| Chapter 8
| 0 | |
| When I awoke I felt greatly refreshed, and lay a considerable
time in a dozing state, enjoying the sensation of bodily comfort.
The experiences of the day previous, my waking to find myself in
the year 2000, the sight of the new Boston, my host and his
family, and the wonderful things I had heard, were a blank in
my memory. I thought I was in my bed-chamber at home, and
the half-dreaming, half-waking fancies which passed before my
mind related to the incidents and experiences of my former life.
Dreamily I reviewed the incidents of Decoration Day, my trip in
company with Edith and her parents to Mount Auburn, and my
dining with them on our return to the city. I recalled how
extremely well Edith had looked, and from that fell to thinking
of our marriage; but scarcely had my imagination begun to
develop this delightful theme than my waking dream was cut
short by the recollection of the letter I had received the night
before from the builder announcing that the new strikes might
postpone indefinitely the completion of the new house. The
chagrin which this recollection brought with it effectually roused
me. I remembered that I had an appointment with the builder
at eleven o'clock, to discuss the strike, and opening my eyes,
looked up at the clock at the foot of my bed to see what time it
was. But no clock met my glance, and what was more, I instantly
perceived that I was not in my room. Starting up on my couch, I
stared wildly round the strange apartment.
| 1 | |
| I think it must have been many seconds that I sat up thus in
bed staring about, without being able to regain the clew to my
personal identity. I was no more able to distinguish myself from
pure being during those moments than we may suppose a soul in
the rough to be before it has received the ear-marks, the
individualizing touches which make it a person. Strange that the
sense of this inability should be such anguish! but so we are
constituted. There are no words for the mental torture I endured
during this helpless, eyeless groping for myself in a boundless
void. No other experience of the mind gives probably anything
like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from the loss of a
mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes during
such a momentary obscuration of the sense of one's identity. I
trust I may never know what it is again.
| 2 | |
| I do not know how long this condition had lasted--it seemed
an interminable time--when, like a flash, the recollection of
everything came back to me. I remembered who and where I
was, and how I had come here, and that these scenes as of the
life of yesterday which had been passing before my mind
concerned a generation long, long ago mouldered to dust.
Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room clasping
my temples with all my might between my hands to keep them
from bursting. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my
face in the pillow, lay without motion. The reaction which was
inevitable, from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect
that had been the first effect of my tremendous experience, had
arrived. The emotional crisis which had awaited the full realization
of my actual position, and all that it implied, was upon me,
and with set teeth and laboring chest, gripping the bedstead
with frenzied strength, I lay there and fought for my sanity. In
my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling, associations of
thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost
coherence and were seething together in apparently irretrievable
chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left stable.
There only remained the will, and was any human will strong
enough to say to such a weltering sea, "Peace, be still"? I dared
not think. Every effort to reason upon what had befallen me,
and realize what it implied, set up an intolerable swimming of
the brain. The idea that I was two persons, that my identity was
double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of my
experience.
| 3 | |
| I knew that I was on the verge of losing my mental balance. If
I lay there thinking, I was doomed. Diversion of some sort I
must have, at least the diversion of physical exertion. I sprang
up, and, hastily dressing, opened the door of my room and went
down-stairs. The hour was very early, it being not yet fairly light,
and I found no one in the lower part of the house. There was a
hat in the hall, and, opening the front door, which was fastened
with a slightness indicating that burglary was not among the
perils of the modern Boston, I found myself on the street. For
two hours I walked or ran through the streets of the city, visiting
most quarters of the peninsular part of the town. None but an
antiquarian who knows something of the contrast which the
Boston of today offers to the Boston of the nineteenth century
can begin to appreciate what a series of bewildering surprises I
underwent during that time. Viewed from the house-top the day
before, the city had indeed appeared strange to me, but that was
only in its general aspect. How complete the change had been I
first realized now that I walked the streets. The few old
landmarks which still remained only intensified this effect, for
without them I might have imagined myself in a foreign town.
A man may leave his native city in childhood, and return fifty
years later, perhaps, to find it transformed in many features. He
is astonished, but he is not bewildered. He is aware of a great
lapse of time, and of changes likewise occurring in himself
meanwhile. He but dimly recalls the city as he knew it when a
child. But remember that there was no sense of any lapse of time
with me. So far as my consciousness was concerned, it was but
yesterday, but a few hours, since I had walked these streets in
which scarcely a feature had escaped a complete metamorphosis.
The mental image of the old city was so fresh and strong that it
did not yield to the impression of the actual city, but contended
with it, so that it was first one and then the other which seemed
the more unreal. There was nothing I saw which was not blurred
in this way, like the faces of a composite photograph.
| 4 | |
| Finally, I stood again at the door of the house from which I
had come out. My feet must have instinctively brought me back
to the site of my old home, for I had no clear idea of returning
thither. It was no more homelike to me than any other spot in
this city of a strange generation, nor were its inmates less utterly
and necessarily strangers than all the other men and women now
on the earth. Had the door of the house been locked, I should
have been reminded by its resistance that I had no object in
entering, and turned away, but it yielded to my hand, and
advancing with uncertain steps through the hall, I entered one
of the apartments opening from it. Throwing myself into a
chair, I covered my burning eyeballs with my hands to shut out
the horror of strangeness. My mental confusion was so intense as
to produce actual nausea. The anguish of those moments, during
which my brain seemed melting, or the abjectness of my sense of
helplessness, how can I describe? In my despair I groaned aloud.
I began to feel that unless some help should come I was about to
lose my mind. And just then it did come. I heard the rustle of
drapery, and looked up. Edith Leete was standing before me.
Her beautiful face was full of the most poignant sympathy.
| 5 | |
| "Oh, what is the matter, Mr. West?" she said. "I was here
when you came in. I saw how dreadfully distressed you looked,
and when I heard you groan, I could not keep silent. What has
happened to you? Where have you been? Can't I do something
for you?"
| 6 | |
| Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture of
compassion as she spoke. At any rate I had caught them in my
own and was clinging to them with an impulse as instinctive as
that which prompts the drowning man to seize upon and cling
to the rope which is thrown him as he sinks for the last time. As
I looked up into her compassionate face and her eyes moist with
pity, my brain ceased to whirl. The tender human sympathy
which thrilled in the soft pressure of her fingers had brought me
the support I needed. Its effect to calm and soothe was like that
of some wonder-working elixir.
| 7 | |
| "God bless you," I said, after a few moments. "He must have
sent you to me just now. I think I was in danger of going crazy
if you had not come." At this the tears came into her eyes.
| 8 | |
| "Oh, Mr. West!" she cried. "How heartless you must have
thought us! How could we leave you to yourself so long! But it is
over now, is it not? You are better, surely."
| 9 | |
| "Yes," I said, "thanks to you. If you will not go away quite
yet, I shall be myself soon."
| 10 | |
| "Indeed I will not go away," she said, with a little quiver of
her face, more expressive of her sympathy than a volume of
words. "You must not think us so heartless as we seemed in
leaving you so by yourself. I scarcely slept last night, for thinking
how strange your waking would be this morning; but father said
you would sleep till late. He said that it would be better not to
show too much sympathy with you at first, but to try to divert
your thoughts and make you feel that you were among friends."
| 11 | |
| "You have indeed made me feel that," I answered. "But you
see it is a good deal of a jolt to drop a hundred years, and
although I did not seem to feel it so much last night, I have had
very odd sensations this morning." While I held her hands and
kept my eyes on her face, I could already even jest a little at my
plight.
| 12 | |
| "No one thought of such a thing as your going out in the city
alone so early in the morning," she went on. "Oh, Mr. West,
where have you been?"
| 13 | |
| Then I told her of my morning's experience, from my first
waking till the moment I had looked up to see her before me,
just as I have told it here. She was overcome by distressful pity
during the recital, and, though I had released one of her hands,
did not try to take from me the other, seeing, no doubt, how
much good it did me to hold it. "I can think a little what this
feeling must have been like," she said. "It must have been
terrible. And to think you were left alone to struggle with it!
Can you ever forgive us?"
| 14 | |
| "But it is gone now. You have driven it quite away for the
present," I said.
| 15 | |
| "You will not let it return again," she queried anxiously.
| 16 | |
| "I can't quite say that," I replied. "It might be too early to say
that, considering how strange everything will still be to me."
| 17 | |
| "But you will not try to contend with it alone again, at least,"
she persisted. "Promise that you will come to us, and let us
sympathize with you, and try to help you. Perhaps we can't do
much, but it will surely be better than to try to bear such
feelings alone."
| 18 | |
| "I will come to you if you will let me," I said.
| 19 | |
| "Oh yes, yes, I beg you will," she said eagerly. "I would do
anything to help you that I could."
| 20 | |
| "All you need do is to be sorry for me, as you seem to be
now," I replied.
| 21 | |
| "It is understood, then," she said, smiling with wet eyes, "that
you are to come and tell me next time, and not run all over
Boston among strangers."
| 22 | |
| This assumption that we were not strangers seemed scarcely
strange, so near within these few minutes had my trouble and
her sympathetic tears brought us.
| 23 | |
| "I will promise, when you come to me," she added, with an
expression of charming archness, passing, as she continued, into
one of enthusiasm, "to seem as sorry for you as you wish, but you
must not for a moment suppose that I am really sorry for you at
all, or that I think you will long be sorry for yourself. I know, as
well as I know that the world now is heaven compared with
what it was in your day, that the only feeling you will have after
a little while will be one of thankfulness to God that your life in
that age was so strangely cut off, to be returned to you in this."
| 24 | |
|