The Time Machine Chapter 7

Books at Bedtime by Calming Anxiety, the Time Machine, Chapter 7, a sudden shock.

As I stood there, musing over this too perfect triumph of man, the full moon, yellow and large, came up out of an overflow of silver light in the northeast. The bright little figures ceased to move about below, a noiseless owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the night. I determined to send and find where I could sleep. I looked for the building I knew, then my eyes traveled along to the figure of the white spinks upon the pedestal of bronze, growing distinct as a light of the rising moon, grew brighter.

I could see the silver birch against it. There was the tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in the pale light, and there was the little lawn. I looked at the lawn again, a queer doubt chilled my complacency. No, said I stoutly to myself, that was not the lawn, but it was the lawn.

For the white, that prist face of the spinks was towards it, can you imagine what I felt at this conviction came home to me, but you cannot. The Time Machine was gone. Not once, like a lash across the face came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation.

I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop my breathing. In another moment, I was in a passion of fear and running with great leaping strides down the slope. Once I fell headlong and cut my face, I lost no time in starching the blood, but jumped up and ran on. With a warm trickle down my cheek and chin.

All the time I ran, I was saying myself, they have moved it a little, pushed under the bushes out of the way, nevertheless I ran with all my might. All the time, with certainty that sometimes comes with excessive dread. I knew that such assurance was folly, new instinctively, that the machine was removed out of my reach. My breath came with pain.

I suppose I covered the whole distance from the hillcrest little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten minutes, and I am not a young man. I cursed aloud as I ran at my confident folly in leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby. I cried aloud and none answered, not a creature seemed to be stirring in that moonlit world. When I reached the lawn, my worst fears were realised.

Not a trace of the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran around it furiously as if the thing might be hidden in a corner and then stopped abruptly with my hands clutching my hair. Above me towered the swings, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining lepros in the light of the rising moon, it seemed to smile in mockery at my dismay.

I may have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their physical and intellectual inadequacy. That is what dismayed me, the sense of some hitherto unsuspected power, through whose intervention my invention had vanished. Yet, for one thing I felt assured, unless some other age had produced its exact duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time. The attachment of the levers I will show you the method later, prevented anyone from tampering with it in a way that they were removed.

It had moved and was hid only in space, but then, where could it be? I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I remember running violently in and out amongst the moonlit bushes all around the sphinx, and startling some white animal that, in the dim light, I took for a small deer. I remember to, late that night, beating the bushes with my clench fist until my luckles were gashed and bleeding from the broken twigs.

Then sobbing and raving in my anguish of mind, I went down to the great building of stone. The big hall was dark, silent and deserted. I slipped on the uneven floor and fell over one of the tables, almost breaking my shin. A little match went on past the dusty curtains of which I have told you.

I found a second, great hall covered with cushions upon which perhaps a score or so of the little people was sleeping. I have no doubt they found my second appearance strange enough, coming suddenly out of the quiet darkness with an articulate noises and a splutter and a flare of a match, for they have forgotten about matches. Here is my time machine I began, bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon them and shaking them up together. It must have been very queer to them.

Some laughed, most of them looked sorely frightened. When I saw them standing around me, it came into my head that I was doing as foolish a thing as possible for me to do under the circumstances, in trying to revive the sensation of fear. For reasoning from their daylight behaviour, I thought that fear must be forgotten. A abruptly, I dashed down the match and knocking one of the people over in my calls went blundering across the big dining hall again, out under the moonlight.

I heard cries of terror and their little feet running and stumbling this way in that. I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up high in the sky. I suppose it was an unexpected nature of my loss that maddened me. I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind, a strange animal in an unknown world.

I must have raved to and fro, screaming and crying upon God and fate. I have a memory of horrible fatigue as the long night of despair wore away of looking in this impossible place and there, of groping amongst the moonlit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows, a last of lying on the ground near the swings and weeping with absolute wretchedness, even anger the folly of leaving the machine having leaked away with my strength. I had nothing left but misery, then I slept and when I woke again it was full day and a couple of sparrows were hopping round the on the turf within reach of my arm. I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember how I had got there and why I had such a profound sense of desertion and despair.

Then things came clear in my mind, with the plain reasonable daylight I could look my circumstances fairly in the face. I saw the wild folly of my friends the overnight and I could not reason with myself. Suppose the worst I said, suppose the machine all together lost, perhaps destroyed. It behoves me to be calm and patient, to learn the way of the people, to get a clear idea the method of my loss and the means of getting materials and tools so that in the end perhaps I may make another.

That would be my only hope, a poor hope perhaps, but better than despair and after all it was a beautiful and curious world. Probably the machine had only been taken away, still I must be calm and patient, find its hiding place and recover it by force or cunning and with that I scrambled to my feet and looked about me wondering where I could bathe. I felt weary, stiff and travel soiled. The freshness of the morning made me desire an equal freshness.

I had exhausted my emotion. Indeed as I went about my business I found myself wondering at my intense excitement overnight. I made a careful examination of the ground about the little lawn. I wasted some time in futile questions conveyed as well as I was able to such that the little people has came by.

They all failed to understand my gestures, some were simply stoddied, some thought it was adjased and laughed at me. I had the hardest task in the world to keep my hands off the pretty laughing faces. It was a foolishness pulse, but the devil begotten of beer and blind anger was ill-curved and still eager to take advantage of my perplexity. The turf though gave better counsel.

I found a groove ripped in it about midway between the pedestal of the swings and the marks of my feet were on arrival. I had struggled with the overturned machine. There were other signs of removal about. With queer narrow footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth.

This directed my closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have said, of bronze. It was not a mere block but highly decorated with deep frame panels on either side. I went and wrapped on these.

The pedestal was hollow. Examining the panels with care, I found them discontinuous with the frames. There were no handles or keyhels, but possibly the panels, if they were doors as I suppose, opened from within. One thing was clear enough to my mind.

It took no very great mental effort to interfere that my time machine was inside that pedestal, but how it got there was a different problem. I saw the heads of two orange-clad people camning through the bushes and under some blossom covered apple trees towards me. I turned, smiling to them and beckon them to me. They came and then pointing to the bronze pedestal.

I tried to intimate my wish to open it. But my first gesture towards this they behaved very oddly. I don't know how to convey their expression to you. I suppose you have to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded woman.

Is that is how it would look? They went off as if they had received the last possible insult. I tried a sweet-looking little chap in white next, with exactly the same result. Somehow his manner made me feel ashamed of myself.

But as you know, I wanted the time machine and I tried him once more. As he turned off like the others, my temper got the better of me. And three strides I was after him had him by the loose part of his robe around his neck and began dragging him towards his slings. Then I saw the horror and repagnance of his face and all of a sudden I let him go.

But I was not beaten yet. I banged with my fist at the bronze panel. I thought I heard something stir inside to be explicit. I thought I heard a sound like a chuckle.

But I must have been mistaken. Then I got a big pebble from the river and came and hammered till I had flattened the coil of them the decorations. And the moss came off in powdery flakes. The delicate little people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away, on either hand, but nothing came of it.

I saw a crowd of them, pond the slopes, looking furtively at me. At last hot and tired. I sat down to watch the place. But I was too restless to watch long.

I am too accidental for a long vigil. I could not work at a problem for years, but to wait in active 24 hours, that is another matter. I got up after a time and began walking aimlessly through the bushes towards the hill again. Patients I sit to myself.

If you want your time machine again, you must leave the sphinx alone. They mean to take your machine away. It is little good, you wrecking their bronze panels. And if they don't, you will get it back as soon as you can ask for it.

To sit amongst all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. If I face this world, learn its ways, watch it, be careful of two hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.

Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind. The thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that a man had ever devised. Although it was at my own expense, I could not help myself.

I laughed out loud. Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people avoided me. It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to do with my hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure of the avoidance.

I was careful, however, to show no concern and to abstain from any pursuit of them, and in the course of the day or two things got back to the old footing. I made what progress I could in the language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here and there. Either I met some subtle point of their language, or it was excessively simple, almost exclusively composed of concrete, substantive and verbs. There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of figurative language.

Their sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any of the simplest propositions. I determined to put the thought to the time machine, and the mystery of the bronze door under the strings, as much as possible in the corner of my memory, until my growing knowledge would leave me back to them in an actual way. Yet a certain feeling you may understand tethered me in a circle of a few miles around the point of my arrival.