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But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people
praying through the night and people going aboard ships and people
fleeing toward mountainous country that the whole world was already
in a terror because of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont
still ruled the world, and save for the talk of idle moments and
the splendour of the night, nine human beings out of ten were still
busy at their common occupations. In all the cities the shops,
save one here and there, opened and closed at their proper hours,
the doctor and the undertaker plied their trades, the workers
gathered in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied,
lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and fled, politicians
planned their schemes. The presses of the newspapers roared
through the night, and many a priest of this church and that would
not open his holy building to further what he considered a foolish
panic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000--for
then, too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no
star--mere gas--a comet; and were it a star it could not possibly
strike the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing. Common
sense was sturdy everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclined
to persecute the
obdurate fearful. That night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time,
the star would be at its nearest to Jupiter. Then the world would
see the turn things would take. The master mathematician's grim
warnings were treated by many as so much mere elaborate
self-advertisement. Common sense at last, a little heated by
argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed.
So, too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went
about their nightly business, and save for a howling dog here and
there, the beast world left the star unheeded.
And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw
the star rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had
been the night before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at
the master mathematician--to take the danger as if it had passed.
But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew--it grew
with a terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each
hour, a little nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and
brighter, until it had turned night into a second day. Had it come
straight to the earth instead of in a curved path, had it lost no
velocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt the intervening gulf in a
day, but as it was it took five days altogether to come by our
planet. The next night it had become a third the size of the moon
before it set to English eyes, and the thaw was assured. It rose
over America near the size of the moon, but blinding white to look
at, and HOT; and a breath of hot wind blew now with its
rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and
down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a
driving reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning,
and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating
floods. And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice
began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of high
country flowed thick and turbid, and soon--in their upper reaches
--with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They rose
steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling
over their banks at last, behind the flying population of their
valleys.
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