Podcast 30 - B2/C1 The Man Who Could Work Miracles - Part 4

Part 4

Chapter starts at 1:57

The man who could work miracles part 4

“But this gives us—it opens—the most amazing possibilities!" said My Maydig.

"The thing's unlimited it seems," said Mr Fotheringay. "And about Mr Winch…"

"Altogether unlimited." And Mr Maydig, waving the Winch difficulty aside, produced a series of wonderful proposals - proposals he invented as he went along.

Now what those proposals were does not concern the essentials of this story. It is enough to say that they were designed in a spirit of infinite benevolence. It is enough to say too, that the problem of Winch remained unsolved. Nor is it necessary to describe how far those events were resolved. There were astonishing changes. The small hours found Mr Maydig and Mr Fotheringay running across the chilly market square under the still moon, in a sort of ecstasy of miracle working. Mr Maydig gesticulating with excitement, Mr Fotheringay eager, and no longer timid about his greatness.

They had reformed every drunk in the in the local Town Hall, changed all the beer and alcohol to water (Mr Fotheringay was very unhappy about that one), they had greatly improved the railway communication of the area, improved the quality of the soil of One Tree Hill, and cured the vicar's wart. "The place," gasped Mr Maydig, "won't be the same place tomorrow. 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 work by eight."

"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 in the sky.

"What?" said Mr Fotheringay.

"Stop it!" said Mr Maydig. "Why not? Stop it."

Mr Fotheringay looked at the moon.

"That's a bit of a tall order," he said, after a pause.

"Why?" 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."

"Hm!" said Mr Fotheringay. "Well," he sighed, "I'll try. Here!"

He buttoned up his jacket and spoke to planet Earth with all the confidence that lay in his power. "Just stop rotating, will you?" said Mr Fotheringay...

Immediately, 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 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 harmful bump, in what appeared to be a mound of soft 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, and flew into stonework, bricks, and cement, 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 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, hardly able to speak for the gale, "That was close! What's gone wrong? Storms and thunder. And only a minute ago a fine night. It was Maydig who made me do this sort of thing. What a wind! If I go on fooling in this way I'm bound to have a terrible accident!

"Where's Maydig? What an incredible mess everything's in!"

He looked about him as 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 made this tremendous wind blow? I didn't order any 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 downwind, 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 ruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only a wilderness of disorder, vanishing at last into the darkness beneath the lightning and thunder of a swiftly rising storm.

You see, when Mr Fotheringay had stopped the rotation of the Earth, he had made no stipulation concerning the things that move 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 speed. 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 shattered and smashed and utterly destroyed. That was all.

These things Mr Fotheringay did not, of course, fully understand. But he perceived that his miracle had gone wrong, and with that he felt a great disgust of miracles. He was in darkness now, for the clouds had swept together and blotted out his momentary glimpse of the moon. A great roaring of wind and waters filled earth and sky, and peering under his hand through the dust and sleet upwind, he saw, in a burst of lightning, a vast wall of water pouring towards him.

"Maydig!" screamed Mr Fotheringay's feeble voice in the middle of the 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 just a moment while I collect my thoughts... And now what shall I do?" he said. "What shall I do? Lord! I wish Maydig was here!"

"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! Remember 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 them. 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 stupid lamp turned upside down. 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 earth, closed his eyes, and said "Off!"

Everything became perfectly still. He perceived that he was standing up.

"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 believe. And I'm prepared to prove it."

"That's what you think," said Toddy Beamish, and added "Prove it if you can!"

"Look here, Mr Beamish," said Mr Fotheringay. “It's something contrary to the course of nature, done by the power of will, something that couldn't happen without being specially willed…"

Image from 1936 film The Man who could work Miracles.