Part 5

HANNO [_leaning forward in an earnest way, and emphasising what he says_]: All you men who get at the head of a Department only think of the work of that Department. That’s why you talk about Hannibal’s being bound to win. Of course he’s bound to win; but Carthage all hangs together, and if he wins at too great a price in money _you’re_ weakened, and your _son_ is weakened, and _all_ of us are weakened. We shall be paying five per cent where we used to pay four. Things don’t go in big jumps; they go in gradations, and I do assure you that if you don’t send more men----

BETHAAL [_interrupting impatiently_]: Oh, curse all that! One can easily see where _you_ were brought up; you smell of Athens like a Don, and you make it worse by living out in the country, reading books and publishing pamphlets and putting people’s backs up for nothing. If you’d ever been in politics--I mean, if you hadn’t got pilled by three thousand at....

[_At this moment an obese and exceedingly stupid Carthaginian of the name of Matho strolls into the smoking-room of the club, sees the two great men, becomes radiant with a mixture of reverence, admiration, and pride of acquaintance, and makes straight for them._]

HANNO: Who on earth’s that? Know him?

BETHAAL [_in a whisper astonishingly vivacious and angry for so old a man_]: Shut your mouth, can’t you? He’s the head of my association! He’s the Mayor of the town!

MATHO: Room for little un? [_He laughs genially and sits down, obviously wanting an introduction to Hanno._]

BETHAAL [_nervously_]: I haven’t seen you for ages, my dear fellow! I hope Lady Matho’s better? [_Turning to Hanno_] Do you know Lady Matho?

HANNO [_gruffly_]: Lady _Who_?

BETHAAL [_really angry, and savage on that half of his face which is turned towards Hanno_]: This gentleman’s wife!

MATHO [_showing great tact and speaking very rapidly in order to bridge over an unpleasant situation_]: Wonderful chap this Hannibal! Dogged does it! No turning back! Once that man puts his hand to the plough he won’t take it off till he’s [_tries hard, and fails to remember what a plough does--then suddenly remembering_] till he’s finished his furrow. That’s where blood tells! Same thing in Tyre, same thing in Sidon, same thing in Tarshish; I don’t care who it is, whether it’s poor Barca, or that splendid old chap Mohesh, whom they call “Sterling Dick.” They’ve all got the blood in them, and they don’t know when they’re beaten. Now [_as though he had something important to say which had cost him years of thought_], shall I tell you what I think produces men like Hannibal? I don’t think it’s the climate, though there’s a lot to be said for _that_. And I don’t think it’s the sea, though there’s a lot to be said for _that_. I think it’s our old Carthaginian home-life [_triumphantly_]. That’s what it is! It isn’t even hunting, though there’s a lot to be said for that. It’s the old---- [_Hanno suddenly gets up and begins walking away._]

BETHAAL [_leaning forwards to Matho_]: Please don’t mind my cousin. You know he’s a little odd when he meets anyone for the first time; but he’s a really good fellow at heart, and he’ll help anyone. But, of course [_smiling gently_], he doesn’t understand politics any more than---- [_Matho waves his hand to show that he understands._] But such a good fellow! Do you know Lady Hanno? [_They continue talking, chiefly upon the merits of Hannibal, but also upon their own._]

The Strange Companion

It was in Lichfield, now some months ago, that I stood by a wall that flanks the main road there and overlooks a fine wide pond, in which you may see the three spires of the Cathedral mirrored.

As I so gazed into the water and noted the clear reflection of the stonework a man came up beside me and talked in a very cheery way. He accosted me with such freedom that he was very evidently not from Europe, and as there was no insolence in his freedom he was not a forward Asiatic either; besides which, his face was that of our own race, for his nose was short and simple and his lips reasonably thin. His eyes were full of astonishment and vitality. He was seeing the world. He was perhaps thirty-five years old.

I would not say that he was a Colonial, because that word means so little; but he talked English in that accent commonly called American, yet he said he was a Brittishur, so what he was remains concealed; but surely he was not of this land, for, as you shall presently see, England was more of a marvel to him than it commonly is to the English.

He asked me, to begin with, the name of the building upon our left, and I told him it was the Cathedral, to which his immediate answer was, was I sure? How could there be a cathedral in such a little town?

I said that it just was so, and I remembered the difficulty of the explanation and said no more. Then he looked up at the three spires and said: “Wondurful; isn’t it?” And I said: “Yes.”

Then I said to him that we would go in, and he seemed very willing; so we went towards the Close, and as we went he talked to me about the religion of those who served the Cathedral, and asked if they were Episcopalian, or what. So this also I told him. And when he learnt that what I told him was true of all the other cathedrals, he said heartily: “Is thet so?” And he was silent for half a minute or more.

We came and stood by the west front, and looked up at the height of it, and he was impressed.

He wagged his head at it and said: “Wondurful, isn’t it?” And then he added: “Marvlurs how they did things in those old days!” but I told him that much of what he was looking at was new.

In answer to this (for I fear that his honest mind was beginning to be disturbed by doubt), he pointed to the sculptured figures and said that they were old, as one could see by their costumes. And as I thought there might be a quarrel about it, I did not contradict; but I let him go wandering round to the south of it until he came to the figure of a knight with a moustache, gooseberry eyes, and in general a face so astoundingly modern that one did not know what to say or do when one looked at it. It was expressionless.

My companion, who had not told me his name, looked long and thoughtfully at this figure, and then came back, more full of time and of the past of our race than ever; he insisted upon my coming round with him and looking at the image. He told me that we could not do better than that nowadays with all our machinery, and he asked me whether a photograph could be got of it. I told him yes, without doubt, and what was better, perhaps the sculptor had a duplicate, and that we would go and find if this were so, but he paid no attention to these words.

The amount of work in the building profoundly moved this man, and he asked me why there was so much ornament, for he could clearly estimate the vast additional expense of working so much stone that might have been left plain; though I am certain, from what I gathered of his character, he would not have left any building wholly plain, not even a railway station, still less a town hall, but would have had here and there an allegorical figure as of Peace or of Commerce--the figure of an Abstract Idea. Still he was moved by such an excess of useless labour as stood before him. Not that it did not give him pleasure--it gave him great pleasure--but that he thought it enough and more than enough.

We went inside. I saw that he took off his hat, a custom doubtless universal, and, what struck me much more, he adopted within the Cathedral a tone of whisper, not only much lower than his ordinary voice, but of quite a different quality, and I noticed that he was less erect as he walked, although his head was craned upward to look towards the roof. The stained glass especially pleased him, but there was much about it he did not understand. I told him that there could be seen there a copy of the Gospels of great antiquity which had belonged to St. Chad; but when I said this he smiled pleasantly, as though I had offered to show him the saddle of a Unicorn or the tanned skin of a Hippogriff. Had we not been in so sacred a place I believe he would have dug me in the ribs. “St. _Who_?” he whispered, looking slily sideways at me as he said it. “St. Chad,” I said. “He was the Apostle to Mercia.” But after that I could do no more with him. For the word “Saint” had put him into fairyland, and he was not such a fool as to mix up a name like Chad with one of the Apostles; and Mercia is of little use to men.

However, there was no quarrelsomeness about him, and he peered at the writing curiously, pointing out to me that the letters were quite legible, though he could not make out the words which they spelled, and very rightly supposed it was a foreign language. He asked a little suspiciously whether it was the Gospel, and accepted the assurance that it was; so that his mind, sceptical to excess in some matters, found its balance by a ready credence in others and remained sane and whole. He was again touched by the glass in the Lady Chapel, and noted that it was of a different colour to the other and paler, so that he liked it less. I told him it was Spanish, and this apparently explained the matter to him, for he changed his face at once and began to give me the reason of its inferiority.

He had not been in Spain, but he had evidently read much about the country, which was moribund. He pointed out to me the unnatural attitude of the figures in this glass, and contrasted its half-tones with the full-blooded colours of the modern work behind us, and he was particularly careful to note the irregularity of the lettering and the dates in this glass compared with the other which had so greatly struck him. I was interested in his fixed convictions relative to the Spaniards, but just as I was about to question him further upon that race I began to have my doubts whether the glass were not French. It was plainly later than the Reformation, and I should have guessed the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century. But I hid the misgiving in my heart, lest the little trust in me which my companion still had should vanish altogether.

We went out of the great building slowly, and he repeatedly turned to look back up it, and to admire the proportions. He asked me the exact height of the central spire, and as I could not tell him this I felt ashamed, but he told me he would find it in a book, and I assured him this could be done with ease. The visit had impressed him deeply; it may be he had not seen such things before, or it may be that he was more at leisure to attend to the details which had been presented to him. This last I gathered on his telling me, as we walked towards the Inn, that he had had no work to do for two days, but that same evening he was to meet a man in Birmingham, by whom, he earnestly assured me, he was offered opportunities of wealth in return for so small an investment of capital as was negligible, and here he would have permitted me also to share in this distant venture, had I not, at some great risk to that human esteem without which we none of us can live, given him clearly to understand that his generosity was waste of time, and that for the reason that there was no money to invest. It impressed him much more sharply than any plea of judgment or of other investments could have done.

Though I had lost very heavily by permitting myself such a confession to him, he was ready to dine with me at the Inn before taking his train, and as he dined he told me at some length the name of his native place, which was, oddly enough, that of a great German statesman, whether Bismarck or another I cannot now remember; its habits and its character he also told me, but as I forgot to press him as to its latitude or longitude to this day I am totally ignorant of the quarter of the globe in which it may lie.

During our meal it disturbed him to see a bottle of wine upon the table, but he was careful to assure me that when he was travelling he did not object to the habits of others, and that he would not for one moment forbid the use in his presence of a beverage which in his native place (he did not omit to repeat) would be as little tolerated as any other open temptation to crime. It was a wine called St. Emilion, but it no more came from that Sub-Prefecture than it did from the hot fields of Barsac; it was common Algerian wine, watered down, and--if you believe me--three shillings a bottle.

I lost my companion at nine, and I have never seen him since, but he is surely still alive somewhere, ready, and happy, and hearty, and noting all the things of this multiple world, and judging them with a hearty common sense, which for so many well fills the place of mere learning.

The Visitor

As I was going across Waterloo Bridge the other day, and when I had got to the other side of it, there appeared quite suddenly, I cannot say whence, a most extraordinary man.

He was dressed in black silk, he had a sort of coat, or rather shirt, of black silk, with ample sleeves which were tied at either wrist tightly with brilliant golden threads. This shirt, or coat, came down to his knees, and appeared to be seamless. His trousers, which were very full and baggy, were caught at his ankles by similar golden threads. His feet were bare save for a pair of sandals. He had nothing upon his head, which was close cropped. His face was clean shaven. The only thing approaching an ornament, besides the golden threads of which I have spoken, was an enormous many-coloured and complicated coat-of-arms embroidered upon his breast, and showing up magnificently against the black.

He had appeared so suddenly that I almost ran into him, and he said to me breathlessly, and with a very strong nasal twang, “Can you talk English?”

I said that I could do so with fluency, and he appeared greatly relieved. Then he added, with that violent nasal twang again, “You take me out of this!”

There was a shut taxi-cab passing and we got into it, and when he had got out of the crush, where several people had already stopped to stare at him, he lay back, panting a little, as though he had been running. The taxi-man looked in suddenly through the window, and asked, in the tone of voice of a man much insulted, where he was to drive to, adding that he didn’t want to go far.

I suggested the “Angel” at Islington, which I had never seen. The machine began to buzz, and we shot northward.

The stranger pulled himself together, and said in that irritating accent of his which I have already mentioned twice, “Now say, _you_, what year’s this anyway?”

I said it was 1909 (for it happened this year), to which he answered thoughtfully, “Well, I have missed it!”

“Missed what?” said I.

“Why, 1903,” said he.

And thereupon he told me a very extraordinary but very interesting tale.

It seems (according to him) that his name was Baron Hogg; that his place of living is (or rather will be) on Harting Hill, above Petersfield, where he has (or rather will have) a large house. But the really interesting thing in all that he told me was this: that he was born in the year 2183, “which,” he added lucidly enough, “would be your 2187.”

“Why?” said I, bewildered, when he told me this.

“Good Lord!” he answered, quite frankly astonished, “you must know, even in 1909, that the calendar is four years out?”

I answered that a little handful of learned men knew this, but that we had not changed our reckoning for various practical reasons. To which he replied, leaning forward with a learned, interested look:

“Well, I came to learn things, and I lay I’m learning.”

He next went on to tell me that he had laid a bet with another man that he would “hit” 1903, on the 15th of June, and that the other man had laid a bet that he would get nearer. They were to meet at the Savoy Hotel at noon on the 30th, and to compare notes; and whichever had won was to pay the other a set of Records, for it seems they were both Antiquarians.

All this was Greek to me (as I daresay it is to you) until he pulled out of his pocket a thing like a watch, and noted that the dial was set at 1909. Whereupon he began tapping it and cursing in the name of a number of Saints familiar to us all.

It seems that to go backwards in time, according to him, was an art easily achieved towards the middle of the Twenty-second Century, and it was worked by the simplest of instruments. I asked him if he had read “The Time Machine.” He said impatiently, “You have,” and went on to explain the little dial.

“They cost a deal of money, but then,” he added, with beautiful simplicity, “I have told you that I am Baron Hogg.”

Rich people played at it apparently as ours do at ballooning, and with the same uncertainty.

I asked him whether he could get forward into the future. He simply said: “What _do_ you mean?”

“Why,” said I, “according to St. Thomas, time is a dimension, just like space.”

When I said the words “St. Thomas” he made a curious sign, like a man saluting. “Yes,” he said, gravely and reverently, “but you know well the future is forbidden to men.” He then made a digression to ask if St. Thomas was read in 1909. I told him to what extent, and by whom. He got intensely interested. He looked right up into my face, and began making gestures with his hands.

“Now that really _is_ interesting,” he said.

I asked him “Why?”

“Well, you see,” he said in an off-hand way, “there’s the usual historic quarrel. On the face of it one would say he wasn’t read at all, looking up the old Records, and so on. Then some Specialist gets hold of all the mentions of him in the early Twentieth Century, and writes a book to show that even the politicians had heard of him. Then there is a discussion, and nothing comes of it. _That’s_ where the fun of Travelling Back comes in. You find out.”

I asked him if he had ever gone to the other centuries. He said, “No, but Pop did.” I learned later that “Pop” was his father.

“You see,” he added respectfully, “Pop’s only just dead, and, of course, I couldn’t afford it on my allowance. Pop,” he went on, rather proudly, “got himself back into the Thirteenth Century during a walk in Kent with a friend, and found himself in the middle of a horrible great river. He was saved just before the time was up.”

“How do you mean ‘the time was up’?” said I.

“Why,” he answered me, “you don’t suppose Pop could afford more than one hour, do you? Why, the Pope couldn’t afford more than six hours, even after they voted him a subsidy from Africa, and Pop was rich enough, Lord knows! Richer’n I am, coz of the gurls.... I told you I was Baron Hogg,” he went on, without affectation.

“Yes” said I, “you did.”

“Well, now, to go back to St. Thomas,” he began----

“Why on earth----?” said I.

He interrupted me. “Now that _is_ interesting,” he said. “You know about St. Thomas, and you can tell me about the people who know about him, but it _does_ show that he had gone out in the Twentieth Century, for you to talk like that! Why, I got full marks in St. Thomas. Only thing I did get full marks in,” he said gloomily, looking out of the window. “That’s what _counts_,” he added: “none of yer high-falutin’ dodgy fellows. When the Colonel said, ‘Who’s got the most stuff in him?’ (not because of the rocks nor because I’m Baron Hogg), they all said, ‘_That’s_ him.’ And that was because I got first in St. Thomas.”

To say that I simply could not make head or tail of this would be to say too little: and my muddlement got worse when he added, “That’s why the Colonel made me Alderman, and now I go to Paris by right.”

Just at that moment the taxi-man put in his head at the window and said, with an aggrieved look:

“Why didn’t you tell me where I was going?”

I looked out, and saw that I was in a desolate place near the River Lea, among marshes and chimneys and the poor. There was a rotten-looking shed close by, and a policeman, uncommonly suspicious. My friend got quite excited. He pointed to the policeman and said:

“Oh, how like the pictures! Is it true that they are the Secret Power in England? Now _do_----”

The taxi-man got quite angry, and pointed out to me that his cab was not a caravan. He further informed me that it had been my business to tell him the way to the “Angel.” His asset was that if he dropped me there I would be in a bad way; mine was that if I paid him off there he would be in a worse one. We bargained and quarrelled, and as we did so the policeman majestically moved up, estimated the comparative wealth of the three people concerned, and falsely imagining my friend to be an actor in broad daylight, he took the taxi-man’s part, and ordered us off back to the “Angel,” telling us we ought to be thankful to be let off so lightly. He further gave the taxi-man elaborate instructions for reaching the place.

As I had no desire to get to the “Angel” really, I implored the taxi-man to take me back to Westminster, which he was willing to do, and on the way the Man from the Future was most entertaining. He spotted the public-houses as we passed, and asked me, as a piece of solid, practical information, whether wine, beer, and spirits were sold in them. I said, “Of course,” but he told me that there was a great controversy in his generation, some people maintaining that the number of them was, in fiction, drawn by enemies; others said that they were, as a fact, quite few and unimportant in London, and others again that they simply did not exist but were the creations of social satire. He asked me to point him out the houses of Brill and Ferguson, who, it seems, were in the eyes of the Twenty-second Century the principal authors of our time. When I answered that I had never heard of them he said, “That _is_ interesting.” I was a little annoyed and asked him whether he had ever heard of Kipling, Miss Fowler, or Swinburne.

He said of course he had read Kipling and Swinburne, and though he had not read Miss Fowler’s works he had been advised to. But he said that Brill for wit and Ferguson for economic analysis were surely the glories of our England. Then he suddenly added, “Well, I’m not sure about 1909. The first _Collected_ Brill is always thought to be 1911. But Ferguson! Why he knew a lot of people as early as 1907! He did the essay on Mediæval Economics which is the appendix to our school text of St. Thomas.”

At this moment we were going down Whitehall. He jumped up excitedly, pointed at the Duke of Cambridge’s statue and said, “That’s Charles I.” Then he pointed to the left and said, “That’s the Duke of Buccleuigh’s house.” And then as he saw the Victoria Tower he shouted, “Oh, that’s Big Ben, I know it. And oh, I say,” he went on, “just look at the Abbey!” “Now,” he said, with genuine bonhomie as the taxi drew up with a jerk, “are those statues symbolic?”

“No,” I said, “they are real people.”

At this he was immensely pleased, and said that he had always said so.

The taxi-man looked in again and asked with genuine pathos where we really wanted to go to.

But just as I was about to answer him two powerful men in billycock hats took my friend quietly but firmly out of the cab, linked their arms in his, and begged me to follow them. I paid the taxi and did so.

The strange man did not resist. He smiled rather foolishly. They hailed a four-wheeler, and we all got in together. We drove about half a mile to the south of Westminster Bridge, stopped at a large Georgian house, and there we all got out. I noticed that the two men treated the stranger with immense respect, but with considerable authority. He, poor fellow, waved his hand at me, and said with a faint smile as he went through the door, arm in arm with his captors:

“Sorry you had to pay. Came away without my salary ticket. Very silly.” And he disappeared.

The other man remaining behind said to me very seriously, “I hope his Lordship didn’t trouble you, sir?”

I said that on the contrary he had behaved like an English gentleman, all except the clothes.