Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Read online

  CHAPTER VIII.

  When I awoke I felt greatly refreshed, and lay a considerable time ina dozing state, enjoying the sensation of bodily comfort. Theexperiences of the day previous, my waking to find myself in the year2000, the sight of the new Boston, my host and his family, and thewonderful things I had heard, were a blank in my memory. I thought Iwas in my bed-chamber at home, and the half-dreaming, half-wakingfancies which passed before my mind related to the incidents andexperiences of my former life. Dreamily I reviewed the incidents ofDecoration Day, my trip in company with Edith and her parents to MountAuburn, and my dining with them on our return to the city. I recalledhow extremely well Edith had looked, and from that fell to thinking ofour marriage; but scarcely had my imagination begun to develop thisdelightful theme than my waking dream was cut short by therecollection of the letter I had received the night before from thebuilder announcing that the new strikes might postpone indefinitelythe completion of the new house. The chagrin which this recollectionbrought with it effectually roused me. I remembered that I had anappointment with the builder at eleven o'clock, to discuss the strike,and opening my eyes, looked up at the clock at the foot of my bed tosee what time it was. But no clock met my glance, and what was more, Iinstantly perceived that I was not in my room. Starting up on mycouch, I stared wildly round the strange apartment.

  I think it must have been many seconds that I sat up thus in bedstaring about, without being able to regain the clew to my personalidentity. I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure beingduring those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to bebefore it has received the ear-marks, the individualizing toucheswhich make it a person. Strange that the sense of this inabilityshould be such anguish! but so we are constituted. There are no wordsfor the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless gropingfor myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind givesprobably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest fromthe loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comesduring such a momentary obscuration of the sense of one's identity. Itrust I may never know what it is again.

  I do not know how long this condition had lasted,--it seemed aninterminable time,--when, like a flash, the recollection of everythingcame back to me. I remembered who and where I was, and how I had comehere, and that these scenes as of the life of yesterday which hadbeen passing before my mind concerned a generation long, long agomouldered to dust. Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the roomclasping my temples with all my might between my hands to keep themfrom bursting. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my face inthe pillow, lay with out motion. The reaction which was inevitable,from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect that had been thefirst effect of my tremendous experience, had arrived. The emotionalcrisis which had awaited the full realization of my actual position,and all that it implied, was upon me, and with set teeth and laboringchest, gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there andfought for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits offeeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all haddissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in apparentlyirretrievable chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was leftstable. There only remained the will, and was any human will strongenough to say to such a weltering sea "Peace, be still"? I dared notthink. Every effort to reason upon what had befallen me, and realizewhat it implied, set up an intolerable swimming of the brain. The ideathat I was two persons, that my identity was double, began tofascinate me with its simple solution of my experience.

  I knew that I was on the verge of losing my mental balance. If I laythere thinking, I was doomed. Diversion of some sort I must have, atleast the diversion of physical exertion. I sprang up, and, hastilydressing, opened the door of my room and went down-stairs. The hourwas very early, it being not yet fairly light, and I found no one inthe lower part of the house. There was a hat in the hall, and, openingthe front door, which was fastened with a slightness indicating thatburglary was not among the perils of the modern Boston, I found myselfon the street. For two hours I walked or ran through the streets ofthe city, visiting most quarters of the peninsular part of the town.None but an antiquarian who knows something of the contrast which theBoston of to-day offers to the Boston of the nineteenth century canbegin to appreciate what a series of bewildering surprises I underwentduring that time. Viewed from the house-top the day before, the cityhad indeed appeared strange to me, but that was only in its generalaspect. How complete the change had been I first realized now that Iwalked the streets. The few old landmarks which still remained onlyintensified this effect, for without them I might have imagined myselfin a foreign town. A man may leave his native city in childhood, andreturn fifty years later, perhaps, to find it transformed in manyfeatures. He is astonished, but he is not bewildered. He is aware of agreat lapse of time, and of changes likewise occurring in himselfmeanwhile. He but dimly recalls the city as he knew it when a child.But remember that there was no sense of any lapse of time with me. Sofar as my consciousness was concerned, it was but yesterday, but a fewhours, since I had walked these streets in which scarcely a featurehad escaped a complete metamorphosis. The mental image of the old citywas so fresh and strong that it did not yield to the impression of theactual city, but contended with it, so that it was first one and thenthe other which seemed the more unreal. There was nothing I saw whichwas not blurred in this way, like the faces of a composite photograph.

  Finally, I stood again at the door of the house from which I had comeout. My feet must have instinctively brought me back to the site of myold home, for I had no clear idea of returning thither. It was no morehomelike to me than any other spot in this city of a strangegeneration, nor were its inmates less utterly and necessarilystrangers than all the other men and women now on the earth. Had thedoor of the house been locked, I should have been reminded by itsresistance that I had no object in entering, and turned away, but ityielded to my hand, and advancing with uncertain steps through thehall, I entered one of the apartments opening from it. Throwing myselfinto a chair, I covered my burning eyeballs with my hands to shut outthe horror of strangeness. My mental confusion was so intense as toproduce actual nausea. The anguish of those moments, during which mybrain seemed melting, or the abjectness of my sense of helplessness,how can I describe? In my despair I groaned aloud. I began to feelthat unless some help should come I was about to lose my mind. Andjust then it did come. I heard the rustle of drapery, and looked up.Edith Leete was standing before me. Her beautiful face was full of themost poignant sympathy.

  "Oh, what is the matter, Mr. West?" she said. "I was here when youcame in. I saw how dreadfully distressed you looked, and when I heardyou groan, I could not keep silent. What has happened to you? Wherehave you been? Can't I do something for you?"

  Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture ofcompassion as she spoke. At any rate I had caught them in my own andwas clinging to them with an impulse as instinctive as that whichprompts the drowning man to seize upon and cling to the rope which isthrown him as he sinks for the last time. As I looked up into hercompassionate face and her eyes moist with pity, my brain ceased towhirl. The tender human sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressureof her fingers had brought me the support I needed. Its effect to calmand soothe was like that of some wonder-working elixir.

  "God bless you," I said, after a few moments. "He must have sent youto me just now. I think I was in danger of going crazy if you had notcome." At this the tears came into her eyes.

  "Oh, Mr. West!" she cried. "How heartless you must have thought us!How could we leave you to yourself so long! But it is over now, is itnot? You are better, surely."

  "Yes," I said, "thanks to you. If you will not go away quite yet, Ishall be myself soon."

  "Indeed I will not go away," she said, with a little quiver of herface, more expressive of her sympathy than a volume of words. "Youmust not think us so heartless as we seemed in leaving you so byyourself. I scarcely sl
ept last night, for thinking how strange yourwaking would be this morning; but father said you would sleep tilllate. He said that it would be better not to show too much sympathywith you at first, but to try to divert your thoughts and make youfeel that you were among friends."

  "You have indeed made me feel that," I answered. "But you see it is agood deal of a jolt to drop a hundred years, and although I did notseem to feel it so much last night, I have had very odd sensationsthis morning." While I held her hands and kept my eyes on her face, Icould already even jest a little at my plight.

  "No one thought of such a thing as your going out in the city alone soearly in the morning," she went on. "Oh, Mr. West, where have youbeen?"

  Then I told her of my morning's experience, from my first waking tillthe moment I had looked up to see her before me, just as I have toldit here. She was overcome by distressful pity during the recital, and,though I had released one of her hands, did not try to take from methe other, seeing, no doubt, how much good it did me to hold it. "Ican think a little what this feeling must been like," she said. "Itmust have been terrible. And to think you were left alone to strugglewith it! Can you ever forgive us?"

  "But it is gone now. You have driven it quite away for the present," Isaid.

  "You will not let it return again," she queried anxiously.

  "I can't quite say that," I replied. "It might be too early to saythat, considering how strange everything will still be to me."

  "But you will not try to contend with it alone again, at least," shepersisted. "Promise that you will come to us, and let us sympathizewith you, and try to help you. Perhaps we can't do much, but it willsurely be better than to try to bear such feelings alone."

  "I will come to you if you will let me," I said.

  "Oh yes, yes, I beg you will," she said eagerly. "I would do anythingto help you that I could."

  "All you need do is to be sorry for me, as you seem to be now," Ireplied.

  "It is understood, then," she said, smiling with wet eyes, "that youare to come and tell me next time, and not run all over Boston amongstrangers."

  This assumption that we were not strangers seemed scarcely strange, sonear within these few minutes had my trouble and her sympathetic tearsbrought us.

  "I will promise, when you come to me," she added, with an expressionof charming archness, passing, as she continued, into one ofenthusiasm, "to seem as sorry for you as you wish, but you must notfor a moment suppose that I am really sorry for you at all, or that Ithink you will long be sorry for yourself. I know, as well as I knowthat the world now is heaven compared with what it was in your day,that the only feeling you will have after a little while will be oneof thankfulness to God that your life in that age was so strangely cutoff, to be returned to you in this."