XII
'So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible uponthe machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights wasresumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed withgreater freedom. The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed andflowed. The hands spun backward upon the dials. At last I saw againthe dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent humanity.These, too, changed and passed, and others came. Presently, when themillion dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I began to recognizeour own pretty and familiar architecture, the thousands hand ran backto the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and slower.Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very gently,now, I slowed the mechanism down.
'I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have toldyou that when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs.Watchett had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me,like a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute whenshe traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared tobe the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lowerend opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost,and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered.Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but he passedlike a flash.
'Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old familiarlaboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them. I gotoff the thing very shakily, and sat down upon my bench. For severalminutes I trembled violently. Then I became calmer. Around me wasmy old workshop again, exactly as it had been. I might have sleptthere, and the whole thing have been a dream.
'And yet, not exactly! The thing had started from the south-eastcorner of the laboratory. It had come to rest again in thenorth-west, against the wall where you saw it. That gives you theexact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the WhiteSphinx, into which the Morlocks had carried my machine.
'For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and camethrough the passage here, limping, because my heel was stillpainful, and feeling sorely begrimed. I saw the _Pall Mall Gazette_on the table by the door. I found the date was indeed to-day, andlooking at the timepiece, saw the hour was almost eight o'clock. Iheard your voices and the clatter of plates. I hesitated--I felt sosick and weak. Then I sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened thedoor on you. You know the rest. I washed, and dined, and now I amtelling you the story.
'I know,' he said, after a pause, 'that all this will be absolutelyincredible to you. To me the one incredible thing is that I am hereto-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly facesand telling you these strange adventures.'
He looked at the Medical Man. 'No. I cannot expect you to believeit. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in theworkshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of ourrace until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of itstruth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And takingit as a story, what do you think of it?'
He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tapwith it nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentarystillness. Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon thecarpet. I took my eyes off the Time Traveller's face, and lookedround at his audience. They were in the dark, and little spots ofcolour swam before them. The Medical Man seemed absorbed in thecontemplation of our host. The Editor was looking hard at the endof his cigar--the sixth. The Journalist fumbled for his watch. Theothers, as far as I remember, were motionless.
The Editor stood up with a sigh. 'What a pity it is you're nota writer of stories!' he said, putting his hand on the TimeTraveller's shoulder.
'You don't believe it?'
'Well----'
'I thought not.'
The Time Traveller turned to us. 'Where are the matches?' he said.He lit one and spoke over his pipe, puffing. 'To tell you the truth... I hardly believe it myself.... And yet...'
His eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowersupon the little table. Then he turned over the hand holding hispipe, and I saw he was looking at some half-healed scars on hisknuckles.
The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the flowers.'The gynaeceum's odd,' he said. The Psychologist leant forward tosee, holding out his hand for a specimen.
'I'm hanged if it isn't a quarter to one,' said the Journalist.'How shall we get home?'
'Plenty of cabs at the station,' said the Psychologist.
'It's a curious thing,' said the Medical Man; 'but I certainly don'tknow the natural order of these flowers. May I have them?'
The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: 'Certainly not.'
'Where did you really get them?' said the Medical Man.
The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one whowas trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. 'They were putinto my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.' He staredround the room. 'I'm damned if it isn't all going. This room and youand the atmosphere of every day is too much for my memory. Did Iever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it allonly a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream attimes--but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's madness. Andwhere did the dream come from? ... I must look at that machine. Ifthere is one!'
He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, throughthe door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickeringlight of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, andaskew; a thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmeringquartz. Solid to the touch--for I put out my hand and felt the railof it--and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits ofgrass and moss upon the lower parts, and one rail bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his handalong the damaged rail. 'It's all right now,' he said. 'The story Itold you was true. I'm sorry to have brought you out here in thecold.' He took up the lamp, and, in an absolute silence, wereturned to the smoking-room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with hiscoat. The Medical Man looked into his face and, with a certainhesitation, told him he was suffering from overwork, at which helaughed hugely. I remember him standing in the open doorway, bawlinggood night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.'For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story wasso fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. Ilay awake most of the night thinking about it. I determined to gonext day and see the Time Traveller again. I was told he was in thelaboratory, and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him.The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a minute at theTime Machine and put out my hand and touched the lever. At that thesquat substantial-looking mass swayed like a bough shaken by thewind. Its instability startled me extremely, and I had a queerreminiscence of the childish days when I used to be forbidden tomeddle. I came back through the corridor. The Time Traveller met mein the smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had a smallcamera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed whenhe saw me, and gave me an elbow to shake. 'I'm frightfully busy,'said he, 'with that thing in there.'
'But is it not some hoax?' I said. 'Do you really travel throughtime?'
'Really and truly I do.' And he looked frankly into my eyes. Hehesitated. His eye wandered about the room. 'I only want half anhour,' he said. 'I know why you came, and it's awfully good of you.There's some magazines here. If you'll stop to lunch I'll prove youthis time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all. If you'llforgive my leaving you now?'
I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words,and he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door ofthe laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a dailypaper. What was he going to do before lunch-time? Then suddenlyI was reminded by an advertisement that I had promised to meetRichardson, the publisher, at two. I looked at my watch, and sawthat I could barely save that engagement. I got up and went down thepassage to tell th
e Time Traveller.
As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation,oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of airwhirled round me as I opened the door, and from within came thesound of broken glass falling on the floor. The Time Traveller wasnot there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting ina whirling mass of black and brass for a moment--a figure sotransparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings wasabsolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes.The Time Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, thefurther end of the laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had,apparently, just been blown in.
I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange hadhappened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strangething might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened,and the man-servant appeared.
We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. 'Has Mr. ----gone out that way?' said I.
'No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find himhere.'
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson Istayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second,perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs hewould bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I mustwait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And,as everybody knows now, he has never returned.
EPILOGUE
One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that heswept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairysavages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of theCretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilianbrutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now--if I may use thephrase--be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coralreef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or didhe go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are stillmen, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisomeproblems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my ownpart, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment,fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminatingtime! I say, for my own part. He, I know--for the question had beendiscussed among us long before the Time Machine was made--thoughtbut cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in thegrowing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that mustinevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If thatis so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to methe future is still black and blank--is a vast ignorance, lit at afew casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, formy comfort, two strange white flowers--shrivelled now, and brown andflat and brittle--to witness that even when mind and strength hadgone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heartof man.
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