The Artificial Man and Other Stories. Clare Winger Harris

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СКАЧАТЬ this has happened before!” I cried as I poured my husband a third cup of coffee.

      John laid down the morning paper and roared with laughter.

      “I’ll say it has, and it’s liable to happen again tomorrow morning! Did you ever know me to drink fewer than three cups of coffee at breakfast, Ellen?”

      “Oh, you don’t know what I mean,” I responded, a trifle irritably. “I have reference to that feeling that we all have occasionally; that the identical set of circumstances that surround us has existed before in some remote eon of time.”

      “Fiddlesticks!” ejaculated John as he set down his empty coffee cup and folded his napkin. “I’m going to get my car started, as it takes so long these cold mornings.”

      In which unsympathetic mood he donned hat and overcoat and disappeared through the kitchen door. A second later his head was thrust through the reopened door, and a jovial smile spread over his features.

      “Say, Ellen, it strikes me as I go out to get the old bus that this has happened before,” he called back to me.

      “Something else will strike you,” I cried, playfully picking up an empty cup.

      He dodged in mock consternation, then his face grew earnest.

      “But seriously, my dear girl,” he said, “I hope you aren’t getting to believe in all that rot about soul transmigration. Surely you don’t think your personality has been previously decked in other corporeal trappings, do you?”

      “No,” I replied, “I do not believe that. I have always been myself, and you will always be yourself (stubborn as ever)! My explanation of the oft-repeated phenomenon that my life has been lived before exactly as I live it now lies solely in the theory that time, which is the fourth dimension, is, like space, curved, and travels in great cycles. You cannot conceive of either the end of space or time. The law of the universe, as illustrated by the movements of the stars and planets and the endless motion of the molecules and atoms and the whirling of the electrons, proves that orbital motion is a cosmic law and that all things return eventually to their starting point. And so, in the vast cycles of time and space, we repeat our existence upon this earth, and I claim that occasionally a fleeting memory of previous cycles thrusts itself into our consciousness.”

      “Too deep for me,” said John with a shrug. “I must get down to the office and, by the way, an apple pie for dinner tonight would be greatly appreciated! I haven’t had any for a long time.”

      “Do you like my apple pies, John?” I asked smiling.

      “Do I? You are an expert at it. I suppose,” he added as he all but disappeared through the crack of the door as it stood slightly ajar, “the infinite number of times that you have baked apple pies in previous cycles of existence has made you adept in that line!”

      The door closed and he was gone.

      Dear John! Of course he understood the theory as well as I did, but he was forced out among associates in the business world and it was essential that his mind be continually occupied with the practical affairs of life. Dreamers might be vouchsafed glimpses of the truth, but did such visions always prove beneficial? There was no doubting that John was a greater success in life than I, whether he grasped the significance of certain cosmic truths or not!

      “After all,” I mused, “the difference between the great and the small, the infinite and the finite, right and wrong, good and evil, is sometimes one of degree and not of quality. The most difficult is simple if we follow the rules. The people who make a muddle of their lives have deliberately, though unknowingly, chosen the harder way. They are lawbreakers, not necessarily in our legal sense, but they are transgressors of Universal Law. Had they simply worked in harmony with the Law, success would have come easily.”

      “I have not always worked in harmony with the Law,” I thought. “None of us have. Do I, now in this cycle of time, possess the ability to change errors performed in previous eons, or am I a mere puppet, destined to a certain definite course of action throughout eternity? Was Henley right or wrong when he wrote, ‘I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul?’”

      I believed in the cycle theory of time, and yet in it I saw no hope for changing the errors of the past. My theory was a death blow to progress and evolution!

      II.

      I had just slipped my last pie into the oven and glanced casually out of the kitchen window when I spied my neighbor, Mrs. Maxwell, on her cinder path between her house and the garage. Suddenly I had the same sensation that I had experienced at breakfast, “This has happened before. I know it.”

      Then, like a flash, before a seeming darkness obliterated my fleeting memory, came the warning to my consciousness that Mrs. Maxwell ought not to enter her garage. I took a step toward the door with the intention of calling to Mrs. Maxwell. There was plenty of time; the path was long and she was not a third of the way to the garage. I watched her, my heart thumping wildly. She had stopped to pick up a scrap of paper. I took another step toward the door, then paused.

      “Oh, what’s the use,” I argued, “she’d think I was crazy to run out there and attempt to keep her from her errand to her garage. I wonder why I have had two sensations of this memory enigma today! Often they are weeks, even months, apart.”

      Resolutely I turned and left the kitchen, intending to finish my remaining housework. I reached the first landing of the stairs when the sound of an explosion that rocked the house to its foundation caused me to start in wild-eyed terror. In a panic of fearful premonition I rushed to a south window. The Maxwell garage was a mass of roaring flames!

      “It is fate, fate,” I groaned in my anguish. “There is no hope! We mortals cannot escape. The cycles of time like the wheels of the ancient Juggernaut ruthlessly grind us to our destruction and there is no hope!”

      It seemed that for months after Mrs. Maxwell’s funeral I could not rise above a sense of despondency. A hopelessness was ever present in my consciousness, and nothing I did seemed worth the effort. Finally realizing that my present mental state must not continue, I plunged into domestic and social duties with a vim that was most unusual for me.

      Not once during many months following the Maxwell tragedy had I experienced a single recurrence of my unaccountable memory flashes. Then one day the sensation returned.

      III.

      John was ready to make a business trip to the south and had purchased his railroad ticket early in the afternoon. The train was scheduled to leave town at 8:15 p.m. The supper dishes had just been cleared away and John had hurried upstairs to pack his grip, when the feeling that this had all happened before came upon me, more realistically than I had ever before experienced it, and this time it was accompanied by a premonition of the same nature as that which had warned me of Mrs. Maxwell’s fatal trip to her garage.

      I lost no time in hurrying up to John’s room, where I found him sorting over the things to take with him on his trip.

      “John, don’t go this evening,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “There is a morning train at 11:53. Can’t you take that instead of going tonight?”

      My husband carefully tucked his hairbrush into his satchel, and for a moment deigned me no reply.

      “I’m afraid to have you go tonight, John,” I continued. “I’ve had a—a—sort СКАЧАТЬ