But Roger interposed. “My uncle means the civil wars. Surely it was in the middle of the troubles that your trance began?”
3
It was by way of such stumblings and misapprehensions that Jeremy gained at last a partial and confused picture of the world into which he had fallen. He had been the first to tire, but the old priest had been very unwilling to let him go.
“No, no,” he said again and again, as Jeremy strove to rise, “you must first tell me ...”—while Roger sat watching them with an air of inalterable mildness. Roger had taken but a little part in the conversation. His notions of the twentieth century were extraordinarily vague and inaccurate; and when he had been rebuked once or twice for ignorance he had shrugged his shoulders, placidly observing that it mattered very little, and had said no more.
Jeremy crept into bed very late by the light of a flickering candle, desiring only to forget everything, to postpone all effort of thought until another day. But when he had blown out his candle, and nothing remained but a patch of moonlight thrown through the window on the opposite wall, his mind grew active again. It was indeed absurd to be lying there in the darkness with nothing to give him ocular evidence of his strange misfortune, nothing visible at all but the square of pale radiance, barred by the heavy leads of the pane.
He might have been in bed in some old-fashioned country inn, the chance lodging of a night, where there would have been just such a window, and where the sheets would have been as coarse and heavy as these were. But then, a mile, or two miles, or five miles away there would have been a railway station, whence sooner or later a train would have carried him back to the flat in Holborn, back to his lectures and the classes of intelligent young men and women eager for rational instruction in the mysteries of the universe. He thought of that station, and for a moment could see it as vividly as he desired it, could picture the fresh morning walk there, the little, almost deserted platform with a name picked out in white pebbles, the old porter.... He could conjure up the journey and even the smoky approach to London. But here, though as he had learnt there were still trains, there was certainly no train which could do that for him.
He shifted uneasily on to the other side, and recognized with a groan that this was an empty vision. It behooved him to make himself at home as much and as soon as he could in the year two thousand and seventy-four, to learn what this world was like, to adapt himself to it.
“We are a diminished people,” was the burden of the priest’s lament. “Our ancestors were wise and rich and strong, but we have lost nearly all they had, and we shall never regain it.” And he had rehearsed the marvels of the twentieth century, trains leaving every town in constant succession, motors on the roads, aeroplanes overhead, steamers on the sea. But the steamship, owing to the difficulties of its construction, had practically ceased to exist. A rapidly growing percentage of accidents, due to faulty workmanship, had driven the aeroplane altogether out of use. There were still a few motors; but these had long been less reliable, and were now growing less speedy, than the horse. As for trains—there were still trains running to and from London. One went to Edinburgh every week, and two to Liverpool and Bristol. The trains to Dover, to the Midlands and to Yorkshire were even more frequent. The line from London to the West of England was still open, but that district had now little importance, and trains were dispatched there only when there was some special reason.
Roger treated his uncle’s laments with gentle and reasonable sarcasm. “I think,” he said weightily, “that you exaggerate. I’m not convinced that the old times were as wonderful as you think. Why, so far as railways go, I know something about railways. It’s part of my duties. And I know this, that engines are always breaking down. I take it that even in the old times an engine that had broken down wouldn’t go. And I imagine that our clever ancestors had just as much trouble as we have in keeping the lines up. Now this week the train from Edinburgh is two days overdue, because there’s been a landslide in the Midlands. I suppose you’ll agree,” he added, turning to Jeremy, “that even in your time a train couldn’t get through a landslide.”
Jeremy had agreed. “I daresay,” Roger went on, “that the railways aren’t as good now as they were before the troubles. But we’re going to improve them. The Speaker talks about repairing the old line that went out to the eastern counties. You know—you can still see parts of it near Chelmsford.”