs lay motionless, and I doubt if my eyes ever left his face for more than a few seconds at a time.
So long this silence and immobility continued that, beginning to feel nothing would ever happen again, I glanced at my wrist-watch, noting that it was close upon four in the morning, the hour when human vitality sinks to its lowest ebb, and thinking that daylight must presently come filtering through the blinds. I can swear that my eyes did not leave his face for longer than ten seconds at most, but it was in this very brief interval I became aware of a sudden movement in the still room. I started, gave a jerk as though a bullet had passed through me, while my questions fled like a flock of terrified sheep. The movement was of the slightest, but it was real—the opening of his eyelids. Mantravers was staring at me across the floor. And accompanying this movement was a low sound that came at me like a bell—his voice.
Caution, circumspection, sensible action, all forsook me in that instant, and fear went with them: memory of detailed instruction vanished utterly; caught in a wave of passionate and overwhelming curiosity, I sprang to my feet, obeying instinctively my dominating impulse. I was across the strip of intervening carpet in a second, I rushed up to the bed; with barely a foot between our two faces, I plumped out my first question, regardless of all else. It was what, above all, I wanted to know, apparently, for it burst out like an automatic explosion.
“How did you do it, Sydney—keep young—arrest age and decay, I mean, for twenty-five years on end?”
The question had spurted spontaneously out of my “subconscious,” of course, where it had lain so long, perplexingly unanswered; for I had no thought of asking it till then, and there were others I had meant to put.
Those strange electric eyes gazed into mine. He spoke, and his voice again was like a bell: “A man in his own place,” he answered with a curious gentleness, “is the ruler of his fate. And I found mine.”
“How—how did you get there?” came from my lips, stupidly enough.
“By leaving—this—this imagery.” He made a slight, even a tiny, gesture with his arm, yet it was as though he swept away the house, London, England itself and all it stood for in ordinary experience. Imagery! I almost felt myself swept with it into something beyond all trivial, confined and relative conditions I had hitherto mistaken for reality and life. Though my mind and emotions were a boiling cauldron, little clear and steady in them, another question rising to the surface shot out of its own accord.
“Our knowledge, then—science——”
An extraordinarily sweet expression stole upon his face. He gently shook his head. “Unreal,” rang the voice, though fainter than before, “and part of the dream we ourselves create. The How is nothing—mere effects. Here we can dream effects only. Knowledge and reality can be known only in the Why—the world of causes . . .”
On the last three words the bell-like quality grew fainter, fading from his voice, the eyelids dropped slowly over the terrific eyes. I searched for one more question among the hundreds I longed to ask, but found no single word. He lay quite still again, apart from the gentle rise and fall of the body that breathed equably in what men call physical sleep. The queer notion came to me that he had not really wakened at all, that Mantravers in his totality had certainly not been there, nor gazed at me, nor spoken, but that only a fraction of his being, using the familiar terms of limited human intelligence, had brushed my mind in passing. True enough, of course, the fragment that was spoken, for even I grasped that, and classifying effects can bring no knowledge of reality. Science, which explains how a thing happens, can tell nothing as to why it happens, nor has normal human consciousness any faculty for apprehending this region of causes. Had he, then, experienced that, dwelt in that, known reality face to face?
I remember withdrawing softly, as a giddy man withdraws cautiously from the edge of a precipice that makes him tremble. Quickly, I jotted down the brief exchange in a hand that shook a little. I sank back into my deep armchair with the strange assurance that it would be long before he really woke. I fell asleep. It was, this time, Vronski’s sharp, practical voice that startled me.
“Humph! So you had to sleep, of course,” he exclaimed in a whispered voice between a snap and a growl, yet somehow not unkindly. “It’s six o’clock, you know. You’ve lost something, probably.” He had already examined the sleeper, I knew, for he came to me out of the bedroom. His fearful eagerness was pathetic.
I shook my head, wide awake on the instant, all my faculties about me. I pushed my notes towards him.
