‘In the long run,’ said I.

  ‘In the long run. And not such a very long run either in these days.’

  I accepted that.

  Gradually I warmed to his intellectual glow. What were the essentials? On that issue I was as keen as, if less outspoken than, he. ‘What is really happening now?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, in manifest delight. ‘What is really happening now? Damn them! Not one of them asks that question. That’s where you are so good, that’s where you are worthwhile. The others all think they know so well that they can afford to be shut and sly about it. They can’t.’

  He called me then a Dealer in the Obvious, and he repeated that not very flattering phrase on various occasions when we met. ‘You have,’ he said, ‘defects that are almost gifts: a rapid but inexact memory for particulars, a quick grasp of proportions and no patience with detail. You hurry on to wholes. You have to see things simply or you could not see them at all. Consequently you cannot endure any conventional elaborations, any sideshows, needless complexities, indirect methods, diplomacies, legal fictions and tactful half-statements. It’s a joy to rattle on to you and feel there’s no complications. It isn’t, I think, that you have the power to take up all those things in your stride; I won’t flatter you like that; no – but you have the intuitive sense to drop them in your stride. There’s the secret of your simplicity; you come as near stupidity as wisdom can. How men of affairs must hate you – if and when they hear of you! They must think you an awful mug, you know – and yet you get there! Complications are their life. You try to get all these complications out of the way. You are a stripper, a damned impatient stripper. I would be a stripper too if I hadn’t the sort of job I have to do. But it is really extraordinarily refreshing to spend these occasional hours stripping events in your company.’

  The reader must forgive my egotism in quoting these comments upon myself; they are necessary if my relations with Raven are to be made clear and if the spirit of this book is to be understood. I met him upon an unusual side that he could afford to reveal to very few other persons. That is my point. ‘If I generalized to other people as I do to you,’ he said, ‘if I talked as plainly, my reputation as an expert would go up – like a battleship hit in the magazine.’

  I was, in fact, an outlet for a definite mental exuberance of his which it had hitherto distressed him to suppress. In my presence he could throw off Balliol and the Foreign Office – or, later on, the Secretariat – and let himself go. He could become the Eastern European Cosmopolitan he was by nature and descent. I became, as it were, an imaginative boon companion for him, his disreputable friend, a sort of intelligent butt, his Watson.151 got to like the relationship. I got used to his physical exoticism, his gestures. I sympathized more and more with his irritation and distress as the Conference at Versailles16 unfolded. My instinctive racial distrust faded before the glowing intensity of his intellectual curiosity. We found we supplemented each other. I had a ready unclouded imagination and he had knowledge. We would go on the speculative spree together.

  Finally it may be he started out to take me on the greatest speculative spree of all. I am quite open to the idea that this book is nothing more than that. It is well to bear that in mind in weighing what I have next to tell about this anticipatory History of his.

  Among other gifted and original friends who, at all too rare intervals, honour me by coming along for a gossip is Mr J. W. Dunne,17 who years ago invented one of the earliest and most ‘different’ of aeroplanes, and who has since done a very considerable amount of subtle thinking upon the relationship of time and space to consciousness. Dunne clings to the idea that in certain ways we may anticipate the future, and he has adduced a series of very remarkable observations indeed to support that in his well-known Experiment with Time. That book was published in 1927, and I found it so attractive and stimulating that I wrote about it in one or two articles that were syndicated very extensively throughout the world.18 It was so excitingly fresh.

  And among others who saw my account of this Experiment with Time, and who got the book and read it and then wrote to me about it, was Raven. Usually his communications to me were the briefest of notes, saying he would be in London, telling me of a change of address, asking about my movements, and so forth; but this was quite a long letter. Experiences such as Dunne’s, he said, were no novelty to him. He could add a lot to what was told in the book, and indeed he could extend the experience. The thing anticipated between sleeping and waking – Dunne’s experiments dealt chiefly with the premonitions in the dozing moment between wakefulness and oblivion – need not be just small affairs of tomorrow or next week; they could have a longer range. If, that is, you had the habit of long-range thinking. But these were days when scepticism had to present a hard face to greedy superstition, and it was one’s public duty to refrain from rash statements about these flimsy intimations, difficult as they were to distinguish from fantasies – except in one’s own mind. One might sacrifice a lot of influence if one betrayed too lively an interest in this sort of thing.

  He wandered off into such sage generalizations and concluded abruptly. The letter had an effect of starting out to tell much more than it did. ‘Are you coming through Geneva on your way to Italy?’19 it wound up. ‘If so, we might talk.’

  When, however, I talked to him in Geneva – it was hot and we took a motor launch and had dinner at a pleasant restaurant on the lake shore beyond the waterspout – he would say scarcely a word about any glimpses he had had into futurity. He was dull and depressed that day. I never found out exactly what it was had robbed him of his customary exuberance. I asked him at last outright whether he hadn’t something to tell me about seeing into the future. He seemed to have forgotten his letter altogether. ‘What is there to see in the future?’ he asked, hunched in his chair. ‘I haven’t the guts for it.

  ‘These people here mean nothing,’ he vouchsafed. ‘Nothing at all.’

  Afterwards we fell talking about the speculative boom that was then at its height in America.20 He said it was essentially an inflation of credit by bulling securities. While it lasted there would be a kind of prosperity, but there was nothing behind it but faith. At any time someone might start a selling that would collapse the whole thing. ‘And once they start a collapse over there …’

  He let a grimace and a gesture of his lean long hand finish his sentence.

  ‘It’s a card castle,’ he said, and then with the groan of a tired man: ‘I can’t even find a metaphor today. It’s a card castle that will fall – like ten million tons of bricks.’

  And I remember another sentence of his.

  ‘What I cannot understand is the levity of human beings -their incurable levity. This Geneva is the home of Calvinism.21 I used to think the Calvinists at least had some conception of the seriousness of life.’

  He shook his head slowly and suddenly a gleam of humour lit up his sombre eyes for a moment. ‘It was liver,’ he said. ‘Everyone who comes to Geneva gets liver.’

  ‘So that’s what’s the matter!’ said I.

  ‘Liver and lethargy. Predestination. Do nothing. Attempt nothing. And burn any heretic who attempts salvation by works…. You hope by nature, you know. It’s just the luck of your glands. They would have burnt you here without hesitation three centuries ago.’

  Between endocrines and theology, whatever experiments with time he had been making were forgotten.

  Afterwards I thought of the Dunne idea again, and I connected it so little with Raven’s abortive confidences that I made up a short story, Brownlow’s Newspaper,22 about a man into whose hands there fell an evening journal of fifty years ahead – and of all the tantalizingly incomplete intimations of change, such a scrap of the future would be sure to convey. Brownlow, whom I imagined as a cheerful and self-indulgent friend, came home late and rather alcoholic, and found this paper stuck through his letter-slit in the place of his usual Evening Standard.23 He found the print, paper and spelling rather queer; he was surprised by the realism of the coloured illustrations, he missed several familiar features, and he thought the news fantastic stuff, but he was too tired and muzzy to see the thing in its proper proportions, and in the morning when he awoke and thought about it, and realized the marvellous glimpse he had had into the world to come, the paper had vanished for ever down the dust-chute. This story was published in a popular magazine – the Strand Magazine,24 if I remember rightly – and Raven saw it. He wrote to me at once.

  You are joking about a serious possibility (he wrote). You are making a fairy tale of something that can happen.

  Then he turned up in London, dropped into my study unexpectedly and made a clean breast of it.

  ‘This Dunne business,’ he began.

  ‘Well?’ said I.

  ‘He has a way of snatching the fleeting dream between unconscious sleep and waking.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He keeps a notebook by his bedside and writes down his dream the very instant he is awake.’

  ‘That’s the procedure.’

  ‘And he finds that a certain percentage of his dream items are – sometimes quite plainly – anticipations of things that will come into his mind out of reality, days, weeks and even years ahead.’

  ‘That’s Dunne.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘But how – nothing?’

  ‘Nothing to what I have been doing for a long time.’

  ‘And that is – ?’

  He stared at the backs of my books. It was amusing to find Raven for once at a loss for words.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  He turned and looked at me with a reluctant expression that broke into a smile. Then he seemed to rally his candour.

  ‘How shall I put it? I wouldn’t tell anyone but you. For some years off and on – between sleeping and waking – I’ve been -in effect – reading a book. A non-existent book. A dream book if you like. It’s always the same book. Always. And it’s a history.’

  ‘Of the past?’

  ‘There’s a lot about the past. With all sorts of things I didn’t know and all sorts of gaps rilled in. Extraordinary things about North India and Central Asia, for instance. And also – it goes on. It’s going on. It keeps on going on.’

  ‘Going on?’

  ‘Right past the present time.’

  ‘Sailing away into the future?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it – is it a paper book?’

  ‘Not quite paper. Rather like that newspaper of your friend Brownlow. Not quite print as we know it. Vivid maps. And quite easy to read, in spite of the queer letters and spelling.’

  He paused. ‘I know it’s nonsense.’

  He added. ‘It’s frightfully real.’

  ‘Do you turn the pages?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘No, I don’t turn the pages. That would wake me up.’

  ‘It just goes on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Until you realize you are doing it?’

  ‘I suppose – yes, it is like that.’

  ‘And then you wake up?’

  ‘Exactly. And it isn’t there!’

  ‘And you are always reading}’

  ‘Generally – very definitely.’

  ‘But at times?’

  ‘Oh – just the same as reading a book when one is awake. If the matter is vivid one sees the events. As if one was looking at a moving picture on the page.’

  ‘But the book is still there?’

  ‘Yes – always. I think it’s there always.’

  ‘Do you by any chance make notes?’

  ‘I didn’t at first. Now I do.’

  ‘At once?’

  ‘I write a kind of shorthand…. Do you know – I’ve piles of notes that high.’

  He straddled my fireplace and stared at me.

  ‘Now you’ve told me,’ I said.

  ‘Now I’ve told you.’

  ‘If I had known this before, I wouldn’t have written Brownlow’s Newspaper.’

  ‘Naturally. My fault for not telling you plainly sooner.’

  His lank hand waved all that aside.

  ‘Can’t I see some of the notes?’

  ‘Illegible, my dear sir – except to me. You don’t know my shorthand. I can hardly read it myself after a week or so. But lately I’ve been writing it out – some I’ve dictated.’

  ‘You see,’ he went on, standing up and walking about my room, ‘if it’s – a reality, it’s the most important thing in the world. And I haven’t an atom of proof. Not an atom. Do you— Do you believe this sort of thing is possible?’

  ‘Possible?’ I considered. ‘I’m inclined to think I do. Though what exactly this kind of thing may be, I don’t know.’

  ‘I can’t tell anyone but you. How could I? Naturally they would say I had gone cranky – or that I was an impostor. You know the sort of row. Look at Oliver Lodge.25 Look at Charles Richet.26 It would smash my work, my position. And yet, you know, it’s such credible stuff. – I tell you I believe in it.’

  ‘If you wrote some of it out. If I could see some of it.’

  ‘You shall.’

  He seemed to be consulting my opinion. ‘The worst thing against it is that I always believe in what the fellow says. That’s rather as though it was me, eh?’

  That in effect was our conversation. I was left half incredulous, half attracted. My disposition was to believe that between sleeping and waking he did actually see this book, but that it was not in any sense a real book; it was the creation of his own hard thinking about man’s past and present and future. He was, I supposed, projecting his own speculations. His bold, far-ranging mind, severely repressed and kept within narrow limits in his official work, was escaping in this fantasy, was indulging in the free play of its possibilities. I was only the recipient of a fraction of his mental overflow. This was the rest. He was not content with simply answering my original question, What is really happening? If one knows what is really happening one knows what is going to happen. His brain was taking the business out of his hands and carrying interpretation on to prophecy. It is a logical development. That is still the most acceptable explanation of this history that follows. Even as a speculation it merits attention. But, I must insist, it is not a perfect explanation. There are one or two little things that do not fit into that.

  He did not send me any of his notes, but when next I met him, it was at Berne, he gave me a spring-backed folder filled with papers. Afterwards he gave me two others. Pencilled sheets they were mostly, but some were evidently written at his desk in ink and perhaps fifty pages had been typed, probably from his dictation. He asked me to take great care of them, to read them carefully, have typed copies made and return a set to him. The whole thing was to be kept as a secret between us. We were both to think over the advisability of a possibly anonymous publication. And meanwhile events might either confirm or explode various statements made in this history and so set a definite value, one way or the other, upon its authenticity.

  Then he died.

  He died quite unexpectedly as the result of a sudden operation. Some dislocation connected with his marked spinal curvature had developed abruptly into an acute crisis.

  As soon as I heard of his death I hurried off to Geneva and told the story of the dream book to his heir and executor, Mr Montefiore Renaud. I am greatly indebted to that gentleman for his courtesy and quick understanding of the situation. He was at great pains to get every possible scrap of material together and to place it all at my disposal. In addition to the three folders Raven had already given me there were a further folder in longhand and a drawerful of papers in his peculiar shorthand evidently dealing with this History. The fourth folder contained the material which forms the concluding book of this present work. The shorthand notes, of which even the pages were not numbered, have supplied the material for the penultimate book, which has had to be a compilation of my own. Generally Raven seems to have scribbled down his impressions of the dream book as soon as he could, before the memory faded, and as he intended to recopy it all himself he had no consideration for any prospective reader. This material was just for his own use. It is a mixture of very cursive (and inaccurate) shorthand and, for proper names and so forth, longhand. Punctuation is indicated by gaps, and often a single word stands for a whole sentence and even a paragraph. About a third of the shorthand stuff was already represented by longhand or typescript copy in the folders. That was my Rosetta Stone.27 If it were not for the indications conveyed by that I do not think it would have been possible to decipher any of the remainder. As it is, I found it impossible to make a flowing narrative, altogether of a piece with the opening and closing parts of this history. Some passages came out fairly clear and then would come confusion and obscurity. I have transcribed what I could and written up the intervals when transcription was hopeless. I think I have made a comprehensible story altogether of the course of events during the struggles and changes in world government that went on between 1980 and 2059, at which date the Air Dictatorship, properly so called, gave place to that world-wide Modern State which was still flourishing when the history was published. The reader will find large gaps, or rather he will find large abbreviations, in that portion, but none that leave the main lines of the history of world consolidation in doubt.

  And now let me say a word or so more about the real value of this queer ‘Outline of the Future’.