I repeated what he had said and he looked steadily at me for a long
minute before he spoke again. “Oh, what’s the use!” he exclaimed,
almost petulantly; “you wouldn’t understand and of course you
wouldn’t believe. I do not understand it myself; but I have to
believe because I know—I know from personal observation. God! if you
could have seen what I have seen.”
“Tell me,” I begged; but he shook his head dubiously.
“Do you realize that there is no such thing as Time?” he asked
suddenly—“That man has invented Time to suit the limitations of his
finite mind, just as he has named another thing, that he can neither
explain nor understand, Space?”
“I have heard of such a theory,” I replied; “but I neither believe
nor disbelieve—I simply do not know.”
I thought I had him started and so I waited as I have read in fiction
stories is the proper way to entice a strange narrative from its
possessor. He was looking beyond me and I imagined that the
expression of his eyes denoted that he was witnessing again the
thrilling scenes of the past. I must have been wrong, though—in fact
I was quite sure of it when he next spoke.
“If that girl isn’t careful,” he said, “the thing will upset and give
her a nasty fall—she is much too near the edge.”
I turned to see a richly dressed and much dishevelled young lady
busily dancing on a table-top while her friends and the surrounding
diners cheered her lustily.
My companion arose. “I have enjoyed your company immensely,” he said,
“and I hope to meet you again. I am going to look for a place to
sleep now—they could not give me a stateroom—I don’t seem to be able
to get enough sleep since they sent me back.” He smiled.
“Miss the gas shells and radio bombs, I suppose,” I remarked.
“Yes,” he replied, “just as a convalescent misses smallpox.”
“I have a room with two beds,” I said. “At the last minute my
secretary was taken ill. I’ll be glad to have you share the room with
me.”
He thanked me and accepted my hospitality for the night—the following
morning we would be in Paris.
As we wound our way among the tables filled with laughing, joyous
diners, my companion paused beside that at which sat the young woman
who had previously attracted his attention. Their eyes met and into
hers came a look of puzzlement and half-recognition. He smiled
frankly in her face, nodded and passed on.
“You know her, then?” I asked.
“I shall—in two hundred years,” was his enigmatical reply.
We found my room, and there we had a bottle of wine and some little
cakes and a quiet smoke and became much better acquainted.
It was he who first reverted to the subject of our conversation in
the Blue Room.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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