Chapter 8
When I awoke I felt greatly refreshed, and lay a considerable time in adozing state, enjoying the sensation of bodily comfort. The experiencesof the day previous, my waking to find myself in the year 2000, thesight of the new Boston, my host and his family, and the wonderfulthings I had heard, were a blank in my memory. I thought I was in mybed-chamber at home, and the half-dreaming, half-waking fancies whichpassed before my mind related to the incidents and experiences of myformer life. Dreamily I reviewed the incidents of Decoration Day, mytrip in company with Edith and her parents to Mount Auburn, and mydining with them on our return to the city. I recalled how extremelywell Edith had looked, and from that fell to thinking of our marriage;but scarcely had my imagination begun to develop this delightful themethan my waking dream was cut short by the recollection of the letter Ihad received the night before from the builder announcing that the newstrikes might postpone indefinitely the completion of the new house.The chagrin which this recollection brought with it effectually rousedme. I remembered that I had an appointment with the builder at eleveno'clock, to discuss the strike, and opening my eyes, looked up at theclock at the foot of my bed to see what time it was. But no clock metmy glance, and what was more, I instantly perceived that I was not inmy room. Starting up on my couch, I stared wildly round the strangeapartment.
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 touches whichmake it a person. Strange that the sense of this inability should besuch anguish! but so we are constituted. There are no words for themental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping formyself 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 had beenpassing before my mind concerned a generation long, long ago moulderedto dust. Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room claspingmy temples with all my might between my hands to keep them frombursting. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my face in thepillow, lay without motion. The reaction which was inevitable, from themental elation, the fever of the intellect that had been the firsteffect of my tremendous experience, had arrived. The emotional crisiswhich had awaited the full realization of my actual position, and allthat it implied, was upon me, and with set teeth and laboring chest,gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there and foughtfor my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling,associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolvedand 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 to fascinateme 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 hour wasvery early, it being not yet fairly light, and I found no one in thelower part of the house. There was a hat in the hall, and, opening thefront 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 of thecity, visiting most quarters of the peninsular part of the town. Nonebut an antiquarian who knows something of the contrast which the Bostonof today offers to the Boston of the nineteenth century can begin toappreciate what a series of bewildering surprises I underwent duringthat time. Viewed from the house-top the day before, the city hadindeed appeared strange to me, but that was only in its general aspect.How complete the change had been I first realized now that I walked thestreets. The few old landmarks which still remained only intensifiedthis effect, for without them I might have imagined myself in a foreigntown. A man may leave his native city in childhood, and return fiftyyears later, perhaps, to find it transformed in many features. He isastonished, but he is not bewildered. He is aware of a great lapse oftime, and of changes likewise occurring in himself meanwhile. He butdimly recalls the city as he knew it when a child. But remember thatthere was no sense of any lapse of time with me. So far as myconsciousness was concerned, it was but yesterday, but a few hours,since I had walked these streets in which scarcely a feature hadescaped a complete metamorphosis. The mental image of the old city wasso 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 necessarily strangersthan all the other men and women now on the earth. Had the door of thehouse been locked, I should have been reminded by its resistance that Ihad no object in entering, and turned away, but it yielded to my hand,and advancing with uncertain steps through the hall, I entered one ofthe apartments opening from it. Throwing myself into a chair, I coveredmy burning eyeballs with my hands to shut out the horror ofstrangeness. My mental confusion was so intense as to produce actualnausea. The anguish of those moments, during which my brain seemedmelting, or the abjectness of my sense of helplessness, how can Idescribe? In my despair I groaned aloud. I began to feel that unlesssome help should come I was about to lose my mind. And just then it didcome. I heard the rustle of drapery, and looked up. Edith Leete wasstanding before me. Her beautiful face was full of the most poignantsympathy.
"Oh, what is the matter, Mr. West?" she said. "I was here when you camein. I saw how dreadfully distressed you looked, and when I heard yougroan, I could not keep silent. What has happened to you? Where haveyou been? Can't I do something for you?"
Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture of compassionas she spoke. At any rate I had caught them in my own and was clingingto them with an impulse as instinctive as that which prompts thedrowning man to seize upon and cling to the rope which is thrown him ashe sinks for the last time. As I looked up into her compassionate faceand her eyes moist with pity, my brain ceased to whirl. The tenderhuman sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressure of her fingers hadbrought me the support I needed. Its effect to calm and soothe was likethat of some wonder-working elixir.
"God bless you," I said, after a few moments. "He must have sent you tome 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! Howcould we leave you to yourself so long! But it is over now, is it not?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. "You mustnot think us so heartless as we seemed in leaving you so by yourself. Iscarcely slept las
t night, for thinking how strange your waking wouldbe this morning; but father said you would sleep till late. He saidthat it would be better not to show too much sympathy with you atfirst, but to try to divert your thoughts and make you feel that youwere 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 sensations thismorning." While I held her hands and kept my eyes on her face, I couldalready 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 you been?"
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 told ithere. She was overcome by distressful pity during the recital, and,though I had released one of her hands, did not try to take from me theother, seeing, no doubt, how much good it did me to hold it. "I canthink a little what this feeling must have 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 expression ofcharming archness, passing, as she continued, into one of enthusiasm,"to seem as sorry for you as you wish, but you must not for a momentsuppose that I am really sorry for you at all, or that I think you willlong be sorry for yourself. I know, as well as I know that the worldnow is heaven compared with what it was in your day, that the onlyfeeling you will have after a little while will be one of thankfulnessto God that your life in that age was so strangely cut off, to bereturned to you in this."
Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 Page 8
