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 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.
’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.
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
