Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (108 page)

3

Next
day
Trimmer
s
few
regular
customers
noticed
that
he
looked ill
and
preoccupied.
He
handed
the
wrong
article
and
the
wrong change.
His
lips
moved
as
if
he
were
talking
to
himself.

As
a
matter
of
fact,
he
was
trying
to
convince
himself
that
his experience
of
the
night
before
was
a
dream—trying
and
failing.
What he
half
believed
was
something
at
which
his
Cockney
common-sense rose
in
rebellion.
By
some
law
contrary
to
that
of
Nature
he
had
been free
to
wander
in
another
age
while
Time,
as
we
count
it,
had
stood still
and
waited
for
him.
Either
that
or
he
was
mad.

He
determined
to
keep
his
clock
exactly
right
according
to
Green
wich time, and be on the watch that night
just before the stroke of twelve to see if the same thing happened again. But
this time he would not venture out of To-day, would not leave his shop and risk
the nameless dangers that awaited him in another age.

Eagerly
and yet fearfully he awaited the coming of night. At nine o'clock he went down
to the Station Hotel and stayed there until closing time, drinking brandy.
Having returned to his shop, he paced the parlour at the back until ten minutes
to twelve, when he took a candle into the shop and waited.

Fearfully he stared through the lifted blind
on the door and out
over the steam-tarred road. It was raining gently, and he saw the
drops dancing on the surface of a puddle. He watched them until
he had almost hypnotized himself; until
----------

He
felt himself start violently. It was as if the road and the house opposite had
given themselves a sudden, convulsive twitch. Suddenly and amazingly it was not
dark, but twilight. Opposite him, instead of a row of houses, was a hedge, with
a rude rustic gate set in it. He found himself looking across fields. He saw a
cluster of cows, a haystack, beyond a further hedge the upturned shafts of a
derelict plough.

The
road was still there, but it had changed out of knowledge. It was narrower,
rutted, and edged with grass. As he looked he heard a jingling of bells, and a
phaeton, with big yellow wheels, drawn by a high-stepping white horse, came
gliding past.

Wonder
rather than fear was his predominating emotion. The musical tooting of a horn
startled him, and he heard the crisp sound of trotting horses and the lumbering
of heavy wheels.

Into
view came a coach and four, with passengers inside and out, a driver, with many
capes, and a guard perched up behind pointing his long, slim horn at Harrow
Hill. Immediately he recognized their clothes as something like those he had
seen in pictures, on the covers of the boys' highwaymen stories he read and
sold.

"It's
safe enough," he reflected, with a strange elation. "Why, it ain't
more than a hundred and fifty years ago!"

He
wrenched open the door of his shop and passed out into the twilight of a June evening
in the eighteenth century. Looking back, he saw that his shop stood alone as
before, but this time it broke the line of a hawthorn hedge, on which red and
white blossom was de
caying
and
dying.
The
scent
of
it
blended
in
his
nostrils
with
the odour
of
new-mown
hay.

He
felt
now
eager
and
confident,
entirely
fearless.
He
was
safe
from the
prehistoric
horror
that
had
attacked
him
the
night
before.
Why, he
was
in
an
age
of
beer
and
constables
and
cricket
matches.

With
light
steps
he
began
to
walk
up
the
road
towards
London. It
was
his
privilege
now
to
wander
without
danger
in
another
age,
and see
things
which
no
other
living
man
had
ever
seen.
An
old
yokel, leaning
against
a
gate,
stared
at
him,
went
on
staring,
and,
as
he drew
nearer,
climbed
the
gate
and
made
his
way
hurriedly
across
a hayfield.
This
reminded
him
that
he
looked
as
strange
to
the
people of
this
age
as
they
looked
to
him.
He
wished
he
had
known,
so
that he
could
have
hired
an
old
costume
and
thus
walked
inconspicuously among
them.

He
must
have
walked
half
a
mile
without
coming
upon
one
single familiar
landmark.
A
finger-post
told
him
what
he
already
knew— that
he
was
four
miles
from
Ealing
Village.
He
paused
outside
an inn
to
read
a
notice
which
announced
that
the
stage-coach
Highflyer,
plying
between
London
and
Oxford,
would
arrive
at
the
George at
Ealing
(
d.v
.)
at
10
.45
^A
-
^M
-
^on
Mondays,
Wednesdays
and
Fridays. He
was
turning
away,
having
read
the
bill,
when
he
first
saw
Miss Marjory.

She
was,
if
you
please,
a
full
seventeen
years
of
age,
and
husband-high
according
to
the
custom
of
her
times.
She
wore
a
prim
little bonnet,
a
costume
of
royal
blue,
and
carried
a
silk
parasol
which, when
open,
must
have
looked
ludicrously
small.
He
had
one
full glance
at
her
piquantly
pretty
face
and
saw,
for
the
fraction
of
an instant,
great
blue
eyes
staring
at
him
in
frank
wonderment.
She lowered
her
gaze
abruptly,
with
an
air
of
conscious
modesty,
when she
saw
that
he
had
observed
her.