Time Travel Omnibus, page 93
After the cataclysm, they had stayed but a week back in Anglese City. The entire western end of the island had sunk into the gulf, carrying Toroh and his Noths and the Arans and their king to destruction. In Anglese City a new government was formed—a democracy of the Bas, with Mogruud at its head.
Rogers was impatient to return to his wife in the New York City of his birth. Azeela and Dee, left orphans, had no wish to stay. Unobtrusively as it had come, the Frazia plane departed.
In the humming, glowing: cabin of the plane the voyagers were waiting for the dials to reach the time world for which they were heading. On one of the side benches, the ghostlike figures of Loto and Azeela sat a little apart from the others; they were talking softly as they gazed down through the window beside them.
“You think Mogruud will make a good leader?” he asked. “My father would have been so strong—stern, tout always just and fair—” Her eyes had filled with tears.
He pressed her hand sympathetically. “I know, Azeela. But you mustn’t grieve. He gave his life for his people—”
“Yes, And he said ‘Good-by—for a little time.’ Oh, Loto—I did not realize then what he meant.”
• • •
Rogers had been talking to Georgie and Dee. He left them to attend to the motors. Dee was watching the scene beneath the plane. As they fled back through the centuries the great city was melting away.
“Your city that we’re going to,” she said after a long silence, “Georgie, is it like this? Are we almost to its time now?”
“No,” he laughed. “It’s a very little, puny city I have to show you, Dee. I used to think it was wonderful! But it’s only a conceited child—learning as fast as it can and thinking it knows everything. I used to be like that myself. But tills sort of trip changes one.”
She did not answer.
“I’m glad you’re coming back with us, Dee.”
“Yes,” she said abstractedly.
“Dee,” he persisted out of another silence, “I wonder if you know how happy it makes me to have you—here where we’re going? I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time. I mean—maybe you don’t know how I feel. I—”
• • •
On this return journey the plane had now reached the height of its time velocity. The swiftly changing form of the city blurred the scene into a confusion of shifting details, among which only the broadest fundamentals were discernible. The northern section of Central Park presently lay open. Then the great building that covered its southern end melted into nothingness, and trees and water were in its stead.
Georgie was at the dials. “One hundred years! We’re almost into our own century.”
Through decreasing Intensities of the Proton current, they slackened their time velocity. The park, whitened with winter, turned green again as the previous summer was reached. Soon the days separated from the nights. The sun came up from the west, plunged swiftly across the sky, and dropped into the east.
It was spring, but the retrogression soon brought winter again. A January snowfall lay white beneath the naked trees of the park. But it was autumn in a moment.
Rogers was watching the dials closely. Summer again; then spring. In one of the brief periods of night he threw the switch to the first intensity. The plane began drifting to the south. The dim stars were swinging eastward, overhead in a murky sky. The city lights shone yellow.
The roof of the Scientific Club came into view among the buildings south of the plane. Rogers threw off the current completely.
“Look, Dee!” cried Georgie. “Look, Azeela! There it is at last! See the board inclosure?”
• • •
An evening in March. In the large living room of the Banker’s Park Avenue apartment, a group of his friends were gathered. Dinner was over; a dignified butler was serving coffee; the men were lighting their cigars.
A matured woman and four men—all in evening dress—were sitting in a group; mingled with their voices came the soft, limpid tones of a piano. It stood in a secluded alcove—a grand piano of carved mahogany. On a bench before its keyboard, a young man in a Tuxedo was sitting playing. Georgie. Dee stood beside him, leaning against the instrument. She was gazing at the page of music with a puzzled frown; then at his fingers as they roamed the keys, and then, in admiration at his face.
On a high-back davenport before an open fireplace, Loto sat with Azeela. There was an artificial black flower in her spun gold hair—the mourning custom of her time world. Her milk-white throat was bare; her clinging blue dress made her seem taller and older.
“That’s very pretty music,” she said finally. “So big an Instrument—this piano as you call it—you never would think one could play it.”
“Chopin,” he answered. “A piece by Chopin. Georgie plays Chopin mighty well. Azeela, there is so much I have to show you. Just that one little thing—Chopin, for instance. I want you to hear the music of some of the great composers—and our pianists.”
Georgie and Dee left the piano and advanced to the fireplace. Azeela moved over on the davenport. Loto stood up, but Georgie shook his head.
“Thanks. Dee and I thought we’d try the window seat.”
Across the room the Big Business Man, the Doctor, and the Banker were demanding additional details from Rogers. Lylda sat among them listening to her husband’s narrative.
Ensconced in the window seat, Georgie and Dee gazed out at the yellow lights of the city around them.
There was a soft, shaded rose light beside the girl. Georgie was not looking out of the window, but at her. He had seen Dee in many costumes, but never, he thought, was she so beautiful as now.
A girl of his own time world. He had not realized that this was the way he had always wanted her to look. Her dress was soft and clinging. Like Azeela, she wore the dark mourning flower.
Feeling his gaze, she turned.
“You like the way Lylda has clothed me? It feels very strange.”
“Yes,” he said. “You look—beautiful!” She turned back to the window in confusion. From below, the hum of the city floated up to them; the raucous sirens of automobiles.
“Yes,” he repeated. “I do like it very much, Dee.”
Abruptly his arms were around her; he was kissing her.
“Georgie! Some one will see you!”
“No,” he protested. “No, they won’t. Anyway, suppose they do? I don’t care—do you?”
A VIEW FROM A HILL
M.R. James
How pleasant it can be, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station. You have a map open on your knee, and you pick out the villages that lie to right and left by their church towers. You marvel at the complete stillness that attends your stoppage at the stations, broken only by a footstep crunching the gravel. Yet perhaps that is best experienced after sundown, and the traveller I have in mind was making his leisurely progress on a sunny afternoon in the latter half of June.
He was in the depths of the country. I need not particularize further than to say that if you divided the map of England into four quarters, he would have been found in the south-western of them.
He was a man of academic pursuits, and his term was just over. He was on his way to meet a new friend, older than himself. The two of them had met first on an official inquiry in town, had found that they had many tastes and habits in common, liked each other, and the result was an invitation from Squire Richards to Mr. Fanshawe which was now taking effect.
The journey ended about five o’clock. Fanshawe was told by a cheerful country porter that the car from the Hall had been up to the station and left a message that something had to be fetched from half a mile farther on, and would the gentleman please to wait a few minutes till it came back? “But I see,” continued the porter, “as you’ve got your bysticle, and very like you’d find it pleasanter to ride up to the ‘All yourself. Straight up the road ‘ere, and then first turn to the left—it ain’t above two mile—and I’ll see as your things is put in the car for you. You’ll excuse me mentioning it, only I thought it were a nice evening for a ride. Yes, sir, very seasonable weather for the haymakers: let me see, I have your bike ticket. Thank you, sir; much obliged: you can’t miss your road, etc., etc.”
The two miles to the Hall were just what was needed, after the day in the train, to dispel somnolence and impart a wish for tea. The Hall, when sighted, also promised just what was needed in the way of a quiet resting-place after days of sitting on committees and college-meetings. It was neither excitingly old nor depressingly new. Plastered walls, sash-windows, old trees, smooth lawns, were the features which Fanshawe noticed as he came up the drive. Squire Richards, a burly man of sixty odd, was awaiting him in the porch with evident pleasure.
“Tea first,” he said, “or would you like a longer drink? No? All right, tea’s ready in the garden. Come along, they’ll put your machine away. I always have tea under the lime-tree by the stream on a day like this.”
Nor could you ask for a better place. Midsummer afternoon, shade and scent of a vast lime-tree, cool, swirling water within five yards. It was long before either of them suggested a move. But about six, Mr. Richards sat up, knocked out his pipe, and said: “Look here, it’s cool enough now to think of a stroll, if you’re inclined? All right: then what I suggest is that we walk up the park and get on to the hill-side, where we can look over the country. We’ll have a map, and I’ll show you where things are; and you can go off on your machine, or we can take the car, according as you want exercise or not. If you’re ready, we can start now and be back well before eight, taking it very easy.”
“I’m ready. I should like my stick, though, and have you got any field-glasses? I lent mine to a man a week ago, and he’s gone off Lord knows where and taken them with him.”
Mr. Richards pondered. “Yes,” he said, “I have, but they’re not things I use myself, and I don’t know whether the ones I have will suit you. They’re old-fashioned, and about twice as heavy as they make ’em now. You’re welcome to have them, but I won’t carry them. By the way, what do you want to drink after dinner?”
Protestations that anything would do were overruled, and a satisfactory settlement was reached on the way to the front hall, where Mr. Fanshawe found his stick, and Mr. Richards, after thoughtful pinching of his lower lip, resorted to a drawer in the hall-table, extracted a key, crossed to a cupboard in the panelling, opened it, took a box from the shelf, and put it on the table. “The glasses are in there,” he said, “and there’s some dodge of opening it, but I’ve forgotten what it is. You try.” Mr. Fanshawe accordingly tried. There was no keyhole, and the box was solid, heavy and smooth: it seemed obvious that some part of it would have to be pressed before anything could happen. “The comers,” said he to himself, “are the likely places; and infernally sharp comers they are too,” he added, as he put his thumb in his mouth after exerting force on a lower comer.
“What’s the matter?” said the Squire.
“Why, your disgusting Borgia box has scratched me, drat it,” said Fanshawe. The Squire chuckled unfeelingly. “Well, you’ve got it open, anyway,” he said.
“So I have! Well, I don’t begrudge a drop of blood in a good cause, and here are the glasses. They are pretty heavy, as you said, but I think I’m equal to carrying them.”
“Ready?” said the Squire. “Come on then; we go out by the garden.”
So they did, and passed out into the park, which sloped decidedly upwards to the hill which, as Fanshawe had seen from the train, dominated the country. It was a spur of a larger range that lay behind. On the way, the Squire, who was great on earthworks, pointed out various spots where he detected or imagined traces of war-ditches and the like. “And here,” he said, stopping on a more or less level plot with a ring of large trees, “is Baxter’s Roman villa.”
“Baxter?” said Mr. Fanshawe.
“I forgot; you don’t know about him. He was the old chap I got those glasses from. I believe he made them. He was an old watchmaker down in the village, a great antiquary. My father gave him leave to grub about where he liked; and when he made a find he used to lend him a man or two to help him with the digging. He got a surprising lot of things together, and when he died—I dare say it’s ten or fifteen years ago—I bought the whole lot and gave them to the town museum. We’ll run in one of these days, and look over them. The glasses came to me with the rest, but of course I kept them. If you look at them, you’ll see they’re more or less amateur work—the body of them; naturally the lenses weren’t his making.”
“Yes, I see they are just the sort of thing that a clever workman in a different line of business might turn out. But I don’t see why he made them so heavy. And did Baxter actually find a Roman villa here?”
“Yes, there’s a pavement turfed over, where we’re standing: it was too rough and plain to be worth taking up, but of course there are drawings of it: and the small things and pottery that turned up were quite good of their kind. An ingenious chap, old Baxter: he seemed to have a quite out-of-the-way instinct for these things. He was invaluable to our archaeologists. He used to shut up his shop for days at a time, and wander off over the district, marking down places, where he scented anything, on the ordnance map; and he kept a book with fuller notes of the places. Since his death, a good many of them have been sampled, and there’s always been something to justify him.”
“What a good man!” said Mr. Fanshawe.
“Good?” said the Squire, pulling up brusquely.
“I meant useful to have about the place,” said Mr. Fanshawe. “But was he a villain?”
“I don’t know about that either,” said the Squire; “but all I can say is, if he was good, he wasn’t lucky. And he wasn’t liked: I didn’t like him,” he added, after a moment.
“Oh?” said Fanshawe interrogatively.
“No, I didn’t; but that’s enough about Baxter: besides, this is the stiffest bit, and I don’t want to talk and walk as well.”
Indeed it was hot, climbing a slippery grass slope that evening. “I told you I should take you the short way,” panted the Squire, “and I wish I hadn’t. However, a bath won’t do us any harm when we get back. Here we are, and there’s the seat.”
A small clump of old Scotch firs crowned the top of the hill; and, at the edge of it, commanding the cream of the view, was a wide and solid seat, on which the two disposed themselves, and wiped their brows, and regained breath.
“Now, then,” said the Squire, as soon as he was in a condition to talk connectedly, “this is where your glasses come in. But you’d better take a general look round first. My word! I’ve never seen the view look better.”
Writing as I am now with a winter wind flapping against dark windows and a rushing, tumbling sea within a hundred yards, I find it hard to summon up the feelings and words which will put my reader in possession of the June evening and the lovely English landscape of which the Squire was speaking.
Across a broad level plain they looked upon ranges of great hills, whose uplands—some green, some furred with woods—caught the light of a sun, westering but not yet low. And all the plain was fertile, though the river which traversed it was nowhere seen. There were copses, green wheat, hedges and pasture-land: the little compact white moving cloud marked the evening train. Then the eye picked out red farms and grey houses, and nearer home scattered cottages, and then the Hall, nestled under the hill. The smoke of chimneys was very blue and straight. There was a smell of hay in the air: there were wild roses on bushes hard by. It was the acme of summer.
After some minutes of silent contemplation, the Squire began to point out the leading features, the hills and valleys, and told where the towns and villages lay. “Now,” he said, “with the glasses you’ll be able to pick out Fulnaker Abbey. Take a line across that big green field, then over the wood beyond it, then over the farm on the knoll.”
“Yes, yes,” said Fanshawe. “I’ve got it. What a fine tower!”
“You must have got the wrong direction,” said the Squire; “there’s not much of a tower about there that I remember, unless it’s Oldbourne Church that you’ve got hold of. And if you call that a fine tower, you’re easily pleased.”
“Well, I do call it a fine tower,” said Fanshawe, the glasses still at his eyes, “whether it’s Oldbourne or any other. And it must belong to a largish church; it looks to me like a central tower—four big pinnacles at the corners, and four smaller ones between. I must certainly go over there. How far is it?”
“Oldbourne’s about nine miles, or less,” said the Squire. “It’s a long time since I’ve been there, but I don’t remember thinking much of it. Now I’ll show you another thing.”
Fanshawe had lowered the glasses, and was still gazing in the Oldbourne direction. “No,” he said, “I can’t make out anything with the naked eye. What was it you were going to show me?”
“A good deal more to the left; it oughtn’t to be difficult to find. Do you see a rather sudden knob of a hill with a thick wood on top of it? It’s in a dead line with that single tree on the top of the big ridge.”
“I do,” said Fanshawe, “and I believe I could tell you without much difficulty what it’s called.”
“Could you now?” said the Squire. “Say on.”
“Why, Gallows Hill,” was the answer.
“How did you guess that?”
“Well, if you don’t want it guessed, you shouldn’t put up a dummy gibbet and a man hanging on it.”
“What’s that?” said the Squire abruptly. “There’s nothing on that hill but wood.”
“On the contrary,” said Fanshawe, “there’s a largish expanse of grass on the top and your dummy gibbet in the middle; and I thought there was something on it when I looked first. But I see there’s nothing—or is there? I can’t be sure.”
