usual to him. "What was that about 'lived in vain'?" whispered one student
to another. "Listen," said the other, nodding towards the lecturer.
And presently they began to understand.
* * * * *
That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had carried
it some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was so great that
the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star was hidden in
its turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius,
and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white and beautiful. In many
parts of the world that night a pallid halo encircled it about. It was
perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of the tropics it seemed
as if it were nearly a quarter the size of the moon. The frost was still
on the ground in England, but the world was as brightly lit as if it were
midsummer moonlight. One could see to read quite ordinary print by that
cold, clear light, and in the cities the lamps burnt yellow and wan.
And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout Christendom
a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the country-side like the
belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to a
clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a million
belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sin
no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And overhead, growing
larger and brighter, as the earth rolled on its way and the night passed,
rose the dazzling star.
And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyards
glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded all
night long. And in all the seas about the civilized lands, ships with
throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men and
living creatures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For already
the warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed all over the
world and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and Neptune,
locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster and faster
towards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew a hundred
miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As it flew now,
indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles, wide of the earth and
scarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet only slightly
perturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons sweeping splendid
round the sun. Every moment now the attraction between the fiery star and
the greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the result of that
attraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected from its orbit into
an elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by his attraction wide of
its sunward rush, would "describe a curved path," and perhaps collide
with, and certainly pass very close to, our earth. "Earthquakes, volcanic
outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and a steady rise in temperature
to I know not what limit"--so prophesied the master mathematician.
And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid blazed the
star of the coming doom.
To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached it seemed that
it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather changed, and
the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France and England
softened towards a thaw.
But you must not imagine, because I have spoken of people praying through
the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing towards
mountainous country, that the whole world was already in a terror because
of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still ruled the world, and
save for the talk of idle moments and the splendour of the night, nine
human beings out of ten were still busy at their common occupations. In
all the cities the shops, save one here and there, opened and closed at
their proper hours, the doctor and the undertaker plied their trades, the
workers gathered in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied,
lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and fled, politicians planned
their schemes. The presses of the newspapers roared through the nights,
and many a priest of this church and that would not open his holy building
to further what he considered a foolish panic. The newspapers insisted on
the lesson of the year 1000--for then, too, people had anticipated the
end. The star was no star--mere gas--a comet; and were it a star it could
not possibly strike the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing.
Common-sense was sturdy everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclined
to persecute the obdurate fearful. That night, at seven-fifteen by
Greenwich time, the star would be at its nearest to Jupiter. Then the
world would see the turn things would take. The master mathematician's
grim warnings were treated by many as so much mere elaborate
self-advertisement. Common-sense at last, a little heated by argument,
signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too, barbarism
and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightly
business, and, save for a howling dog here and there, the beast world left
the star unheeded.
And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the star
rise, an hour later, it is true, but no larger than it had been the night
before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master
mathematician--to take the danger as if it had passed.
But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew--it grew with a terrible
steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little nearer
the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had turned night
into a second day. Had it come straight to the earth instead of in a
curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt the
intervening gulf in a day; but as it was, it took five days altogether to
come by our planet. The next night it had become a third the size of the
moon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw was assured. It rose over
America near the size of the moon, but blinding white to look at, and
_hot_; and a breath of hot wind blew now with its rising and
gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and down the St. Lawrence
valley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunder-clouds,
flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a
thaw and devastating floods. And upon all the mountains of the earth the
snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of
high country flowed thick and turbid, and soon--in their upper reaches--
with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily,
steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at
last, behind the flying population of their valleys.
And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides were
higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms drove the
waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole cities. And so
great grew the heat during the night that the rising of the sun was like
the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew until all down
America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides were sliding,
fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. The
whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult of
lava poured out so high and broad and swift and liquid that in one day it
reached the sea.
So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific,
trailed the thunder-storms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal
wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and
island and swept them clear of men: until that wave came at last--in a
blinding light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it
came--a wall of water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long
coasts of Asia, and swept inland across the plains of China. For a space
the star, hotter now and larger and brighter than the sun in its strength,
showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country; towns and
villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated fields,
millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at the
incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of the flood.
And thus it was with millions of men that night--a flight nowhither, with
limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, and the flood like a
wall swift and white behind. And then death.
China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands
of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of the
steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to salute its
coming. Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the seething
floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake shocks.
Soon the immemorial snows of Thibet and the Himalaya were melting and
pouring down by ten million deepening converging channels upon the plains
of Burmah and Hindostan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were
aflame in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the
stems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected the
blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a multitude of
men and women fled down the broad river-ways to that one last hope of
men--the open sea.
Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible
swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the
whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged
incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.
And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the
rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a
thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither
from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill watched
for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense,
and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the old
constellations they had counted lost to them for ever. In England it was
hot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered perpetually, but in the
tropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam.
And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late, the sun rose
close upon it, and in the centre of its white heart was a disc of black.
Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the
sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been veiled.
All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of the
Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of which rose
temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaret
was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbid
waters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole land seemed a-wailing,
and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace of despair, and a
breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out of the cooling air.
Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, saw that a black disc was
creeping across the light. It was the moon, coming between the star and
the earth. And even as men cried to God at this respite, out of the East
with a strange inexplicable swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun,
and moon rushed together across the heavens.
So it was that presently to the European watchers star and sun rose close
upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at last
came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of
the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to sight in the
brilliance of the sky. And though those who were still alive regarded it
for the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat and
despair engender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning of
these signs. Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one
another, and the star had passed. Already it was receding, swifter and
swifter, in the last stage of its headlong journey downward into the sun.
And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the
thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth
was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the
volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of
mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted
ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had
floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For days
the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and houses
in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic gullies over
the country-side. Those were the days of darkness that followed the star
and the heat. All through them, and for many weeks and months, the
earthquakes continued.
But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage only
slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, and
sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time came
stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the new
marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided men
perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sun
larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its former size, took now
fourscore days between its new and new.
But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving of
laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come over
Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's Bay, so that the sailors
coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could scarce
believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement of
mankind, now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward towards
the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with the coming and the
passing of the star.
The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars, although they
are very different beings from men--were naturally profoundly interested
by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of course.
"Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung
through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is astonishing what
a little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All
the familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain
intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the
white discolouration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole."
Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at a
distance of a few million miles.
XXI.
THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES.
A PANTOUM IN PROSE.
It is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it
came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and
did not believe in miraculous powers. And here, since it is the most
convenient place, I must mention that he was a little man, and had eyes of
a hot brown, very erect red hair, a moustache with ends that he twisted
up, and freckles. His name was George McWhirter Fotheringay--not the sort
of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles--and he was
clerk at Gomshott's. He was greatly addicted to assertive argument. It was
while he was asserting the impossibility of miracles that he had his first
intimation of his extraordinary powers. This particular argument was being
held in the bar of the Long Dragon, and Toddy Beamish was conducting the
opposition by a monotonous but effective "So _you_ say," that drove
Mr. Fotheringay to the very limit of his patience.
There were present, besides these two, a very dusty cyclist, landlord Cox,
and Miss Maybridge, the perfectly respectable and rather portly barmaid of
the Dragon. Miss Maybridge was standing with her back to Mr. Fotheringay,
washing glasses; the others were watching him, more or less amused by the
present ineffectiveness of the assertive method. Goaded by the Torres
Vedras tactics of Mr. Beamish, Mr. Fotheringay determined to make an
unusual rhetorical effort. "Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr.
Fotheringay. "Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It's something
contrariwise to the course of nature, done by power of will, something
what couldn't happen without being specially willed."
"So _you_ say," said Mr. Beamish, repulsing him.
Mr. Fotheringay appealed to the cyclist, who had hitherto been a silent
auditor, and received his assent--given with a hesitating cough and a
glance at Mr. Beamish. The landlord would express no opinion, and Mr.
Fotheringay, returning to Mr. Beamish, received the unexpected concession
of a qualified assent to his definition of a miracle.
"For instance," said Mr. Fotheringay, greatly encouraged. "Here would be a
miracle. That lamp, in the natural course of nature, couldn't burn like
that upsy-down, could it, Beamish?"
"_You_ say it couldn't," said Beamish.
"And you?" said Fotheringay. "You don't mean to say--eh?"
"No," said Beamish reluctantly. "No, it couldn't."
"Very well," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Then here comes someone, as it might
be me, along here, and stands as it might be here, and says to that lamp,
as I might do, collecting all my will--Turn upsy-down without breaking,
and go on burning steady, and--Hullo!"
It was enough to make anyone say "Hullo!" The impossible, the incredible,
was visible to them all. The lamp hung inverted in the air, burning
quietly with its flame pointing down. It was as solid, as indisputable as
ever a lamp was, the prosaic common lamp of the Long Dragon bar.
Mr. Fotheringay stood with an extended forefinger and the knitted brows of
one anticipating a catastrophic smash. The cyclist, who was sitting next
the lamp, ducked and jumped across the bar. Everybody jumped, more or
less. Miss Maybridge turned and screamed. For nearly three seconds the
lamp remained still. A faint cry of mental distress came from Mr.
Fotheringay. "I can't keep it up," he said, "any longer." He staggered
back, and the inverted lamp suddenly flared, fell against the corner of
the bar, bounced aside, smashed upon the floor, and went out.
It was lucky it had a metal receiver, or the whole place would have been
in a blaze. Mr. Cox was the first to speak, and his remark, shorn of
needless excrescences, was to the effect that Fotheringay was a fool.
Fotheringay was beyond disputing even so fundamental a proposition as
that! He was astonished beyond measure at the thing that had occurred. The
subsequent conversation threw absolutely no light on the matter so far as
Fotheringay was concerned; the general opinion not only followed Mr. Cox
very closely but very vehemently. Everyone accused Fotheringay of a silly
trick, and presented him to himself as a foolish destroyer of comfort and
security. His mind was in a tornado of perplexity, he was himself inclined
to agree with them, and he made a remarkably ineffectual opposition to the
proposal of his departure.
He went home flushed and heated, coat-collar crumpled, eyes smarting, and
ears red. He watched each of the ten street lamps nervously as he passed
it. It was only when he found himself alone in his little bedroom in
Church Row that he was able to grapple seriously with his memories of the
occurrence, and ask, "What on earth happened?"
He had removed his coat and boots, and was sitting on the bed with his
hands in his pockets repeating the text of his defence for the seventeenth
time, "I didn't want the confounded thing to upset," when it occurred to
him that at the precise moment he had said the commanding words he had
inadvertently willed the thing he said, and that when he had seen the lamp
in the air he had felt that it depended on him to maintain it there
without being clear how this was to be done. He had not a particularly
complex mind, or he might have stuck for a time at that "inadvertently
willed," embracing, as it does, the abstrusest problems of voluntary
action; but as it was, the idea came to him with a quite acceptable
haziness. And from that, following, as I must admit, no clear logical
path, he came to the test of experiment.
He pointed resolutely to his candle and collected his mind, though he felt
he did a foolish thing. "Be raised up," he said. But in a second that
feeling vanished. The candle was raised, hung in the air one giddy moment,
and as Mr. Fotheringay gasped, fell with a smash on his toilet-table,
leaving him in darkness save for the expiring glow of its wick.
For a time Mr. Fotheringay sat in the darkness, perfectly still. "It did
happen, after all," he said. "And 'ow _I'm_ to explain it I
_don't_ know." He sighed heavily, and began feeling in his pockets
for a match. He could find none, and he rose and groped about the
toilet-table. "I wish I had a match," he said. He resorted to his coat,
and there was none there, and then it dawned upon him that miracles were
possible even with matches. He extended a hand and scowled at it in the
dark. "Let there be a match in that hand," he said. He felt some light
object fall across his palm and his fingers closed upon a match.
After several ineffectual attempts to light this, he discovered it was a
safety match. He threw it down, and then it occurred to him that he might
have willed it lit. He did, and perceived it burning in the midst of his
toilet-table mat. He caught it up hastily, and it went out. His perception
of possibilities enlarged, and he felt for and replaced the candle in its
candlestick. "Here! _you_ be lit," said Mr. Fotheringay, and
forthwith the candle was flaring, and he saw a little black hole in the
toilet-cover, with a wisp of smoke rising from it. For a time he stared
from this to the little flame and back, and then looked up and met his own
gaze in the looking-glass. By this help he communed with himself in
silence for a time.
"How about miracles now?" said Mr. Fotheringay at last, addressing his
reflection.
The subsequent meditations of Mr. Fotheringay were of a severe but
confused description. So far, he could see it was a case of pure willing
with him. The nature of his experiences so far disinclined him for any
further experiments, at least until he had reconsidered them. But he
lifted a sheet of paper, and turned a glass of water pink and then green,
and he created a snail, which he miraculously annihilated, and got himself
a miraculous new tooth-brush. Somewhere in the small hours he had reached
the fact that his will-power must be of a particularly rare and pungent
quality, a fact of which he had indeed had inklings before, but no certain
assurance. The scare and perplexity of his first discovery was now
qualified by pride in this evidence of singularity and by vague
intimations of advantage. He became aware that the church clock was
striking one, and as it did not occur to him that his daily duties at
Gomshott's might be miraculously dispensed with, he resumed undressing, in
order to get to bed without further delay. As he struggled to get his
shirt over his head, he was struck with a brilliant idea. "Let me be in
bed," he said, and found himself so. "Undressed," he stipulated; and,
finding the sheets cold, added hastily, "and in my nightshirt--ho, in a
nice soft woollen nightshirt. Ah!" he said with immense enjoyment. "And
now let me be comfortably asleep..."
He awoke at his usual hour and was pensive all through breakfast-time,
wondering whether his over-night experience might not be a particularly
vivid dream. At length his mind turned again to cautious experiments. For
instance, he had three eggs for breakfast; two his landlady had supplied,
good, but shoppy, and one was a delicious fresh goose-egg, laid, cooked,
and served by his extraordinary will. He hurried off to Gomshott's in a
state of profound but carefully concealed excitement, and only remembered
the shell of the third egg when his landlady spoke of it that night. All
day he could do no work because of this astonishing new self-knowledge,
but this caused him no inconvenience, because he made up for it
miraculously in his last ten minutes.