“Was it last night?”
“Late last night. One or two in the morning.”
He leant back on his hand and looked at me, smiling frankly. “Even
now,” he said, “it’s odd, but the whole of that seems like a silly
dream. Do you think there _was_ a _Lord Warden?_ Do you really believe
we sank all that machinery—for fun? It was a dream. And yet—it
happened.”
By all the standards of the former time it would have been remarkable
that I talked quite easily and freely with so great a man. “Yes,” I
said; “that’s it. One feels one has awakened—from something more than
that green gas. As though the other things also—weren’t quite real.”
He knitted his brows and felt the calf of his leg thoughtfully. “I made
a speech at Colchester,” he said.
I thought he was going to add something more about that, but there
lingered a habit of reticence in the man that held him for the moment.
“It is a very curious thing,” he broke away; “that this pain should be,
on the whole, more interesting than disagreeable.”
“You are in pain?”
“My ankle is! It’s either broken or badly sprained—I think sprained;
it’s very painful to move, but personally I’m not in pain. That sort of
general sickness that comes with local injury—not a trace of it! . . .”
He mused and remarked, “I was speaking at Colchester, and saying things
about the war. I begin to see it better. The reporters—scribble,
scribble. Max Sutaine, 1885. Hubbub. Compliments about the oysters.
Mm—mm. . . . What was it? About the war? A war that must needs be long
and bloody, taking toll from castle and cottage, taking toll! . . .
Rhetorical gusto! Was I drunk last night?”
His eyebrows puckered. He had drawn up his right knee, his elbow rested
thereon and his chin on his fist. The deep-set gray eyes beneath his
thatch of eyebrow stared at unknown things. “My God!” he murmured, “My
God!” with a note of disgust. He made a big brooding figure in the
sunlight, he had an effect of more than physical largeness; he made me
feel that it became me to wait upon his thinking. I had never met a man
of this sort before; I did not know such men existed. . . .
It is a curious thing, that I cannot now recall any ideas whatever that
I had before the Change about the personalities of statesmen, but I
doubt if ever in those days I thought of them at all as tangible
individual human beings, conceivably of some intellectual complexity. I
believe that my impression was a straightforward blend of caricature
and newspaper leader. I certainly had no respect for them. And now
without servility or any insincerity whatever, as if it were a
first-fruit of the Change, I found myself in the presence of a human
being towards whom I perceived myself inferior and subordinate, before
whom I stood without servility or any insincerity whatever, in an
attitude of respect and attention. My inflamed, my rancid egotism—or
was it after all only the chances of life?—had never once permitted
that before the Change.
He emerged from his thoughts, still with a faint perplexity in his
manner. “That speech I made last night,” he said, “was damned
mischievous nonsense, you know. Nothing can alter that. Nothing. . . .
No! . . . Little fat gnomes in evening dress—gobbling oysters. Gulp!”
It was a most natural part of the wonder of that morning that he should
adopt this incredible note of frankness, and that it should abate
nothing from my respect for him.
“Yes,” he said, “you are right. It’s all indisputable fact, and I can’t
believe it was anything but a dream.”
§ 5
That memory stands out against the dark past of the world with
extraordinary clearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was full
of the calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a curious
persuasion too that there was a distant happy clamor of pealing bells,
but that I am half convinced is a mistake. Nevertheless, there was
something in the fresh bite of things, in the dewy newness of sensation
that set bells rejoicing in one’s brain. And that big, fair, pensive
man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his clumsy pose, as though
indeed some Great Master of strength and humor had made him.
And—it is so hard now to convey these things—he spoke to me, a
stranger, without reservations, carelessly, as men now speak to men.
Before those days, not only did we think badly, but what we thought, a
thousand short-sighted considerations, dignity, objective discipline,
discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of soul, made us
muffle before we told it to our fellow-men.
“It’s all returning now,” he said, and told me half soliloquizingly
what was in his mind.
I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out image after
image to my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragments of
speech. If I had a precise full memory of that morning I should give it
you, verbatim, minutely. But here, save for the little sharp things
that stand out, I find only blurred general impressions. Throughout I
have to make up again his half-forgotten sentences and speeches, and be
content with giving you the general effect. But I can see and hear him
now as he said, “The dream got worst at the end. The war—a perfectly
horrible business! Horrible! And it was just like a nightmare, you
couldn’t do anything to escape from it—every one was driven!”
His sense of indiscretion was gone.
He opened the war out to me—as every one sees it now. Only that morning
it was astonishing. He sat there on the ground, absurdly forgetful of
his bare and swollen foot, treating me as the humblest accessory and as
altogether an equal, talking out to himself the great obsessions of his
mind. “We could have prevented it! Any of us who chose to speak out
could have prevented it. A little decent frankness. What was there to
prevent us being frank with one another? Their emperor—his position was
a pile of ridiculous assumptions, no doubt, but at bottom—he was a sane
man.” He touched off the emperor in a few pithy words, the German
press, the German people, and our own. He put it as we should put it
all now, but with a certain heat as of a man half guilty and wholly
resentful. “Their damned little buttoned-up professors!” he cried,
incidentally. “Were there ever such men? And ours! Some of us might
have taken a firmer line. . . . If a lot of us had taken a firmer line
and squashed that nonsense early. . . .”
He lapsed into inaudible whisperings, into silence. . . .
I stood regarding him, understanding him, learning marvelously from
him. It is a fact that for the best part of the morning of the Change I
forgot Nettie and Verrall as completely as though they were no more
than characters in some novel that I had put aside to finish at my
leisure, in order that I might talk to this man.
“Eh, well,” he said, waking startlingly from his thoughts. “Here we are
awakened! The thing can’t go on now; all this must end. How it ever
began———! My dear boy, how did all those things ever begin? I feel like
a new Adam. . . . Do you think this has happened—generally? Or shall we
find all these gnomes and things? . . . Who cares?”
He made as if to rise, and remembered his ankle. He suggested I should
help him as far as his bungalow. There seemed nothing strange to either
of us that he should requisition my services or that I should
cheerfully obey. I helped him bandage his ankle, and we set out, I his
crutch, the two of us making up a sort of limping quadruped, along the
winding lane toward the cliffs and the sea.
§ 6
His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and a quarter
from the lane. We went down to the beach margin and along the pallid
wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying, hopping,
tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, and then, as soon
as we could, sitting down. His ankle was, in fact, broken, and he could
not put it to the ground without exquisite pain. So that it took us
nearly two hours to get to the house, and it would have taken longer if
his butler-valet had not come out to assist me. They had found
motor-car and chauffeur smashed and still at the bend of the road near
the house, and had been on that side looking for Melmount, or they
would have seen us before.
For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalk
boulder, now on a timber groin, and talking one to the other, with the
frankness proper to the intercourse of men of good intent, without
reservations or aggressions, in the common, open fashion of
contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then, nevertheless, was the
rarest and strangest thing in the world. He for the most part talked,
but at some shape of a question I told him—as plainly as I could tell
of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible to me—of my
murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how the green vapors
overcame me. He watched me with grave eyes and nodded understandingly,
and afterwards he asked me brief penetrating questions about my
education, my upbringing, my work. There was a deliberation in his
manner, brief full pauses, that had in them no element of delay.
“Yes,” he said, “yes—of course. What a fool I have been!” and said no
more until we had made another of our tripod struggles along the beach.
At first I did not see the connection of my story with that
self-accusation.
“Suppose,” he said, panting on the groin, “there had been such a thing
as a statesman! . . .”
He turned to me. “If one had decided all this muddle shall end! If one
had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who builds takes
site and stone, and made———” He flung out his big broad hand at the
glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, “something to fit that
setting.”
He added in explanation, “Then there wouldn’t have been such stories as
yours at all, you know. . . .”
“Tell me more about it,” he said, “tell me all about yourself. I feel
all these things have passed away, all these things are to be changed
for ever. . . . You won’t be what you have been from this time forth.
All the things you have done—don’t matter now. To us, at any rate, they
don’t matter at all. We have met, who were separated in that darkness
behind us. Tell me.
“Yes,” he said; and I told my story straight and as frankly as I have
told it to you. “And there, where those little skerries of weed rock
run out to the ebb, beyond the headland, is Bungalow village. What did
you do with your pistol?”
“I left it lying there—among the barley.”
He glanced at me from under his light eyelashes. “If others feel like
you and I,” he said, “there’ll be a lot of pistols left among the
barley to-day. . . .”
So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love of brothers
so plain between us it needed not a word. Our souls went out to one
another in stark good faith; never before had I had anything but a
guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man. Still I see him, upon that
wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see him leaning against the
shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at the poor drowned sailor
whose body we presently found. For we found a newly drowned man who had
just chanced to miss this great dawn in which we rejoiced. We found him
lying in a pool of water, among brown weeds in the dark shadow of the
timberings. You must not overrate the horrors of the former days; in
those days it was scarcely more common to see death in England than it
would be to-day. This dead man was a sailor from the _Rother Adler_,
the great German battleship that—had we but known it—lay not four miles
away along the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn
and battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and
holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all strong
and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .
I remember that poor boy very vividly. He had been drowned during the
anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young face was quiet and calm,
but the skin of his chest had been crinkled by scalding water and his
right arm was bent queerly back. Even to this needless death and all
its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come. Everything flowed
together to significance as we stood there, I, the ill-clad, cheaply
equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his great fur-trimmed coat—he was
hot with walking but he had not thought to remove it—leaning upon the
clumsy groins and pitying this poor victim of the war he had helped to
make. “Poor lad!” he said, “poor lad! A child we blunderers sent to
death! Do look at the quiet beauty of that face, that body—to be flung
aside like this!”
(I remember that near this dead man’s hand a stranded star-fish writhed
its slowly feeling limbs, struggling back toward the sea. It left
grooved traces in the sand.)
“There must be no more of this,” panted Melmount, leaning on my
shoulder, “no more of this. . . .”
But most I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting upon a
great chalk boulder with the sunlight on his big, perspiration-dewed
face. He made his resolves. “We must end war,” he said, in that full
whisper of his; “it is stupidity. With so many people able to read and
think—even as it is—there is no need of anything of the sort. Gods!
What have we rulers been at? . . . Drowsing like people in a stifling
room, too dull and sleepy and too base toward each other for any one to
get up and open the window. What haven’t we been at?”
A great powerful figure he sits there still in my memory, perplexed and
astonished at himself and all things. “We must change all this,” he
repeated, and threw out his broad hands in a powerful gesture against
the sea and sky. “We have done so weakly—Heaven alone knows why!” I can
see him now, queer giant that he looked on that dawnlit beach of
splendor, the sea birds flying about us and that crumpled death hard
by, no bad symbol in his clumsiness and needless heat of the unawakened
powers of the former time. I remember it as an integral part of that
picture that far away across the sandy stretches one of those white
estate boards I have described, stuck up a little askew amidst the
yellow-green turf upon the crest of the low cliffs.
He talked with a sort of wonder of the former things. “Has it ever
dawned upon you to imagine the pettiness—the pettiness!—of every soul
concerned in a declaration of war?” he asked. He went on, as though
speech was necessary to make it credible, to describe Laycock, who
first gave the horror words at the cabinet council, “an undersized
Oxford prig with a tenoring voice and a garbage of Greek—the sort of
little fool who is brought up on the admiration of his elder sisters. .
. .
“All the time almost,” he said, “I was watching him—thinking what an
ass he was to be trusted with men’s lives. . . . I might have done
better to have thought that of myself. I was doing nothing to prevent
it all! The damned little imbecile was up to his neck in the drama of
the thing, he liked to trumpet it out, he goggled round at us. ‘Then it
is war!’ he said. Richover shrugged his shoulders. I made some slight
protest and gave in. . . . Afterward I dreamt of him.
“What a lot we were! All a little scared at ourselves—all, as it were,
instrumental. . . .
“And it’s fools like that lead to things like this!” He jerked his head
at that dead man near by us.
“It will be interesting to know what has happened to the world. . . .
This green vapor—queer stuff. But I know what has happened to me. It’s
Conversion. I’ve always known. . . . But this is being a fool. Talk!
I’m going to stop it.”
He motioned to rise with his clumsy outstretched hands.
“Stop what?” said I, stepping forward instinctively to help him.
“War,” he said in his great whisper, putting his big hand on my
shoulder but making no further attempt to arise, “I’m going to put an
end to war—to any sort of war! And all these things that must end. The
world is beautiful, life is great and splendid, we had only to lift up
our eyes and see. Think of the glories through which we have been
driving, like a herd of swine in a garden place. The color in life—the
sounds—the shapes! We have had our jealousies, our quarrels, our
ticklish rights, our invincible prejudices, our vulgar enterprise and
sluggish timidities, we have chattered and pecked one another and
fouled the world—like daws in the temple, like unclean birds in the
holy place of God. All my life has been foolishness and pettiness,
gross pleasures and mean discretions—all. I am a meagre dark thing in
this morning’s glow, a penitence, a shame! And, but for God’s mercy, I
might have died this night—like that poor lad there—amidst the squalor
of my sins! No more of this! No more of this!—whether the whole world
has changed or no, matters nothing. _We two have seen this dawn!_ . .
.”
He paused.
“I will arise and go unto my Father,” he began presently, “and will say
unto Him———”
His voice died away in an inaudible whisper. His hand tightened
painfully on my shoulder and he rose. . . .
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE AWAKENING
§ 1
So the great Day came to me.
And even as I had awakened so in that same dawn the whole world awoke.
For the whole world of living things had been overtaken by the same
tide of insensibility; in an hour, at the touch of this new gas in the
comet, the shiver of catalytic change had passed about the globe. They
say it was the nitrogen of the air, the old _azote_, that in the
twinkling of an eye was changed out of itself, and in an hour or so
became a respirable gas, differing indeed from oxygen, but helping and
sustaining its action, a bath of strength and healing for nerve and
brain. I do not know the precise changes that occurred, nor the names
our chemists give them, my work has carried me away from such things,
only this I know—I and all men were renewed.
I picture to myself this thing happening in space, a planetary moment,
the faint smudge, the slender whirl of meteor, drawing nearer to this
planet,—this planet like a ball, like a shaded rounded ball, floating
in the void, with its little, nearly impalpable coat of cloud and air,
with its dark pools of ocean, its gleaming ridges of land. And as that
midge from the void touches it, the transparent gaseous outer shell
clouds in an instant green and then slowly clears again. . . .
Thereafter, for three hours or more,—we know the minimum time for the
Change was almost exactly three hours because all the clocks and
watches kept going—everywhere, no man nor beast nor bird nor any living
thing that breathes the air stirred at all but lay still. . . .
Everywhere on earth that day, in the ears of every one who breathed,
there had been the same humming in the air, the same rush of green
vapors, the crepitation, the streaming down of shooting stars. The
Hindoo had stayed his morning’s work in the fields to stare and marvel
and fall, the blue-clothed Chinaman fell head foremost athwart his
midday bowl of rice, the Japanese merchant came out from some
chaffering in his office amazed and presently lay there before his
door, the evening gazers by the Golden Gates were overtaken as they
waited for the rising of the great star. This had happened in every
city of the world, in every lonely valley, in every home and house and
shelter and every open place. On the high seas, the crowding steamship
passengers, eager for any wonder, gaped and marveled, and were suddenly
terror-stricken, and struggled for the gangways and were overcome, the
captain staggered on the bridge and fell, the stoker fell headlong
among his coals, the engines throbbed upon their way untended, the
fishing craft drove by without a hail, with swaying rudder, heeling and
dipping. . . .
The great voice of material Fate cried Halt! And in the midst of the
play the actors staggered, dropped, and were still. The figure runs
from my pen. In New York that very thing occurred. Most of the
theatrical audiences dispersed, but in two crowded houses the company,
fearing a panic, went on playing amidst the gloom, and the people,
trained by many a previous disaster, stuck to their seats. There they
sat, the back rows only moving a little, and there, in disciplined
lines, they drooped and failed, nodded, and fell forward or slid down
upon the floor. I am told by Parload—though indeed I know nothing of
the reasoning on which his confidence rests—-that within an hour of the
great moment of impact the first green modification of nitrogen had
dissolved and passed away, leaving the air as translucent as ever. The
rest of that wonderful interlude was clear, had any had eyes to see its
clearness. In London it was night, but in New York, for example, people
were in the full bustle of the evening’s enjoyment, in Chicago they
were sitting down to dinner, the whole world was abroad. The moonlight
must have illuminated streets and squares littered with crumpled
figures, through which such electric cars as had no automatic brakes
had ploughed on their way until they were stopped by the fallen bodies.
People lay in their dress clothes, in dining-rooms, restaurants, on
staircases, in halls, everywhere just as they had been overcome. Men
gambling, men drinking, thieves lurking in hidden places, sinful
couples, were caught, to arise with awakened mind and conscience amidst
the disorder of their sin. America the comet reached in the full tide
of evening life, but Britain lay asleep. But as I have told, Britain
did not slumber so deeply but that she was in the full tide of what may
have been battle and a great victory. Up and down the North Sea her
warships swept together like a net about their foes. On land, too, that
night was to have decided great issues. The German camps were under
arms from Redingen to Markirch, their infantry columns were lying in
swathes like mown hay, in arrested night march on every track between
Longuyon and Thiancourt, and between Avricourt and Donen. The hills
beyond Spincourt were dusted thick with hidden French riflemen; the
thin lash of the French skirmishers sprawled out amidst spades and
unfinished rifle-pits in coils that wrapped about the heads of the
German columns, thence along the Vosges watershed and out across the
frontier near Belfort nearly to the Rhine. . . .
The Hungarian, the Italian peasant, yawned and thought the morning
dark, and turned over to fall into a dreamless sleep; the Mahometan
world spread its carpet and was taken in prayer. And in Sydney, in
Melbourne, in New Zealand, the thing was a fog in the afternoon, that
scattered the crowd on race-courses and cricket-fields, and stopped the
unloading of shipping and brought men out from their afternoon rest to
stagger and litter the streets. . . .
§ 2
My thoughts go into the woods and wildernesses and jungles of the
world, to the wild life that shared man’s suspension, and I think of a
thousand feral acts interrupted and truncated—as it were frozen, like
the frozen words Pantagruel met at sea. Not only men it was that were
quieted, all living creatures that breathe the air became insensible,
impassive things. Motionless brutes and birds lay amidst the drooping
trees and herbage in the universal twilight, the tiger sprawled beside
his fresh-struck victim, who bled to death in a dreamless sleep. The
very flies came sailing down the air with wings outspread; the spider
hung crumpled in his loaded net; like some gaily painted snowflake the
butterfly drifted to earth and grounded, and was still. And as a queer
contrast one gathers that the fishes in the sea suffered not at all. .
. .
Speaking of the fishes reminds me of a queer little inset upon that
great world-dreaming. The odd fate of the crew of the submarine vessel
B 94 has always seemed memorable to me. So far as I know, they were the
only men alive who never saw that veil of green drawn across the world.
All the while that the stillness held above, they were working into the
mouth of the Elbe, past the booms and the mines, very slowly and
carefully, a sinister crustacean of steel, explosive crammed, along the
muddy bottom. They trailed a long clue that was to guide their fellows
from the mother ship floating awash outside. Then in the long channel
beyond the forts they came up at last to mark down their victims and
get air. That must have been before the twilight of dawn, for they tell
of the brightness of the stars. They were amazed to find themselves not
three hundred yards from an ironclad that had run ashore in the mud,
and heeled over with the falling tide. It was afire amidships, but no
one heeded that—no one in all that strange clear silence heeded
that—and not only this wrecked vessel, but all the dark ships lying
about them, it seemed to their perplexed and startled minds must be
full of dead men!
Theirs I think must have been one of the strangest of all experiences;
they were never insensible; at once, and, I am told, with a sudden
catch of laughter, they began to breathe the new air. None of them has
proved a writer; we have no picture of their wonder, no description of
what was said. But we know these men were active and awake for an hour
and a half at least before the general awakening came, and when at last
the Germans stirred and sat up they found these strangers in possession
of their battleship, the submarine carelessly adrift, and the
Englishmen, begrimed and weary, but with a sort of furious exultation,
still busy, in the bright dawn, rescuing insensible enemies from the
sinking conflagration. . . .
But the thought of certain stokers the sailors of the submarine failed
altogether to save brings me back to the thread of grotesque horror
that runs through all this event, the thread I cannot overlook for all
the splendors of human well-being that have come from it. I cannot
forget the unguided ships that drove ashore, that went down in disaster
with all their sleeping hands, nor how, inland, motor-cars rushed to
destruction upon the roads, and trains upon the railways kept on in
spite of signals, to be found at last by their amazed, reviving drivers
standing on unfamiliar lines, their fires exhausted, or, less lucky, to
be discovered by astonished peasants or awakening porters smashed and
crumpled up into heaps of smoking, crackling ruin. The foundry fires of
the Four Towns still blazed, the smoke of our burning still denied the
sky. Fires burnt indeed the brighter for the Change—and spread. . . .
§ 3
Picture to yourself what happened between the printing and composing of
the copy of the _New Paper_ that lies before me now. It was the first
newspaper that was printed upon earth after the Great Change. It was
pocket-worn and browned, made of a paper no man ever intended for
preservation. I found it on the arbor table in the inn garden while I
was waiting for Nettie and Verrall, before that last conversation of
which I have presently to tell. As I look at it all that scene comes
back to me, and Nettie stands in her white raiment against a blue-green
background of sunlit garden, scrutinizing my face as I read. . . .
It is so frayed that the sheet cracks along the folds and comes to
pieces in my hands. It lies upon my desk, a dead souvenir of the dead
ages of the world, of the ancient passions of my heart. I know we
discussed its news, but for the life of me I cannot recall what we
said, only I remember that Nettie said very little, and that Verrall
for a time read it over my shoulder. And I did not like him to read
over my shoulder. . . .
The document before me must have helped us through the first
awkwardness of that meeting.
But of all that we said and did then I must tell in a later chapter. .
. .
It is easy to see the _New Paper_ had been set up overnight, and then
large pieces of the stereo plates replaced subsequently. I do not know
enough of the old methods of printing to know precisely what happened.
The thing gives one an impression of large pieces of type having been
cut away and replaced by fresh blocks. There is something very rough
and ready about it all, and the new portions print darker and more
smudgily than the old, except toward the left, where they have missed
ink and indented. A friend of mine, who knows something of the old
typography, has suggested to me that the machinery actually in use for
the _New Paper_ was damaged that night, and that on the morning of the
Change Banghurst borrowed a neighboring office—perhaps in financial
dependence upon him—to print in.
The outer pages belong entirely to the old period, the only parts of
the paper that had undergone alteration are the two middle leaves. Here
we found set forth in a curious little four-column oblong of print,
WHAT HAS HAPPENED. This cut across a column with scare headings
beginning, “Great Naval Battle Now in Progress. The Fate of Two Empires
in the Balance. Reported Loss of Two More———”
These things, one gathered, were beneath notice now. Probably it was
guesswork, and fabricated news in the first instance.
It is curious to piece together the worn and frayed fragments, and
reread this discolored first intelligence of the new epoch.
The simple clear statements in the replaced portion of the paper
impressed me at the time, I remember, as bald and strange, in that
framework of shouting bad English. Now they seem like the voice of a
sane man amidst a vast faded violence. But they witness to the prompt
recovery of London from the gas; the new, swift energy of rebound in
that huge population. I am surprised now, as I reread, to note how much
research, experiment, and induction must have been accomplished in the
day that elapsed before the paper was printed. . . . But that is by the
way. As I sit and muse over this partly carbonized sheet, that same
curious remote vision comes again to me that quickened in my mind that
morning, a vision of those newspaper offices I have already described
to you going through the crisis.
The catalytic wave must have caught the place in full swing, in its
nocturnal high fever, indeed in a quite exceptional state of fever,
what with the comet and the war, and more particularly with the war.
Very probably the Change crept into the office imperceptibly, amidst
the noise and shouting, and the glare of electric light that made the
night atmosphere in that place; even the green flashes may have passed
unobserved there, the preliminary descending trails of green vapor
seemed no more than unseasonable drifting wisps of London fog. (In
those days London even in summer was not safe against dark fogs.) And
then at the last the Change poured in and overtook them.
If there was any warning at all for them, it must have been a sudden
universal tumult in the street, and then a much more universal quiet.
They could have had no other intimation.
There was no time to stop the presses before the main development of
green vapor had overwhelmed every one. It must have folded about them,
tumbled them to the earth, masked and stilled them. My imagination is
always curiously stirred by the thought of that, because I suppose it
is the first picture I succeeded in making for myself of what had
happened in the towns. It has never quite lost its strangeness for me
that when the Change came, machinery went on working. I don’t precisely
know why that should have seemed so strange to me, but it did, and
still to a certain extent does. One is so accustomed, I suppose, to
regard machinery as an extension of human personality that the extent
of its autonomy the Change displayed came as a shock to me. The
electric lights, for example, hazy green-haloed nebulas, must have gone
on burning at least for a time; amidst the thickening darkness the huge
presses must have roared on, printing, folding, throwing aside copy
after copy of that fabricated battle report with its quarter column of
scare headlines, and all the place must have still quivered and
throbbed with the familiar roar of the engines. And this though no men
ruled there at all any more! Here and there beneath that thickening fog
the crumpled or outstretched forms of men lay still.
A wonderful thing that must have seemed, had any man had by chance the
power of resistance to the vapor, and could he have walked amidst it.
And soon the machines must have exhausted their feed of ink and paper,
and thumped and banged and rattled emptily amidst the general quiet.
Then I suppose the furnaces failed for want of stoking, the steam
pressure fell in the pistons, the machinery slackened, the lights burnt
dim, and came and went with the ebb of energy from the power-station.
Who can tell precisely the sequence of these things now?
And then, you know, amidst the weakening and terminating noises of men,
the green vapor cleared and vanished, in an hour indeed it had gone,
and it may be a breeze stirred and blew and went about the earth.
The noises of life were all dying away, but some there were that abated
nothing, that sounded triumphantly amidst the universal ebb. To a
heedless world the church towers tolled out two and then three. Clocks
ticked and chimed everywhere about the earth to deafened ears. . . .
And then came the first flush of morning, the first rustlings of the
revival. Perhaps in that office the filaments of the lamps were still
glowing, the machinery was still pulsing weakly, when the crumpled,
booted heaps of cloth became men again and began to stir and stare. The
chapel of the printers was, no doubt, shocked to find itself asleep.
Amidst that dazzling dawn the _New Paper_ woke to wonder, stood up and
blinked at its amazing self. . . .
The clocks of the city churches, one pursuing another, struck four. The
staffs, crumpled and disheveled, but with a strange refreshment in
their veins, stood about the damaged machinery, marveling and
questioning; the editor read his overnight headlines with incredulous
laughter. There was much involuntary laughter that morning. Outside,
the mail men patted the necks and rubbed the knees of their awakening
horses. . . .
Then, you know, slowly and with much conversation and doubt, they set
about to produce the paper.
Imagine those bemused, perplexed people, carried on by the inertia of
their old occupations and doing their best with an enterprise that had
suddenly become altogether extraordinary and irrational. They worked
amidst questionings, and yet light-heartedly. At every stage there must
have been interruptions for discussion. The paper only got down to
Menton five days late.
§ 4
Then let me give you a vivid little impression I received of a certain
prosaic person, a grocer, named Wiggins, and how he passed through the
Change. I heard this man’s story in the post-office at Menton, when, in
the afternoon of the First Day, I bethought me to telegraph to my
mother. The place was also a grocer’s shop, and I found him and the
proprietor talking as I went in. They were trade competitors, and
Wiggins had just come across the street to break the hostile silence of
a score of years. The sparkle of the Change was in their eyes, their
slightly flushed cheeks, their more elastic gestures, spoke of new
physical influences that had invaded their beings.
“It did us no good, all our hatred,” Mr. Wiggins said to me, explaining
the emotion of their encounter; “it did our customers no good. I’ve
come to tell him that. You bear that in mind, young man, if ever you
come to have a shop of your own. It was a sort of stupid bitterness
possessed us, and I can’t make out we didn’t see it before in that
light. Not so much downright wickedness it wasn’t as stupidity. A
stupid jealousy! Think of it!—two human beings within a stone’s throw,
who have not spoken for twenty years, hardening our hearts against each
other!”
“I can’t think how we came to such a state, Mr. Wiggins,” said the
other, packing tea into pound packets out of mere habit as he spoke.
“It was wicked pride and obstinacy. We _knew_ it was foolish all the
time.”