He sat by a window and watched Trail Street trundle past, watched Congdon Mire slide under, watched the country beyond. It was like leaving a place he had lived in for years to get away from Claines. The bus purred to a stop at Gerrinsford, where people got off and more people got on. A pudgy old man in a tan suit came to sit beside Thunstone and speak to him with ready friendship about the fineness of the weather. When Thunstone replied, the man asked if he were a Scot.
“I'm American," said Thunstone.
“Oh, ah," said the other. “You're of such a fine height, I thought Scot. Now America, there's a land I hope to visit one day."
He went on to say that his daughter had gone there, that she had married a man from Texas, that her son was in the United States Army. Rattling on, he mentioned the ancient friendship between England and the United States, asked Thunstone about income tax in America, and when Thunstone explained as best he could, wished earnestly that taxes in England were as low.
As they talked, the bus cruised through other towns, stopping to let passengers off or take passengers on. Nine came and went, and they rolled through the streets of London, at last coming to the terminal at Victoria Station.
Everyone got off. Thunstone said good bye to his seatmate and sought the underground station. Far below the earth, he waited for his train and rode away northward.
He changed at Green Park, passed the stations at Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, and Holbom, and got off at Russell Square. There was an escalator to ride up and up a tall, cliff like slope; then a walk to a heavily grilled door and another ascent in a crowded elevator like a soaring freight car and at last the open air of London on the street.
It was a street that Thunstone knew, not far from his hotel on Southampton Row. He walked a few yards and turned left into Herbrand Street.
That was more like an alley, a narrow, seamed pavement between buildings closely crowding on either hand. As before, he wondered how one car could safely pass another there. On ahead of him rose a sign he recognized, painted in tawny yellow on blue-green. It depicted a rescuer leaning down from an open boat to reach and help an understandably desperate flounderer in tossing waves. The door of the place displayed above it, in raised, gilded letters, the name the friend at hand. To the left of that, more letters promised splendid food, and to the right, excellent ales.
Thunstone entered a spacious room amid a hubbub of voices. The Friend at Hand was always thronged at lunchtime. Customers lined the bar, besieged the long buffet on the far side of it. He stood for a moment, looking here and there. Then a voice rose to shout his name.
At a table on a sort of raised platform in the left rear corner sat his friends Spayte and Vickery, both lifting their arms to wave a greeting to him.
CHAPTER 10
Thunstone flung up his own right arm to acknowledge the salutation. Then he worked his way through the considerable crowd to a place against the bar. A white-jacketed barman looked up and saw him. "Oh, you're back in town, sir,” he said. "Missed you here.” "I’ve been in the country for a few days,” said Thunstone. "Let me have a pint of the special bitter.”
The bartender drew it. Thunstone put down a pound note and went up two steps to where Spayte and Vickery sat, smiling their welcome. Spayte was impeccable in tailored gray, and gray was his close-curled hair. His beard was trimmed to a smart point, his mustaches carefully waxed. As often before, Thunstone thought he had an Elizabethan look. Vickery was considerably younger, leaner, than Spayte. He was dressed in an open-fronted jeans jacket and a blue T- shirt which bore on its front the cryptic word LATER. He had the face of an Indian warrior, with gaunt cheeks, straight nose, strong chin. His dark hair was swept back from a broad, high brow, and fell on either side to his square shoulders.
"On time to the dot,” Spayte greeted Thunstone. "One o'clock, as 1 believe I said. And one o'clock it is.”
"You said one o'clock or thereabouts,” said Thunstone, setting down his mug. "I see that both of you are eating. Give me a minute to get myself something.”
The buffet, too, had its crowd of customers. Thunstone chose a long sausage of a kind he had learned to like, a scoop of salad, and some white bread and butter. He carried the food back to where Spayte and Vickery were eating. Spayte had a slice of quiche. Vickery had taken a generous wedge of liver pate and a Scotch egg, both of which he ate with good appetite, and drank from his mug of dark beer. Thunstone sat down and began on his own lunch.
“I got your letter from there in Claines," said Spayte. “That little place isn't hospitable to scholars, and so I haven't gone there as yet. Like Alan Breck Stewart, I'm no very keen to stay where I'm no wanted. How have you fared there?"
“That’s what I came to tell," said Thunstone. “Claines is jumping with uncanny things."
“You wrote me nothing about those," said Spayte. “You should have done, I'm interested in Claines, however inhospitable."
“Fine ale, this," said Vickery, drinking. “Excellent, as promised on the sign outside. Even George Borrow would approve." Then he looked sharply at Thunstone. “Uncanny, did you say uncanny? Why haven't you told us before?"
“I'm not surprised to see that word fetch him," said Spayte to Thunstone. “You know that the uncanny is his enthusiasm, and he writes it into his books. He's been at me the last day or so with something he came on at the Museum library, all about old churches being built on the sites of abandoned pagan temples, and what it means, at least to him. For my part, I've forgotten what it may mean, if anything."
“Our professor here is rock-ribbedly empirical," said Vickery affectionately. “Believes only in material evidence, and decides for himself what the material evidence is."
“I’ve always been glad to hear him talk on any subject," said Thunstone.
“I also, because then I can disagree each time," said Vickery. “I wouldn't be without him, Thunstone; he's a fascinating character. I'd put him in a novel, only I'm afraid he'd bring an action for damages."
“What damages?" wondered Spayte. “What could you write that could damage me? But hold on; we're interrupting Thunstone here. What's the uncanniness you say you've found in Claines?"
“I’ll tell you about that," said Thunstone, and as they ate their lunches and drank from their mugs, he did so.
He did his best to omit nothing. He told about the Moonraven and Mrs. Fothergill's bed-and-breakfast enterprise, about St. Jude's and the opinions of David Gates, about Chimney Pots and Gram Ensley, about the ancient chalk outline of Old Thunder on Sweepside and the fallen pillar called the Dream Rock and the traditional activities at both of them. He described, too, his grapple with Porrask, at which Vickery remarked, “Well done,” and told of Ensley’s courteous but cryptic manner and speech, and finally of his sense of seeing and feeling a strange landscape at night.
They listened with great attention, and when he had finished they made eager comments.
“This dream or nightmare you had, now—” began Spayte.
“It wasn’t a dream, and I can prove it,” interrupted Thunstone, somewhat impatiently. “I told you I brought back a Stone Age spear from it, a spear that was used to threaten me. I can show you that. But in any case, a man knows the difference between a dream and a reality.”
“I don’t,” vowed Vickery. “Quite often, I wonder if life itself isn’t a dream, and a thoroughly unpleasant one most of the time.”
“I believe that of you, Vickery, and Sigmund Freud himself would be puzzled by your dreams,” said Spayte. “But you’re into the supernatural here, Thunstone old man, and I’m not a good friend to the supernatural.”
“Supernatural is the laziest word in the vocabulary of ignorance,” put in Vickery. “Nothing is supernatural, because nothing can transcend the laws of nature. Don’t glitter at me like that, Herr Professor; I’m only quoting from Louis K. Anspacher. I don’t know much about him, but I liked that statement of his enough to commit it to memory.”
“Touche, so I’ll change the word to s
upernormal,” said Spayte. “Let me ask you a cheeky question, Thunstone, and you can answer it or not as you choose. Do you take drugs of any sort?”
“Not the kind you mean,” replied Thunstone, with a grin. “The only narcotics I ever use, and I try to use them temperately, are alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee.”
“All good of their kind,” said Vickery approvingly. “Let me say something, Thunstone. I believe your whole story, believe it implicitly, and 1 can offer a good precedent for evidence of journeying back to the past.”
"What sort of precedent, for God’s sake?” demanded Spayte.
"It’s in a very interesting book called An Adventure, and there’s an equivocal title for you, I grant, but it tells about an adventure, right enough. It seems that in 1901 there were two highly intelligent and deeply respected English schoolmistresses, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdan, who visited Versailles and went into the Trianon gardens, where the French court liked to amuse itself before the Revolution wiped out the court and the courtiers, at the end of the eighteenth century.”
"Yes, of course,” said Thunstone, interested. "I’ve read about that. There have been some interesting articles.”
"I’ve seen the book myself, some years back,” added Spayte, finishing his quiche.
"And I happen to own a copy, edition of the 1930s,” continued Vickery. "Let me just summarize for you. These ladies—and I say again, they came from distinguished families of educators and churchmen—well then, they walked into the Trianon gardens, not paying attention to which way they took, and they found themselves among people in eighteenth century costumes.”
"Masqueraders,” growled Spayte in his beard.
"Yes, that’s been charged,” said Vickery, unabashed. "They spoke to some of these in French, and found the conversations more or less mystifying. They crossed a bridge, over a ravine where a cataract flowed, and at last they came back among scenes and people of their own time, the beginning of the twentieth century.”
"I remember some of those details,” nodded Thunstone, but Spayte kept a gloomy silence.
"All right then,” went on Vickery, "these two ladies came away wondering exactly what it was they had seen. They wrote out their impressions, both of them. They studied maps of Trianon, and didn’t understand. Buildings on the map didn’t agree with the buildings they had seen on their walk; some seemed to have been moved, some seemed to have disappeared.”
“The accounts I’ve seen had maps to demonstrate that,” said Thunstone. Spayte still was silent.
“They brought their accounts to show to the SPR, the Society for Psychical Research,” Vickery warmed to his story. “Had they journeyed into the past, they wondered. The SPR brushed them off. In those days, it included distinguished scholars like Sir William Crookes, like Sir Oliver Lodge. People who read their accounts said they were all wrong, especially about the ravine and the cataract and the bridge, none of which existed in the Trianon gardens at the time of that visit in 1901. And that sort of disbelief went on after they published the first edition of their written recollections.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Thunstone. “They did a lot of research, carloads of it. They even identified people they’d met on their walk, gave their names as courtiers and servants of the year 1789, isn’t that the date?”
“So they did,” said Spayte. “They even purported to have seen Marie Antoinette.”
“And finally,” said Vickery, “after their book had been published and pretty much derided by all the reviewers who cared to notice it at all—after they’d been accused of having illusions, perhaps of making up the whole story—a map turned up, in 1913 as I remember, an old lost map crumpled and stuffed up a chimney in a house where Jean- Jacques Rousseau had lived. And that map showed the gardens as those two ladies had seen it in 1901 and as it had been in 1789—all the buildings in their 1789 places, and it included the vanished ravine and the bridge and so on.”
Triumphantly Vickery spread his hands, with a fragment of his Scotch egg in one of them. “And since then,” he said, “there’s been a whole lot of taking back of all the sneers and charges.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Thunstone. “What’s your opinion, Spayte?”
“It’s certainly an interesting story,” replied Spayte. “A curious one. And I’m afraid I must reserve judgment.”
“Which means, you're afraid to give the right answer to the thing,” charged Vickery good-humoredly.
“I don’t know where to go for a logical answer,” said Spayte.
“Try going to Einstein,” urged Vickery. “To Einstein’s theory of relativity, and what J. W. Dunne calls serialism. The point they make is, we're cramped into a three-dimensional world. We experience it only instant by instant of time.”
"Thomas de Quincey had one of his opium dreams about that," said Spayte. "About a water clock, and drops passing through, a hundred of them every second. When the fiftieth drop was on its way through, forty-nine drops didn’t exist because they were gone, and fifty more drops didn’t exist because they were yet to come. That’s the way it happens here with us, a hundredth of a second at a time. That’s what time is, a scrap of a second.’’
"But time exists,’’ Vickery pursued, "so that if we can get out of our three dimensions into the fourth dimension of time—’’
"Yes, yes,” broke in Spayte impatiently. "I’ve heard that all, many times before. Thunstone says he got into it in the dark. But surely, Thunstone, there are lights all over this little village of yours.” "They have streetlights all along their main way, Trail Street, and in shops and houses,” said Thunstone. "But when I turn out the light in my room it’s full darkness there, and then the other landscape comes back, all dark night except for stars overhead, and no village at all.”
Spayte tweaked his elegant beard. "Thunstone, you know by now how much I like you,” he said. "You’ve been entertained at my home, and my wife rhapsodizes about you until I begin to be jealous. But I must protest against these imaginings. Imagination can’t come into something like this.”
"Can it not?” said Vickery, his warrior face seamed into a smile. "I’ve read the statement of a great, great man that imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Spayte swung his own face toward Vickery. "What’s that you’re saying? Whoever offered such drivel as that?”
"I can answer that,” said Thunstone, himself smiling. "It was written by someone we’ve just been discussing—Albert Einstein, in an essay he called ‘On Science.’ It’s comforted me in the past.”
"And it’s comforted me, too,” seconded Vickery. "Come now, Spayte, you aren’t going to fly up and have a fit in the face of Einstein, now are you?”
Spayte furrowed his brow. “All this is interesting. I'll look that passage up. But let’s just get back to Thunstone.”
“From the sublime to the ridiculous,” said Thunstone.
Spayte shook his head impatiently. “Let’s get back to you without so many sarcasms. You make everything dark in your room, you say, and that brings you back into what you think is the distant past.” Spayte shook his head again. “Could we do that?”
“Maybe not everybody can,” said Thunstone. “Maybe it calls for something in a special individual, as with those two schoolmistresses at Versailles.”
“Or like you, at Claines,” said Vickery. “Or your little witch girl, Constance Bailey you called her. Is she pretty? I do hope so.”
“This man Ensley, who’s been such a stumbling block to honest researchers,” said Spayte. “What does he think about all this? Popping back and forth in time, and so on.”
“What he thinks he isn’t about to tell,” replied Thunstone. “He can irritate you by saying nothing, while all the time he hints that he could say a good deal. He does have one thing he repeats, a reference to ten thousand years ago. Well, I’m going to have dinner with him at his Chimney Pots house tomorrow.”
“I hope it’s a good dinner,” said Vickery.
“
Well,” said Thunstone, “I've already had a good lunch there. Luncheon, I suppose I should say. But now, gentlemen, I wanted to talk to both of you face to face, give you my report, get your reactions, clarify things by talking. So I’ll go catch a bus back to Claines.”
“This evening?” said Spayte. “I’d hoped you’d come and stay at my place.”
“I’m going to church there tomorrow morning.”
“Church?” Vickery almost squeaked, as though that was the strangest thing he had heard from Thunstone. “Look here, I’m coming to Claines with you.”
“And I’ll do the same, if you’ll just give me time to telephone my wife and buy a toothbrush somewhere,” said Spayte. “I daresay this Fothergill lady will have lodging for us.”
“No, please,” said Thunstone. “Don’t either of you come.”
“Whyever not?” Vickery protested. “All three of us should be there; we could do a lot more than just one.”
“I doubt if three could do anything,” said Thunstone. “Just I myself have come in for a lot of notice in that little hamlet. Three of us together would be just too rich for the blood of the people. If there's anything to be found out, you can bet it would be squirreled * away out of our collective sight.”
Spayte frowned at him. “You're going back there alone, then? And whatever are you going to be up to?”
“Frankly, I'm not sure,” said Thunstone. “But let me have tonight and tomorrow—Sunday—and Sunday night. They're going to turn the Dream Rock at midnight Sunday, and it's plain that something special is due to happen. If you and Vickery want to visit Claines, come on Monday morning. Ask for me at the Moonraven—that's a good pub, almost as good as this one—or across the street at Mrs. Fothergill’s.”
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