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The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to keep hold of an idea
that eluded him.
'They were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.' He stared round the room. `I'm
damned if it isn't all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my
memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream?
They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times--but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's
madness. And where did the dream come from? . . . I must look at that machine. If there is one!'
He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the door into the corridor. We
followed him. There in the flickering light of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and
askew; a thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch--for I put
out my hand and felt the rail of it--and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits of grass
and moss upon the lower parts, and one rail bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand along the damaged rail. `It's all
right now,' he said.
'The story I told you was true. I'm sorry to have brought you out here in the cold.' He took up the lamp,
and, in an absolute silence, we returned to the smoking-room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with his coat. The Medical Man looked into his
face and, with a certain hesitation, told him he was suffering from overwork, at which he laughed
hugely. I remember him standing in the open doorway, bawling good night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a `gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come
to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay
awake most of the night thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see the Time Traveller
again. I was told he was in the laboratory, and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The
laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a minute at the Time Machine and put out my hand and
touched the lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass swayed like a bough shaken by the wind.
Its instability startled me extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days when I used
to be forbidden to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The Time Traveller met me in the
smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack
under the other. He laughed when he saw me, and gave me an elbow to shake. `I'm frightfully busy,'
said he, `with that thing in there.'
`But is it not some hoax?' I said. `Do you really travel through time?'
`Really and truly I do.' And he looked frankly into my eyes. He hesitated. His eye wandered about the
room. `I only want half an hour,' he said. `I know why you came, and it's awfully good of you. There's
some magazines here. If you'll stop to lunch I'll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen
and all. If you'll forgive my leaving you now?'
I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and he nodded and went on
down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily
paper. What was he going to do before lunch-time? Then suddenly I was reminded by an
advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two. I looked at my watch, and
saw that I could barely save that engagement. I got up and went down the passage to tell the Time
Traveller.
As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click
and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of
broken glass falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly,
indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment--a figure so transparent that
the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I
rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the
laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blown in.
I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had happened, and for the moment
could not distinguish what the strange thing might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden
opened, and the man-servant appeared.
We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. `Has Mr. ---- gone out that way?' said I.
`No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here.'
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for the Time
Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he
would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller
vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.
EPILOGUE
One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and
fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the
Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He
may even now--if I may use the phrase--be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral
reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer
ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome
problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part cannot think that these latter
days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time!
I say, for my own part. He, I know--for the question had been discussed among us long before the
Time Machine was made--thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the
growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its
makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is
still black and blank--is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I
have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers --shrivelled now, and brown and flat and
brittle--to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still
lived on in the heart of man. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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