Tales of Space and Time
"Dear, no!" said Mwres, "I went to a modern school and we had none of
that old-fashioned nonsense. Phonographs are good enough for me."
"Of course," said the hypnotist, "of course"; and surveyed the table for
his next choice. "You know," he said, helping himself to a dark blue
confection that promised well, "in those days our business was scarcely
thought of. I daresay if any one had told them that in two hundred
years' time a class of men would be entirely occupied in impressing
things upon the memory, effacing unpleasant ideas, controlling and
overcoming instinctive but undesirable impulses, and so forth, by means
of hypnotism, they would have refused to believe the thing possible. Few
people knew that an order made during a mesmeric trance, even an order
to forget or an order to desire, could be given so as to be obeyed after
the trance was over. Yet there were men alive then who could have told
them the thing was as absolutely certain to come about as--well, the
transit of Venus."
"They knew of hypnotism, then?"
"Oh, dear, yes! They used it--for painless dentistry and things like
that! This blue stuff is confoundedly good: what is it?"
"Haven't the faintest idea," said Mwres, "but I admit it's very good.
Take some more."
The hypnotist repeated his praises, and there was an appreciative pause.
"Speaking of these historical romances," said Mwres, with an attempt at
an easy, off-hand manner, "brings me--ah--to the matter I--ah--had in
mind when I asked you--when I expressed a wish to see you." He paused
and took a deep breath.
The hypnotist turned an attentive eye upon him, and continued eating.
"The fact is," said Mwres, "I have a--in fact a--daughter. Well, you
know I have given her--ah--every educational advantage. Lectures--not a
solitary lecturer of ability in the world but she has had a telephone
direct, dancing, deportment, conversation, philosophy, art criticism ..."
He indicated catholic culture by a gesture of his hand. "I had intended
her to marry a very good friend of mine--Bindon of the Lighting
Commission--plain little man, you know, and a bit unpleasant in some of
his ways, but an excellent fellow really--an excellent fellow."
"Yes," said the hypnotist, "go on. How old is she?"
"Eighteen."
"A dangerous age. Well?"
"Well: it seems that she has been indulging in these historical
romances--excessively. Excessively. Even to the neglect of her
philosophy. Filled her mind with unutterable nonsense about soldiers who
fight--what is it?--Etruscans?"
"Egyptians."
"Egyptians--very probably. Hack about with swords and revolvers and
things--bloodshed galore--horrible!--and about young men on torpedo
catchers who blow up--Spaniards, I fancy--and all sorts of irregular
adventurers. And she has got it into her head that she must marry for
Love, and that poor little Bindon--"
"I've met similar cases," said the hypnotist. "Who is the other young
man?"
Mwres maintained an appearance of resigned calm. "You may well ask," he
said. "He is"--and his voice sank with shame--"a mere attendant upon the
stage on which the flying-machines from Paris alight. He has--as they
say in the romances--good looks. He is quite young and very eccentric.
Affects the antique--he can read and write! So can she. And instead of
communicating by telephone, like sensible people, they write and
deliver--what is it?"
"Notes?"
"No--not notes.... Ah--poems."
The hypnotist raised his eyebrows. "How did she meet him?"
"Tripped coming down from the flying-machine from Paris--and fell into
his arms. The mischief was done in a moment!"
"Yes?"
"Well--that's all. Things must be stopped. That is what I want to
consult you about. What must be done? What _can_ be done? Of course I'm
not a hypnotist; my knowledge is limited. But you--?"
"Hypnotism is not magic," said the man in green, putting both arms on
the table.
"Oh, precisely! But still--!"
"People cannot be hypnotised without their consent. If she is able to
stand out against marrying Bindon, she will probably stand out against
being hypnotised. But if once she can be hypnotised--even by somebody
else--the thing is done."
"You can--?"
"Oh, certainly! Once we get her amenable, then we can suggest that she
_must_ marry Bindon--that that is her fate; or that the young man is
repulsive, and that when she sees him she will be giddy and faint, or
any little thing of that sort. Or if we can get her into a sufficiently
profound trance we can suggest that she should forget him altogether--"
"Precisely."
"But the problem is to get her hypnotised. Of course no sort of proposal
or suggestion must come from you--because no doubt she already distrusts
you in the matter."
The hypnotist leant his head upon his arm and thought.
"It's hard a man cannot dispose of his own daughter," said Mwres
irrelevantly.
"You must give me the name and address of the young lady," said the
hypnotist, "and any information bearing upon the matter. And, by the
bye, is there any money in the affair?"
Mwres hesitated.
"There's a sum--in fact, a considerable sum--invested in the Patent Road
Company. From her mother. That's what makes the thing so exasperating."
"Exactly," said the hypnotist. And he proceeded to cross-examine Mwres
on the entire affair.
It was a lengthy interview.
And meanwhile "Elizebe{th} Mwres," as she spelt her name, or "Elizabeth
Morris" as a nineteenth-century person would have put it, was sitting in
a quiet waiting-place beneath the great stage upon which the
flying-machine from Paris descended. And beside her sat her slender,
handsome lover reading her the poem he had written that morning while on
duty upon the stage. When he had finished they sat for a time in
silence; and then, as if for their special entertainment, the great
machine that had come flying through the air from America that morning
rushed down out of the sky.
At first it was a little oblong, faint and blue amidst the distant
fleecy clouds; and then it grew swiftly large and white, and larger and
whiter, until they could see the separate tiers of sails, each hundreds
of feet wide, and the lank body they supported, and at last even the
swinging seats of the passengers in a dotted row. Although it was
falling it seemed to them to be rushing up the sky, and over the
roof-spaces of the city below its shadow leapt towards them. They heard
the whistling rush of the air about it and its yelling siren, shrill and
swelling, to warn those who were on its landing-stage of its arrival.
And abruptly the note fell down a couple of octaves, and it had passed,
and the sky was clear and void, and she could turn her sweet eyes again
to Denton at her side.
Their silence ended; and Denton, speaking in a little language of broken
English that was, they fancied, their private possession--though lovers
have used such little languages since the world began--told her how they
too would leap into the air one morning out of all the obstacles and
difficulties about them, and fly to a sunlit city of delight he knew of
in Japan, half-way about the world.
She loved the dream, but she feared the leap; and she put him off with
"Some day, dearest one, some day," to all his pleading that it might be
soon; and at last came a shrilling of whistles, and it was time for him
to go back to his duties on the stage. They parted--as lovers have been
wont to part for thousands of years. She walked down a passage to a
lift, and so came to one of the streets of that latter-day London, all
glazed in with glass from the weather, and with incessant moving
platforms that went to all parts of the city. And by one of these she
returned to her apartments in the Hotel for Women where she lived, the
apartments that were in telephonic communication with all the best
lecturers in the world. But the sunlight of the flying stage was in her
heart, and the wisdom of all the best lecturers in the world seemed
folly in that light.
She spent the middle part of the day in the gymnasium, and took her
midday meal with two other girls and their common chaperone--for it was
still the custom to have a chaperone in the case of motherless girls of
the more prosperous classes. The chaperone had a visitor that day, a man
in green and yellow, with a white face and vivid eyes, who talked
amazingly. Among other things, he fell to praising a new historical
romance that one of the great popular story-tellers of the day had just
put forth. It was, of course, about the spacious times of Queen
Victoria; and the author, among other pleasing novelties, made a little
argument before each section of the story, in imitation of the chapter
headings of the old-fashioned books: as for example, "How the Cabmen of
Pimlico stopped the Victoria Omnibuses, and of the Great Fight in Palace
Yard," and "How the Piccadilly Policeman was slain in the midst of his
Duty." The man in green and yellow praised this innovation. "These pithy
sentences," he said, "are admirable. They show at a glance those
headlong, tumultuous times, when men and animals jostled in the filthy
streets, and death might wait for one at every corner. Life was life
then! How great the world must have seemed then! How marvellous! They
were still parts of the world absolutely unexplored. Nowadays we have
almost abolished wonder, we lead lives so trim and orderly that courage,
endurance, faith, all the noble virtues seem fading from mankind."
And so on, taking the girls' thoughts with him, until the life they led,
life in the vast and intricate London of the twenty-second century, a
life interspersed with soaring excursions to every part of the globe,
seemed to them a monotonous misery compared with the daedal past.
At first Elizabeth did not join in the conversation, but after a time
the subject became so interesting that she made a few shy
interpolations. But he scarcely seemed to notice her as he talked. He
went on to describe a new method of entertaining people. They were
hypnotised, and then suggestions were made to them so skilfully that
they seemed to be living in ancient times again. They played out a
little romance in the past as vivid as reality, and when at last they
awakened they remembered all they had been through as though it were a
real thing.
"It is a thing we have sought to do for years and years," said the
hypnotist. "It is practically an artificial dream. And we know the way
at last. Think of all it opens out to us--the enrichment of our
experience, the recovery of adventure, the refuge it offers from this
sordid, competitive life in which we live! Think!"
"And you can do that!" said the chaperone eagerly.
"The thing is possible at last," the hypnotist said. "You may order a
dream as you wish."
The chaperone was the first to be hypnotised, and the dream, she said,
was wonderful, when she came to again.
The other two girls, encouraged by her enthusiasm, also placed
themselves in the hands of the hypnotist and had plunges into the
romantic past. No one suggested that Elizabeth should try this novel
entertainment; it was at her own request at last that she was taken into
that land of dreams where there is neither any freedom of choice nor
will....
And so the mischief was done.
One day, when Denton went down to that quiet seat beneath the flying
stage, Elizabeth was not in her wonted place. He was disappointed, and a
little angry. The next day she did not come, and the next also. He was
afraid. To hide his fear from himself, he set to work to write sonnets
for her when she should come again....
For three days he fought against his dread by such distraction, and then
the truth was before him clear and cold, and would not be denied. She
might be ill, she might be dead; but he would not believe that he had