The Plattner Story, and OthersWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science
The Plattner Story, and Others
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories, English
I stuck it with elaborate care into my pocket, and with a whirling
brain walked home through the Regent Street loiterers and the dark
back streets beyond Portland Road. I remember the sensations of that
walk very vividly, strange as they were. I was still so far myself
that I could notice my strange mental state, and wonder whether this
stuff I had had was opium--a drug beyond my experience. It is hard now
to describe the peculiarity of my mental strangeness--mental doubling
vaguely expresses it. As I was walking up Regent Street I found in my
mind a queer persuasion that it was Waterloo station, and had an odd
impulse to get into the Polytechnic as a man might get into a train. I
put a knuckle in my eye, and it was Regent Street. How can I express
it? You see a skilful actor looking quietly at you, he pulls a grimace,
and lo!--another person. Is it too extravagant if I tell you that it
seemed to me as if Regent Street had, for the moment, done that? Then,
being persuaded it was Regent Street again, I was oddly muddled about
some fantastic reminiscences that cropped up. "Thirty years ago,"
thought I, "it was here that I quarrelled with my brother." Then I
burst out laughing, to the astonishment and encouragement of a group of
night prowlers. Thirty years ago I did not exist, and never in my life
had I boasted a brother. The stuff was surely liquid folly, for the
poignant regret for that lost brother still clung to me. Along Portland
Road the madness took another turn. I began to recall vanished shops,
and to compare the street with what it used to be. Confused, troubled
thinking is comprehensible enough after the drink I had taken, but what
puzzled me were these curiously vivid phantasm memories that had crept
into my mind, and not only the memories that had crept in, but also
the memories that had slipped out. I stopped opposite Stevens', the
natural history dealer's, and cudgelled my brains to think what he had
to do with me. A 'bus went by, and sounded exactly like the rumbling
of a train. I seemed to be dipped into some dark, remote pit for the
recollection. "Of course," said I, at last, "he has promised me three
frogs to-morrow. Odd I should have forgotten."
Do they still show children dissolving views? In those I remember one
view would begin like a faint ghost, and grow and oust another. In
just that way it seemed to me that a ghostly set of new sensations was
struggling with those of my ordinary self.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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