back to Rotherfield. Another hour of this dreadful, silent
city would drive me mad."

We got into the car without another word. Lord John backed her round and
turned her to the south. To us the chapter seemed closed. Little did we
foresee the strange new chapter which was to open.

Chapter VI

THE GREAT AWAKENING

And now I come to the end of this extraordinary incident, so
overshadowing in its importance, not only in our own small, individual
lives, but in the general history of the human race. As I said when I
began my narrative, when that history comes to be written, this
occurrence will surely stand out among all other events like a mountain
towering among its foothills. Our generation has been reserved for a
very special fate since it has been chosen to experience so wonderful a
thing. How long its effect may last--how long mankind may preserve the
humility and reverence which this great shock has taught it--can only be
shown by the future. I think it is safe to say that things can never be
quite the same again. Never can one realize how powerless and ignorant
one is, and how one is upheld by an unseen hand, until for an instant
that hand has seemed to close and to crush. Death has been imminent upon
us. We know that at any moment it may be again. That grim presence
shadows our lives, but who can deny that in that shadow the sense of
duty, the feeling of sobriety and responsibility, the appreciation of the
gravity and of the objects of life, the earnest desire to develop and
improve, have grown and become real with us to a degree that has leavened
our whole society from end to end? It is something beyond sects and
beyond dogmas. It is rather an alteration of perspective, a shifting of
our sense of proportion, a vivid realization that we are insignificant
and evanescent creatures, existing on sufferance and at the mercy of the
first chill wind from the unknown. But if the world has grown graver
with this knowledge it is not, I think, a sadder place in consequence.
Surely we are agreed that the more sober and restrained pleasures of the
present are deeper as well as wiser than the noisy, foolish hustle which
passed so often for enjoyment in the days of old--days so recent and yet
already so inconceivable. Those empty lives which were wasted in aimless
visiting and being visited, in the worry of great and unnecessary
households, in the arranging and eating of elaborate and tedious meals,
hav