Tales of Space and Time
unsolved. Nor is it necessary to describe how far that series got to its
fulfilment. There were astonishing changes. The small hours found Mr.
Maydig and Mr. Fotheringay careering across the chilly market-square
under the still moon, in a sort of ecstasy of thaumaturgy, Mr. Maydig
all flap and gesture, Mr. Fotheringay short and bristling, and no longer
abashed at his greatness. They had reformed every drunkard in the
Parliamentary division, changed all the beer and alcohol to water (Mr.
Maydig had overruled Mr. Fotheringay on this point); they had, further,
greatly improved the railway communication of the place, drained
Flinder's swamp, improved the soil of One Tree Hill, and cured the
Vicar's wart. And they were going to see what could be done with the
injured pier at South Bridge. "The place," gasped Mr. Maydig, "won't be
the same place to-morrow. How surprised and thankful everyone will be!"
And just at that moment the church clock struck three.
"I say," said Mr. Fotheringay, "that's three o'clock! I must be getting
back. I've got to be at business by eight. And besides, Mrs. Wimms--"
"We're only beginning," said Mr. Maydig, full of the sweetness of
unlimited power. "We're only beginning. Think of all the good we're
doing. When people wake--"
"But--," said Mr. Fotheringay.
Mr. Maydig gripped his arm suddenly. His eyes were bright and wild. "My
dear chap," he said, "there's no hurry. Look"--he pointed to the moon at
the zenith--"Joshua!"
"Joshua?" said Mr. Fotheringay.
"Joshua," said Mr. Maydig. "Why not? Stop it."
Mr. Fotheringay looked at the moon.
"That's a bit tall," he said after a pause.
"Why not?" said Mr. Maydig. "Of course it doesn't stop. You stop the
rotation of the earth, you know. Time stops. It isn't as if we were
doing harm."
"H'm!" said Mr. Fotheringay. "Well." He sighed. "I'll try. Here--"
He buttoned up his jacket and addressed himself to the habitable globe,
with as good an assumption of confidence as lay in his power. "Jest stop
rotating, will you," said Mr. Fotheringay.
Incontinently he was flying head over heels through the air at the rate
of dozens of miles a minute. In spite of the innumerable circles he was
describing per second, he thought; for thought is wonderful--sometimes
as sluggish as flowing pitch, sometimes as instantaneous as light. He
thought in a second, and willed. "Let me come down safe and sound.
Whatever else happens, let me down safe and sound."
He willed it only just in time, for his clothes, heated by his rapid
flight through the air, were already beginning to singe. He came down
with a forcible, but by no means injurious bump in what appeared to be a
mound of fresh-turned earth. A large mass of metal and masonry,
extraordinarily like the clock-tower in the middle of the market-square,
hit the earth near him, ricochetted over him, and flew into stonework,
bricks, and masonry, like a bursting bomb. A hurtling cow hit one of the
larger blocks and smashed like an egg. There was a crash that made all
the most violent crashes of his past life seem like the sound of falling
dust, and this was followed by a descending series of lesser crashes. A
vast wind roared throughout earth and heaven, so that he could scarcely
lift his head to look. For a while he was too breathless and astonished
even to see where he was or what had happened. And his first movement
was to feel his head and reassure himself that his streaming hair was
still his own.
"Lord!" gasped Mr. Fotheringay, scarce able to speak for the gale, "I've
had a squeak! What's gone wrong? Storms and thunder. And only a minute
ago a fine night. It's Maydig set me on to this sort of thing. _What_ a
wind! If I go on fooling in this way I'm bound to have a thundering
accident!...
"Where's Maydig?
"What a confounded mess everything's in!"
He looked about him so far as his flapping jacket would permit. The
appearance of things was really extremely strange. "The sky's all right
anyhow," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And that's about all that is all right.
And even there it looks like a terrific gale coming up. But there's the
moon overhead. Just as it was just now. Bright as midday. But as for the
rest--Where's the village? Where's--where's anything? And what on earth
set this wind a-blowing? _I_ didn't order no wind."
Mr. Fotheringay struggled to get to his feet in vain, and after one
failure, remained on all fours, holding on. He surveyed the moonlit
world to leeward, with the tails of his jacket streaming over his head.
"There's something seriously wrong," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And what it
is--goodness knows."
Far and wide nothing was visible in the white glare through the haze of
dust that drove before a screaming gale but tumbled masses of earth and
heaps of inchoate ruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only a
wilderness of disorder vanishing at last into the darkness beneath the
whirling columns and streamers, the lightnings and thunderings of a
swiftly rising storm. Near him in the livid glare was something that
might once have been an elm-tree, a smashed mass of splinters, shivered
from boughs to base, and further a twisted mass of iron girders--only
too evidently the viaduct--rose out of the piled confusion.
You see, when Mr. Fotheringay had arrested the rotation of the solid
globe, he had made no stipulation concerning the trifling movables upon
its surface. And the earth spins so fast that the surface at its equator
is travelling at rather more than a thousand miles an hour, and in these
latitudes at more than half that pace. So that the village, and Mr.
Maydig, and Mr. Fotheringay, and everybody and everything had been
jerked violently forward at about nine miles per second--that is to say,
much more violently than if they had been fired out of a cannon. And
every human being, every living creature, every house, and every
tree--all the world as we know it--had been so jerked and smashed and
utterly destroyed. That was all.
These things Mr. Fotheringay did not, of course, fully appreciate. But
he perceived that his miracle had miscarried, and with that a great
disgust of miracles came upon him. He was in darkness now, for the
clouds had swept together and blotted out his momentary glimpse of the
moon, and the air was full of fitful struggling tortured wraiths of
hail. A great roaring of wind and waters filled earth and sky, and,
peering under his hand through the dust and sleet to windward, he saw by
the play of the lightnings a vast wall of water pouring towards him.
"Maydig!" screamed Mr. Fotheringay's feeble voice amid the elemental
uproar. "Here!--Maydig!
"Stop!" cried Mr. Fotheringay to the advancing water. "Oh, for goodness'
sake, stop!
"Just a moment," said Mr. Fotheringay to the lightnings and thunder.
"Stop jest a moment while I collect my thoughts.... And now what shall I
do?" he said. "What _shall_ I do? Lord! I wish Maydig was about.
"I know," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And for goodness' sake let's have it
right _this_ time."
He remained on all fours, leaning against the wind, very intent to have
everything right.
"Ah!" he said. "Let nothing what I'm going to order happen until I say
'Off!'.... Lord! I wish I'd thought of that before!"
He lifted his little voice against the whirlwind, shouting louder and
louder in the vain desire to hear himself speak. "Now then!--here goes!
Mind about that what I said just now. In the first place, when all I've
got to say is done, let me lose my miraculous power, let my will become
just like anybody else's will, and all these dangerous miracles be
stopped. I don't like them. I'd rather I didn't work 'em. Ever so much.
That's the first thing. And the second is--let me be back just before
the miracles begin; let everything be just as it was before that blessed
lamp turned up. It's a big job, but it's the last. Have you got it? No
more miracles, everything as it was--me back in the Long Dragon just
before I drank my half-pint. That's it! Yes."
He dug his fingers into the mould, closed his eyes, and said "Off!"
Everything became perfectly still. He perceived that he was standing
erect.
"So _you_ say," said a voice.
He opened his eyes. He was in the bar of the Long Dragon, arguing about
miracles with Toddy Beamish. He had a vague sense of some great thing
forgotten that instantaneously passed. You see that, except for the loss
of his miraculous powers, everything was back as it had been, his mind
and memory therefore were now just as they had been at the time when
this story began. So that he knew absolutely nothing of all that is told
here, knows nothing of all that is told here to this day. And among
other things, of course, he still did not believe in miracles.
"I tell you that miracles, properly speaking, can't possibly happen," he
said, "whatever you like to hold. And I'm prepared to prove it up to the
hilt."
"That's what _you_ think," said Toddy Beamish, and "Prove it if you
can."
"Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Let us clearly
understand what a miracle is. It's something contrariwise to the course
of nature done by power of Will...."
THE END
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
Edinburgh & London
When the
Sleeper Wakes
A Story of the Days to Come. By
H. G. WELLS, Author of "The War
of the Worlds," &c.
"When the Sleeper Wakes," by far the longest story Mr. Wells has yet
given us, presents a spacious picture of the development of our
civilisation during the next two hundred years. The sleeper is a typical
liberal-minded man of means of the nineteenth century, and he awakens
from a cataleptic trance in the year 2100, to discover that by an ironic
combination of circumstances he has become the central figure of an
enormous political convulsion. His attempt to rise to the
responsibilities of his position, his struggle for power--inspired by an
enthusiastic girl--with the great political organiser Ostrog, give the
great structural lines of the story.
"He fell to sleep a fanatical democrat--a socialist: he woke a
tyrant; he died fighting with the people against the tyranny he had
unconsciously fashioned while he slept. Surely a theme of
magnificent possibilities--a theme more fertile in romance even than
the central idea of 'The War of the Worlds.' The discovery of such
material is in itself no mean triumph."--_Bookman._
"One of the cleverest books ever written."--_Birmingham Post._
"Mr. Wells sustains his reputation as the leading novelist of the
unknown in his latest effort of imagination, 'When the Sleeper
Wakes.'"--_The World._
"There is more than the triumph of extravagant fancy in Mr. Wells's
book; its undertones are well worth attention too."--_The World._
"Mr. Wells beats Jules Verne on his own ground."--_Daily News._
"An enthralling effort of imagination, vivid and bizarre as a
powerful nightmare."--_The Guardian._
"This is undoubtedly a most remarkable book, a _tour de force_ of
the intellect and imagination."--_The Queen._
Harper & Brothers, 45 Albemarle Street
London, W.
Successful Short Stories
_By Thomas Hardy_
A Group of Noble Dames. _Price 6s._
Life's Little Ironies. _Price 6s._
Wessex Tales. _Price 6s._
_By Mary E. Wilkins_
A New England Nun. _Price 6s._
Silence. _Price 6s._
_By Mrs. Francis Blundell_
In a North Country Village.
Illustrated by Frank Felloes. _Price 6s._
_By E. F. Benson_