DISCOVERIES
1
How and when Jeremy’s second unconsciousness overtook him he did not
know. He remembered stumbling after his friend down the uneven road
he had now begun to hate. He remembered that the heat of the day had
grown intense, that his own dizziness had increased, and that he had
been falling wearily over stones and from one rut to another. He had
a dim recollection of entering the street he had seen before, and of
noticing the odd effect produced by twentieth-century buildings sagging
crazily forward over a rough cobbled roadway. But he did not remember
his sudden collapse, or how his friend had secured a cart and anxiously
bundled him into it. He did not remember the jolting journey that
followed, as speedy as the streets of this new London would allow.
He came to himself in a bed in a little, bare, whitewashed room through
the windows of which the westering sun was throwing a last golden
flood. He sat up hastily, and saw that he was alone. At his side on
a small table stood a metal dish holding a thick slice of bread and
some leaves of lettuce; and by the dish there was a mug of rudely
glazed earthenware. His mouth was dry and his tongue swollen; and he
investigated the mug first. He was rewarded by a draught of thin but,
as he then thought, delicious ale. He immediately set to on the bread
and lettuce, and thought of nothing else till he had finished it. When
he had scraped together the last crumbs and his first ravenousness had
given way to a healthy and normal hunger, he looked about him with more
interest.
The room, his first glance told him, was bare even to meanness. It
held nothing but the bed in which he lay, the table and a large,
cumbrously-made wooden chest which stood in the further corner. The
walls, as well as the ceiling, were covered with a coarse whitewash
which was flaking here and there; and there was a square of rough
matting on the boards of the floor. Jeremy, quite awake and alert
now, wondered whether, after all, he had not been taken to an asylum,
perhaps--and this seemed most probable--to the infirmary of a
workhouse. The sheets on the bed and the nightshirt in which he found
himself, clean but of very coarse linen, seemed to support this theory.
On the other hand, if it were correct, ought he not to be in a ward
with the other patients? And was it usual in the workhouses of this age
to have mugs of ale by the bedside of unconscious men?
Curiosity soon stirred him farther; and he put one foot cautiously to
the ground. He was reassured at once by a sensation of strength and
health; and he slipped out of bed and went to the window. Here he met
with another surprise; for it was glazed with small leaded panes of
thick and muddy glass, such as was becoming rare in his own time even
in the remotest and most primitive parts of the country. And a brief
examination showed that the window was genuine, not merely a sheet of
glass cut up by sham leads to give a false appearance of antiquity.
Puzzling a little over this, and finding that he could not see clearly
through the stains and whorls in the glass, he undid the window, and
thrust his head out. Below him stretched spacious gardens with lawns
and shrubberies, fading in the distance among tall trees, through which
buildings could just be discerned.
As he leant out he could hear the voices of persons hidden somewhere
beneath; and he was straining forward to catch their meaning when a
hand fell on his shoulder. He looked round with a start, and saw his
friend carrying a pile of clothes over one arm, and smiling at him
pleasantly.
“Well,” said the young man, “I’m relieved to find you awake again. Do
you know that you’ve lain there since before noon, and that it’s now
nearly six o’clock? I began to think that you’d fallen into another
trance.”
“Where am I?” Jeremy asked bluntly.
And the young man replied with simplicity: “This is the Treasury.
You know, I’m one of the Speaker’s Clerks.” And then seeing Jeremy’s
stare of bewilderment, he went on: “Or perhaps you don’t know. We have
apartments here in the Treasury during our term of service, and dine
in the Great Hall. This room belongs to another of the Clerks. Luckily
he’s away on a journey, and so I’ve been able to borrow it for you. And
that reminds me that though you told me a great deal about yourself,
you never told me your name.” Jeremy told him. “And mine’s Roger Vaile.
Now I think you ought to get dressed, if you feel strong enough.”
But Jeremy’s bewilderment was by no means dissipated. “The Speaker? The
Treasury?” he inquired disconnectedly.
The young man whose name was Roger Vaile laughed in a good-humored way.
“Didn’t you have them in your time? It’s not much use asking me, I’m
afraid. I know so little about the old times that I can’t tell what
will be new to you, and what you know already. But you must know who
the Speaker is?”
“Yes ... I suppose so ... the Speaker of the House of Commons,” Jeremy
began. “But----”
Roger Vaile looked perplexed in his turn. “N-no--I don’t know ...
perhaps ... he’s ... oh, he’s the ruler of the country--like a king,
you know.”
“But why is he called the Speaker?” Jeremy persisted.
“Oh, I suppose because he speaks for the people, who know more about
these things than I do. Now that’s evident, isn’t it? But I’ll find
some one for you; you’d better dress,” he concluded, making for the
door, plainly anxious to avoid further questions. “Dinner’s served at
half-past six. I’ll call for you.” He escaped, but returned in a moment
to say: “By the way, I’ve told no one anything about you. I’ve only
said that I’m entertaining a friend from the country.”
“Thanks ... oh, thanks,” Jeremy replied hastily and rather foolishly,
looking up from his manipulation of the garments which Roger had
disposed on the bed. They proved, however, on examination, to be the
least of the problems at that moment confusing his mind. They were, in
fact, exceedingly like the evening dress to which he was accustomed.
A kind of dinner-jacket with coarsely woven silk on the lapels was
substituted for the tail-coat, and the shirt was made of heavy,
unstarched linen, and had a soft collar attached to it. The socks were
of thick and heavy silk; but the cloth of the coat, waistcoat and
trousers, which turned out, under closer inspection, to be dark purple
instead of black, was as soft and fine as could be desired. The shoes
were more unusual. They were of fine leather, long and pointed and
intricately adorned, and their color was a rich and pleasing green.
Jeremy had no trouble in dressing; but when he had finished he was
made a little uneasy by what he could see of the result. He supposed,
however, that his costume was that of a well-dressed young man of
the period, though it did not fit him at all points as he could have
wished; and he sat down on the bed to wait as tranquilly as he could
till Roger should call for him. Tranquillity, however, was not to be
had for the asking. Too many questions beset his mind; and though he
had a wealth of observations on which to reflect there seemed to be at
once too many and too few. He certainly had never believed that the
Millennium was somewhere just around the corner, waiting to be led in
by the hand of Science. But he _had_ held the comfortable belief that
mankind was advancing in conveniences and the amenities of life by
regular and inevitable degrees. Yet all that he had seen so far seemed
to be preparing an overthrow of this supposition no less direct and
amazing than the revelation he had received when he looked for the
houses of Whitechapel and found that they were no longer there. The
mere fact that a whole quarter of London had been destroyed and had
never been rebuilt was in itself significant. The condition of the
still inhabited houses which he had seen was strange. The clothes he
wore, the sheets on his bed, the glazing of his window, pointed to an
unexpected state of affairs. And Roger Vaile’s attitude towards the
scientific theories which Jeremy had so guilelessly spread before him
was perhaps the most striking phenomenon of all. Jeremy sought vainly
for words which would describe the impression it had made on him. Could
a savage have looked otherwise if you had explained to him the theory
of atomic weights? And the Speaker, who spoke for the people ... and
the Treasury? Jeremy thought suddenly, with a certain ingratitude,
that Roger’s easy acceptance of his own almost impossible story had
something about it that was decidedly queer.
The course of his meditations led him to as many blind alleys as there
were paths to be followed; and he was just staring down the eighth or
ninth when Roger entered, dressed in garments closely resembling those
he had given to Jeremy. Jeremy followed his beckoning finger and was
led down a narrow staircase, along a passage and into a hall of some
dimensions, which was lit partly by the sun still streaming through the
windows, partly by a multitude of tall, thick candles. It contained
three tables, two of which were long and stood in the body of the hall.
The third was much smaller and was raised on a dais at the end, at
right angles to the others. This was still unoccupied; but around the
long tables sat or stood a number of men of varying ages, mostly young,
talking desultorily, and waiting. These were also dressed like Jeremy;
but some of them had been more adventurous in the colors of their
jackets, and some displayed modest touches of lace on their breasts or
at their wrists.
Jeremy was still staring covertly at these people and finding, a little
to his surprise, that neither their costume nor his own looked odd,
being naturally worn, when a trumpet rang out metallically, and at
once all the lounging men sprang to their feet in rigid attitudes. A
door on the dais was thrown open by a servant, and a tall, stooping
figure walked in.
“The Speaker,” Roger whispered softly in Jeremy’s ear. Jeremy craned
his neck to see the ruler of England. He caught a glimpse of a large,
rather fleshy face, with deep folds, discernible in spite of the long
white beard about the heavy, drooping mouth, and more than a touch
of Jewish traits in the curve of the nose, and the heaviness of the
eyelids. As the Speaker walked to his seat, another man, shorter, but
spare, and more erect, with lean features and a bearing of almost
barbaric pride, which was accentuated by the dull red of his jacket,
followed him in.
“That damned Canadian!” Roger muttered, and Jeremy staring in some
surprise found that the exclamation was not for him. Still no one sat.
Even the Speaker and his guest remained standing by their chairs, until
another trumpet sounded, and a second door on the dais was thrown
open. Two women came through it. The first was middle-aged and stout,
florid of coloring, and, even at that distance, obviously over-painted.
The second, whom the first partially hid, seemed to be young, and to
move with a carriage as robust and distinguished as that of the erect
Canadian. Jeremy had seen no more than this when his gaze was diverted
by the rising of a priest who intoned a grace and then by the bustle
attendant on the whole company sitting down. He gathered from Roger’s
whisper that these were the Speaker’s wife and daughter; but after
dinner had begun, he could not clearly see the party of four on the
dais because of the glare and the flickering of the candles between him
and them.
2
Roger Vaile did more for Jeremy than provide him with food and lodging.
He was also at the pains of finding out the wisest man he knew to
answer Jeremy’s questions and resolve his doubts. After a lengthy meal
of huge and crudely spiced dishes they returned to Roger’s own room, an
apartment a little larger than that in which Jeremy had found himself,
but not much less bare; and there they discovered, sitting on the bed
and waiting for them, an elderly priest in a long black soutane, with a
golden crucifix at his breast.
He rose as they entered, and surveyed Jeremy with intense curiosity.
Jeremy returned the stare, but rather less intently. This, he found
with little interest, was like any priest of any age. He was clean
shaven and almost bald, with pouched and drooping cheeks, and a chin
that multiplied and returned to unity as he talked and moved his head.
But above these signs of age were two large and childlike blue eyes
which shone on Jeremy with something like greed in their eagerness.
“This is the man,” Roger said briefly to the priest, and to Jeremy he
said: “This is my Uncle, Father Henry Dean. He is writing the chronicle
of the Speakers, and he knows more about the old times than any other
man alive.”
The priest took Jeremy’s hand in a soft clasp without relaxing his
eager stare. “There are few men alive who are older than I am,” he
murmured, “but you are one of them, if my nephew has told me the truth.
Yes--more than a century older.”
“I don’t feel it,” Jeremy answered aimlessly.
“No? No. That is miraculous. Ah, yes, I believe your story. I know well
that the world is full of marvels. Who should know that better than I
who have spent so many years searching the wonderful past? And there
were greater marvels in those days than now. Young man----” he stopped
and chuckled with a touch of senility. “Young man, you will be nearly
two centuries old.”
Jeremy nodded without speaking.
“Yes, yes,” the old man went on, “so many strange things happened in
those days that we have no call to be amazed at you. Why, there used to
be a machine in those times that the doctors used to look right through
men’s bodies.”
Jeremy started slightly. “You mean the Röntgen Rays?” he said.
“A wonderful light,” said the old man eagerly, “you know it, you have
seen it?”
“Why, yes,” Jeremy turned to Roger. “You know that vacuum-tube I showed
you----” But the old man was continuing his catalogue of wonders.
“Men used to cross to America in less than a week. Yes--and some even
flew over in aeroplanes in a day.”
“Uncle, uncle,” Roger remonstrated gently, “you mustn’t tell fairy
tales to a man who has been to fairyland. He knows what the truth is.”
“But that is true,” Jeremy roused himself to say; “it was done several
times--not regularly, but often.” Roger bestowed on him a glance of
covert doubt, and the priest leant forward in tremulous gratitude.
“I knew it, I knew it!” he cried. “Roger, like all the world to-day you
are too ignorant. You do not know----”
But Jeremy interrupted again. “But have you aeroplanes now?” he asked.
“Can you fly?”
“Not for many years now,” the old man sighed, “Roger has never seen
a man flying. I did when I was very young.” He drew a deep breath
and regarded Jeremy almost with reverence. “You lived in a wonderful
time,” he said. “Why, you were alive in the time of the great artists,
when that was made.” He turned, and indicated with a devout finger a
little marble statue which stood on the mantelpiece behind him. Jeremy
followed his gesture, and noticed for the first time that the room
was not entirely without decoration. The statue to which his gaze was
directed represented the body of a man from the waist upwards. The
anatomy of the body was entirely distorted, the ribs stood out like
ridgers, and one arm, which was raised over the head, was a good third
longer than the other.
“Yes,” Jeremy said, surveying it with interest, “perhaps I did. That is
what we used to call Futurist art.”
“They were masters then,” said the priest with a deep expulsion of his
breath. Jeremy’s eyes wandered round the room and fell on a picture,
plainly a lithograph of the war-period, which, when he had regarded
it long enough, resolved itself into a crane lifting a great gun into
a railway wagon. But it was drawn in fierce straight lines and savage
angles, with shadows like wedges, making a bewildering pattern which
for a moment defeated him. He dropped his eyes from it, and again
looked round the room. This time his gaze fell on the bed, which was
wooden and obviously new. The flat head of it was covered with rude
carving such as might have been executed by a child armed for the
first time with a gouge and a mallet. It had none of the vigor and
rhythm that commonly goes with primitive workmanship. The design was
glaringly stupid and senseless.
“We are poor workmen to-day,” said the priest, following and
interpreting his glance.
Roger, who had stood by, silent but a little impatient, now intervened.
“These are old family things,” he explained, “that I brought with me
from home. They are very rare. But the bed is new, and I think it very
pretty. I had it made only a few months ago.” He motioned his guests
into chairs, and produced a large earthenware pot which he offered to
Jeremy. Jeremy removed the lid, and saw, somewhat to his surprise, that
it contained a dark, finely cut tobacco.
“It’s Connemara,” he said laconically. The old priest shook a long
finger at him.
“Ah, Roger, Roger!” he chided. “When will you learn to be thrifty?
Cannot you smoke the tobacco of your own country? Winchcombe is
good enough for me,” he added to Jeremy, bringing a linen bag and a
cherrywood pipe out of the folds of his robe.
“I’ve no pipe,” said Jeremy, fumbling mechanically in his pockets.
Roger, without speaking, went to a chest, and produced two new, short
clay pipes, one of which he handed to Jeremy, while he kept the other
himself. All three were silent for a moment while they filled and
lighted from a taper; and the familiar operation, the familiar pause,
afflicted Jeremy with an acute memory of earlier days. Then while his
palate was still savoring the first breath of the strong, cool Irish
tobacco in the new pipe, the priest began again his rambling spoken
reveries.
“Tell me,” he demanded suddenly, “did you live in the time of the first
Speaker?”
Jeremy, hampered by a grievous lack of historical knowledge, tried to
explain that the Speaker was a functionary dating from centuries before
his time. The old man jumped in his chair with childlike enthusiasm.
“Yes, yes!” he cried. “This generation has almost forgotten how he came
by his name. But I meant the great-grandfather of our Speaker, the
first to rule England. You know he was the only strong man when the
troubles began. Do you remember him? Surely you must remember him?”
Jeremy shook his head, considering. He did not even recall what had
been the name of the Speaker when he fell asleep. But his mind caught
at a word the priest had used.
“The troubles?” he repeated.
“Yes,” the priest answered, a little taken aback, throwing a glance at
Roger. “Don’t you know? The wars, the fighting....”
“The war ...” Jeremy began. He knew a great deal about what had been
called by his generation, quite simply, The War.
But Roger interposed. “My uncle means the civil wars. Surely it was in
the middle of the troubles that your trance began?”
3
It was by way of such stumblings and misapprehensions that Jeremy
gained at last a partial and confused picture of the world into which
he had fallen. He had been the first to tire, but the old priest had
been very unwilling to let him go.
“No, no,” he said again and again, as Jeremy strove to rise, “you
must first tell me ...”--while Roger sat watching them with an air
of inalterable mildness. Roger had taken but a little part in the
conversation. His notions of the twentieth century were extraordinarily
vague and inaccurate; and when he had been rebuked once or twice for
ignorance he had shrugged his shoulders, placidly observing that it
mattered very little, and had said no more.
Jeremy crept into bed very late by the light of a flickering candle,
desiring only to forget everything, to postpone all effort of thought
until another day. But when he had blown out his candle, and nothing
remained but a patch of moonlight thrown through the window on the
opposite wall, his mind grew active again. It was indeed absurd to be
lying there in the darkness with nothing to give him ocular evidence of
his strange misfortune, nothing visible at all but the square of pale
radiance, barred by the heavy leads of the pane.
He might have been in bed in some old-fashioned country inn, the chance
lodging of a night, where there would have been just such a window, and
where the sheets would have been as coarse and heavy as these were. But
then, a mile, or two miles, or five miles away there would have been a
railway station, whence sooner or later a train would have carried him
back to the flat in Holborn, back to his lectures and the classes of
intelligent young men and women eager for rational instruction in the
mysteries of the universe. He thought of that station, and for a moment
could see it as vividly as he desired it, could picture the fresh
morning walk there, the little, almost deserted platform with a name
picked out in white pebbles, the old porter.... He could conjure up the
journey and even the smoky approach to London. But here, though as he
had learnt there were still trains, there was certainly no train which
could do that for him.
He shifted uneasily on to the other side, and recognized with a groan
that this was an empty vision. It behooved him to make himself at
home as much and as soon as he could in the year two thousand and
seventy-four, to learn what this world was like, to adapt himself to it.
“We are a diminished people,” was the burden of the priest’s lament.
“Our ancestors were wise and rich and strong, but we have lost nearly
all they had, and we shall never regain it.” And he had rehearsed
the marvels of the twentieth century, trains leaving every town
in constant succession, motors on the roads, aeroplanes overhead,
steamers on the sea. But the steamship, owing to the difficulties of
its construction, had practically ceased to exist. A rapidly growing
percentage of accidents, due to faulty workmanship, had driven the
aeroplane altogether out of use. There were still a few motors; but
these had long been less reliable, and were now growing less speedy,
than the horse. As for trains--there were still trains running to and
from London. One went to Edinburgh every week, and two to Liverpool and
Bristol. The trains to Dover, to the Midlands and to Yorkshire were
even more frequent. The line from London to the West of England was
still open, but that district had now little importance, and trains
were dispatched there only when there was some special reason.
Roger treated his uncle’s laments with gentle and reasonable sarcasm.
“I think,” he said weightily, “that you exaggerate. I’m not convinced
that the old times were as wonderful as you think. Why, so far as
railways go, I know something about railways. It’s part of my duties.
And I know this, that engines are always breaking down. I take it that
even in the old times an engine that had broken down wouldn’t go. And I
imagine that our clever ancestors had just as much trouble as we have
in keeping the lines up. Now this week the train from Edinburgh is
two days overdue, because there’s been a landslide in the Midlands. I
suppose you’ll agree,” he added, turning to Jeremy, “that even in your
time a train couldn’t get through a landslide.”
Jeremy had agreed. “I daresay,” Roger went on, “that the railways
aren’t as good now as they were before the troubles. But we’re going to
improve them. The Speaker talks about repairing the old line that went
out to the eastern counties. You know--you can still see parts of it
near Chelmsford.”
The old man on this had looked appealingly at Jeremy, who sought
without success to convince Roger that the difference was really great.
But his attention was chiefly concentrated on discovering how this
and other differences had come about. It seemed incredible that the
race could have forgotten so much and yet live. The “Troubles” were
so often in the mouths of both uncle and nephew that Jeremy’s mind
came at last to give them their due in the shape of a capital letter.
The “Troubles.”... He supposed that his trance had begun with this
beginning and indeed much of what the priest had told him was more
vivid to him than to the teller when he remembered the soldier and the
alien woman who had called him a dirty bourgeois, or Scott leaning
down, pale and anxious from the lorry, or the man whom he had never
seen, but who had thrown a bomb at him down Trehanoc’s cellar steps.
Jeremy gathered that it had been a question not of one outburst of
fighting, one upheaval and turning-point of time, but of numbers spread
over many years.
“It is hard to say how it all came about,” mused the old man, at one
of the few moments when he was cajoled into telling instead of asking.
“Some have said that the old life grew too difficult, and just ground
itself to pieces. It began with the rich and the poor. When some
accident brought them to blows it was too late to put the world right.
After that they never trusted one another, and there was no more peace.”
“When did the fighting stop at last?” asked Jeremy.
“It kept on stopping--it kept on stopping. And it kept on breaking
out again, first in one country and then in another. For fifty years
there was always war in some part of the world. And when they stopped
fighting they couldn’t settle down again. The workers idled, or smashed
the machines. And at last a time came when the fighting didn’t stop. It
went on and on in England and all over the Continent. All the schools
were closed, all the teachers were idle for more than twenty years.
I have often thought that that was how we came to lose so much. A
generation grew up that had never learnt anything. Only a few men knew
how to do the things their fathers had done every day, and the rest
were too stupid or too lazy to learn from them properly. Then everybody
was tired out and more than half the people were dead; they had to
begin again, and they were too weary to recover as much as they might
have done.”
Jeremy pondered over again the vision raised by these words. He could
see the earth ravaged by exhausted enemies, too evenly matched to
bring the struggle to an end until exhaustion had reached its lowest
pitch. He could see all the mechanical wonders of his own age smashed
by men who were too weak to prevail, but who were strong enough not
to endure the soulless contrivances which had brought them into
servitude. And he could see the gradual triumph of the Speaker over
a weary and starving population. The first Speaker, who had really
been Speaker of the House of Commons in the year when Jeremy had
fallen into his trance, had been a man of unsuspected strength of
character and a member of a great and wealthy Jewish house. Assisted
by his kinsmen in all parts of the world, he had been a rallying-point
for the rich in the early disorders; and he had established a party
which had lasted, with varying fortunes, through all the changes of
succeeding years. He it was who had arranged that compromise with the
Church of Rome by which all southern England became again more or less
Catholic without too violently alienating those parts of the country
in which other sorts of religion were dominant. Not the least of his
claims for greatness had been his perception of the real power still
concentrated in the fugitive and changing person of that Bishop of
Rome who was chased from his own ruined palace and his own city, up
and down Europe from one refuge to another, as the forces of disorder
veered and changed ... subsided here and rose again there. One by
one the countries of the earth had sunk, bloodless and impoverished,
into quiescence, and when the turn of England came, the house of the
Speaker, the house of Burney, in the person of his grandson, had been
at hand to take the opportunity.
“And did all the people die off in the fighting?” Jeremy had wondered.
“In battle and disease and famine,” the priest answered. “Towards the
end of the Troubles came the Great Famine. And that was the cause
of the worst of the wars. The people of the towns were starving,
because they were fighting in America and sent us no food-ships, and
the country people were nearly starving too, because their crops
had failed. They struggled for what food there was ... they died by
millions ... by millions and millions....”
“I must say I find it hard to believe all that,” Roger interposed with
an air of detachment. “My uncle is so enthusiastic about the old times
that he believes whatever any one tells him or what he reads in a lot
of old books--books you couldn’t imagine if you hadn’t seen them,
filthy, simply dropping to pieces.... The more improbable the story the
better he likes it. Well, in the first place, why should those people
have wanted food from other countries? What did they do if they didn’t
grow it for themselves? And why should so many of them be living in
towns?”
“You are very ignorant, my boy,” said the old man calmly. “Look at
London now; look at the miles of houses that no one has lived in for a
hundred years. Who did live in them but the people who died of famine?”
“It isn’t a very great matter after all, is it?” Roger muttered,
suppressing a yawn.
“Before the Troubles,” the priest continued, half to himself, “there
were nearly fifty millions of people in England alone. Do you know what
the census was?” he asked sharply, turning to Jeremy. Jeremy replied
that he did. “Ah, Roger wouldn’t know what the word meant. Well, I
have read the report of the census of 1921, and then there were nearly
fifty million people in England alone. Where are they now? We have not
more than ten or twelve millions, and we have never counted them--never
counted them. But Roger and the young men of his age think that nothing
has happened, that we are not much worse off than we were, that there
is no need for us to bestir ourselves.”
“And is it like this all over the world?” Jeremy had asked, stunned by
the implications of this fact.
“All over the world--so far as we know.”
“All over the world--all over the world.” The words rang again
in Jeremy’s ears as he tossed uneasily in bed. The old world had
collapsed, and the falling roof had crushed and blotted out forever
most of what he had thought perpetually established. And then,
amazingly, the stones and timbers had not continued in their fall to
utter ruin. They had found their level and stayed, jammed together,
perhaps, fortuitously, to make a lower and narrower vault, which still
sufficed to shelter the improvident family of men. The human race
had not perished, had not even been reduced to utter barbarism. Its
glissade into the abyss had been arrested, and it remained on the ledge
of ground where it had been thrown. So much was left. How much?
He realized with a slight shock that he was lying on his back, beating
feverishly with his hands on the bedclothes, and muttering half aloud
as though in a delirium, “What is left? What can be left?” He dragged
himself back abruptly from what seemed for a moment to be the edge of
madness. Still his mind obstinately demanded to know what was left that
was tangible, that he had known and could recognize. He could not get
beyond the landmarks of his childhood. Was Westminster Abbey still
standing? Was the Monument? He knew that St. Paul’s was gone. It had
been lost by a generation which had been careless of the warnings given
by its groaning arches and leaning walls; it had fallen and crushed
some hundreds of the negligent inheritors. Was Nelson’s column still in
Trafalgar Square? Jeremy, with a childish unreason, was eager to have
an answer to this question.
Now his thoughts abruptly abandoned it and fled back to pictures of the
Troubles. He could see very vividly, more vividly than anything else,
the classroom in which he had been accustomed to deliver his lecture
empty and deserted, benches torn up to make bonfires or barricades,
dust sifting in through the broken windows and lying thick on the
floor. He remembered with a painful laugh that he had left the first
written sheets of a paper on the Viscosity of Liquids in a drawer in
the lecturer’s table. Burnt, too, no doubt.... That knowledge had
perished. But most knowledge had perished in another way, had merely
faded from the mind of man, because of his growing incapacity for
acquiring it. There flashed upon him the vision of a changed world, in
which there was no fellow for him, save only a few, and those among the
very old.
For a moment his mind paused, as though a cold finger had intervened
and touched it. During the hours of the night his eyes had been growing
used to the darkness, but, so much were his thoughts turned inwards,
he had not noticed it. Now, in the sudden cessation of thought, he
saw clearly the bed in which he was lying, the matting on the floor,
the rough walls and ceiling, and every detail of the little room. He
started up, went to the window and thrust his head out into the night
air. The bushes below murmured faintly under the touch of a breeze he
could not feel. All around was perfectly quiet; and where that evening
he had seen buildings through the farthest trees, no lights were to be
descried. He pushed his head farther out and looked to left and right.
There were no lights in the Treasury: no sound came from any of the
rooms. Jeremy stayed thus for a little, helpless in one of those fits
in which every physical faculty is capable while the mind is dizzied by
the mere power of a thought.
He knew that, by reason of his strange fate, he was alone in this
generation. But he had only just begun to realize how much alone he
was. Now he felt he had no community with any of these creatures, that
not only the face of the earth but the spirit of its dwellers had been
changed while he slept. They looked at the world and at themselves in a
manner which was not familiar to him. They were ignorant of things he
could never explain to them. They believed things which to him could
never be credible. There was a gap between him and them which nothing
could ever bridge.
Tears came into his eyes as he pondered numbly over his tragedy. It
seemed to him that he could look back and see his own world, full of
familiar men and places, friendly and infinitely desirable. He began
to believe that all things which had happened and are to happen exist
simultaneously somewhere in the universe. And then, shaking himself
free from this absurd homesickness in time, he began to consider the
immediate future. The rest of his life was perhaps a negligible piece
of eternity compared with that through which he had already lived; but
it would have to be passed somehow. The more he thought about it the
more ridiculously impossible it seemed that he should now see out the
reasonable span of human life.
Could he adjust himself to this new world, find a place in its
business, earn a living, make friends, perhaps marry and beget
children? The idea was preposterous; he ought rather to be in a museum.
Could it be possible that one day his youth in the twentieth century
would be as dim a recollection to him as must be, he supposed, the
youth of most old men to them? There passed before his eyes, sudden and
uncalled for, a procession of solemn persons, parents, and even aunts,
schoolmasters, the principal of the college in which he lectured, the
professor under whom he had worked. All, in that distant youth, when
he had seemed rash and impatient, had advised him, had adjured him
to consider his future. Well, here it was.... He laughed loudly and
harshly.
He drew his head from the window and turned slowly back towards his
bed, cooled and refreshed and a little inclined towards sleep. As he
pulled the clothes over his body and settled his head on the pillow
the thought struck him that perhaps all this was a nightmare, which
would have disappeared when he woke, for sleeping and waking were now
invested for him with powers so incalculable that anything might be
expected of either of them. He drew closer down into the bed and found
the warmth of the rough sheets pleasant to his limbs. The square of
the window was rapidly changing to a pale gray. Perhaps in the morning
this fantastic mirage would have altered its appearance. It was getting
towards dawn--would he never go to sleep? Or if it did not ... no doubt
a humdrum career was as possible in this century as in any other.
There was a bird waking in the bushes under his window; and when they
all began it would be impossible to go to sleep. Perhaps he could get
a job of some kind--he might be useful on the railways.... His eyelids
sank and an invincible lassitude spread through his body. A sudden fear
of sleep seized him--a terror lest this time it might carry him into
some even less friendly age; but in spite of it, consciousness faded
away.
4
In another room, not far off in that diminished city, candles
were burning while Jeremy tossed to and fro in the darkness. At a
great mahogany table--the dining-table of some moldered Victorian
gentleman--Father Henry Dean sat down long after midnight, and, with
the sleepless industry of a very old man, began to turn over the pages
of his chronicle. All around the lighted circle in which he sat soft
shadows filled the room, obscuring the great oak dresser, a now worn
and mellowed relic of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the bookcase,
which was modern work, covered with crude and tasteless arabesques, and
offended its owner whenever he saw it.
His labors in the composition of his history were immense and were
bewildering to the younger men of his time. It had been a blissful
experience to meet, in Jeremy, one who understood the pains he took
in order to arrive at a seemingly useless truth. The pages through
which he was now glancing represented a lifetime of devotion. They
represented also an enduring and a passionate regret. Father Henry
deserved whatever condemnation properly falls upon the praiser of the
past.
In the pursuit of his object he had lavished his youth and his middle
age; and he was still spending his last years in the discovery and
study of the books that were now slowly vanishing from the world. He
alone in his generation had made many journeys to the great deserted
repository where, before the Troubles, the authorities of the British
Museum had stored the innumerable and bewildering periodicals of a time
that had been, if anything, too well informed. A satirical poet might
have found a theme in that dark, dejected, and rat-ridden building,
whose windows and doors had long since vanished and where man’s neglect
had conspired with the weather and the sheltering beasts to disperse
the knowledge it contained.
The priest’s youth had gone before he heard of this storehouse. When
he found it, the stooping, patient figure, turning over the pages of
long-forgotten newspapers, which were brown and ragged, dropping in
pieces, covered with mildew, sodden with rain or eaten away by rats,
might have offered the same poet a spectacle too pathetic for the
exercise of his fancy. Father Henry did his best; but the ravages of
time had been enormous. For the whole of 1920 and part of 1921 he could
find no connected authority but the files of an illustrated Sunday
paper.
It had been almost the same in the British Museum itself, which he
had discovered in earlier life and where his strange passion was
first nurtured. There was only the tragic difference that here decay
had not gone so far that it might not yet be repaired. Many of the
treasures of the Museum had been destroyed, or spoilt, or stolen, and
the library had suffered no less. Father Henry, when he was a young
man, obtained a key to the rooms in which the books lay and wandered
among the shelves, observing with tears the damage done here, too, by
rain and the rats, so that here too many unique records were already
wholly destroyed or rendered illegible. There was still a curator of
the Museum, an official at the Speaker’s court, who held the post as a
sinecure and visited the building perfunctorily once or twice a year.
In his very early and ardent youth the priest had addressed a petition
to the Speaker, praying with some vehemence that the part of the
Museum which held the library might be mended and made weatherproof.
The Speaker was indifferent, the curator resentful; and Father Henry’s
foolish persistence had spoilt his own hopes of advancement and thrown
him more deeply into his solitary enthusiasm for the recovery of
knowledge.
Once again, in his middle years, on the succession of a new Speaker,
he renewed his petition, and for a time his expectations had risen.
But the new ruler had lost interest when he found that Father Henry’s
object was only the study of history, not the revival of mechanical
inventions. Other things had intervened, and the project had been
dropped. After that the priest began carrying to his own house such
volumes as he most valued; but he dared not do this on a great scale,
lest the curator should make it a convenient occasion for a display of
zeal. He prophesied privately to acquaintances, who did not care, that
in another generation the library would have been altogether lost.
Amid these difficulties he had almost completed the work through which
he was now abstractedly rambling. Jeremy’s appearance had filled him
with homesickness for the past no less acute than Jeremy’s own; and
he looked at the crabbedly written pages through a film of tears.
In an early chapter he corrected with pleasure his own doubt whether
the Atlantic had ever really been crossed through the air. In the
newspapers he had consulted by some odd chance, only allusions to
this feat, but no direct record of it survived. He noted also that he
must revise his estimate of one Bob Hart, a prominent Labor leader
of the years in which the Troubles began. Relying on the illustrated
Sunday paper, Father Henry Dean had depicted him as a great, corrupt,
and sinister demagogue, who combined the more salient qualities of
Robespierre and Heliogabalus. Jeremy happened to have met him once or
twice, and affirmed confidently that he was a small, bewildered and
timid man, with a stock of homely eloquence and no reasoning power.
The old priest turned on and reached his account of the ruin of St.
Paul’s, which had occurred after the Troubles and, indeed, during his
own childhood. He had actually seen it standing, though he had not seen
it fall. In the chronicle he described the catastrophe, the portents
which preceded it, and the cloud of dust which hung for a few minutes
over the settling ruins, and in which many had thought they had seen an
avenging shape.
After this he had given a long and elaborate account of the wonderful
building, supplementing his childish recollections from a rich and
varied tradition. Father Henry remembered that the great dome of the
cathedral had been gilded, and here tradition supported him. Jeremy,
however, declared that this was not true. The old priest looked
carefully through what he had written; and then, sitting back in his
great chair and rattling his quill between his teeth, he considered
Jeremy’s evidence. At last he shook his head, put down his pen, and
locked his papers away. Having done this, he blew out all the candles
but one, took the last and dragged himself heavily away to bed.