| Chapter 3
| 0 | |
| "He is going to open his eyes. He had better see but one of
us at first."
| 1 | |
| "Promise me, then, that you will not tell him."
| 2 | |
| The first voice was a man's, the second a woman's, and both
spoke in whispers.
| 3 | |
| "I will see how he seems," replied the man.
| 4 | |
| "No, no, promise me," persisted the other.
| 5 | |
| "Let her have her way," whispered a third voice, also a
woman.
| 6 | |
| "Well, well, I promise, then," answered the man. "Quick, go!
He is coming out of it."
| 7 | |
| There was a rustle of garments and I opened my eyes. A fine
looking man of perhaps sixty was bending over me, an expression
of much benevolence mingled with great curiosity upon his
features. He was an utter stranger. I raised myself on an elbow
and looked around. The room was empty. I certainly had never
been in it before, or one furnished like it. I looked back at my
companion. He smiled.
| 8 | |
| "How do you feel?" he inquired.
| 9 | |
| "Where am I?" I demanded.
| 10 | |
| "You are in my house," was the reply.
| 11 | |
| "How came I here?"
| 12 | |
| "We will talk about that when you are stronger. Meanwhile, I
beg you will feel no anxiety. You are among friends and in good
hands. How do you feel?"
| 13 | |
| "A bit queerly," I replied, "but I am well, I suppose. Will you
tell me how I came to be indebted to your hospitality? What has
happened to me? How came I here? It was in my own house
that I went to sleep."
| 14 | |
| "There will be time enough for explanations later," my
unknown host replied, with a reassuring smile. "It will be better
to avoid agitating talk until you are a little more yourself. Will
you oblige me by taking a couple of swallows of this mixture? It
will do you good. I am a physician."
| 15 | |
| I repelled the glass with my hand and sat up on the couch,
although with an effort, for my head was strangely light.
| 16 | |
| "I insist upon knowing at once where I am and what you have
been doing with me," I said.
| 17 | |
| "My dear sir," responded my companion, "let me beg that you
will not agitate yourself. I would rather you did not insist upon
explanations so soon, but if you do, I will try to satisfy you,
provided you will first take this draught, which will strengthen
you somewhat."
| 18 | |
| I thereupon drank what he offered me. Then he said, "It is
not so simple a matter as you evidently suppose to tell you how
you came here. You can tell me quite as much on that point as I
can tell you. You have just been roused from a deep sleep, or,
more properly, trance. So much I can tell you. You say you were
in your own house when you fell into that sleep. May I ask you
when that was?"
| 19 | |
| "When?" I replied, "when? Why, last evening, of course, at
about ten o'clock. I left my man Sawyer orders to call me at nine
o'clock. What has become of Sawyer?"
| 20 | |
| "I can't precisely tell you that," replied my companion,
regarding me with a curious expression, "but I am sure that he is
excusable for not being here. And now can you tell me a little
more explicitly when it was that you fell into that sleep, the
date, I mean?"
| 21 | |
| "Why, last night, of course; I said so, didn't I? that is, unless I
have overslept an entire day. Great heavens! that cannot be
possible; and yet I have an odd sensation of having slept a long
time. It was Decoration Day that I went to sleep."
| 22 | |
| "Decoration Day?"
| 23 | |
| "Yes, Monday, the 30th."
| 24 | |
| "Pardon me, the 30th of what?"
| 25 | |
| "Why, of this month, of course, unless I have slept into June,
but that can't be."
| 26 | |
| "This month is September."
| 27 | |
| "September! You don't mean that I've slept since May! God
in heaven! Why, it is incredible."
| 28 | |
| "We shall see," replied my companion; "you say that it was
May 30th when you went to sleep?"
| 29 | |
| "Yes."
| 30 | |
| "May I ask of what year?"
| 31 | |
| I stared blankly at him, incapable of speech, for some
moments.
| 32 | |
| "Of what year?" I feebly echoed at last.
| 33 | |
| "Yes, of what year, if you please? After you have told me that
I shall be able to tell you how long you have slept."
| 34 | |
| "It was the year 1887," I said.
| 35 | |
| My companion insisted that I should take another draught
from the glass, and felt my pulse.
| 36 | |
| "My dear sir," he said, "your manner indicates that you are a
man of culture, which I am aware was by no means the matter
of course in your day it now is. No doubt, then, you have
yourself made the observation that nothing in this world can be
truly said to be more wonderful than anything else. The causes
of all phenomena are equally adequate, and the results equally
matters of course. That you should be startled by what I shall
tell you is to be expected; but I am confident that you will not
permit it to affect your equanimity unduly. Your appearance is
that of a young man of barely thirty, and your bodily condition
seems not greatly different from that of one just roused from a
somewhat too long and profound sleep, and yet this is the tenth
day of September in the year 2000, and you have slept exactly
one hundred and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days."
| 37 | |
| Feeling partially dazed, I drank a cup of some sort of broth at
my companion's suggestion, and, immediately afterward becoming
very drowsy, went off into a deep sleep.
| 38 | |
| When I awoke it was broad daylight in the room, which had
been lighted artificially when I was awake before. My mysterious
host was sitting near. He was not looking at me when I opened
my eyes, and I had a good opportunity to study him and
meditate upon my extraordinary situation, before he observed
that I was awake. My giddiness was all gone, and my mind
perfectly clear. The story that I had been asleep one hundred
and thirteen years, which, in my former weak and bewildered
condition, I had accepted without question, recurred to me now
only to be rejected as a preposterous attempt at an imposture,
the motive of which it was impossible remotely to surmise.
| 39 | |
| Something extraordinary had certainly happened to account
for my waking up in this strange house with this unknown
companion, but my fancy was utterly impotent to suggest more
than the wildest guess as to what that something might have
been. Could it be that I was the victim of some sort of
conspiracy? It looked so, certainly; and yet, if human lineaments
ever gave true evidence, it was certain that this man by my side,
with a face so refined and ingenuous, was no party to any scheme
of crime or outrage. Then it occurred to me to question if I
might not be the butt of some elaborate practical joke on the
part of friends who had somehow learned the secret of my
underground chamber and taken this means of impressing me
with the peril of mesmeric experiments. There were great
difficulties in the way of this theory; Sawyer would never have
betrayed me, nor had I any friends at all likely to undertake such
an enterprise; nevertheless the supposition that I was the victim
of a practical joke seemed on the whole the only one tenable.
Half expecting to catch a glimpse of some familiar face grinning
from behind a chair or curtain, I looked carefully about the
room. When my eyes next rested on my companion, he was
looking at me.
| 40 | |
| "You have had a fine nap of twelve hours," he said briskly,
"and I can see that it has done you good. You look much better.
Your color is good and your eyes are bright. How do you feel?"
| 41 | |
| "I never felt better," I said, sitting up.
| 42 | |
| "You remember your first waking, no doubt," he pursued,
"and your surprise when I told you how long you had been
asleep?"
| 43 | |
| "You said, I believe, that I had slept one hundred and thirteen
years."
| 44 | |
| "Exactly."
| 45 | |
| "You will admit," I said, with an ironical smile, "that the
story was rather an improbable one."
| 46 | |
| "Extraordinary, I admit," he responded, "but given the proper
conditions, not improbable nor inconsistent with what we know
of the trance state. When complete, as in your case, the vital
functions are absolutely suspended, and there is no waste of the
tissues. No limit can be set to the possible duration of a trance
when the external conditions protect the body from physical
injury. This trance of yours is indeed the longest of which there
is any positive record, but there is no known reason wherefore,
had you not been discovered and had the chamber in which we
found you continued intact, you might not have remained in a
state of suspended animation till, at the end of indefinite ages,
the gradual refrigeration of the earth had destroyed the bodily
tissues and set the spirit free."
| 47 | |
| I had to admit that, if I were indeed the victim of a practical
joke, its authors had chosen an admirable agent for carrying out
their imposition. The impressive and even eloquent manner of
this man would have lent dignity to an argument that the moon
was made of cheese. The smile with which I had regarded him as
he advanced his trance hypothesis did not appear to confuse him
in the slightest degree.
| 48 | |
| "Perhaps," I said, "you will go on and favor me with some
particulars as to the circumstances under which you discovered
this chamber of which you speak, and its contents. I enjoy good
fiction."
| 49 | |
| "In this case," was the grave reply, "no fiction could be so
strange as the truth. You must know that these many years I
have been cherishing the idea of building a laboratory in the
large garden beside this house, for the purpose of chemical
experiments for which I have a taste. Last Thursday the excava-
tion for the cellar was at last begun. It was completed by that
night, and Friday the masons were to have come. Thursday
night we had a tremendous deluge of rain, and Friday morning I
found my cellar a frog-pond and the walls quite washed down.
My daughter, who had come out to view the disaster with me,
called my attention to a corner of masonry laid bare by the
crumbling away of one of the walls. I cleared a little earth from
it, and, finding that it seemed part of a large mass, determined to
investigate it. The workmen I sent for unearthed an oblong vault
some eight feet below the surface, and set in the corner of what
had evidently been the foundation walls of an ancient house. A
layer of ashes and charcoal on the top of the vault showed that
the house above had perished by fire. The vault itself was
perfectly intact, the cement being as good as when first applied.
It had a door, but this we could not force, and found entrance
by removing one of the flagstones which formed the roof. The
air which came up was stagnant but pure, dry and not cold.
Descending with a lantern, I found myself in an apartment
fitted up as a bedroom in the style of the nineteenth century. On
the bed lay a young man. That he was dead and must have been
dead a century was of course to be taken for granted; but the
extraordinary state of preservation of the body struck me and the
medical colleagues whom I had summoned with amazement.
That the art of such embalming as this had ever been known we
should not have believed, yet here seemed conclusive testimony
that our immediate ancestors had possessed it. My medical
colleagues, whose curiosity was highly excited, were at once for
undertaking experiments to test the nature of the process
employed, but I withheld them. My motive in so doing, at least
the only motive I now need speak of, was the recollection of
something I once had read about the extent to which your
contemporaries had cultivated the subject of animal magnetism.
It had occurred to me as just conceivable that you might be in a
trance, and that the secret of your bodily integrity after so long a
time was not the craft of an embalmer, but life. So extremely
fanciful did this idea seem, even to me, that I did not risk the
ridicule of my fellow physicians by mentioning it, but gave some
other reason for postponing their experiments. No sooner, however,
had they left me, than I set on foot a systematic attempt at
resuscitation, of which you know the result."
| 50 | |
| Had its theme been yet more incredible, the circumstantiality
of this narrative, as well as the impressive manner and personality
of the narrator, might have staggered a listener, and I had
begun to feel very strangely, when, as he closed, I chanced to
catch a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall
of the room. I rose and went up to it. The face I saw was the
face to a hair and a line and not a day older than the one I had
looked at as I tied my cravat before going to Edith that
Decoration Day, which, as this man would have me believe, was
celebrated one hundred and thirteen years before. At this, the
colossal character of the fraud which was being attempted on
me, came over me afresh. Indignation mastered my mind as I
realized the outrageous liberty that had been taken.
| 51 | |
| "You are probably surprised," said my companion, "to see
that, although you are a century older than when you lay down
to sleep in that underground chamber, your appearance is
unchanged. That should not amaze you. It is by virtue of the
total arrest of the vital functions that you have survived this
great period of time. If your body could have undergone any
change during your trance, it would long ago have suffered
dissolution."
| 52 | |
| "Sir," I replied, turning to him, "what your motive can be in
reciting to me with a serious face this remarkable farrago, I am
utterly unable to guess; but you are surely yourself too intelligent
to suppose that anybody but an imbecile could be deceived by it.
Spare me any more of this elaborate nonsense and once for all
tell me whether you refuse to give me an intelligible account of
where I am and how I came here. If so, I shall proceed to
ascertain my whereabouts for myself, whoever may hinder."
| 53 | |
| "You do not, then, believe that this is the year 2000?"
| 54 | |
| "Do you really think it necessary to ask me that?" I returned.
| 55 | |
| "Very well," replied my extraordinary host. "Since I cannot
convince you, you shall convince yourself. Are you strong
enough to follow me upstairs?"
| 56 | |
| "I am as strong as I ever was," I replied angrily, "as I may have
to prove if this jest is carried much farther."
| 57 | |
| "I beg, sir," was my companion's response, "that you will not
allow yourself to be too fully persuaded that you are the victim
of a trick, lest the reaction, when you are convinced of the truth
of my statements, should be too great."
| 58 | |
| The tone of concern, mingled with commiseration, with
which he said this, and the entire absence of any sign of
resentment at my hot words, strangely daunted me, and I
followed him from the room with an extraordinary mixture of
emotions. He led the way up two flights of stairs and then up a
shorter one, which landed us upon a belvedere on the house-top.
"Be pleased to look around you," he said, as we reached the
platform, "and tell me if this is the Boston of the nineteenth
century."
| 59 | |
| At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by
trees and lined with fine buildings, for the most part not in
continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller inclosures,
stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open
squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and
fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings of a
colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my
day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never
seen this city nor one comparable to it before. Raising my eyes at
last towards the horizon, I looked westward. That blue ribbon
winding away to the sunset, was it not the sinuous Charles? I
looked east; Boston harbor stretched before me within its
headlands, not one of its green islets missing.
| 60 | |
| I knew then that I had been told the truth concerning the
prodigious thing which had befallen me.
| 61 | |
|