"I don't remember what I was thinking," said Mr. Newman. "Perhaps I
wasn't thinking. I saw a signpost farther along the road with
something like a long bundle--it was rather like a limp bolster, I
fancy--hanging from it. I was staring toward it, when there came a
noise behind me, like a trumpet being blown, and I turned to see a
coach with four horses come tearing along toward me, with a red-
coated man at the back, blowing a horn. The roof of it was crowded
with people curiously dressed; they all looked down on me as they
came abreast, and their faces had a sort of strange roughness. I saw
them as clearly as all that--a coarseness, it was--a kind of cruel
stupidity. Several of them seemed to be pock-marked, too. It struck
me; I wondered how a coach-load of such people had been gathered
together; and I might have wondered longer; but one of them laughed,
a great neighing guffaw of a laugh, as the coachman swung his whip."
Mr. Newman paused, and his hand floated to his face again.
"It cut me across here," he said thoughtfully. "It--it hurt.
Awfully!"
Carrick nodded.
"And that was all," Mr. Newman went on. "At the sting of the lash, as
though some one had turned a switch, the daylight went out--to the
sound of that gross animal laugh. There was again the frozen dark,
the solitude--the chill--and I heard you saying, as from another
planet, across great gulfs of space: 'Drink some of this!' Only--"
"Yes?"
"It's like a memory of something that actually took place. I ought to
have a weal just below my eyes where the whip took me-it wasn't five
minutes ago. I remember the dusty smell of that white road-and how
the thing that hung on the signpost was-some-how-ugly and nasty. It's
awfully queer, Carrick."
"Yes!" Carrick sank his hands in his pockets and walked away to the
shadowy far end of the room. Mr. Newman sat in thought, flavoring the
vivid quality of his vision, with his underlip caught up between his
teeth. The great room was silent for a space of minutes.
"I say!" Carrick spoke from the other end of it.
"What?"
"That signpost you saw-it wasn't a signpost, you know."
"What was it, then?"
"It was a gallows," said Carrick, "with a man hanging on it."
There was a pause. "Eh?" said Mr. Newman, and rose from his chair.
"Carrick, what exactly did you do to me?"
"I sent you back a hundred years," Carrick answered, in a measured
voice. His excitement got the better of his restraint and his voice
cracked. "Part of the-what was it you said you were, Newman?" he
cried, on a note of shrillness. "I tell you, man, you've proved a
hundred things you never dreamed of-theories of mine. You've proved
them, I tell you. I've dipped you back into the past as I dip my
hands into water. What you saw was what happened; it was you-you,
man, a hundred years ago. Oh, why did I stop at a hundred? A
thousand, a dozen thousand years would have been as easy."
He came down the long room almost at a run.
"Newman," he said, taking the elder man by the arm with a swift,
feverish hand; "we've got 'em, all those old diploma-screened fools
that call us quacks-Zinzau, Berlier, von Rascowicz, Scott-Evans-we've
got 'em. We'll make 'em squeal. Before I've done with you, we'll see
what the earth was like when it was in the pot, being cooked. You
shall be a batwinged lizard again, and a cave-dweller, and a flint
man. We'll turn you loose through history-our special correspondent
at the siege of Troy-what?"
He broke into high, uncontrollable laughter.
"The Wandering Jew," he babbled. "We'll show him!"
Mr. Newman heard him with growing wonder, but now he shook his arm
loose.
"Get yourself a drink," he said. "You're raving. I want to talk to
you."
The word was enough; Carrick stopped laughing, and walked away toward
his desk. Mr. Newman, standing by the big arm-chair from which he had
just risen, looked after him with a sudden liveliness growing in his
face. The experience through which he had just come, abiding with him
as so secure a memory, precluded the doubts he might otherwise have
felt; Carrick's words and his excitement, so unusual in him, and the
clear, unquestionable sense of recollection with which he summoned
again to his mind the white dusty road, the swaying body of the
hanged man, the drum of the hoofs of the coach-horses-these stormed
his reason and forced conviction on him.
"The siege of Troy, you said?" he asked, with a nervous titter. The
thing was gripping him.
Carrick had seated himself at his desk, as though to steady himself
by the sight of its prosaic litter. He looked up now, his face
composed and usual in the light of the reading lamp.
"Or anywhere," he said shortly. He nodded two or three times
impressively; he was master of himself again. "It's true, Newman; I
can do it; I've opened the door. We must have a few more tests and
verify the method by trying it on another subject. Then we'll go to
war with the professors."
"Ye-es," agreed Mr. Newman absently. "Anywhere, you said? You can
open my eyes at any period in time? You can do that, Carrick?"
"Well," began Carrick, and paused. "Why?" he demanded. "What have you
got in your mind?"
Mr. Newman came slowly down toward him till he leaned across the top
of the desk facing the younger man. He was smiling still, but a fire
had lit in his eyes, something adventurous and strong looked out
through them. The elderly stout man was braced and exalted like a
martyr going to the stake.
"Can you?" he repeated. "Can you, Carrick? Say--can you do that?"
"Unless----" hesitated the other, staring at him. "But--you must have
been somewhere, at any time. Yes, I can do it."
Mr. Newman's eyes looked over his head and beyond him.
"Then," he said, and a deep note reverberated in his even voice--
"then show me the day on which Christ died!"
He continued to look past Carrick at the shadowy end of the room,
still smiling his strange and uplifted smile.
Carrick moved in his chair, with a half-gesture as of irritation.
"Look here," he said. "Pull yourself together, Newman. There are
limits, you know, after all."
Two days elapsed before the evening on which the attempt was to be
made; Carrick, alleging difficulties and dangers with long scientific
names, had refused to try it earlier. He had been unwilling to try it
at all.
"I don't want to mix up a matter of clear science with your religious
emotions," he had declared. "And I've got a certain amount of
religion of my own, for that matter. I manage to believe in it
without corroboration; what's the matter with yours, that you can't
do the same?"
But it was not corroboration which Mr. Newman desired. He had not so
much argued as insisted; and it had been difficult to reason with his
manner of one buoyed up, exalted, inspired. He had had his way, on
the sole condition that he should wait two days--"and give sanity a
chance," Carrick had added.
But on the stroke of nine, on the appointed evening, he was standing
within the door of Carrick's study, his hat in his hand, a white silk
muffler about his neck, instead of a collar.
"I was very careful to eat very little at dinner," were his first
words.
Carrick, who had been looking forward to his arrival with nervous
dread, glanced up sharply with an affectation of annoyance at an
interruption.
"More fool you," he barked, in his harshest voice. Mr. Newman smiled,
and laid his hat down on the table and began to unwind his muffler.
Carrick frowned at him. "I'm rather busy to-night, Newman," he said.
That had no effect. He rose. "Besides, something has occurred to me,
and--it is not safe, you know."
Mr. Newman laid his muffler beside his hat; without it he had a
curiously incomplete and undressed appearance. He turned round.
"Oh yes, it is," he contradicted mildly. "As safe as it was on
Monday, at any rate!"
"Ah!" Carrick caught him up eagerly. "But that wasn't safe, either.
I hadn't thought of this then. You see, we don't understand yet how
the thing applies. What is it that becomes conscious in the period
you see? Is it you, in an earlier incarnation? If so, supposing I--I
let go of you at a time when you were dead! What happens then? Do I
get you back--or what?"
He tried to make the consideration graphic, driving it at Mr.
Newman's serenity with a knit brow and a moving forefinger.
Mr. Newman shook his head. "I don't know," he answered, unmoved by
Carrick's fervor. "I can't tell you that. But--you leave me where you
found me--in the hands of my God."
With the same quiet cheerfulness, he crossed to the big chair, turned
it to face the wall, and sat down in it. "I'm quite ready," he said.
Carrick was still standing by the table. He was frowning heavily; the
proceeding was utterly against his inclination. When Mr. Newman
spoke, he sighed windily, a sigh of resignation, of defeat.
"I warned you," he said, and wiped the palms of his hands on his
trousers for what he had to do.
A less honest man than Carrick, finding himself in the like
predicament, might plausibly have contrived a failure. Nothing easier
than to tell Mr. Newman that nerves, a mental burden, or what not,
stood in the way of the adventure. Mr. Carrick got to work forthwith.
Mr. Newman, supine in his chair, knew the preliminary stages of the
process well. They took longer than usual to-night; both of them were
unkeyed and had to compose themselves to the affair. But at last the
visible world, the wall before him, commenced to dislimn; it shifted;
it became mist, writhing and tinged with faint colors, that submerged
his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus,
into a void below--the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on
the body and is rudderless. He knew the blackness which is death, the
momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the sense of chill, the
dumbness.
"Ah!" Carrick saw that his head fell, and ceased his labors. He
stood, gaunt and perplexed, contemplating the body from which he had
expelled the will, the life--the soul. It was a plump body, well
clad, well fed, a carcase that had absorbed much of its world. It
cost labor and the pains of innumerable toilers to clothe it, nourish
it, maintain it, guard, comfort, and embellish it. And an effort of
ten minutes was enough to drain it of all save the fleshly, the mere
bestial. The habit of his mind impelled him to sneer as he stood
above it, to moralise in the tune of cynicism. "Ecce homo!" were the
words he chanced upon; but the flavor of them troubled him when he
remembered the goal of the journey upon which that absent spirit had
departed.
"Oh, Lord!" said Carrick, in a kind of whispering panic.
He cast scared looks to and fro, as though he feared the great room
should contain a spy upon him. It was empty save for him and that
witless body. He put his hands together with the gesture of a child
and shut his eyes tight.
"Our Father," he began, "Which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name!"
The place was as still as a church. He recited his prayer aloud, in a
quiet, careful voice that echoed faintly among the book-shelves.
He bad got as far as "Thine is the kingdom, the power"--no farther--
when Mr. Newman stirred, and he gabbled the words to an end hastily
before he opened his eyes. Mr. Newman came back to consciousness
with a rush; his body inflated with life, his still face woke, and
his vacant eyes, meeting Carrick's and recognising him, suddenly lit
with sense--and terror.
"I say!" exclaimed Carrick; "will you have some water?"
His hand groped for the glass on the mantelshelf, but he continued to
look at Mr. Newman, and presently he forgot the glass. Terror was the
word, the terror of a man who finds--unawaited, ambushed in his
being--depths and capacities unguessed and appalling. A blank,
horror-ridden face fronted his own, till Mr. Newman put his hands
before his face and shuddered. "What is it?" cried Carrick. "Old
chap, what's up?"
"My God!"
It was not an expletive, but a prayer, a supplication. Mr. Newman
dashed the hands from his face and sprang up. Carrick caught him by
the arm.
"I say," he cried. "It's rot. It's a fake--it must be! Whatever
happened--it's not a sure thing. Pull yourself together, Newman. I--I
may be wrong; perhaps it's all an induced--you know, an illusion. I
say, look here----"
"No!"
Gently, but with decision, Mr. Newman put his friendly hand away.
"It's not an illusion," he said.
He walked away. Carrick stood staring after him, a battlefield of
compunctions and a growing curiosity. Mr. Newman was wrestling with
his trouble in the shadows; minutes passed before he came again into
the lamplight. His face was blenched, but something like a stricken
purpose dwelt on it.
"I'll tell you," he said. Then, wildly, "Oh, man! why did you let me?
This trick of yours--it's the knowledge of good and evil; it's the
forbidden fruit. Why did you let me?"
Carrick stammered futilely; there was no answer possible to give.
"I am a Christian," went on Mr. Newman, as though he appealed for
justification. "By my lights I serve God. I try not to judge others.
I've not judged you, have I, Carrick? You--you don't go to church,
but I make a friend of you, don't I?"
"Yes," said Carrick.
"Then--why--" cried Mr. Newman--"why, of all people, should I--oh,
Carrick, I don't know how to tell you."
Let Carrick's answer be remembered when his epitaph is written.
"Then don't tell me," he said. "I don't want to hear."
Mr. Newman shook his head. He had come to a standstill at the side of
the big chair. He looked old and stricken and sad.
"Ah," he said. "But listen all the same."
He remained standing while he told his tale, with eyes that sought
Carrick's listening face and fell away again.
"It took you longer than it usually does," he said; "to send me on, I
mean. I expect I wasn't as good a subject as usual, too. I know I was
full of a sort of gladness and expectation, for I didn't doubt that
you could do it. I had a feeling that I was going to see--really to
see, with mortal eyes--Him, my Redeemer, the Son of God! I wasn't
afraid--only joyful with a great solemnity. I carried it with me,
that joy, into the fog and darkness; it was all that I knew when the
utter night surged up and gulfed me, and even life was forgotten. I
was to see Him, like the pure in heart who are to see God. I had had
that wonder in my mind since Sunday evening; the curate preached on
it--and I--I thought my heart was pure."
His fearful eyes fluttered to Carrick's face and sank.
"The light came as it came before," he went on, quickly and
miserably. "First a sense of something that was not mere darkness,
infinitely distant, but swooping down upon me at an unimaginable
speed, broadening more quickly than the sense could follow--and then
it was daylight all about me, and I was in the world, seeing,
hearing, and--yes, and speaking, speaking, Carrick. Oh, my God!"
He shivered and put a hand out to the arm of the big chair. Carrick
said nothing.
"It's so clear," said Mr. Newman. "If it weren't so clear, I might
persuade myself that it was an illusion, a vision--but it's not. It
happened. The first thing I know was that it was very hot. A sun
stood in the sky; its rays beat on me, and they were strong. I was in
a crowd of people, and they--we, that is--we all stood facing a
building, a white building with a great door. There were many of us;
I was thrust between two big hairy men, and there was a great noise.
Everybody was shouting. I was shouting too. I had both my arms raised
above my head, with my fists clenched--like that----"
Mr. Newman raised his shut hands as high as he could; his tragic face
compelled Carrick's eyes.
"But my arms were bare and very brown, I noticed. I was shouting
vehemently, frantically, in some strange tongue. It was a language I
do not know; but I knew what I was shouting, and I know still."
He stopped. Carrick waited.
"What was it?" he asked at last.
For answer Mr. Newman raised his arms again, the hands clenched, in a
sudden and savage gesture.
"I was shouting like this," he said, and raised a voice that Carrick
did not recognize. "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!"
He dropped his arms and stood staring at Carrick; then covered his
face with his hands.
Carrick stood aghast and shaken. At last he went to his friend and
took his arm.