Tales of Space and Time
possess, he possessed; and everything that it was not right and proper
for a man in his position to possess, he did not possess.
And among other right and proper possessions, this Mr. Morris had a wife
and children. They were the right sort of wife, and the right sort and
number of children, of course; nothing imaginative or highty-flighty
about any of them, so far as Mr. Morris could see; they wore perfectly
correct clothing, neither smart nor hygienic nor faddy in any way, but
just sensible; and they lived in a nice sensible house in the later
Victorian sham Queen Anne style of architecture, with sham
half-timbering of chocolate-painted plaster in the gables, Lincrusta
Walton sham carved oak panels, a terrace of terra cotta to imitate
stone, and cathedral glass in the front door. His boys went to good
solid schools, and were put to respectable professions; his girls, in
spite of a fantastic protest or so, were all married to suitable,
steady, oldish young men with good prospects. And when it was a fit and
proper thing for him to do so, Mr. Morris died. His tomb was of marble,
and, without any art nonsense or laudatory inscription, quietly
imposing--such being the fashion of his time.
He underwent various changes according to the accepted custom in these
cases, and long before this story begins his bones even had become dust,
and were scattered to the four quarters of heaven. And his sons and his
grandsons and his great-grandsons and his great-great-grandsons, they
too were dust and ashes, and were scattered likewise. It was a thing he
could not have imagined, that a day would come when even his
great-great-grandsons would be scattered to the four winds of heaven. If
any one had suggested it to him he would have resented it. He was one of
those worthy people who take no interest in the future of mankind at
all. He had grave doubts, indeed, if there was any future for mankind
after he was dead.
It seemed quite impossible and quite uninteresting to imagine anything
happening after he was dead. Yet the thing was so, and when even his
great-great-grandson was dead and decayed and forgotten, when the sham
half-timbered house had gone the way of all shams, and the _Times_ was
extinct, and the silk hat a ridiculous antiquity, and the modestly
imposing stone that had been sacred to Mr. Morris had been burnt to make
lime for mortar, and all that Mr. Morris had found real and important
was sere and dead, the world was still going on, and people were still
going about it, just as heedless and impatient of the Future, or,
indeed, of anything but their own selves and property, as Mr. Morris had
been.
And, strange to tell, and much as Mr. Morris would have been angered if
any one had foreshadowed it to him, all over the world there were
scattered a multitude of people, filled with the breath of life, in
whose veins the blood of Mr. Morris flowed. Just as some day the life
which is gathered now in the reader of this very story may also be
scattered far and wide about this world, and mingled with a thousand
alien strains, beyond all thought and tracing.
And among the descendants of this Mr. Morris was one almost as sensible
and clear-headed as his ancestor. He had just the same stout, short
frame as that ancient man of the nineteenth century, from whom his name
of Morris--he spelt it Mwres--came; he had the same half-contemptuous
expression of face. He was a prosperous person, too, as times went, and
he disliked the "new-fangled," and bothers about the future and the
lower classes, just as much as the ancestral Morris had done. He did not
read the _Times_: indeed, he did not know there ever had been a
_Times_--that institution had foundered somewhere in the intervening
gulf of years; but the phonograph machine, that talked to him as he
made his toilet of a morning, might have been the voice of a
reincarnated Blowitz when it dealt with the world's affairs. This
phonographic machine was the size and shape of a Dutch clock, and down
the front of it were electric barometric indicators, and an electric
clock and calendar, and automatic engagement reminders, and where the
clock would have been was the mouth of a trumpet. When it had news the
trumpet gobbled like a turkey, "Galloop, galloop," and then brayed out
its message as, let us say, a trumpet might bray. It would tell Mwres in
full, rich, throaty tones about the overnight accidents to the omnibus
flying-machines that plied around the world, the latest arrivals at the
fashionable resorts in Tibet, and of all the great monopolist company
meetings of the day before, while he was dressing. If Mwres did not like
hearing what it said, he had only to touch a stud, and it would choke a
little and talk about something else.
Of course his toilet differed very much from that of his ancestor. It is
doubtful which would have been the more shocked and pained to find
himself in the clothing of the other. Mwres would certainly have sooner
gone forth to the world stark naked than in the silk hat, frock coat,
grey trousers and watch-chain that had filled Mr. Morris with sombre
self-respect in the past. For Mwres there was no shaving to do: a
skilful operator had long ago removed every hair-root from his face. His
legs he encased in pleasant pink and amber garments of an air-tight
material, which with the help of an ingenious little pump he distended
so as to suggest enormous muscles. Above this he also wore pneumatic
garments beneath an amber silk tunic, so that he was clothed in air and
admirably protected against sudden extremes of heat or cold. Over this
he flung a scarlet cloak with its edge fantastically curved. On his
head, which had been skilfully deprived of every scrap of hair, he
adjusted a pleasant little cap of bright scarlet, held on by suction and
inflated with hydrogen, and curiously like the comb of a cock. So his
toilet was complete; and, conscious of being soberly and becomingly
attired, he was ready to face his fellow-beings with a tranquil eye.
This Mwres--the civility of "Mr." had vanished ages ago--was one of the
officials under the Wind Vane and Waterfall Trust, the great company
that owned every wind wheel and waterfall in the world, and which pumped
all the water and supplied all the electric energy that people in these
latter days required. He lived in a vast hotel near that part of London
called Seventh Way, and had very large and comfortable apartments on the
seventeenth floor. Households and family life had long since disappeared
with the progressive refinement of manners; and indeed the steady rise
in rents and land values, the disappearance of domestic servants, the
elaboration of cookery, had rendered the separate domicile of Victorian
times impossible, even had any one desired such a savage seclusion. When
his toilet was completed he went towards one of the two doors of his
apartment--there were doors at opposite ends, each marked with a huge
arrow pointing one one way and one the other--touched a stud to open it,
and emerged on a wide passage, the centre of which bore chairs and was
moving at a steady pace to the left. On some of these chairs were seated
gaily-dressed men and women. He nodded to an acquaintance--it was not in
those days etiquette to talk before breakfast--and seated himself on one
of these chairs, and in a few seconds he had been carried to the doors
of a lift, by which he descended to the great and splendid hall in which
his breakfast would be automatically served.
It was a very different meal from a Victorian breakfast. The rude
masses of bread needing to be carved and smeared over with animal fat
before they could be made palatable, the still recognisable fragments of
recently killed animals, hideously charred and hacked, the eggs torn
ruthlessly from beneath some protesting hen,--such things as these,
though they constituted the ordinary fare of Victorian times, would have
awakened only horror and disgust in the refined minds of the people of
these latter days. Instead were pastes and cakes of agreeable and
variegated design, without any suggestion in colour or form of the
unfortunate animals from which their substance and juices were derived.
They appeared on little dishes sliding out upon a rail from a little box
at one side of the table. The surface of the table, to judge by touch
and eye, would have appeared to a nineteenth-century person to be
covered with fine white damask, but this was really an oxidised metallic
surface, and could be cleaned instantly after a meal. There were
hundreds of such little tables in the hall, and at most of them were
other latter-day citizens singly or in groups. And as Mwres seated
himself before his elegant repast, the invisible orchestra, which had
been resting during an interval, resumed and filled the air with music.
But Mwres did not display any great interest either in his breakfast or
the music; his eye wandered incessantly about the hall, as though he
expected a belated guest. At last he rose eagerly and waved his hand,
and simultaneously across the hall appeared a tall dark figure in a
costume of yellow and olive green. As this person, walking amidst the
tables with measured steps, drew near, the pallid earnestness of his
face and the unusual intensity of his eyes became apparent. Mwres
reseated himself and pointed to a chair beside him.
"I feared you would never come," he said. In spite of the intervening
space of time, the English language was still almost exactly the same as
it had been in England under Victoria the Good. The invention of the
phonograph and suchlike means of recording sound, and the gradual
replacement of books by such contrivances, had not only saved the human
eyesight from decay, but had also by the establishment of a sure
standard arrested the process of change in accent that had hitherto been
so inevitable.
"I was delayed by an interesting case," said the man in green and
yellow. "A prominent politician--ahem!--suffering from overwork." He
glanced at the breakfast and seated himself. "I have been awake for
forty hours."
"Eh dear!" said Mwres: "fancy that! You hypnotists have your work to
do."
The hypnotist helped himself to some attractive amber-coloured jelly. "I
happen to be a good deal in request," he said modestly.
"Heaven knows what we should do without you."
"Oh! we're not so indispensable as all that," said the hypnotist,
ruminating the flavour of the jelly. "The world did very well without us
for some thousands of years. Two hundred years ago even--not one! In
practice, that is. Physicians by the thousand, of course--frightfully
clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like
sheep--but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there
were none."
He concentrated his mind on the jelly.
"But were people so sane--?" began Mwres.
The hypnotist shook his head. "It didn't matter then if they were a bit
silly or faddy. Life was so easy-going then. No competition worth
speaking of--no pressure. A human being had to be very lopsided before
anything happened. Then, you know, they clapped 'em away in what they
called a lunatic asylum."
"I know," said Mwres. "In these confounded historical romances that
every one is listening to, they always rescue a beautiful girl from an
asylum or something of the sort. I don't know if you attend to that
rubbish."
"I must confess I do," said the hypnotist. "It carries one out of
oneself to hear of those quaint, adventurous, half-civilised days of the
nineteenth century, when men were stout and women simple. I like a good
swaggering story before all things. Curious times they were, with their
smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses and
their horse vehicles. I suppose you don't read books?"