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_Title:_ The Eternal Moment and Other Stories
_Date of first publication:_ 1928
_Author:_ E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
_Date first posted:_ March 4, 2024
_Date last updated:_ March 4, 2024
Faded Page eBook #20240302
This eBook was produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
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THE ETERNAL MOMENT
and Other Stories
By E. M. FORSTER
New York
HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.
_To_
T. E.
IN THE ABSENCE
OF ANYTHING ELSE
_These stories were written at various dates previous to 1914, and
represent, together with those in the_ CELESTIAL OMNIBUS _volume, all
that I am likely to accomplish in a particular line. Much has happened
since; transport has been disorganised, frontiers rectified on the
map and in the spirit, and under the mass-shock of facts Fantasy has
tended to retreat or at all events to dig herself in. She can be
caught in the open here by those who care to catch her. She flits over
the scenes of Italian and English holidays, or wings her way with
even less justification towards the countries of the future. She or
he. For Fantasy, though often a lady, sometimes resembles a man, and
even functions for Hermes who used to do the smaller behests of the
gods–messenger, machine-breaker, and conductor of souls to a not too
terrible hereafter._
_One of the stories appeared in the_ ATLANTIC MONTHLY _and is reprinted
by courtesy of its editor; the rest, as far as I know, have never been
published in America._
CONTENTS
THE MACHINE STOPS
THE POINT OF IT
MR. ANDREWS
CO-ORDINATION
THE STORY OF THE SIREN
THE ETERNAL MOMENT
THE MACHINE STOPS
_Part I_
THE AIR-SHIP
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of
a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled
with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the
air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment
that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds.
An arm-chair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk–that is
all the furniture. And in the arm-chair there sits a swaddled lump of
flesh–a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus.
It is to her that the little room belongs.
An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.
“I suppose I must see who it is,” she thought, and set her chair in
motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery, and it
rolled her to the other side of the room, where the bell still rang
importunately.
“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been
interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand
people; in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.
But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into
smiles, and she said:
“Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect
anything important will happen for the next five minutes–for I can
give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on
‘Music during the Australian Period.'”
She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to
her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was
plunged into darkness.
“Be quick!” she called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here
I am in the dark wasting my time.”
But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she
held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it,
darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son,
who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.
“Kuno, how slow you are.”
He smiled gravely.
“I really believe you enjoy dawdling.”
“I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or
isolated. I have something particular to say.”
“What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by
pneumatic post?”
“Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want—-“
“Well?”
“I want you to come and see me.”
Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.
“But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?”
“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to
speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything
against the Machine.”
“Why not?”
“One mustn’t.”
“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I
believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not
forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not
everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see
you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not
hear you. That is why I want you to come. Come and stop with me. Pay
me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes
that are in my mind.”
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.
“The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me and you.”
“I dislike air-ships.”
“Why?”
“I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars
when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-ship.”
“I do not get them anywhere else.”
“What kind of ideas can the air give you?”
He paused for an instant.
“Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong, and three stars
close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from these
stars, three other stars?”
“No, I do not. I dislike the stars. But did they give you an idea? How
interesting; tell me.”
“I had an idea that they were like a man.”
“I do not understand.”
“The four big stars are the man’s shoulders and his knees. The three
stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and the
three stars hanging are like a sword.”
“A sword?”
“Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals and other men.”
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