THE TIME DRUNKARD

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue III, 18 January 1896, Page 58

THE TIME DRUNKARD

BY

ARTHUR SPERRY.)

ILLUSTRATED BY HAL HURST.

EAR MISS HOULTON,—I scarcely know how to begin writing to you. I feel so sure that I shall be unable to prevent your misunderstanding me, and also that perhaps I deserve to be misunderstood by you, that only the false pluck that comes from desperation enables me to begin. And now that I have begun I am at a loss how to go on. When I asked you to marry me, and you told me not to speak of the matter again for a month, I could not help thinking that it was very strange, because you are usually such a straightforward, outspoken girl. I was much hurt, too, by your refusing to even tell me why you said “No” to my proposal. Then, when I called, you refused to see me, and, on top of it all, three days ago, when I got to the club, Irvine drawled out to me, “ I say, old boy, you know’ Miss Houlton ?” * I looked at him. wondering what was coming. * “ Well,” he said, “ the paper here announces her engagement to old Colonel Haynes.” ‘“Rubbish!” I said. But, when I looked at the paper, I felt as though I were growing twenty years older when I read the paragraph. Irvine saw that something was the matter with me, and as I put the paper down he drawled—•

‘“I say, old boy, you are not interested in that quarter, are you ?” ‘ I could have killed him for the way he said it. I had but one thought—to get away, away from London, where everyone I saw would remind me of you, and of the change that had come over me. It was early, and there was time to catch the mail for Queenstown and the New York boat. You know how alone in the world I am, and how little any living person cares what I do or where I go. I put a few things in a bag, and caught the boat at Queenstown the next morning. ‘Two hours after we left Queenstown I saw Colonel Haynes on the promenade deck. His appearance is as striking as mine is commonplace, and it is no wonder that, though we had only met once, I should know him very well, while he entirely failed to remember me. Naturally, I did not care to make myself known to him, but his going away from you at such a time puzzled me. I thought there must be some mistake in what the paper said. Yet it is hardly possible. I don’t know what to do. I feel that I shall go mad if I do not write this letter to you. Several times I have been on the point of making myself known to the Colonel and congratulating him on his engagement, but I feel that I should not be able to keep from making a fool of myself while I talked to him. At first I thought I would cable to you from New York as soon as I landed, and ask you to wire me at once whether the report in the paper was correct. But perhaps you would be offended. One cannot say everything in a cablegram. So I have decided to be as patient as I can. and wait for you to answer this by cable If the report was wrong, and you will let me come back to London and try to tell you how I love you. the one word ‘ Yes ’ will mean more to me than all the literature in the world. But please wire me either ‘ Yes ’or* No ’ at once. The uncertainty is what I cannot bear. I do not know what I shall do with myself till I have your answer. ' Cable to “ Spencer, F Avenue, New York,” and your message will reach me at the hotel where I shall stop. We will get to New York Friday night or Saturday morning, and this letter will go by the same day’s boat, so that you will have it a week later, and I shall expect your answer the same day. * Be kind to me, Ethel, and end this agony of suspense. Even if you cannot say “ Yes,” wire something, so that I can know my fate. I shall not try now to tell you how much I love you, Ethel. I have tried before, and failed. —Ever yours fondly, • Gerald Spencer.’

Painful as Spencer had found the uncertainty on shipboard, it was trifling to the suspense that followed his landing in New York. Before he posted the letter—and he did this at once —he had it to think about, to alter and extend or shorten. But, after it was sent, there was onlv the dreary wait of a week. He could not interest himself in anything. He walked and drove, but saw nothing of what was about him. He rode from end to end of New York on the overhead railways over and over again. The impatience that surged about him iu the trains suited his mood, and he was more nearly at his ease there than anywhere else. Spencer passed five days of the week in this feverish way, eating little and sleeping only when he dosed himself with bromide. On Friday morning, when he went to ask at the hotel office if any letters for him had come, he stopped to chat with the pleasant-mannered young fellow in the office. ‘ You don’t seem to be enjoying your visit overmuch,’ the hotel clerk said. • I am not enjoving it at all.’ Spencer answered. ‘ I am merely waiting for a very important cablegram, and I cannot get my mind from it long enough to enjoy anything.’ ‘ You should go about a little. Have you been down to Coney Island ?’ Spencer said that he had no wish to go anywhere. The hotel clerk mentioned some of the points of interest in and about New York, but Spencer shook his head wearily. * Go down and make a tour of Chinatown —the Chinese quarter, you know,’ the clerk said. • That will surely interest you. I can get you a young Americanised

Chinaman who will act as guide, and you will be sure to enjoy an afternoon in Chinatown with him.’ At first Spencer demurred, but changed his mind, and said he would go. He felt that some diversion was absolutely necessary. After luncheon the hotel clerk introduced to him an intelligent-looking, bright-eyed, yellowskinned young man, well-dressed and gentlemanly, whose slanting eyes alone bespoke the celestial. With his guide, Spencer went across town and took an overhead train for Chatham Square, where they got out. A few steps through Pell-street took them into the midst of Chinatown—that weirdest of weird dwellingplaces, where the quaintness of the old changeless Chinese civilisation is engrafted on to the modern, everchanging ways of New York. Spencer went through it all like a man in a stupor. The tiny dens of the opium ‘joint’ keepers, like tollhouses in their smallness and prettiness ; the gamblingrooms, where strange games, older than even the languages of the West, were proceeding—some of them in the midst of ceaseless chatter, others in silence ; the grocery shops, where birds’ nests and sharks’ fins were the least strange of the wares displayed for sale ; the Chinese printer’s establishment, where books and papers were being printed by exactly the same methods the proprietor’s ancestors used on the other side of the world before any European nation had even a name——none of the strange things of Chinatown aroused even passing interest in Spencer’s troubled mind. At the Joss House, where an occasional worshipper was burning Joss-paper before the great, grotesque, painted Joss, Spencer was sufficiently interested to ask his guide what it all meant —this solemn worship of a painted thing by grown men. The guide rapidly outlined some of the oddities of Chinese religion. ‘ These men you see burning Joss-sticks before the image,’ he said, ‘ are not seekers of salvation or repentant sinners, as one would expect them to be if they were worshipping in a Christian church. They are simply asking Joss to give them luck in some particular undertaking—gambling, probably.’ ‘ And do you believe in that sort of thing ?’ Spencer asked, as the guide bought a little bundle of Joss-sticks at the counter beside the door from the ante-room through which they had entered. ‘ I am sure,’ said the guide, with a smile, * you do not care to have me discuss my religious views with you. It

is expected that people who come here will invest something in Joss sticks.’ For a moment the troubled look had gone from Spencer's face, but it returned again as the guide talked. The young Chinaman noticed it, and seemed disappointed. ‘lam afraid you do not find Chinatown interesting,’ he said. ‘ I am sorry, for I had hoped you would be amused. ’ • You are no more sorry than I am for my indifference,’ Spencer returned. • At any other time I am sure I should have enjoyed the day very much. But, to tell you the truth, I am not able to interest myself in anything to-day. I am expecting a cablegram that will mean everything to me. It cannot reach me till tomorrow ; but, meanwhile, I am almost insane with anxiety. If your Joss, now,’ —Spencer looked at his guide with a weak smile—‘ if your Joss could make it tomorrow. ’ ‘ Ah 1’ said the guide lightly,’ ‘ you are not a China-

man. But,’ he went on seriously, after a moment’s thought, ‘I have heard that old Hop Wah, the philosopher, can teach anyone how to kill time —how to annihilate it. He is a strange man, Hop Wah. He will interest you, perhaps, even if he does not teach you how to kill time. Shall we go and see him ?’ With the thought that to do so might pass an hour of the time that separated him from the morrow, Spencer assented, and in a few minutes they were in the little waiting room of the Chinese philosopher's residence. The guide explained in Chinese to the servant who stood by the door to the inner room, that Spencer wished to consult Hop Wah. In a moment the servant returned and motioned that Spencer was to enter the inner room. • You must go alone,’ the guide said. ‘ltis a secret. I understand, this time-killing trick. Hop Wah knows English, so you will get on all right. I will wait for you here. ’ The large, square inner room was brightly lighted by large windows. The floor was covered with skins of all sorts and sizes. There were no chairs, but around the walls there were great wide divans, as large as beds, and between them stood strange-looking cabinets of lacquer. One of the walls was occupied bv a cabinet divided into scores of narrow square holes, in each of which was a rolled Chinese rice-paper book. Hop Wah stood in the centre of the room—a little wiry old Chinaman, whose queue was so long that its end rested on the ground at his heels. His black satin tunic was lavishly ornamented with strange gold and silver embroideries, the richly-worked sleeves falling over his hands and hiding them. • And what may I have the pleasure of doing for you ?’ Hop Wah asked, in a pleasant vigorous voice that came strangely from so old a man. The philosopher wore a pair of large, round, tortoiseshell rimmed spectacles, and through their lenses looked the calmest, most searching pair of eyes Spencer had ever gazed into. Any idea that he was going to enjoy a lark, or be amused, that the Englishman may have had before he looked into those eyes, vanished at once. His mind became serious under their silent mastery. ‘ I am tortured by uncertainty regarding a matter that is of the greatest possible importance to me,’ he said. ‘ I expect a message to-morrow or Sunday that will end the uncertainty, but meanwhile the time drags so slowly that I feel as if it were endless. I have been told that

you were able to teach people how to make time pass quickly.’ ‘ It must be that you are in love,’ said Hop Wah, with a smile. ‘ Will you sit down ?’ ‘ Yes.’ Spencer answered, simply. ‘ All I can do ’ said the philosopher, ‘ is to teach you to deceive yourself. Hypnotism, you call it in English. We Chinese think that what you call a hypnotist does not hypnotise his subject, but merely tells the subject how to hypnotise himself. We will try it if you like. But I must warn you not to do this sort of thing again after to-day. You must not get into the habit of killing time in this way. I should like you to promise this before we go on.’ Spencer had become deeply interested. The old man’s eyes, with their calm expression of limitless power, fascinated him. If the Chinese philosopher could but hurry the time when a message would come from the woman he loved, he would promise anything. ‘ Yes, I promise,’ he said, quickly. ‘ Thank you,’ said the philosopher. ‘ Listen to me

now, please. Keep your eyes fixed steadily on wine. Can you bring yourself to imagine that, stretched straight before you, from between your eyes, is a hair, a single slender hair ? It is there : you can just see it. It is very long, as long as Eternity. It is Time. Yes, you see it now, slender and straight, and endless, as endless as Time. But it is unbroken, and you can follow it with your eye far, very far. Is it not so ?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ answered Spencer, eagerly, so readily had his mind followed the Chinese philosopher. • Listen to me again. Inside your head is a reel, a tiny little reel, that winds in the thread of time that you see before you. Listen ! You can hear the steady, clickety-click-click, clickety click click-click, clickety-click-click, clickety-click-click-click, of the mechanism as it draws in the hair. Now it has begun to go faster. Has it not? Listen ! “ Clickety-click, clickety-click, clickety-click, clickety-click,” more and more quickly. Is it not so ?’ Speneer’s face lost its look of anxiety. He smiled. He knew it was all foolishness ; yet there was the pleasant sound of perfect mechanism in his head. He lost all sense of the duration of time. The morrow no longer seemed distant. It was rushing along toward him. as the hair wound into his head. It was coming quickly now, very quickly. ‘ Clickety-click, clicketyclick, clickety-click, clickety-click It was all veryvivid to his overwrought brain. Hop Wall smiled as he saw what was passing through the younger man’s mind. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it will be to-morrow very quickly now. You must hurry back to your hotel and have dinner, so that you will be in time for the theatre to night. You should go to the theatre to night. You will enjoy it, for you will know that this reel in your head is going all the time, faster and faster, bringing to morrow to you. But listen to me a moment longer. Take out your watch, please. Ah, it is a keyless watch. Now press the spring so that you can turn the hands of the watch. Turn them backward, now, backward, backward. There ! The sound in your head has stopped, vou no longer hear the mechanism. It is going slowly, naturally, so that it makes no sound.’ Slowly, scarcely knowing what he was doing, Spencer had taken his watch from his pocket and turned its hands backward, as the philosopher told him to do. The spell was broken. Again time dragged so slowly the morrow seemed an age off. He was angry with himself for having done as the Chinaman told him. and so lost the delightful delusion that had come to his relief. ‘ Now you are all right, my young friend ; you are yourself again,’ said Hop Wah, pleasantly. ‘ I have shown you how to withdraw yourself from the influence under which I placed you, so now you can kill time until you receive the message that you are expecting, and then you can stop the process. My fee is ten

dollars. Thank you. Now, if you will keep your eyes fixed on mine, we will make another start in our fight with time.’ Then, with a few words, more quickly and easily, because Spencer’s mind was so eager to follow, the Chinese philosopher again conjured up the fancy of the hair and the reel that devoured it, and sent Spencer away with the ' clickety-click, clickety-click ’ of the time wheels in his head. ‘ Well, what do you think of him ?’ asked the guide, as Spencer came into the ante-room. ' Wonderful, wonderful,’ Spencer answered. ‘ But we must hurry. I want to go to the theatre after dinner, and it must be getting late.’ Through the evening the charm lasted, and Spencer’s spirits rose as he felt the time slipping by. Events seemed to come and go with the rapidity of a hurried dream. When he awoke the next morning he thought it was very late. His watch, he remembered, would not be right, for he had not set it after turning it backward at the Chinaman’s. He wondered if he could stop the time-killer that was ticking away in his head all the time. He turned the hands of his watch backward. Suddenly the sound in his head ceased, and his normal perception of time returned. The fever of impatience

again seized him, and he dressed hastily and hurried down to the hotel office to see if Ethel's message had come. It was waiting for him. ‘ Come. Must explain,’ the message read simply. Spencer booked homeward on the steamer sailing the same day, the one he had come over in. During the hours he sat alone with his thoughts, sheltered from the wind on the bench at the back of the engine-room, and watched the tossing waves glide past on either side, he could scarcely realise that anyone so happy as he could have been so miserable as he had been as he sat in that same spot little more than a week before. Now the whole future lay bright and smiling before him. Fate had but one favour, and that he had but to claim. He was happy ; and if a thought of the trick the Chinaman had taught him came into his mind, he smiled at the idea that he would ever again be impatient at the slowness with which time passed. That was all over now. He was on his way to the woman he loved, and the time flew with the sparkling wings of happiness. Once, when the steamer’s chaplain came and talked to him, failing to see that Spencer would rather be alone with his thoughts, he tried, as an experiment, to put himself under the influence of the Chinaman’s fantasy. The endless hair, the reel in his head, the ‘ clicketyclick, clickety-click,’ all came back to his mind, as vivid as they had been under the old Chinaman’s masterful eyes, and shortened his boredom, so that he readily forgave the chaplain. When the dinner bell rang through the vessel, Spencer easily freed his mind from the Chinaman’s chimera by turning the hands of his watch backward. Spencer reached London early in the evening, and went at once to Ethel Houlton’s home. She had gone to a dance, and left word that he was to follow her. As soon as he could dress, he went, and found that Ethel had refused all invita-

tions to dance in anticipation of his coming. As they sat in the conservatory, she explained matters to him. Colonel Haynes had been her father’s most valued friend, and when Mr Houlton died four years before, everything except the real estate had been left in the colonel’s hands. Before he died, Ethel’s father asked her if she liked Colonel Haynes well enough to marry him. Ethel had known the colonel all her life, and.

after her father, thought him the finest and best gentleman in the world. She mistook her admiration for love, and she told her father that she loved Colonel Haynes. But Mr Houlton would not allow Ethel to make any promise, except that she would not engage herself to anyone else before she was of age. She went on to tell Spencer how she had become interested in him. and her voice faltered, until Spencer took her hand and kissed it. ‘Keep your story till another time, darling,’ he said. • All I want to know is, that you love me and will marry me.’ ‘ But you must listen,’she said. It is so sad. I feel so sorry for the poor Colonel. He invested the moneypoor papa left in shares or something of the sort that turned out very badly ; he is a very poor man of business, and lost it, but he was too easy-going to know what was happening. He signed bills for other people, too, and had to pay them, and then began borrowing money. Everything he had, as well as what papa entrusted to him is gone, and, worst of all, the money-lenders closed in on him. He told me everything, how much he owed and all the rest, and then asked me if I cared enough for him to save him by marrying him. I had never seen you then, and had never thought of marrying anyone else. Of course, I said ' Yes.’ A week later I met you,

and within a month you asked me to marry you. I hardly knew what to say to you. I loved you, I know that now, and I was within a month of coming of age, and no longer bound by my promise to my father. So I asked you to wait a month for your answer. ‘ The very next day I told Colonel Haynes all about it. He said the money-lenders were pressing him so closely that his solicitor had thought l>est to let his engagement be announced in some of the papers. They would wait then and not take proceedings against him, in the hope that they would get more by waiting. Mamma and I offered to lend him what money we could, but he refused to take a penny and told us that he was going to clear out. This is how he happened to be on the steamer with you.’ None of this was particularly interesting to Spencer. He wanted to talk of his love, the happiness he felt, and of the future. But Ethel wished to make him understand the reasons for her action. As he listened he could not help wishing that she would finish so that they might talk ot other things. Then the thought came to his mind that the finish could easily be hastened. ‘ Dear me,' said the girl, ‘ you are turning your watch back. What do you do that for ?’ ‘ The time passes so quickly, now I am with you, my darling,’ he said. ‘ I was thinking how glad 1 would be if I could turn the evening back as easily as I can my watch.’ ‘ You are a funny boy.’ she said lightly, more pleased than puzzled. A few weeks later they were married, and were both very happy. But sometimes there were trains to be waited for during their honeymooning on the Continent, and sometimes there were shopping excursions to the shrines of fashion that the young bride had to undertake. At such times the fantasy of the thread and its reel recurred to the bridegroom’s mind, and he found that it never failed to hasten the leaden hours that separated him from his wife. All things seemed to go well with Spencer. His wife wished him to be a great man as well as a good one, to shine in his reflected glory. To please her he succeeded in winning a seat in Parliament, and Ethel was happy. He succeeded in all he undertook, and there seemed no limit to his possibilities. The great factor in his success was the capacity for hard work. The disagreeable tasks were cheerfully undertaken, and enthusiastically worked through. The Chinese timekiller hastened the heavy hours that he gave to his work, and quickened the coming of his leisure with its pleasures. He was able to sit out the longest speeches in the House, and none of their weak points escaped him. He was often the only member who knew ail that had been said during a sitting. He felt no imnatience under any circumstances, and was that rare man who was always at his best. But as he came to resort more and more to the Chinese fantasy to relieve him of what was disagreeable in his busy life, to shorten the time during which his pleasures remained in anticipation, a change came over him. The pleasures no longer being deferred, coming quickly to him at his bidding, their anticipation was brief and free from impatience, and their enjoyment tame and without the thrill of satisfied longing The absence of contrast left his life a flat succession of pleasant things that no longer had their full power of pleasing, having little or no foil in the shape ot things not pleasant. One of Spencer's chief delights had been his wife's singing. She was an accomplished musician, and Spencer used to bring home with him all the new music he could find, and spend hours listening to bis wife’s playing and singing, looking forward to these evenings with his two passions. Ethel and music, as ample rewards for the work and worries of his days. But as he came more and more to shorten the duration of what he did not enjoy, the keenness of his enjoyments failed. His wife’s voice was no less musical, nor her instrumentation less skilful, but he had made himself deaf to the discords that were needed to accentuate their harmony. Thoughts of the morrow and its bothers used to come to him as he listened. He turned to the things that had before been unpleasant, for relief from the pleasures that palled on him, because they seemed so uninterrupted. The evenings seemed long, and he was impatient for the morrow with its change. To things that had been wearisome he began to look forward for relief from the monotony of pleasure. He no longer resorted to the time-killer to relieve him from drudgery, but, unconsciously at first, then systematicalv, availled himself of it to shorten the hours that were given to pleasure that no longer pleased. He undertook the compilation of vast masses of statistics to satisfy his craving for that which was disagreeable. He only recalled the Chinaman’s fantasy now to shorten the duration of the time he, from habit, devoted to enjoyment. He had so effectively shielded himself from the tedium of work and worry, that this very tedium, long drawn out by stopping the time-killer, was his only pleasure. But by shortening, obliterating his pleasures, Spencer deprived the unpleasant parts of his existence of the contrast that gave them their character, and they no longer pleased him. He became impatient of both happiness and unhappiness. He found in life no pleasures and no pains. The possibility of being unhappy, and with it the possibility of being happy, were gone from him. There were neither lights nor shades in his life, and it grew unbearable. They found him one wet night in a first-class compartment, with an ugly black hole in his head. — To-Dnu.