There was no sound at all, and nothing to see: something that had
hitherto been ceased to be, like a dream on waking. Nothing crashed,
nothing fell: no mist, not a whiff of steam. No gossamer. Things rolled
up into nothing, as if they had vanished up their own sleeves.... The
world around seemed to be burning, silently, quickly, invisibly.
They stood round and watched intently. Would the vaccination prove
adequate in neutralizing the creeping disease? Or would it overtake
their little hill, reach them and consume them all? By the answer to
this question Christopher de Jones will stand or fall. If he succeed,
how will they reward him? Foolish associations intrude their minds.
“Payment by results.” How long, how long! Will this ever end? Has it
ended? Are they dead, and, in a sense, as good as before? “Come, now,”
said Christopher impatiently.
Gradually the hill detached itself, and as Baby and Herbert ran down the
slope hand in hand to ascertain if they were clear of the contamination,
floated away into space.
“A clean piece of work, what?” said de Jones, looking round at everybody
for approbation. “We’re clear of the old earth.”
They all looked admiringly at the wizard.
“We’ve peeled right off the rotten crust of the world; the old planet’s
gone off to die by itself.”
“The whole of her fabric vanished by now?” asked Frank.
“Well, there may still be a piece of Asia left as we are talking. But it
need concern us no longer.”
“I should hate to think, Chris,” Eva said, “that you have not quite
killed the earth and that she is suffering.”
“A matter of a day or so, that’s all. The wound is mortal.”
They stared away into space. “Look out!” he cried. “We are floating
away. No need for alarm. Merely changing our bearings in the firmament.
The stars are looking at us inquisitively; that is because we are
newcomers.”
They could not recognise their Chris, their gloomy, silent Chris. He was
gay, excited, communicative; like a Cook’s tourists’ guide. “Hold on!”
he cried presently. “We seem to be getting away somewhere, I don’t quite
know where.”
Away, away, away! To the sun, Frank thought, to be consumed in its
light!
The movement increased in velocity. It seemed they were falling.
Falling, falling, still falling; but falling upwards, not downwards.
With indrawn breath they awaited the final impact which was to shatter
them into space. Now, with a crash, they would fall on the moon.
Trembling, Eva came into Frank’s arms. He held her close that he might
drink her breath, commit her kiss into the keeping of his soul, forever
lost in hers. For his identity, as it dissolved in the encroaching dusk,
clung to his own self’s dream in her soul mirrored. Was it the end? Shut
in that vision! Now, Doom, devour them!... “Ever, and again, and
forever, thine.”
Yet the minutes passed and no blow came. When they had stood tensely and
motionlessly for what seemed to them a decade, the velocity of their
fall decreased perceptibly, and they came to a halt. The sky gradually
cleared, and the sun flickered through the clouds. It looked as though
it might be over.
Lord de Jones looked as nonplussed as the others. “Apparently,” said he,
“the law of gravity is no object to God.”
“Yes,” Frank agreed, releasing Eva from his protective grasp, “we are
saved--if unscientifically saved.”
“God has shown,” remarked Herr Kogl, “that whatever else He may be, He
is no doctrinaire.”
“Apparently,” replied de Jones, still looking worried, “our knowledge of
astronomy is incomplete--if this sort of thing can happen.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etcetera,” said
Frank.
Herr Kogl looked at Frau Kogl. They smiled faintly at each other. They
were pale, yet happy. But where was Herbert?
“Never mind Herbert. Where was Baby?” The question flashed through Eva’s
mind.
Steps were taken accordingly to satisfy the curiosity on both sides.
Herbert and Baby had, it was remembered, run down the slope hand in hand
to ascertain whether the hill was clear of the dissolving earth, before
the hill had shot, like a bolt, into space; and neither Herbert nor Baby
could be traced any more. Lord de Jones advanced an interesting and
plausible theory that Herbert and Baby, having thoughtlessly overstepped
the line of demarcation, had rendered themselves subject to the chemical
laws operating outside the area he had thoughtfully isolated by means of
vaccination, and thus had shared the fate of all matter. While they were
discussing the sensational disappearance of two of their number who
should have been saved, the ground beneath them gave a jerk and then
began to revolve, at first slowly, then faster and faster.
“Hold tight!” cried de Jones. The new globe was whirling with incredible
rapidity on its own axis and, what was even more distressing, round the
sun; which made it doubly difficult to keep one’s feet. They were, thank
God, for the most part of them, Londoners, accustomed to roughing it on
the tops of omnibuses, and this sort of thing held no real peril for
them. But twenty Austrian citizens, mountain folk who had lived away
from urban surroundings, failed to keep their poise and were hurled into
infinity to ascertain, but never to report, whether Einsteinian infinity
was indeed finite (even though some of the victims had no scientific
bias at all).
But all things come to an end sooner or later, as was remarked by some
keen observer. Gradually the revolutions slowed down and then almost
subsided: and there they were--behold! the new Jerusalem descending out
of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto
a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. And
they saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the
first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
“By God, John, you’re right!” Frank exclaimed: “as right as sixpence!”
“That was a narrow escape,” said Herr Kogl.
Lord de Jones sat down on the ground and stretched out his limbs and
yawned. “Ha!” he laughed.
“What is the joke, if I may ask?” Frank smiled enquiringly.
“Fifty years ago,” said de Jones, “when the laws of science were
absolute, this would have been impossible. But in this age of
Relativity, nothing, thank God, is absolutely impossible!”
“Relatively speaking,” said Frank.
“I have always put God above mathematics,” said Herr Kogl.
“Either nature lacked science,” Frank said, “or God knew a lot more. Our
experience is decidedly novel and interesting.”
“As a matter of fact,” rejoined Lord de Jones, “it all happened
according to plan. Just as I thought. Nothing surprises me.”
He _hadn’t_ thought so. He was like a captain who in a storm mislaid his
chart and instruments and, when the storm was over, pretended to take
his bearings and said that they tallied with his intended course.
They were miraculously saved; and there was still a world. But what a
world! A rounded mountain top, peeled away and revolving very slowly by
itself round the old sun.
And there, as before, stood the Pension Kogl. Nothing seemed to have
happened to it; all the windows were whole. Here was the garden, the
courtyard, the stables; and there the fields with the cows and sheep and
horses grazing imperturbably as before. Was it a dream? Where was it?
When was it?
And here was Herr Kogl standing on the doorstep puffing at his pipe; and
there was Frau Kogl, agitated, throwing out her hands, probably saying,
Frank thought, “I don’t know what to do!” to the policeman who was
mystified, though not disagreeably, by the disappearance of the young
shrew who had been his wife. And in her agitation Frau Kogl seemed to
be forgetting her own grief.
“The matter is simple,” de Jones was explaining. “When our new little
planet began to whirl like a merry-go-round, the Frau Policeman, having
failed to clutch at a solid object, or clutching an object that was not
solid (possibly her husband), was hurled like a stone outside the now
negligible gravitation zone of this little earth of ours, and was
attracted by the superior gravitation of the moon.”
“For one who has always whined for the moon,” said Herr Kogl, “the
transference must have its attraction.”
“The bump,” retorted de Jones, “will have been fatal. But that is
neither here nor there. All I ask you to note is that her death was due
to natural causes.”
“Lucid, admirable,” said Frank, “and entirely convincing!”
The apoplectic old Baron came up to say that he had just stumbled over
the body of little Hans, the policeman’s boy, and the company, sobered
by recent apocalyptic events, slowly made for the spot. De Jones again
assumed the initiative.
“Observe,” he said, “an interesting phenomenon. The boy, too small and
not used to transit either by omnibus or the Metropolitan Railways, had
not developed the instinct of a strap-hanger, and if his ancestors had
indeed ever had this instinct, it had been atrophied in him through long
disuse. And thus he failed to clutch instinctively at the small bush
that might have saved him, and was hurled instead into space. But being
light in body he was not hurled far enough to reach the gravitation zone
of the moon, but remained within the gravitation halo of this little
planet whose power of attraction, as you are aware, is so weak that when
we raise our legs in walking we have some difficulty in touching ground
again. We might be penny balloons on the day after their purchase when,
no longer able to rise in the air, they do the next best thing. And so,
observe, this infant’s fall was not heavy: it did not maim or deform
him: only knocked the life out of him. All in the natural order of
phenomena.”
“Most interesting and instructive,” said Frank.
“Poor child,” said Eva. “Poor Baby! Poor Herbert! I wish now,
Christopher, you had never begun it.”
“You can’t have,” retorted Christopher, “a worldwide cataclysm like this
without a victim here and there, which is all in the day’s work.”
“The number of your victims,” interjected Frank, “is in the
neighbourhood of 1,600,000,000.”
“What!” Frau Kogl was appalled. “That is not allowed! _Das gibt es
nicht!_ Herr Wachmann!” she called out to the policeman, “will you have
this gentleman arrested. He is the biggest murderer that ever lived!”
The policeman, a tin sword trailing at his side, looked from one to the
other with an irresolute air.
“Come, come!” said Lord de Jones, patting him on the shoulder, “this is
no longer your old Austria.”
“Now don’t be a funk,” Frau Kogl egged him on, “assert your authority,
show what you can do.”
“I am the only policeman in the world, a poor, lonely man. How can I
arrest anybody?”
“Come, come, don’t you bother them,” Herr Kogl intervened. “What is done
is done and cannot be undone.”
But she would not listen to him. And even when he bawled at her she did
not quail, this time, before the man with the strong will; and he turned
into the house with a shrug. “Women,” he said tenderly.
“You’re a fine policeman and no mistake,” Frau Kogl jeered, till even
Lord de Jones himself felt sorry for the man.
“Leave the poor man alone, can’t you?” he said. “What has he done to
you?”
“It’s not what he, but what you’ve done, sir. Killed Herbert, killed
everybody. Everybody, everybody ... absolutely everybody one can think
of. And now with this funk of a policeman there will be no justice, no
authority left in the world; no one to bring you to book!”
“That will do, Frau Kogl.”
“No, it _won’t_ do, sir. This is _my_ pension, bought on my mother’s
hard savings she made in Alsace-Lorraine from where we spring, and as an
Alsacian I am too proud to tolerate the presence of the murderer of the
human race in my house.”
“Stop!” cried de Jones. “Don’t try my patience too far, woman! My nerves
are on edge. I’ve had a very exceptional day. Do you know what you are
saying? This is the New Jerusalem that you see, the home of pacifism.
None of your Alsace-Lorraine now, I beg of you.”
“I came from there--”
“And you’ll go that way, if you are not careful.”
“All this is mine.”
“Oh, is it? Let heaven be my judge.” He snatched the sword from the
policeman and struck her on the head.
She collapsed in a heap.
The policeman walked away into the hills with a look which implied: “I
haven’t seen it.”
Lord de Jones lit his pipe. Frank and Eva stood by, aghast. De Jones
looked at them with a propitiating smile. “I have slain,” he said,
removing his pipe, “this dragon of contention, this symbol of war and
nationalism, I hope, for ever.”
“Cain!”
A cock crowed twice.
He started; then relaxed again. If the cock crowed twice to remind him
that he had betrayed his ideal at least once, he was nevertheless mighty
glad to know that there was a cock on the premises. He hoped there were
hens, too.
“I have released,” he said, “the spirit imprisoned in a foul house.”
“You’re blaspheming.”
“It had to be done.”
“Oh, had it?”
“A hard thing, I admit, for a pacifist. But we must not sentimentalise
if we are to survive; we must fight the peace as we fought the war!”
There was silence.
“Even the cock is too sick with you to crow again,” said Frank.
The light sank: there was a long drop of rain, then another. It began to
hail. The three of them turned in and stood at the window blurred with
rain. The old woman’s body lay out in the wet. Neither the hail nor rain
could waken her. The earth was wrapped in a wet mist. And the Spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters.
And Lord de Jones said, “Let there be light”: and there was no light. So
he switched on the electric light: and he saw that it was quite good.
“You blooming fool, Christopher! You’ve upset all the seasons!” cried
Eva. “You’ve made a mess of the weather! It’s neither day nor night, but
heaven knows what! It should be summer now, and it is winter.”
“O Wind! If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
He sank into a chair and picked up a periodical, a copy of _The New
Statesman_, the last number. The very last! Eva opened the _Illustrated
London News_ full of pictures of the _concours hippique_ at the Olympia,
and Frank strolled over to the piano and tried his hand at the
_Symphony of the New World_, when Herr Kogl came in from the
dining-room.
“Bad weather, Herr Kogl, what?”
“Das ist kein Wetter, sondern ein Skandal,” and he adjusted the electric
stove. “Everyone can switch it out--I mean switch it on--whenever he
likes, but you must on no account switch it out without telling
Herbert....” He stopped, blubbered; then continued with a catch in his
voice: “because I mean then you release so much current that the dynamo
goes off like mad and may go phut, and then anything may happen. Though
I don’t care what happens now that Herbert....” He gulped and turned
away to the window. “What’s that?”
Next, he was in the courtyard by her side. He stood still, petrified.
“Anna!” he said. “Anna!”
Lord de Jones rose with _The New Statesman_ still in his hand, and went
upstairs, “To spare his feelings,” he said. “Though I wish these people
would realise that a certain modicum of suffering is unavoidable even in
this New Jerusalem. However, we don’t want scenes.”
Herr Kogl placed the body on chairs in the dining-room and came back
into the lounge. Eva eyed him compassionately. “What will you do to
him?”
“Nothing,” he said, “nothing. It is between him and his God, and I can
do nothing.” Tears streamed down his cheeks. “There are laws, delicately
adjusted spiritual laws. We must not meddle, must not touch God’s
scales. If I did, what would happen? ‘Leave off!’ God would say. ‘Away
with your clumsy hands, you bull in a china shop! By taking the law into
your own hands you have upset the delicate adjustment of my spiritual
world. You have disturbed the balance, disarranged the symmetry. Now,
instead of letting him, who has wrongfully taken, put it back by his own
exertion of soul, I must let him off lest I upset the scales of my world
by the wrong you have heaped on him. And who will square the original
sin? It falls back on the whole of mankind, don’t you see, young
feller-me-lad?’ That’s how God would speak to me if, in my great
ignorance, I presumed to take things into my own foolish hands.”
For a minute they said nothing, but looked out of doors, where the rain
had stopped, at the dripping trees flooded with light.
“And she was a clever woman,” he said; “she knew languages. Brought up
in a convent on the border of France....” His face puckered: he sobbed.
When the others had gone, he stood alone in the doorway, gazed at the
clouds and listened to the pines in the wind. He looked with despair for
the night to cover his grief: and it was perpetual day.