"Nothing else?"
"Why, no, sir, not that I can recall."
"Well, now, what hour did you leave Victoria?"
The American smiled.
"I came here to interview you, Professor, but it seems to be a case of'Is this nigger fishing, or is this fish niggering?' You're doing most ofthe work."
"It happens to interest me. Do you recall the hour?"
"Sure. It was half-past twelve."
"And you arrived?"
"At a quarter-past two."
"And you hired a cab?"
"That was so."
"How far do you suppose it is to the station?"
"Well, I should reckon the best part of two miles."
"So how long do you think it took you?"
"Well, half an hour, maybe, with that asthmatic in front."
"So it should be three o'clock?"
"Yes, or a trifle after it."
"Look at your watch."
The American did so and then stared at us in astonishment.
"Say!" he cried. "It's run down. That horse has broken every record,sure. The sun is pretty low, now that I come to look at it. Well,there's something here I don't understand."
"Have you no remembrance of anything remarkable as you came up the hill?"
"Well, I seem to recollect that I was mighty sleepy once. It comes backto me that I wanted to say something to the driver and that I couldn'tmake him heed me. I guess it was the heat, but I felt swimmy for amoment. That's all."
"So it is with the whole human race," said Challenger to me. "They haveall felt swimmy for a moment. None of them have as yet any comprehensionof what has occurred. Each will go on with his interrupted job as Austinhas snatched up his hose-pipe or the golfer continued his game. Youreditor, Malone, will continue the issue of his papers, and very muchamazed he will be at finding that an issue is missing. Yes, my youngfriend," he added to the American reporter, with a sudden mood of amusedgeniality, "it may interest you to know that the world has swum throughthe poisonous current which swirls like the Gulf Stream through the oceanof ether. You will also kindly note for your own future convenience thatto-day is not Friday, August the twenty-seventh, but Saturday, August thetwenty-eighth, and that you sat senseless in your cab for twenty-eighthours upon the Rotherfield hill."
And "right here," as my American colleague would say, I may bring thisnarrative to an end. It is, as you are probably aware, only a fuller andmore detailed version of the account which appeared in the Monday editionof the Daily Gazette--an account which has been universally admitted tobe the greatest journalistic scoop of all time, which sold no fewer thanthree-and-a-half million copies of the paper. Framed upon the wall of mysanctum I retain those magnificent headlines:--
TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS' WORLD COMA UNPRECEDENTED EXPERIENCE CHALLENGER JUSTIFIED OUR CORRESPONDENT ESCAPES ENTHRALLING NARRATIVE THE OXYGEN ROOM WEIRD MOTOR DRIVE DEAD LONDON REPLACING THE MISSING PAGE GREAT FIRES AND LOSS OF LIFE WILL IT RECUR?
Underneath this glorious scroll came nine and a half columns ofnarrative, in which appeared the first, last, and only account of thehistory of the planet, so far as one observer could draw it, during onelong day of its existence. Challenger and Summerlee have treated thematter in a joint scientific paper, but to me alone was left the popularaccount. Surely I can sing "Nunc dimittis." What is left butanti-climax in the life of a journalist after that!
But let me not end on sensational headlines and a merely personaltriumph. Rather let me quote the sonorous passages in which the greatestof daily papers ended its admirable leader upon the subject--a leaderwhich might well be filed for reference by every thoughtful man.
"It has been a well-worn truism," said the Times, "that our human raceare a feeble folk before the infinite latent forces which surround us.From the prophets of old and from the philosophers of our own time thesame message and warning have reached us. But, like all oft-repeatedtruths, it has in time lost something of its actuality and cogency. Alesson, an actual experience, was needed to bring it home. It is fromthat salutory but terrible ordeal that we have just emerged, with mindswhich are still stunned by the suddenness of the blow and with spiritswhich are chastened by the realization of our own limitations andimpotence. The world has paid a fearful price for its schooling. Hardlyyet have we learned the full tale of disaster, but the destruction
byfire of New York, of Orleans, and of Brighton constitutes in itself oneof the greatest tragedies in the history of our race. When the accountof the railway and shipping accidents has been completed, it will furnishgrim reading, although there is evidence to show that in the vastmajority of cases the drivers of trains and engineers of steamerssucceeded in shutting off their motive power before succumbing to thepoison. But the material damage, enormous as it is both in life and inproperty, is not the consideration which will be uppermost in our mindsto-day. All this may in time be forgotten. But what will not beforgotten, and what will and should continue to obsess our imaginations,is this revelation of the possibilities of the universe, this destructionof our ignorant self-complacency, and this demonstration of how narrow isthe path of our material existence and what abysses may lie upon eitherside of it. Solemnity and humility are at the base of all our emotionsto-day. May they be the foundations upon which a more earnest andreverent race may build a more worthy temple."