The rain was splashing against the windows one evening in the autumn of our third year at Leyden, when Professor Van Stopp honored us with a visit in the Breede Straat. Never had I seen the old gentleman in such spirits. He talked incessantly. The gossip of the town, the news of Europe, science, poetry, philosophy, were in turn touched upon and treated with the same high and good humor. I sought to draw him out on Hegel, with whose chapter on the complexity and interdependency of things I was just then struggling.
“You do not grasp the return of the Itself into Itself through its Otherself?” he said smiling.
“Well, you will, sometime.”
Harry was silent and preoccupied. His taciturnity gradually affected even the professor. The conversation flagged, and we sat a long while without a word. Now and then there was a flash of lightning succeeded by distant thunder.
“Your clock does not go,” suddenly remarked the professor. “Does it ever go?”
“Never since we can remember,” I replied. “That is, only once, and then it went backward. It was when Aunt Gertrude—”
Here I caught a warning glance from Harry. I laughed and stammered, “The clock is old and useless. It cannot be made to go.”
“Only backward?” said the professor, calmly, and not appearing to notice my embarrassment.
“Well, and why should not a clock go backward? Why should not Time itself turn and retrace its course?”
He seemed to be waiting for an answer. I had none to give. “I thought you Hegelian enough,” he continued, “to admit that every condition includes its own contradiction. Time is a condition, not an essential. Viewed from the Absolute, the sequence by which future follows present and present follows past is purely arbitrary. Yesterday, today, tomorrow; there is no reason in the nature of things why the order should not be tomorrow, today, yesterday.”
A sharper peal of thunder interrupted the professor’s speculations.
“The day is made by the planet’s revolution on its axis from west to east. I fancy you can conceive conditions under which it might turn from east to west, unwinding, as it were, the revolutions of past ages. Is it so much more difficult to imagine Time unwinding itself; Time on the ebb, instead of on the flow; the past unfolding as the future recedes; the centuries countermarching; the course of events proceeding toward the Beginning and not, as now, toward the End?”
“But,” I interposed, “we know that as far as we are concerned the-”
“We know!” exclaimed Van Stopp, with growing scorn. “Your intelligence has no wings. You follow in the trail of Compte and his slimy brood of creepers and crawlers. You speak with amazing assurance of your position in the universe. You seem to think that your wretched little individuality has a firm foothold in the Absolute. Yet you go to bed tonight and dream into existence men, women, children, beasts of the past or of the future. How do you know that at this moment you yourself, with all your conceit of nineteenth-century thought, are anything more than a creature of a dream of the future, dreamed, let us say, by some philosopher of the sixteenth century? How do you know that you are anything more than a creature of a dream of the past, dreamed by some Hegelian of the twenty-sixth century? How do you know, boy, that you will not vanish into the sixteenth century or 2060 the moment the dreamer awakes?”
There was no replying to this, for it was sound metaphysics. Harry yawned. I got up and went to the window. Professor Van Stopp approached the clock.
“Ah, my children,” said he, “there is no fixed progress of human events. Past, present, and future are woven together in one inextricable mesh. Who shall say that this old clock is not right to go backward?”
A crash of thunder shook the house. The storm was over our heads.
When the blinding glare had passed away, Professor Van Stopp was standing upon a chair before the tall timepiece. His face looked more than ever like Aunt Gertrude’s. He stood as she had stood in that last quarter of an hour when we saw her wind the clock.
The same thought struck Harry and myself.
“Hold!” we cried, as he began to wind the works. “It may be death if you—”
The professor’s sallow features shone with the strange enthusiasm that had transformed Aunt Gertrude’s.
“True,” he said, “it may be death; but it may be the awakening. Past, present, future; all woven together! The shuffle goes to and fro, forward and back—”
He had wound the clock. The hands were whirling around the dial from right to left with inconceivable rapidity. In this whirl we ourselves seemed to be borne along. Eternities seemed to contract into minutes while lifetimes were thrown off at every tick. Van Stopp, both arms outstretched, was reeling in his chair. The house shook again under a tremendous peal of thunder. At the same instant a ball of fire, leaving a wake of sulphurous vapor and filling the room with dazzling light, passed over our heads and smote the clock. Van Stopp was prostrated.
The hands ceased to revolve.
IV
The roar of the thunder sounded like heavy cannonading. The lightning’s blaze appeared as the steady light of a conflagration. With our hands over our eyes, Harry and I rushed out into the night.
Under a red sky people were hurrying toward the Stadthuis. Flames in the direction of the Roman tower told us that the heart of the town was afire. The faces of those we saw were haggard and emaciated. From every side we caught disjointed phrases of complaint or despair.
“Horseflesh at ten schillings the pound,” said one, “and bread at sixteen schillings.”
“Bread indeed!” an old woman retorted: “It’s eight weeks gone since I have seen a crumb.”
“My little grandchild, the lame one, went last night”
“Do you know what Gekke Betje, the washerwoman, did? She was starving. Her babe died, and she and her man—”
A louder cannon burst cut short this revelation. We made our way on toward the citadel of the town, passing a few soldiers here and there and many burghers with grim faces under their broad-brimmed felt hats.
“There is bread plenty yonder where the gunpowder is, and full pardon, too. Valdez shot another amnesty over the walls this morning.”
An excited crowd immediately surrounded the speaker. “But the fleet!” they cried.
“The fleet is grounded fast on the Greenway polder. Boisot may turn his one eye seaward for a wind till famine and pestilence have carried off every mother’s son of ye, and his ark will not be a rope’s length nearer. Death by plague, death by starvation, death by fire and musketry—that is what the burgomaster offers us in return for glory for himself and kingdom for Orange.”
“He asks us,” said a sturdy citizen, “to hold out only twenty-four hours longer, and to pray meanwhile for an ocean wind.”
“Ah, yes!” sneered the first speaker. “Pray on. There is bread enough locked in Pieter Adriaanszoon van der Werf’s cellar. I warrant you that is what gives him so wonderful a stomach for resisting the Most Catholic King.”
A young girl, with braided yellow hair, pressed through the crowd and confronted the malcontent. “Good people,” said the maiden, “do not listen to him. He is a traitor with a Spanish heart. I am Pieter’s daughter. We have no bread. We ate malt cakes and rapeseed like the rest of you till that was gone. Then we stripped the green leaves from the lime trees and willows in our garden and ate them. We have eaten even the thistles and weeds that grew between the stones by the canal. The coward lies.”
Nevertheless, the insinuation had its effect. The throng, now become a mob, surged off in the direction of the burgomaster’s house. One ruffian raised his hand to strike the girl out of the way.
In a wink the cur was under the feet of his fellows, and Harry, panting and glowing, stood at the maiden’s side, shouting defiance in good English at the backs of the rapidly retreating crowd.
With the utmost frankness she put both her arms around Harry’s neck and kissed him.
“Thank you,” she said. “You are a hearty lad. My name is Gertruyd v
an der Wert.”
Harry was fumbling in his vocabulary for the proper Dutch phrases, but the girl would not stay for compliments. “They mean mischief to my father”; and she hurried us through several exceedingly narrow streets into a three-cornered market place dominated by a church with two spires. ‘There he is,” she exclaimed, “on the steps of St. Pancras.”
There was a tumult in the market place. The conflagration raging beyond the church and the voices of the Spanish and Walloon cannon outside of the walls were less angry than the roar of this multitude of desperate men clamoring for the bread that a single word from their leader’s lips would bring them. “Surrender to the King!” they cried, “or we will send your dead body to Lammen as Leyden’s token of submission.”
One tall man, taller by half a head than any of the burghers confronting him, and so dark of complexion that we wondered bow he could be the father of Gertruyd, heard the threat in silence.
When the burgomaster spoke, the mob listened in spite of themselves.
“What is it you ask, my friends? That we break our vow and surrender Leyden to the Spaniards? That is to devote ourselves to a fate far more horrible than starvation. I have to keep the oath! Kill me, if you will have it so. I can die only once, whether by your hands, by the enemy’s, or by the hand of God. Let us starve, if we must, welcoming starvation because it comes before dishonor. Your menaces do not move me; my life is at your disposal. Here, take my sword, thrust it into my breast, and divide my flesh among you to appease your hunger. So long as I remain alive expect no surrender.”
There was silence again while the mob wavered. Then there were mutterings around us. Above these rang out the clear voice of the girl whose hand Harry still held—unnecessarily, it seemed to me.
“Do you not feel the sea wind? It has come at last. To the tower! And the first man there will see by moonlight the full white sails of the prince’s ships.”
For several hours I scoured the streets of the town, seeking in vain my cousin and his companion; the sudden movement of the crowd toward the Roman tower had separated us. On every side I saw evidences of the terrible chastisement that had brought this stout-hearted people to the verge of despair. A man with hungry eyes chased a lean rat along the bank of the canal. A young mother, with two dead babes in her arms, sat in a doorway to which they bore the bodies of her husband and father, just killed at the walls. In the middle of a deserted street I passed unburied corpses in a pile twice as high as my head. The pestilence had been there—kinder than the Spaniard, because it held out no treacherous promises while it dealt its blows.
Toward morning the wind increased to a gale. There was no sleep in Leyden, no more talk of surrender, no longer any thought or care about defense. These words were on the lips of everybody I met: “Daylight will bring the fleet!”
Did daylight bring the fleet? History says so, but I was not a witness. I know only that before dawn the gale culminated in a violent thunderstorm, and that at the same time a muffled explosion, heavier than the thunder, shook the town. I was in the crowd that watched from the Roman Mound for the first signs of the approaching relief. The concussion shook hope out of every face. “Their mine has reached the wall!” But where? I pressed forward until I found the burgomaster, who was standing among the rest. “Quick!” I whispered. “It is beyond the Cow Gate, and this side of the Tower of Burgundy.” He gave me a searching glance, and then strode away, without making any attempt to quiet the general panic. I followed close at his heels.
It was a tight run of nearly half a mile to the rampart in question. When we reached the Cow Gate this is what we saw:
A great gap, where the wall had been, opening to the swampy fields beyond: in the moat, outside and below, a confusion of upturned faces, belonging to men who struggled like demons to achieve the breach, and who now gained a few feet and now were forced back; on the shattered rampart a handful of soldiers and burghers forming a living wall where masonry had failed; perhaps a double handful of women and girls, serving stones to the defenders and boiling water in buckets, besides pitch and oil and unslaked lime, and some of them quoiting tarred and burning hoops over the necks of the Spaniards in the moat; my cousin Harry leading and directing the men; the burgomaster’s daughter Gertruyd encouraging and inspiring the women.
But what attracted my attention more than anything else was the frantic activity of a little figure in black, who, with a huge ladle, was showering molten lead on the heads of the assailing party. As he turned to the bonfire and kettle which supplied him with ammunition, his features came into the full light. I gave a cry of surprise: the ladler of molten lead was Professor Van Stopp.
The burgomaster Van der Werf turned at my sudden exclamation. “Who is that?” I said. “The man at the kettle?”
“That,” replied Van der Werf, “is the brother of my wife, the clockmaker Jan Lipperdam.”
The affair at the breach was over almost before we had had time to grasp the situation. The Spaniards, who had overthrown the wall of brick and stone, found the living wall impregnable.
They could not even maintain their position in the moat; they were driven off into the darkness.
Now I felt a sharp pain in my left arm. Some stray missile must have hit me while we watched the fight.
“Who has done this thing?” demanded the burgomaster. “Who is it that has kept watch on today while the rest of us were straining fools’ eyes toward tomorrow?”
Gertruyd van der Wed came forward proudly, leading my cousin. “My father,” said the girl, “he has saved my life.”
“That is much to me,” said the burgomaster, “but it is not all. He has saved Leyden and he has saved Holland.”
I was becoming dizzy. The faces around me seemed unreal. Why were we here with these people? Why did the thunder and lightning forever continue? Why did the clockmaker, Jan Lipperdam, turn always toward me the face of Professor Van Stopp? “Harry!” I said, “come back to our rooms.”
But though he grasped my hand warmly his other hand still held that of the girl, and he did not move. Then nausea overcame me. My head swam, and the breach and its defenders faded from sight.
V
Three days later I sat with one arm bandaged in my accustomed seat in Van Stopp’s lecture room. The place beside me was vacant.
“We hear much,” said the Hegelian professor, reading from a notebook in his usual dry, hurried tone, “of the influence of the sixteenth century upon the nineteenth. No philosopher, as far as I am aware, has studied the influence of the nineteenth century upon the sixteenth. If cause produces effect, does effect never induce cause? Does the law of heredity, unlike all other laws of this universe of mind and matter, operate in one direction only? Does the descendant owe everything to the ancestor, and the ancestor nothing to the descendant? Does destiny, which may seize upon our existence, and for its own purposes bear us far into the future, never carry us back into the past?”
I went back to my rooms in the Breede Straat, where my only companion was the silent clock.
A GUN FOR DINOSAUR
L. Sprague De Camp
No, I’m sorry, Mr. Seligman, but I can’t take you hunting Late Mesozoic dinosaur.
Yes, I know what the advertisement says.
Why not? How much d’you weigh? A hundred and thirty? Let’s see; that’s under ten stone, which is my lower limit.
I could take you to other periods, you know. I’ll take you to any period in the Cenozoic. I’ll get you a shot at an entelodont or a uintathere. They’ve got fine heads.
I’ll even stretch a point and take you to the Pleistocene, where you can try for one of the mammoths or the mastodon.
I’ll take you back to the Triassic where you can shoot one of the smaller ancestral dinosaurs. But I will jolly well not take you to the Jurassic or Cretaceous. You’re just too small.
What’s your size got to do with it? Look here, old boy, what did you think you were going to shoot your dinosaur with?
Oh, you
hadn’t thought, eh?
Well, sit there a minute…. Here you are: my own private gun for that work, a Continental .600. Does look like a shotgun, doesn’t it? But it’s rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .600 Nitro Express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs fourteen and a half pounds and has a muzzle energy of over seven thousand foot-pounds. Costs fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. Lot of money for a gun, what?
I have some spares I rent to the sahibs. Designed for knocking down elephant. Not just wounding them, knocking them base-over-apex. That’s why they don’t make guns like this in America, though I suppose they will if hunting parties keep going back in time.
Now, I’ve been guiding hunting parties for twenty years. Guided ’em in Africa until the game gave out there except on the preserves. And all that time I’ve never known a man your size who could handle the six-nought-nought. It knocks ’em over, and even when they stay on their feet they get so scared of the bloody cannon after a few shots that they flinch. And they find the gun too heavy to drag around rough Mesozoic country. Wears ’em out.
It’s true that lots of people have killed elephant with lighter guns: the .500, .475, and .465 doubles, for instance, or even .375 magnum repeaters. The difference is, with a .375 you have to hit something vital, preferably the heart, and can’t depend on simple shock power.
An elephant weighs—let’s see—four to six tons. You’re proposing to shoot reptiles weighing two or three times as much as an elephant and with much greater tenacity of life. That’s why the syndicate decided to take no more people dinosaur hunting unless they could handle the .600. We learned the hard way, as you Americans say. There were some unfortunate incidents….
I’ll tell you, Mr. Seligman. It’s after seventeen-hundred. Time I closed the office.
Why don’t we stop at the bar on our way out while I tell you the story?
Time Travelers Page 13
