Chapter VI
THE GREAT AWAKENING
And now I come to the end of this extraordinary incident, soovershadowing in its importance, not only in our own small, individuallives, but in the general history of the human race. As I said when Ibegan my narrative, when that history comes to be written, thisoccurrence will surely stand out among all other events like a mountaintowering among its foothills. Our generation has been reserved for avery special fate since it has been chosen to experience so wonderful athing. How long its effect may last--how long mankind may preserve thehumility and reverence which this great shock has taught it--can only beshown by the future. I think it is safe to say that things can never bequite the same again. Never can one realize how powerless and ignorantone is, and how one is upheld by an unseen hand, until for an instantthat hand has seemed to close and to crush. Death has been imminent uponus. We know that at any moment it may be again. That grim presenceshadows our lives, but who can deny that in that shadow the sense ofduty, the feeling of sobriety and responsibility, the appreciation of thegravity and of the objects of life, the earnest desire to develop andimprove, have grown and become real with us to a degree that has leavenedour whole society from end to end? It is something beyond sects andbeyond dogmas. It is rather an alteration of perspective, a shifting ofour sense of proportion, a vivid realization that we are insignificantand evanescent creatures, existing on sufferance and at the mercy of thefirst chill wind from the unknown. But if the world has grown graverwith this knowledge it is not, I think, a sadder place in consequence.Surely we are agreed that the more sober and restrained pleasures of thepresent are deeper as well as wiser than the noisy, foolish hustle whichpassed so often for enjoyment in the days of old--days so recent and yetalready so inconceivable. Those empty lives which were wasted in aimlessvisiting and being visited, in the worry of great and unnecessaryhouseholds, in the arranging and eating of elaborate and tedious meals,have now found rest and health in the reading, the music, the gentlefamily communion which comes from a simpler and saner division of theirtime. With greater health and greater pleasure they are richer thanbefore, even after they have paid those increased contributions to thecommon fund which have so raised the standard of life in these islands.
There is some clash of opinion as to the exact hour of the greatawakening. It is generally agreed that, apart from the difference ofclocks, there may have been local causes which influenced the action ofthe poison. Certainly, in each separate district the resurrection waspractically simultaneous. There are numerous witnesses that Big Benpointed to ten minutes past six at the moment. The Astronomer Royal hasfixed the Greenwich time at twelve past six. On the other hand, LairdJohnson, a very capable East Anglia observer, has recorded six-twenty asthe hour. In the Hebrides it was as late as seven. In our own casethere can be no doubt whatever, for I was seated in Challenger's studywith his carefully tested chronometer in front of me at the moment. Thehour was a quarter-past six.
An enormous depression was weighing upon my spirits. The cumulativeeffect of all the dreadful sights which we had seen upon our journey washeavy upon my soul. With my abounding animal health and great physicalenergy any kind of mental clouding was a rare event. I had the Irishfaculty of seeing some gleam of humor in every darkness. But now theobscurity was appalling and unrelieved. The others were downstairsmaking their plans for the future. I sat by the open window, my chinresting upon my hand and my mind absorbed in the misery of our situation.Could we continue to live? That was the question which I had begun toask myself. Was it possible to exist upon a dead world? Just as inphysics the greater body draws to itself the lesser, would we not feel anoverpowering attraction from that vast body of humanity which had passedinto the unknown? How would the end come? Would it be from a return ofthe poison? Or would the earth be uninhabitable from the mephiticproducts of universal decay? Or, finally, might our awful situation preyupon and unbalance our minds? A group of insane folk upon a dead world!My mind was brooding upon this last dreadful idea when some slight noisecaused me to look down upon the road beneath me. The old cab horse wascoming up the hill!
I was conscious at the same instant of the twittering of birds, ofsomeone coughing in the yard below, and of a background of movement inthe landscape. And yet I remember that it was that absurd, emaciated,superannuated cab-horse which held my gaze. Slowly and wheezily it wasclimbing the slope. Then my eye traveled to the driver sitting hunchedup upon the box and finally to the young man who was leaning out of thewindow in some excitement and shouting a direction. They were allindubitably, aggressively alive!
Everybody was alive once more! Had it all been a delusion? Was itconceivable that this whole poison belt incident had been an elaboratedream? For an instant my startled brain was really ready to believe it.Then I looked down, and there was the rising blister on my hand where itwas frayed by the rope of the city bell. It had really been so, then.And yet here was the world resuscitated--here was life come back in aninstant full tide to the planet. Now, as my eyes wandered all over thegreat landscape, I saw it in every direction--and moving, to myamazement, in the very same groove in which it had halted. There werethe golfers. Was it possible that they were going on with their game?Yes, there was a fellow driving off from a tee, and that other group uponthe green were surely putting for the hole. The reapers were slowlytrooping back to their work. The nurse-girl slapped one of her chargesand then began to push the perambulator up the hill. Everyone hadunconcernedly taken up the thread at the very point where they haddropped it.
I rushed downstairs, but the hall door was open, and I heard the voicesof my companions, loud in astonishment and congratulation, in the yard.How we all shook hands and laughed as we came together, and how Mrs.Challenger kissed us all in her emotion, before she finally threw herselfinto the bear-hug of her husband.
"But they could not have been asleep!" cried Lord John. "Dash it all,Challenger, you don't mean to believe that those folk were asleep withtheir staring eyes and stiff limbs and that awful death grin on theirfaces!"
"It can only have been the condition that is called catalepsy," saidChallenger. "It has been a rare phenomenon in the past and hasconstantly been mistaken for death. While it endures, the temperaturefalls, the respiration disappears, the heartbeat is indistinguishable--infact, it _is_ death, save that it is evanescent. Even the mostcomprehensive mind"--here he closed his eyes and simpered--"could hardlyconceive a universal outbreak of it in this fashion."
"You may label it catalepsy," remarked Summerlee, "but, after all, thatis only a name, and we know as little of the result as we do of thepoison which has caused it. The most we can say is that the vitiatedether has produced a temporary death."
Austin was seated all in a heap on the step of the car. It was hiscoughing which I had heard from above. He had been holding his head insilence, but now he was muttering to himself and running his eyes overthe car.
"Young fat-head!" he grumbled. "Can't leave things alone!"
"What's the matter, Austin?"
"Lubricators left running, sir. Someone has been fooling with the car.I expect it's that young garden boy, sir."
Lord John looked guilty.
"I don't know what's amiss with me," continued Austin, staggering to hisfeet. "I expect I came over queer when I was hosing her down. I seem toremember flopping over by the step. But I'll swear I never left thoselubricator taps on."
In a condensed narrative the astonished Austin was told what had happenedto himself and the world. The mystery of the dripping lubricators wasalso explained to him. He listened with an air of deep distrust whentold how an amateur had driven his car and with absorbed interest to thefew sentences in which our experiences of the sleeping city wererecorded. I can remember his comment when the story was concluded.
"Was you outside the Bank of England, sir?"
"Yes, Austin."
"With all them millions inside and everybody asleep?"
; "That was so."
"And I not there!" he groaned, and turned dismally once more to thehosing of his car.
There was a sudden grinding of wheels upon gravel. The old cab hadactually pulled up at Challenger's door. I saw the young occupant stepout from it. An instant later the maid, who looked as tousled andbewildered as if she had that instant been aroused from the deepestsleep, appeared with a card upon a tray. Challenger snorted ferociouslyas he looked at it, and his thick black hair seemed to bristle up in hiswrath.
"A pressman!" he growled. Then with a deprecating smile: "After all, itis natural that the whole world should hasten to know what I think ofsuch an episode."
"That can hardly be his errand," said Summerlee, "for he was on the roadin his cab before ever the crisis came."
I looked at the card: "James Baxter, London Correspondent, New YorkMonitor."
"You'll see him?" said I.
"Not I."
"Oh, George! You should be kinder and more considerate to others.Surely you have learned something from what we have undergone."
He tut-tutted and shook his big, obstinate head.
"A poisonous breed! Eh, Malone? The worst weed in modern civilization,the ready tool of the quack and the hindrance of the self-respecting man!When did they ever say a good word for me?"
"When did you ever say a good word to them?" I answered. "Come, sir,this is a stranger who has made a journey to see you. I am sure that youwon't be rude to him."
"Well, well," he grumbled, "you come with me and do the talking. Iprotest in advance against any such outrageous invasion of my privatelife." Muttering and mumbling, he came rolling after me like an angryand rather ill-conditioned mastiff.
The dapper young American pulled out his notebook and plunged instantlyinto his subject.
"I came down, sir," said he, "because our people in America would verymuch like to hear more about this danger which is, in your opinion,pressing upon the world."
"I know of no danger which is now pressing upon the world," Challengeranswered gruffly.
The pressman looked at him in mild surprise.
"I meant, sir, the chances that the world might run into a belt ofpoisonous ether."
"I do not now apprehend any such danger," said Challenger.
The pressman looked even more perplexed.
"You are Professor Challenger, are you not?" he asked.
"Yes, sir; that is my name."
"I cannot understand, then, how you can say that there is no such danger.I am alluding to your own letter, published above your name in the LondonTimes of this morning."
It was Challenger's turn to look surprised.
"This morning?" said he. "No London Times was published this morning."
"Surely, sir," said the American in mild remonstrance, "you must admitthat the London Times is a daily paper." He drew out a copy from hisinside pocket. "Here is the letter to which I refer."
Challenger chuckled and rubbed his hands.
"I begin to understand," said he. "So you read this letter this morning?"
"Yes, sir."
"And came at once to interview me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did you observe anything unusual upon the journey down?"
"Well, to tell the truth, your people seemed more lively and generallyhuman than I have ever seen them. The baggage man set out to tell me afunny story, and that's a new experience for me in this country."
"Nothing else?"
"Why, no, sir, not that I can recall."
"Well, now, what hour did you leave Victoria?"
The American smiled.
"I came here to interview you, Professor, but it seems to be a case of'Is this nigger fishing, or is this fish niggering?' You're doing most ofthe work."
"It happens to interest me. Do you recall the hour?"
"Sure. It was half-past twelve."
"And you arrived?"
"At a quarter-past two."
"And you hired a cab?"
"That was so."
"How far do you suppose it is to the station?"
"Well, I should reckon the best part of two miles."
"So how long do you think it took you?"
"Well, half an hour, maybe, with that asthmatic in front."
"So it should be three o'clock?"
"Yes, or a trifle after it."
"Look at your watch."
The American did so and then stared at us in astonishment.
"Say!" he cried. "It's run down. That horse has broken every record,sure. The sun is pretty low, now that I come to look at it. Well,there's something here I don't understand."
"Have you no remembrance of anything remarkable as you came up the hill?"
"Well, I seem to recollect that I was mighty sleepy once. It comes backto me that I wanted to say something to the driver and that I couldn'tmake him heed me. I guess it was the heat, but I felt swimmy for amoment. That's all."
"So it is with the whole human race," said Challenger to me. "They haveall felt swimmy for a moment. None of them have as yet any comprehensionof what has occurred. Each will go on with his interrupted job as Austinhas snatched up his hose-pipe or the golfer continued his game. Youreditor, Malone, will continue the issue of his papers, and very muchamazed he will be at finding that an issue is missing. Yes, my youngfriend," he added to the American reporter, with a sudden mood of amusedgeniality, "it may interest you to know that the world has swum throughthe poisonous current which swirls like the Gulf Stream through the oceanof ether. You will also kindly note for your own future convenience thatto-day is not Friday, August the twenty-seventh, but Saturday, August thetwenty-eighth, and that you sat senseless in your cab for twenty-eighthours upon the Rotherfield hill."
And "right here," as my American colleague would say, I may bring thisnarrative to an end. It is, as you are probably aware, only a fuller andmore detailed version of the account which appeared in the Monday editionof the Daily Gazette--an account which has been universally admitted tobe the greatest journalistic scoop of all time, which sold no fewer thanthree-and-a-half million copies of the paper. Framed upon the wall of mysanctum I retain those magnificent headlines:--
TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS' WORLD COMA UNPRECEDENTED EXPERIENCE CHALLENGER JUSTIFIED OUR CORRESPONDENT ESCAPES ENTHRALLING NARRATIVE THE OXYGEN ROOM WEIRD MOTOR DRIVE DEAD LONDON REPLACING THE MISSING PAGE GREAT FIRES AND LOSS OF LIFE WILL IT RECUR?
Underneath this glorious scroll came nine and a half columns ofnarrative, in which appeared the first, last, and only account of thehistory of the planet, so far as one observer could draw it, during onelong day of its existence. Challenger and Summerlee have treated thematter in a joint scientific paper, but to me alone was left the popularaccount. Surely I can sing "Nunc dimittis." What is left butanti-climax in the life of a journalist after that!
But let me not end on sensational headlines and a merely personaltriumph. Rather let me quote the sonorous passages in which the greatestof daily papers ended its admirable leader upon the subject--a leaderwhich might well be filed for reference by every thoughtful man.
"It has been a well-worn truism," said the Times, "that our human raceare a feeble folk before the infinite latent forces which surround us.From the prophets of old and from the philosophers of our own time thesame message and warning have reached us. But, like all oft-repeatedtruths, it has in time lost something of its actuality and cogency. Alesson, an actual experience, was needed to bring it home. It is fromthat salutory but terrible ordeal that we have just emerged, with mindswhich are still stunned by the suddenness of the blow and with spiritswhich are chastened by the realization of our own limitations andimpotence. The world has paid a fearful price for its schooling. Hardlyyet have we learned the full tale of disaster, but the destruction
byfire of New York, of Orleans, and of Brighton constitutes in itself oneof the greatest tragedies in the history of our race. When the accountof the railway and shipping accidents has been completed, it will furnishgrim reading, although there is evidence to show that in the vastmajority of cases the drivers of trains and engineers of steamerssucceeded in shutting off their motive power before succumbing to thepoison. But the material damage, enormous as it is both in life and inproperty, is not the consideration which will be uppermost in our mindsto-day. All this may in time be forgotten. But what will not beforgotten, and what will and should continue to obsess our imaginations,is this revelation of the possibilities of the universe, this destructionof our ignorant self-complacency, and this demonstration of how narrow isthe path of our material existence and what abysses may lie upon eitherside of it. Solemnity and humility are at the base of all our emotionsto-day. May they be the foundations upon which a more earnest andreverent race may build a more worthy temple."
The Poison Belt Page 6
