Tales of Space and Time
been betrayed. There followed a week of misery. And then he knew she was
the only thing on earth worth having, and that he must seek her, however
hopeless the search, until she was found once more.
He had some small private means of his own, and so he threw over his
appointment on the flying stage, and set himself to find this girl who
had become at last all the world to him. He did not know where she
lived, and little of her circumstances; for it had been part of the
delight of her girlish romance that he should know nothing of her,
nothing of the difference of their station. The ways of the city opened
before him east and west, north and south. Even in Victorian days London
was a maze, that little London with its poor four millions of people;
but the London he explored, the London of the twenty-second century, was
a London of thirty million souls. At first he was energetic and
headlong, taking time neither to eat nor sleep. He sought for weeks and
months, he went through every imaginable phase of fatigue and despair,
over-excitement and anger. Long after hope was dead, by the sheer
inertia of his desire he still went to and fro, peering into faces and
looking this way and that, in the incessant ways and lifts and passages
of that interminable hive of men.
At last chance was kind to him, and he saw her.
It was in a time of festivity. He was hungry; he had paid the inclusive
fee and had gone into one of the gigantic dining-places of the city; he
was pushing his way among the tables and scrutinising by mere force of
habit every group he passed.
He stood still, robbed of all power of motion, his eyes wide, his lips
apart. Elizabeth sat scarcely twenty yards away from him, looking
straight at him. Her eyes were as hard to him, as hard and
expressionless and void of recognition, as the eyes of a statue.
She looked at him for a moment, and then her gaze passed beyond him.
Had he had only her eyes to judge by he might have doubted if it was
indeed Elizabeth, but he knew her by the gesture of her hand, by the
grace of a wanton little curl that floated over her ear as she moved her
head. Something was said to her, and she turned smiling tolerantly to
the man beside her, a little man in foolish raiment knobbed and spiked
like some odd reptile with pneumatic horns--the Bindon of her father's
choice.
For a moment Denton stood white and wild-eyed; then came a terrible
faintness, and he sat before one of the little tables. He sat down with
his back to her, and for a time he did not dare to look at her again.
When at last he did, she and Bindon and two other people were standing
up to go. The others were her father and her chaperone.
He sat as if incapable of action until the four figures were remote and
small, and then he rose up possessed with the one idea of pursuit. For
a space he feared he had lost them, and then he came upon Elizabeth and
her chaperone again in one of the streets of moving platforms that
intersected the city. Bindon and Mwres had disappeared.
He could not control himself to patience. He felt he must speak to her
forthwith, or die. He pushed forward to where they were seated, and sat
down beside them. His white face was convulsed with half-hysterical
excitement.
He laid his hand on her wrist. "Elizabeth?" he said.
She turned in unfeigned astonishment. Nothing but the fear of a strange
man showed in her face.
"Elizabeth," he cried, and his voice was strange to him: "dearest--you
_know_ me?"
Elizabeth's face showed nothing but alarm and perplexity. She drew
herself away from him. The chaperone, a little grey-headed woman with
mobile features, leant forward to intervene. Her resolute bright eyes
examined Denton. "_What_ do you say?" she asked.
"This young lady," said Denton,--"she knows me."
"Do you know him, dear?"
"No," said Elizabeth in a strange voice, and with a hand to her
forehead, speaking almost as one who repeats a lesson. "No, I do not
know him. I _know_--I do not know him."
"But--but ... Not know me! It is I--Denton. Denton! To whom you used to
talk. Don't you remember the flying stages? The little seat in the open
air? The verses--"
"No," cried Elizabeth,--"no. I do not know him. I do not know him. There
is something.... But I don't know. All I know is that I do not know
him." Her face was a face of infinite distress.
The sharp eyes of the chaperone flitted to and fro from the girl to the
man. "You see?" she said, with the faint shadow of a smile. "She does
not know you."
"I do not know you," said Elizabeth. "Of that I am sure."
"But, dear--the songs--the little verses--"
"She does not know you," said the chaperone. "You must not.... You have
made a mistake. You must not go on talking to us after that. You must
not annoy us on the public ways."
"But--" said Denton, and for a moment his miserably haggard face
appealed against fate.
"You must not persist, young man," protested the chaperone.
"_Elizabeth!_" he cried.
Her face was the face of one who is tormented. "I do not know you," she
cried, hand to brow. "Oh, I do not know you!"
For an instant Denton sat stunned. Then he stood up and groaned aloud.
He made a strange gesture of appeal towards the remote glass roof of the
public way, then turned and went plunging recklessly from one moving
platform to another, and vanished amidst the swarms of people going to
and fro thereon. The chaperone's eyes followed him, and then she looked
at the curious faces about her.
"Dear," asked Elizabeth, clasping her hand, and too deeply moved to heed
observation, "who was that man? Who _was_ that man?"
The chaperone raised her eyebrows. She spoke in a clear, audible voice.
"Some half-witted creature. I have never set eyes on him before."
"Never?"
"Never, dear. Do not trouble your mind about a thing like this."
* * * * *
And soon after this the celebrated hypnotist who dressed in green and
yellow had another client. The young man paced his consulting-room, pale
and disordered. "I want to forget," he cried. "I _must_ forget."
The hypnotist watched him with quiet eyes, studied his face and clothes
and bearing. "To forget anything--pleasure or pain--is to be, by so
much--_less_. However, you know your own concern. My fee is high."
"If only I can forget--"
"That's easy enough with you. You wish it. I've done much harder things.
Quite recently. I hardly expected to do it: the thing was done against
the will of the hypnotised person. A love affair too--like yours. A
girl. So rest assured."
The young man came and sat beside the hypnotist. His manner was a forced
calm. He looked into the hypnotist's eyes. "I will tell you. Of course
you will want to know what it is. There was a girl. Her name was
Elizabeth Mwres. Well ..."
He stopped. He had seen the instant surprise on the hypnotist's face. In
that instant he knew. He stood up. He seemed to dominate the seated
figure by his side. He gripped the shoulder of green and gold. For a
time he could not find words.
"_Give her me back!_" he said at last. "Give her me back!"
"What do you mean?" gasped the hypnotist.
"Give her me back."
"Give whom?"
"Elizabeth Mwres--the girl--"
The hypnotist tried to free himself; he rose to his feet. Denton's grip
tightened.
"Let go!" cried the hypnotist, thrusting an arm against Denton's chest.
In a moment the two men were locked in a clumsy wrestle. Neither had the
slightest training--for athleticism, except for exhibition and to afford
opportunity for betting, had faded out of the earth--but Denton was not
only the younger but the stronger of the two. They swayed across the
room, and then the hypnotist had gone down under his antagonist. They
fell together....
Denton leaped to his feet, dismayed at his own fury; but the hypnotist
lay still, and suddenly from a little white mark where his forehead had
struck a stool shot a hurrying band of red. For a space Denton stood
over him irresolute, trembling.
A fear of the consequences entered his gently nurtured mind. He turned
towards the door. "No," he said aloud, and came back to the middle of
the room. Overcoming the instinctive repugnance of one who had seen no
act of violence in all his life before, he knelt down beside his
antagonist and felt his heart. Then he peered at the wound. He rose
quietly and looked about him. He began to see more of the situation.
When presently the hypnotist recovered his senses, his head ached
severely, his back was against Denton's knees and Denton was sponging
his face.
The hypnotist did not speak. But presently he indicated by a gesture
that in his opinion he had been sponged enough. "Let me get up," he
said.
"Not yet," said Denton.
"You have assaulted me, you scoundrel!"
"We are alone," said Denton, "and the door is secure."
There was an interval of thought.
"Unless I sponge," said Denton, "your forehead will develop a tremendous
bruise."
"You can go on sponging," said the hypnotist sulkily.
There was another pause.
"We might be in the Stone Age," said the hypnotist. "Violence!
Struggle!"
"In the Stone Age no man dared to come between man and woman," said
Denton.
The hypnotist thought again.
"What are you going to do?" he asked.
"While you were insensible I found the girl's address on your tablets.
I did not know it before. I telephoned. She will be here soon. Then--"
"She will bring her chaperone."
"That is all right."
"But what--? I don't see. What do you mean to do?"
"I looked about for a weapon also. It is an astonishing thing how few
weapons there are nowadays. If you consider that in the Stone Age men
owned scarcely anything _but_ weapons. I hit at last upon this lamp. I
have wrenched off the wires and things, and I hold it so." He extended
it over the hypnotist's shoulders. "With that I can quite easily smash
your skull. I _will_--unless you do as I tell you."
"Violence is no remedy," said the hypnotist, quoting from the "Modern
Man's Book of Moral Maxims."
"It's an undesirable disease," said Denton.
"Well?"
"You will tell that chaperone you are going to order the girl to marry
that knobby little brute with the red hair and ferrety eyes. I believe
that's how things stand?"
"Yes--that's how things stand."
"And, pretending to do that, you will restore her memory of me."
"It's unprofessional."
"Look here! If I cannot have that girl I would rather die than not. I
don't propose to respect your little fancies. If anything goes wrong you
shall not live five minutes. This is a rude makeshift of a weapon, and
it may quite conceivably be painful to kill you. But I will. It is
unusual, I know, nowadays to do things like this--mainly because there
is so little in life that is worth being violent about."
"The chaperone will see you directly she comes--"
"I shall stand in that recess. Behind you."
The hypnotist thought. "You are a determined young man," he said, "and
only half civilised. I have tried to do my duty to my client, but in
this affair you seem likely to get your own way...."
"You mean to deal straightly."
"I'm not going to risk having my brains scattered in a petty affair like
this."
"And afterwards?"
"There is nothing a hypnotist or doctor hates so much as a scandal. I at
least am no savage. I am annoyed.... But in a day or so I shall bear no
malice...."
"Thank you. And now that we understand each other, there is no
necessity to keep you sitting any longer on the floor."
II--THE VACANT COUNTRY
The world, they say, changed more between the year 1800 and the year
1900 than it had done in the previous five hundred years. That century,
the nineteenth century, was the dawn of a new epoch in the history of