"By George, young fellah!" said he, pulling off his coat. "You've hit ona 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 Challengerand Summerlee had added their weight to ours that we heard the roaringand clanging above our heads which told us that the great clapper wasringing out its music. Far over dead London resounded our message ofcomradeship and hope to any fellow-man surviving. It cheered our ownhearts, that strong, metallic call, and we turned the more earnestly toour work, dragged two feet off the earth with each upward jerk of therope, but all straining together on the downward heave, Challenger thelowest of all, bending all his great strength to the task and flopping upand down like a monstrous bull-frog, croaking with every pull. It was atthat moment that an artist might have taken a picture of the fouradventurers, the comrades of many strange perils in the past, whom fatehad 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 theexertion. Then we went out into the portico of the church and lookedeagerly up and down the silent, crowded streets. Not a sound, not amotion, 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, silentcity would drive me mad."
We got into the car without another word. Lord John backed her round andturned her to the south. To us the chapter seemed closed. Little did weforesee the strange new chapter which was to open.
Chapter VI
THE GREAT AWAKENING
And now I come to the end of this extraordinary incident, soovershadowing in its importance, not only in our own small, individuallives, but in the general history of the human race. As I said when Ibegan my narrative, when that history comes to be written, thisoccurrence will surely stand out among all other events like a mountaintowering among its foothills. Our generation has been reserved for avery special fate since it has been chosen to experience so wonderful athing. How long its effect may last--how long mankind may preserve thehumility and reverence which this great shock has taught it--can only beshown by the future. I think it is safe to say that things can never bequite the same again. Never can one realize how powerless and ignorantone is, and how one is upheld by an unseen hand, until for an instantthat hand has seemed to close and to crush. Death has been imminent uponus. We know that at any moment it may be again. That grim presenceshadows our lives, but who can deny that in that shadow the sense ofduty, the feeling of sobriety and responsibility, the appreciation of thegravity and of the objects of life, the earnest desire to develop andimprove, have grown and become real with us to a degree that has leavenedour whole society from end to end? It is something beyond sects andbeyond dogmas. It is rather an alteration of perspective, a shifting ofour sense of proportion, a vivid realization that we are insignificantand evanescent creatures, existing on sufferance and at the mercy of thefirst chill wind from the unknown. But if the world has grown graverwith this knowledge it is not, I think, a sadder place in consequence.Surely we are agreed that the more sober and restrained pleasures of thepresent are deeper as well as wiser than the noisy, foolish hustle whichpassed so often for enjoyment in the days of old--days so recent and yetalready so inconceivable. Those empty lives which were wasted in aimlessvisiting and being visited, in the worry of great and unnecessaryhouseholds, in the arranging and eating of elaborate and tedious meals,have now found rest and health in the reading, the music, the gentlefamily communion which comes from a simpler and saner division of theirtime. With greater health and greater pleasure they are richer thanbefore, even after they have paid those increased contributions to thecommon 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 greatawakening. It is generally agreed that, apart from the difference ofclocks, there may have been local causes which influenced the action ofthe poison. Certainly, in each separate district the resurrection waspractically simultaneous. There are numerous witnesses that Big Benpointed to ten minutes past six at the moment. The Astronomer Royal hasfixed the Greenwich time at twelve past six. On the other hand, LairdJohnson, a very capable East Anglia observer, has recorded six-twenty asthe hour. In the Hebrides it was as late as seven. In our own casethere can be no doubt whatever, for I was seated in Challenger's studywith his carefully tested chronometer in front of me at the moment. Thehour was a quarter-past six.
An enormous depression was weighing upon my spirits. The cumulativeeffect of all the dreadful sights which we had seen upon our journey washeavy upon my soul. With my abounding animal health and great physicalenergy any kind of mental clouding was a rare event. I had the Irishfaculty of seeing some gleam of humor in every darkness. But now theobscurity was appalling and unrelieved. The others were downstairsmaking their plans for the future. I sat by the open window, my chinresting 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 toask myself. Was it possible to exist upon a dead world? Just as inphysics the greater body draws to itself the lesser, would we not feel anoverpowering attraction from that vast body of humanity which had passedinto the unknown? How would the end come? Would it be from a return ofthe poison? Or would the earth be uninhabitable from the mephiticproducts of universal decay? Or, finally, might our awful situation preyupon 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 noisecaused me to look down upon the road beneath me. The old cab horse wascoming up the hill!
I was conscious at the same instant of the twittering of birds, ofsomeone coughing in the yard below, and of a background of movement inthe landscape. And yet I remember that it was that absurd, emaciated,superannuated cab-horse which held my gaze. Slowly and wheezily it wasclimbing the slope. Then my eye traveled to the driver sitting hunchedup upon the box and finally to the young man who was leaning out of thewindow in some excitement and shouting a direction. They were allindubitably, aggressively alive!
Everybody was alive once more! Had it all been a delusion? Was itconceivable that this whole poison belt incident had been an elaboratedream? 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 itwas 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 aninstant full tide to the planet. Now, as my eyes wandered all over thegreat landscape, I saw it in every direction--and moving, to myamazement, in the very same groove in which it had halted. There werethe 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 uponthe green were surely putting for the hole. The reapers were slowlytrooping back to their work. The nurse-girl slapped one of her chargesand then began to push the perambulator up the hill. Everyone hadunconcernedly taken up the thread at the very point where they haddropped it.
I rushed downstairs, but the hall door was open, and I heard the voicesof 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 herselfinto 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 withtheir staring eyes and stiff limbs and that awful death grin on theirfaces!"
"It can only have been the condition that is called catalepsy," saidChallenger. "It has been a rare phenomenon in the past and hasconstantly been mistaken for death. While it endures, the temperaturefalls, the respiration disappears, the heartbeat is indistinguishable--infact, it _is_ death, save that it is evanescent. Even the mostcomprehensive mind"--here he closed his eyes and simpered--"could hardlyconceive a universal outbreak of it in this fashion."
"You may label it catalepsy," remarked Summerlee, "but, after all, thatis only a name, and we know as little of the result as we do of thepoison which has caused it. The most we can say is that the vitiatedether has produced a temporary death."
Austin was seated all in a heap on the step of the car. It was hiscoughing which I had heard from above. He had been holding his head insilence, but now he was muttering to himself and running his eyes overthe 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 hisfeet. "I expect I came over queer when I was hosing her down. I seem toremember flopping over by the step. But I'll swear I never left thoselubricator taps on."
In a condensed narrative the astonished Austin was told what had happenedto himself and the world. The mystery of the dripping lubricators wasalso explained to him. He listened with an air of deep distrust whentold how an amateur had driven his car and with absorbed interest to thefew sentences in which our experiences of the sleeping city wererecorded. 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 thehosing of his car.
There was a sudden grinding of wheels upon gravel. The old cab hadactually pulled up at Challenger's door. I saw the young occupant stepout from it. An instant later the maid, who looked as tousled andbewildered as if she had that instant been aroused from the deepestsleep, appeared with a card upon a tray. Challenger snorted ferociouslyas he looked at it, and his thick black hair seemed to bristle up in hiswrath.