“What a lot we were! All a little scared at ourselves—all, as it were, instrumental. . . .
“And it’s fools like that lead to things like this!” He jerked his head at that dead man near by us.
“It will be interesting to know what has happened to the world. . . . This green vapor—queer stuff. But I know what has happened to me. It’s Conversion. I’ve always known. . . . But this is being a fool. Talk! I’m going to stop it.”
He motioned to rise with his clumsy outstretched hands.
“Stop what?” said I, stepping forward instinctively to help him.
“War,” he said in his great whisper, putting his big hand on my shoulder but making no further attempt to arise, “I’m going to put an end to war—to any sort of war! And all these things that must end. The world is beautiful, life is great and splendid, we had only to lift up our eyes and see. Think of the glories through which we have been driving, like a herd of swine in a garden place. The color in life—the sounds—the shapes! We have had our jealousies, our quarrels, our ticklish rights, our invincible prejudices, our vulgar enterprise and sluggish timidities, we have chattered and pecked one another and fouled the world—like daws in the temple, like unclean birds in the holy place of God. All my life has been foolishness and pettiness, gross pleasures and mean discretions—all. I am a meagre dark thing in this morning’s glow, a penitence, a shame! And, but for God’s mercy, I might have died this night—like that poor lad there—amidst the squalor of my sins! No more of this! No more of this!—whether the whole world has changed or no, matters nothing. _We two have seen this dawn!_ . . .”
“I will arise and go unto my Father,” he began presently, “and will say unto Him———”
His voice died away in an inaudible whisper. His hand tightened painfully on my shoulder and he rose. . . .
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.