“I know,” he said, after a pause, “that all this will seem impossible to you. But to me the one impossible thing is that I am here tonight in this old room, looking at your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures.” He looked at the Medical Man. “No. I can’t expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie, or as a look into the future. But as a story, what do you think of it?”
He picked up his pipe and began, in his old way, to tap it nervously on the fireplace. For a moment nobody spoke. Then the Editor stood up with a sigh. “What a pity you’re not a writer of stories!” he said, and put his hand on the Time Traveller’s shoulder.
“You don’t believe it?”
“Well…”
“I thought not.” The Time Traveller lit his pipe. “To tell you the truth, I hardly believe it myself. And yet…”
He looked silently at the dry white flowers on the little table. Then he turned his hand over, and I saw half-healed cuts on his fingers.
The Medical Man got up, came to the lamp and looked at the flowers. “It’s a strange thing,” he said, “but I certainly don’t know what kind of flowers these are. May I have them?”
The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly he said, “Certainly not.”
“Where did you really get them?” asked the Medical Man.
The Time Traveller put his hand to his head, like a man trying to hold on to an idea that is slipping away. “Weena put them in my pocket, when I travelled through time.” He looked round the room. “I’m forgetting it all. Did I ever make a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? I must look at that machine. If there is one!”
He quickly picked up the lamp and carried it along the corridor to the laboratory, and we followed him. There in the flickering light was the machine, sure enough: low, ugly and leaning to one side. I put out my hand and felt its rail, and it was solid. There were brown spots on it, bits of grass and moss on the lower parts, and one rail was bent.
The Time Traveller ran his hand along the bent rail. “It’s all right now,” he said. “The story I told you was true. I’m sorry I brought you out here in the cold.” In complete silence we went back to the smoking room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor into his coat. The Medical Man told him, a little uncertainly, that he was working too hard, and at this he laughed loudly. I remember him standing in the open doorway, shouting good night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the story was a “colourful lie”. I did not know what to think. The story was impossible, but he had told it so calmly and seriously. I lay awake most of the night, and the next day I went back to his house.
The Time Traveller met me in the smoking room. He had a small camera under one arm and a bag under the other. He laughed when he saw me. “I’m terribly busy,” he said, “with that thing in there.”
“But isn’t it some trick?” I said. “Do you really travel through time?”
“Really and truly I do.” He looked straight into my eyes. Then he hesitated. “I only want half an hour,” he said. “I know why you came, and it’s very good of you. If you stay for lunch, I’ll prove this time travelling to you, with things I bring back and everything. Will you forgive me if I leave you now?”
I agreed, without really understanding what he meant, and he went off down the corridor. I heard the laboratory door close. After a while I remembered that I had promised to meet someone at two o’clock, so I went down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.
As I took hold of the door handle, I heard a cry that stopped suddenly, then a click and a thud. A rush of air went round me as I opened the door, and I heard broken glass falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. For a moment I seemed to see a ghostly figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass, so transparent that I could see the bench behind it. But when I rubbed my eyes, it was gone. The Time Machine had gone. A pane of glass in the roof had just blown in.
I stood there in amazement. Then the door to the garden opened, and a servant came in.
“Has your master gone out that way?” I asked.
“No, sir. Nobody has come out this way. I thought he was in here.”
Then I understood. I stayed and waited for the Time Traveller, waiting for a second, perhaps even stranger story, and the photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning to fear now that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller disappeared three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.
I often wonder: will he ever return? Perhaps he went back into the past and is living among the wild, hairy people of the Stone Age, or among the dinosaurs. Or perhaps he went forward into a nearer age, when men are still men, but the problems of our own time are solved. He himself, I know, thought little of human progress. He believed that everything we build must one day fall on us and destroy us. If that is true, we must still live as if it were not. To me the future is dark and unknown, lit in a few places by the memory of his story. And I have, for my comfort, two strange white flowers, dry now, brown and flat, as a sign that even when mind and strength had gone, thankfulness and love still lived on in the human heart.