THE PEOPLE OF
THE RUINS

A STORY OF THE ENGLISH
REVOLUTION AND AFTER

BY
EDWARD SHANKS

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1920, by
Edward Shanks

All Rights Reserved

TO
ELSIE AND J. MURRAY ALLISON

CONTENTS

THE PEOPLE OF THE
RUINS

CHAPTER I
TROUBLE

1

MR. JEREMY TUFT became aware with a slight shock that he was lying in bed wide awake. He raised his head a little, stared around him, found something vaguely unfamiliar, and tried to go to sleep again. But sleep would not come. Though he felt dull and stupid, he was yet invincibly awake. His eyes opened again of themselves, and he stared round him once more. It was the subdued light, filtered through the curtains, that was strange; and as intelligence flowed back into his empty mind, he realized that this was because it was much stronger than it should have been at any time before eight o’clock. Thence to the conclusion that it was very likely later than eight o’clock was an easy step for his reviving faculties. Energy followed the returning intelligence, and he sat up suddenly, his head throbbing as he did so, and took his watch from the table beside him. It was, in fact, a quarter to ten.

Arising out of this discovery a stream of possibilities troubled the still somewhat confused processes of his mind. Either Mrs. Watkins for some unaccountable reason had failed to arrive, or else, contrary to his emphatic and often repeated instructions, she had been perfunctory in knocking at his door and had not stayed for an answer. In either case it was annoying; but Mrs. Watkins’ arrival at half-past seven was so fixed a point in the day, she was so regular, so trustworthy, and, moreover, life without her ministrations was so unthinkable that the first possibility seemed much the less possible of the two. When Jeremy had thus exhausted the field of speculation he rose and went out of his room to speak sharply to Mrs. Watkins. His intention of severity was a little belied by the genial grotesqueness of his short and rather broad figure in dressing-gown and pyjamas; but he hoped that he looked a disciplinarian.

Mrs. Watkins, however, was not there. The flat was silent and completely empty. The blinds were drawn over the sitting-room windows, and stirred faintly as he opened the door. He passed into the kitchen, but not hopefully, for as a rule his ear told him without mistake when the charwoman was to be found there. As he had expected, she was not there, nor yet in the bathroom. There was a quiet uncanny silence everywhere, so strange and yet at the same time so reminiscent of something that eluded his memory, that Jeremy paused a moment, head lifted in air, trying to analyze its effect on him. He ascribed it at last to the obvious cause of Mrs. Watkins’ absence at this unusually late hour; and he went further into the bathroom, whence he could see, with a little craning of the neck, the clock on St. Andrew’s Church in Holborn. This last testimony confirmed that of his watch. He returned to the sitting-room, struggling half-consciously in his mind with a quite irrational feeling, for which he could not account, that it was a Sunday. He knew very well that it was a Tuesday—Tuesday, the 18th of April, in the year 1924.

When he came into the sitting-room he drew back the blinds and let in the full morning light, and by its aid he surveyed unfavorably his overcoat lying where he had thrown it the night before, coming in late from a party. He looked also with some disgust at the glass from which he had drunk a last unnecessary whisky and soda previous to going to bed. Then he paddled back wearily with bare feet to the narrow kitchen (a cupboard containing a gas-stove and a smaller cupboard), set a kettle on to boil, and began the always laborious process of bathing, shaving, and dressing. At the end he shirked making tea, or boiling an egg, and he sat down discontentedly to another whisky, in the same glass, and a piece of stale bread.

As he consumed this unsuitable meal he remembered his appointment for one o’clock that day, and hoped with a sudden devoutness that the ’buses would be running after all. It was no joke to go from Holborn to Whitechapel High Street on foot. But a young and rather aggressive Socialist whom he had unwillingly met at that party had predicted with confidence a strike of ’busmen some time during the evening. Certainly Jeremy had had to walk all the way home from Chelsea, a thing he much disliked, but then perhaps by that time the ’buses had stopped running in the ordinary course.... They did stop running, those Chelsea ’buses—a horrid place—at an ungodly early hour, he was not quite sure what. But then he was not quite sure at what time he had started home ... he was not really sure of anything that had happened towards the end of the party. He remembered long, devastating arguments in the earlier part about Anarchism, Socialism, Syndicalism, Bolshevism, and some other doctrines, the names of which were formed on the same analogy, but which were too novel to him to be readily apprehended.

These discussions were mingled with more practical but equally windy disputes on the questions whether the railwaymen would come out, whether the miners were bluffing, what Bob Hart was going to do, and much more besides on the same level of interest. There had been also a youth with great superiority of manner, who seemed as tedious and irritating to the politicians as they were to Jeremy—a sort of super-bore who stated at intervals that the General Strike was a myth, but praised all and sundry for talking about it and threatening it. It had been—hadn’t it?—a studio party. At least, Jeremy had gone to it on that understanding; but the political push had rushed it somehow, and had bored everybody else to tears. Jeremy, who did not very much relish political argument, had applied himself to a kind of pleasure he could better understand. He now remembered little enough of those long, muddling disputations, punctuated by visits to the sideboard, but he knew that his head ached terribly. Aspirin tablets washed down with whisky would probably not be much good, but they would be better than nothing. He took some.

In the midst of these difficulties and discomforts he began obscurely to miss something; and at last it flashed on him that he had no morning paper—because there had been no Mrs. Watkins to bring it in with her and put it on his table. He realized at the same time that the morning paper would tell him whether he had to walk to Whitechapel High Street, and that it was worth a journey to the street door from his flat at the top of the building to know the worst. But when he had made the journey there was no paper. While he was reflecting on this disagreeable fact an envelope in the letter box caught his eye. It was addressed to him in a somewhat illiterate script, and appeared to have been delivered by hand, since it bore no stamp. When he opened it he found the following communication:

“Dere Sir,—Ime sorry to tell you I shal not be able to come in to-morro as we working womin have gone on stricke in simpathy with husbands and other working men the buses are al out and the railways and so are we dere Mr. Tuft I dont know Ime sure how you will get on without me but do youre best and dont forget to-day is the day for your clean underclose they are in the chest of draws there is a tin of sardins in the larder so no more at present from your truely,

“Mrs. Watkins.”

“Well, I’m damned....” said Mr. Tuft, staring at this touching epistle; and for a moment he was filled with annoyance by the recollection that he had not put on his clean underclothes. Presently, however, he trailed upstairs again; and when he had found the sardines in the larder the effort thus endured strengthened him for the task of making tea. Eventually he got ready a quite satisfactory breakfast, in the course of which his mind cleared to an exhausted and painful lucidity.

“That’s what it is!” he cried at last, thumping the table; and in his excitement, he let the last half sardine slide off his fork and on to the floor. He groped after it, wincing and starting up when his head throbbed too badly, retrieved the rather dusty fish, wiped it carefully with his napkin, and slowly ate it. The strange silence and the odd feeling that this was Sunday morning were at last explained. The printing works across the narrow street were empty, and through the grimy windows Jeremy could see the great machines standing idle. Below there were no carts, where usually they banged and clattered through the whole working day. The printers were out on strike. Very possibly everybody had struck; for surely nothing short of a national upheaval could have deterred the industrious Mrs. Watkins from her work.

He went to his window and threw it wide open to make a nearer inspection. The traffic which usually thronged the noisy little street, the carts and cars which stood outside the newspaper offices and printing works, were absent. A few of the tenement-dwellers lounged at their doors in such groups as were commonly seen only at night or on Saturday afternoons or Sundays. Jeremy felt a faint thrill go through him. This looked like being exciting. He had seen upheavals before, but never, even in the worst of them, had he seen this busy district in a state of idleness so Sabbatical. There had been ’bus strikes and tube strikes in 1918 and 1919, and since. The railwaymen and the miners had come out together for two days late in 1920, and had made a paralyzing impression. But throughout these affairs somehow printing had gone on, and newspapers had continued to be published, getting at each crisis, according to the temperaments of their proprietors, politer or more abusive towards the strikers. At the end of the previous year, 1923, when a very serious situation had arisen, and a collapse had been narrowly averted, there had been a distinct and arresting note of helpless panic in both politeness and abuse. During the last few days, while the present trouble was brewing, neither had much appeared in the papers, but only an exhibition of dithering fright.

But Jeremy had grown on the whole accustomed to it. He had ceased to believe in the coming of what some of the horrible people he had met at that studio referred to caressingly as the “Big Show.” The Government would always arrange things somehow. The wages of lecturers and investigators in physics (of whom he was one) never went up, because they never went on strike, and because it was unlikely that any one would care if they did. He had not been able to believe that a time would ever come when there would be no Government, no Paymaster-General, no Ministry of Pensions, to pay him his partial disability pension. But this morning unexpected events seemed much more probable. There was not much of the world to be perceived from his window looking down the street, but what there was smelt somehow remarkably like real trouble.

2

Jeremy Tuft was not unused to “trouble” of one sort and another. When the Great War began in 1914 he was a lecturer on physical science in one of the modern universities of Northern England. He had published a series of papers on the Viscosity of Liquids, which had gained him a European reputation—that is to say, it had been quoted with approval by two Germans and a Pole, while the conclusions had been appropriated without acknowledgment by a Norwegian—and he received a stipend of £300 per annum, to which he added a little by private coaching in his spare time. With what was left of his spare time he tried to make the liquids move faster or slower or in some other direction—in view of his ultimate destiny it matters very little which—and at all events to gather such evidence as would blow the Norwegian, for whom he had conceived an unreasonable hatred, quite out of the water.

War called him from these pursuits. He did not stand upon his scientific status or attainments; but concluding that the country wanted MEN to set an example, he hastened to set an example by applying for a commission in the artillery, which, after some difficulty, he obtained. When the first excitement and muddle had been cleared away, so he supposed, no doubt the specialists would be sorted out and set to do the jobs for which they were best fitted. He was a naturally modest man; but he could think of two or three jobs for which he was very well fitted indeed.

He passed through Woolwich in a breathless rush, and learnt to ride even more breathlessly. As the day for departure overseas drew near he congratulated himself a little that the inevitable sorting-out seemed to be postponed. He would get a few weeks more of this invaluable experience in a sphere which was completely unfamiliar to him; he would perhaps even see some of the fighting which he had never really expected. When, five days after his arrival in the Salient with the battery of sixty-pounders to which he was attached, one of the guns blew up with a premature explosion and drenched him in blood not his own, he felt that his experience was reasonably complete, and began to look forward to the still deferred sorting-out. Unfortunately, it continued to be deferred; but after a little while Jeremy settled down with the battery, and rose in it to the rank of captain.

His companions described him as the most consistent and richly eloquent grumbler on the British front; and he filled in his spare time by poking round little shops in Béthune and such towns, and picking up old, unconsidered engravings and some rather good lace. In the early part of 1918, his horse, in a set-to with a traction-engine, performed the operation of sorting-out which the authorities had so long neglected; and Jeremy, when his dislocated knee was somewhat recovered, parted forever from the intelligent animal, and went to use his special attainments as a bottle-washer in the office of Divisional Headquarters. The armistice came; and he was released from the army after difficulties much exceeding those which he had encountered in entering it.

In April, 1922, he was again a lecturer in physics, this time at a newly-instituted college in London, receiving a stipend of £350 per annum, to which he was luckily able to add a partial disability pension of £20. In his spare moments he pursued the Viscosity of Liquids with a movement less lively than their own; but he had forgotten the Norwegian’s name. He lived alone, not too uncomfortably, in his little flat in Holborn, a short distance from the building where it was his duty to explain to young men who sometimes, and young women who rarely, understood him, the difference between mass and weight, and other such interesting points. He was tended daily by the careful Mrs. Watkins, and he had a number of friends, mostly artists, whose tendency to live in Chelsea or in Camden Town he heartily deplored.

On this morning of April, 1924, the first day of the Great Strike or the Big Show, Jeremy set out at a few moments after eleven to keep his appointment with a friend who lived in a place no less inconvenient than the Whitechapel High Street. The streets were, as they had seemed from his windows, even emptier and quieter than on a Sunday, and most of the shops were closed. But there was, on the whole, a feeling of electricity in the air that Jeremy had never associated with that day. It was when he came into Fetter Lane and saw a patrol of troops lying on the grass outside the Record Office that he first found something concrete to justify this feeling.

“There is going to be trouble, then,” he muttered to himself, admitting it with reluctance, as he walked on steadily into Fleet Street; and there his apprehensions were again confirmed. A string of lorries came rapidly down the empty roadway, past him from the West, and they were crowded with troops. Guards, he thought—carrying machine-guns in the first lorry.

Jeremy paused for a moment, staring after them, and then as he turned to go on he saw a small special constable standing as inconspicuously as possible in the door of a shop, swinging nervously the truncheon at his wrist. His uniform looked a little dusty and unkept, and there was an obvious moth-hole on one side of the cap. His whole appearance was that of a man desperately imploring Providence not to let anything happen.

“That man’s face is simply asking for a riot,” Jeremy grunted to himself; and he said aloud, “Perhaps you can tell me what it’s all about?”

The special constable started suspiciously. But seeing that Jeremy was comparatively well-dressed, and seemed to be a member of what in those days was beginning to be known as the P.B.M.C.[A] he was reassured. Jeremy’s air of clumsy geniality and self-confidence was, moreover, far removed from the sinister aspect of the traditional Bolshevist. “I don’t know really,” he said in a complaining voice, “it’s so difficult to find out with no newspapers or anything. All I do know for certain is that we were called out last night, and some say one thing and some another.”

“How long have you been on duty?” Jeremy asked.

“Only an hour,” the special constable replied. “I slept at the station all night on the floor.”

“Like old times in billets, what?” Jeremy remarked pleasantly, observing a silver badge on the man’s right lapel.

“No.... Oh, no.... I wasn’t ever in the army really. They invalided me out after three days. I’m not strong, you know—I’m not fit for this sort of thing. And we didn’t get any proper sleep.”

“Why not?”

“We were afraid we might be attacked,” said the special constable darkly. “Nearly all the police are out. There was only an inspector and a sergeant at the station besides us.”

“Well, who else is out?” Jeremy asked.

“The railwaymen came out yesterday, and the ’busmen last night. All the miners are out now. And the printers, too. They say the electrical men are out, too, but I don’t know about that.”

“Looks like almighty smash, don’t it?” Jeremy commented. “Where are all those troops going?”

“I don’t know,” said the special constable. “Nobody really knows anything for certain.”

“Cheerful business,” Jeremy grumbled, mostly to himself. “And how the devil am I going to get to Whitechapel High Street, I wonder?”

“To Whitechapel High Street?” the special constable cried. “Down in the East End? Oh, don’t go down there! It’ll be frightfully dangerous there!”

“That be damned,” said Jeremy. “I can’t say you look as though you were feeling particularly safe yourself, do you?” And with a wave of his hand he passed down Fleet Street in an easterly direction.

It was only a few hundred yards farther on that he received his first personal shock of the day. As he came to Ludgate Circus he heard an empty lorry, driven at a furious rate, bumping and clanging down the street behind him. At the same time a large gray staff car, packed with red-tabbed officers, shot into the Circus out of Farrington Street, making for Blackfriars Bridge. His heart was for a moment in his mouth, but the driver of the lorry pulled up abruptly and let the car go by, stopping his own engine as he did so. Jeremy saw him descend, swearing softly, to crank up again; and the sight of the empty vehicle revived in him glad memories of the French and Flemish roads. He therefore stepped into the street, and said with a confidence that returned to him naturally from earlier years:

“Look here, my lad, if you’re going east, you might give me a bit of a lift.”

The soldier had got his engine going again, and rose from the starting handle with a flushed and frowning face.

“’Oo are you talkin’ to?” he asked sullenly. “’Oo the ’ell do you think this lorry belongs to, eh? Think it belongs to you?” And as Jeremy was too taken aback to answer, he continued: “This lorry belongs to the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council of Southwark, that’s ’oo it belongs to.” He climbed slowly back into his seat, and as he slipped the clutch in leant outwards to Jeremy and exclaimed in a particularly emphatic and vicious tone, “Dirty boorjwar!” The machine leapt forward, swept round the Circus, and disappeared over the bridge.

Jeremy, a little perturbed by this incident, pursued his journey, unconsciously grasping his heavy cane somewhat tighter, and glancing almost nervously down every side street or alley he passed, hardly knowing for what he looked. His notion of the way by foot to Whitechapel High Street was not very clear, but he knew more or less the way to Liverpool Street, and he supposed that by going thither he would be following the proper line. He therefore trudged up Ludgate Hill and along Cheapside, cursing the Revolution and all extremists from the bottom of his heart. The lorry driver’s parting shot still rankled in his mind. He felt that it was extremely unjust to accuse him of being a member of the bourgeoisie, and he was quite ready to exchange all his vested interests in anything whatever against a seat in a ’bus.

Close to Liverpool Street Station he came out of deserted and silent streets, whose silence and emptiness had begun to have an effect on his nerves, into a scene of activity and animation. A string of five lorries, driven by soldiers, but loaded with something hidden under tarpaulins instead of troops, was drawn up by the curb, while a large and growing crowd blocked its further progress. The crowd was held together apparently by an orator mounted on a broken chair, who was lashing himself into a fury which he found difficult to communicate to his audience. Jeremy pushed forward as unobtrusively as he could, but eventually found himself stayed, close to the foremost lorry, on the skirts of the crowd. The orator, not far off, was working himself into ever wilder and wilder passions.

“The hour has come,” he was saying. “All over the country our brothers have risen——”

“And I and my brothers,” Jeremy murmured to himself, “are going to get the dirty end of the stick.”

But as he looked about him and examined the crowd in which he was involved, he found some difficulty in connecting it with the fiery phrases of the speaker or with the impending Revolution which, until this moment, he had really been beginning to dread. Now a sudden wave of relief passed over his mind. These honest, blunt, good-natured people had expressed the subtle influence of the day, which he himself had felt, by putting on their Sunday clothes. They were not meditating bloodshed or the overthrow of the State. But for a certain seriousness and determination in their faces and voices one might have thought that they were making holiday in an unpremeditated and rather eccentric manner. Their seriousness was not that of men forming desperate resolves. It was that of men who, having entered into an argument, intend to argue it out. They believed in argument, in the power of reason, and the voting force of majorities. They applauded the speaker, but not when he became blood-thirsty; and time and time again he lost touch with them in his violence. At the most frenzied point of the oration a thick-set man, with a startling orange handkerchief round his neck, turned to Jeremy and said disgustedly:

“Listen to ’im jowin’! Sheeny, that’s what he is, no more than a—Sheeny.” Jeremy was neither a politician nor a sociologist. He did not weigh a previous diagnosis against this fresh evidence and come to a more cheerful conclusion; but he breathed rather more freely and relaxed his grip on his cane. He was not disturbed by the confused and various clamor which came from the crowd and in which there was a good admixture of laughter.

Just at this moment he saw on the lorry by which he had halted a face that was familiar to him. He looked again more closely, and recognized Scott—Scott who had been in the Divisional Office, Scott who had panicked so wildly in the 1918 retreat, though God knew he had taken a long enough start, Scott who had nearly landed him in a row over that girl in the estaminet at Bailleul, just after the armistice. And Scott, who never knew that he was disliked—a characteristic of his kind!—was eagerly beckoning to him.

He slid quietly through the fringe of the crowd and stood by the driving-seat of the lorry. Scott leant down and shook him by the hand warmly, speaking in a whisper:

“Tuft, old man,” he said effusively, “I often wondered what had become of you. What a piece of luck meeting you here!”

“I could think of better places to meet in,” Jeremy answered drily. He was determined not to encourage Scott; he knew very well that something damned awkward would most likely come of it. “This looks to me like a hold-up. What have you got in the lorries?”

“Sh!” Scott murmured with a scared look. “It’s bombs for the troops at Liverpool Street, but it’d be all up with us if the crowd knew that. No—why I said it was lucky was because I thought you might help me to get through.”

“I? How could I?” Jeremy asked defensively.

“Well, I don’t know.... I thought you might have some influence with them, persuade them that there’s nothing particular in the lorries, or....”

Jeremy favored him with a stare of bewildered dislike. “Why on earth should I have any influence with them?” he enquired.

“Don’t be sick with me, old man.... I only thought you used to have some damned queer opinions, you know; used to be a sort of Bolshevist yourself.... I thought you might know how to speak to them.” Scott, of course, always had thought that any man whose opinions he could not understand was a sort of Bolshevist. Jeremy shirked the task of explanation and contented himself with calling his old comrade-in-arms an ass.

“And, anyway,” he went on, “I’ll tell you one thing. There isn’t likely to be any revolution hereabouts, unless you make it yourself. What are you stopping for? Did they make you stop?”

“Not exactly ... don’t you see, the General said....”

Jeremy heaved a groan. He had heard that phrase on Scott’s lips before, and it was generally a sign that the nadir of his incapacity had been reached. Heaven help the Social Order if it depended on Scott’s fidelity to what the General had said! But the voice above him maundered on, betraying helplessness in every syllable. The General had said that the bombs were at all costs to reach the troops at Liverpool Street. He had also said that on no account must the nature of the convoy be betrayed; and on no account must Scott risk any encounter with a mob. And the mob had not really stopped the convoy. They had just shown no alacrity in making room for it, and Scott had thought that by pushing on he would perhaps be risking an encounter. Now, however, he thought that by remaining where he was might be exciting curiosity.

Jeremy looked at him coolly, and spoke in a tone of restrained sorrow. “Scott,” he said, “it takes more than jabberers like this chap here to make a revolution. They want a few damned fools like you to help them. I’m going on before the trouble begins.” And he drew back from the lorry and began to look about for a place where the crowd might be a little sparser. The orator on the broken chair had now been replaced by another, an Englishman, of the serious type, one of those working-men whose passion it is to instruct their fellows and who preach political reform with the earnestness and sobriety of the early evangelical missionaries. He was speaking in a quiet, intense tone, without rant or excitement, and the crowd was listening to him in something of his own spirit. Occasionally, when he paused on a telling sentence, there were low rumbling murmurs of assent or of sympathetic comment.

“No, but look here——” came from the lorry after Jeremy in an agonized whisper. But he saw his opportunity, and did not look back until he was on the other side of the crowd round the speaker. He went on rapidly eastwards past the station, his mood of relief already replaced by an ominous mood of doubt. Once or twice, until the turn of the street hid them, he glanced apprehensively over his shoulders at the crowd and the string of motionless lorries.

CHAPTER II
THE DEAD RAT

1

AS he came closer to Whitechapel High Street, Jeremy found with surprise and some addition to his uneasiness, that this district had a more wakeful and week-day appearance. Many of the shops and eating-houses were open; and the Government order, issued two days before, forbidding the sale of liquor while the strike menace endured, was being frankly disregarded. This was the first use that had been made of the Public Order (Preservation of) Act, passed hurriedly and almost in secret two or three months before; and Jeremy, enquiring what his own feelings would have been if he had been in a like position to the restless workmen, had been stirred out of his ordinary political indifference to call it unwise. He might have been stirred to even greater feeling about the original Act if he had known that it was principally this against which the strikes were directed. But he had omitted to ask why the unions were striking, and no one had told him. The middle classes of those days had got used to unintelligible and apparently senseless upheavals. Now, as he passed by one public-house after another, all open, and saw the crowds inside and round the doors, conversing with interest and perceptibly rising excitement on only one topic, he rather wished that the order could have been enforced. There was something sinister in the silence which fell where he passed. He felt uncomfortably that he was being looked at with suspicion.

He turned out of the wide road, now empty of all wheeled traffic, except for a derelict tramcar which stood desolate, apparently where driver and conductor had struck work earlier or later than their fellows. In the side street which led to his destination, there were mostly women—dark, ugly, alien women—sitting on their doorsteps; and he began to feel even more afraid of them than of the men. They did not lower their voices as he passed, but he could not understand what they were saying. But as he swung with a distinct sense of relief into the little narrow court where Trehanoc absurdly lived and had his laboratory, he heard one of them call after him, “Dir-r-rty bourgeois!” and all the rest laugh ominously together. The repetition of the phrase in this new accent startled him and he fretted at the door because Trehanoc did not immediately answer his knock.

“Damn you for living down here!” he said heartily, when Trehanoc at last opened to him. “I don’t like your neighbors at all.”

“I know.... I know...,” Trehanoc answered apologetically. “But how could I expect—— And anyway they’re nice people really when you get to know them. I get on very well with them.” He paused and looked with some apprehension at Jeremy’s annoyed countenance.

He was a Cornishman, a tall, loose, queerly excitable and eccentric fellow, with whom, years before, Jeremy had worked in the laboratories at University College. He had taken his degree—just taken it—and this result, while not abating his strange passion for research in physics, seemed to have destroyed forever all hope of his indulging it. After that no one knew what he had done, until a distant relative had died and left him a few hundreds a year and the empty warehouse in Lime Court. He had accepted the legacy as a direct intervention of providence, refused the specious offers of a Hebrew dealer in fur coats, and had fitted up the crazy building as a laboratory, with a living-room or two, where he spent vastly exciting hours pursuing with the sketchiest of home-made apparatus the abstrusest of natural mysteries. One or two old acquaintances of the Gower Street days had run across him here and there, and, on confessing that they were still devoted to science, had been urgently invited to pay a visit to Whitechapel. They had returned, half-alarmed, half-amused, and had reported that Trehanoc was madder than ever, and was attempting the transmutation of the elements with a home-made electric coil, an old jam-jar, and a biscuit tin. They also reported that his neighborhood was rich in disagreeable smells and that his laboratory was inhabited by rats.

But Jeremy’s taste in acquaintances was broad and comprehensive, always provided that they escaped growing tedious. After his first visit to Lime Court he had not been slow in paying a second. His acquaintance ripened into friendship with Trehanoc, whom he regarded, perhaps only half-consciously, as being an inspired, or at any rate an exceedingly lucky, fool. When he received an almost illegible and quite incoherent summons to go and see a surprising new experiment, “something,” as the fortunate discoverer put it, “very funny,” he had at once promised to go. It was characteristic of him that, having promised, he went, although he had to walk through disturbed London, arrived grumbling, and reassured his anxious host without once ceasing to complain of the inconvenience he had suffered.

“I ought to tell you,” Trehanoc said, with increased anxiety when Jeremy paused to take breath, “that a man’s dropped in to lunch. I didn’t ask him, and he isn’t a scientist, and he talks rather a lot, but—but—I don’t suppose he’ll be much in the way,” he finished breathlessly.

“All right, Augustus,” Jeremy replied in a more resigned tone, and with a soothing wave of his hand, “carry on. I don’t suppose one extra useless object in one of your experiments will make any particular difference.”

He followed Trehanoc with lumbering speed up the narrow, uncarpeted stairs and into the big loft which served for living-room and kitchen combined. There he saw the useless object stretched on a couch—a pleasant youth of rather disheveled appearance, who raised his head and said lazily:

“Hullo! It’s you, is it? We met last night, but I don’t suppose you remember that.”

“No, I don’t,” said Jeremy shortly.

“No, I thought you wouldn’t. My name’s MacIan. You must have known that last night, because you told me twice that no man whose name began with Mac ever knew when he was boring the company.”

“Did I?” Jeremy looked a little blank, and then began to brighten. “Of course. You were the man who was talking about the General Strike being a myth. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings too much?”

“Not at all. I knew you meant well; and, after all, you weren’t in a condition to realize what I was up to. The secret of it all was that by boring all the rest of the company till they wanted to scream I was very effectually preventing them from boring me. You see, I saw at once that the politicians had taken the floor for the rest of the evening, and I knew that the only way to deal with them was to irritate them on their own ground. It was rather good sport really, only, of course, you couldn’t be expected to see the point of it.”

Jeremy began to chuckle with appreciation. “Very good,” he agreed. “Very good. I wish I’d known.” And Trehanoc, who had been hovering behind him uneasily, holding a frying-pan, said with a deep breath of relief: “That’s all right, then.”

“What the devil’s the matter with you, Augustus?” Jeremy cried, wheeling round on him. “What do you mean, ‘That’s all right, then’?”

“I was only afraid you two chaps would quarrel,” he explained. “You’re both of you rather difficult to get on with.” And he disappeared with the frying-pan into the corner which was curtained off for cooking.

“Old Trehanoc’s delightfully open about everything,” MacIan observed, stretching himself and lighting a cigarette. “I suppose we all of us have to apologize for a friend to another now and again, but he’s the only man I ever met that did it in the presence of both. It’s the sort of thing that makes a man distinctive.”

Lunch was what the two guests might have expected, and probably did. The sausages would no doubt have been more successful if Trehanoc had remembered to provide either potatoes or bread; but his half-hearted offer of a little uncooked oatmeal was summarily rejected. Jeremy’s appetite, however, was reviving, and MacIan plainly cared very little what he ate. His interest lay rather in talking; and throughout the meal he discoursed to a stolidly masticating Jeremy and a nervous, protesting Trehanoc on the theme that civilization had reached and passed its climax and was hurrying into the abyss. He instanced the case of Russia.

“Russia,” he said, leaning over towards the Cornishman and marking his points with flourishes of a fork, “Russia went so far that she couldn’t get back. For a long time they shouted for the blockade to be raised so that they could get machinery for their factories and their railways. Now they’ve been without it so long they don’t want it any more. Oh, of course, they still talk about reconstruction and rebuilding the railways and so forth, but it’ll never happen. It’s too late. They’ve dropped down a stage; and there they’ll stop, unless they go lower still, as they are quite likely to.”

Trehanoc looked up with a fanatical gleam in his big brown eyes, which faded as he saw MacIan, poised and alert, waiting for him, and Jeremy quietly eating with the greatest unconcern. “I don’t care what you say,” he muttered sullenly, dropping his head again. “There’s no limit to what science can do. Look what we’ve done in the last hundred years. We shall discover the origin of matter, and how to transmute the elements; we shall abolish disease ... and there’s my discovery——”

“But, my dear man,” MacIan interrupted, “just because we’ve done this, that, and the other in the last hundred years, there’s no earthly reason for supposing that we shall go on doing it. You don’t allow for the delicacy of all these things or for the brutality of the forces that are going to break them up. Why, if you got the world really in a turmoil for thirty years, at the end of that time you wouldn’t be able to find a man who could mend your electric light, and you’d have forgotten how to do it yourself. And you don’t allow for the fact that we ourselves change.... What do you say, Tuft? You’re a scientist, too.”

“The present state of our knowledge,” Jeremy replied cheerfully with his mouth full, “doesn’t justify prophecies.”

“Ah! our knowledge ... no, perhaps not. But our intuitions!” And here, as he spoke, MacIan seemed to grow for a moment a little more serious. “Don’t you know there’s a moment in anything—a holiday, or a party, or a love-affair, or whatever you like—when you feel that you’ve reached the climax, and that there’s nothing more to come. I feel that now. Oh! it’s been a good time, and we seemed to be getting freer and freer and richer and richer. But now we’ve got as far as we can and everything changes.... Change here for the Dark Ages!” he added with a sudden alteration in his manner. “In fact, if I may put it so, this is where we get out and walk.”

Jeremy looked at him, wondering vaguely how much of this was genuine and how much mere discourse. He thought that, whichever it was, on the whole he disliked it. “Oh! we shall go jogging on just as usual,” he said at last, as matter-of-fact as he could.

“Oh, no, we shan’t!” MacIan returned with equal coolness. “We shall go to eternal smash.”

Trehanoc looked up again from the food he had been wolfing down with absent-minded ferocity. “It doesn’t matter what either of you thinks,” he affirmed earnestly. “There’s no limit to what we are going to do. We——” A dull explosion filled their ears and shook the windows.

“And what in hell’s that?” cried Jeremy.

2

For a moment all three of them sat rigid, staring instinctively out of the windows, whence nothing could be seen save the waving branches of the tree that gave its name to Lime Court. MacIan at last broke the silence.

“The Golden Age,” he said solemnly, “has tripped over the mat. Hadn’t we better go and see what’s happened to it?”

“Don’t be a fool!” Jeremy ejaculated. “If there really is trouble these streets won’t be too pleasant, and we’d better not draw attention to ourselves.” Immediately in the rear of his words came the confused noise of many people running and shouting. It was the mixed population of Whitechapel going to see what was up; and before many of them could have done so, the real fighting must have begun. The sound of firing, scattered and spasmodic, punctuated by the dull, vibrating bursts which Jeremy recognized for bombs, came abruptly to the listeners in the warehouse. There was an opening and shutting of windows and a banging of doors, men shouting and women crying, as though suddenly the whole district had been set in motion. All this gradually died away again and left to come sharper and clearer the incessant noise of the rifles and the bombs.

“Scott has set them going,” Jeremy murmured to himself, almost content in the fulfilment of a prophecy, and then he said aloud: “Have you got any cigarettes, Augustus? I can’t say we’re well off where we are, but we’ve got to stop for a bit.”

Trehanoc produced a tin of Virginians which he offered to his guests. “I’m afraid,” he said miserably, “that this isn’t a very good time for asking you to have a look at my experiment.” Jeremy surveyed him with a curious eye, and reflected that the contrast in the effect of the distant firing on the three of them was worth observation. He himself did not pretend to like it, but knew that nothing could be done, and so endured it stoically. MacIan had settled in an armchair with a cigarette and a very tattered copy of La Vie Parisienne, and was giving an exhibition of almost flippant unconcern; but every time there was a louder burst of fire his shoulders twitched slightly. Trehanoc’s behavior was the most interesting of all. He had been nervous and excited while they were at table, and the explosion had obviously accentuated his condition. But he had somehow turned his excitement into the channel of his discovery, and his look of hungry and strained disappointment was pathetic to witness. It touched Jeremy’s heart, and moved him to say as heartily as he could:

“Nonsense, old fellow. We’ll come along and see it in a moment. What’s it all about?”

Trehanoc murmured “Thanks awfully.... I was afraid you wouldn’t want....”—like a child who has feared that the party would not take place after all. Then he sat down sprawlingly in a chair and fixed his wild, shining eyes on Jeremy’s face. “You see,” he began, “I think it’s a new ray. I’m almost certain it’s a new ray. But I’m not quite certain how I got it. I’ll show you all that later. But it’s something like the ray that man used to change bacilli. He changed bacilli into cocci, or something. I’m no biologist; I was going to get in a biologist when you’d helped me a bit. You remember the experiment I mean, don’t you?”

“Vaguely,” said Jeremy. “It’s a bit out of my line, but my recollection is that he used alpha rays. However, go on.”

“Well, that’s what I was after,” Trehanoc continued. “I believe these rays do something of the same kind, and they’ve got other properties I don’t understand. There’s the rat ... but I’ll show you the rat later on. And then I got my hand in front of the vacuum-tube for half a second without any protection....”

“Did you get a burn?” Jeremy asked sharply.

“No,” said Trehanoc. “No ... I didn’t ... that’s the strange thing. I’d got a little radium burn on that hand already, and a festering cut as well, where I jabbed myself with the tin-opener.... Well, first of all, my hand went queer. It was a sort of dead, numb feeling, spreading into the arm above the wrist, and I was scared, I can tell you. I was almost certain that these were new rays, and I hadn’t the least notion what effect they might have on living tissue. The numbness kept on all day, with a sort of tingling in the finger-tips, and I went to bed in a bit of a panic. And when I woke, the radium burn had quite gone, leaving a little scar behind, and the cut had begun to heal. It was very nearly healed!”

“Quite sure it’s a new ray?” Jeremy interjected.

“Oh, very nearly sure. You see, I——” and he entered into a long and highly technical argument which left Jeremy both satisfied and curious. At the close of it MacIan remarked in a tone of deep melancholy:

“Tre, my old friend, if the experiment isn’t more exciting than the lecture, I shall go out and take my turn on the barricades. I got lost at the point where you began talking about electrons. Do, for heaven’s sake, let’s go and see your hell-broth!”

“Would you like to go and see it now?” Trehanoc asked, watching Jeremy’s face with solicitous anxiety; and receiving assent he led the way at once, saying, “You know, I use the cellar for this radio-active work. The darkness.... And by the way,” he interrupted himself, “look out how you go. This house is in a rotten state of repair.” The swaying of the stairs down from the loft, when all three were upon them, confirmed him alarmingly.

As they went past the front door towards the cellar steps, Jeremy, cocking his head sideways, thought that every now and then some of the shots rang out much louder, as though the skirmishing was getting close to Lime Court. But he was by now deeply interested in Trehanoc’s experiment, and followed without speaking.

When they came down into the cellar Trehanoc touched a switch and revealed a long room, lit only in the nearer portion, where electric bulbs hung over two great laboratory tables and stretching away into clammy darkness.

“Here it is,” he said nervously, indicating the further of the two tables, and hung on Jeremy’s first words.

Jeremy’s first words were characteristic. “How you ever get any result at all,” he said, slowly and incisively, “is more than I can make out. This table looks as though some charwoman had been piling rubbish on it.”

“Yes, I know.... I know....” Trehanoc admitted in a voice of shame. “That’s where I wanted you to help me. You see, I can’t be quite sure exactly what it is that does determine the result. There’s the vacuum-tube, worked by a coil, and there’s an electric magnet ... and that tube on the other side has got radium-emanation in it....”

“And then there’s the dead rat,” Jeremy interrupted rather brutally. “What about the dead rat? Does that affect the result?” He pointed with a forefinger, expressing some disgust, to a remarkably sleek and well-favored corpse which decorated the end of the table.

“I was going to tell you....” Trehanoc muttered, twisting one hand in the other. “You know, there are rather a lot of rats in this cellar——”

“I know,” said Jeremy.

“And when I was making the first experiment that chap jumped on to the table and ran across in front of the vacuum-tube——”

“Well?”

“And he just dropped like that, dropped dead in his tracks ... and ... and I was frightfully excited, so I only picked him up by his tail and threw him away and forgot all about him. And then quite a long time afterwards, when I was looking for something, I came across him, just like that, just as fresh——”

“And when was that?” Jeremy asked.

“It must be quite six weeks since I made that first experiment.”

“So he’s one of the exhibits,” Jeremy began slowly. But a new outbreak of firing, unmistakably closer at hand, broke across his sentence. MacIan, who was beginning to find the rat a little tedious, and had been hoping that Trehanoc would soon turn a handle and produce long, crackling sparks, snatched at the interruption.

“I must go up and see what’s happening!” he cried. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He vanished up the steps. When he returned, Jeremy was still turning over the body of the rat with a thoughtful expression and placing it delicately to his nose for olfactory evidence. Trehanoc, who seemed to have begun to think that there was something shameful, if not highly suspicious, in the existence of the corpse, stood before him in an almost suppliant attitude, twisting his long fingers together, and shuffling his feet.

MacIan disregarded the high scientific deliberations. “I say,” he cried with the almost hysterical flippancy that sometimes denotes serious nerve-strain, “it’s frightfully exciting. The fighting is getting nearer, and somebody’s got a machine-gun trained down Whitechapel High Street. There’s nobody in sight here, but I’m certain there are people firing from the houses round about.”

“Oh, damn!” said Jeremy uneasily but absently, continuing to examine the rat.

“And, I say, Tre,” MacIan went on, “do you think this barn of yours would stand a bomb or two? It looks to me as if it would fall over if you pushed it.”

“I’m afraid it would,” Trehanoc admitted, looking as if he ought to apologize. “In fact, I’m always afraid that they’ll condemn it, but I can’t afford repairs.”

“Oh, hang all that!” Jeremy suddenly interjected. “This is extraordinarily interesting. Get the thing going, Trehanoc, and let’s have a look at your rays.”

“That’s right, Tre,” said MacIan. “We’re caught, so let’s make the best of it. Let’s try and occupy our minds as the civilians used to in the old air-raid days. Stick to the dead rat, Tre, and let politics alone.” He laughed—a laugh in which hysteria was now plainly perceptible—but Trehanoc, disregarding him, went into a corner and began fumbling with the switches. In a moment the vacuum-tube began to glow faintly, and Jeremy and Trehanoc bent over it together.

Suddenly a loud knocking at the front door echoed down the cellar steps. Trehanoc twitched his shoulders irritatingly, but otherwise did not move. A moment after it was repeated, and in addition there was a more menacing sound as though some one were trying to break the door in with a heavy instrument.

“You’d better go and see what it is, Augustus,” Jeremy murmured absorbedly. “It may be some one wanting to take shelter from the firing. Go on, and I’ll watch this thing.”

Trehanoc obediently but reluctantly went up the cellar steps, and Jeremy, with some idle, half-apprehending portion of his mind, heard him throw open the front door and heard the sound of angry voices coming through. But he remained absorbed in the vacuum-tube, until MacIan, who was standing at the foot of the steps, said in a piercing whisper:

“Here, Tuft, come here and listen!”

“Yes? What is it?” Jeremy replied vaguely, without changing his position.

“Come here quickly,” MacIan whispered in an urgent tone. Jeremy was aroused and went to the foot of the steps to listen. For a moment he could only hear voices speaking angrily, and then he distinguished Trehanoc’s voice shouting:

“You fools! I tell you there’s no one in the upper rooms. How could any one be firing from the windows?” There was a shot and a gurgling scream. Jeremy and MacIan turned to look at one another, and each saw the other’s face ghastly, distorted by shadows which the electric light in the cellar could not quite dispel.

“Good God!” screamed MacIan. “They’ve killed him!” He started wildly up the stairs. Jeremy, as he began to follow him, heard another shot, saw MacIan poised for a moment, arms up, on the edge of a step, and just had time to flatten himself against the wall before the body fell backwards. He ran down again into the cellar, and began looking about desperately for a weapon of some kind.

As he was doing so there was a cautious footstep on the stair. “Bombs!” he thought, and instinctively threw himself on the floor. The next moment the bomb landed, thrown well out in the middle of the cellar, and it seemed that a flying piece spun viciously through his hair. And then he saw the table which held the glowing vacuum-tube slowly tilting towards him and all the apparatus sliding to the floor, and at the same moment he became aware that the cellar-roof was descending on his head. He had time and wit enough to crawl under the other table before it fell. Darkness came with it.

Jeremy struggled for a moment against unconsciousness. Then something seemed to be going round and round, madly and erratically at first, finally settling into a regular motion of enormous speed. He was vaguely aware of the glowing vacuum-tube, and the dead rat, partly illuminated by it, close to his face; but he felt himself being borne away, he knew not whither. A sort of peace in that haste overtook his limbs and he slept.

CHAPTER III
A WORLD GROWN STRANGE

1

WHEN Jeremy awoke at last it was to find only the change from darkness of the mind to darkness of the eyes. No dreams had stirred his sleep with memories or premonitions. At one moment that great engine had still been implacably and regularly revolving. At the next it slackened and stopped; and, without any transition, he found himself prone, staring into the blackness as he had hopelessly stared when he saw the cellar-roof coming down upon him. He felt no pain, nor was there any singing or dizziness in his head. There was only a sort of blankness, in which he had hardly begun to wonder where he was. He assumed for a moment that he was in his own bed and in his own flat. But two things persuaded him that he was not. He had been awakened by something soft and damp falling on his eyes, and when he tried to brush it away he found that he could not use his arms. Then he remembered.

But the memory brought for the moment a panic that made him dizzy. The bomb had been thrown, the roof had fallen, and, from then till now, there had been only darkness. What more certain than that in that catastrophe, which he now so clearly recalled, his back had been broken, so that he lay there with no more than an hour or two to live? The absence of pain made it only the more terrible, for had he been in agony he might have welcomed death, which now would approach, unmasked, in the most hateful aspect. He made a convulsive movement with his body, which showed him that he was held all along his length, and confirmed his fears. But, in the calmness of despair which followed, he became conscious that the air he was breathing was exceedingly close. Then he realized with a relief that again made him giddy that his back was not broken, but that he was unable to move because he was in some way pinned under the ruins of Trehanoc’s crazy warehouse. He made a renewed effort to stir his body; and this time he was rewarded by an inch of difficult motion in each limb.

Fortified by this assurance, he lay still for a few seconds, and tried to make out his position. He was held tight at every point, but he was not crushed. Neither was he suffocated, nor, as it seemed, in any immediate danger of it. In these circumstances, to be buried alive was a comparatively small evil; it would be odd if he could not somehow dig himself out. The problem was merely how to do so with the least danger of dislodging the still unstable débris above him and so putting himself in a worse position than before. Apparently the ruins had formed a very constricted vault fitting closely to his body and raised a little over his face, where they seemed to admit the passage of air. It was obvious that his first step was to clear his face so that he might see what he was doing. But to do this he needed a free arm, and he could not move either of his arms more than an inch or two. Nevertheless he set to work to move his right arm to and fro in the cramped space that was possible.

The result delighted him. The roof of his grave was some hard substance, probably wood, so a splinter informed him; and he remembered the table under which he had crawled just in time. It must have buckled, so as to make a shield for him; and now, though he could not pick it away, it yielded—an infinitesimal distance at a time, but still it yielded. Presently he was able to crook his elbow, and soon after that to draw his hand up to his face. Then he began to remove the roof which hung an inch or two from his eyes. The process was unpleasant, for as he plucked at the roof it crumbled between his fingers, and he was not able to protect his face from the dust that fell on it. In the darkness he could not trust his sense of touch, but otherwise he would have sworn that, with pieces of wood, which he expected, he was tearing up and pushing away damp clods of grass-grown earth. He had to keep his eyes closed while he worked. After a little while, when he judged that he had made an opening, he laboriously brushed his face clear of dust, opened his eyes, and looked anxiously up. There was darkness above him still, and a cool breath passed over his forehead. It was night. A single star hung motionless in the field of his vision.

A little exhausted by his efforts, Jeremy let his head sink down again, and reflected. Clearly the whole warehouse had come down with a surprising completeness, since he was able to look straight up into the sky. And there was another thing that engaged his attention, though he had not noticed it until now. His ears were quite free and his head lay at last in the open, but still he could hear nothing. Considering the circumstances in which he had been buried, he would certainly have expected to hear something going on. If there were not shots, there should at least have been shouting, movement, noise of some kind—any noise, he thought suddenly, rather than this uncanny, unbroken silence. But there was only a gentle, hardly perceptible rustling, like leaves in the wind ... the old lime tree in the court he decided at last, which had escaped when the warehouse had fallen. He grew almost sentimental in thinking about it. He had looked at it with pleasure on that fatal day, leaning from the window, with MacIan and Trehanoc behind him; and now MacIan and Trehanoc were done for; he and the lime tree remained....

The fighting, he supposed eventually, when his thoughts returned to the strange silence, must have been brought to an end in some very decided and effective manner. Perhaps the troops had got the upper hand over the rioters, and had used it so as to suppress even a whisper of resistance. “Peace reigns in Warsaw,” he quoted grimly to himself. But this explanation hardly satisfied him, and in a spasm of curiosity he renewed the effort to free himself from his grave.

When he did so, he made the discovery that the roof of his vault was now so far lifted that he might have drawn himself out, but for something that was gripping at his left ankle. He could kick his leg an inch or so further down, but he could not by any exertion pull it further out. Here a new panic overcame him. What might not happen to him, thus pinned and helpless, on such a night as this? The fighting seemed to have gone over, but it might return. The men who had killed Trehanoc and MacIan and had thrown a bomb at him might come this way again. Something might set fire to the ruins of the warehouse above him. The troops passing by might see him, take him for a rioter, and bomb or bayonet him on general principles of making all sure. As these thoughts passed through his mind he struggled furiously, and did not cease until his whole body was aching, sweat was running down his face, and his ankle was painfully bruised by the vise which held it. Then he lay panting for some minutes, like a wild animal in a trap, and in as desperate a state of mind.

But again the coolness of despair came to save him. He perceived that he had no hope save in lifting the heavy and solid timbers of the table which had closed about him. Only in this way could he see what it was that held his ankle; and, hopeless as it seemed, he must set about it. The effort was easier, and he was able to work more methodically than when he had given himself up for lost. But there was only an inch or two for leverage; and his labors continued, as it seemed to him, during fruitless hours. Certainly the small patch of sky which was visible to him had begun to grow pale, and the one star had wavered and gone out before he felt any result. Then, suddenly, without warning, the tabletop heaved up a good foot under his pressure and seemed much looser. He breathlessly urged his advantage, while the fabric of his grave shook and creaked reluctantly. He shoved once more with the last of his strength, and the coffin lid lifted bodily, and the invisible fetter on his ankle, with a last tweak, released it. He lay back again, fighting for breath, half in exhaustion, half in hysteria. He was free.

When at last he was a little recovered he drew himself gingerly out, looking anxiously into the vault lest it should close again and pin him. But when he knelt on the edge of the hole from which he had safely emerged, he paused in a frozen rigidity. The dawn was just breaking, and there was a little mist, with strange and unnatural shadows. In Whitechapel, as Jeremy knew it, dawn was usually apt to seem a little tarnished and cheerless. That neighborhood always seemed to him a more agreeable object for study when its inhabitants were hurrying about their business than when they were waking and first opening their doors. But this morning, as he knelt in an involuntary attitude of thanksgiving on the edge of his grave, Jeremy did not see Whitechapel at all, because it was not there. It had vanished overnight.

He was kneeling on short grass, and the crevice in the earth from which he had crept lay towards one end of a shallow depression, enclosed by low grassy banks. A young poplar in the middle of it moved its leaves delicately in the faint wind. All round were meadows of irregular and broken surface, with a few sheep grazing in them, and here and there patches of bramble and wild thorn. Farther off Jeremy could distinguish small groves of trees and the dark outlines of low houses or sheds. Farther off still he saw, black and jagged against the rising sun, something that resembled the tumbled ruins of a great public building. He turned giddy and could not rise from his knees. His muscles refused their service, though it seemed that he strained at them with all his strength, until his stomach revolted and he was seized with a dreadful nausea, which shook him physically and brought a sick taste into his mouth. He found himself looking down at his grave as though he wanted to crawl back into it; and then suddenly an inexplicable horror and despair overcame him, and he flung himself face downwards in the dew-laden grass.

2

What were Jeremy’s thoughts while he lay face down in the grass he could not himself have told. They were not articulate, consecutive thoughts. The landscape that he had seen on emerging from his grave had pressed him back into the shapeless abysms that lie behind reason and language. But, when the fit had passed, when he raised his head again, and saw that nothing had changed, that he was indeed in this unfamiliar country, he would have given a world to be able to accept the evidence of his eyes without incurring an immediate self-accusation of folly.

The transition from the image in his mind to the image which his eyes gave him had been so violent and so abrupt that it had wrenched up all his ordinary means of thought, and set his mind wildly adrift. During a moment he would not have been surprised to hear the Last Trump, to see the visible world go up in flame, and the Court of Judgment assembled in the sky. He told himself that the next instant MacIan and Trehanoc might step from behind the nearest clump of thorn and greet him. But the new landscape continued stable and definite, as unlike the scene of an Apocalypse as the creation of a dream. Could this then be an hallucination of unusual completeness? And, if so, had those dreadful hours during which he had struggled in his tomb been also the result of an hallucination? He stooped absent-mindedly to the low grassy bank by which he was standing and plucked a confidently promenading snail from a plantain leaf. The creature hastily drew in its horns and retracted its body within the shell. Was that, too, delusion?

And yet, the day before, he had been in Trehanoc’s warehouse in Lime Court in Whitechapel, there had been that sudden violence, and, as he still clearly remembered, he had crawled under the laboratory table before the cellar-roof had fallen on him. While he had struggled through the night to free himself, a picture of the place had been perfectly distinct in his mind. On emerging he had turned without reflection to where he knew the door of the cellar stood. The table which had saved him had been at one end of the cellar, parallel to the shorter wall. Jeremy went back to his crevice and stood beside it. It lay in a depression which was roughly four-sided, and it was parallel to the shorter pair of sides. Jeremy bit his lips and looked about him vaguely. Over there should have been the cellar steps, and, going up them, one came to the front door ... just over there ... and beyond the front door there had been the flags of Lime Court. Jeremy followed this imaginary path with the absorbed care and exactitude which were his means of keeping in touch with reason. Where the flag-stones should have been there was now soft turf, dotted here and there with the droppings of sheep. And suddenly Jeremy saw a patch where something had rubbed away the turf and stone protruded....

He stood above it, legs wide apart, teeth clenched, and hands gripped. He felt like a man whom a torrent carries down a dark cleft towards something he dares not conjecture. But when this fit, too, had passed away he felt nothing more acutely than the desire to be able to believe. Presently, as he stood and wrestled with himself, his scientific training and cast of mind came to his help. It was legitimate to form a hypothesis, provided that it accounted for all the facts and made no more assumptions than were necessary in order to do so. Illuminated by this thought, he took a few steps back to his crevice, sat down, grasped his jaw firmly between his hands, and began to enquire what hypothesis would be most suitable. That of an hallucination he immediately dismissed. It might be the true explanation; but as a working basis it led nowhere and required no thought. If he was living amid illusory shows the country round him might change at any moment to a desert or an ice-floe ... or he might find himself pursued by snakes with three heads.

Well.... The alternative theory assumed that the spot on which he now sat was the same which had formerly been occupied by Trehanoc’s warehouse. His observations underground prior to his delivery, the shape of the depression, and the flag-stone where Lime Court should have been, all supported this assumption. In that case it followed irrefragably that he could not have been knocked on the head on the previous day. He must have been in that grave, covered by the table, and the rubble, and the turf for a considerable time. It therefore remained only to estimate a period sufficient for the changes he now observed to have taken place.

It was perhaps just as well that Jeremy had steadied his mind by exercising it in a mode of thought to which it was accustomed: for when he reached this point and looked round enquiringly at the material evidence his head began to whirl again. There was, in particular, a young poplar, about ten or twelve feet high, standing in the middle of the hollow.... Jeremy rose, went to it, and slapped the hole reflectively. It was still young enough to reply by a more agitated rustling of its leaves. Here was the problem compactly put. What was the shortest possible time in which the tree could have attained this growth?

If Jeremy knew that he would also indisputably know the shortest possible time he could have been underground. It was true that his estimate might still be too small by many years. He suspected that most of the much taller trees he could see round him at a greater distance must have been sown since the change; but still with the poplar he would have reached a firm minimum basis. Unfortunately, Jeremy did not know the answer to the question. He was not a botanist, but a physicist, and if he had ever known the rate at which a poplar grows, he had forgotten it. It could hardly be less than ten or fifteen years.... But if it was fifteen, what then? And if he could have lain entombed for fifteen years, why not for fifty? why not for five hundred? And the turf? How long would it be before the ruins of a house were covered with thick turf? That could hardly happen in fifteen years, even if the ruins were left quite undisturbed.... And why had it been left undisturbed in what used to be a busy quarter of London? (The questions thronged now, innumerable and irrepressible.) What had been going on while he had been underground? Were any living men still left? As he asked the last question it was answered. In the distance a couple of figures walked leisurely across the meadows to one of the sheds which Jeremy had vaguely descried, fumbled with the door and went in. They were far too far off for Jeremy to see what manner of men they were; but were they never so gentle, never so kindly, he feared them. He crouched lower down by the entrance to his crevice, and for the second time that morning had half a mind to get back into it, as though it were a magic car that could transport him whence he had come.

The sun rose higher and began to grow hot, and the dew dried swiftly off the grass and the leaves. Very strangely sleep descended on Jeremy, not violently as before, but soft and unnoticed, as though some superior power, seeing his mind reach the limits of conjecture, had gently thrown it out of action. Before he even knew that he was drowsy he had collapsed on the soft turf, his head on the little mound which hid his tabletop, and there he slept for two or three hours, careless and defenseless in a novel and possibly hostile world. When he woke he found that in sleep his main perplexity had been resolved. He now believed without difficulty that he had been carried in a trance out of his own time, how far he did not know, and the admission of the fact gave him a curious tranquillity and courage to face whatever the consequences might be. It did not, however, alter the ineluctable truth that he was very hungry, and this truth made it plain to him that he must take up the business of living, and run even the risk of meeting the strange people from whom he instinctively shrank. He therefore stood up with a gesture of resolution, and determined to discover, if he could, the trace of Whitechapel High Street, and to follow it in the direction of what had once been London. He remembered having spent a toilsome morning in the South Downs following the track of an old Roman road, and he judged that this ought not to be much more difficult. He had a strange repugnance to throwing himself on the charity of the inhabitants of the new Whitechapel, and an equally strange desire to reach the ruins of Holborn, which had once been his home.

When he had made this resolution he went again into the ghost of Lime Court, took three steps down it, and turned to the left into what he hoped would be the side street leading to the main road. His shot was a lucky one. Banks of grass here and there, mounds crested with bramble, and at one point a heap of moldering brickwork, pointed out his road, and there was actually a little ribbon of a foot-path running down the middle of it. Jeremy moved on slowly, feeling unpleasantly alone in the wide silent morning, and watching carefully for a sign of the great street along which the trams used to run.

The end of the path which he was following was marked by a grove of young trees, surrounded by bushes; and beyond this, Jeremy conjectured, he would most likely find the traces of what he sought. He approached this point cautiously, and when the path dipped down into the grove he slipped along it as noiselessly as he could. When it emerged again he started back with a suppressed cry. Whitechapel High Street was not hard to find, for it was still in being. Here, cutting the path at right angles, was a road—one of the worst he had ever seen, but a road nevertheless. He walked out into the middle of it, stared right and left, and was satisfied. Its curve was such that with the smallest effort he could restore it in his mind to what it had been. On the side from which he came the banks and irregularities, which were all that was left of the houses, stretched brokenly out of sight. On the other side the rubble seemed for the most part to have been cleared, and some of it had been used to make a low continuous fence, which was now grass-grown, though ends of brick and stone pushed out of the green here and there. Beyond it cows were grazing, and the ground fell gently down to a belt of woods, which shut off the view.

Jeremy turned his attention again to the road itself. To a man who recollected the roads round Ypres and on the Somme, it had no new horrors to offer, but to a man who had put these memories behind him and who had, for all practical purposes, walked only yesterday through the streets of London, it was a surprising sight. Water lay on it in pools, though the soil at its side was comparatively dry. The ruts were six or seven inches deep and made a network over the whole surface, which, between them, was covered with grass and weeds. Immediately in front of Jeremy there was a small pit deeper than the ruts, and filled at the bottom with loose stones. It was below the worst of farm tracks, but it was too wide for that, and besides, Jeremy could not rid his vision of the great ghostly trams that flitted through it.

But, bad as it was, it meant life, and even apparently a degree of civilization. And Jeremy felt again an unconquerable aversion from presenting himself to the strange people who had inherited the earth of his other life. A road, to a man who comes suddenly on it out of open country, is always mutely and strangely a witness of the presence of other men. This unspeakable track, more than the path down which he had just walked, more even than the figures he had seen in the distance, filled him with a dread of the explanations he would have to make to the first chance comer he met. His appearance would no doubt be suspicious to them, and his story would be more suspicious still. Either they would not have the intelligence to understand it or, understanding, would not credit it. Jeremy tried to imagine his own feelings supposing that he had met, say, somewhere on the slopes of Leith Hill, a person in archaic costume who affirmed that he had been buried for a century or so and desired assistance. Jeremy could think of no method by which his tale could be made to sound more probable. He therefore, making excuses to himself, shrank back into the grove, and took shelter behind a bush, in the hope, as he put it, of thinking of some likely mendacity to serve instead of the truth. When he was settled there he broke off a young trailer of the hedge rose, peeled it, and ate it. It was neither satisfying nor nourishing, but it had been one of the inexpensive delights of his childhood, and it was something.

He was just consuming this dainty when a curious rattling and clanking round the curve of the road struck his ear. It rapidly approached, and he started forward to get a view through the leaves of his bush. To his astonishment he saw a young man propelling a bicycle of uncouth appearance, which leapt uncontrollably on the broken road, and threatened to throw its rider at every yard of progress. He peered at it as closely as he could, and had just decided that its odd look came from an unwieldy frame and most unusual tires when, after a last alarming stagger, its front wheel shot into a rut and its rider was deposited within a yard or two of Jeremy’s feet.

Jeremy had then an opportunity of inspecting both at his leisure, and hardly knew which ought to engage his attention first. The machine was sufficiently remarkable, and reminded him of nothing so much as of some which he had seen in the occupied territories of Germany at the end of the war. Its frame was exceedingly heavy, as were all the working parts which could be seen; and it was covered, not with enamel, but with a sort of coarse paint. The spokes of the wheels were half the size of a man’s little finger, and the rims were of thick wood, with springs in the place of tires. The rider, when he had wearily picked himself up and dusted his garments just under Jeremy’s staring eyes, was by no means so unexpected. The dress, from which he was still brushing the dust with reluctant fingers, consisted of a short brown coat like a blazer, brown breeches, and leather leggings, and on his head he wore a wide-brimmed brown soft hat. His shirt was open at the throat, but below the opening hung a loose and voluminous tie of green linen. His face, on which sat a plainly unwonted expression of annoyance, was mild, candid, and friendly. His voice, when he spoke, was soft and pleasant, and his accent had a strange rich burr in it, which vaguely reminded Jeremy of something he had heard before and could not quite name ... something, it seemed, almost grotesque in this connection....

“I never,” said the young man, solemnly but without rancor, to the inattentive universe, “I never will mount one of those devices again.”

3

Jeremy had ample time to be certain of these details while the young man stood as it were for inspection. When he had dusted himself thoroughly and had looked three or four times round him and up into the sky, apparently to make sure that no celestial chariot was coming to rescue him, he dragged the bicycle from the middle of the road and began to examine it. First of all he tried to wheel it a pace or two, and when it refused to advance he discovered with a gesture of surprise that the chain was off. He slowly lowered the whole machine on to the grass by the roadside and squatted down to adjust the chain. After several fruitless attempts a renewed expression of annoyance crossed his tranquil features, and he sat back on his heels with a sigh.

Jeremy could bear it no longer. Dearer to him even than his European reputation for research into the Viscosity of Liquids was the reputation he had among his friends as a useful man for small mechanical jobs. He would soon have to introduce himself to one or another of what he vaguely supposed to be his descendants. This young man had an unusually calm and friendly appearance, and it was not unlikely that Jeremy might be able to help him in his trouble. He therefore came out of his hiding-place, saying brusquely. “Let me see if I can do anything.”

The young man did not start up in fear or even speak. He merely looked slightly surprised and yielded the bicycle without protest into Jeremy’s hands. Jeremy turned it over and peered into it with the silent absorbed competence of a mechanic. Presently he looked up and made a brief demand for a spanner. The young man, still mutely, replied with a restrained but negative movement of his hands. Jeremy, frowning, ran through his own pockets, and produced a metal fountain pen holder, with which in a moment he levered the incredibly clumsy chain back into place. Then he raised the machine and wheeled it a few yards, showing the chain in perfect action. But the front wheel perceptibly limped. Jeremy dropped on one knee and looked at it with an acute eye.

“No good,” he pronounced at last, “it’s buckled. You won’t be able to ride it, but at least you can wheel it.” And he solemnly handed the machine back to its owner.

“Thank you very much,” said the young man gently. Jeremy could still hear that odd, pleasant burr in his voice. And then he enquired with a little hesitation, “Are you a blacksmith?”

“Good Heavens, no!” Jeremy cried. “Why——”

The young man appeared to choose his words carefully. “I’m sorry. You see, you know all about the bicycle, and ... and ... I couldn’t quite see what your clothes were....” He slurred over the last remark, perhaps feeling it to be ill-mannered, and went on hastily: “I asked because in the village I’ve come from, just a couple of miles down the road, the blacksmith is dead and....” He paused and looked at Jeremy expectantly.

Jeremy on his side realized that the moment had come when he must either tell his amazing story or deliberately shirk it. But while he had been bending over the bicycle a likely substitute had occurred to him, a substitute which, however, he would have hesitated to offer to any one less intelligent and kindly in appearance than his new acquaintance. He hesitated a moment, and decided on shirking, or, as he excused it to himself, on feeling his way slowly.

“I don’t know,” he said with an accent of dull despair. “I don’t know who or what I am. I think I must have lost my memory.”

The young man gave a sympathetic exclamation. “Lost your memory?” he cried. “Then,” he went on, his face brightening, “perhaps you are a blacksmith. I can tell you they want one very badly over there....” But he caught himself up, and added, “Perhaps not. I suppose you can’t tell what you might have been.” He ceased, and regarded Jeremy with benevolent interest.

“I can’t,” Jeremy said earnestly. “I don’t know where I came from, or what I am, or where I am. I don’t even know what year this is. I can remember nothing.”

“That’s bad,” the young man commented with maddening deliberation. “I can tell you where you are, at any rate. This is called Whitechapel Meadows—just outside London, you know. Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Nothing ... nothing ... I woke up just over there”—he swung his arm vaguely in the direction of the ruins of the warehouse—“and that’s all I know.” He suppressed an urgent desire to emphasize again his ignorance of what year it was. Something told him that a man who had just lost his memory would be concerned with more immediate problems.

“Well,” said the young man pleasantly at last, “do you think you came from London? If you do, you’d better let me take you there and see you safe in one of the monastery hospitals or something of that sort. Then perhaps your family would find you.”

“I think so.” Jeremy was uncertain whether this would be a step in the right direction. “I seem to remember.... I don’t know....” He paused, feeling that he could not have imagined a situation so difficult. He had read a number of books in which men had been projected from their own times into the future, but, by one lucky chance or another, none of them had any trouble in establishing himself as the immediate center of interest. Yet he supposed it would be more natural for such an adventurer to be treated as he was going to be treated—that is to say as a mental case. It would be tragically absurd if he in his unique position were to be immured in a madhouse, regarded as a man possessed by incurable delusions, when he might be deriving some consolation for his extraordinary fate in seeing how the world had changed, in seeing, among other things, what was the current theory of the Viscosity of Liquids, and whether his own name was remembered among the early investigators into that fascinating question.

While he still hesitated his companion went on in a soothing tone, “That will be much the best way. Come with me if you think you’re well enough to walk.”

“Oh, yes ... yes ...” distractedly. And as a matter of fact, his hunger and his increasing bewilderment aside, Jeremy had never felt so well or so strong in his life before. He was even a little afraid that the activity of his manner might belie the supposed derangement of his mind. He therefore attempted to assume a somewhat depressed demeanor as he followed his new friend along the road.

The young man was evidently either by nature not loquacious, or else convinced that it would be unwise to excite Jeremy by much conversation—perhaps both. As they went along he gave most of his attention to the conduct of his bicycle, and only threw over his shoulder now and again a kindly “Do you remember that?” or “Does that remind you of anything?” as they passed what would apparently be landmarks familiar to any Londoner in the habit of using that road.

But all were equally strange to Jeremy, and he gazed round him keenly to guess if he could what sort of people they were among whom he had fallen. Clearly, if he were to judge by the man who was walking at his side, they were not barbarians; and yet everywhere the countryside showed evidence of decay, which totally defeated all the expectations of the prophets of his own time. As they drew closer to London, which was still hidden from them by belts of trees, the broken meadows of Whitechapel gave place to cleared plots of garden, and here and there among them stood rude hovels, huts that no decent district council would have allowed to be erected. Jeremy, gazing at them as closely as he could without exciting the attention of his guide, thought that many of them seemed to have been built by piling roughly together fragments of other buildings. Presently a gang of laborers going out to the fields passed them, saluting Jeremy with a curious stare, and his companion, when they were able to transfer their gaze to him, with touched caps, whether because they knew him or merely out of respect for his appearance Jeremy could not decide. But it was surprising how familiar their look was. They were what Jeremy had encountered many hundreds of times in country lanes and the bars of country inns; and it was only vaguely and as it were with the back of his consciousness that he perceived their ruder dress and the greater respectfulness of their manner.

The transition from the fields to the town was abrupt. They reached and passed a little wood which bordered both sides of the road, and immediately beyond it the first street began. The houses were almost all of Jeremy’s own day or before it, but though they were inhabited they were heavy with age, sagging and hanging in different directions in a manner which betokened long neglect. At the end of the street a knot of loiterers stood. Behind them the street was busy with foot passengers, and Jeremy stared along it to a tangle of houses, some old and some new, but nearly all wearing the same strange air of instability and imminent collapse. Their appearance affected him, as one is affected when one wakes in an unfamiliar room, sleepily expecting to see accustomed things and grows dizzy in substituting the real picture for the imagined. He caught his breath and paused.

“What’s the matter?” asked the young man, instantly solicitous.

“Nothing,” Jeremy replied, “only feel faint ... must rest a minute.” He leant against a mass of ruined and lichened brickwork, breathing shortly and jerkily.

“Here,” cried his companion, dropping the bicycle, “sit down till you feel better.” And, exerting an unsuspected strength, he took Jeremy bodily in his arms and lowered him gently till he reclined on the grass. Jeremy looked up, grateful for his kindness, which was reassuring, though he knew that it did not spring from sympathy with his real perplexities. But he immediately dropped his eyes and clenched his hands while he strove to master his doubts. Would it not perhaps be the wiser plan to confess his position to this young man and take the risk of being thought a madman? And a moment’s reflection convinced him that he would never have a better opportunity. The face that now leant anxiously above him was not perhaps so alert or active in appearance as he could have wished; but it was extraordinarily friendly and trustworthy. If the young man could be made to believe in Jeremy’s story, he would do all that was possible to help him. Jeremy made his decision with a leap, and looking up again said thickly:

“I say.... I didn’t tell you the truth just now.”

“What? Don’t talk. You’ll feel better in a moment.”

“No, I must,” Jeremy insisted. “I’m all right; I haven’t lost my memory. I wish to God I had lost it.”

The young man showed for the first time serious symptoms of surprise and alarm. “What,” he began, “are you a—”

Jeremy silenced him with an imperative wave of the hand. “Let me go on,” he said feverishly, “you mustn’t interrupt me. It’s difficult enough to say, anyway. Listen.”

Then, brokenly, he told his story in a passion of eagerness to be as brief as he could, and at the same time to make it credible by the mere force of his will. When he began to speak he was looking at the ground, but as he reached the crucial points he glanced up to see the listener’s expression, and he ended with his gaze fixed directly, appealingly, on the young man’s eyes. But the first words in response made him break into a fit of hysterical laughter.

“Good heavens!” the young man cried in accents of obvious relief. “Do you know what I was thinking? Why, I more than half thought you were going to say that you were a criminal or a runaway!”

Jeremy pulled himself together with a jerk, and asked breathlessly, “What year is this? For God’s sake tell me what year it is!”

“The year of Our Lord two thousand and seventy-four,” the young man answered, and then suddenly realizing the significance of what he had said, he put his hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, and added: “All right, man, all right. Be calm.”

“I’m all right,” Jeremy muttered, putting his hands on the ground to steady himself, “only it’s rather a shock—to hear it—” For, strangely, though he had admitted in his thoughts the possibility of even greater periods than this, the concrete naming of the figures struck him harder than anything that day since the moment in which he had expected to see houses and had seen only empty meadows. Now when he closed his eyes his mind at once sank in a whirlpool of vague but powerful emotions. In this darkness he perceived that he had been washed up by fate on a foreign shore, more than a century and a half out of his own generation, in a world of which he was ignorant, and which had no place for him, that his friends were all long dead and forgotten.... When his mind emerged from this eclipse, he found that his cheeks were wet with tears and that he was laughing feebly. All the strength and activity were gone out of him; and he gazed up at his companion helplessly, feeling as dependent on him as a young child on its parent.

“What shall we do now?” he asked in a toneless voice.

But the young man was turning his bicycle around again. “If you feel well enough,” he answered gently, “I want you to come back and show me the place where you were hidden. You know ... I don’t doubt you. I honestly don’t; but it’s a strange story, and perhaps it would be better for you if I were to look at the place before any one disturbs it. So, if you’re well enough...?” Jeremy nodded consent, grateful for the kindness of his friend’s voice, and went with him.

The way back to the little grove where they had first met seemed much longer to Jeremy as he retraced it with feet that had begun to drag and back that had begun to ache. When they reached it, the young man hid his bicycle among the bushes, and asked Jeremy to lead him. At the edge of the crevice he paused, and looked down thoughtfully, rubbing his chin with one finger.

“It is just as you described it,” he murmured. “I can see the tabletop. Did you look inside when you had got out?” It had not occurred to Jeremy, and he admitted it. “Never mind,” the young man went on, “we’ll do that in a moment.” Then he made Jeremy explain to him how the warehouse had stood, where Lime Court had been, and how it fell into the side street. He paced the ground which was indicated to him with serious absorbed face, and said at last: “You understand that I haven’t doubted what you told me. I felt that you were speaking the truth. But you might have been deluded, and it was as much for your own sake....”

Jeremy interrupted him eagerly. “Couldn’t you get the old records, or an old map of London that would show where all these things were? That would help to prove the truth of what I say.”

The young man shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t suppose I could,” he answered vaguely, his eyes straying off in another direction. “I never heard of such things. Now for this....” And turning to the crevice again he seized the tabletop and with a vigorous effort wrenched it up. As he did so a rat ran squeaking from underneath, and scampered away across the grass. Jeremy started back bewildered.

“You had a pleasant bedfellow,” said the young man in his grave manner. Jeremy was silent, struggling with something in his memory that had been overlaid by more recent concerns. Was it possible that he was not alone in this unfamiliar generation? With a sudden movement he jumped down into the open grave and began to search in the loose dust at the bottom. The next moment he was out again, presenting for the inspection of his bewildered companion an oddly-shaped glass vessel.

“This is it!” he cried, his face white, his eyes blazing, “I told you I came to see an experiment——” Then he was checked by the perfect blankness of the expression that met him. “Of course,” he said more slowly, “if you’re not a scientist, perhaps you wouldn’t know what this is.” And he began to explain, in the simplest words he could find, the astonishing theory that had just leapt up fully born in his brain. He guessed, staggered by his own supposition, that Trehanoc’s ray had been more potent than even the discoverer had suspected, and that welling softly and invisibly from the once excited vacuum-tube which he held in his hand, it had preserved him and the rat together in a state of suspended animation for more than a century and a half. Then with the rolling of the timbers over his head and the collapse of the soft earth which had gathered on them, the air had entered the hermetically sealed chamber and brought awakening with it.

As his own excitement began to subside he was checked again by the absolute lack of comprehension patent in his companion’s face. He stopped in the middle of a sentence, feeling himself all astray. Was this ray one of the commonplaces of the new age? Was it his surprise, rather than the cause of it, which was so puzzling to his friend? The whole world was swimming around him, and ideas began to lose their connection. But, as through a mist, he could still see the young man’s face, and hear him saying seriously as ever:

“I do not understand how that bottle could have kept you asleep for so long, nor do I know what you mean by a ray. You are very ill, or you would not try to explain things which cannot be explained. You do not know any more than I what special grace has preserved you. Many strange things happened in the old times which we cannot understand to-day.” As he spoke he crossed himself and bowed his head. Jeremy was silenced by his expression of devout and final certainty, and stifled the exclamation that rose to his lips.

CHAPTER IV
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?”