Part 13

‘I seem to remember that the aeroplanes came up out of the south, and that the battle went away to the west. One aeroplane was struck, and overset and fell. I remember that--though it didn’t interest me in the least. It didn’t seem to signify. It was like a wounded gull, you know--flapping for a time in the water. I could see it down the aisle of the temple--a black thing in the bright blue water.

‘Three or four times shells burst about the beach, and then that ceased. Each time that happened all the lizards scuttled in and hid for a space. That was all the mischief done, except that once a stray bullet gashed the stone hard by--made just a fresh bright surface.

‘As the shadows grew longer, the stillness seemed greater.

‘The curious thing,’ he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a trivial conversation, ‘is that I didn’t _think_--I didn’t think at all. I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones--in a sort of lethargy--stagnant.

‘And I don’t remember waking up. I don’t remember dressing that day. I know I found myself in my office, with my letters all slit open in front of me, and how I was struck by the absurdity of being there, seeing that in reality I was sitting, stunned, in that Pæstum Temple with a dead woman in my arms. I read my letters like a machine. I have forgotten what they were about.’

He stopped, and there was a long silence.

Suddenly I perceived that we were running down the incline from Chalk Farm to Euston. I started at this passing of time. I turned on him with a brutal question with the tone of ‘Now or never.’

‘And did you dream again?’

‘Yes.’

He seemed to force himself to finish. His voice was very low.

‘Once more, and as it were only for a few instants. I seemed to have suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me. A gaunt body. Not her, you know. So soon--it was not her....

‘I may have heard voices. I do not know. Only I knew clearly that men were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.

‘I stood up and walked through the temple, and there came into sight--first one man with a yellow face, dressed in a uniform of dirty white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing to the crest of the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there. They were little bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung, weapon in hand, peering cautiously before them.

‘And further away I saw others, and then more at another point in the wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.

‘Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command, and his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards the temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.

‘At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when I had seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid them. I shouted to the officer.

“‘You must not come here,” I cried, “_I_ am here, I am here with my dead.”

‘He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown tongue.

‘I repeated what I had said.

‘He shouted again, and I folded my arms and stood still. Presently he spoke to his men and came forward. He carried a drawn sword.

‘I signed to him to keep away, but he continued to advance. I told him again very patiently and clearly: “You must not come here. These are old temples, and I am here with my dead.”

‘Presently he was so close I could see his face clearly. It was a narrow face, with dull gray eyes, and a black moustache. He had a scar on his upper lip, and he was dirty and unshaven. He kept shouting unintelligible things, questions perhaps, at me.

‘I know now that he was afraid of me, but at the time that did not occur to me. As I tried to explain to him he interrupted me in imperious tones, bidding me, I suppose, stand aside.

‘He made to go past me, and I caught hold of him.

‘I saw his face change at my grip.

‘“You fool,” I cried. “Don’t you know? She is dead!”

‘He started back. He looked at me with cruel eyes. I saw a sort of exultant resolve leap into them--delight. Then suddenly, with a scowl, he swept his sword back--_so_--and thrust.’

He stopped abruptly.

I became aware of a change in the rhythm of the train. The brakes lifted their voices and the carriage jarred and jerked. This present world insisted upon itself, became clamorous. I saw through the steamy window huge electric lights glaring down from tall masts upon a fog, saw rows of stationary empty carriages passing by, and then a signal-box, hoisting its constellation of green and red into the murky London twilight, marched after them. I looked again at his drawn features.

‘He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment--no fear, no pain--but just amazement, that I felt it pierce me, felt the sword drive home into my body. It didn’t hurt, you know. It didn’t hurt at all.’

The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of men passed to and fro without.

‘Euston!’ cried a voice.

‘Do you mean----?’

‘There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face of the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of existence----’

‘Euston!’ clamoured the voices outside; ‘Euston!’

The carriage door opened, admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truck-load of lighted lamps blazed along the platform.

‘A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out all things.’

‘Any luggage, sir?’ said the porter.

‘And that was the end?’ I asked.

He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, ‘_No_.’

‘You mean?’

‘I couldn’t get to her. She was there on the other side of the temple---- And then----’

‘Yes,’ I insisted. ‘Yes?’

‘Nightmares,’ he cried; ‘nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that fought and tore.’

THE NEW ACCELERATOR

Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a pin, it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionise human life. And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful days. I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do better than describe the effect the thing had on me. That there are astonishing experiences in store for all in search of new sensations will become apparent enough.

Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone. Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has already appeared in _The Strand Magazine_--I think late in 1899; but I am unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to some one who has never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps, recall the high forehead and the singularly long black eyebrows that give such a Mephistophelian touch to his face. He occupies one of those pleasant little detached houses in the mixed style that make the western end of the Upper Sandgate Road so interesting. His is the one with the Flemish gables and the Moorish portico, and it is in the little room with the mullioned bay window that he works when he is down here, and in which of an evening we have so often smoked and talked together. He is a mighty jester, but, besides, he likes to talk to me about his work; he is one of those men who find a help and stimulus in talking, and so I have been able to follow the conception of the New Accelerator right up from a very early stage. Of course, the greater portion of his experimental work is not done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in the fine new laboratory next to the hospital that he has been the first to use.

As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved a reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anæsthetics he is, I am told, unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I suppose in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about the ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living man. And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous upon this question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the discovery of the New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical science has to thank him for at least three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the preparation known as Gibberne’s B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more lives already than any lifeboat round the coast.

‘But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet,’ he told me nearly a year ago. ‘Either they increase the central energy without affecting the nerves, or they simply increase the available energy by lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal and local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and leaves the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion, and does nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want--and what, if it’s an earthly possibility, I mean to have--is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two--or even three--to everybody else’s one. Eh? That’s the thing I’m after.’

‘It would tire a man,’ I said.

‘Not a doubt of it. And you’d eat double or treble--and all that. But just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with a little phial like this’--he held up a little bottle of green glass and marked his points with it--‘and in this precious phial is the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do.’

‘But is such a thing possible?’

‘I believe so. If it isn’t, I’ve wasted my time for a year. These various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem to show that something of the sort.... Even if it was only one and a half times as fast it would do.’

‘It _would_ do,’ I said.

‘If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing up against you, something urgent to be done, eh?’

‘He could dose his private secretary,’ I said.

‘And gain--double time. And think if _you_, for example, wanted to finish a book.’

‘Usually,’ I said, ‘I wish I’d never begun ’em.’

‘Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out a case. Or a barrister--or a man cramming for an examination.’

‘Worth a guinea a drop,’ said I, ‘and more--to men like that.’

‘And in a duel, again,’ said Gibberne, ‘where it all depends on your quickness in pulling the trigger.’

‘Or in fencing,’ I echoed.

‘You see,’ said Gibberne, ‘if I get it as an all-round thing, it will really do you no harm at all--except perhaps to an infinitesimal degree it brings you nearer old age. You will just have lived twice to other people’s once----’

‘I suppose,’ I meditated, ‘in a duel--it would be fair?’

‘That’s a question for the seconds,’ said Gibberne.

I harked back further. ‘And you really think such a thing _is_ possible?’ I said.

‘As possible,’ said Gibberne, and glanced at something that went throbbing by the window, ‘as a motor-bus. As a matter of fact----’

He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge of his desk with the green phial. ‘I think I know the stuff.... Already I’ve got something coming.’ The nervous smile upon his face betrayed the gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of his actual experimental work unless things were very near the end. ‘And it may be, it may be--I shouldn’t be surprised--it may even do the thing at a greater rate than twice.’

‘It will be rather a big thing,’ I hazarded.

‘It will be, I think, rather a big thing.’

But I don’t think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for all that.

I remember we had several talks about the stuff after that. ‘The New Accelerator’ he called it, and his tone about it grew more confident on each occasion. Sometimes he talked nervously of unexpected physiological results its use might have, and then he would get a little unhappy; at others he was frankly mercenary, and we debated long and anxiously how the preparation might be turned to commercial account. ‘It’s a good thing,’ said Gibberne, ‘a tremendous thing. I know I’m giving the world something, and I think it only reasonable we should expect the world to pay. The dignity of science is all very well, but I think somehow I must have the monopoly of the stuff for, say, ten years. I don’t see why _all_ the fun in life should go to the dealers in ham.’

My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time. I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we are all the time. The marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs, and here was a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors use! But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical points to enter very keenly into my aspect of the question.

It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation that would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward as we talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was done and the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met him as I was going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone--I think I was going to get my hair cut, and he came hurrying down to meet me--I suppose he was coming to my house to tell me at once of his success. I remember that his eyes were unusually bright and his face flushed, and I noted even then the swift alacrity of his step.

‘It’s done,’ he cried, and gripped my hand, speaking very fast; ‘it’s more than done. Come up to my house and see.’

‘Really?’

‘Really!’ he shouted. ‘Incredibly! Come up and see.’

‘And it does--twice?’

‘It does more, much more. It scares me. Come up and see the stuff. Taste it! Try it! It’s the most amazing stuff on earth.’ He gripped my arm and, walking at such a pace that he forced me into a trot, went shouting with me up the hill. A whole _char-à-banc_-full of people turned and stared at us in unison after the manner of people in _chars-à-banc_. It was one of those hot, clear days that Folkestone sees so much of, every colour incredibly bright and every outline hard. There was a breeze, of course, but not so much breeze as sufficed under these conditions to keep me cool and dry. I panted for mercy.

‘I’m not walking fast, am I?’ cried Gibberne, and slackened his pace to a quick march.

‘You’ve been taking some of this stuff,’ I puffed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘At the utmost a drop of water that stood in a beaker from which I had washed out the last traces of the stuff. I took some last night, you know. But that is ancient history now.’

‘And it goes twice?’ I said, nearing his doorway in a grateful perspiration.

‘It goes a thousand times, many thousand times!’ cried Gibberne, with a dramatic gesture, flinging open his Early English carved oak gate.

‘Phew!’ said I, and followed him to the door.

‘I don’t know how many times it goes,’ he said, with his latch-key in his hand.

‘And you----’

‘It throws all sorts of light on nervous physiology, it kicks the theory of vision into a perfectly new shape.... Heaven knows how many thousand times. We’ll try all that after---- The thing is to try the stuff now.’

‘Try the stuff?’ I said, as we went along the passage.

‘Rather,’ said Gibberne, turning on me in his study. ‘There it is in that little green phial there! Unless you happen to be afraid?’

I am a careful man by nature, and only theoretically adventurous. I _was_ afraid. But on the other hand, there is pride.

‘Well,’ I haggled. ‘You say you’ve tried it?’

‘I’ve tried it,’ he said, ‘and I don’t look hurt by it, do I? I don’t even look livery, and I _feel_----’

I sat down. ‘Give me the potion,’ I said. ‘If the worst comes to the worst it will save having my hair cut, and that, I think, is one of the most hateful duties of a civilised man. How do you take the mixture?’

‘With water,’ said Gibberne, whacking down a carafe.

He stood up in front of his desk and regarded me in his easy-chair; his manner was suddenly affected by a touch of the Harley Street specialist. ‘It’s rum stuff, you know,’ he said.

I made a gesture with my hand.

‘I must warn you, in the first place, as soon as you’ve got it down to shut your eyes, and open them very cautiously in a minute or so’s time. One still sees. The sense of vision is a question of length of vibration, and not of multitude of impacts; but there’s a kind of shock to the retina, a nasty giddy confusion just at the time if the eyes are open. Keep ’em shut.’

‘Shut,’ I said. ‘Good!’

‘And the next thing is, keep still. Don’t begin to whack about. You may fetch something a nasty rap if you do. Remember you will be going several thousand times faster than you ever did before, heart, lungs, muscles, brain--everything--and you will hit hard without knowing it. You won’t know it, you know. You’ll feel just as you do now. Only everything in the world will seem to be going ever so many thousand times slower than it ever went before. That’s what makes it so deuced queer.’

‘Lor,’ I said. ‘And you mean----’

‘You’ll see,’ said he, and took up a little measure. He glanced at the material on his desk. ‘Glasses,’ he said, ‘water. All here. Mustn’t take too much for the first attempt.

The little phial glucked out its precious contents. ‘Don’t forget what I told you,’ he said, turning the contents of the measure into a glass in the manner of an Italian waiter measuring whisky. ‘Sit with the eyes tightly shut and in absolute stillness for two minutes,’ he said. ‘Then you will hear me speak.’

He added an inch or so of water to the little dose in each glass.

‘By-the-by,’ he said, ‘don’t put your glass down. Keep it in your hand and rest your hand on your knee. Yes--so. And now----’

He raised his glass.

‘The New Accelerator,’ I said.

‘The New Accelerator,’ he answered, and we touched glasses and drank, and instantly I closed my eyes.

You know that blank non-existence into which one drops when one has taken ‘gas.’ For an indefinite interval it was like that. Then I heard Gibberne telling me to wake up, and I stirred and opened my eyes. There he stood as he had been standing, glass still in hand. It was empty, that was all the difference.

‘Well?’ said I.

‘Nothing out of the way?’

‘Nothing. A slight feeling of exhilaration, perhaps. Nothing more.’

‘Sounds?’

‘Things are still,’ I said. ‘By Jove! yes! They _are_ still. Except the sort of faint pat, patter, like rain falling on different things. What is it?’

‘Analysed sounds,’ I think he said, but I am not sure. He glanced at the window. ‘Have you ever seen a curtain before a window fixed in that way before?’

I followed his eyes, and there was the end of the curtain, frozen, as it were, corner high, in the act of flapping briskly in the breeze.

‘No,’ said I; ‘that’s odd.’

‘And here,’ he said, and opened the hand that held the glass. Naturally I winced, expecting the glass to smash. But so far from smashing, it did not even seem to stir; it hung in mid-air--motionless. ‘Roughly speaking,’ said Gibberne, ‘an object in these latitudes falls 16 feet in the first second. This glass is falling 16 feet in a second now. Only, you see, it hasn’t been falling yet for the hundredth part of a second. That gives you some idea of the pace of my Accelerator.’

And he waved his hand round and round, over and under the slowly sinking glass. Finally he took it by the bottom, pulled it down and placed it very carefully on the table. ‘Eh?’ he said to me, and laughed.

‘That seems all right,’ I said, and began very gingerly to raise myself from my chair. I felt perfectly well, very light and comfortable, and quite confident in my mind. I was going fast all over. My heart, for example, was beating a thousand times a second, but that caused me no discomfort at all. I looked out of the window. An immovable cyclist, head down and with a frozen puff of dust behind his driving-wheel, scorched to overtake a galloping _char-à-banc_ that did not stir. I gaped in amazement at this incredible spectacle. ‘Gibberne,’ I cried, ‘how long will this confounded stuff last?’

‘Heaven knows!’ he answered. ‘Last time I took it I went to bed and slept it off. I tell you, I was frightened. It must have lasted some minutes, I think--it seemed like hours. But after a bit it slows down rather suddenly, I believe.’

I was proud to observe that I did not feel frightened--I suppose because there were two of us. ‘Why shouldn’t we go out?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’

‘They’ll see us.’

‘Not they. Goodness, no! Why, we shall be going a thousand times faster than the quickest conjuring trick that was ever done. Come along! Which way shall we go? Window, or door?’

And out by the window we went.

Assuredly of all the strange experiences that I have ever had, or imagined, or read of other people having or imagining, that little raid I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the legs of the horses of this _char-à-banc_, the end of the whip-lash and the lower jaw of the conductor--who was just beginning to yawn--were perceptibly in motion, but all the rest of the lumbering conveyance seemed still. And quite noiseless except for a faint rattling that came from one man’s throat. And as parts of this frozen edifice there were a driver, you know, and a conductor, and eleven people! The effect as we walked about the thing began by being madly queer and ended by being--disagreeable. There they were, people like ourselves and yet not like ourselves, frozen in careless attitudes, caught in mid-gesture. A girl and a man smiled at one another, a leering smile that threatened to last for evermore; a woman in a floppy capelline rested her arm on the rail and stared at Gibberne’s house with the unwinking stare of eternity; a man stroked his moustache like a figure of wax, and another stretched a tiresome stiff hand with extended fingers towards his loosened hat. We stared at them, we laughed at them, we made faces at them, and then a sort of disgust of them came upon us, and we turned away and walked round in front of the cyclist towards the Leas.

‘Goodness!’ cried Gibberne, suddenly; ‘look there!’