Chapter 4 (The Time Machine)

01CHAPTER IV In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile thing out of futurity.

02He came straight up to me and laughed into my eyes.

03The absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at once.

04Then he turned to the two others who were following him and spoke to them in a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue.

05There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps eight or ten of these exquisite creatures were about me.

06One of them addressed me.

07It came into my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too harsh and deep for them.

08So I shook my head, and pointing to my ears, shook it again.

09He came a step forward, hesitated, and then touched my hand.

10Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders.

11They wanted to make sure I was real.

12There was nothing in this at all alarming.

13Indeed, there was something in these pretty little people that inspired confidence, a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease.

14And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy myself flinging the whole dozen of them about like ninepins.

15But I made a sudden motion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling the time machine.

16Happily then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the machine, I unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion, and put these in my pocket.

17Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way of communication.

18And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further peculiarities in their Dresden-China type of prettiness.

19Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek.

20There was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly minute.

21Their mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point.

22The eyes were large and mild.

23And, this may seem egotism on my part, I fancied even that there was a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them.

24As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round me smiling, and speaking in soft, cooing notes to each other, I began the conversation.

25I pointed to the time machine, and to myself.

26Then, hesitating for a moment how to express time, I pointed to the sun.

27At once, a quaintly pretty little figure in checkered purple and white followed my gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder.

28For a moment I staggered, though the import of his gesture was plain enough.

29The question had come into my mind abruptly.

30Were these creatures fools?

31You may hardly understand how it took me.

32You see, I had always anticipated that the people of the year eight hundred and two thousand-odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.

33Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children.

34Asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm.

35It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features.

36A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind.

37For a moment I felt that I had built the time machine in vain.

38I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of a thunderclap as startled them.

39They all withdrew a pace or so, and bowed.

40Then came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful flowers altogether new to me, and put it about my neck.

41The idea was received with melodious applause, and presently they were all running to and fro for flowers, and laughingly flinging them upon me, until I was almost smothered with blossom.

42You who have never seen the light can scarcely imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created.

43Then someone suggested that their plaything should be exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while, with a smile at my astonishment, towards a vast gray edifice of fretted stone.

44As I went with them, the memory of my confident anticipations of a profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came with irresistible merriment to my mind.

45The building had a huge entry, and was altogether of colossal dimensions.

46I was naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of little people, and with the big open portals that yawn before me, shadowy and mysterious.

47My general impression of the world I saw over their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long-neglected and yet weedless garden.

48I saw a number of tall spikes of strange white flowers, measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of the waxen petals.

49They grew scattered, as if wild, among the variegated shrubs, but, as I say, I did not examine them closely at this time.

50The time machine was left deserted on the turf among the rhododendrons.

51The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but, naturally, I did not observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions of old Phoenician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that they were very badly broken and weather-worn.

52Several more brightly clad people met me in the doorway, and so we entered.

53I, dressed in dingy, nineteenth-century garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers, and surrounded by an eddying mass of bright, soft-colored robes, and shining white limbs, in a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing speech.

54The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall, hung with brown.

55The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed with colored glass, and partially unglazed, admitted a tempered light.

56The floor was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not plates nor slabs, blocks, and it was so much worn, as I judged by the going to and fro of past generations, as to be deeply channeled along the more frequented ways.

57Transverse to the length were innumerable tables made of slabs of polished stone, raised perhaps a foot from the floor, and upon these were heaps of fruits.

58Some I recognized as a kind of hypertrophied raspberry and orange, but for the most part they were strange.

59Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions.

60Upon these my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise.

61With a pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands, flinging peel and stalks, and so forth, into the round openings in the sides of the tables.

62I was not loathe to follow their example, for I felt thirsty and hungry.

63As I did so, I surveyed the hall at my leisure.

64And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated look.

65The stained-glass windows, which displayed only a geometrical pattern, were broken in many places, and the curtains that hung across the lower end were thick with dust.

66And it caught my eye that the corner of the marble table near me was fractured.

67Nevertheless, the general effect was extremely rich and picturesque.

68There were perhaps a couple of hundred people dining in the hall, and most of them, seated as near to me as they could come, were watching me with interest, their little eyes shining over the fruit they were eating.

69All were clad in the same soft and yet strong silky material.

70Fruit, by the by, was all their diet.

71These people of the remote future were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some carnal cravings, I had to be frugivorous also.

72Indeed, I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the ichthyosaurus into extinction.

73But the fruits were very delightful.

74One, in particular, had seemed to be in season all the time I was there.

75A flowery thing in a three-sided husk was especially good, and I made it my staple.

76At first, I was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and by the strange flowers I saw, but later, I began to perceive their import.

77However, I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future now.

78So soon as my appetite was a little checked, I determined to make a resolute attempt to learn the speech of these new men of mine.

79Clearly, that was the next thing to do.

80The fruits seemed a convenient thing to begin upon, and holding one of these up, I began a series of interrogative sounds and gestures.

81I had some considerable difficulty in conveying my meaning.

82At first, my efforts met with a stare of surprise or inextinguishable laughter, but presently, a fair-haired little creature seemed to grasp my intention and repeated a name.

83They had to chatter and explain the business at great length to each other, and my first attempt to make the exquisite little sounds of their language caused an immense amount of amusement.

84However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted, and presently, I had a score of noun substantives at least at my command.

85And then I got to demonstrate pronouns, and even the verb to eat.

86But it was slow work, and the little people soon tired and wanted to get away from my interrogations, so I determined, rather of necessity, to let them give their lessons in little doses when they felt inclined.

87And very little doses I found they were before long, for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued.

88A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest.

89They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but, like children, they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy.

90The dinner and my conversation beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all those who had surrounded me at first were gone.

91It is odd, too, how speedily I came to disregard these little people.

92I went out through the portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied.

93I was continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would follow me at a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.

94The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the great hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun.

95At first, things were very confusing.

96Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known, even the flowers.

97The big building I had left was situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames had shifted perhaps a mile from its present position.

98I resolved to mount to the summit of a crest perhaps a mile and a half away, from which I could get a wider view of this, our planet, in the year 802,701 A.D.

99For that, I should explain, was the date the little dials of my machine recorded.

100As I walked, I was watched for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendor in which I found the world, for ruinous it was.

101A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of granite, bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like plants, nettles possibly, but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, and incapable of stinging.

102It was, evidently, the derelict remains of some vast structure.

103To what end built, I could not determine.

104It was here that I was destined, at a later date, to have a very strange experience, the first intimation of a still stranger discovery, but of that I will speak in its proper place.

105Looking round with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realized that there were no small houses to be seen.

106Apparently, the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished.

107Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which formed such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared.

108Communism, said I to myself.

109And on the heels of that came another thought.

110I looked at the half-dozen little figures that were following me.

111Then, in a flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft, hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb.

112It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before.

113But everything was so strange.

114Now, I saw the fact plainly enough.

115In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike.

116And the children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents.

117I judged, then, that the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at least, and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.

118Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was, after all, what one would expect.

119For the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations, are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force.

120Where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the state.

121Where violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity, indeed, there is no necessity, for an efficient family.

122And the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children's needs disappears.

123We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete.

124This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the time.

125Later, I was to appreciate how far it fell short of the reality.

126While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola.

127I thought in a transitory way of the oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed the thread of my speculations.

128There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time.

129With a strange sense of freedom and adventure, I pushed on up to the crest.

130There, I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize, corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust, and half smothered in soft moss.

131The armrests cast and filed into the resemblance of griffin's heads.

132I sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day.

133It was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen.

134The sun had already gone below the horizon, and the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple and crimson.

135Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel.

136I have already spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins, and some still occupied.

137Here and there rose a white or silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth.

138Here and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk.

139There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture.

140The whole earth had become a garden.

141So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was something in this way.

142Afterwards, I found I had got only a half-truth, or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth.

143It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane.

144The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind.

145For the first time, I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are present engaged.

146And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough.

147Strength is the outcome of need.

148Security sets a premium on feebleness.

149The work of ameliorating the conditions of life, the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure, had gone steadily on to a climax.

150One triumph of a united humanity over nature had followed another.

151Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward.

152And the harvest was what I saw.

153After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage.

154The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently.

155Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there, and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can.

156We improve our favorite plants and animals, and how few they are, gradually, by selective breeding.

157Now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle.

158We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited, because nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands.

159Someday, all this will be better organized and still better.

160That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies.

161The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and cooperating.

162Things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of nature.

163In the end, wisely and carefully, we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable to suit our human needs.

164This adjustment, I say, must have been done, and done well, done indeed for all time, in the space of time across which my machine had leaped.

165The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi.

166Everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers.

167Brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither.

168The ideal of preventive medicine was attained.

169Diseases had been stamped out.

170I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay.

171And I shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes.

172Social triumphs, too, had been effected.

173I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil.

174There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle.

175The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone.

176It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise.

177The difficulty of increasing population had been met, I guessed, and population had ceased to increase.

178But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the change.

179What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigor, hardship and freedom, conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive, and the weaker go to the wall?

180Conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision.

181And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.

182Now, where are these imminent dangers?

183There is a sentiment arising, and it will grow, against connubial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts.

184Unnecessary things now, and things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a refined and pleasant life.

185I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big, abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of nature.

186For after the battle comes quiet, humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived.

187And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

188Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy that with us is strength would become weakness.

189Even in our own time, certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure.

190Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help, may even be hindrances to a civilized man.

191And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual, as well as physical, would be out of place.

192For countless years, I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil.

193For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak.

194Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet.

195No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind, before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived, the flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace.

196This has ever been the fate of energy in security.

197It takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.

198Even this artistic impetus would at last die away, had almost died in the time I saw.

199To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight.

200So much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more.

201Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity.

202We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and it seemed to me that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last.

203As I stood there in the gathering dark, I thought that, in this simple explanation, I had mastered the problem of the world, mastered the whole secret of these delicious people.

204Possibly, the checks they had devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well, and their numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary.

205That would account for the abandoned ruins.

206Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough, as most wrong theories are.

207End of chapter 4 are not So, as most wrong theories as most wrong theories are not the same.

208as most wrong theories So, as most wrong theories So, So, So, so,