disturbed by doubt), he pointed to the sculptured figures and said that
they were old, as one could see by their costumes. And as I thought
there might be a quarrel about it, I did not contradict; but I let him
go wandering round to the south of it until he came to the figure of
a knight with a moustache, gooseberry eyes, and in general a face so
astoundingly modern that one did not know what to say or do when one
looked at it. It was expressionless.
My companion, who had not told me his name, looked long and
thoughtfully at this figure, and then came back, more full of time
and of the past of our race than ever; he insisted upon my coming
round with him and looking at the image. He told me that we could not
do better than that nowadays with all our machinery, and he asked me
whether a photograph could be got of it. I told him yes, without doubt,
and what was better, perhaps the sculptor had a duplicate, and that we
would go and find if this were so, but he paid no attention to these
words.
The amount of work in the building profoundly moved this man, and he
asked me why there was so much ornament, for he could clearly estimate
the vast additional expense of working so much stone that might have
been left plain; though I am certain, from what I gathered of his
character, he would not have left any building wholly plain, not even
a railway station, still less a town hall, but would have had here and
there an allegorical figure as of Peace or of Commerce--the figure
of an Abstract Idea. Still he was moved by such an excess of useless
labour as stood before him. Not that it did not give him pleasure--it
gave him great pleasure--but that he thought it enough and more than
enough.
We went inside. I saw that he took off his hat, a custom doubtless
universal, and, what struck me much more, he adopted within the
Cathedral a tone of whisper, not only much lower than his ordinary
voice, but of quite a different quality, and I noticed that he was
less erect as he walked, although his head was craned upward to look
towards the roof. The stained glass especially pleased him, but there
was much about it he did not understand. I told him that there could be
seen there a copy of the Gospels of great antiquity which had belonged
to St. Chad; but when I said this he smiled pleasantly, as though I
had offered to show him the saddle of a Unicorn or the tanned skin of
a Hippogriff. Had we not been in so sacred a place I believe he would
have dug me in the ribs. “St. _Who_?” he whispered, looking slily
sideways at me as he said it. “St. Chad,” I said. “He was the Apostle
to Mercia.” But after that I could do no more with him. For the word
“Saint” had put him into fairyland, and he was not such a fool as to
mix up a name like Chad with one of the Apostles; and Mercia is of
little use to men.
However, there was no quarrelsomeness about him, and he peered at the
writing curiously, pointing out to me that the letters were quite
legible, though he could not make out the words which they spelled,
and very rightly supposed it was a foreign language. He asked a little
suspiciously whether it was the Gospel, and accepted the assurance that
it was; so that his mind, sceptical to excess in some matters, found
its balance by a ready credence in others and remained sane and whole.
He was again touched by the glass in the Lady Chapel, and noted that
it was of a different colour to the other and paler, so that he liked
it less. I told him it was Spanish, and this apparently explained the
matter to him, for he changed his face at once and began to give me the
reason of its inferiority.
He had not been in Spain, but he had evidently read much about the
country, which was moribund. He pointed out to me the unnatural
attitude of the figures in this glass, and contrasted its half-tones
with the full-blooded colours of the modern work behind us, and he was
particularly careful to note the irregularity of the lettering and
the dates in this glass compared with the other which had so greatly
struck him. I was interested in his fixed convictions relative to the
Spaniards, but just as I was about to question him further upon that
race I began to have my doubts whether the glass were not French. It
was plainly later than the Reformation, and I should have guessed the
end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century. But I
hid the misgiving in my heart, lest the little trust in me which my
companion still had should vanish altogether.
We went out of the great building slowly, and he repeatedly turned to
look back up it, and to admire the proportions. He asked me the exact
height of the central spire, and as I could not tell him this I felt
ashamed, but he told me he would find it in a book, and I assured him
this could be done with ease. The visit had impressed him deeply; it
may be he had not seen such things before, or it may be that he was
more at leisure to attend to the details which had been presented to
him. This last I gathered on his telling me, as we walked towards the
Inn, that he had had no work to do for two days, but that same evening
he was to meet a man in Birmingham, by whom, he earnestly assured
me, he was offered opportunities of wealth in return for so small
an investment of capital as was negligible, and here he would have
permitted me also to share in this distant venture, had I not, at some
great risk to that human esteem without which we none of us can live,
given him clearly to understand that his generosity was waste of time,
and that for the reason that there was no money to invest. It impressed
him much more sharply than any plea of judgment or of other investments
could have done.
Though I had lost very heavily by permitting myself such a confession
to him, he was ready to dine with me at the Inn before taking his
train, and as he dined he told me at some length the name of his native
place, which was, oddly enough, that of a great German statesman,
whether Bismarck or another I cannot now remember; its habits and its
character he also told me, but as I forgot to press him as to its
latitude or longitude to this day I am totally ignorant of the quarter
of the globe in which it may lie.
During our meal it disturbed him to see a bottle of wine upon the
table, but he was careful to assure me that when he was travelling he
did not object to the habits of others, and that he would not for one
moment forbid the use in his presence of a beverage which in his native
place (he did not omit to repeat) would be as little tolerated as any
other open temptation to crime. It was a wine called St. Emilion, but
it no more came from that Sub-Prefecture than it did from the hot
fields of Barsac; it was common Algerian wine, watered down, and--if
you believe me--three shillings a bottle.
I lost my companion at nine, and I have never seen him since, but he is
surely still alive somewhere, ready, and happy, and hearty, and noting
all the things of this multiple world, and judging them with a hearty
common sense, which for so many well fills the place of mere learning.
The Visitor
As I was going across Waterloo Bridge the other day, and when I had got
to the other side of it, there appeared quite suddenly, I cannot say
whence, a most extraordinary man.
He was dressed in black silk, he had a sort of coat, or rather shirt,
of black silk, with ample sleeves which were tied at either wrist
tightly with brilliant golden threads. This shirt, or coat, came down
to his knees, and appeared to be seamless. His trousers, which were
very full and baggy, were caught at his ankles by similar golden
threads. His feet were bare save for a pair of sandals. He had nothing
upon his head, which was close cropped. His face was clean shaven.
The only thing approaching an ornament, besides the golden threads of
which I have spoken, was an enormous many-coloured and complicated
coat-of-arms embroidered upon his breast, and showing up magnificently
against the black.
He had appeared so suddenly that I almost ran into him, and he said
to me breathlessly, and with a very strong nasal twang, “Can you talk
English?”
I said that I could do so with fluency, and he appeared greatly
relieved. Then he added, with that violent nasal twang again, “You
take me out of this!”
There was a shut taxi-cab passing and we got into it, and when he had
got out of the crush, where several people had already stopped to stare
at him, he lay back, panting a little, as though he had been running.
The taxi-man looked in suddenly through the window, and asked, in the
tone of voice of a man much insulted, where he was to drive to, adding
that he didn’t want to go far.
I suggested the “Angel” at Islington, which I had never seen. The
machine began to buzz, and we shot northward.
The stranger pulled himself together, and said in that irritating
accent of his which I have already mentioned twice, “Now say, _you_,
what year’s this anyway?”
I said it was 1909 (for it happened this year), to which he answered
thoughtfully, “Well, I have missed it!”
“Missed what?” said I.
“Why, 1903,” said he.
And thereupon he told me a very extraordinary but very interesting tale.
It seems (according to him) that his name was Baron Hogg; that
his place of living is (or rather will be) on Harting Hill, above
Petersfield, where he has (or rather will have) a large house. But the
really interesting thing in all that he told me was this: that he was
born in the year 2183, “which,” he added lucidly enough, “would be
your 2187.”
“Why?” said I, bewildered, when he told me this.
“Good Lord!” he answered, quite frankly astonished, “you must know,
even in 1909, that the calendar is four years out?”
I answered that a little handful of learned men knew this, but that we
had not changed our reckoning for various practical reasons. To which
he replied, leaning forward with a learned, interested look:
“Well, I came to learn things, and I lay I’m learning.”
He next went on to tell me that he had laid a bet with another man that
he would “hit” 1903, on the 15th of June, and that the other man had
laid a bet that he would get nearer. They were to meet at the Savoy
Hotel at noon on the 30th, and to compare notes; and whichever had won
was to pay the other a set of Records, for it seems they were both
Antiquarians.
All this was Greek to me (as I daresay it is to you) until he pulled
out of his pocket a thing like a watch, and noted that the dial was set
at 1909. Whereupon he began tapping it and cursing in the name of a
number of Saints familiar to us all.
It seems that to go backwards in time, according to him, was an art
easily achieved towards the middle of the Twenty-second Century, and it
was worked by the simplest of instruments. I asked him if he had read
“The Time Machine.” He said impatiently, “You have,” and went on to
explain the little dial.
“They cost a deal of money, but then,” he added, with beautiful
simplicity, “I have told you that I am Baron Hogg.”
Rich people played at it apparently as ours do at ballooning, and with
the same uncertainty.
I asked him whether he could get forward into the future. He simply
said: “What _do_ you mean?”
“Why,” said I, “according to St. Thomas, time is a dimension, just like
space.”
When I said the words “St. Thomas” he made a curious sign, like a man
saluting. “Yes,” he said, gravely and reverently, “but you know well
the future is forbidden to men.” He then made a digression to ask if
St. Thomas was read in 1909. I told him to what extent, and by whom. He
got intensely interested. He looked right up into my face, and began
making gestures with his hands.
“Now that really _is_ interesting,” he said.
I asked him “Why?”
“Well, you see,” he said in an off-hand way, “there’s the usual
historic quarrel. On the face of it one would say he wasn’t read at
all, looking up the old Records, and so on. Then some Specialist gets
hold of all the mentions of him in the early Twentieth Century, and
writes a book to show that even the politicians had heard of him. Then
there is a discussion, and nothing comes of it. _That’s_ where the fun
of Travelling Back comes in. You find out.”
I asked him if he had ever gone to the other centuries. He said, “No,
but Pop did.” I learned later that “Pop” was his father.
“You see,” he added respectfully, “Pop’s only just dead, and, of
course, I couldn’t afford it on my allowance. Pop,” he went on, rather
proudly, “got himself back into the Thirteenth Century during a walk in
Kent with a friend, and found himself in the middle of a horrible great
river. He was saved just before the time was up.”
“How do you mean ‘the time was up’?” said I.
“Why,” he answered me, “you don’t suppose Pop could afford more than
one hour, do you? Why, the Pope couldn’t afford more than six hours,
even after they voted him a subsidy from Africa, and Pop was rich
enough, Lord knows! Richer’n I am, coz of the gurls.... I told you I
was Baron Hogg,” he went on, without affectation.
“Yes” said I, “you did.”
“Well, now, to go back to St. Thomas,” he began----
“Why on earth----?” said I.
He interrupted me. “Now that _is_ interesting,” he said. “You know
about St. Thomas, and you can tell me about the people who know about
him, but it _does_ show that he had gone out in the Twentieth Century,
for you to talk like that! Why, I got full marks in St. Thomas. Only
thing I did get full marks in,” he said gloomily, looking out of the
window. “That’s what _counts_,” he added: “none of yer high-falutin’
dodgy fellows. When the Colonel said, ‘Who’s got the most stuff in
him?’ (not because of the rocks nor because I’m Baron Hogg), they all
said, ‘_That’s_ him.’ And that was because I got first in St. Thomas.”
To say that I simply could not make head or tail of this would be to
say too little: and my muddlement got worse when he added, “That’s why
the Colonel made me Alderman, and now I go to Paris by right.”
Just at that moment the taxi-man put in his head at the window and
said, with an aggrieved look:
“Why didn’t you tell me where I was going?”
I looked out, and saw that I was in a desolate place near the
River Lea, among marshes and chimneys and the poor. There was a
rotten-looking shed close by, and a policeman, uncommonly suspicious.
My friend got quite excited. He pointed to the policeman and said:
“Oh, how like the pictures! Is it true that they are the Secret Power
in England? Now _do_----”
The taxi-man got quite angry, and pointed out to me that his cab was
not a caravan. He further informed me that it had been my business to
tell him the way to the “Angel.” His asset was that if he dropped me
there I would be in a bad way; mine was that if I paid him off there he
would be in a worse one. We bargained and quarrelled, and as we did so
the policeman majestically moved up, estimated the comparative wealth
of the three people concerned, and falsely imagining my friend to be an
actor in broad daylight, he took the taxi-man’s part, and ordered us
off back to the “Angel,” telling us we ought to be thankful to be let
off so lightly. He further gave the taxi-man elaborate instructions for
reaching the place.
As I had no desire to get to the “Angel” really, I implored the
taxi-man to take me back to Westminster, which he was willing to do,
and on the way the Man from the Future was most entertaining. He
spotted the public-houses as we passed, and asked me, as a piece of
solid, practical information, whether wine, beer, and spirits were sold
in them. I said, “Of course,” but he told me that there was a great
controversy in his generation, some people maintaining that the number
of them was, in fiction, drawn by enemies; others said that they were,
as a fact, quite few and unimportant in London, and others again that
they simply did not exist but were the creations of social satire. He
asked me to point him out the houses of Brill and Ferguson, who, it
seems, were in the eyes of the Twenty-second Century the principal
authors of our time. When I answered that I had never heard of them he
said, “That _is_ interesting.” I was a little annoyed and asked him
whether he had ever heard of Kipling, Miss Fowler, or Swinburne.
He said of course he had read Kipling and Swinburne, and though he
had not read Miss Fowler’s works he had been advised to. But he said
that Brill for wit and Ferguson for economic analysis were surely the
glories of our England. Then he suddenly added, “Well, I’m not sure
about 1909. The first _Collected_ Brill is always thought to be 1911.
But Ferguson! Why he knew a lot of people as early as 1907! He did the
essay on Mediæval Economics which is the appendix to our school text of
St. Thomas.”
At this moment we were going down Whitehall. He jumped up excitedly,
pointed at the Duke of Cambridge’s statue and said, “That’s Charles I.”
Then he pointed to the left and said, “That’s the Duke of Buccleuigh’s
house.” And then as he saw the Victoria Tower he shouted, “Oh, that’s
Big Ben, I know it. And oh, I say,” he went on, “just look at the
Abbey!” “Now,” he said, with genuine bonhomie as the taxi drew up with
a jerk, “are those statues symbolic?”
“No,” I said, “they are real people.”
At this he was immensely pleased, and said that he had always said so.
The taxi-man looked in again and asked with genuine pathos where we
really wanted to go to.
But just as I was about to answer him two powerful men in billycock
hats took my friend quietly but firmly out of the cab, linked their
arms in his, and begged me to follow them. I paid the taxi and did so.
The strange man did not resist. He smiled rather foolishly. They hailed
a four-wheeler, and we all got in together. We drove about half a
mile to the south of Westminster Bridge, stopped at a large Georgian
house, and there we all got out. I noticed that the two men treated the
stranger with immense respect, but with considerable authority. He,
poor fellow, waved his hand at me, and said with a faint smile as he
went through the door, arm in arm with his captors:
“Sorry you had to pay. Came away without my salary ticket. Very silly.”
And he disappeared.
The other man remaining behind said to me very seriously, “I hope his
Lordship didn’t trouble you, sir?”
I said that on the contrary he had behaved like an English gentleman,
all except the clothes.
“Well,” said the keeper, “he’s not properly a Lord as you may say; he’s
an Australian gent. But he’s a Lord in a manner of speaking, because
Parliament did make him one. As for the clothes--ah! you may well ask!
But we durstn’t say anything: the doctor and the nurse says it soothes
him since his money trouble. But _I_ say, _make_ ’em act sensible and
they will be sensible.”
He then watched to see whether I would give him money for no particular
reason, and as I made no gestures to that effect I went away, and thus
avoided what politicians call “studied insolence.”
A Reconstruction of the Past
“It has been said with some justice that we know more about the
Victorian Period in England than we do of any one of the intervening
nine centuries, even of those which lie closest to our own time, and
even of such events as have taken place upon our own soil in the Malay
Peninsula. I will attempt to put before you very briefly, as a sort of
introduction to the series of lectures which I am to deliver, a picture
of what one glimpse of life in London towards the end of the Nineteenth
Century must have resembled.
“It is a sound rule in history to accept none but positive evidence and
to depend especially upon the evidence of documents. I will not debate
how far tradition should be admitted into the reconstruction of the
past. It _may_ contain elements of truth; it _must_ contain elements of
falsehood, and on that account I propose neither to deny nor to admit
this species of information, but merely to ignore it; and I think the
student will see before I have done with my subject that, using only
the positive information before us, a picture may be drawn so fully
detailed as almost to rival our experience of contemporary events.
“We will imagine ourselves,” continued the professor, with baleful
smile of playful pedantry, “in Piccadilly, the fashionable promenade of
the city, at nine o’clock in the morning, the hour when the greatest
energies of this imperial people were apparent in their outdoor life;
for, as we know from the famous passage which we owe to the pen of the
pseudo-Kingsley, the English people, as befitted their position, were
the earliest risers of their time. We will further imagine (to give
verisimilitude to the scene) the presence of a north-east wind, in
which these hardy Northerners took exceptional delight, and to which
the anonymous author above alluded to has preserved a famous hymn.
“Piccadilly is thronged with the three classes into which we know the
population to have been divided--the upper class, the middle, and the
lower, to use the very simple analytical terms which were most common
in that lucid and strenuous period. The lower class are to be seen
hurrying eastward in their cloth caps and ‘fustian,’ a textile fabric
the exact nature of which is under dispute, but which we can guess,
from the relics of contemporary evidence in France, to have been of a
vivid blue, highly glazed, and worn as a sort of sleeved tunic reaching
to the knees. The headgear these myriads are wearing is uniform: it is
a brown skull cap with a leather peak projecting over the eyes, the
conjectural ‘cricket cap,’ of which several examples are preserved.
It has been argued by more than one authority that the article in
question was not a headgear. It appears in none of the statuary of
the period. No mention of it is made in any of the vast compilations
of legal matter which have come down to us, and attempts have been
made to explain in an allegorical sense the very definite allusions
to it with which English letters of that time abound. I am content
to accept the documentary evidence in the plain meaning of the words
used, and to portray to you these ‘toiling millions’ (to use the phrase
of the great classic poet) hurrying eastward upon this delightful
morning in March of the year 1899. Each is carrying the implement of
his trade (possession in which was secured to him by law). The one
holds a pickaxe, another balances upon his head a ladder, a third is
rolling before him a large square box or ‘trunk’--a word of Oriental
origin--upon a ‘trolley’ or small two-wheeled vehicle dedicated to
some one of the five combinations of letters which had a connection
not hitherto established with the system of roads and railways in the
country. Yet another drags after him a small dynamo mounted on wheels,
such as may be seen in the frieze illustrating the Paris Exhibition of
ten years before.
“Interspersed with this crowd may be seen the soldiery, clad entirely
in bright red. But these, by a custom which has already the force of
law, are compelled to occupy the middle of the thoroughfare. They are
of the same class as the labouring men round them, and like these
carry the implements of their trade, with which we must imagine them
from time to time threatening the passers-by. All, I say, are hurrying
eastward to their respective avocations in the working part of this
great hive.