第28章

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, Ithink, 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.