Chapter IV
A DIARY OF THE DYING
How strange the words look scribbled at the top of the empty
page of my book! How stranger still that it is I, Edward Malone,
who have written them--I who started only some twelve hours ago
from my rooms in Streatham without one thought of the marvels
which the day was to bring forth! I look back at the chain of
incidents, my interview with McArdle, Challenger's first note of
alarm in the Times, the absurd journey in the train, the
pleasant luncheon, the catastrophe, and now it has come to
this--that we linger alone upon an empty planet, and so sure is
our fate that I can regard these lines, written from mechanical
professional habit and never to be seen by human eyes, as the
words of one who is already dead, so closely does he stand to
the shadowed borderland over which all outside this one little
circle of friends have already gone. I feel how wise and true
were the words of Challenger when he said that the real tragedy
would be if we were left behind when all that is noble and good
and beautiful had passed. But of that there can surely be no
danger. Already our second tube of oxygen is drawing to an end.
We can count the poor dregs of our lives almost to a minute.
We have just been treated to a lecture, a good quarter of an
hour long, from Challenger, who was so excited that he roared
and bellowed as if he were addressing his old rows of scientific
sceptics in the Queen's Hall. He had certainly a strange
audience to harangue: his wife perfectly acquiescent and
absolutely ignorant of his meaning, Summerlee seated in the
shadow, querulous and critical but interested, Lord John
lounging in a corner somewhat bored by the whole proceeding, and
myself beside the window watching the scene with a kind of
detached attention, as if it were all a dream or something in
which I had no personal interest whatever. Challenger sat at the
centre table with the electric light illuminating the slide
under the microscope which he had brought from his dressing
room. The small vivid circle of white light from the mirror left
half of his rugged, bearded face in brilliant radiance and half
in deepest shadow. He had, it seems, been working of late upon
the lowest forms of life, and what excited him at the present
moment was that in the microscopic slide made up the day before
he found the amoeba to he still alive.
"You can see it for yourselves," he kept repeating in great
excitement. "Summerlee, will you step across and satisfy
yourself upon the point? Malone, will you kindly verify what I
say? The little spindle-shaped things in the centre are diatoms
and may be disregarded since they are probably vegetable rather
than animal. But the right-hand side you will see an undoubted
amoeba, moving sluggishly across the field. The upper screw is
the fine adjustment. Look at it for yourselves."
Summerlee did so and acquiesced. So did I and perceived a little
creature which looked as if it were made of ground glass flowing
in a sticky way across the lighted circle. Lord John was
prepared to take him on trust.
"I'm not troublin' my head whether he's alive or dead," said he.
"We don't so much as know each other by sight, so why should I
take it to heart? I don't suppose he's worryin' himself over the
state of OUR health."
I laughed at this, and Challenger looked in my direction with
his coldest and most supercilious stare. It was a most
petrifying experience.
"The flippancy of the half-educated is more obstructive to
science than the obtuseness of the ignorant," said he. "If Lord
John Roxton would condescend----"
"My dear George, don't be so peppery," said his wife, with her
hand on the black mane that drooped over the microscope. "What
can it matter whether the amoeba is alive or not?"
"It matters a great deal," said Challenger gruffly.
"Well, let's hear about it," said Lord John with a good-humoured
smile. "We may as well talk about that as anything else. If you
think I've been too off-hand with the thing, or hurt its feelin's
in any way, I'll apologize."
"For my part," remarked Summerlee in his creaky, argumentative
voice, "I can't see why you should attach such importance to the
creature being alive. It is in the same atmosphere as ourselves,
so naturally the poison does not act upon it. If it were outside
of this room it would be dead, like all other animal life."
"Your remarks, my good Summerlee," said Challenger with enormous
condescension (oh, if I could paint that over-bearing, arrogant
face in the vivid circle of reflection from the microscope
mirror!)--"your remarks show that you imperfectly appreciate
the situation. This specimen was mounted yesterday and is
hermetically sealed. None of our oxygen can reach it. But the
ether, of course, has penetrated to it, as to every other point
upon the universe. Therefore, it has survived the poison.
Hence,
we may argue that every amoeba outside this room, instead of
being dead, as you have erroneously stated, has really survived
the catastrophe."
"Well, even now I don't feel inclined to hip-hurrah about it,"
said Lord John. "What does it matter?"
"It just matters this, that the world is a living instead of a
dead one. If you had the scientific imagination, you would cast
your mind forward from this one fact, and you would see some few
millions of years hence--a mere passing moment in the enormous
flux of the ages--the whole world teeming once more with the
animal and human life which will spring from this tiny root. You
have seen a prairie fire where the flames have swept every trace
of grass or plant from the surface of the earth and left only a
blackened waste. You would think that it must be forever desert.
Yet the roots of growth have been left behind, and when you pass
the place a few years hence you can no longer tell where the
black scars used to be. Here in this tiny creature are the roots
of growth of the animal world, and by its inherent development,
and evolution, it will surely in time remove every trace of this
incomparable crisis in which we are now involved."
"Dooced interestin'!" said Lord John, lounging across and
looking through the microscope. "Funny little chap to hang
number one among the family portraits. Got a fine big shirt-stud
on him!"
"The dark object is his nucleus," said Challenger with the air
of a nurse teaching letters to a baby.
"Well, we needn't feel lonely," said Lord John laughing.
"There's somebody livin' besides us on the earth."
"You seem to take it for granted, Challenger," said Summerlee,
"that the object for which this world was created was that it
should produce and sustain human life."
"Well, sir, and what object do you suggest?" asked Challenger,
bristling at the least hint of contradiction.
"Sometimes I think that it is only the monstrous conceit of
mankind which makes him think that all this stage was erected
for him to strut upon."
"We cannot be dogmatic about it, but at least without what you
have ventured to call monstrous conceit we can surely say that
we are the highest thing in nature."
"The highest of which we have cognizance."
"That, sir, goes without saying."
"Think of all the millions and possibly billions of years that
the earth swung empty through space--or, if not empty, at least
without a sign or thought of the human race. Think of it, washed
by the rain and scorched by the sun and swept by the wind for
those unnumbered ages. Man only came into being yesterday so far
as geological times goes. Why, then, should it be taken for
granted that all this stupendous preparation was for his
benefit?"
"For whose then--or for what?"
Summerlee shrugged his shoulders.
"How can we tell? For some reason altogether beyond our
conception--and man may have been a mere accident, a by-product
evolved in the process. It is as if the scum upon the surface of
the ocean imagined that the ocean was created in order to
produce and sustain it or a mouse in a cathedral thought that
the building was its own proper ordained residence."
I have jotted down the very words of their argument, but now it
degenerates into a mere noisy wrangle with much polysyllabic
scientific jargon upon each side. It is no doubt a privilege to
hear two such brains discuss the highest questions; but as they
are in perpetual disagreement, plain folk like Lord John and I
get little that is positive from the exhibition. They neutralize
each other and we are left as they found us. Now the hubbub has
ceased, and Summerlee is coiled up in his chair, while
Challenger, still fingering the screws of his microscope, is
keeping up a continual low, deep, inarticulate growl like the
sea after a storm. Lord John comes over to me, and we look out
together into the night.
There is a pale new moon--the last moon that human eyes will
ever rest upon--and the stars are most brilliant. Even in the
clear plateau air of South America I have never seen them
brighter. Possibly this etheric change has some effect upon
light. The funeral pyre of Brighton is still blazing, and there
is a very distant patch of scarlet in the western sky, which may
mean trouble at Arundel or Chichester, possibly even at
Portsmouth. I sit and muse and make an occasional note. There
is
a sweet melancholy in the air. Youth and beauty and chivalry and
love--is this to be the end of it all? The starlit earth looks
a dreamland of gentle peace. Who would imagine it as the
terrible Golgotha strewn with the bodies of the human race?
Suddenly, I find myself laughing.
"Halloa, young fellah!" says Lord John, staring at me in
surprise. "We could do with a joke in these hard times. What
was
it, then?"
"I was thinking of all the great unsolved questions," I answer,
"the questions that we spent so much labor and thought over.
Think of Anglo-German competition, for example--or the Persian
Gulf that my old chief was so keen about. Whoever would have
guessed, when we fumed and fretted so, how they were to be
eventually solved?"
We fall into silence again. I fancy that each of us is thinking
of friends that have gone before. Mrs. Challenger is sobbing
quietly, and her husband is whispering to her. My mind turns to
all the most unlikely people, and I see each of them lying white
and rigid as poor Austin does in the yard. There is McArdle, for
example, I know exactly where he is, with his face upon his
writing desk and his hand on his own telephone, just as I heard
him fall. Beaumont, the editor, too--I suppose he is lying upon
the blue-and-red Turkey carpet which adorned his sanctum. And
the fellows in the reporters' room--Macdona and Murray and Bond.
They had certainly died hard at work on their job, with
note-books
full of vivid impressions and strange happenings in their
hands. I could just imagine how this one would have been packed
off to the doctors, and that other to Westminster, and yet a
third to St. Paul's. What glorious rows of head-lines they must
have seen as a last vision beautiful, never destined to
materialize in printer's ink! I could see Macdona among the
doctors--"Hope in Harley Street"--Mac had always a weakness for
alliteration. "Interview with Mr. Soley Wilson." "Famous
Specialist says `Never despair!'" "Our Special Correspondent
found the eminent scientist seated upon the roof, whither he had
retreated to avoid the crowd of terrified patients who had
stormed his dwelling. With a manner which plainly showed his
appreciation of the immense gravity of the occasion, the
celebrated physician refused to admit that every avenue of hope
had been closed." That's how Mac would start. Then there was
Bond; he would probably do St. Paul's. He fancied his own
literary touch. My word, what a theme for him! "Standing in the
little gallery under the dome and looking down upon that packed
mass of despairing humanity, groveling at this last instant
before a Power which they had so persistently ignored, there
rose to my ears from the swaying crowd such a low moan of
entreaty and terror, such a shuddering cry for help to the
Unknown, that----" and so forth.
Yes, it would be a great end for a reporter, though, like
myself, he would die with the treasures still unused. What would
Bond not give, poor chap, to see "J. H. B." at the foot of a
column like that?
But what drivel I am writing! It is just an attempt to pass the
weary time. Mrs. Challenger has gone to the inner dressing-room,
and the Professor says that she is asleep. He is making notes
and consulting books at the central table, as calmly as if years
of placid work lay before him. He writes with a very noisy quill
pen which seems to be screeching scorn at all who disagree with
him.
Summerlee has dropped off in his chair and gives from time to
time a peculiarly exasperating snore. Lord John lies back with
his hands in his pockets and his eyes closed. How people can
sleep under such conditions is more than I can imagine.
Three-thirty a.m. I have just wakened with a start. It was five
minutes past eleven when I made my last entry. I remember
winding up my watch and noting the time. So I have wasted some
five hours of the little span still left to us. Who would have
believed it possible? But I feel very much fresher, and ready
for my fate--or try to persuade myself that I am. And yet, the
fitter a man is, and the higher his tide of life, the more must
he shrink from death. How wise and how merciful is that
provision of nature by which his earthly anchor is usually
loosened by many little imperceptible tugs, until his
consciousness has drifted out of its untenable earthly harbor
into the great sea beyond!
Mrs. Challenger is still in the dressing room. Challenger has
fallen asleep in his chair. What a picture! His enormous frame
leans back, his huge, hairy hands are clasped across his
waistcoat, and his head is so tilted that I can see nothing
above his collar save a tangled bristle of luxuriant beard. He
shakes with the vibration of his own snoring. Summerlee adds his
occasional high tenor to Challenger's sonorous bass. Lord John
is sleeping also, his long body doubled up sideways in a
basket-chair. The first cold light of dawn is just stealing into
the room, and everything is grey and mournful.
I look out at the sunrise--that fateful sunrise which will shine
upon an unpeopled world. The human race is gone, extinguished in
a day, but the planets swing round and the tides rise or fall,
and the wind whispers, and all nature goes her way, down, as it
would seem, to the very amoeba, with never a sign that he who
styled himself the lord of creation had ever blessed or cursed
the universe with his presence. Down in the yard lies Austin
with sprawling limbs, his face glimmering white in the dawn, and
the hose nozzle still projecting from his dead hand. The whole
of human kind is typified in that one half-ludicrous and
half-pathetic figure, lying so helpless beside the machine which
it used to control.
Here end the notes which I made at the time. Henceforward events
were too swift and too poignant to allow me to write, but they
are too clearly outlined in my memory that any detail could
escape me.
Some chokiness in my throat made me look at the oxygen
cylinders, and I was startled at what I saw. The sands of our
lives were running very low. At some period in the night
Challenger had switched the tube from the third to the fourth
cylinder. Now it was clear that this also was nearly exhausted.
That horrible feeling of constriction was closing in upon me. I
ran across and, unscrewing the nozzle, I changed it to our last
supply. Even as I did so my conscience pricked me, for I felt
that perhaps if I had held my hand all of them might have passed
in their sleep. The thought was banished, however, by the voice
of the lady from the inner room crying:--
"George, George, I am stifling!"
"It is all right, Mrs. Challenger," I answered as the others
started to their feet. "I have just turned on a fresh supply."
Even at such a moment I could not help smiling at Challenger,
who with a great hairy fist in each eye was like a huge, bearded
baby, new wakened out of sleep. Summerlee was shivering like a
man with the ague, human fears, as he realized his position,
rising for an instant above the stoicism of the man of science.
Lord John, however, was as cool and alert as if he had just been
roused on a hunting morning.
"Fifthly and lastly," said he, glancing at the tube. "Say, young
fellah, don't tell me you've been writin' up your impressions in
that paper on your knee."
"Just a few notes to pass the time."
"Well, I don't believe anyone but an Irishman would have done
that. I expect you'll have to wait till little brother amoeba
gets grown up before you'll find a reader. He don't seem to take
much stock of things just at present. Well, Herr Professor, what
are the prospects?"
Challenger was looking out at the great drifts of morning mist
which lay over the landscape. Here and there the wooded hills
rose like conical islands out of this woolly sea.
"It might be a winding sheet," said Mrs. Challenger, who had
entered in her dressing-gown. "There's that song of yours,
George, `Ring out the old, ring in the new.' It was prophetic.
But you are shivering, my poor dear friends. I have been warm
under a coverlet all night, and you cold in your chairs. But
I'll soon set you right."
The brave little creature hurried away, and presently we heard
the sizzling of a kettle. She was back soon with five steaming
cups of cocoa upon a tray.
"Drink these," said she. "You will feel so much better."
And we did. Summerlee asked if he might light his pipe, and we
all had cigarettes. It steadied our nerves, I think, but it was
a mistake, for it made a dreadful atmosphere in that stuffy
room. Challenger had to open the ventilator.
"How long, Challenger?" asked Lord John.
"Possibly three hours," he answered with a shrug.
"I used to be frightened," said his wife. "But the nearer I get
to
it, the easier it seems. Don't you think we ought to pray,
George?"
"You will pray, dear, if you wish," the big man answered, very
gently. "We all have our own ways of praying. Mine is a
complete
acquiescence in whatever fate may send me--a cheerful
acquiescence. The highest religion and the highest science seem
to unite on that."
"I cannot truthfully describe my mental attitude as acquiescence
and far less cheerful acquiescence," grumbled Summerlee over his
pipe. "I submit because I have to. I confess that I should have
liked another year of life to finish my classification of the
chalk fossils."
"Your unfinished work is a small thing," said Challenger
pompously, "when weighed against the fact that my own MAGNUM
OPUS, `The Ladder of Life,' is still in the first stages. My
brain, my reading, my experience--in fact, my whole unique
equipment--were to be condensed into that epoch-making volume.
And yet, as I say, I acquiesce."
"I expect we've all left some loose ends stickin' out," said
Lord John. "What are yours, young fellah?"
"I was working at a book of verses," I answered.
"Well, the world has escaped that, anyhow," said Lord John.
"There's always compensation somewhere if you grope around."
"What about you?" I asked.
"Well, it just so happens that I was tidied up and ready. I'd
promised Merivale to go to Tibet for a snow leopard in the
spring. But it's hard on you, Mrs. Challenger, when you have
just built up this pretty home."
"Where George is, there is my home. But, oh, what would I not
give for one last walk together in the fresh morning air upon
those beautiful downs!"
Our hearts re-echoed her words. The sun had burst through the
gauzy mists which veiled it, and the whole broad Weald was
washed in golden light. Sitting in our dark and poisonous
atmosphere that glorious, clean, wind-swept countryside seemed
a very dream of beauty. Mrs. Challenger held her hand stretched
out to it in her longing. We drew up chairs and sat in a
semicircle in the window. The atmosphere was already very close.
It seemed to me that the shadows of death were drawing in upon
us--the last of our race. It was like an invisible curtain
closing down upon every side.
"That cylinder is not lastin' too well," said Lord John with a
long gasp for breath.
"The amount contained is variable," said Challenger, "depending
upon the pressure and care with which it has been bottled. I am
inclined to agree with you, Roxton, that this one is defective."
"So we are to be cheated out of the last hour of our lives,"
Summerlee remarked bitterly. "An excellent final illustration of
the sordid age in which we have lived. Well, Challenger, now is
your time if you wish to study the subjective phenomena of
physical dissolution."
"Sit on the stool at my knee and give me your hand," said
Challenger to his wife. "I think, my friends, that a further
delay in this insufferable atmosphere is hardly advisable. You
would not desire it, dear, would you?"
His wife gave a little groan and sank her face against his leg.
"I've seen the folk bathin' in the Serpentine in winter," said
Lord John. "When the rest are in, you see one or two shiverin'
on the bank, envyin' the others that have taken the plunge. It's
the last that have the worst of it. I'm all for a header and
have done with it."
"You would open the window and face the ether?"
"Better be poisoned than stifled."
Summerlee nodded his reluctant acquiescence and held out his
thin hand to Challenger.
"We've had our quarrels in our time, but that's all over," said
he. "We were good friends and had a respect for each other under
the surface. Good-by!"
"Good-by, young fellah!" said Lord John. "The window's plastered
up. You can't open it."
Challenger stooped and raised his wife, pressing her to his
breast, while she threw her arms round his neck.
"Give me that field-glass, Malone," said he gravely.
I handed it to him.
"Into the hands of the Power that made us we render ourselves
again!" he shouted in his voice of thunder, and at the words he
hurled the field-glass through the window.
Full in our flushed faces, before the last tinkle of falling
fragments had died away, there came the wholesome breath of the
wind, blowing strong and sweet.
I don't know how long we sat in amazed silence. Then as in a
dream, I heard Challenger's voice once more.
"We are back in normal conditions," he cried. "The world has
cleared the poison belt, but we alone of all mankind are saved."
