The Shadow Out of Time | Page 4

in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile.
It was about one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but the stranger's motor still at the curb. By 4 o'clock the motor was certainly gone.
It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call--a long-distance one--was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.
When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting room--in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished top were scratches showing where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away.
In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning of the every remainmg scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after a hypodermic injection it became more regular.
At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto masklike face began to show signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11.30 I muttered some very curious syllables--syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just afternoon--the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned--I began to mutter in English.
"--of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of--"
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back--a spirit in whose time scale it was still Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.

Chapter 2
My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless matters to be adjusted.
What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining custody of my second son, Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume my teaching--my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.
I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I realized how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane--I hoped--and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the World War turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion.
My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness--seemed subtly disordered so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one's mind all over etenity for knowledge of past and future ages.
The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences--as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set a against them.
When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity--then discussed only in learned circles--which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.
But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular work in 1915. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying shape--giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed had suffered displacement. been an in-
Thus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body's late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines.
Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with some background of black knowledge which festered in the