red, through the door into the corridor. We followed
him. There in the flickering light of the lamp was the
machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew; a thing of
brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. The Time Machine
143 of 148
Solid to the touch—for I put out my hand and felt the rail
of it—and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory,
and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts, and one
rail bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench,
and ran his hand along the damaged rail. ‘It’s all right
now,’ he said. ‘The story I told you was true. I’m sorry to
have brought you out here in the cold.’ He took up the
lamp, and, in an absolute silence, we returned to the
smoking-room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on
with his coat. The Medical Man looked into his face and,
with a certain hesitation, told him he was suffering from
overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I remember him
standing in the open doorway, bawling good night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a
‘gaudy lie.’ For my own part I was unable to come to a
conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the
telling so credible and sober. I lay awake most of the night
thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see the
Time Traveller again. I was told he was in the laboratory,
and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him.
The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a minute
at the Time Machine and put out my hand and touched The Time Machine
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the lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass
swayed like a bough shaken by the wind. Its instability
startled me extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence of
the childish days when I used to be forbidden to meddle. I
came back through the corridor. The Time Traveller met
me in the smoking-room. He was coming from the house.
He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack
under the other. He laughed when he saw me, and gave
me an elbow to shake. ‘I’m frightfully busy,’ said he, ‘with
that thing in there.’
‘But is it not some hoax?’ I said. ‘Do you really travel
through time?’
‘Really and truly I do.’ And he looked frankly into my
eyes. He hesitated. His eye wandered about the room. ‘I
only want half an hour,’ he said. ‘I know why you came,
and it’s awfully good of you. There’s some magazines
here. If you’ll stop to lunch I’ll prove you this time
travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all. If you’ll forgive
my leaving you now?’
I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import
of his words, and he nodded and went on down the
corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory slam, seated
myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper. What was he
going to do before lunch-time? Then suddenly I was The Time Machine
145 of 148
reminded by an advertisement that I had promised to meet
Richardson, the publisher, at two. I looked at my watch,
and saw that I could barely save that engagement. I got up
and went down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.
As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an
exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a
thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the
door, and from within came the sound of broken glass
falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I
seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a
whirling mass of black and brass for a moment—a figure
so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of
drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm
vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had
gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of
the laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had,
apparently, just been blown in.
I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that
something strange had happened, and for the moment
could not distinguish what the strange thing might be. As I
stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the
man-servant appeared.
We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come.
‘Has Mr. —— gone out that way?’ said I. The Time Machine
146 of 148
‘No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was
expecting to find him here.’
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing
Richardson I stayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller;
waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the
specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But
I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime.
The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as
everybody knows now, he has never returned. The Time Machine
147 of 148
EPILOGUE
One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It
may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among
the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of
Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea;
or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes
of the Jurassic times. He may even now—if I may use the
phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted
Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the
Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer
ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of
our own time answered and its wearisome problems
solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own
part cannot think that these latter days of weak
experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are
indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part.
He, I know—for the question had been discussed among
us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but
cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in
the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that
must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in
the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it The Time Machine
148 of 148
were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—
is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory
of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two
strange white flowers —shrivelled now, and brown and
flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and
strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still
lived on in the heart of man.
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