The man who regards his watch every so often, who thinks of time as something fixed and arranged, like a calendar, and not as a power to which is owed the very beating of his heart, may easily scoff. My family’s faith is not to be communicated by appeals to reason. And yet in our case there is one unique and clinching item of evidence, one undeniable and sacred repository of material proof.
No one can say why, of all my worthy ancestors, my great-grandfather Stanislaw should have been singled out. No one can determine what mysterious conjunction of influences, what gatherings of instinct, knowledge and skill made the moment propitious. But on a September day, in Lublin, in 1809, my great-grandfather made the breakthrough which to the clockmaker is as the elixir to the alchemist. He created a clock which would not only function perpetually without winding, but from which time itself, that invisible yet palpable essence, could actually be gleaned — by contact, by proximity — like some form of magnetic charge. So, at least, it proved. The properties of this clock — or large pocket-watch, to be precise, for its benefits necessitated that it be easily carried — were not immediately observable. My great-grandfather had only an uncanny intuition. In his diary for that September day he writes cryptically: “The new watch — I know, feel it in my blood — it is the one.” Thereafter, at weekly intervals, the same entry: “The new watch — not yet wound.” The weekly interval lapses into a monthly one. Then, on September 3rd, 1810—the exact anniversary of the watch’s birth — the entry: “The Watch — a whole year without winding,” to which is added the mystical statement: “We shall live for ever.”
But this was not all. I write now in the 1970s. In 1809 my great-grandfather was forty-two. Simple arithmetic will indicate that we are dealing here with extraordinary longevity. My great-grandfather died in 1900—a man of one hundred and thirty-three, by this time an established and industrious clockmaker in one of the immigrant quarters of London. He was then, as a faded daguerrotype testifies, a man certainly old in appearance but not decrepit (you would have judged him perhaps a hale seventy), still on his feet and still busy at his trade; and he died not from senility but from being struck by an ill-managed horse-drawn omnibus while attempting one July day to cross Ludgate Hill. From this it will be seen that my great-grandfather’s watch did not confer immortality. It gave to those who had access to it a perhaps indefinite store of years; it was proof against age and against all those processes by which we are able to say that a man’s time runs out, but it was not proof against external accident. Witness the death of Juliusz, my great-grandfather’s first-born, killed by a Russian musket-ball in 1807. And Josef, the second-born, who came to a violent end in the troubles which forced my great-grandfather to flee his country.
To come closer home. In 1900 my grandfather, Feliks (my great-grandfather’s third son), was a mere stripling of ninety-two. Born in 1808, and therefore receiving almost immediate benefit from my great-grandfather’s watch, he was even sounder in limb, relatively speaking, than his father. I can vouch for this because (though, in 1900, I was yet to be conceived) I am now speaking of a man whom I have known intimately for the greater part of my own life and who, indeed, reared me almost from birth.
In every respect my grandfather was the disciple and image of my great-grandfather. He worked long and hard at the workshop in East London where he and Stanislaw, though blessed among mortals, still laboured at the daily business of our family. As he grew older — and still older — he acquired the solemn, vigilant and somewhat miserly looks of my great-grandfather. In 1900 he was the only remaining son and heir — for Stanislaw, by wondrous self-discipline, considering his length of years, had refrained from begetting further children, having foreseen the jealousies and divisions that the watch might arouse in a large family.
Feliks thus became the guardian of the watch which had now ticked away unwound for little short of a century. Its power was undiminished. Feliks lived on to the age of one hundred and sixty-one. He met his death, in brazen and spectacular fashion, but a few years ago, from a bolt of lightning, whilst walking in a violent storm in the Sussex downs. I myself can bear witness to his vigour, both of body and mind, at that more-than-ripe old age. For I myself watched him tramp off defiantly on that August night. I myself pleaded with him to heed the fury of the weather. And, after he failed to return, it was I who discovered his rain-soaked body, at the foot of a split tree, and pulled from his waistcoat pocket, on the end of its gold chain, the Great Watch — still ticking.
• • •
But what of my father? Where was he while my grandfather took me in charge? That is another story — which we shall come to shortly. One of perversity and rebellion, and one, so my grandfather was never slow to remind me, which cast a shadow on our family honour and pride.
You will note that I mave made no mention of the womenfolk of our family. Futhermore, I have said that Stanislaw took what must be considered some pains to limit his progeny. Increase in years, you might suppose, would lead to increase in issue. But this was not so — and Great-grandfather’s feat was, perhaps, not so formidable. Consider the position of a man who has the prospect before him of extraordinary length of years and who looks back at his own past as other men look at history books. The limits of his being, his “place in time,” as the phrase goes, the fact of his perishability begin to fade and he begins not to interest himself in those means by which other men seek to prolong their existence. And of these, what is more universal than the begetting of children, the passing on of one’s own blood?
Because they were little moved by the breeding instinct my great-grandfather and my grandfather were little moved by women. The wives they had — both of them got through three — followed very much the Oriental pattern where women are little more than the property of their husbands. Chosen neither for their beauty nor fecundity but more for blind docility, they were kept apart from the masculine mysteries of clock-making and were only acquainted with the Great Watch on a sort of concessionary basis. If the only one of them I knew myself — my grandfather’s last wife Eleanor — is anything to go by, they were slavish, silent, timid creatures, living in a kind of bemused remoteness from their husbands (who, after all, might be more than twice their age).
I remember my grandfather once expatiating on the reasons for this subjection and exclusion of women. “Women, you see,” he warned, “have no sense of time, they do not appreciate the urgency of things — that is what puts them in their place”—an explanation which I found unpersuasive then, perhaps because I was a young man and not uninterested in young women. But the years have confirmed the — painful — truth of my grandfather’s judgement. Show me a woman who has the same urgency as a man. Show me a woman who cares as much about the impending deadline, the ticking seconds, the vanishing hours. Ah yes, you will say, this is masculine humbug. Ah yes, I betray all the prejudice and contempt which ruined my brief marriage — which has ruined my life. But look at the matter on a broader plane. In the natural order of things it is women who are the longer lived. Why is this? Is it not precisely because they lack urgency — that urgency which preoccupies men, which drives them to unnatural subterfuges and desperate acts, which exhausts them and ushers them to an early death?