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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!"
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"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, 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 PLATTNER STORY
Whether the story of Gottfried Plattner is to be credited or not, is a pretty
question in the value of evidence. On the one hand, we have seven
witnesses--to be perfectly exact, we have six and a half pairs of eyes, and
one undeniable fact; and on the other we have--what is it? --prejudice, common
sense, the inertia of opinion. Never were there seven more honest-seeming
witnesses; never was there a more undeniable, fact than the inversion of
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Gottfried Plattner's anatomical structure, and--never was there a more
preposterous story than the one they have to tell! The most preposterous part
of the story is the worthy Gottfried's contribution (for I count him as one of
the seven). Heaven forbid that I should be led into giving countenance to
superstition by a passion for impartiality, and so come to share the fate of
Eusapia's patrons! Frankly, I believe there is something crooked about this
business of Gottfried Plattner; but what that crooked factor is, I will admit
as frankly, I do not know. I have been surprised at the credit accorded to the
story in the most unexpected and authoritative quarters. The fairest way to
the reader, however, will be for me to tell it without further comment.
Gottfried Plattner is, in spite of his name, a freeborn Englishman. His
father was an Alsatian who came to England in the Sixties, married a
respectable English girl of unexceptionable antecedents, and died, after a
wholesome and uneventful life (devoted, I understand, chiefly to the laying of
parquet flooring), in 1887. Gottfried's age is seven-and-twenty. He is, by
virtue of his heritage of three languages, Modern Languages Master in a small
private school in the South of England. To the casual observer he is
singularly like any other Modern Languages Master in any other small private
school. His costume is neither very costly nor very fashionable, but, on the
other hand, it is not markedly cheap or shabby; his complexion, like his
height and his bearing, is inconspicuous. You would notice, perhaps, that,
like the majority of people, his face was not absolutely symmetrical, his
right eye a little larger than the left, and his jaw a trifle heavier on the
right side. If you, as an ordinary careless person, were to bare his chest and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]