The Second Class Passenger Part 39

The chair faced the blank, bare wall of the room; there was nothing in front of Mr. Newman for his eyes to rest on and take hold of.

Carrick's hands no longer touched his head; he was alone in his chair, in a posture of ease, with the gear of his mind slacked off, his consciousness unmoored to drift with what-ever current should flow about it. He knew, without noting it, that something like a fog was creeping up about him; the pale wall became a bank of mist, stirring slowly; his pulse was a rhythm that lulled him faintly. He-- the aggregate of powers, capacities habits that made the sum of him-- was adrift, flowing like a vapor that leaks into the air and thins abroad. A coolness was on his forehead as of a little breeze.

Carrick, behind the chair, saw that his head drooped, and came round to look at him. He seemed to slumber with his eyes half open, and his plump hands, white and luxurious, were clasped in his lap. Carrick considered him and then crossed to his desk to get his pipe. He expected to have to wait for some time.

But it was less than five minutes before Mr. Newman stirred like a man who moves in his-sleep and emitted a long gusty sigh. His hands unclasped; he drove up to consciousness like a diver who shoots up through strangling fathoms of water to the generous air above. Life was compelling him; through the confusion of his senses he felt Carrick's hand on his shoulder and heard him speaking.

"Feeling quite all right--what? Here, drink some of this. It's only water. A drop more? Right!"

Mr. Newman pushed the gla.s.s away and sat upright, staring wide-eyed into the curious face of Carrick, who bent over him, tumbler in hand.

"All right?" asked Carrick again.

"Yes--now," replied Mr. Newman slowly. "But--what did you do to me, Carrick?"

Carrick gave a relieved snort and set the tumbler down on the mantelshelf.

"What did I do?" he repeated. "Opened a door for you--that's all.

What did you find the other side?"

Mr. Newman pa.s.sed an uncertain hand across his eyes. The feeling with which he had returned to consciousness, that liberties had been taken with him, was leaving him as the familiar ugly room grew about him again.

"It was queer," he said doubtfully, and Carrick bent his head in eagerness to listen.

"You've been hypnotised before, often enough. What was queer?"

"Hypnotism is unconsciousness, so far as I'm concerned," said Mr.

Newman. "But this--wasn't! Not dreams, either; the thing was so absolutely real."

"Go on," said Carrick, as he paused to ponder.

"I felt myself going off, you know, just as usual--the mistiness, the reposefulness, the last moment when one would rebel if one could--but one can't; that was all ordinary. And then came the blank, that second of utter emptiness, as though one were alone in the wilderness of outer s.p.a.ce, and light were not yet created. As a rule, that ends it; one's asleep then. But this time I wasn't. It seemed--it sort of dawned toward me----" Mr. Newman groped for a word which eluded him, with a face that brooded heavily.

"What did?" demanded Carrick.

"It was a lightness, first of all, a thinning of the dark, that grew and broadened till it was like a thing coming at me--like something thrown at me. And suddenly it was all about me, and I was in it, and it was daylight--just ordinary daylight, you know. There was a white, flat road, with a hedge on one side and a low leaning fence on the other, and over the fence there were fields; and I was walking along by the roadside, with the thick powdery dust kicking up from under my feet as I went."

He paused. "Yes?" cried Carrick. "Yes? Yes?"

"I don't remember what I was thinking," said Mr. Newman. "Perhaps I wasn't thinking. I saw a signpost farther along the road with something like a long bundle--it was rather like a limp bolster, I fancy--hanging from it. I was staring toward it, when there came a noise behind me, like a trumpet being blown, and I turned to see a coach with four horses come tearing along toward me, with a red- coated man at the back, blowing a horn. The roof of it was crowded with people curiously dressed; they all looked down on me as they came abreast, and their faces had a sort of strange roughness. I saw them as clearly as all that--a coa.r.s.eness, it was--a kind of cruel stupidity. Several of them seemed to be pock-marked, too. It struck me; I wondered how a coach-load of such people had been gathered together; and I might have wondered longer; but one of them laughed, a great neighing guffaw of a laugh, as the coachman swung his whip."

Mr. Newman paused, and his hand floated to his face again.

"It cut me across here," he said thoughtfully. "It--it hurt.

Awfully!"

Carrick nodded.

"And that was all," Mr. Newman went on. "At the sting of the lash, as though some one had turned a switch, the daylight went out--to the sound of that gross animal laugh. There was again the frozen dark, the solitude--the chill--and I heard you saying, as from another planet, across great gulfs of s.p.a.ce: 'Drink some of this!' Only--"

"Yes?"

"It's like a memory of something that actually took place. I ought to have a weal just below my eyes where the whip took me-it wasn't five minutes ago. I remember the dusty smell of that white road-and how the thing that hung on the signpost was-some-how-ugly and nasty. It's awfully queer, Carrick."

"Yes!" Carrick sank his hands in his pockets and walked away to the shadowy far end of the room. Mr. Newman sat in thought, flavoring the vivid quality of his vision, with his underlip caught up between his teeth. The great room was silent for a s.p.a.ce of minutes.

"I say!" Carrick spoke from the other end of it.

"What?"

"That signpost you saw-it wasn't a signpost, you know."

"What was it, then?"

"It was a gallows," said Carrick, "with a man hanging on it."

There was a pause. "Eh?" said Mr. Newman, and rose from his chair.

"Carrick, what exactly did you do to me?"

"I sent you back a hundred years," Carrick answered, in a measured voice. His excitement got the better of his restraint and his voice cracked. "Part of the-what was it you said you were, Newman?" he cried, on a note of shrillness. "I tell you, man, you've proved a hundred things you never dreamed of-theories of mine. You've proved them, I tell you. I've dipped you back into the past as I dip my hands into water. What you saw was what happened; it was you-you, man, a hundred years ago. Oh, why did I stop at a hundred? A thousand, a dozen thousand years would have been as easy."

He came down the long room almost at a run.

"Newman," he said, taking the elder man by the arm with a swift, feverish hand; "we've got 'em, all those old diploma-screened fools that call us quacks-Zinzau, Berlier, von Rascowicz, Scott-Evans-we've got 'em. We'll make 'em squeal. Before I've done with you, we'll see what the earth was like when it was in the pot, being cooked. You shall be a batwinged lizard again, and a cave-dweller, and a flint man. We'll turn you loose through history-our special correspondent at the siege of Troy-what?"

He broke into high, uncontrollable laughter.

"The Wandering Jew," he babbled. "We'll show him!"

Mr. Newman heard him with growing wonder, but now he shook his arm loose.

"Get yourself a drink," he said. "You're raving. I want to talk to you."

The word was enough; Carrick stopped laughing, and walked away toward his desk. Mr. Newman, standing by the big arm-chair from which he had just risen, looked after him with a sudden liveliness growing in his face. The experience through which he had just come, abiding with him as so secure a memory, precluded the doubts he might otherwise have felt; Carrick's words and his excitement, so unusual in him, and the clear, unquestionable sense of recollection with which he summoned again to his mind the white dusty road, the swaying body of the hanged man, the drum of the hoofs of the coach-horses-these stormed his reason and forced conviction on him.

"The siege of Troy, you said?" he asked, with a nervous t.i.tter. The thing was gripping him.

Carrick had seated himself at his desk, as though to steady himself by the sight of its prosaic litter. He looked up now, his face composed and usual in the light of the reading lamp.

"Or anywhere," he said shortly. He nodded two or three times impressively; he was master of himself again. "It's true, Newman; I can do it; I've opened the door. We must have a few more tests and verify the method by trying it on another subject. Then we'll go to war with the professors."

"Ye-es," agreed Mr. Newman absently. "Anywhere, you said? You can open my eyes at any period in time? You can do that, Carrick?"

"Well," began Carrick, and paused. "Why?" he demanded. "What have you got in your mind?"

Mr. Newman came slowly down toward him till he leaned across the top of the desk facing the younger man. He was smiling still, but a fire had lit in his eyes, something adventurous and strong looked out through them. The elderly stout man was braced and exalted like a martyr going to the stake.

"Can you?" he repeated. "Can you, Carrick? Say--can you do that?"

"Unless----" hesitated the other, staring at him. "But--you must have been somewhere, at any time. Yes, I can do it."