Tuesday's Serial: “The Messiah of the Cylinder” by Victor Rousseau (in Englsih) - III

 

CHAPTER III - IN THE CELLAR

I have heard patients, emerging from the chloroform swoon, describe how, before awakening, they had seemed to view themselves lying unconscious upon their beds, detailing the posture of their motionless bodies and inert limbs. In this way, now, I seemed to see myself.

I am sure that was no dream of the vague borderland between death and life. I saw the pallid face, so shrunken that the skin clung to the edged bones, and the dry hair, the pinched lips and waxen hands. I saw myself as if from some non-spatial point, and with singular indifference, except that one fragment of knowledge, detached from my serene omniscience, troubled me. I had to return within that physical envelope; and behind me lay dim memories, quite untranslatable, but ineffably rapturous, which made that projected incarnation an event of dread.

Vague images of earthly things began to float upward out of the dark, as it were, symbols of physical life whose meaning remained obscure. I pictured a spring-board, on which a swimmer stood poised, waiting to dive into the sea and set the plank behind him quivering, and a large roll of some material, like a carpet, blocking a cellar door.

Gradually, through an alternation of dreams and blankness, I began to be aware of the parched and withered body that cloaked me. The point of consciousness had shrunk within its earthly envelope. Soon it diffused itself throughout my members. Now I could translate my symbols into ideas. That coiled-up substance that blocked the door was my tongue, fallen back into the throat. And the spring-board on which the swimmer stood—that was my heart, waiting to beat. And unless and until the swimmer—I—made that plunge into life’s ocean, it could not. Slowly the need of physical resurrection urged me onward.

A thousand darts were stabbing in my flesh, like purgatorial fire. No motor nerve had yet awakened, but the capillaries, opening, pricked me like red-hot needles. Faint memories of the past flashed through my mind, and, though I recalled no intervening period, I was sensible that those events had happened infinitely long before.

Suddenly I plunged. I felt as if a sword had pierced my body. I felt the waters of that living ocean close over my face, and gasped. I breathed. Simultaneously, with a loud click, the cap of the cylinder flew off, air rushed in, a stabbing light broke through my closed eyelids; I fainted.

It was, of course, the gradual unscrewing of the cylinder cap as the mechanism ran down, and the consequent admission of minute quantities of oxygen, that had begun to restore me. I must have passed several days in semi-consciousness before the cylinder opened. When the last thread of the screw was traversed, the inrush of air caused the respiration to begin.

I was breathing when I became conscious once more, and my heart was straining in my breast. I got my eyes open. There followed hours of light-tortured delirium, during which I struggled to regain the motor powers. With infinite endeavor I placed one hand upon the other and passed it up the wrist and forearm. The muscles were all gone. The ulna and radius were perfectly distinguishable, and I could encircle either with my fingers, after I had managed to flex them. I noticed that my joints creaked like rusty hinges.

I tried to bend my elbows, and this next grim battle lasted an incalculable time. Gradually I became aware of some obstacle on each side of me. Then, for the first time since my awakening, I knew that I was inside the cylinder. But I did not know that it had fallen upon its side until it slid forward, and my puny struggles dislodged me and flung me free into a pool of water. I drew in a deep breath, feeling my lungs crackle like old parchment, and plunged my face and shoulders beneath the surface. My skin sucked up the moisture like a sponge, and I contrived to get a few drops past my swollen tongue. I had just sense enough and time to turn my face upward before I became unconscious again.

I must have slept long, for, on my next awakening, the light was brighter and still more torturing. Memory began to stir. I recalled my conversation with Sir Spofforth, our journey into the annex, Lazaroff’s invitation to me to enter the cylinder. He must have shut me in for a moment by way of a practical joke, and gone away with Esther, persuading himself and her that I could free myself and would follow. I tried to call him. But only a croaking gasp came from my lips. I tried again and again, gradually regaining the power of vocal utterance. But there came no answer, and each time that I called, the echoing, hoarse susurrus brought me nearer to the realization of some terror at hand which I did not dare to face.

I looked about me. Beside me lay the cylinder, almost buried in mud. I was still within the secret vault, but a part of the brick partition had fallen inward in such a way as to screen the few visible inches of the steel case that had housed me, so that nobody would have suspected its presence in the mud of the little chamber. I remembered that there had been two more; I looked about me, but there was no sign of them.

Now I began to realize that there had been a considerable change in my surroundings since I became unconscious. The light which had distressed me came through a hole in the roof of the adjoining cellar, filtering thence through the aperture in the broken wall, and was of the dimmest. In place of the concrete floor there was a swamp of mud, with pools of water here and there, and the dirt was heaped up in the corners and against the walls. Moss and splotched fungi grew among the tumbled bricks, and everywhere were spore stains and microscopic plant growth.

I was bewildered by these signs of dilapidation everywhere. The guinea-pigs and monkeys were gone; the cellar was empty, save for some low, rough planks of wood fitted on trestles and set about the floor. On the wall at the far end hung something that gradually took form as I strained my aching eyes to a focus.

It was a crucifix. The cellar had become a subterranean chapel. The cross was hewn coarsely of pine, and the figure that hung upon it grotesquely carven; yet there was the pathos of wistful, ignorant effort in the workmanship that bespoke the sincerity of the artist.

I made my difficult way toward the stairs

I made my difficult way upon hands and knees through the gap in the wall, across the mud floor of the cellar, toward the stairs, resting several times from weariness before I reached my destination. But when I arrived at the far end, where the stairs should have been, I received a shock that totally unnerved me. The stairs were gone. In place of them was a debris of rubble and broken stones, as firmly set as if workmen had built it into the wall. The mass must have been there for years, because, out of the thin soil that had drifted in, a little oak tree sprang, twisting its spindling stem to rear its crown toward the patch of daylight.

At last I understood. I had come to realize the fact that my sleep had been a prolonged one; it might have lasted weeks—even months, I had thought, as with cataleptics; but an entire century! that idea had been too incredibly grotesque for consideration. That Sir Spofforth, with whom, it seemed, I had dined almost yesterday, had gone, ages ago, to his long home; Lazaroff; Esther, whom I loved; that generations had come into birth and died ... it seemed too cruel a jest. I wept. I raved and called for Esther. Surely a hundred years had never passed, turning her brown hair to gray, lining her gentle face, bringing at last the gift of death to her, while I lay underground, encased in steel and air!

I cried aloud in terror. I hammered helplessly upon the walls. Again I called Esther, Lazaroff, George. There was no answer of any kind.

Presently a ray of light quivered through the hole, falling upon the heap of debris that blocked the stairway. The yellow beam moved onward, and now it bathed the thin branches of the little twisted tree that, by the aid of those few minutes of sunlight daily, had ventured into life. It had grown cunningly sidewise, so as to expose the maximum of wood to the light. I watched the ray till it went out; I wanted to show the plant to Lazaroff, to ask him whether the mechanics of heliotropism could suffice to answer the problem of the tree’s brainless consciousness; and my chagrin that this whim could not be fulfilled assumed an absurd significance. It was, in fact, the realization of this loss of responsiveness to the reality of the situation that constantly urged me to find some way of escape when I might have relapsed otherwise into an acquiescence which would have brought insanity and death.

The stairs being gone, I turned my consideration to the cellar roof. To reach this it would be necessary to drag one of the planks beneath the hole and scramble up, clinging to the sides with my fingers and bracing my feet against the wall. This feat was not a difficult one for a normal man, but for me clearly impossible. I must wait until I became stronger.

It is a strange thing, but I had not associated the need of waiting with the idea of food until I found the box of biscuit. I stumbled upon the box by the accident of scratching my wrist against the edge as I crawled along the wall. I saw the corner projecting from a mound of earth, and, scraping some of the dirt away, I lifted the pine-wood lid.

Inside the box I found a quantity of biscuit which seemed to have been baked recently. It was crisp, and too hard for me to break. I dipped a piece in the stagnant water, and, as I swallowed the first morsels, became aware of my ravenous hunger.

I can hardly estimate the duration of the imprisonment that followed. It was of days and nights which succeeded each the other in monotonous succession, during which, like a hibernating beast, I crouched and groped within the cellar, dozing and shivering, and gnawing incessantly at my food. Only those few minutes of sunshine daily saved my reason, I am convinced now. My evening clothes, which at first had appeared to have suffered no injury during my century of sleep, had begun to disintegrate, and hung upon me in tattered fragments. It was a period of despair, with very little alternating hope. Sometimes I prayed wildly beneath the crucifix, sometimes, in an access of madness, I cried for Esther and Lazaroff again. And for whole hours I convinced myself that this was a dream.

But my strength returned with amazing swiftness. As in the case of a typhoid convalescent, every particle of food seemed to build up my body. I must have put on pounds each day. The barrel framework of my ribs filled out, the muscles showed their old outlines beneath the skin, the fluid rushed into the joints and restored their suppleness. And daily I practiced exercises. I managed to drag one of the benches beneath the hole at last, and, standing on this, tried often to draw myself up; but on each occasion my struggles only brought down a shower of earth and stones, and I resigned myself to a period of further waiting, watching for dawn like a troglodyte, and for the sun like a fire-worshiper.

In the end my escape developed in a manner the least imaginable. It began with my discovery of a second box in another of the mounds. I opened it hastily, in the greedy anticipation of finding something more palatable than biscuit.

Instead of this I found a number of strange batons of wood. They resembled policemen’s truncheons, but each had a tiny rounded plate of glass near the head, and there evidently was some sort of mechanism near the handle, for there was a push-button, fitted with a heavy guard of brass, so strong that I could not raise it with my fingers. It was indeed providential that I was unable to do so.

I carried the strange implement beneath the hole in the roof and laid it on the bench, intending to examine it more carefully as soon as the sun appeared. Meanwhile, this being the time for my daily exercise, I mounted the bench and tried to pull myself up. I failed; yet I detected a considerable improvement in my muscular power, and, becoming exhausted, I prepared to descend. Inadvertently, but without anticipating any serious result, I placed my foot against the truncheon in such a way as to elevate the guard.

I heard it click as it rose into position, and, in setting down my foot again, depressed the push-button.

The truncheon tipped to the ground, pointing upward. I saw a ray of blinding light, of intense whiteness tipped with mauve, shoot from the head, and, with a crash, a shower of stones fell on me, bearing me to the ground and enveloping me in a cloud of dust.

I must have lain half stunned for some minutes. I was aroused by feeling the sunlight on my eyelids. I started to my feet. The hole in the roof was nearly twice the former size, and a heap of fallen stones and pieces of brick afforded me a perfect stepway. I was scratched by the falling debris, but happily the explosion, as I deemed it, seemed to have been in an upward direction.

In a moment I was scrambling up the stones. I slipped and clutched and struggled; I got my head and shoulders in the air and pulled my body after me; I trod upon leaves; I looked about me.

I was standing in the midst of what appeared to be an ancient forest of oak and beech trees, whose bare boughs, covered with snow, shook under a gray sky above a carpet of withered, snow-spread leaves, and under these were endless heaps of disintegrating bricks. In vain I looked about me for the Institute. There was no sign of it, nor of Sir Spofforth’s house. Nowhere was anything to be seen but the same forest growth, the dead leaves scurrying before the chill wind, and the vast brick piles. I had emerged from the cellar into a trackless wilderness.

And now at last my final doubt, which had bred hope, was gone. I ran through the forest, on and on, shouting like a madman and beating my breast, stumbling over the brick heaps that lay everywhere, plunging through thorny undergrowth, heedless of any course. I must have been running for ten minutes when my strength failed me, and I collapsed beside an ancient road, overgrown with shrubs and saplings, yet discernible in its course between the tall trees that bordered it. Before me, far away through the vista line, I saw a white bank against the gray horizon.

I flung myself upon my face and prayed, with all my will, to die.

 

 

CHAPTER IV - THE ROAD TO LONDON

A shadow swept over me, and, looking up, I saw an airplane gliding noiselessly above; it stopped, hung poised and motionless, and then dropped slowly and almost vertically into the road, coming to ground within a dozen yards of where I lay.

There stepped out a man in a uniform of pale blue, having insewn upon the breast a piece of white linen, cut to the shape of a swan. He came toward me with hesitancy, and stood over me, staring at me and at my clothes with an expression indicative of the greatest bewilderment.

“Where’s your brass, friend?” he inquired after a few moments, speaking in a high-pitched, monotonous, and rather nasal tone. He rubbed his smooth-shaven face in thought. “Where’s your brass?” he repeated.

I perceived that he wore about his neck a twisted cord whose ends were tied through the loop of a brass plate, stamped with letters and figures.

“For God’s sake tell me what year this is!” I cried.

At the profane expletive, which had been drawn from me by my anguish, he recoiled in dismay; he seemed less shocked than frightened; he glanced about him quickly, and then cast a very searching look at me. But next he began to smile in a half-humorous, kindly way.

“You’re one of the escaped defectives, aren’t you?” he inquired. “You have nothing to fear from me, friend. We airplane scouts have no love for the Guard. You can go on your way. But where are you lying up? Are your friends near?”

“Will you tell me what year this is?” I demanded frantically.

“Yap, certainly,” he answered. “This is Thirty-seven, Cold Solstice less five.” He shook his head and began staring at me again.

I laughed hysterically. “I don’t know what that jargon means,” I answered, “but I went to sleep in the vault of the Biological Institute in the year 1915.”

Perplexity had succeeded alarm. The airscout shook his head again. He was one of those deliberate, slow-moving men whose resolutions, tardily made, harden to inflexibility; I recognized the type and found the individual pleasing. He was a good-looking young fellow of about eight and twenty, with straight, dark hair and a very frank countenance. He looked like a sailor, and the rolling, open collar, which fell back, sailor fashion, revealed a muscular throat, tanned, like his face, to the color of the bricks around us.

“I don’t know what to make of you,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t want to trap you, but you were better off in the art factories. I don’t know what to do with you.”

I sprang to my feet, and for an instant I ceased to realize my predicament. “Will you take me to my friends in London?” I asked. In my mind was the memory of a university acquaintance who lived in St. John’s Wood. But then the swift remembrance came back to me, and I hung my head and groaned.

“Back to London!” exclaimed the airscout. “But you’ll be put to the leather vats. Doctor Sanson is furious, and the police are searching for you everywhere. You’re crazed! What’s the sense of running away from painting pictures and going back to sweat ten years over the hides?”

“Take me to London!” I implored. “I have nowhere to go. Perhaps—I don’t know—”

I was hoping wildly that somebody whom I had known might still survive. But by this time I was beginning to pull myself together. I resolved to wait for his decision.

“Now, friend,” he said, as if he had made up his mind, “your top got stuffed making those factory pictures, as was very natural. Now, I think you had better go back to London, and I’ll take you there, since your friends have shaken you. But of course it must be the police station. I can’t risk my own liberty. Once more, are you sure you want to go? If not, I haven’t seen you.”

“I’ll go,” I answered indifferently.

“Yap? Step in, then!”

I took my seat beside him. It will seem incredible, but I had never ridden in an airplane before. In my other days only a few had seen these craft. It was hardly more than six years since the Wrights had flown when my long sleep began. In spite of my oppression of mind, or perhaps because the days of horror that I had spent in the cellar produced the unavoidable reaction, I began to feel the exhilaration of the flight as we ascended to a height of perhaps a thousand feet and drove northward. The sensation was that of sitting still and seeing the trees flit by beneath me, and would have been pleasing but for the intense cold, which pierced through my rags and numbed me. I perceived that the airplane was under perfect control, and could be stayed without falling. After a while I realized that there was no motor.

My companion saw me looking at the machine. “Improved solar type,” he said, patting her caressingly. “Better than a bird, isn’t she?” He turned toward me. “You’ve been sleeping in the wood these three days?” he asked. “And find the factories best? I don’t score you for that. Where’s the rest of you? Five, weren’t there? Why didn’t you keep together? Where’s that bishop of yours?”

But, seeing that he could elicit no comprehensible answer to his repeated questions—in truth, I did not know how to reply—he relapsed into an equal silence. And now the white bank that I had seen on the horizon began to assume crenellations, which in turn became buildings of immense height and symmetrical aspect. And I forgot my situation in admiration and amazement at the panorama that began to unfold beneath us.

The county of Surrey appeared to be an extensive forest, ending about a waste of dismantled brick, the suburbs of old London, which extended on each side as far as I could see. Then the modern town began: an outer ring of what I took to be enormous factories and storage warehouses; an inner ring, no doubt, of residences; and then the nucleus, the most splendid city that the imagination could have devised.

London seemed to be smaller than the metropolis of a century ago. I could see from the height of Hampstead, in the north, to the region of Dulwich, and from Woolwich to Acton, all clearly defined, like a great map unrolled beneath me, though I could recognize none of the old landmarks, save the unchanging Thames. The interior city was laid out in squares, huge buildings, sometimes enclosing interior courts, occupying the blocks formed by the parallel and intersecting streets. As we drove inward from the outskirts, the buildings became higher, but always uniformly so, the city thus presenting the aspect of a succession of gigantic steps, until the summit, the square mile comprising the heart, was reached.

This consisted of an array of enormous edifices, with fronts perfectly plain, and evidently constructed of brick-faced steel-work, but all glistening a dazzling white, which, even at that height, made my eyes water, and rising uniformly some forty-five or fifty stories. The flat roofs were occupied by gardens or what I took to be gymnasia, sheltered beneath tarpaulins. I saw innumerable airplanes at rest, suspended high above the streets, while others flitted here and there above the roofs, and a whole fleet lay, as if moored, some distance away, apparently over the center of the city, above a singular building, which awakened associations in my mind, though I was unable to name it.

It had a round dome, being, in fact, the only domed building that I could see. This covered only the central portion of the enormous architectural mass, and appeared to float in the air above an aerial garden, laid out with walks that radiated from a flat building, which filled the space between the floating dome and the roof beneath it. I surmised that this must be the new House of Parliament. The entire mass was surrounded by a double wall, with a roofed space of perhaps ninety feet from rear to front, castellated. Mounted on this were what appeared to be a number of large, conical-shaped implements, of great size. Long, graceful bridges on arches connected this wall with the domed building; and wall and building glistened from top to base so brilliantly that the glow seared my eyes like sunlight.

As we were now flying at a low altitude, I turned my attention to the streets, which appeared like canyons far beneath. Along these swarmed a multitude of travelers, dressed in two colors only, white and blue, the latter vastly predominating. I could see no vehicles, and I imagined, what proved to be correct, that the streets themselves were moving. Most of those journeying seemed content to lean back against the railings, the lowest bars of which projected, forming a continuous seat, and rest. Nearly all the streets were traveling in the same direction, those that reversed this movement being small and comparatively empty. From the presence of what seemed to be iron stanchions, set along the edges of these moving ways, I surmised that they were roofed with crystal.

Along the front of the buildings ran single tracks, connecting at regular intervals with the streets beneath by means of elevators, which shot up and down continuously, bearing their freight. These tracks were placed above each other at ten-story intervals, so that there were three or four rows of these aerial streets, ranging from the ground to the upper portions of the buildings, all filled with travelers. The buildings, each comprising an entire block, the elevated streets, with their graceful bridges flung forth across the chasms, the absence of any of the old poverty and dirt, and that huge gathering of human beings, going about their business in so systematic a fashion, fascinated me, and even aroused my enthusiasm.

Signs evidently indicated to persons approaching in airships the purpose of each building and landing-stage, but these were in characters entirely unintelligible to me.

My companion stayed the vessel in the air and tapped me on the arm. I started, to see him regarding me with the same expression of humorous perplexity.

“I must put you off here, friend,” he said. “I think I have done the best I could for you. You would have died in the forest, while here—well, there’s a chance for you. And it’s better to go to the leather vats for a few years than to die and go nowhere. I’ll know you if we meet again. What’s your name?”

“Arnold Pennell,” I answered, clasping the hand that he held out to me.

He almost jumped. “Don’t tell that to the Council, unless you want the Rest Cure,” he said.

“Don’t tell them my name?”

“Not both names, friend. You know what I mean. If you don’t know—” He shrugged his shoulders. “Mine’s Jones,” he said. “My father’s was Williams. My grandfather’s was Jones again. They say it’s one of our oldest names—common in the days before civilization. Now down we go.”

 

The airplane swooped down and came to rest upon the roof immediately beneath us. On this I saw a number of men, apparently practicing gymnastic exercises; and hardly were we at a standstill when two of them came running up to us. They were clad in blue uniforms resembling that of the airscout, but instead of a swan each wore a shield-shaped piece of linen upon his back and breast.

“What’s this?” they demanded in a breath, pointing at me and bursting into bellowing laughter.

“One of your defectives,” answered Jones. “I found him in the forest while patrolling.”

They rushed at me and dragged me from the airplane, swiftly patting me about the body, as if in search of weapons. Satisfied that I was unarmed, they turned to the airscout.

“You’ll share the reward!” they cried, again simultaneously.

“Keep it!” replied the airscout tartly, and rose into the air, waving me a cordial good-bye.

They rushed me across the roof through a crowd of other men, similarly clad, down an elevator, and into the street. They dragged me upon one of the moving platforms and conveyed me a short distance, descending at the entrance to one of the innumerable shining buildings, over which was inscribed something in the same undecipherable letters.

But, quickly as we had gone, the report of my arrest seemed to have preceded us, for our way was blocked by a vast and constantly increasing crowd, that came running up with lively and shameless curiosity, and, attracted by my rags, I suppose, pressed closely about us and uttered hoots of laughter. I heard the word “defective” bandied from mouth to mouth.

I looked at these people attentively. There were both men and women present, all wearing clothing of the same pale blue color, which seemed to be prescribed, although the cut of each garment was to some extent individual. In effect, the men wore sack suits of a coarsely woven woolen material, with short, loose trousers fastened with laces about the ankles, and square-cut coats having wide lapels extending to a broad, turned-back collar that fell over the shoulders like a sailor’s, revealing a neckpiece of blue linen. The women’s short skirts reached to the tops of their high boots, and the fashion seemed to run to large buttons and loose sleeves. They wore no hats. Upon the breast, near the shoulder, each person wore a small linen badge, indicative of his occupation.

I glanced from one to another, and met hard, mirthless eyes, and mouths twisted in sneering mockery

What disconcerted me was the shrewd, mocking smile upon each face. I glanced from one to another, seeking to find something of the same friendly interest that animated me, and met hard, mirthless eyes, and mouths twisted in sneering mockery.

Another thing that startled and almost terrified me was the absence of a certain conventionality of restraint that had ruled everybody in that other world of mine. For instance, among those gibing at me was a gray-bearded man who danced before me like a small urchin. Another made an expressive pantomime of death. A girl stuck out her tongue at me. I remembered the plaint, that never since the glorious age of Greece had the code of public morality coincided with that privately held. This we all knew; the statesman in parliament was not on bowing terms with the same statesman in the smoking-room. Some said it was Christianity, others respectability that bound us in this organic hypocrisy; but now the two codes seemed to have coalesced. A grandfather grimaced at me; a gray-haired woman put out her foot to trip me; if there had been stones I think they would have flung them at me. But suddenly a youngish lad in white appeared, and the crowd, hastening to make a path for him, shrank back with servile demeanor. Taking advantage of this, my captors, linking their arms in mine, made a rush forward, scattering the mob right and left, and bore me through a swinging door into a small rotunda, in which a number of other policemen were seated with their blue-clad prisoners.

Tuesday's Serial: “The Messiah of the Cylinder” by Victor Rousseau (in Englsih) - II

 

CHAPTER II - THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

Since Sir Spofforth was a little infirm, and leaned on my arm to make his slow ascent of the stairs, we entered the drawing-room a full minute after the others. The room was empty; Esther and Lazaroff had gone into the big conservatory that opened out of the south side. I heard the rustle of the girl’s dress as she moved among the palms, and Lazaroff speaking earnestly in a low voice.

“Sit down, Arnold,” said Sir Spofforth, subsiding stiffly into his arm chair. “Thank you, my boy. I feel old age coming swiftly upon me nowadays. No, I am not self-deceived. It is strange, this sense of the daily diminution of the physical powers, and not at all unpleasant, either. It seems familiar, too, as if one had passed through it plenty of times before. It is something like bedtime, Arnold, but I hope and believe there will be a tomorrow, for I assure you I have an almost boyish zest for life, though rather contemplative than energetic for a while, till I have rested. There is a little forgetfulness of names and places, but memory seems to become more luminous as it falls back upon itself. Well, some day you will experience this. You two must carry on the work of the Institute. Herman is an able fellow, in spite of his mechanistic notions. But I wonder whether any woman could be happy with him?”

He watched me rather keenly as he said that.

“There’s only one thing makes me want to live a little longer, Arnold,” he continued, “and that is Esther’s future. It would be a great satisfaction to me to see her settled happily before I go. Forgive an old man’s frankness if I say that sometimes I have almost thought you two cared for each other.”

“You are quite right in part, sir,” I replied. “I do care for Esther a good deal.”

“And she, I am sure, has a very warm feeling for you, Arnold. There is nobody whom I would rather have for Esther’s husband than yourself.”

“Well, sir, the fact is, we are not sure that our views are altogether harmonious,” I confessed. “I am, as you know, rather sceptical about the newest views for revolutionizing woman’s status, while Esther—”

“Is a full-fledged suffragist and has exalted notions about the race of the future. Tush, my boy! Never hold back proposing marriage because of intellectual differences. The race spirit, sitting up aloft and pulling the strings, is laughing at you.”

“But, Sir Spofforth, to be candid, it was not I who held back,” I answered.

“Hum! I see!” he answered, nodding his head. Then, very seriously, “My boy, I want you to win her. It would embitter my last days to see my daughter the wife of Herman Lazaroff. I have watched and tried to study him: it isn’t his materialism, Arnold, it’s his infernal will. He’ll break everything and everybody that conflicts with it when he wakes up and knows his powers. Now he doesn’t understand himself at all. He can see nothing interiorly, as good old Swedenborg would say. I tell you, Herman Lazaroff, able fellow as he is, and splendid brain, is a machine of devilish energy, and, unfortunately, fashioned for purely destructive purposes.”

Like most old men, he had the habit of falling into soliloquy, and toward the end of his speech his voice dropped, and he spoke rather to himself than to me. Though I remembered his words afterward, at the time I regarded his indictment as the prejudice of an octogenarian. He was in his eightieth year, and there was no doubt his keen mind was failing. I was searching for a reply when Esther and Lazaroff came back from the conservatory.

Esther’s face was flushed and she looked utterly miserable. But I was amazed to see the expression upon Lazaroff’s. He was deathly white, and his black eyes seemed to gleam with infernal resolution. At that moment it did occur to me that Sir Spofforth might be wiser in his judgment than I. Lazaroff came forward quietly and sat down, and I tried to make the occasion for conversation. But he, seated motionless and abstracted, seemed hardly to hear me, and rose from his chair after a few moments, looking toward Esther, who was standing near the conservatory entrance. Her brown-colored gown gleamed golden in the lamplight.

“Sir Spofforth, Miss Esther is interested in our new freezing-plant,” he said. “I thought, with your permission, that I would take her to see it lit up by electricity. You’ll come too, Pennell?”

“Wouldn’t daytime be better, Lazaroff?” I suggested, and I did not know what was the cause of the vaguely felt distrust that prompted my words. Certainly I had no fears of any sort, or reason for any. Yet, looking at Lazaroff’s face, now flushed and somehow sinister, I remembered Sir Spofforth’s words again.

“Let us go tonight,” said Esther, and it seemed to me that there was a note of penitence in her voice, as if she wished to make Lazaroff amends.

She came slowly across the room toward us. She looked at Lazaroff—I thought remorsefully, and at me with an expression of understanding that I never had seen in her eyes before. My heart leaped up to meet that message. But that was the instant signal-flash of souls, and the next moment I detected in her glance the same sense of foreboding that mine must have shown her.

It is strange how instantaneously such complexities present themselves with convincing power. Though the knowledge lay latent in my mind, I am sure now I was aware that I should never set eyes upon Sir Spofforth, in life or death, again.

He rose up slowly. “Don’t be long, my dear,” he said to Esther. “I shall not wait up for you. Good night, Herman. Good night, Arnold.” He passed the door and began to ascend the stairs. He turned. “Arnold!” he began. “No, never mind. I will tell you tomorrow.”

He never told me. He was gone, and we three went downstairs, out of the house, and crossed the garden toward the Institute, whose squat form blocked the view of the road. Croydon, in the distance, hummed like a huge dynamo. The Bear dipped slantingly above; the wind was shaking down the fading petals of the rambler roses. I remember the picture more vividly than I perceived it then; the intense darkness, the white lights of the distant town, the yellow lamp glow on the short grass, cut off squarely by the window-sash and trisected by the window-bars. Lazaroff led the way, walking a little distance in front of us, toward the annex, a building just completed, in which was the new freezing-plant, with our few guinea-pigs, and the monkeys that had been bought recently, out of our own money, for the great experiment. He drew a key from his pocket and began fumbling with the lock. Esther stopped in the shadows at my side.

“He asked me to marry him,” she said. “I told him never—never! That was the word I used. I used to think that I could care for him, Arnold, but in that instant I knew—yes, I knew my heart.”

I knew mine too, and I took her in my arms in the shadow of the Institute. She lifted her mouth to mine. All the while Lazaroff was fumbling with the lock. Yet I am sure he was aware, by virtue of that intuition which tells us all vital things.

When he had opened the door he turned a switch, and the interior leaped into view round twenty points of light that pierced the shadows.

“Come in, Arnold,” he said, turning to me—and I thought there was blood on his lip. “I will lead, and you and Miss Esther can follow me. Don’t be alarmed, Miss Esther, if you hear the monkeys screaming. They grow lonely at night.”

“Poor little things! How dreadful!” Esther said.

“We shall not keep them here very long,” Lazaroff answered in extenuation. He stooped over a cane chair and picked up a warm shawl. “You will need to put this about you,” he continued, standing back and leaving me to adjust it about Esther’s shoulders.

So he had planned to bring her here; his subtle mind had foreseen even this detail. He left nothing to the unexpected. He lived up to his principles.

We passed between two silent dynamos. The freezing-plant was already in operation, but George, the machinist, went off duty at six, after stopping the dynamos, and the temperature did not rise much during the night. It was very cold. The moisture on the brick walls had congealed to a thin film of ice, and a frosted network covered the ammonia pipes. Lazaroff stopped in front of a large wooden chest, with a glass door.

“In this very ordinary-looking icebox we keep our choicest specimens,” he said to Esther.

“Don’t open that!” I exclaimed.

He laughed disagreeably. “I had no intention of doing so,” he answered. “You applauded Sir Spofforth’s mediaeval vitalistic views tonight, Pennell, and the transition from the dream to the reality might prove too disturbing for your peace of mind. Dream on, by permission of those five missing centimeters. It is such an extinguisher of the soul theory to see parts of the organism flourishing in perfect health, all ready to work and grow, devoid of consciousness and brain attachments. We have two-fifths of a guinea-pig’s heart, Miss Esther, that is yearning to begin its pulsations as soon as it is placed in a suitable medium.”

He passed on. Esther’s fingers gripped my wrist tightly. “What an abominable man!” she whispered. “Arnold—my dear—to think I didn’t know my mind until an hour ago! When he asked me, something seemed to strip the mask from his face and the scales from my eyes. I hate him—but I’m afraid of him, Arnold.”

I drew her arm through mine and held her hand. Lazaroff preceded us down a flight of new concrete steps which had just dried. The cellar into which we descended had been used for storing packing-cases, and we had always gone down by a short ladder. It was here that the experiment was to be made. I had been shown nothing of Lazaroff’s preparations.

The cellar had been paved with concrete since my last visit, and I thought it looked smaller than formerly. As we went down we heard the monkeys begin to chatter. Lazaroff switched on a light. I saw a cage of guinea-pigs close at hand. They squealed and scurried among their straw. Two monkeys, awakened by the light, put their arms about each other and grimaced at me. A tiny marmoset stretched out its black, human-like arms between the bars appealingly. It looked very lonely and child-like as it blinked at us. What a terrific journey into the future Lazaroff, like some god, planned for that atom of flesh.

He stopped at the end of the cellar. I perceived now that the brick wall was new; it seemed to be an inner wall, bounding a partition; that was why the cellar looked smaller. The half-dried mortar clung flabbily to the interstices.

“Can you find the entrance, Arnold?” asked Lazaroff.

“The entrance?” The light was not strong, to be sure, but still it seemed impossible that there could be an ingress into that solid wall.

Lazaroff touched a brick, and a large mass swung inward, like a door. In fact, it was a door, with bricks facing it, the outer edge contiguous with the outer edge of the fixed rows, so that the deception was perfect.

“You didn’t tell me that the chamber was completed, Lazaroff!” I exclaimed in surprise.

“No, Arnold? Well, but I don’t tell you everything,” he answered.

We stepped through the doorway, and Lazaroff switched on a tiny light within. Now I perceived that we were standing in a long and very narrow space, with cement-faced walls and roof, making the chamber impervious to sound and light. It was below the level of the ground, and thus, as Lazaroff had said, earthquakes might happen above, and it would never be discovered, not even though the annex were pulled down, unless one blasted out the foundations.

The sole contents were three large cylinders of metal, looking like giant thermos bottles. Each was about six feet long—too long for a monkey, it seemed to me—and had a glass plate in front. Lazaroff drove his heel against the glass of the nearest cylinder with all his might.

“It is quite unbreakable, you see,” he said. “It will turn a rifle bullet. ‘Suffragette glass,’ the maker calls it.”

“But what are these for?” asked Esther.

“These, Miss Esther, are to convey three monkeys into the twenty-first century,” answered Lazaroff. “By instantaneously suspending animation at a temperature of twenty-five degrees, we hope to maintain the bodily organism without change until the time for their awakening comes. The problem is, whether that mysterious by-product of matter called consciousness will return.”

“How dreadful!” exclaimed Esther, shuddering.

“But the temperature will rise, Lazaroff,” I interposed, “and however carefully your cylinders are made it is impossible to hope to maintain the internal heat at only twenty-five degrees during a century.”

“You forget that our monkeys will be sealed in a vacuum,” he answered. “There is an inner and an outer case of vanadium steel mixed with a secret composition which will resist even thermite. And even if the temperature does rise—well, if a homely instance may be allowed—you are aware that canned beef, as the Americans term it, will remain fresh in an air-tight tin even in the tropics. That is dead matter, while our monkeys will be millions of living cells. The vacuum is created by simply screwing on this cap.”

“But not a perfect vacuum,” I interposed. “That is impossible.”

“Sufficiently near to eliminate the aerobic bacilli which flourish on oxygen, and the infinitesimal amount of that remaining in the cylinder is probably absorbed and transmuted by the surface capillaries and lungs, leaving simply carbon dioxide, neon, crypton, et cetera.”

I examined the cylinder nearest me with interest. A small dial was set into its cap. Lazaroff anticipated my question.

“That is the most ingenious part of the mechanism,” he explained. “It is a hundred-year clock, made specially for me by Jurgensen, of Copenhagen, and, to salve your conscience, paid for, like the cylinders, out of my private purse. It runs true to within three-tenths of a second. The alarm can be set to any year, if necessary. A good alarm clock for lazy people, Miss Esther. This one, you see, I have already set to a hundred years ahead. This is at sixty-five; I shall set that to a hundred presently, for we don’t want one of our monkeys to awaken several generations ahead of his friends. This one is not set. Now, observe, I turn the hands on the dials. The large figures are years. The smaller ones are days. Now as soon as the cap is screwed on, the internal vacuum causes this lever to fall, catching this cam and starting the mechanism. We have then a bottled monkey in an indestructible shell, for really I do not know what could make much impression on steel of this thickness, which is both resistant and malleable, and fireproof too. It is impossible, in short, to release the inmate before the appointed time, and, even then, immediate death would ensue.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because resuscitation must be gradual. I base my hopes upon the chance that the lungs and heart will automatically resume their functions, being in their most perfect medium. But if air were admitted before the bodily machine had become, so to say, synchronized, the swarm of micro-organisms would make short work of our subject. Besides, the hasty respiration produced by this rush of air would produce immediate death by its transformation into carbon dioxide. The air must enter under slight pressure, in minute quantities, during a period of about ten days. Very well! As the timepiece gradually runs down, the cap slowly unscrews, and a tiny quantity of filtered air leaks in. It is so arranged that, at the exact end of the period, the cap flies off, and the subject awakes.”

“Herman,” said Esther, hurriedly, “I don’t like this. It isn’t right. And I am sure my father does not know about it.”

“My dear Miss Esther, I assure you that it is a very ordinary scientific experiment,” Lazaroff answered, laughing. “Come, Arnold,” he added, “why not get in yourself and try how it feels? You are not afraid?”

“In my clothes?”

“Certainly.”

“Arnold, I don’t want you to get into that thing,” Esther protested.

“Of course, if our friend is afraid that I am going to screw him up for a century—” began Lazaroff.

“I am not at all afraid,” I returned, a little nettled. “How do I get in?”

“I’ll have to help you,” Lazaroff answered. “It was not made for a big man in clothes. Button your coat. Now—put your arms down by your sides.” He rolled a cylinder upon the floor, and I put my feet inside rather reluctantly and squeezed down to the bottom. Lazaroff looked at me and burst into loud laughter.

“Not much room to turn round, is there?” he said, raising the cylinder with an effort and standing it on its base again.

“Come out, Arnold,” pleaded Esther; and I saw that her face was white with fear.

But I was quite helpless, and above me I saw Lazaroff, smiling at my predicament.

“Now if I were going to be so unkind as to send you into the next century,” he said, “to be the only animist, with a defective skull, in a world of vile materialism—”

“Please, Herman, for my sake!” Esther implored.

“I should put on the cap,” he said, and fitted it.

He must have touched some mechanism that I had not seen, for instantly the cap began to whir on the screw. Through the glass face I caught a last glimpse of Esther’s terrified eyes. The image blurred and vanished as my breath dimmed the glass and frosted it. I heard the swift jar of the cap mechanism end in a jarring click. I gasped for air; there was none. My head swam, my throat was closed; the blackness was pricked into flecks of fire. I groped for memory through unconsciousness—and ceased.