The Shadow Out of Time | Page 4

was circular and convex. All this is borne out
by such makers of parts as can be located.
On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper
and the maid until noon of the next day. Lights burned 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