CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE AWAKENING
Section 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 Longnyon 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. . . .
