The Poison Belt

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Title: The Poison Belt
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Release Date: May 15, 2008 [EBook #126]
[Last updated: February 24, 2014]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POISON BELT ***
THE POISON BELT
BY
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Being an account of another adventure of
Prof. George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton,
Prof. Summerlee, and Mr. E. D. Malone,
the discoverers of "The Lost World"
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
I THE BLURRING OF LINES
II THE TIDE OF DEATH
III SUBMERGED
IV A DIARY OF THE DYING
V THE DEAD WORLD
VI THE GREAT AWAKENING
Chapter I
THE BLURRING OF LINES
It is imperative that now at once, while these stupendous events are
still clear in my mind, I should set them down with that exactness of
detail which time may blur. But even as I do so, I am overwhelmed by the
wonder of the fact that it should be our little group of the "Lost
World"--Professor Challenger, Professor Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and
myself--who have passed through this amazing experience.
When, some years ago, I chronicled in the Daily Gazette our epoch-making
journey in South America, I little thought that it should ever fall to my
lot to tell an even stranger personal experience, one which is unique in
all human annals and must stand out in the records of history as a great
peak among the humble foothills which surround it. The event itself will
always be marvellous, but the circumstances that we four were together at
the time of this extraordinary episode came about in a most natural and,
indeed, inevitable fashion. I will explain the events which led up to it
as shortly and as clearly as I can, though I am well aware that the
fuller the detail upon such a subject the more welcome it will be to the
reader, for the public curiosity has been and still is insatiable.
It was upon Friday, the twenty-seventh of August--a date forever
memorable in the history of the world--that I went down to the office of
my paper and asked for three days' leave of absence from Mr. McArdle, who
still presided over our news department. The good old Scotchman shook
his head, scratched his dwindling fringe of ruddy fluff, and finally put
his reluctance into words.
"I was thinking, Mr. Malone, that we could employ you to advantage these
days. I was thinking there was a story that you are the only man that
could handle as it should be handled."
"I am sorry for that," said I, trying to hide my disappointment. "Of
course if I am needed, there is an end of the matter. But the engagement
was important and intimate. If I could be spared----"
"Well, I don't see that you can."
It was bitter, but I had to put the best face I could upon it. After
all, it was my own fault, for I should have known by this time that a
journalist has no right to make plans of his own.
"Then I'll think no more of it," said I with as much cheerfulness as I
could assume at so short a notice. "What was it that you wanted me to
do?"
"Well, it was just to interview that deevil of a man down at Rotherfield."
"You don't mean Professor Challenger?" I cried.
"Aye, it's just him that I do mean. He ran young Alec Simpson of the
Courier a mile down the high road last week by the collar of his coat and
the slack of his breeches. You'll have read of it, likely, in the police
report. Our boys would as soon interview a loose alligator in the zoo.
But you could do it, I'm thinking--an old friend like you."
"Why," said I, greatly relieved, "this makes it all easy. It so happens
that it was to visit Professor Challenger at Rotherfield that I was
asking for leave of absence. The fact is, that it is the anniversary of
our main adventure on the plateau three years ago, and he has asked our
whole party down to his house to see him and celebrate the occasion."
"Capital!" cried McArdle, rubbing his hands and beaming through his
glasses. "Then you will be able to get his opeenions out of him. In any
other man I would say it was all moonshine, but the fellow has made good
once, and who knows but he may again!"
"Get what out of him?" I asked. "What has he been doing?"
"Haven't you seen his letter on 'Scientific Possibeelities' in to-day's
Times?"
"No."
McArdle dived down and picked a copy from the floor.
"Read it aloud," said he, indicating a column with his finger. "I'd be
glad to hear it again, for I am not sure now that I have the man's
meaning clear in my head."
This was the letter which I read to the news editor of the Gazette:--
"SCIENTIFIC POSSIBILITIES"
"Sir,--I have read with amusement, not wholly unmixed with some less
complimentary emotion, the complacent and wholly fatuous letter of James
Wilson MacPhail which has lately appeared in your columns upon the
subject of the blurring of Fraunhofer's lines in the spectra both of the
planets and of the fixed stars. He dismisses the matter as of no
significance. To a wider intelligence it may well seem of very great
possible importance--so great as to involve the ultimate welfare of every
man, woman, and child upon this planet. I can hardly hope, by the use of
scientific language, to convey any sense of my meaning to those
ineffectual people who gather their ideas from the columns of a daily
newspaper. I will endeavour, therefore, to condescend to their
limitation and to indicate the situation by the use of a homely analogy
which will be within the limits of the intelligence of your readers."
"Man, he's a wonder--a living wonder!" said McArdle, shaking his head
reflectively. "He'd put up the feathers of a sucking-dove and set up a
riot in a Quakers' meeting. No wonder he has made London too hot for
him. It's a peety, Mr. Malone, for it's a grand brain! We'll let's have
the analogy."
"We will suppose," I read, "that a small bundle of connected corks was
launched in a sluggish current upon a voyage across the Atlantic. The
corks drift slowly on from day to day with the same conditions all round
them. If the corks were sentient we could imagine that they would
consider these conditions to be permanent and assured. But we, with our
superior knowledge, know that many things might happen to surprise the
corks. They might possibly float up against a ship, or a sleeping whale,
or become entangled in seaweed. In any case, their voyage would probably
end by their being thrown up on the rocky coast of Labrador. But what
could they know of all this while they drifted so gently day by day in
what they thought was a limitless and homogeneous ocean?
"Your readers will possibly comprehend that the Atlantic, in this
parable, stands for the mighty ocean of ether through which we drift and
that the bunch of corks represents the little and obscure planetary
system to which we belong. A third-rate sun, with its rag tag and
bobtail of insignificant satellites, we float under the same daily
conditions towards some unknown end, some squalid catastrophe which will
overwhelm us at the ultimate confines of space, where we are swept over
an etheric Niagara or dashed upon some unthinkable Labrador. I see no
room here for the shallow and ignorant optimism of your correspondent,
Mr. James Wilson MacPhail, but many reasons why we should watch with a
very close and interested attention every indication of change in those
cosmic surroundings upon which our own ultimate fate may depend."
"Man, he'd have made a grand meenister," said McArdle. "It just booms
like an organ. Let's get doun to what it is that's troubling him."
"The general blurring and shifting of Fraunhofer's lines of the spectrum
point, in my opinion, to a widespread cosmic change of a subtle and
singular character. Light from a planet is the reflected light of the
sun. Light from a star is a self-produced light. But the spectra both
from planets and stars have, in this instance, all undergone the same
change. Is it, then, a change in those planets and stars? To me such an
idea is inconceivable. What common change could simultaneously come upon
them all? Is it a change in our own atmosphere? It is possible, but in
the highest degree improbable, since we see no signs of it around us, and
chemical analysis has failed to reveal it. What, then, is the third
possibility? That it may be a change in the conducting medium, in that
infinitely fine ether which extends from star to star and pervades the
whole universe. Deep in that ocean we are floating upon a slow current.
Might that current not drift us into belts of ether which are novel and
have properties of which we have never conceived? There is a change
somewhere. This cosmic disturbance of the spectrum proves it. It may be
a good change. It may be an evil one. It may be a neutral one. We do
not know. Shallow observers may treat the matter as one which can be
disregarded, but one who like myself is possessed of the deeper
intelligence of the true philosopher will understand that the
possibilities of the universe are incalculable and that the wisest man is
he who holds himself ready for the unexpected. To take an obvious
example, who would undertake to say that the mysterious and universal
outbreak of illness, recorded in your columns this very morning as having
broken out among the indigenous races of Sumatra, has no connection with
some cosmic change to which they may respond more quickly than the more
complex peoples of Europe? I throw out the idea for what it is worth.
To assert it is, in the present stage, as unprofitable as to deny it, but
it is an unimaginative numskull who is too dense to perceive that it is
well within the bounds of scientific possibility.
"Yours faithfully,
"GEORGE EDWARD CHALLENGER.
"THE BRIARS, ROTHERFIELD."
"It's a fine, steemulating letter," said McArdle thoughtfully, fitting a
cigarette into the long glass tube which he used as a holder. "What's
your opeenion of it, Mr. Malone?"
I had to confess my total and humiliating ignorance of the subject at
issue. What, for example, were Fraunhofer's lines? McArdle had just
been studying the matter with the aid of our tame scientist at the
office, and he picked from his desk two of those many-coloured spectral
bands which bear a general resemblance to the hat-ribbons of some young
and ambitious cricket club. He pointed out to me that there were certain
black lines which formed crossbars upon the series of brilliant colours
extending from the red at one end through gradations of orange, yellow,
green, blue, and indigo to the violet at the other.
"Those dark bands are Fraunhofer's lines," said he. "The colours are
just light itself. Every light, if you can split it up with a prism,
gives the same colours. They tell us nothing. It is the lines that
count, because they vary according to what it may be that produces the
light. It is these lines that have been blurred instead of clear this
last week, and all the astronomers have been quarreling over the reason.
Here's a photograph of the blurred lines for our issue to-morrow. The
public have taken no interest in the matter up to now, but this letter of
Challenger's in the Times will make them wake up, I'm thinking."
"And this about Sumatra?"
"Well, it's a long cry from a blurred line in a spectrum to a sick nigger
in Sumatra. And yet the chiel has shown us once before that he knows
what he's talking about. There is some queer illness down yonder, that's
beyond all doubt, and to-day there's a cable just come in from Singapore
that the lighthouses are out of action in the Straits of Sundan, and two
ships on the beach in consequence. Anyhow, it's good enough for you to
interview Challenger upon. If you get anything definite, let us have a
column by Monday."
I was coming out from the news editor's room, turning over my new mission
in my mind, when I heard my name called from the waiting-room below. It
was a telegraph-boy with a wire which had been forwarded from my lodgings
at Streatham. The message was from the very man we had been discussing,
and ran thus:--
Malone, 17, Hill Street, Streatham.--Bring oxygen.--Challenger.
"Bring oxygen!" The Professor, as I remembered him, had an elephantine
sense of humour capable of the most clumsy and unwieldly gambollings.
Was this one of those jokes which used to reduce him to uproarious
laughter, when his eyes would disappear and he was all gaping mouth and
wagging beard, supremely indifferent to the gravity of all around him? I
turned the words over, but could make nothing even remotely jocose out of
them. Then surely it was a concise order--though a very strange one. He
was the last man in the world whose deliberate command I should care to
disobey. Possibly some chemical experiment was afoot; possibly----Well,
it was no business of mine to speculate upon why he wanted it. I must
get it. There was nearly an hour before I should catch the train at
Victoria. I took a taxi, and having ascertained the address from the
telephone book, I made for the Oxygen Tube Supply Company in Oxford
Street.
As I alighted on the pavement at my destination, two youths emerged from
the door of the establishment carrying an iron cylinder, which, with some
trouble, they hoisted into a waiting motor-car. An elderly man was at
their heels scolding and directing in a creaky, sardonic voice. He
turned towards me. There was no mistaking those austere features and
that goatee beard. It was my old cross-grained companion, Professor
Summerlee.
"What!" he cried. "Don't tell me that _you_ have had one of these
preposterous telegrams for oxygen?"
I exhibited it.
"Well, well! I have had one too, and, as you see, very much against the
grain, I have acted upon it. Our good friend is as impossible as ever.
The need for oxygen could not have been so urgent that he must desert the
usual means of supply and encroach upon the time of those who are really
busier than himself. Why could he not order it direct?"
I could only suggest that he probably wanted it at once.
"Or thought he did, which is quite another matter. But it is superfluous
now for you to purchase any, since I have this considerable supply."
"Still, for some reason he seems to wish that I should bring oxygen too.
It will be safer to do exactly what he tells me."
Accordingly, in spite of many grumbles and remonstrances from Summerlee,
I ordered an additional tube, which was placed with the other in his
motor-car, for he had offered me a lift to Victoria.
I turned away to pay off my taxi, the driver of which was very
cantankerous and abusive over his fare. As I came back to Professor
Summerlee, he was having a furious altercation with the men who had
carried down the oxygen, his little white goat's beard jerking with
indignation. One of the fellows called him, I remember, "a silly old
bleached cockatoo," which so enraged his chauffeur that he bounded out of
his seat to take the part of his insulted master, and it was all we could
do to prevent a riot in the street.
These little things may seem trivial to relate, and passed as mere
incidents at the time. It is only now, as I look back, that I see their
relation to the whole story which I have to unfold.
The chauffeur must, as it seemed to me, have been a novice or else have
lost his nerve in this disturbance, for he drove vilely on the way to the
station. Twice we nearly had collisions with other equally erratic
vehicles, and I remember remarking to Summerlee that the standard of
driving in London had very much declined. Once we brushed the very edge
of a great crowd which was watching a fight at the corner of the Mall.
The people, who were much excited, raised cries of anger at the clumsy
driving, and one fellow sprang upon the step and waved a stick above our
heads. I pushed him off, but we were glad when we had got clear of them
and safe out of the park. These little events, coming one after the
other, left me very jangled in my nerves, and I could see from my
companion's petulant manner that his own patience had got to a low ebb.
But our good humour was restored when we saw Lord John Roxton waiting for
us upon the platform, his tall, thin figure clad in a yellow tweed
shooting-suit. His keen face, with those unforgettable eyes, so fierce
and yet so humorous, flushed with pleasure at the sight of us. His ruddy
hair was shot with grey, and the furrows upon his brow had been cut a
little deeper by Time's chisel, but in all else he was the Lord John who
had been our good comrade in the past.
"Hullo, Herr Professor! Hullo, young fella!" he shouted as he came
toward us.
He roared with amusement when he saw the oxygen cylinders upon the
porter's trolly behind us. "So you've got them too!" he cried. "Mine is
in the van. Whatever can the old dear be after?"
"Have you seen his letter in the Times?" I asked.
"What was it?"
"Stuff and nonsense!" said Summerlee harshly.
"Well, it's at the bottom of this oxygen business, or I am mistaken,"
said I.
"Stuff and nonsense!" cried Summerlee again with quite unnecessary
violence. We had all got into a first-class smoker, and he had already
lit the short and charred old briar pipe which seemed to singe the end of
his long, aggressive nose.
"Friend Challenger is a clever man," said he with great vehemence. "No
one can deny it. It's a fool that denies it. Look at his hat. There's
a sixty-ounce brain inside it--a big engine, running smooth, and turning
out clean work. Show me the engine-house and I'll tell you the size of
the engine. But he is a born charlatan--you've heard me tell him so to
his face--a born charlatan, with a kind of dramatic trick of jumping into
the limelight. Things are quiet, so friend Challenger sees a chance to
set the public talking about him. You don't imagine that he seriously
believes all this nonsense about a change in the ether and a danger to
the human race? Was ever such a cock-and-bull story in this life?"
He sat like an old white raven, croaking and shaking with sardonic
laughter.
A wave of anger passed through me as I listened to Summerlee. It was
disgraceful that he should speak thus of the leader who had been the
source of all our fame and given us such an experience as no men have
ever enjoyed. I had opened my mouth to utter some hot retort, when Lord
John got before me.
"You had a scrap once before with old man Challenger," said he sternly,
"and you were down and out inside ten seconds. It seems to me, Professor
Summerlee, he's beyond your class, and the best you can do with him is to
walk wide and leave him alone."
"Besides," said I, "he has been a good friend to every one of us.
Whatever his faults may be, he is as straight as a line, and I don't
believe he ever speaks evil of his comrades behind their backs."
"Well said, young fellah-my-lad," said Lord John Roxton. Then, with a
kindly smile, he slapped Professor Summerlee upon his shoulder. "Come,
Herr Professor, we're not going to quarrel at this time of day. We've
seen too much together. But keep off the grass when you get near
Challenger, for this young fellah and I have a bit of a weakness for the
old dear."
But Summerlee was in no humour for compromise. His face was screwed up
in rigid disapproval, and thick curls of angry smoke rolled up from his
pipe.
"As to you, Lord John Roxton," he creaked, "your opinion upon a matter of
science is of as much value in my eyes as my views upon a new type of
shot-gun would be in yours. I have my own judgment, sir, and I use it in
my own way. Because it has misled me once, is that any reason why I
should accept without criticism anything, however far-fetched, which this
man may care to put forward? Are we to have a Pope of science, with
infallible decrees laid down _ex cathedra_, and accepted without question
by the poor humble public? I tell you, sir, that I have a brain of my
own and that I should feel myself to be a snob and a slave if I did not
use it. If it pleases you to believe this rigmarole about ether and
Fraunhofer's lines upon the spectrum, do so by all means, but do not ask
one who is older and wiser than yourself to share in your folly. Is it
not evident that if the ether were affected to the degree which he
maintains, and if it were obnoxious to human health, the result of it
would already be apparent upon ourselves?" Here he laughed with
uproarious triumph over his own argument. "Yes, sir, we should already
be very far from our normal selves, and instead of sitting quietly
discussing scientific problems in a railway train we should be showing
actual symptoms of the poison which was working within us. Where do we
see any signs of this poisonous cosmic disturbance? Answer me that, sir!
Answer me that! Come, come, no evasion! I pin you to an answer!"
I felt more and more angry. There was something very irritating and
aggressive in Summerlee's demeanour.
"I think that if you knew more about the facts you might be less positive
in your opinion," said I.
Summerlee took his pipe from his mouth and fixed me with a stony stare.
"Pray what do you mean, sir, by that somewhat impertinent observation?"
"I mean that when I was leaving the office the news editor told me that a
telegram had come in confirming the general illness of the Sumatra
natives, and adding that the lights had not been lit in the Straits of
Sunda."
"Really, there should be some limits to human folly!" cried Summerlee in
a positive fury. "Is it possible that you do not realize that ether, if
for a moment we adopt Challenger's preposterous supposition, is a
universal substance which is the same here as at the other side of the
world? Do you for an instant suppose that there is an English ether and
a Sumatran ether? Perhaps you imagine that the ether of Kent is in some
way superior to the ether of Surrey, through which this train is now
bearing us. There really are no bounds to the credulity and ignorance of
the average layman. Is it conceivable that the ether in Sumatra should
be so deadly as to cause total insensibility at the very time when the
ether here has had no appreciable effect upon us whatever? Personally, I
can truly say that I never felt stronger in body or better balanced in
mind in my life."
"That may be. I don't profess to be a scientific man," said I, "though I
have heard somewhere that the science of one generation is usually the
fallacy of the next. But it does not take much common sense to see that,
as we seem to know so little about ether, it might be affected by some
local conditions in various parts of the world and might show an effect
over there which would only develop later with us."
"With 'might' and 'may' you can prove anything," cried Summerlee
furiously. "Pigs may fly. Yes, sir, pigs _may_ fly--but they don't. It
is not worth arguing with you. Challenger has filled you with his
nonsense and you are both incapable of reason. I had as soon lay
arguments before those railway cushions."
"I must say, Professor Summerlee, that your manners do not seem to have
improved since I last had the pleasure of meeting you," said Lord John
severely.
"You lordlings are not accustomed to hear the truth," Summerlee answered
with a bitter smile. "It comes as a bit of a shock, does it not, when
someone makes you realize that your title leaves you none the less a very
ignorant man?"
"Upon my word, sir," said Lord John, very stern and rigid, "if you were a
younger man you would not dare to speak to me in so offensive a fashion."
Summerlee thrust out his chin, with its little wagging tuft of goatee
beard.
"I would have you know, sir, that, young or old, there has never been a
time in my life when I was afraid to speak my mind to an ignorant
coxcomb--yes, sir, an ignorant coxcomb, if you had as many titles as
slaves could invent and fools could adopt."
For a moment Lord John's eyes blazed, and then, with a tremendous effort,
he mastered his anger and leaned back in his seat with arms folded and a
bitter smile upon his face. To me all this was dreadful and deplorable.
Like a wave, the memory of the past swept over me, the good comradeship,
the happy, adventurous days--all that we had suffered and worked for and
won. That it should have come to this--to insults and abuse! Suddenly I
was sobbing--sobbing in loud, gulping, uncontrollable sobs which refused
to be concealed. My companions looked at me in surprise. I covered my
face with my hands.
"It's all right," said I. "Only--only it _is_ such a pity!"
"You're ill, young fellah, that's what's amiss with you," said Lord John.
"I thought you were queer from the first."
"Your habits, sir, have not mended in these three years," said Summerlee,
shaking his head. "I also did not fail to observe your strange manner
the moment we met. You need not waste your sympathy, Lord John. These
tears are purely alcoholic. The man has been drinking. By the way, Lord
John, I called you a coxcomb just now, which was perhaps unduly severe.
But the word reminds me of a small accomplishment, trivial but amusing,
which I used to possess. You know me as the austere man of science. Can
you believe that I once had a well-deserved reputation in several
nurseries as a farmyard imitator? Perhaps I can help you to pass the
time in a pleasant way. Would it amuse you to hear me crow like a cock?"
"No, sir," said Lord John, who was still greatly offended, "it would
_not_ amuse me."
"My imitation of the clucking hen who had just laid an egg was also
considered rather above the average. Might I venture?"
"No, sir, no--certainly not."
But in spite of this earnest prohibition, Professor Summerlee laid down
his pipe and for the rest of our journey he entertained--or failed to
entertain--us by a succession of bird and animal cries which seemed so
absurd that my tears were suddenly changed into boisterous laughter,
which must have become quite hysterical as I sat opposite this grave
Professor and saw him--or rather heard him--in the character of the
uproarious rooster or the puppy whose tail had been trodden upon. Once
Lord John passed across his newspaper, upon the margin of which he had
written in pencil, "Poor devil! Mad as a hatter." No doubt it was very
eccentric, and yet the performance struck me as extraordinarily clever
and amusing.
Whilst this was going on, Lord John leaned forward and told me some
interminable story about a buffalo and an Indian rajah which seemed to me
to have neither beginning nor end. Professor Summerlee had just begun to
chirrup like a canary, and Lord John to get to the climax of his story,
when the train drew up at Jarvis Brook, which had been given us as the
station for Rotherfield.
And there was Challenger to meet us. His appearance was glorious. Not
all the turkey-cocks in creation could match the slow, high-stepping
dignity with which he paraded his own railway station and the benignant
smile of condescending encouragement with which he regarded everybody
around him. If he had changed in anything since the days of old, it was
that his points had become accentuated. The huge head and broad sweep of
forehead, with its plastered lock of black hair, seemed even greater than
before. His black beard poured forward in a more impressive cascade, and
his clear grey eyes, with their insolent and sardonic eyelids, were even
more masterful than of yore.
He gave me the amused hand-shake and encouraging smile which the head
master bestows upon the small boy, and, having greeted the others and
helped to collect their bags and their cylinders of oxygen, he stowed us
and them away in a large motor-car which was driven by the same impassive
Austin, the man of few words, whom I had seen in the character of butler
upon the occasion of my first eventful visit to the Professor. Our
journey led us up a winding hill through beautiful country. I sat in
front with the chauffeur, but behind me my three comrades seemed to me to
be all talking together. Lord John was still struggling with his buffalo
story, so far as I could make out, while once again I heard, as of old,
the deep rumble of Challenger and the insistent accents of Summerlee as
their brains locked in high and fierce scientific debate. Suddenly
Austin slanted his mahogany face toward me without taking his eyes from
his steering-wheel.
"I'm under notice," said he.
"Dear me!" said I.
Everything seemed strange to-day. Everyone said queer, unexpected
things. It was like a dream.
"It's forty-seven times," said Austin reflectively.
"When do you go?" I asked, for want of some better observation.
"I don't go," said Austin.
The conversation seemed to have ended there, but presently he came back
to it.
"If I was to go, who would look after 'im?" He jerked his head toward
his master. "Who would 'e get to serve 'im?"
"Someone else," I suggested lamely.
"Not 'e. No one would stay a week. If I was to go, that 'ouse would run
down like a watch with the mainspring out. I'm telling you because
you're 'is friend, and you ought to know. If I was to take 'im at 'is
word--but there, I wouldn't have the 'eart. 'E and the missus would be
like two babes left out in a bundle. I'm just everything. And then 'e
goes and gives me notice."
"Why would no one stay?" I asked.
"Well, they wouldn't make allowances, same as I do. 'E's a very clever
man, the master--so clever that 'e's clean balmy sometimes. I've seen
'im right off 'is onion, and no error. Well, look what 'e did this
morning."
"What did he do?"
Austin bent over to me.
"'E bit the 'ousekeeper," said he in a hoarse whisper.
"Bit her?"
"Yes, sir. Bit 'er on the leg. I saw 'er with my own eyes startin' a
marathon from the 'all-door."
"Good gracious!"
"So you'd say, sir, if you could see some of the goings on. 'E don't
make friends with the neighbors. There's some of them thinks that when
'e was up among those monsters you wrote about, it was just ''Ome, Sweet
'Ome' for the master, and 'e was never in fitter company. That's what
_they_ say. But I've served 'im ten years, and I'm fond of 'im, and,
mind you, 'e's a great man, when all's said an' done, and it's an honor
to serve 'im. But 'e does try one cruel at times. Now look at that,
sir. That ain't what you might call old-fashioned 'ospitality, is it
now? Just you read it for yourself."
The car on its lowest speed had ground its way up a steep, curving
ascent. At the corner a notice-board peered over a well-clipped hedge.
As Austin said, it was not difficult to read, for the words were few and
arresting:--
+---------------------------------------+
| WARNING. |
| ---- |
| Visitors, Pressmen, and Mendicants |
| are not encouraged. |
| |
| G. E. CHALLENGER. |
+---------------------------------------+
"No, it's not what you might call 'earty," said Austin, shaking his head
and glancing up at the deplorable placard. "It wouldn't look well in a
Christmas card. I beg your pardon, sir, for I haven't spoke as much as
this for many a long year, but to-day my feelings seem to 'ave got the
better of me. 'E can sack me till 'e's blue in the face, but I ain't
going, and that's flat. I'm 'is man and 'e's my master, and so it will
be, I expect, to the end of the chapter."
We had passed between the white posts of a gate and up a curving drive,
lined with rhododendron bushes. Beyond stood a low brick house, picked
out with white woodwork, very comfortable and pretty. Mrs. Challenger, a
small, dainty, smiling figure, stood in the open doorway to welcome us.
"Well, my dear," said Challenger, bustling out of the car, "here are our
visitors. It is something new for us to have visitors, is it not? No
love lost between us and our neighbors, is there? If they could get rat
poison into our baker's cart, I expect it would be there."
"It's dreadful--dreadful!" cried the lady, between laughter and tears.
"George is always quarreling with everyone. We haven't a friend on the
countryside."
"It enables me to concentrate my attention upon my incomparable wife,"
said Challenger, passing his short, thick arm round her waist. Picture a
gorilla and a gazelle, and you have the pair of them. "Come, come, these
gentlemen are tired from the journey, and luncheon should be ready. Has
Sarah returned?"
The lady shook her head ruefully, and the Professor laughed loudly and
stroked his beard in his masterful fashion.
"Austin," he cried, "when you have put up the car you will kindly help
your mistress to lay the lunch. Now, gentlemen, will you please step
into my study, for there are one or two very urgent things which I am
anxious to say to you."
Chapter II
THE TIDE OF DEATH
As we crossed the hall the telephone-bell rang, and we were the
involuntary auditors of Professor Challenger's end of the ensuing
dialogue. I say "we," but no one within a hundred yards could have
failed to hear the booming of that monstrous voice, which reverberated
through the house. His answers lingered in my mind.
"Yes, yes, of course, it is I.... Yes, certainly, _the_ Professor
Challenger, the famous Professor, who else?... Of course, every word of
it, otherwise I should not have written it.... I shouldn't be
surprised.... There is every indication of it.... Within a day or so at
the furthest.... Well, I can't help that, can I?... Very unpleasant, no
doubt, but I rather fancy it will affect more important people than you.
There is no use whining about it.... No, I couldn't possibly. You must
take your chance.... That's enough, sir. Nonsense! I have something
more important to do than to listen to such twaddle."
He shut off with a crash and led us upstairs into a large airy apartment
which formed his study. On the great mahogany desk seven or eight
unopened telegrams were lying.
"Really," he said as he gathered them up, "I begin to think that it would
save my correspondents' money if I were to adopt a telegraphic address.
Possibly 'Noah, Rotherfield,' would be the most appropriate."
As usual when he made an obscure joke, he leaned against the desk and
bellowed in a paroxysm of laughter, his hands shaking so that he could
hardly open the envelopes.
"Noah! Noah!" he gasped, with a face of beetroot, while Lord John and I
smiled in sympathy and Summerlee, like a dyspeptic goat, wagged his head
in sardonic disagreement. Finally Challenger, still rumbling and
exploding, began to open his telegrams. The three of us stood in the bow
window and occupied ourselves in admiring the magnificent view.
It was certainly worth looking at. The road in its gentle curves had
really brought us to a considerable elevation--seven hundred feet, as we
afterwards discovered. Challenger's house was on the very edge of the
hill, and from its southern face, in which was the study window, one
looked across the vast stretch of the weald to where the gentle curves of
the South Downs formed an undulating horizon. In a cleft of the hills a
haze of smoke marked the position of Lewes. Immediately at our feet
there lay a rolling plain of heather, with the long, vivid green
stretches of the Crowborough golf course, all dotted with the players. A
little to the south, through an opening in the woods, we could see a
section of the main line from London to Brighton. In the immediate
foreground, under our very noses, was a small enclosed yard, in which
stood the car which had brought us from the station.
An ejaculation from Challenger caused us to turn. He had read his
telegrams and had arranged them in a little methodical pile upon his
desk. His broad, rugged face, or as much of it as was visible over the
matted beard, was still deeply flushed, and he seemed to be under the
influence of some strong excitement.
"Well, gentlemen," he said, in a voice as if he was addressing a public
meeting, "this is indeed an interesting reunion, and it takes place under
extraordinary--I may say unprecedented--circumstances. May I ask if you
have observed anything upon your journey from town?"
"The only thing which I observed," said Summerlee with a sour smile, "was
that our young friend here has not improved in his manners during the
years that have passed. I am sorry to state that I have had to seriously
complain of his conduct in the train, and I should be wanting in
frankness if I did not say that it has left a most unpleasant impression
in my mind."
"Well, well, we all get a bit prosy sometimes," said Lord John. "The
young fellah meant no real harm. After all, he's an International, so if
he takes half an hour to describe a game of football he has more right to
do it than most folk."
"Half an hour to describe a game!" I cried indignantly. "Why, it was you
that took half an hour with some long-winded story about a buffalo.
Professor Summerlee will be my witness."
"I can hardly judge which of you was the most utterly wearisome," said
Summerlee. "I declare to you, Challenger, that I never wish to hear of
football or of buffaloes so long as I live."
"I have never said one word to-day about football," I protested.
Lord John gave a shrill whistle, and Summerlee shook his head sadly.
"So early in the day too," said he. "It is indeed deplorable. As I sat
there in sad but thoughtful silence----"
"In silence!" cried Lord John. "Why, you were doin' a music-hall turn of
imitations all the way--more like a runaway gramophone than a man."
Summerlee drew himself up in bitter protest.
"You are pleased to be facetious, Lord John," said he with a face of
vinegar.
"Why, dash it all, this is clear madness," cried Lord John. "Each of us
seems to know what the others did and none of us knows what he did
himself. Let's put it all together from the first. We got into a
first-class smoker, that's clear, ain't it? Then we began to quarrel
over friend Challenger's letter in the Times."
"Oh, you did, did you?" rumbled our host, his eyelids beginning to droop.
"You said, Summerlee, that there was no possible truth in his contention."
"Dear me!" said Challenger, puffing out his chest and stroking his beard.
"No possible truth! I seem to have heard the words before. And may I
ask with what arguments the great and famous Professor Summerlee
proceeded to demolish the humble individual who had ventured to express
an opinion upon a matter of scientific possibility? Perhaps before he
exterminates that unfortunate nonentity he will condescend to give some
reasons for the adverse views which he has formed."
He bowed and shrugged and spread open his hands as he spoke with his
elaborate and elephantine sarcasm.
"The reason was simple enough," said the dogged Summerlee. "I contended
that if the ether surrounding the earth was so toxic in one quarter that
it produced dangerous symptoms, it was hardly likely that we three in the
railway carriage should be entirely unaffected."
The explanation only brought uproarious merriment from Challenger. He
laughed until everything in the room seemed to rattle and quiver.
"Our worthy Summerlee is, not for the first time, somewhat out of touch
with the facts of the situation," said he at last, mopping his heated
brow. "Now, gentlemen, I cannot make my point better than by detailing
to you what I have myself done this morning. You will the more easily
condone any mental aberration upon your own part when you realize that
even I have had moments when my balance has been disturbed. We have had
for some years in this household a housekeeper--one Sarah, with whose
second name I have never attempted to burden my memory. She is a woman
of a severe and forbidding aspect, prim and demure in her bearing, very
impassive in her nature, and never known within our experience to show
signs of any emotion. As I sat alone at my breakfast--Mrs. Challenger is
in the habit of keeping her room of a morning--it suddenly entered my
head that it would be entertaining and instructive to see whether I could
find any limits to this woman's inperturbability. I devised a simple but
effective experiment. Having upset a small vase of flowers which stood
in the centre of the cloth, I rang the bell and slipped under the table.
She entered and, seeing the room empty, imagined that I had withdrawn to
the study. As I had expected, she approached and leaned over the table
to replace the vase. I had a vision of a cotton stocking and an
elastic-sided boot. Protruding my head, I sank my teeth into the calf of
her leg. The experiment was successful beyond belief. For some moments
she stood paralyzed, staring down at my head. Then with a shriek she
tore herself free and rushed from the room. I pursued her with some
thoughts of an explanation, but she flew down the drive, and some minutes
afterwards I was able to pick her out with my field-glasses travelling
very rapidly in a south-westerly direction. I tell you the anecdote for
what it is worth. I drop it into your brains and await its germination.
Is it illuminative? Has it conveyed anything to your minds? What do
_you_ think of it, Lord John?"
Lord John shook his head gravely.
"You'll be gettin' into serious trouble some of these days if you don't
put a brake on," said he.
"Perhaps you have some observation to make, Summerlee?"
"You should drop all work instantly, Challenger, and take three months in
a German watering-place," said he.
"Profound! Profound!" cried Challenger. "Now, my young friend, is it
possible that wisdom may come from you where your seniors have so
signally failed?"
And it did. I say it with all modesty, but it did. Of course, it all
seems obvious enough to you who know what occurred, but it was not so
very clear when everything was new. But it came on me suddenly with the
full force of absolute conviction.
"Poison!" I cried.
Then, even as I said the word, my mind flashed back over the whole
morning's experiences, past Lord John with his buffalo, past my own
hysterical tears, past the outrageous conduct of Professor Summerlee, to
the queer happenings in London, the row in the park, the driving of the
chauffeur, the quarrel at the oxygen warehouse. Everything fitted
suddenly into its place.
"Of course," I cried again. "It is poison. We are all poisoned."
"Exactly," said Challenger, rubbing his hands, "we are all poisoned. Our
planet has swum into the poison belt of ether, and is now flying deeper
into it at the rate of some millions of miles a minute. Our young friend
has expressed the cause of all our troubles and perplexities in a single
word, 'poison.'"
We looked at each other in amazed silence. No comment seemed to meet the
situation.
"There is a mental inhibition by which such symptoms can be checked and
controlled," said Challenger. "I cannot expect to find it developed in
all of you to the same point which it has reached in me, for I suppose
that the strength of our different mental processes bears some proportion
to each other. But no doubt it is appreciable even in our young friend
here. After the little outburst of high spirits which so alarmed my
domestic I sat down and reasoned with myself. I put it to myself that I
had never before felt impelled to bite any of my household. The impulse
had then been an abnormal one. In an instant I perceived the truth. My
pulse upon examination was ten beats above the usual, and my reflexes
were increased. I called upon my higher and saner self, the real G. E.
C., seated serene and impregnable behind all mere molecular disturbance.
I summoned him, I say, to watch the foolish mental tricks which the
poison would play. I found that I was indeed the master. I could
recognize and control a disordered mind. It was a remarkable exhibition
of the victory of mind over matter, for it was a victory over that
particular form of matter which is most intimately connected with mind.
I might almost say that mind was at fault and that personality controlled
it. Thus, when my wife came downstairs and I was impelled to slip behind
the door and alarm her by some wild cry as she entered, I was able to
stifle the impulse and to greet her with dignity and restraint. An
overpowering desire to quack like a duck was met and mastered in the same
fashion.
"Later, when I descended to order the car and found Austin bending over
it absorbed in repairs, I controlled my open hand even after I had lifted
it and refrained from giving him an experience which would possibly have
caused him to follow in the steps of the housekeeper. On the contrary, I
touched him on the shoulder and ordered the car to be at the door in time
to meet your train. At the present instant I am most forcibly tempted to
take Professor Summerlee by that silly old beard of his and to shake his
head violently backwards and forwards. And yet, as you see, I am
perfectly restrained. Let me commend my example to you."
"I'll look out for that buffalo," said Lord John.
"And I for the football match."
"It may be that you are right, Challenger," said Summerlee in a chastened
voice. "I am willing to admit that my turn of mind is critical rather
than constructive and that I am not a ready convert to any new theory,
especially when it happens to be so unusual and fantastic as this one.
However, as I cast my mind back over the events of the morning, and as I
reconsider the fatuous conduct of my companions, I find it easy to
believe that some poison of an exciting kind was responsible for their
symptoms."
Challenger slapped his colleague good-humouredly upon the shoulder. "We
progress," said he. "Decidedly we progress."
"And pray, sir," asked Summerlee humbly, "what is your opinion as to the
present outlook?"
"With your permission I will say a few words upon that subject." He
seated himself upon his desk, his short, stumpy legs swinging in front of
him. "We are assisting at a tremendous and awful function. It is, in my
opinion, the end of the world."
The end of the world! Our eyes turned to the great bow-window and we
looked out at the summer beauty of the country-side, the long slopes of
heather, the great country-houses, the cozy farms, the pleasure-seekers
upon the links.
The end of the world! One had often heard the words, but the idea that
they could ever have an immediate practical significance, that it should
not be at some vague date, but now, to-day, that was a tremendous, a
staggering thought. We were all struck solemn and waited in silence for
Challenger to continue. His overpowering presence and appearance lent
such force to the solemnity of his words that for a moment all the
crudities and absurdities of the man vanished, and he loomed before us as
something majestic and beyond the range of ordinary humanity. Then to
me, at least, there came back the cheering recollection of how twice
since we had entered the room he had roared with laughter. Surely, I
thought, there are limits to mental detachment. The crisis cannot be so
great or so pressing after all.
"You will conceive a bunch of grapes," said he, "which are covered by
some infinitesimal but noxious bacillus. The gardener passes it through
a disinfecting medium. It may be that he desires his grapes to be
cleaner. It may be that he needs space to breed some fresh bacillus less
noxious than the last. He dips it into the poison and they are gone.
Our Gardener is, in my opinion, about to dip the solar system, and the
human bacillus, the little mortal vibrio which twisted and wriggled upon
the outer rind of the earth, will in an instant be sterilized out of
existence."
Again there was silence. It was broken by the high trill of the
telephone-bell.
"There is one of our bacilli squeaking for help," said he with a grim
smile. "They are beginning to realize that their continued existence is
not really one of the necessities of the universe."
He was gone from the room for a minute or two. I remember that none of
us spoke in his absence. The situation seemed beyond all words or
comments.
"The medical officer of health for Brighton," said he when he returned.
"The symptoms are for some reason developing more rapidly upon the sea
level. Our seven hundred feet of elevation give us an advantage. Folk
seem to have learned that I am the first authority upon the question. No
doubt it comes from my letter in the Times. That was the mayor of a
provincial town with whom I talked when we first arrived. You may have
heard me upon the telephone. He seemed to put an entirely inflated value
upon his own life. I helped him to readjust his ideas."
Summerlee had risen and was standing by the window. His thin, bony hands
were trembling with his emotion.
"Challenger," said he earnestly, "this thing is too serious for mere
futile argument. Do not suppose that I desire to irritate you by any
question I may ask. But I put it to you whether there may not be some
fallacy in your information or in your reasoning. There is the sun
shining as brightly as ever in the blue sky. There are the heather and
the flowers and the birds. There are the folk enjoying themselves upon
the golf-links and the laborers yonder cutting the corn. You tell us
that they and we may be upon the very brink of destruction--that this
sunlit day may be that day of doom which the human race has so long
awaited. So far as we know, you found this tremendous judgment upon
what? Upon some abnormal lines in a spectrum--upon rumours from
Sumatra--upon some curious personal excitement which we have discerned in
each other. This latter symptom is not so marked but that you and we
could, by a deliberate effort, control it. You need not stand on
ceremony with us, Challenger. We have all faced death together before
now. Speak out, and let us know exactly where we stand, and what, in
your opinion, are our prospects for our future."
It was a brave, good speech, a speech from that stanch and strong spirit
which lay behind all the acidities and angularities of the old zoologist.
Lord John rose and shook him by the hand.
"My sentiment to a tick," said he. "Now, Challenger, it's up to you to
tell us where we are. We ain't nervous folk, as you know well; but when
it comes to makin' a week-end visit and finding you've run full butt into
the Day of Judgment, it wants a bit of explainin'. What's the danger,
and how much of it is there, and what are we goin' to do to meet it?"
He stood, tall and strong, in the sunshine at the window, with his brown
hand upon the shoulder of Summerlee. I was lying back in an armchair, an
extinguished cigarette between my lips, in that sort of half-dazed state
in which impressions become exceedingly distinct. It may have been a new
phase of the poisoning, but the delirious promptings had all passed away
and were succeeded by an exceedingly languid and, at the same time,
perceptive state of mind. I was a spectator. It did not seem to be any
personal concern of mine. But here were three strong men at a great
crisis, and it was fascinating to observe them. Challenger bent his
heavy brows and stroked his beard before he answered. One could see that
he was very carefully weighing his words.
"What was the last news when you left London?" he asked.
"I was at the Gazette office about ten," said I. "There was a Reuter
just come in from Singapore to the effect that the sickness seemed to be
universal in Sumatra and that the lighthouses had not been lit in
consequence."
"Events have been moving somewhat rapidly since then," said Challenger,
picking up his pile of telegrams. "I am in close touch both with the
authorities and with the press, so that news is converging upon me from
all parts. There is, in fact, a general and very insistent demand that I
should come to London; but I see no good end to be served. From the
accounts the poisonous effect begins with mental excitement; the rioting
in Paris this morning is said to have been very violent, and the Welsh
colliers are in a state of uproar. So far as the evidence to hand can be
trusted, this stimulative stage, which varies much in races and in
individuals, is succeeded by a certain exaltation and mental lucidity--I
seem to discern some signs of it in our young friend here--which, after
an appreciable interval, turns to coma, deepening rapidly into death. I
fancy, so far as my toxicology carries me, that there are some vegetable
nerve poisons----"
"Datura," suggested Summerlee.
"Excellent!" cried Challenger. "It would make for scientific precision
if we named our toxic agent. Let it be daturon. To you, my dear
Summerlee, belongs the honour--posthumous, alas, but none the less
unique--of having given a name to the universal destroyer, the Great
Gardener's disinfectant. The symptoms of daturon, then, may be taken to
be such as I indicate. That it will involve the whole world and that no
life can possibly remain behind seems to me to be certain, since ether is
a universal medium. Up to now it has been capricious in the places which
it has attacked, but the difference is only a matter of a few hours, and
it is like an advancing tide which covers one strip of sand and then
another, running hither and thither in irregular streams, until at last
it has submerged it all. There are laws at work in connection with the
action and distribution of daturon which would have been of deep interest
had the time at our disposal permitted us to study them. So far as I can
trace them"--here he glanced over his telegrams--"the less developed
races have been the first to respond to its influence. There are
deplorable accounts from Africa, and the Australian aborigines appear to
have been already exterminated. The Northern races have as yet shown
greater resisting power than the Southern. This, you see, is dated from
Marseilles at nine-forty-five this morning. I give it to you verbatim:--
"'All night delirious excitement throughout Provence. Tumult of vine
growers at Nimes. Socialistic upheaval at Toulon. Sudden illness
attended by coma attacked population this morning. _Peste foudroyante_.
Great numbers of dead in the streets. Paralysis of business and
universal chaos.'
"An hour later came the following, from the same source:--
"'We are threatened with utter extermination. Cathedrals and churches
full to overflowing. The dead outnumber the living. It is inconceivable
and horrible. Decease seems to be painless, but swift and inevitable.'
"There is a similar telegram from Paris, where the development is not yet
as acute. India and Persia appear to be utterly wiped out. The Slavonic
population of Austria is down, while the Teutonic has hardly been
affected. Speaking generally, the dwellers upon the plains and upon the
seashore seem, so far as my limited information goes, to have felt the
effects more rapidly than those inland or on the heights. Even a little
elevation makes a considerable difference, and perhaps if there be a
survivor of the human race, he will again be found upon the summit of
some Ararat. Even our own little hill may presently prove to be a
temporary island amid a sea of disaster. But at the present rate of
advance a few short hours will submerge us all."
Lord John Roxton wiped his brow.
"What beats me," said he, "is how you could sit there laughin' with that
stack of telegrams under your hand. I've seen death as often as most
folk, but universal death--it's awful!"
"As to the laughter," said Challenger, "you will bear in mind that, like
yourselves, I have not been exempt from the stimulating cerebral effects
of the etheric poison. But as to the horror with which universal death
appears to inspire you, I would put it to you that it is somewhat
exaggerated. If you were sent to sea alone in an open boat to some
unknown destination, your heart might well sink within you. The
isolation, the uncertainty, would oppress you. But if your voyage were
made in a goodly ship, which bore within it all your relations and your
friends, you would feel that, however uncertain your destination might
still remain, you would at least have one common and simultaneous
experience which would hold you to the end in the same close communion.
A lonely death may be terrible, but a universal one, as painless as this
would appear to be, is not, in my judgment, a matter for apprehension.
Indeed, I could sympathize with the person who took the view that the
horror lay in the idea of surviving when all that is learned, famous, and
exalted had passed away."
"What, then, do you propose to do?" asked Summerlee, who had for once
nodded his assent to the reasoning of his brother scientist.
"To take our lunch," said Challenger as the boom of a gong sounded
through the house. "We have a cook whose omelettes are only excelled by
her cutlets. We can but trust that no cosmic disturbance has dulled her
excellent abilities. My Scharzberger of '96 must also be rescued, so far
as our earnest and united efforts can do it, from what would be a
deplorable waste of a great vintage." He levered his great bulk off the
desk, upon which he had sat while he announced the doom of the planet.
"Come," said he. "If there is little time left, there is the more need
that we should spend it in sober and reasonable enjoyment."
And, indeed, it proved to be a very merry meal. It is true that we could
not forget our awful situation. The full solemnity of the event loomed
ever at the back of our minds and tempered our thoughts. But surely it
is the soul which has never faced death which shies strongly from it at
the end. To each of us men it had, for one great epoch in our lives,
been a familiar presence. As to the lady, she leaned upon the strong
guidance of her mighty husband and was well content to go whither his
path might lead. The future was our fate. The present was our own. We
passed it in goodly comradeship and gentle merriment. Our minds were, as
I have said, singularly lucid. Even I struck sparks at times. As to
Challenger, he was wonderful! Never have I so realized the elemental
greatness of the man, the sweep and power of his understanding.
Summerlee drew him on with his chorus of subacid criticism, while Lord
John and I laughed at the contest and the lady, her hand upon his sleeve,
controlled the bellowings of the philosopher. Life, death, fate, the
destiny of man--these were the stupendous subjects of that memorable
hour, made vital by the fact that as the meal progressed strange, sudden
exaltations in my mind and tinglings in my limbs proclaimed that the
invisible tide of death was slowly and gently rising around us. Once I
saw Lord John put his hand suddenly to his eyes, and once Summerlee
dropped back for an instant in his chair. Each breath we breathed was
charged with strange forces. And yet our minds were happy and at ease.
Presently Austin laid the cigarettes upon the table and was about to
withdraw.
"Austin!" said his master.
"Yes, sir?"
"I thank you for your faithful service." A smile stole over the
servant's gnarled face.
"I've done my duty, sir."
"I'm expecting the end of the world to-day, Austin."
"Yes, sir. What time, sir?"
"I can't say, Austin. Before evening."
"Very good, sir."
The taciturn Austin saluted and withdrew. Challenger lit a cigarette,
and, drawing his chair closer to his wife's, he took her hand in his.
"You know how matters stand, dear," said he. "I have explained it also
to our friends here. You're not afraid are you?"
"It won't be painful, George?"
"No more than laughing-gas at the dentist's. Every time you have had it
you have practically died."
"But that is a pleasant sensation."
"So may death be. The worn-out bodily machine can't record its
impression, but we know the mental pleasure which lies in a dream or a
trance. Nature may build a beautiful door and hang it with many a gauzy
and shimmering curtain to make an entrance to the new life for our
wondering souls. In all my probings of the actual, I have always found
wisdom and kindness at the core; and if ever the frightened mortal needs
tenderness, it is surely as he makes the passage perilous from life to
life. No, Summerlee, I will have none of your materialism, for I, at
least, am too great a thing to end in mere physical constituents, a
packet of salts and three bucketfuls of water. Here--here"--and he beat
his great head with his huge, hairy fist--"there is something which uses
matter, but is not of it--something which might destroy death, but which
death can never destroy."
"Talkin' of death," said Lord John. "I'm a Christian of sorts, but it
seems to me there was somethin' mighty natural in those ancestors of ours
who were buried with their axes and bows and arrows and the like, same as
if they were livin' on just the same as they used to. I don't know," he
added, looking round the table in a shamefaced way, "that I wouldn't feel
more homely myself if I was put away with my old .450 Express and the
fowlin'-piece, the shorter one with the rubbered stock, and a clip or two
of cartridges--just a fool's fancy, of course, but there it is. How does
it strike you, Herr Professor?"
"Well," said Summerlee, "since you ask my opinion, it strikes me as an
indefensible throwback to the Stone Age or before it. I'm of the
twentieth century myself, and would wish to die like a reasonable
civilized man. I don't know that I am more afraid of death than the rest
of you, for I am an oldish man, and, come what may, I can't have very
much longer to live; but it is all against my nature to sit waiting
without a struggle like a sheep for the butcher. Is it quite certain,
Challenger, that there is nothing we can do?"
"To save us--nothing," said Challenger. "To prolong our lives a few
hours and thus to see the evolution of this mighty tragedy before we are
actually involved in it--that may prove to be within my powers. I have
taken certain steps----"
"The oxygen?"
"Exactly. The oxygen."
"But what can oxygen effect in the face of a poisoning of the ether?
There is not a greater difference in quality between a brick-bat and a
gas than there is between oxygen and ether. They are different planes of
matter. They cannot impinge upon one another. Come, Challenger, you
could not defend such a proposition."
"My good Summerlee, this etheric poison is most certainly influenced by
material agents. We see it in the methods and distribution of the
outbreak. We should not _a priori_ have expected it, but it is
undoubtedly a fact. Hence I am strongly of opinion that a gas like
oxygen, which increases the vitality and the resisting power of the body,
would be extremely likely to delay the action of what you have so happily
named the daturon. It may be that I am mistaken, but I have every
confidence in the correctness of my reasoning."
"Well," said Lord John, "if we've got to sit suckin' at those tubes like
so many babies with their bottles, I'm not takin' any."
"There will be no need for that," Challenger answered. "We have made
arrangements--it is to my wife that you chiefly owe it--that her boudoir
shall be made as airtight as is practicable. With matting and varnished
paper."
"Good heavens, Challenger, you don't suppose you can keep out ether with
varnished paper?"
"Really, my worthy friend, you are a trifle perverse in missing the
point. It is not to keep out the ether that we have gone to such
trouble. It is to keep in the oxygen. I trust that if we can ensure an
atmosphere hyper-oxygenated to a certain point, we may be able to retain
our senses. I had two tubes of the gas and you have brought me three
more. It is not much, but it is something."
"How long will they last?"
"I have not an idea. We will not turn them on until our symptoms become
unbearable. Then we shall dole the gas out as it is urgently needed. It
may give us some hours, possibly even some days, on which we may look out
upon a blasted world. Our own fate is delayed to that extent, and we
will have the very singular experience, we five, of being, in all
probability, the absolute rear guard of the human race upon its march
into the unknown. Perhaps you will be kind enough now to give me a hand
with the cylinders. It seems to me that the atmosphere already grows
somewhat more oppressive."
Chapter III
SUBMERGED
The chamber which was destined to be the scene of our unforgettable
experience was a charmingly feminine sitting-room, some fourteen or
sixteen feet square. At the end of it, divided by a curtain of red
velvet, was a small apartment which formed the Professor's dressing-room.
This in turn opened into a large bedroom. The curtain was still hanging,
but the boudoir and dressing-room could be taken as one chamber for the
purposes of our experiment. One door and the window frame had been
plastered round with varnished paper so as to be practically sealed.
Above the other door, which opened on to the landing, there hung a
fanlight which could be drawn by a cord when some ventilation became
absolutely necessary. A large shrub in a tub stood in each corner.
"How to get rid of our excessive carbon dioxide without unduly wasting
our oxygen is a delicate and vital question," said Challenger, looking
round him after the five iron tubes had been laid side by side against
the wall. "With longer time for preparation I could have brought the
whole concentrated force of my intelligence to bear more fully upon the
problem, but as it is we must do what we can. The shrubs will be of some
small service. Two of the oxygen tubes are ready to be turned on at an
instant's notice, so that we cannot be taken unawares. At the same time,
it would be well not to go far from the room, as the crisis may be a
sudden and urgent one."
There was a broad, low window opening out upon a balcony. The view
beyond was the same as that which we had already admired from the study.
Looking out, I could see no sign of disorder anywhere. There was a road
curving down the side of the hill, under my very eyes. A cab from the
station, one of those prehistoric survivals which are only to be found in
our country villages, was toiling slowly up the hill. Lower down was a
nurse girl wheeling a perambulator and leading a second child by the
hand. The blue reeks of smoke from the cottages gave the whole
widespread landscape an air of settled order and homely comfort. Nowhere
in the blue heaven or on the sunlit earth was there any foreshadowing of
a catastrophe. The harvesters were back in the fields once more and the
golfers, in pairs and fours, were still streaming round the links. There
was so strange a turmoil within my own head, and such a jangling of my
overstrung nerves, that the indifference of those people was amazing.
"Those fellows don't seem to feel any ill effects," said I, pointing down
at the links.
"Have you played golf?" asked Lord John.
"No, I have not."
"Well, young fellah, when you do you'll learn that once fairly out on a
round, it would take the crack of doom to stop a true golfer. Halloa!
There's that telephone-bell again."
From time to time during and after lunch the high, insistent ring had
summoned the Professor. He gave us the news as it came through to him in
a few curt sentences. Such terrific items had never been registered in
the world's history before. The great shadow was creeping up from the
south like a rising tide of death. Egypt had gone through its delirium
and was now comatose. Spain and Portugal, after a wild frenzy in which
the Clericals and the Anarchists had fought most desperately, were now
fallen silent. No cable messages were received any longer from South
America. In North America the southern states, after some terrible
racial rioting, had succumbed to the poison. North of Maryland the
effect was not yet marked, and in Canada it was hardly perceptible.
Belgium, Holland, and Denmark had each in turn been affected. Despairing
messages were flashing from every quarter to the great centres of
learning, to the chemists and the doctors of world-wide repute, imploring
their advice. The astronomers too were deluged with inquiries. Nothing
could be done. The thing was universal and beyond our human knowledge or
control. It was death--painless but inevitable--death for young and old,
for weak and strong, for rich and poor, without hope or possibility of
escape. Such was the news which, in scattered, distracted messages, the
telephone had brought us. The great cities already knew their fate and
so far as we could gather were preparing to meet it with dignity and
resignation. Yet here were our golfers and laborers like the lambs who
gambol under the shadow of the knife. It seemed amazing. And yet how
could they know? It had all come upon us in one giant stride. What was
there in the morning paper to alarm them? And now it was but three in
the afternoon. Even as we looked some rumour seemed to have spread, for
we saw the reapers hurrying from the fields. Some of the golfers were
returning to the club-house. They were running as if taking refuge from
a shower. Their little caddies trailed behind them. Others were
continuing their game. The nurse had turned and was pushing her
perambulator hurriedly up the hill again. I noticed that she had her
hand to her brow. The cab had stopped and the tired horse, with his head
sunk to his knees, was resting. Above there was a perfect summer
sky--one huge vault of unbroken blue, save for a few fleecy white clouds
over the distant downs. If the human race must die to-day, it was at
least upon a glorious death-bed. And yet all that gentle loveliness of
nature made this terrific and wholesale destruction the more pitiable and
awful. Surely it was too goodly a residence that we should be so
swiftly, so ruthlessly, evicted from it!
But I have said that the telephone-bell had rung once more. Suddenly I
heard Challenger's tremendous voice from the hall.
"Malone!" he cried. "You are wanted."
I rushed down to the instrument. It was McArdle speaking from London.
"That you, Mr. Malone?" cried his familiar voice. "Mr. Malone, there are
terrible goings-on in London. For God's sake, see if Professor
Challenger can suggest anything that can be done."
"He can suggest nothing, sir," I answered. "He regards the crisis as
universal and inevitable. We have some oxygen here, but it can only
defer our fate for a few hours."
"Oxygen!" cried the agonized voice. "There is no time to get any. The
office has been a perfect pandemonium ever since you left in the morning.
Now half of the staff are insensible. I am weighed down with heaviness
myself. From my window I can see the people lying thick in Fleet Street.
The traffic is all held up. Judging by the last telegrams, the whole
world----"
His voice had been sinking, and suddenly stopped. An instant later I
heard through the telephone a muffled thud, as if his head had fallen
forward on the desk.
"Mr. McArdle!" I cried. "Mr. McArdle!"
There was no answer. I knew as I replaced the receiver that I should
never hear his voice again.
At that instant, just as I took a step backwards from the telephone, the
thing was on us. It was as if we were bathers, up to our shoulders in
water, who suddenly are submerged by a rolling wave. An invisible hand
seemed to have quietly closed round my throat and to be gently pressing
the life from me. I was conscious of immense oppression upon my chest,
great tightness within my head, a loud singing in my ears, and bright
flashes before my eyes. I staggered to the balustrades of the stair. At
the same moment, rushing and snorting like a wounded buffalo, Challenger
dashed past me, a terrible vision, with red-purple face, engorged eyes,
and bristling hair. His little wife, insensible to all appearance, was
slung over his great shoulder, and he blundered and thundered up the
stair, scrambling and tripping, but carrying himself and her through
sheer will-force through that mephitic atmosphere to the haven of
temporary safety. At the sight of his effort I too rushed up the steps,
clambering, falling, clutching at the rail, until I tumbled half
senseless upon by face on the upper landing. Lord John's fingers of
steel were in the collar of my coat, and a moment later I was stretched
upon my back, unable to speak or move, on the boudoir carpet. The woman
lay beside me, and Summerlee was bunched in a chair by the window, his
head nearly touching his knees. As in a dream I saw Challenger, like a
monstrous beetle, crawling slowly across the floor, and a moment later I
heard the gentle hissing of the escaping oxygen. Challenger breathed two
or three times with enormous gulps, his lungs roaring as he drew in the
vital gas.
"It works!" he cried exultantly. "My reasoning has been justified!" He
was up on his feet again, alert and strong. With a tube in his hand he
rushed over to his wife and held it to her face. In a few seconds she
moaned, stirred, and sat up. He turned to me, and I felt the tide of
life stealing warmly through my arteries. My reason told me that it was
but a little respite, and yet, carelessly as we talk of its value, every
hour of existence now seemed an inestimable thing. Never have I known
such a thrill of sensuous joy as came with that freshet of life. The
weight fell away from my lungs, the band loosened from my brow, a sweet
feeling of peace and gentle, languid comfort stole over me. I lay
watching Summerlee revive under the same remedy, and finally Lord John
took his turn. He sprang to his feet and gave me a hand to rise, while
Challenger picked up his wife and laid her on the settee.
"Oh, George, I am so sorry you brought me back," she said, holding him by
the hand. "The door of death is indeed, as you said, hung with
beautiful, shimmering curtains; for, once the choking feeling had passed,
it was all unspeakably soothing and beautiful. Why have you dragged me
back?"
"Because I wish that we make the passage together. We have been together
so many years. It would be sad to fall apart at the supreme moment."
For a moment in his tender voice I caught a glimpse of a new Challenger,
something very far from the bullying, ranting, arrogant man who had
alternately amazed and offended his generation. Here in the shadow of
death was the innermost Challenger, the man who had won and held a
woman's love. Suddenly his mood changed and he was our strong captain
once again.
"Alone of all mankind I saw and foretold this catastrophe," said he with
a ring of exultation and scientific triumph in his voice. "As to you, my
good Summerlee, I trust your last doubts have been resolved as to the
meaning of the blurring of the lines in the spectrum and that you will no
longer contend that my letter in the Times was based upon a delusion."
For once our pugnacious colleague was deaf to a challenge. He could but
sit gasping and stretching his long, thin limbs, as if to assure himself
that he was still really upon this planet. Challenger walked across to
the oxygen tube, and the sound of the loud hissing fell away till it was
the most gentle sibilation.
"We must husband our supply of the gas," said he. "The atmosphere of the
room is now strongly hyperoxygenated, and I take it that none of us feel
any distressing symptoms. We can only determine by actual experiments
what amount added to the air will serve to neutralize the poison. Let us
see how that will do."
We sat in silent nervous tension for five minutes or more, observing our
own sensations. I had just begun to fancy that I felt the constriction
round my temples again when Mrs. Challenger called out from the sofa that
she was fainting. Her husband turned on more gas.
"In pre-scientific days," said he, "they used to keep a white mouse in
every submarine, as its more delicate organization gave signs of a
vicious atmosphere before it was perceived by the sailors. You, my dear,
will be our white mouse. I have now increased the supply and you are
better."
"Yes, I am better."
"Possibly we have hit upon the correct mixture. When we have ascertained
exactly how little will serve we shall be able to compute how long we
shall be able to exist. Unfortunately, in resuscitating ourselves we
have already consumed a considerable proportion of this first tube."
"Does it matter?" asked Lord John, who was standing with his hands in his
pockets close to the window. "If we have to go, what is the use of
holdin' on? You don't suppose there's any chance for us?"
Challenger smiled and shook his head.
"Well, then, don't you think there is more dignity in takin' the jump and
not waitin' to be pushed in? If it must be so, I'm for sayin' our
prayers, turnin' off the gas, and openin' the window."
"Why not?" said the lady bravely. "Surely, George, Lord John is right
and it is better so."
"I most strongly object," cried Summerlee in a querulous voice. "When we
must die let us by all means die, but to deliberately anticipate death
seems to me to be a foolish and unjustifiable action."
"What does our young friend say to it?" asked Challenger.
"I think we should see it to the end."
"And I am strongly of the same opinion," said he.
"Then, George, if you say so, I think so too," cried the lady.
"Well, well, I'm only puttin' it as an argument," said Lord John. "If
you all want to see it through I am with you. It's dooced interestin',
and no mistake about that. I've had my share of adventures in my life,
and as many thrills as most folk, but I'm endin' on my top note."
"Granting the continuity of life," said Challenger.
"A large assumption!" cried Summerlee. Challenger stared at him in
silent reproof.
"Granting the continuity of life," said he, in his most didactic manner,
"none of us can predicate what opportunities of observation one may have
from what we may call the spirit plane to the plane of matter. It surely
must be evident to the most obtuse person" (here he glared a Summerlee)
"that it is while we are ourselves material that we are most fitted to
watch and form a judgment upon material phenomena. Therefore it is only
by keeping alive for these few extra hours that we can hope to carry on
with us to some future existence a clear conception of the most
stupendous event that the world, or the universe so far as we know it,
has ever encountered. To me it would seem a deplorable thing that we
should in any way curtail by so much as a minute so wonderful an
experience."
"I am strongly of the same opinion," cried Summerlee.
"Carried without a division," said Lord John. "By George, that poor
devil of a chauffeur of yours down in the yard has made his last journey.
No use makin' a sally and bringin' him in?"
"It would be absolute madness," cried Summerlee.
"Well, I suppose it would," said Lord John. "It couldn't help him and
would scatter our gas all over the house, even if we ever got back alive.
My word, look at the little birds under the trees!"
We drew four chairs up to the long, low window, the lady still resting
with closed eyes upon the settee. I remember that the monstrous and
grotesque idea crossed my mind--the illusion may have been heightened by
the heavy stuffiness of the air which we were breathing--that we were in
four front seats of the stalls at the last act of the drama of the world.
In the immediate foreground, beneath our very eyes, was the small yard
with the half-cleaned motor-car standing in it. Austin, the chauffeur,
had received his final notice at last, for he was sprawling beside the
wheel, with a great black bruise upon his forehead where it had struck
the step or mud-guard in falling. He still held in his hand the nozzle
of the hose with which he had been washing down his machine. A couple of
small plane trees stood in the corner of the yard, and underneath them
lay several pathetic little balls of fluffy feathers, with tiny feet
uplifted. The sweep of death's scythe had included everything, great and
small, within its swath.
Over the wall of the yard we looked down upon the winding road, which led
to the station. A group of the reapers whom we had seen running from the
fields were lying all pell-mell, their bodies crossing each other, at the
bottom of it. Farther up, the nurse-girl lay with her head and shoulders
propped against the slope of the grassy bank. She had taken the baby
from the perambulator, and it was a motionless bundle of wraps in her
arms. Close behind her a tiny patch upon the roadside showed where the
little boy was stretched. Still nearer to us was the dead cab-horse,
kneeling between the shafts. The old driver was hanging over the
splash-board like some grotesque scarecrow, his arms dangling absurdly in
front of him. Through the window we could dimly discern that a young man
was seated inside. The door was swinging open and his hand was grasping
the handle, as if he had attempted to leap forth at the last instant. In
the middle distance lay the golf links, dotted as they had been in the
morning with the dark figures of the golfers, lying motionless upon the
grass of the course or among the heather which skirted it. On one
particular green there were eight bodies stretched where a foursome with
its caddies had held to their game to the last. No bird flew in the blue
vault of heaven, no man or beast moved upon the vast countryside which
lay before us. The evening sun shone its peaceful radiance across it,
but there brooded over it all the stillness and the silence of universal
death--a death in which we were so soon to join. At the present instant
that one frail sheet of glass, by holding in the extra oxygen which
counteracted the poisoned ether, shut us off from the fate of all our
kind. For a few short hours the knowledge and foresight of one man could
preserve our little oasis of life in the vast desert of death and save us
from participation in the common catastrophe. Then the gas would run
low, we too should lie gasping upon that cherry-coloured boudoir carpet,
and the fate of the human race and of all earthly life would be complete.
For a long time, in a mood which was too solemn for speech, we looked out
at the tragic world.
"There is a house on fire," said Challenger at last, pointing to a column
of smoke which rose above the trees. "There will, I expect, be many
such--possibly whole cities in flames--when we consider how many folk may
have dropped with lights in their hands. The fact of combustion is in
itself enough to show that the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere is
normal and that it is the ether which is at fault. Ah, there you see
another blaze on the top of Crowborough Hill. It is the golf clubhouse,
or I am mistaken. There is the church clock chiming the hour. It would
interest our philosophers to know that man-made mechanisms have survived
the race who made it."
"By George!" cried Lord John, rising excitedly from his chair. "What's
that puff of smoke? It's a train."
We heard the roar of it, and presently it came flying into sight, going
at what seemed to me to be a prodigious speed. Whence it had come, or
how far, we had no means of knowing. Only by some miracle of luck could
it have gone any distance. But now we were to see the terrific end of
its career. A train of coal trucks stood motionless upon the line. We
held our breath as the express roared along the same track. The crash
was horrible. Engine and carriages piled themselves into a hill of
splintered wood and twisted iron. Red spurts of flame flickered up from
the wreckage until it was all ablaze. For half an hour we sat with
hardly a word, stunned by the stupendous sight.
"Poor, poor people!" cried Mrs. Challenger at last, clinging with a
whimper to her husband's arm.
"My dear, the passengers on that train were no more animate than the
coals into which they crashed or the carbon which they have now become,"
said Challenger, stroking her hand soothingly. "It was a train of the
living when it left Victoria, but it was driven and freighted by the dead
long before it reached its fate."
"All over the world the same thing must be going on," said I as a vision
of strange happenings rose before me. "Think of the ships at sea--how
they will steam on and on, until the furnaces die down or until they run
full tilt upon some beach. The sailing ships too--how they will back and
fill with their cargoes of dead sailors, while their timbers rot and
their joints leak, till one by one they sink below the surface. Perhaps
a century hence the Atlantic may still be dotted with the old drifting
derelicts."
"And the folk in the coal-mines," said Summerlee with a dismal chuckle.
"If ever geologists should by any chance live upon earth again they will
have some strange theories of the existence of man in carboniferous
strata."
"I don't profess to know about such things," remarked Lord John, "but it
seems to me the earth will be 'To let, empty,' after this. When once our
human crowd is wiped off it, how will it ever get on again?"
"The world was empty before," Challenger answered gravely. "Under laws
which in their inception are beyond and above us, it became peopled. Why
may the same process not happen again?"
"My dear Challenger, you can't mean that?"
"I am not in the habit, Professor Summerlee, of saying things which I do
not mean. The observation is trivial." Out went the beard and down came
the eyelids.
"Well, you lived an obstinate dogmatist, and you mean to die one," said
Summerlee sourly.
"And you, sir, have lived an unimaginative obstructionist and never can
hope now to emerge from it."
"Your worst critics will never accuse you of lacking imagination,"
Summerlee retorted.
"Upon my word!" said Lord John. "It would be like you if you used up our
last gasp of oxygen in abusing each other. What can it matter whether
folk come back or not? It surely won't be in our time."
"In that remark, sir, you betray your own very pronounced limitations,"
said Challenger severely. "The true scientific mind is not to be tied
down by its own conditions of time and space. It builds itself an
observatory erected upon the border line of present, which separates the
infinite past from the infinite future. From this sure post it makes its
sallies even to the beginning and to the end of all things. As to death,
the scientific mind dies at its post working in normal and methodic
fashion to the end. It disregards so petty a thing as its own physical
dissolution as completely as it does all other limitations upon the plane
of matter. Am I right, Professor Summerlee?"
Summerlee grumbled an ungracious assent.
"With certain reservations, I agree," said he.
"The ideal scientific mind," continued Challenger--"I put it in the third
person rather than appear to be too self-complacent--the ideal scientific
mind should be capable of thinking out a point of abstract knowledge in
the interval between its owner falling from a balloon and reaching the
earth. Men of this strong fibre are needed to form the conquerors of
nature and the bodyguard of truth."
"It strikes me nature's on top this time," said Lord John, looking out of
the window. "I've read some leadin' articles about you gentlemen
controllin' her, but she's gettin' a bit of her own back."
"It is but a temporary setback," said Challenger with conviction. "A few
million years, what are they in the great cycle of time? The vegetable
world has, as you can see, survived. Look at the leaves of that plane
tree. The birds are dead, but the plant flourishes. From this vegetable
life in pond and in marsh will come, in time, the tiny crawling
microscopic slugs which are the pioneers of that great army of life in
which for the instant we five have the extraordinary duty of serving as
rear guard. Once the lowest form of life has established itself, the
final advent of man is as certain as the growth of the oak from the
acorn. The old circle will swing round once more."
"But the poison?" I asked. "Will that not nip life in the bud?"
"The poison may be a mere stratum or layer in the ether--a mephitic Gulf
Stream across that mighty ocean in which we float. Or tolerance may be
established and life accommodate itself to a new condition. The mere
fact that with a comparatively small hyperoxygenation of our blood we can
hold out against it is surely a proof in itself that no very great change
would be needed to enable animal life to endure it."
The smoking house beyond the trees had burst into flames. We could see
the high tongues of fire shooting up into the air.
"It's pretty awful," muttered Lord John, more impressed than I had ever
seen him.
"Well, after all, what does it matter?" I remarked. "The world is dead.
Cremation is surely the best burial."
"It would shorten us up if this house went ablaze."
"I foresaw the danger," said Challenger, "and asked my wife to guard
against it."
"Everything is quite safe, dear. But my head begins to throb again.
What a dreadful atmosphere!"
"We must change it," said Challenger. He bent over his cylinder of
oxygen.
"It's nearly empty," said he. "It has lasted us some three and a half
hours. It is now close on eight o'clock. We shall get through the night
comfortably. I should expect the end about nine o'clock to-morrow
morning. We shall see one sunrise, which shall be all our own."
He turned on his second tube and opened for half a minute the fanlight
over the door. Then as the air became perceptibly better, but our own
symptoms more acute, he closed it once again.
"By the way," said he, "man does not live upon oxygen alone. It's dinner
time and over. I assure you, gentlemen, that when I invited you to my
home and to what I had hoped would be an interesting reunion, I had
intended that my kitchen should justify itself. However, we must do what
we can. I am sure that you will agree with me that it would be folly to
consume our air too rapidly by lighting an oil-stove. I have some small
provision of cold meats, bread, and pickles which, with a couple of
bottles of claret, may serve our turn. Thank you, my dear--now as ever
you are the queen of managers."
It was indeed wonderful how, with the self-respect and sense of propriety
of the British housekeeper, the lady had within a few minutes adorned the
central table with a snow-white cloth, laid the napkins upon it, and set
forth the simple meal with all the elegance of civilization, including an
electric torch lamp in the centre. Wonderful also was it to find that
our appetites were ravenous.
"It is the measure of our emotion," said Challenger with that air of
condescension with which he brought his scientific mind to the
explanation of humble facts. "We have gone through a great crisis. That
means molecular disturbance. That in turn means the need for repair.
Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence
from food, as our novelists will have it."
"That's why the country folk have great feasts at funerals," I hazarded.
"Exactly. Our young friend has hit upon an excellent illustration. Let
me give you another slice of tongue."
"The same with savages," said Lord John, cutting away at the beef. "I've
seen them buryin' a chief up the Aruwimi River, and they ate a hippo that
must have weighed as much as a tribe. There are some of them down New
Guinea way that eat the late-lamented himself, just by way of a last tidy
up. Well, of all the funeral feasts on this earth, I suppose the one we
are takin' is the queerest."
"The strange thing is," said Mrs. Challenger, "that I find it impossible
to feel grief for those who are gone. There are my father and mother at
Bedford. I know that they are dead, and yet in this tremendous universal
tragedy I can feel no sharp sorrow for any individuals, even for them."
"And my old mother in her cottage in Ireland," said I. "I can see her in
my mind's eye, with her shawl and her lace cap, lying back with closed
eyes in the old high-backed chair near the window, her glasses and her
book beside her. Why should I mourn her? She has passed and I am
passing, and I may be nearer her in some other life than England is to
Ireland. Yet I grieve to think that that dear body is no more."
"As to the body," remarked Challenger, "we do not mourn over the parings
of our nails nor the cut locks of our hair, though they were once part of
ourselves. Neither does a one-legged man yearn sentimentally over his
missing member. The physical body has rather been a source of pain and
fatigue to us. It is the constant index of our limitations. Why then
should we worry about its detachment from our psychical selves?"
"If they can indeed be detached," Summerlee grumbled. "But, anyhow,
universal death is dreadful."
"As I have already explained," said Challenger, "a universal death must
in its nature be far less terrible than a isolated one."
"Same in a battle," remarked Lord John. "If you saw a single man lying
on that floor with his chest knocked in and a hole in his face it would
turn you sick. But I've seen ten thousand on their backs in the Soudan,
and it gave me no such feelin', for when you are makin' history the life
of any man is too small a thing to worry over. When a thousand million
pass over together, same as happened to-day, you can't pick your own
partic'lar out of the crowd."
"I wish it were well over with us," said the lady wistfully. "Oh,
George, I am so frightened."
"You'll be the bravest of us all, little lady, when the time comes. I've
been a blusterous old husband to you, dear, but you'll just bear in mind
that G. E. C. is as he was made and couldn't help himself. After all,
you wouldn't have had anyone else?"
"No one in the whole wide world, dear," said she, and put her arms round
his bull neck. We three walked to the window and stood amazed at the
sight which met our eyes.
Darkness had fallen and the dead world was shrouded in gloom. But right
across the southern horizon was one long vivid scarlet streak, waxing and
waning in vivid pulses of life, leaping suddenly to a crimson zenith and
then dying down to a glowing line of fire.
"Lewes is ablaze!"
"No, it is Brighton which is burning," said Challenger, stepping across
to join us. "You can see the curved back of the downs against the glow.
That fire is miles on the farther side of it. The whole town must be
alight."
There were several red glares at different points, and the pile of
_debris_ upon the railway line was still smoldering darkly, but they all
seemed mere pin-points of light compared to that monstrous conflagration
throbbing beyond the hills. What copy it would have made for the
Gazette! Had ever a journalist such an opening and so little chance of
using it--the scoop of scoops, and no one to appreciate it? And then,
suddenly, the old instinct of recording came over me. If these men of
science could be so true to their life's work to the very end, why should
not I, in my humble way, be as constant? No human eye might ever rest
upon what I had done. But the long night had to be passed somehow, and
for me at least, sleep seemed to be out of the question. My notes would
help to pass the weary hours and to occupy my thoughts. Thus it is that
now I have before me the notebook with its scribbled pages, written
confusedly upon my knee in the dim, waning light of our one electric
torch. Had I the literary touch, they might have been worthy of the
occasion. As it is, they may still serve to bring to other minds the
long-drawn emotions and tremors of that awful night.
Chapter IV
A DIARY OF THE DYING
How strange the words look scribbled at the top of the empty page of my
book! How stranger still that it is I, Edward Malone, who have written
them--I who started only some twelve hours ago from my rooms in Streatham
without one thought of the marvels which the day was to bring forth! I
look back at the chain of incidents, my interview with McArdle,
Challenger's first note of alarm in the Times, the absurd journey in the
train, the pleasant luncheon, the catastrophe, and now it has come to
this--that we linger alone upon an empty planet, and so sure is our fate
that I can regard these lines, written from mechanical professional habit
and never to be seen by human eyes, as the words of one who is already
dead, so closely does he stand to the shadowed borderland over which all
outside this one little circle of friends have already gone. I feel how
wise and true were the words of Challenger when he said that the real
tragedy would be if we were left behind when all that is noble and good
and beautiful had passed. But of that there can surely be no danger.
Already our second tube of oxygen is drawing to an end. We can count the
poor dregs of our lives almost to a minute.
We have just been treated to a lecture, a good quarter of an hour long,
from Challenger, who was so excited that he roared and bellowed as if he
were addressing his old rows of scientific sceptics in the Queen's Hall.
He had certainly a strange audience to harangue: his wife perfectly
acquiescent and absolutely ignorant of his meaning, Summerlee seated in
the shadow, querulous and critical but interested, Lord John lounging in
a corner somewhat bored by the whole proceeding, and myself beside the
window watching the scene with a kind of detached attention, as if it
were all a dream or something in which I had no personal interest
whatever. Challenger sat at the centre table with the electric light
illuminating the slide under the microscope which he had brought from his
dressing room. The small vivid circle of white light from the mirror
left half of his rugged, bearded face in brilliant radiance and half in
deepest shadow. He had, it seems, been working of late upon the lowest
forms of life, and what excited him at the present moment was that in the
microscopic slide made up the day before he found the amoeba to be still
alive.
"You can see it for yourselves," he kept repeating in great excitement.
"Summerlee, will you step across and satisfy yourself upon the point?
Malone, will you kindly verify what I say? The little spindle-shaped
things in the centre are diatoms and may be disregarded since they are
probably vegetable rather than animal. But the right-hand side you will
see an undoubted amoeba, moving sluggishly across the field. The upper
screw is the fine adjustment. Look at it for yourselves."
Summerlee did so and acquiesced. So did I and perceived a little
creature which looked as if it were made of ground glass flowing in a
sticky way across the lighted circle. Lord John was prepared to take him
on trust.
"I'm not troublin' my head whether he's alive or dead," said he. "We
don't so much as know each other by sight, so why should I take it to
heart? I don't suppose he's worryin' himself over the state of _our_
health."
I laughed at this, and Challenger looked in my direction with his coldest
and most supercilious stare. It was a most petrifying experience.
"The flippancy of the half-educated is more obstructive to science than
the obtuseness of the ignorant," said he. "If Lord John Roxton would
condescend----"
"My dear George, don't be so peppery," said his wife, with her hand on
the black mane that drooped over the microscope. "What can it matter
whether the amoeba is alive or not?"
"It matters a great deal," said Challenger gruffly.
"Well, let's hear about it," said Lord John with a good-humoured smile.
"We may as well talk about that as anything else. If you think I've been
too off-hand with the thing, or hurt its feelin's in any way, I'll
apologize."
"For my part," remarked Summerlee in his creaky, argumentative voice, "I
can't see why you should attach such importance to the creature being
alive. It is in the same atmosphere as ourselves, so naturally the
poison does not act upon it. If it were outside of this room it would be
dead, like all other animal life."
"Your remarks, my good Summerlee," said Challenger with enormous
condescension (oh, if I could paint that over-bearing, arrogant face in
the vivid circle of reflection from the microscope mirror!)--"your
remarks show that you imperfectly appreciate the situation. This
specimen was mounted yesterday and is hermetically sealed. None of our
oxygen can reach it. But the ether, of course, has penetrated to it, as
to every other point upon the universe. Therefore, it has survived the
poison. Hence, we may argue that every amoeba outside this room, instead
of being dead, as you have erroneously stated, has really survived the
catastrophe."
"Well, even now I don't feel inclined to hip-hurrah about it," said Lord
John. "What does it matter?"
"It just matters this, that the world is a living instead of a dead one.
If you had the scientific imagination, you would cast your mind forward
from this one fact, and you would see some few millions of years hence--a
mere passing moment in the enormous flux of the ages--the whole world
teeming once more with the animal and human life which will spring from
this tiny root. You have seen a prairie fire where the flames have swept
every trace of grass or plant from the surface of the earth and left only
a blackened waste. You would think that it must be forever desert. Yet
the roots of growth have been left behind, and when you pass the place a
few years hence you can no longer tell where the black scars used to be.
Here in this tiny creature are the roots of growth of the animal world,
and by its inherent development, and evolution, it will surely in time
remove every trace of this incomparable crisis in which we are now
involved."
"Dooced interestin'!" said Lord John, lounging across and looking through
the microscope. "Funny little chap to hang number one among the family
portraits. Got a fine big shirt-stud on him!"
"The dark object is his nucleus," said Challenger with the air of a nurse
teaching letters to a baby.
"Well, we needn't feel lonely," said Lord John laughing. "There's
somebody livin' besides us on the earth."
"You seem to take it for granted, Challenger," said Summerlee, "that the
object for which this world was created was that it should produce and
sustain human life."
"Well, sir, and what object do you suggest?" asked Challenger, bristling
at the least hint of contradiction.
"Sometimes I think that it is only the monstrous conceit of mankind which
makes him think that all this stage was erected for him to strut upon."
"We cannot be dogmatic about it, but at least without what you have
ventured to call monstrous conceit we can surely say that we are the
highest thing in nature."
"The highest of which we have cognizance."
"That, sir, goes without saying."
"Think of all the millions and possibly billions of years that the earth
swung empty through space--or, if not empty, at least without a sign or
thought of the human race. Think of it, washed by the rain and scorched
by the sun and swept by the wind for those unnumbered ages. Man only
came into being yesterday so far as geological times goes. Why, then,
should it be taken for granted that all this stupendous preparation was
for his benefit?"
"For whose then--or for what?"
Summerlee shrugged his shoulders.
"How can we tell? For some reason altogether beyond our conception--and
man may have been a mere accident, a by-product evolved in the process.
It is as if the scum upon the surface of the ocean imagined that the
ocean was created in order to produce and sustain it, or a mouse in a
cathedral thought that the building was its own proper ordained
residence."
I have jotted down the very words of their argument, but now it
degenerates into a mere noisy wrangle with much polysyllabic scientific
jargon upon each side. It is no doubt a privilege to hear two such
brains discuss the highest questions; but as they are in perpetual
disagreement, plain folk like Lord John and I get little that is positive
from the exhibition. They neutralize each other and we are left as they
found us. Now the hubbub has ceased, and Summerlee is coiled up in his
chair, while Challenger, still fingering the screws of his microscope, is
keeping up a continual low, deep, inarticulate growl like the sea after a
storm. Lord John comes over to me, and we look out together into the
night.
There is a pale new moon--the last moon that human eyes will ever rest
upon--and the stars are most brilliant. Even in the clear plateau air of
South America I have never seen them brighter. Possibly this etheric
change has some effect upon light. The funeral pyre of Brighton is still
blazing, and there is a very distant patch of scarlet in the western sky,
which may mean trouble at Arundel or Chichester, possibly even at
Portsmouth. I sit and muse and make an occasional note. There is a
sweet melancholy in the air. Youth and beauty and chivalry and love--is
this to be the end of it all? The starlit earth looks a dreamland of
gentle peace. Who would imagine it as the terrible Golgotha strewn with
the bodies of the human race? Suddenly, I find myself laughing.
"Halloa, young fellah!" says Lord John, staring at me in surprise. "We
could do with a joke in these hard times. What was it, then?"
"I was thinking of all the great unsolved questions," I answer, "the
questions that we spent so much labor and thought over. Think of
Anglo-German competition, for example--or the Persian Gulf that my old
chief was so keen about. Whoever would have guessed, when we fumed and
fretted so, how they were to be eventually solved?"
We fall into silence again. I fancy that each of us is thinking of
friends that have gone before. Mrs. Challenger is sobbing quietly, and
her husband is whispering to her. My mind turns to all the most unlikely
people, and I see each of them lying white and rigid as poor Austin does
in the yard. There is McArdle, for example, I know exactly where he is,
with his face upon his writing desk and his hand on his own telephone,
just as I heard him fall. Beaumont, the editor, too--I suppose he is
lying upon the blue-and-red Turkey carpet which adorned his sanctum. And
the fellows in the reporters' room--Macdona and Murray and Bond. They
had certainly died hard at work on their job, with note-books full of
vivid impressions and strange happenings in their hands. I could just
imagine how this one would have been packed off to the doctors, and that
other to Westminster, and yet a third to St. Paul's. What glorious rows
of head-lines they must have seen as a last vision beautiful, never
destined to materialize in printer's ink! I could see Macdona among the
doctors--"Hope in Harley Street"--Mac had always a weakness for
alliteration. "Interview with Mr. Soley Wilson." "Famous Specialist says
'Never despair!'" "Our Special Correspondent found the eminent scientist
seated upon the roof, whither he had retreated to avoid the crowd of
terrified patients who had stormed his dwelling. With a manner which
plainly showed his appreciation of the immense gravity of the occasion,
the celebrated physician refused to admit that every avenue of hope had
been closed." That's how Mac would start. Then there was Bond; he would
probably do St. Paul's. He fancied his own literary touch. My word,
what a theme for him! "Standing in the little gallery under the dome and
looking down upon that packed mass of despairing humanity, groveling at
this last instant before a Power which they had so persistently ignored,
there rose to my ears from the swaying crowd such a low moan of entreaty
and terror, such a shuddering cry for help to the Unknown, that----" and
so forth.
Yes, it would be a great end for a reporter, though, like myself, he
would die with the treasures still unused. What would Bond not give,
poor chap, to see "J. H. B." at the foot of a column like that?
But what drivel I am writing! It is just an attempt to pass the weary
time. Mrs. Challenger has gone to the inner dressing-room, and the
Professor says that she is asleep. He is making notes and consulting
books at the central table, as calmly as if years of placid work lay
before him. He writes with a very noisy quill pen which seems to be
screeching scorn at all who disagree with him.
Summerlee has dropped off in his chair and gives from time to time a
peculiarly exasperating snore. Lord John lies back with his hands in his
pockets and his eyes closed. How people can sleep under such conditions
is more than I can imagine.
Three-thirty a.m. I have just wakened with a start. It was five minutes
past eleven when I made my last entry. I remember winding up my watch
and noting the time. So I have wasted some five hours of the little span
still left to us. Who would have believed it possible? But I feel very
much fresher, and ready for my fate--or try to persuade myself that I am.
And yet, the fitter a man is, and the higher his tide of life, the more
must he shrink from death. How wise and how merciful is that provision
of nature by which his earthly anchor is usually loosened by many little
imperceptible tugs, until his consciousness has drifted out of its
untenable earthly harbor into the great sea beyond!
Mrs. Challenger is still in the dressing room. Challenger has fallen
asleep in his chair. What a picture! His enormous frame leans back, his
huge, hairy hands are clasped across his waistcoat, and his head is so
tilted that I can see nothing above his collar save a tangled bristle of
luxuriant beard. He shakes with the vibration of his own snoring.
Summerlee adds his occasional high tenor to Challenger's sonorous bass.
Lord John is sleeping also, his long body doubled up sideways in a
basket-chair. The first cold light of dawn is just stealing into the
room, and everything is grey and mournful.
I look out at the sunrise--that fateful sunrise which will shine upon an
unpeopled world. The human race is gone, extinguished in a day, but the
planets swing round and the tides rise or fall, and the wind whispers,
and all nature goes her way, down, as it would seem, to the very amoeba,
with never a sign that he who styled himself the lord of creation had
ever blessed or cursed the universe with his presence. Down in the yard
lies Austin with sprawling limbs, his face glimmering white in the dawn,
and the hose nozzle still projecting from his dead hand. The whole of
human kind is typified in that one half-ludicrous and half-pathetic
figure, lying so helpless beside the machine which it used to control.
Here end the notes which I made at the time. Henceforward events were
too swift and too poignant to allow me to write, but they are too clearly
outlined in my memory that any detail could escape me.
Some chokiness in my throat made me look at the oxygen cylinders, and I
was startled at what I saw. The sands of our lives were running very
low. At some period in the night Challenger had switched the tube from
the third to the fourth cylinder. Now it was clear that this also was
nearly exhausted. That horrible feeling of constriction was closing in
upon me. I ran across and, unscrewing the nozzle, I changed it to our
last supply. Even as I did so my conscience pricked me, for I felt that
perhaps if I had held my hand all of them might have passed in their
sleep. The thought was banished, however, by the voice of the lady from
the inner room crying:--
"George, George, I am stifling!"
"It is all right, Mrs. Challenger," I answered as the others started to
their feet. "I have just turned on a fresh supply."
Even at such a moment I could not help smiling at Challenger, who with a
great hairy fist in each eye was like a huge, bearded baby, new wakened
out of sleep. Summerlee was shivering like a man with the ague, human
fears, as he realized his position, rising for an instant above the
stoicism of the man of science. Lord John, however, was as cool and
alert as if he had just been roused on a hunting morning.
"Fifthly and lastly," said he, glancing at the tube. "Say, young fellah,
don't tell me you've been writin' up your impressions in that paper on
your knee."
"Just a few notes to pass the time."
"Well, I don't believe anyone but an Irishman would have done that. I
expect you'll have to wait till little brother amoeba gets grown up
before you'll find a reader. He don't seem to take much stock of things
just at present. Well, Herr Professor, what are the prospects?"
Challenger was looking out at the great drifts of morning mist which lay
over the landscape. Here and there the wooded hills rose like conical
islands out of this woolly sea.
"It might be a winding sheet," said Mrs. Challenger, who had entered in
her dressing-gown. "There's that song of yours, George, 'Ring out the
old, ring in the new.' It was prophetic. But you are shivering, my poor
dear friends. I have been warm under a coverlet all night, and you cold
in your chairs. But I'll soon set you right."
The brave little creature hurried away, and presently we heard the
sizzling of a kettle. She was back soon with five steaming cups of cocoa
upon a tray.
"Drink these," said she. "You will feel so much better."
And we did. Summerlee asked if he might light his pipe, and we all had
cigarettes. It steadied our nerves, I think, but it was a mistake, for
it made a dreadful atmosphere in that stuffy room. Challenger had to
open the ventilator.
"How long, Challenger?" asked Lord John.
"Possibly three hours," he answered with a shrug.
"I used to be frightened," said his wife. "But the nearer I get to it,
the easier it seems. Don't you think we ought to pray, George?"
"You will pray, dear, if you wish," the big man answered, very gently.
"We all have our own ways of praying. Mine is a complete acquiescence in
whatever fate may send me--a cheerful acquiescence. The highest religion
and the highest science seem to unite on that."
"I cannot truthfully describe my mental attitude as acquiescence and far
less cheerful acquiescence," grumbled Summerlee over his pipe. "I submit
because I have to. I confess that I should have liked another year of
life to finish my classification of the chalk fossils."
"Your unfinished work is a small thing," said Challenger pompously, "when
weighed against the fact that my own _magnum opus_, 'The Ladder of Life,'
is still in the first stages. My brain, my reading, my experience--in
fact, my whole unique equipment--were to be condensed into that
epoch-making volume. And yet, as I say, I acquiesce."
"I expect we've all left some loose ends stickin' out," said Lord John.
"What are yours, young fellah?"
"I was working at a book of verses," I answered.
"Well, the world has escaped that, anyhow," said Lord John. "There's
always compensation somewhere if you grope around."
"What about you?" I asked.
"Well, it just so happens that I was tidied up and ready. I'd promised
Merivale to go to Tibet for a snow leopard in the spring. But it's hard
on you, Mrs. Challenger, when you have just built up this pretty home."
"Where George is, there is my home. But, oh, what would I not give for
one last walk together in the fresh morning air upon those beautiful
downs!"
Our hearts re-echoed her words. The sun had burst through the gauzy
mists which veiled it, and the whole broad Weald was washed in golden
light. Sitting in our dark and poisonous atmosphere that glorious,
clean, wind-swept countryside seemed a very dream of beauty. Mrs.
Challenger held her hand stretched out to it in her longing. We drew up
chairs and sat in a semicircle in the window. The atmosphere was already
very close. It seemed to me that the shadows of death were drawing in
upon us--the last of our race. It was like an invisible curtain closing
down upon every side.
"That cylinder is not lastin' too well," said Lord John with a long gasp
for breath.
"The amount contained is variable," said Challenger, "depending upon the
pressure and care with which it has been bottled. I am inclined to agree
with you, Roxton, that this one is defective."
"So we are to be cheated out of the last hour of our lives," Summerlee
remarked bitterly. "An excellent final illustration of the sordid age in
which we have lived. Well, Challenger, now is your time if you wish to
study the subjective phenomena of physical dissolution."
"Sit on the stool at my knee and give me your hand," said Challenger to
his wife. "I think, my friends, that a further delay in this
insufferable atmosphere is hardly advisable. You would not desire it,
dear, would you?"
His wife gave a little groan and sank her face against his leg.
"I've seen the folk bathin' in the Serpentine in winter," said Lord John.
"When the rest are in, you see one or two shiverin' on the bank, envyin'
the others that have taken the plunge. It's the last that have the worst
of it. I'm all for a header and have done with it."
"You would open the window and face the ether?"
"Better be poisoned than stifled."
Summerlee nodded his reluctant acquiescence and held out his thin hand to
Challenger.
"We've had our quarrels in our time, but that's all over," said he. "We
were good friends and had a respect for each other under the surface.
Good-by!"
"Good-by, young fellah!" said Lord John. "The window's plastered up.
You can't open it."
Challenger stooped and raised his wife, pressing her to his breast, while
she threw her arms round his neck.
"Give me that field-glass, Malone," said he gravely.
I handed it to him.
"Into the hands of the Power that made us we render ourselves again!" he
shouted in his voice of thunder, and at the words he hurled the
field-glass through the window.
Full in our flushed faces, before the last tinkle of falling fragments
had died away, there came the wholesome breath of the wind, blowing
strong and sweet.
I don't know how long we sat in amazed silence. Then as in a dream, I
heard Challenger's voice once more.
"We are back in normal conditions," he cried. "The world has cleared the
poison belt, but we alone of all mankind are saved."
Chapter V
THE DEAD WORLD
I remember that we all sat gasping in our chairs, with that sweet, wet
south-western breeze, fresh from the sea, flapping the muslin curtains
and cooling our flushed faces. I wonder how long we sat! None of us
afterwards could agree at all on that point. We were bewildered,
stunned, semi-conscious. We had all braced our courage for death, but
this fearful and sudden new fact--that we must continue to live after we
had survived the race to which we belonged--struck us with the shock of a
physical blow and left us prostrate. Then gradually the suspended
mechanism began to move once more; the shuttles of memory worked; ideas
weaved themselves together in our minds. We saw, with vivid, merciless
clearness, the relations between the past, the present, and the
future--the lives that we had led and the lives which we would have to
live. Our eyes turned in silent horror upon those of our companions and
found the same answering look in theirs. Instead of the joy which men
might have been expected to feel who had so narrowly escaped an imminent
death, a terrible wave of darkest depression submerged us. Everything on
earth that we loved had been washed away into the great, infinite,
unknown ocean, and here were we marooned upon this desert island of a
world, without companions, hopes, or aspirations. A few years' skulking
like jackals among the graves of the human race and then our belated and
lonely end would come.
"It's dreadful, George, dreadful!" the lady cried in an agony of sobs.
"If we had only passed with the others! Oh, why did you save us? I feel
as if it is we that are dead and everyone else alive."
Challenger's great eyebrows were drawn down in concentrated thought,
while his huge, hairy paw closed upon the outstretched hand of his wife.
I had observed that she always held out her arms to him in trouble as a
child would to its mother.
"Without being a fatalist to the point of nonresistance," said he, "I
have always found that the highest wisdom lies in an acquiescence with
the actual." He spoke slowly, and there was a vibration of feeling in
his sonorous voice.
"I do _not_ acquiesce," said Summerlee firmly.
"I don't see that it matters a row of pins whether you acquiesce or
whether you don't," remarked Lord John. "You've got to take it, whether
you take it fightin' or take it lyin' down, so what's the odds whether
you acquiesce or not?
"I can't remember that anyone asked our permission before the thing
began, and nobody's likely to ask it now. So what difference can it make
what we may think of it?"
"It is just all the difference between happiness and misery," said
Challenger with an abstracted face, still patting his wife's hand. "You
can swim with the tide and have peace in mind and soul, or you can thrust
against it and be bruised and weary. This business is beyond us, so let
us accept it as it stands and say no more."
"But what in the world are we to do with our lives?" I asked, appealing
in desperation to the blue, empty heaven.
"What am I to do, for example? There are no newspapers, so there's an
end of my vocation."
"And there's nothin' left to shoot, and no more soldierin', so there's an
end of mine," said Lord John.
"And there are no students, so there's an end of mine," cried Summerlee.
"But I have my husband and my house, so I can thank heaven that there is
no end of mine," said the lady.
"Nor is there an end of mine," remarked Challenger, "for science is not
dead, and this catastrophe in itself will offer us many most absorbing
problems for investigation."
He had now flung open the windows and we were gazing out upon the silent
and motionless landscape.
"Let me consider," he continued. "It was about three, or a little after,
yesterday afternoon that the world finally entered the poison belt to the
extent of being completely submerged. It is now nine o'clock. The
question is, at what hour did we pass out from it?"
"The air was very bad at daybreak," said I.
"Later than that," said Mrs. Challenger. "As late as eight o'clock I
distinctly felt the same choking at my throat which came at the outset."
"Then we shall say that it passed just after eight o'clock. For
seventeen hours the world has been soaked in the poisonous ether. For
that length of time the Great Gardener has sterilized the human mold
which had grown over the surface of His fruit. Is it possible that the
work is incompletely done--that others may have survived besides
ourselves?"
"That's what I was wonderin'," said Lord John. "Why should we be the only
pebbles on the beach?"
"It is absurd to suppose that anyone besides ourselves can possibly have
survived," said Summerlee with conviction. "Consider that the poison was
so virulent that even a man who is as strong as an ox and has not a nerve
in his body, like Malone here, could hardly get up the stairs before he
fell unconscious. Is it likely that anyone could stand seventeen minutes
of it, far less hours?"
"Unless someone saw it coming and made preparation, same as old friend
Challenger did."
"That, I think, is hardly probable," said Challenger, projecting his
beard and sinking his eyelids. "The combination of observation,
inference, and anticipatory imagination which enabled me to foresee the
danger is what one can hardly expect twice in the same generation."
"Then your conclusion is that everyone is certainly dead?"
"There can be little doubt of that. We have to remember, however, that
the poison worked from below upwards and would possibly be less virulent
in the higher strata of the atmosphere. It is strange, indeed, that it
should be so; but it presents one of those features which will afford us
in the future a fascinating field for study. One could imagine,
therefore, that if one had to search for survivors one would turn one's
eyes with best hopes of success to some Tibetan village or some Alpine
farm, many thousands of feet above the sea level."
"Well, considerin' that there are no railroads and no steamers you might
as well talk about survivors in the moon," said Lord John. "But what I'm
askin' myself is whether it's really over or whether it's only half-time."
Summerlee craned his neck to look round the horizon. "It seems clear and
fine," said he in a very dubious voice; "but so it did yesterday. I am
by no means assured that it is all over."
Challenger shrugged his shoulders.
"We must come back once more to our fatalism," said he. "If the world
has undergone this experience before, which is not outside the range of
possibility, it was certainly a very long time ago. Therefore, we may
reasonably hope that it will be very long before it occurs again."
"That's all very well," said Lord John, "but if you get an earthquake
shock you are mighty likely to have a second one right on the top of it.
I think we'd be wise to stretch our legs and have a breath of air while
we have the chance. Since our oxygen is exhausted we may just as well be
caught outside as in."
It was strange the absolute lethargy which had come upon us as a reaction
after our tremendous emotions of the last twenty-four hours. It was both
mental and physical, a deep-lying feeling that nothing mattered and that
everything was a weariness and a profitless exertion. Even Challenger
had succumbed to it, and sat in his chair, with his great head leaning
upon his hands and his thoughts far away, until Lord John and I, catching
him by each arm, fairly lifted him on to his feet, receiving only the
glare and growl of an angry mastiff for our trouble. However, once we
had got out of our narrow haven of refuge into the wider atmosphere of
everyday life, our normal energy came gradually back to us once more.
But what were we to begin to do in that graveyard of a world? Could ever
men have been faced with such a question since the dawn of time? It is
true that our own physical needs, and even our luxuries, were assured for
the future. All the stores of food, all the vintages of wine, all the
treasures of art were ours for the taking. But what were we to _do_?
Some few tasks appealed to us at once, since they lay ready to our hands.
We descended into the kitchen and laid the two domestics upon their
respective beds. They seemed to have died without suffering, one in the
chair by the fire, the other upon the scullery floor. Then we carried in
poor Austin from the yard. His muscles were set as hard as a board in
the most exaggerated rigor mortis, while the contraction of the fibres
had drawn his mouth into a hard sardonic grin. This symptom was
prevalent among all who had died from the poison. Wherever we went we
were confronted by those grinning faces, which seemed to mock at our
dreadful position, smiling silently and grimly at the ill-fated survivors
of their race.
"Look here," said Lord John, who had paced restlessly about the
dining-room whilst we partook of some food, "I don't know how you fellows
feel about it, but for my part, I simply _can't_ sit here and do nothin'."
"Perhaps," Challenger answered, "you would have the kindness to suggest
what you think we ought to do."
"Get a move on us and see all that has happened."
"That is what I should myself propose."
"But not in this little country village. We can see from the window all
that this place can teach us."
"Where should we go, then?"
"To London!"
"That's all very well," grumbled Summerlee. "You may be equal to a
forty-mile walk, but I'm not so sure about Challenger, with his stumpy
legs, and I am perfectly sure about myself." Challenger was very much
annoyed.
"If you could see your way, sir, to confining your remarks to your own
physical peculiarities, you would find that you had an ample field for
comment," he cried.
"I had no intention to offend you, my dear Challenger," cried our
tactless friend. "You can't be held responsible for your own physique.
If nature has given you a short, heavy body you cannot possibly help
having stumpy legs."
Challenger was too furious to answer. He could only growl and blink and
bristle. Lord John hastened to intervene before the dispute became more
violent.
"You talk of walking. Why should we walk?" said he.
"Do you suggest taking a train?" asked Challenger, still simmering.
"What's the matter with the motor-car? Why should we not go in that?"
"I am not an expert," said Challenger, pulling at his beard reflectively.
"At the same time, you are right in supposing that the human intellect in
its higher manifestations should be sufficiently flexible to turn itself
to anything. Your idea is an excellent one, Lord John. I myself will
drive you all to London."
"You will do nothing of the kind," said Summerlee with decision.
"No, indeed, George!" cried his wife. "You only tried once, and you
remember how you crashed through the gate of the garage."
"It was a momentary want of concentration," said Challenger complacently.
"You can consider the matter settled. I will certainly drive you all to
London."
The situation was relieved by Lord John.
"What's the car?" he asked.
"A twenty-horsepower Humber."
"Why, I've driven one for years," said he. "By George!" he added. "I
never thought I'd live to take the whole human race in one load. There's
just room for five, as I remember it. Get your things on, and I'll be
ready at the door by ten o'clock."
Sure enough, at the hour named, the car came purring and crackling from
the yard with Lord John at the wheel. I took my seat beside him, while
the lady, a useful little buffer state, was squeezed in between the two
men of wrath at the back. Then Lord John released his brakes, slid his
lever rapidly from first to third, and we sped off upon the strangest
drive that ever human beings have taken since man first came upon the
earth.
You are to picture the loveliness of nature upon that August day, the
freshness of the morning air, the golden glare of the summer sunshine,
the cloudless sky, the luxuriant green of the Sussex woods, and the deep
purple of heather-clad downs. As you looked round upon the many-coloured
beauty of the scene all thought of a vast catastrophe would have passed
from your mind had it not been for one sinister sign--the solemn,
all-embracing silence. There is a gentle hum of life which pervades a
closely-settled country, so deep and constant that one ceases to observe
it, as the dweller by the sea loses all sense of the constant murmur of
the waves. The twitter of birds, the buzz of insects, the far-off echo
of voices, the lowing of cattle, the distant barking of dogs, roar of
trains, and rattle of carts--all these form one low, unremitting note,
striking unheeded upon the ear. We missed it now. This deadly silence
was appalling. So solemn was it, so impressive, that the buzz and rattle
of our motor-car seemed an unwarrantable intrusion, an indecent disregard
of this reverent stillness which lay like a pall over and round the ruins
of humanity. It was this grim hush, and the tall clouds of smoke which
rose here and there over the country-side from smoldering buildings,
which cast a chill into our hearts as we gazed round at the glorious
panorama of the Weald.
And then there were the dead! At first those endless groups of drawn and
grinning faces filled us with a shuddering horror. So vivid and mordant
was the impression that I can live over again that slow descent of the
station hill, the passing by the nurse-girl with the two babes, the sight
of the old horse on his knees between the shafts, the cabman twisted
across his seat, and the young man inside with his hand upon the open
door in the very act of springing out. Lower down were six reapers all
in a litter, their limbs crossing, their dead, unwinking eyes gazing
upwards at the glare of heaven. These things I see as in a photograph.
But soon, by the merciful provision of nature, the over-excited nerve
ceased to respond. The very vastness of the horror took away from its
personal appeal. Individuals merged into groups, groups into crowds,
crowds into a universal phenomenon which one soon accepted as the
inevitable detail of every scene. Only here and there, where some
particularly brutal or grotesque incident caught the attention, did the
mind come back with a sudden shock to the personal and human meaning of
it all.
Above all, there was the fate of the children. That, I remember, filled
us with the strongest sense of intolerable injustice. We could have
wept--Mrs. Challenger did weep--when we passed a great council school and
saw the long trail of tiny figures scattered down the road which led from
it. They had been dismissed by their terrified teachers and were
speeding for their homes when the poison caught them in its net. Great
numbers of people were at the open windows of the houses. In Tunbridge
Wells there was hardly one which had not its staring, smiling face. At
the last instant the need of air, that very craving for oxygen which we
alone had been able to satisfy, had sent them flying to the window. The
sidewalks too were littered with men and women, hatless and bonnetless,
who had rushed out of the houses. Many of them had fallen in the
roadway. It was a lucky thing that in Lord John we had found an expert
driver, for it was no easy matter to pick one's way. Passing through the
villages or towns we could only go at a walking pace, and once, I
remember, opposite the school at Tonbridge, we had to halt some time
while we carried aside the bodies which blocked our path.
A few small, definite pictures stand out in my memory from amid that long
panorama of death upon the Sussex and Kentish high roads. One was that
of a great, glittering motor-car standing outside the inn at the village
of Southborough. It bore, as I should guess, some pleasure party upon
their return from Brighton or from Eastbourne. There were three gaily
dressed women, all young and beautiful, one of them with a Peking spaniel
upon her lap. With them were a rakish-looking elderly man and a young
aristocrat, his eyeglass still in his eye, his cigarette burned down to
the stub between the fingers of his begloved hand. Death must have come
on them in an instant and fixed them as they sat. Save that the elderly
man had at the last moment torn out his collar in an effort to breathe,
they might all have been asleep. On one side of the car a waiter with
some broken glasses beside a tray was huddled near the step. On the
other, two very ragged tramps, a man and a woman, lay where they had
fallen, the man with his long, thin arm still outstretched, even as he
had asked for alms in his lifetime. One instant of time had put
aristocrat, waiter, tramp, and dog upon one common footing of inert and
dissolving protoplasm.
I remember another singular picture, some miles on the London side of
Sevenoaks. There is a large convent upon the left, with a long, green
slope in front of it. Upon this slope were assembled a great number of
school children, all kneeling at prayer. In front of them was a fringe
of nuns, and higher up the slope, facing towards them, a single figure
whom we took to be the Mother Superior. Unlike the pleasure-seekers in
the motor-car, these people seemed to have had warning of their danger
and to have died beautifully together, the teachers and the taught,
assembled for their last common lesson.
My mind is still stunned by that terrific experience, and I grope vainly
for means of expression by which I can reproduce the emotions which we
felt. Perhaps it is best and wisest not to try, but merely to indicate
the facts. Even Summerlee and Challenger were crushed, and we heard
nothing of our companions behind us save an occasional whimper from the
lady. As to Lord John, he was too intent upon his wheel and the
difficult task of threading his way along such roads to have time or
inclination for conversation. One phrase he used with such wearisome
iteration that it stuck in my memory and at last almost made me laugh as
a comment upon the day of doom.
"Pretty doin's! What!"
That was his ejaculation as each fresh tremendous combination of death
and disaster displayed itself before us. "Pretty doin's! What!" he
cried, as we descended the station hill at Rotherfield, and it was still
"Pretty doin's! What!" as we picked our way through a wilderness of
death in the High Street of Lewisham and the Old Kent Road.
It was here that we received a sudden and amazing shock. Out of the
window of a humble corner house there appeared a fluttering handkerchief
waving at the end of a long, thin human arm. Never had the sight of
unexpected death caused our hearts to stop and then throb so wildly as
did this amazing indication of life. Lord John ran the motor to the
curb, and in an instant we had rushed through the open door of the house
and up the staircase to the second-floor front room from which the signal
proceeded.
A very old lady sat in a chair by the open window, and close to her, laid
across a second chair, was a cylinder of oxygen, smaller but of the same
shape as those which had saved our own lives. She turned her thin,
drawn, bespectacled face toward us as we crowded in at the doorway.
"I feared that I was abandoned here forever," said she, "for I am an
invalid and cannot stir."
"Well, madam," Challenger answered, "it is a lucky chance that we
happened to pass."
"I have one all-important question to ask you," said she. "Gentlemen, I
beg that you will be frank with me. What effect will these events have
upon London and North-Western Railway shares?"
We should have laughed had it not been for the tragic eagerness with
which she listened for our answer. Mrs. Burston, for that was her name,
was an aged widow, whose whole income depended upon a small holding of
this stock. Her life had been regulated by the rise and fall of the
dividend, and she could form no conception of existence save as it was
affected by the quotation of her shares. In vain we pointed out to her
that all the money in the world was hers for the taking and was useless
when taken. Her old mind would not adapt itself to the new idea, and she
wept loudly over her vanished stock. "It was all I had," she wailed.
"If that is gone I may as well go too."
Amid her lamentations we found out how this frail old plant had lived
where the whole great forest had fallen. She was a confirmed invalid and
an asthmatic. Oxygen had been prescribed for her malady, and a tube was
in her room at the moment of the crisis. She had naturally inhaled some
as had been her habit when there was a difficulty with her breathing. It
had given her relief, and by doling out her supply she had managed to
survive the night. Finally she had fallen asleep and been awakened by
the buzz of our motor-car. As it was impossible to take her on with us,
we saw that she had all necessaries of life and promised to communicate
with her in a couple of days at the latest. So we left her, still
weeping bitterly over her vanished stock.
As we approached the Thames the block in the streets became thicker and
the obstacles more bewildering. It was with difficulty that we made our
way across London Bridge. The approaches to it upon the Middlesex side
were choked from end to end with frozen traffic which made all further
advance in that direction impossible. A ship was blazing brightly
alongside one of the wharves near the bridge, and the air was full of
drifting smuts and of a heavy acrid smell of burning. There was a cloud
of dense smoke somewhere near the Houses of Parliament, but it was
impossible from where we were to see what was on fire.
"I don't know how it strikes you," Lord John remarked as he brought his
engine to a standstill, "but it seems to me the country is more cheerful
than the town. Dead London is gettin' on my nerves. I'm for a cast
round and then gettin' back to Rotherfield."
"I confess that I do not see what we can hope for here," said Professor
Summerlee.
"At the same time," said Challenger, his great voice booming strangely
amid the silence, "it is difficult for us to conceive that out of seven
millions of people there is only this one old woman who by some
peculiarity of constitution or some accident of occupation has managed to
survive this catastrophe."
"If there should be others, how can we hope to find them, George?" asked
the lady. "And yet I agree with you that we cannot go back until we have
tried."
Getting out of the car and leaving it by the curb, we walked with some
difficulty along the crowded pavement of King William Street and entered
the open door of a large insurance office. It was a corner house, and we
chose it as commanding a view in every direction. Ascending the stair,
we passed through what I suppose to have been the board-room, for eight
elderly men were seated round a long table in the centre of it. The high
window was open and we all stepped out upon the balcony. From it we
could see the crowded city streets radiating in every direction, while
below us the road was black from side to side with the tops of the
motionless taxis. All, or nearly all, had their heads pointed outwards,
showing how the terrified men of the city had at the last moment made a
vain endeavor to rejoin their families in the suburbs or the country.
Here and there amid the humbler cabs towered the great brass-spangled
motor-car of some wealthy magnate, wedged hopelessly among the dammed
stream of arrested traffic. Just beneath us there was such a one of
great size and luxurious appearance, with its owner, a fat old man,
leaning out, half his gross body through the window, and his podgy hand,
gleaming with diamonds, outstretched as he urged his chauffeur to make a
last effort to break through the press.
A dozen motor-buses towered up like islands in this flood, the passengers
who crowded the roofs lying all huddled together and across each others'
laps like a child's toys in a nursery. On a broad lamp pedestal in the
centre of the roadway, a burly policeman was standing, leaning his back
against the post in so natural an attitude that it was hard to realize
that he was not alive, while at his feet there lay a ragged newsboy with
his bundle of papers on the ground beside him. A paper-cart had got
blocked in the crowd, and we could read in large letters, black upon
yellow, "Scene at Lord's. County Match Interrupted." This must have
been the earliest edition, for there were other placards bearing the
legend, "Is It the End? Great Scientist's Warning." And another, "Is
Challenger Justified? Ominous Rumours."
Challenger pointed the latter placard out to his wife, as it thrust
itself like a banner above the throng. I could see him throw out his
chest and stroke his beard as he looked at it. It pleased and flattered
that complex mind to think that London had died with his name and his
words still present in their thoughts. His feelings were so evident that
they aroused the sardonic comment of his colleague.
"In the limelight to the last, Challenger," he remarked.
"So it would appear," he answered complacently. "Well," he added as he
looked down the long vista of the radiating streets, all silent and all
choked up with death, "I really see no purpose to be served by our
staying any longer in London. I suggest that we return at once to
Rotherfield and then take counsel as to how we shall most profitably
employ the years which lie before us."
Only one other picture shall I give of the scenes which we carried back
in our memories from the dead city. It is a glimpse which we had of the
interior of the old church of St. Mary's, which is at the very point
where our car was awaiting us. Picking our way among the prostrate
figures upon the steps, we pushed open the swing door and entered. It
was a wonderful sight. The church was crammed from end to end with
kneeling figures in every posture of supplication and abasement. At the
last dreadful moment, brought suddenly face to face with the realities of
life, those terrific realities which hang over us even while we follow
the shadows, the terrified people had rushed into those old city churches
which for generations had hardly ever held a congregation. There they
huddled as close as they could kneel, many of them in their agitation
still wearing their hats, while above them in the pulpit a young man in
lay dress had apparently been addressing them when he and they had been
overwhelmed by the same fate. He lay now, like Punch in his booth, with
his head and two limp arms hanging over the ledge of the pulpit. It was
a nightmare, the grey, dusty church, the rows of agonized figures, the
dimness and silence of it all. We moved about with hushed whispers,
walking upon our tip-toes.
And then suddenly I had an idea. At one corner of the church, near the
door, stood the ancient font, and behind it a deep recess in which there
hung the ropes for the bell-ringers. Why should we not send a message
out over London which would attract to us anyone who might still be
alive? I ran across, and pulling at the list-covered rope, I was
surprised to find how difficult it was to swing the bell. Lord John had
followed me.
"By George, young fellah!" said he, pulling off his coat. "You've hit on
a dooced good notion. Give me a grip and we'll soon have a move on it."
But, even then, so heavy was the bell that it was not until Challenger
and Summerlee had added their weight to ours that we heard the roaring
and clanging above our heads which told us that the great clapper was
ringing out its music. Far over dead London resounded our message of
comradeship and hope to any fellow-man surviving. It cheered our own
hearts, that strong, metallic call, and we turned the more earnestly to
our work, dragged two feet off the earth with each upward jerk of the
rope, but all straining together on the downward heave, Challenger the
lowest of all, bending all his great strength to the task and flopping up
and down like a monstrous bull-frog, croaking with every pull. It was at
that moment that an artist might have taken a picture of the four
adventurers, the comrades of many strange perils in the past, whom fate
had now chosen for so supreme an experience. For half an hour we worked,
the sweat dropping from our faces, our arms and backs aching with the
exertion. Then we went out into the portico of the church and looked
eagerly up and down the silent, crowded streets. Not a sound, not a
motion, in answer to our summons.
"It's no use. No one is left," I cried.
"We can do nothing more," said Mrs. Challenger. "For God's sake, George,
let us get back to Rotherfield. Another hour of this dreadful, silent
city would drive me mad."
We got into the car without another word. Lord John backed her round and
turned her to the south. To us the chapter seemed closed. Little did we
foresee the strange new chapter which was to open.
Chapter VI
THE GREAT AWAKENING
And now I come to the end of this extraordinary incident, so
overshadowing in its importance, not only in our own small, individual
lives, but in the general history of the human race. As I said when I
began my narrative, when that history comes to be written, this
occurrence will surely stand out among all other events like a mountain
towering among its foothills. Our generation has been reserved for a
very special fate since it has been chosen to experience so wonderful a
thing. How long its effect may last--how long mankind may preserve the
humility and reverence which this great shock has taught it--can only be
shown by the future. I think it is safe to say that things can never be
quite the same again. Never can one realize how powerless and ignorant
one is, and how one is upheld by an unseen hand, until for an instant
that hand has seemed to close and to crush. Death has been imminent upon
us. We know that at any moment it may be again. That grim presence
shadows our lives, but who can deny that in that shadow the sense of
duty, the feeling of sobriety and responsibility, the appreciation of the
gravity and of the objects of life, the earnest desire to develop and
improve, have grown and become real with us to a degree that has leavened
our whole society from end to end? It is something beyond sects and
beyond dogmas. It is rather an alteration of perspective, a shifting of
our sense of proportion, a vivid realization that we are insignificant
and evanescent creatures, existing on sufferance and at the mercy of the
first chill wind from the unknown. But if the world has grown graver
with this knowledge it is not, I think, a sadder place in consequence.
Surely we are agreed that the more sober and restrained pleasures of the
present are deeper as well as wiser than the noisy, foolish hustle which
passed so often for enjoyment in the days of old--days so recent and yet
already so inconceivable. Those empty lives which were wasted in aimless
visiting and being visited, in the worry of great and unnecessary
households, in the arranging and eating of elaborate and tedious meals,
have now found rest and health in the reading, the music, the gentle
family communion which comes from a simpler and saner division of their
time. With greater health and greater pleasure they are richer than
before, even after they have paid those increased contributions to the
common 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 great
awakening. It is generally agreed that, apart from the difference of
clocks, there may have been local causes which influenced the action of
the poison. Certainly, in each separate district the resurrection was
practically simultaneous. There are numerous witnesses that Big Ben
pointed to ten minutes past six at the moment. The Astronomer Royal has
fixed the Greenwich time at twelve past six. On the other hand, Laird
Johnson, a very capable East Anglia observer, has recorded six-twenty as
the hour. In the Hebrides it was as late as seven. In our own case
there can be no doubt whatever, for I was seated in Challenger's study
with his carefully tested chronometer in front of me at the moment. The
hour was a quarter-past six.
An enormous depression was weighing upon my spirits. The cumulative
effect of all the dreadful sights which we had seen upon our journey was
heavy upon my soul. With my abounding animal health and great physical
energy any kind of mental clouding was a rare event. I had the Irish
faculty of seeing some gleam of humor in every darkness. But now the
obscurity was appalling and unrelieved. The others were downstairs
making their plans for the future. I sat by the open window, my chin
resting 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 to
ask myself. Was it possible to exist upon a dead world? Just as in
physics the greater body draws to itself the lesser, would we not feel an
overpowering attraction from that vast body of humanity which had passed
into the unknown? How would the end come? Would it be from a return of
the poison? Or would the earth be uninhabitable from the mephitic
products of universal decay? Or, finally, might our awful situation prey
upon 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 noise
caused me to look down upon the road beneath me. The old cab horse was
coming up the hill!
I was conscious at the same instant of the twittering of birds, of
someone coughing in the yard below, and of a background of movement in
the landscape. And yet I remember that it was that absurd, emaciated,
superannuated cab-horse which held my gaze. Slowly and wheezily it was
climbing the slope. Then my eye traveled to the driver sitting hunched
up upon the box and finally to the young man who was leaning out of the
window in some excitement and shouting a direction. They were all
indubitably, aggressively alive!
Everybody was alive once more! Had it all been a delusion? Was it
conceivable that this whole poison belt incident had been an elaborate
dream? 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 it
was 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 an
instant full tide to the planet. Now, as my eyes wandered all over the
great landscape, I saw it in every direction--and moving, to my
amazement, in the very same groove in which it had halted. There were
the 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 upon
the green were surely putting for the hole. The reapers were slowly
trooping back to their work. The nurse-girl slapped one of her charges
and then began to push the perambulator up the hill. Everyone had
unconcernedly taken up the thread at the very point where they had
dropped it.
I rushed downstairs, but the hall door was open, and I heard the voices
of 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 herself
into 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 with
their staring eyes and stiff limbs and that awful death grin on their
faces!"
"It can only have been the condition that is called catalepsy," said
Challenger. "It has been a rare phenomenon in the past and has
constantly been mistaken for death. While it endures, the temperature
falls, the respiration disappears, the heartbeat is indistinguishable--in
fact, it _is_ death, save that it is evanescent. Even the most
comprehensive mind"--here he closed his eyes and simpered--"could hardly
conceive a universal outbreak of it in this fashion."
"You may label it catalepsy," remarked Summerlee, "but, after all, that
is only a name, and we know as little of the result as we do of the
poison which has caused it. The most we can say is that the vitiated
ether has produced a temporary death."
Austin was seated all in a heap on the step of the car. It was his
coughing which I had heard from above. He had been holding his head in
silence, but now he was muttering to himself and running his eyes over
the 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 his
feet. "I expect I came over queer when I was hosing her down. I seem to
remember flopping over by the step. But I'll swear I never left those
lubricator taps on."
In a condensed narrative the astonished Austin was told what had happened
to himself and the world. The mystery of the dripping lubricators was
also explained to him. He listened with an air of deep distrust when
told how an amateur had driven his car and with absorbed interest to the
few sentences in which our experiences of the sleeping city were
recorded. 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 the
hosing of his car.
There was a sudden grinding of wheels upon gravel. The old cab had
actually pulled up at Challenger's door. I saw the young occupant step
out from it. An instant later the maid, who looked as tousled and
bewildered as if she had that instant been aroused from the deepest
sleep, appeared with a card upon a tray. Challenger snorted ferociously
as he looked at it, and his thick black hair seemed to bristle up in his
wrath.
"A pressman!" he growled. Then with a deprecating smile: "After all, it
is natural that the whole world should hasten to know what I think of
such an episode."
"That can hardly be his errand," said Summerlee, "for he was on the road
in his cab before ever the crisis came."
I looked at the card: "James Baxter, London Correspondent, New York
Monitor."
"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 you
won't be rude to him."
"Well, well," he grumbled, "you come with me and do the talking. I
protest in advance against any such outrageous invasion of my private
life." Muttering and mumbling, he came rolling after me like an angry
and rather ill-conditioned mastiff.
The dapper young American pulled out his notebook and plunged instantly
into his subject.
"I came down, sir," said he, "because our people in America would very
much 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," Challenger
answered gruffly.
The pressman looked at him in mild surprise.
"I meant, sir, the chances that the world might run into a belt of
poisonous 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 London
Times 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 admit
that the London Times is a daily paper." He drew out a copy from his
inside 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 generally
human than I have ever seen them. The baggage man set out to tell me a
funny 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 of
the 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 back
to me that I wanted to say something to the driver and that I couldn't
make him heed me. I guess it was the heat, but I felt swimmy for a
moment. That's all."
"So it is with the whole human race," said Challenger to me. "They have
all felt swimmy for a moment. None of them have as yet any comprehension
of what has occurred. Each will go on with his interrupted job as Austin
has snatched up his hose-pipe or the golfer continued his game. Your
editor, Malone, will continue the issue of his papers, and very much
amazed he will be at finding that an issue is missing. Yes, my young
friend," he added to the American reporter, with a sudden mood of amused
geniality, "it may interest you to know that the world has swum through
the poisonous current which swirls like the Gulf Stream through the ocean
of ether. You will also kindly note for your own future convenience that
to-day is not Friday, August the twenty-seventh, but Saturday, August the
twenty-eighth, and that you sat senseless in your cab for twenty-eight
hours upon the Rotherfield hill."
And "right here," as my American colleague would say, I may bring this
narrative to an end. It is, as you are probably aware, only a fuller and
more detailed version of the account which appeared in the Monday edition
of the Daily Gazette--an account which has been universally admitted to
be the greatest journalistic scoop of all time, which sold no fewer than
three-and-a-half million copies of the paper. Framed upon the wall of my
sanctum 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 of
narrative, in which appeared the first, last, and only account of the
history of the planet, so far as one observer could draw it, during one
long day of its existence. Challenger and Summerlee have treated the
matter in a joint scientific paper, but to me alone was left the popular
account. Surely I can sing "Nunc dimittis." What is left but
anti-climax in the life of a journalist after that!
But let me not end on sensational headlines and a merely personal
triumph. Rather let me quote the sonorous passages in which the greatest
of daily papers ended its admirable leader upon the subject--a leader
which might well be filed for reference by every thoughtful man.
"It has been a well-worn truism," said the Times, "that our human race
are a feeble folk before the infinite latent forces which surround us.
From the prophets of old and from the philosophers of our own time the
same message and warning have reached us. But, like all oft-repeated
truths, it has in time lost something of its actuality and cogency. A
lesson, an actual experience, was needed to bring it home. It is from
that salutory but terrible ordeal that we have just emerged, with minds
which are still stunned by the suddenness of the blow and with spirits
which are chastened by the realization of our own limitations and
impotence. The world has paid a fearful price for its schooling. Hardly
yet have we learned the full tale of disaster, but the destruction by
fire of New York, of Orleans, and of Brighton constitutes in itself one
of the greatest tragedies in the history of our race. When the account
of the railway and shipping accidents has been completed, it will furnish
grim reading, although there is evidence to show that in the vast
majority of cases the drivers of trains and engineers of steamers
succeeded in shutting off their motive power before succumbing to the
poison. But the material damage, enormous as it is both in life and in
property, is not the consideration which will be uppermost in our minds
to-day. All this may in time be forgotten. But what will not be
forgotten, and what will and should continue to obsess our imaginations,
is this revelation of the possibilities of the universe, this destruction
of our ignorant self-complacency, and this demonstration of how narrow is
the path of our material existence and what abysses may lie upon either
side of it. Solemnity and humility are at the base of all our emotions
to-day. May they be the foundations upon which a more earnest and
reverent race may build a more worthy temple."
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