The War of the Worlds
By H.G. Wells
| Day 5 Audio |
It was while the curate had sat
and talked so wildly to me under the hedge in the flat meadows near Halliford,
and while my brother was watching the fugitives stream over Westminster Bridge,
that the Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from
the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them remained
busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that night, hurrying on
some operation that disengaged huge volumes of green smoke.
But three certainly came out
about eight o'clock and, advancing slowly and cautiously, made their way through
Byfleet and Pyrford towards Ripley and Weybridge, and so came in sight of the
expectant batteries against the setting sun. These Martians did not advance in a
body, but in a line, each perhaps a mile and a half from his nearest fellow.
They communicated with one another by means of sirenlike howls, running up and
down the scale from one note to another.
It was this howling and firing
of the guns at Ripley and St. George's Hill that we had heard at Upper
Halliford. The Ripley gunners, unseasoned artillery volunteers who ought never
to have been placed in such a position, fired one wild, premature, ineffectual
volley, and bolted on horse and foot through the deserted village, while the
Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over their guns, stepped
gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so came unexpectedly upon the
guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed.
The St. George's Hill men,
however, were better led or of a better mettle. Hidden by a pine wood as they
were, they seem to have been quite unsuspected by the Martian nearest to them.
They laid their guns as deliberately as if they had been on parade, and fired at
about a thousand yards' range.
The shells flashed all round
him, and he was seen to advance a few paces, stagger, and go down. Everybody
yelled together, and the guns were reloaded in frantic haste. The overthrown
Martian set up a prolonged ululation, and immediately a second glittering giant,
answering him, appeared over the trees to the south. It would seem that a leg of
the tripod had been smashed by one of the shells. The whole of the second volley
flew wide of the Martian on the ground, and, simultaneously, both his companions
brought their Heat-Rays to bear on the battery. The ammunition blew up, the pine
trees all about the guns flashed into fire, and only one or two of the men who
were already running over the crest of the hill escaped.
After this it would seem that
the three took counsel together and halted, and the scouts who were watching
them report that they remained absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The
Martian who had been overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small brown
figure, oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and apparently
engaged in the repair of his support. About nine he had finished, for his cowl
was then seen above the trees again.
It was a few minutes past nine
that night when these three sentinels were joined by four other Martians, each
carrying a thick black tube. A similar tube was handed to each of the three, and
the seven proceeded to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved
line between St. George's Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, southwest of
Ripley.
A dozen rockets sprang out of
the hills before them so soon as they began to move, and warned the waiting
batteries about Ditton and Esher. At the same time four of their fighting
machines, similarly armed with tubes, crossed the river, and two of them, black
against the western sky, came into sight of myself and the curate as we hurried
wearily and painfully along the road that runs northward out of Halliford. They
moved, as it seemed to us, upon a cloud, for amilky mist covered the fields and
rose to a third of their height.
At this sight the curate cried
faintly in his throat, and began running; but I knew it was no good running from
a Martian, and I turned aside and crawled through dewy nettles and brambles into
the broad ditch by the side of the road. He looked back, saw what I was doing,
and turned to join me.
The two halted, the nearer to us
standing and facing Sunbury, the remoter being a grey indistinctness towards the
evening star, away towards Staines.
The occasional howling of the
Martians had ceased; they took up their positions in the huge crescent about
their cylinders in absolute silence. It was a crescent with twelve miles between
its horns. Never since the devising of gunpowder was the beginning of a battle
so still. To us and to an observer about Ripley it would have had precisely the
same effect--the Martians seemed in solitary possession of the darkling night,
lit only as it was by the slender moon, the stars, the afterglow of the
daylight, and the ruddy glare from St. George's Hill and the woods of Painshill.
But facing that crescent
everywhere--at Staines, Hounslow, Ditton, Esher, Ockham, behind hills and woods
south of the river, and across the flat grass meadows to the north of it,
wherever a cluster of trees or village houses gave sufficient cover--the guns
were waiting. The signal rockets burst and rained their sparks through the night
and vanished, and the spirit of all those watching batteries rose to a tense
expectation. The Martians had but to advance into the line of fire, and
instantly those motionless black forms of men, those guns glittering so darkly
in the early night, would explode into a thunderous fury of battle.
No doubt the thought that was
uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in
mine, was the riddle--how much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in
our millions were organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they
interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady
investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of onslaught
in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might exterminate us? (At that
time no one knew what food they needed.) A hundred such questions struggled
together in my mind as I watched that vast sentinel shape. And in the back of my
mind was the sense of all the huge unknown and hidden forces Londonward. Had
they prepared pitfalls? Were the powder mills at Hounslow ready as a snare?
Would the Londoners have the heart and courage to make a greater Moscow of their
mighty province of houses?
Then, after an interminable
time, as it seemed to us, crouching and peering through the hedge, came a sound
like the distant concussion of a gun. Another nearer, and then another. And then
the Martian beside us raised his tube on high and discharged it, gunwise, with a
heavy report that made the ground heave. The one towards Staines answered him.
There was no flash, no smoke, simply that loaded detonation.
I was so excited by these heavy
minute-guns following one another that I so far forgot my personal safety and my
scalded hands as to clamber up into the hedge and stare towards Sunbury. As I
did so a second report followed, and a big projectile hurtled overhead towards
Hounslow. I expected at least to see smoke or fire, or some such evidence of its
work. But all I saw was the deep blue sky above, with one solitary star, and the
white mist spreading wide and low beneath. And there had been no crash, no
answering explosion. The silence was restored; the minute lengthened to three.
"What has happened?" said the
curate, standing up beside me.
"Heaven knows!" said I.
A bat flickered by and vanished.
A distant tumult of shouting began and ceased. I looked again at the Martian,
and saw he was now moving eastward along the riverbank, with a swift, rolling
motion,
Every moment I expected the fire
of some hidden battery to spring upon him; but the evening calm was unbroken.
The figure of the Martian grew smaller as he receded, and presently the mist and
the gathering night had swallowed him up. By a common impulse we clambered
higher. Towards Sunbury was a dark appearance, as though a conical hill had
suddenly come into being there, hiding our view of the farther country; and
then, remoter across the river, over Walton, we saw another such summit. These
hill-like forms grew lower and broader even as we stared.
Moved by a sudden thought, I
looked northward, and there I perceived a third of these cloudy black kopjes had
risen.
Everything had suddenly become
very still. Far away to the southeast, marking the quiet, we heard the Martians
hooting to one another, and then the air quivered again with the distant thud of
their guns. But the earthly artillery made no reply.
Now at the time we could not
understand these things, but later I was to learn the meaning of these ominous
kopjes that gathered in the twilight. Each of the Martians, standing in the
great crescent I have described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he
carried, a huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other
possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only one of
these, some two--as in the case of the one we had seen; the one at Ripley is
said to have discharged no fewer than five at that time. These canisters smashed
on striking the ground--they did not explode--and incontinently disengaged an
enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and
ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the
surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent
wisps, was death to all that breathes.
It was heavy, this vapour,
heavier than the densest smoke, so that, after the first tumultuous uprush and
outflow of its impact, it sank down through the air and poured over the ground
in a manner rather liquid than gaseous, abandoning the hills, and streaming into
the valleys and ditches and watercourses even as I have heard the carbonic-acid
gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And where it came upon water
some chemical action occurred, and the surface would be instantly covered with a
powdery scum that sank slowly and made way for more. The scum was absolutely
insoluble, and it is a strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that
one could drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained. The
vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together in banks,
flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving reluctantly before the
wind, and very slowly it combined with the mist and moisture of the air, and
sank to the earth in the form of dust. Save that an unknown element giving a
group of four lines in the blue of the spectrum is concerned, we are still
entirely ignorant of the nature of this substance.
Once the tumultuous upheaval of
its dispersion was over, the black smoke clung so closely to the ground, even
before its precipitation, that fifty feet up in the air, on the roofs and upper
stories of high houses and on great trees, there was a chance of escaping its
poison altogether, as was proved even that night at Street Cobham and Ditton.
The man who escaped at the
former place tells a wonderful story of the strangeness of its coiling flow, and
how he looked down from the church spire and saw the houses of the village
rising like ghosts out of its inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained
there, weary, starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and
against the prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red
roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, outhouses,
and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.
But that was at Street Cobham,
where the black vapour was allowed to remain until it sank of its own accord
into the ground. As a rule the Martians, when it had served its purpose, cleared
the air of it again by wading into it and directing a jet of steam upon it.
This they did with the vapour
banks near us, as we saw in the starlight from the window of a deserted house at
Upper Halliford, whither we had returned. From there we could see the
searchlights on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill going to and fro, and about
eleven the windows rattled, and we heard the sound of the huge siege guns that
had been put in position there. These continued intermittently for the space of
a quarter of an hour, sending chance shots at the invisible Martians at Hampton
and Ditton, and then the pale beams of the electric light vanished, and were
replaced by a bright red glow.
Then the fourth cylinder fell--a
brilliant green meteor--as I learned afterwards, in Bushey Park. Before the guns
on the Richmond and Kingston line of hills began, there was a fitful cannonade
far away in the southwest, due, I believe, to guns being fired haphazard before
the black vapour could overwhelm the gunners.
So, setting about it as
methodically as men might smoke out a wasps' nest, the Martians spread this
strange stifling vapour over the Londonward country. The horns of the crescent
slowly moved apart, until at last they formed a line from Hanwell to Coombe and
Malden. All night through their destructive tubes advanced. Never once, after
the Martian at St. George's Hill was brought down, did they give the artillery
the ghost of a chance against them. Wherever there was a possibility of guns
being laid for them unseen, a fresh canister of the black vapour was discharged,
and where the guns were openly displayed the Heat-Ray was brought to bear.
By midnight the blazing trees
along the slopes of Richmond Park and the glare of Kingston Hill threw their
light upon a network of black smoke, blotting out the whole valley of the Thames
and extending as far as the eye could reach. And through this two Martians
slowly waded, and turned their hissing steam jets this way and that.
They were sparing of the
Heat-Ray that night, either because they had but a limited supply of material
for its production or because they did not wish to destroy the country but only
to crush and overawe the opposition they had aroused. In the latter aim they
certainly succeeded. Sunday night was the end of the organised opposition to
their movements. After that no body of men would stand against them, so hopeless
was the enterprise. Even the crews of the torpedo-boats and destroyers that had
brought their quick-firers up the Thames refused to stop, mutinied, and went
down again. The only offensive operation men ventured upon after that night was
the preparation of mines and pitfalls, and even in that their energies were
frantic and spasmodic.
One has to imagine, as well as
one may, the fate of those batteries towards Esher, waiting so tensely in the
twilight. Survivors there were none. One may picture the orderly expectation,
the officers alert and watchful, the gunners ready, the ammunition piled to
hand, the limber gunners with their horses and waggons, the groups of civilian
spectators standing as near as they were permitted, the evening stillness, the
ambulances and hospital tents with the burned and wounded from Weybridge; then
the dull resonance of the shots the Martians fired, and the clumsy projectile
whirling over the trees and houses and smashing amid the neighbouring fields.
One may picture, too, the sudden
shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that
blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a
palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its
victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling
headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and
writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of
smoke. And then night and extinction--nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable
vapour hiding its dead.
Before dawn the black vapour was
pouring through the streets of Richmond, and the disintegrating organism of
government was, with a last expiring effort, rousing the population of London to
the necessity of flight.
So you understand the roaring
wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday
was dawning--the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a
foaming tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle
about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel
northward and eastward. By ten o'clock the police organisation, and by midday
even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and
efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of
the social body.
All the railway lines north of
the Thames and the South-Eastern people at Cannon Street had been warned by
midnight on Sunday, and trains were being filled. People were fighting savagely
for standing-room in the carriages even at two o'clock. By three, people were
being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards
or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and
the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated,
were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect.
And as the day advanced and the
engine drivers and stokers refused to return to London, the pressure of the
flight drove the people in an ever-thickening multitude away from the stations
and along the northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at
Barnes, and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and
across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in its
sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, and surrounded a little island
of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape.
After a fruitless struggle to
get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk Farm--the engines of the trains that
had loaded in the goods yard there ploughed through shrieking people,
and a dozen stalwart men fought to keep the crowd from crushing the driver
against his furnace--my brother emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across
through a hurrying swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the
sack of a cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got was punctured in
dragging it through the window, but he got up and off, notwithstanding, with no
further injury than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock Hill was
impassable owing to several overturned horses, and my brother struck into
Belsize Road.
So he got out of the fury of the
panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road, reached Edgware about seven, fasting and
wearied, but well ahead of the crowd. Along the road people were standing in the
roadway, curious, wondering. He was passed by a number of cyclists, some
horsemen, and two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of the wheel broke,
and the machine became unridable. He left it by the roadside and trudged through
the village. There were shops half opened in the main street of the place, and
people crowded on the pavement and in the doorways and windows, staring
astonished at this extraordinary procession of fugitives that was beginning. He
succeeded in getting some food at an inn.
For a time he remained in
Edgware not knowing what next to do. The flying people increased in number. Many
of them, like my brother, seemed inclined to loiter in the place. There was no
fresh news of the invaders from Mars.
At that time the road was
crowded, but as yet far from congested. Most of the fugitives at that hour were
mounted on cycles, but there were soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and carriages
hurrying along, and the dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to St. Albans.
It was perhaps a vague idea of
making his way to Chelmsford, where some friends of his lived, that at last
induced my brother to strike into a quiet lane running eastward. Presently he
came upon a stile, and, crossing it, followed a footpath northeastward. He
passed near several farmhouses and some little places whose names he did not
learn. He saw few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards High Barnet, he
happened upon two ladies who became his fellow travellers. He came upon them
just in time to save them.
He heard their screams, and,
hurrying round the corner, saw a couple of men struggling to drag them out of
the little pony-chaise in which they had been driving, while a third with
difficulty held the frightened pony's head. One of the ladies, a short woman
dressed in white, was simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure,
slashed at the man who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her disengaged
hand.
My brother immediately grasped
the situation, shouted, and hurried towards the struggle. One of the men
desisted and turned towards him, and my brother, realising from his antagonist's
face that a fight was unavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into him
forthwith and sent him down against the wheel of the chaise.
It was no time for pugilistic
chivalry and my brother laid him quiet with a kick, and gripped the collar of
the man who pulled at the slender lady's arm. He heard the clatter of hoofs, the
whip stung across his face, a third antagonist struck him between the eyes, and
the man he held wrenched himself free and made off down the lane in the
direction from which he had come.
Partly stunned, he found himself
facing the man who had held the horse's head, and became aware of the chaise
receding from him down the lane, swaying from side to side, and with the women
in it looking back. The man before him, a burly rough, tried to close, and he
stopped him with a blow in the face. Then, realising that he was deserted, he
dodged round and made off down the lane after the chaise, with the sturdy man
close behind him, and the fugitive, who had turned now, following remotely.
Suddenly he stumbled and fell;
his immediate pursuer went headlong, and he rose to his feet to find himself
with a couple of antagonists again. He would have had little chance against them
had not the slender lady very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help. It
seems she had had a revolver all this time, but it had been under the seat when
she and her companion were attacked. She fired at six yards' distance, narrowly
missing my brother. The less courageous of the robbers made off, and his
companion followed him, cursing his cowardice. They both stopped in sight down
the lane, where the third man lay insensible.
"Take this!" said the slender
lady, and she gave my brother her revolver.
"Go back to the chaise," said my
brother, wiping the blood from his split lip.
She turned without a word--they
were both panting--and they went back to where the lady in white struggled to
hold back the frightened pony.
The robbers had evidently had
enough of it. When my brother looked again they were retreating.
"I'll sit here," said my
brother, "if I may"; and he got upon the empty front seat. The lady looked over
her shoulder.
"Give me the reins," she said,
and laid the whip along the pony's side. In another moment a bend in the road
hid the three men from my brother's eyes.
So, quite unexpectedly, my
brother found himself, panting, with a cut mouth, a bruised jaw, and
bloodstained knuckles, driving along an unknown lane with these two women.
He learned they were the wife
and the younger sister of a surgeon living at Stanmore, who had come in the
small hours from a dangerous case at Pinner, and heard at some railway station
on his way of the Martian advance. He had hurried home, roused the women--their
servant had left them two days before--packed some provisions, put his revolver
under the seat--luckily for my brother--and told them to drive on to Edgware,
with the idea of getting a train there. He stopped behind to tell the
neighbours. He would overtake them, he said, at about half past four in the
morning, and now it was nearly nine and they had seen nothing of him. They could
not stop in Edgware because of the growing traffic through the place, and so
they had come into this side lane.
That was the story they told my
brother in fragments when presently they stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He
promised to stay with them, at least until they could determine what to do, or
until the missing man arrived, and professed to be an expert shot with the
revolver--a weapon strange to him--in order to give them confidence.
They made a sort of encampment
by the wayside, and the pony became happy in the hedge. He told them of his own
escape out of London, and all that he knew of these Martians and their ways. The
sun crept higher in the sky, and after a time their talk died out and gave place
to an uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along the lane, and
of these my brother gathered such news as he could. Every broken answer he had
deepened his impression of the great disaster that had come on humanity,
deepened his persuasion of the immediate necessity for prosecuting this flight.
He urged the matter upon them.
"We have money," said the
slender woman, and hesitated.
Her eyes met my brother's, and
her hesitation ended.
"So have I," said my brother.
She explained that they had as
much as thirty pounds in gold, besides a five-pound note, and suggested that
with that they might get upon a train at St. Albans or New Barnet. My brother
thought that was hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the
trains, and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and
thence escaping from the country altogether.
Mrs. Elphinstone--that was the
name of the woman in white--would listen to no reasoning, and kept calling upon
"George"; but her sister-in-law was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at
last agreed to my brother's suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great North
Road, they went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the pony to save it as
much as possible.
As the sun crept up the sky the
day became excessively hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grew burning
and blinding, so that they travelled only very slowly. The hedges were grey with
dust. And as they advanced towards Barnet a tumultuous murmuring grew stronger.
They began to meet more people.
For the most part these were staring before them, murmuring indistinct
questions, jaded, haggard, unclean. One man in evening dress passed them on
foot, his eyes on the ground. They heard his voice, and, looking back at him,
saw one hand clutched in his hair and the other beating invisible things. His
paroxysm of rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.
As my brother's party went on
towards the crossroads to the south of Barnet they saw a woman approaching the
road across some fields on their left, carrying a child and with two other
children; and then passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand
and a small portmanteau in the other. Then round the corner of the lane, from
between the villas that guarded it at its confluence with the high road, came a
little cart drawn by a sweating black pony and driven by a sallow youth in a
bowler hat, grey with dust. There were three girls, East End factory girls, and
a couple of little children crowded in the cart.
"This'll tike us rahnd Edgware?"
asked the driver, wild-eyed, white-faced; and when my brother told him it would
if he turned to the left, he whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.
My brother noticed a pale grey
smoke or haze rising among the houses in front of them, and veiling the white
facade of a terrace beyond the road that appeared between the backs of the
villas. Mrs. Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red
flame leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue sky.
The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many
voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the staccato of
hoofs. The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from the crossroads.
"Good heavens!" cried Mrs.
Elphinstone. "What is this you are driving us into?"
My brother stopped.
For the main road was a boiling
stream of people, a torrent of human beings rushing northward, one pressing on
another. A great bank of dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made
everything within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and was
perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses and of men
and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every description.
"Way!" my brother heard voices
crying. "Make way!"
It was like riding into the
smoke of a fire to approach the meeting point of the lane and road; the crowd
roared like a fire, and the dust was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way
up the road a villa was burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across
the road to add to the confusion.
Two men came past them. Then a
dirty woman, carrying a heavy bundle and weeping. A lost retriever dog, with
hanging tongue, circled dubiously round them, scared and wretched, and fled at
my brother's threat.
So much as they could see of the
road Londonward between the houses to the right was a tumultuous stream of
dirty, hurrying people, pent in between the villas on either side; the black
heads, the crowded forms, grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the
corner, hurried past, and merged their individuality again in a receding
multitude that was swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust.
"Go on! Go on!" cried the
voices. "Way! Way!"
One man's hands pressed on the
back of another. My brother stood at the pony's head. Irresistibly attracted, he
advanced slowly, pace by pace, down the lane.
Edgware had been a scene of
confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous tumult, but this was a whole population in
movement. It is hard to imagine that host. It had no character of its own. The
figures poured out past the corner, and receded with their backs to the group in
the lane. Along the margin came those who were on foot threatened by the wheels,
stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another.
The carts and carriages crowded
close upon one another, making little way for those swifter and more impatient
vehicles that darted forward every now and then when an opportunity showed
itself of doing so, sending the people scattering against the fences and gates
of the villas.
"Push on!" was the cry. "Push
on! They are coming!"
In one cart stood a blind man in
the uniform of the Salvation Army, gesticulating with his crooked fingers and
bawling, "Eternity! Eternity!" His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my
brother could hear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some of the
people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horses and quarrelled
with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing with miserable eyes;
some gnawed their hands with thirst, or lay prostrate in the bottoms of their
conveyances. The horses' bits were covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot.
There were cabs, carriages, shop
cars, waggons, beyond counting; a mail cart, a road-cleaner's cart marked
"Vestry of St. Pancras," a huge timber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer's
dray rumbled by with its two near wheels splashed with fresh blood.
"Clear the way!" cried the
voices. "Clear the way!"
"Eter-nity! Eter-nity!" came
echoing down the road.
There were sad, haggard women
tramping by, well dressed, with children that cried and stumbled, their dainty
clothes smothered in dust, their weary faces smeared with tears. With many of
these came men, sometimes helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side
by side with them pushed some weary street outcast in faded black rags,
wide-eyed, loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy workmen thrusting
their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed like clerks or shopmen,
struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my brother noticed, men dressed in
the clothes of railway porters, one wretched creature in a nightshirt with a
coat thrown over it.
But varied as its composition
was, certain things all that host had in common. There were fear and pain on
their faces, and fear behind them. A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place
in a waggon, sent the whole host of them quickening their pace; even a man so
scared and broken that his knees bent under him was galvanised for a moment into
renewed activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon this
multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and cracked. They were all
thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the various cries one heard disputes,
reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue; the voices of most of them were
hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a refrain:
"Way! Way! The Martians are
coming!"
Few stopped and came aside from
that flood. The lane opened slantingly into the main road with a narrow opening,
and had a delusive appearance of coming from the direction of London. Yet a kind
of eddy of people drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of the stream, who
for the most part rested but a moment before plunging into it again. A little
way down the lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a man with a bare leg,
wrapped about with bloody rags. He was a lucky man to have friends.
A little old man, with a grey
military moustache and a filthy black frock coat, limped out and sat down beside
the trap, removed his boot--his sock was blood-stained--shook out a pebble, and
hobbled on again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw
herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.
"I can't go on! I can't go on!"
My brother woke from his torpor
of astonishment and lifted her up, speaking gently to her, and carried her to
Miss Elphinstone. So soon as my brother touched her she became quite still, as
if frightened.
"Ellen!" shrieked a woman in the
crowd, with tears in her voice--"Ellen!" And the child suddenly darted away from
my brother, crying "Mother!"
"They are coming," said a man on
horseback, riding past along the lane.
"Out of the way, there!" bawled
a coachman, towering high; and my brother saw a closed carriage turning into the
lane.
The people crushed back on one
another to avoid the horse. My brother pushed the pony and chaise back into the
hedge, and the man drove by and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a
carriage, with a pole for a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces. My
brother saw dimly through the dust that two men lifted out something on a white
stretcher and put it gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge.
One of the men came running to
my brother.
"Where is there any water?" he
said. "He is dying fast, and very thirsty. It is Lord Garrick."
"Lord Garrick!" said my brother;
"the Chief Justice?"
"The water?" he said.
"There may be a tap," said my
brother, "in some of the houses. We have no water. I dare not leave my people."
The man pushed against the crowd
towards the gate of the corner house.
"Go on!" said the people,
thrusting at him. "They are coming! Go on!"
Then my brother's attention was
distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man lugging a small handbag, which split
even as my brother's eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that
seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled
hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped
and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and
sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved him
narrowly.
"Way!" cried the men all about
him. "Make way!"
So soon as the cab had passed,
he flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap of coins, and began
thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in another
moment, half rising, he had been borne down under the horse's hoofs.
"Stop!" screamed my brother, and
pushing a woman out of his way, tried to clutch the bit of the horse.
Before he could get to it, he
heard a scream under the wheels, and saw through the dust the rim passing over
the poor wretch's back. The driver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother,
who ran round behind the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The
man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise, for the
wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead. My brother
stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a man on a black horse came to his
assistance.
"Get him out of the road," said
he; and, clutching the man's collar with his free hand, my brother lugged him
sideways. But he still clutched after his money, and regarded my brother
fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of gold. "Go on! Go on!" shouted
angry voices behind.
"Way! Way!"
There was a smash as the pole of
a carriage crashed into the cart that the man on horseback stopped. My brother
looked up, and the man with the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist
that held his collar. There was a concussion, and the black horse came
staggering sideways, and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed my
brother's foot by a hair's breadth. He released his grip on the fallen man and
jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on the
ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne backward and
carried past the entrance of the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent to
recover it.
He saw Miss Elphinstone covering
her eyes, and a little child, with all a child's want of sympathetic
imagination, staring with dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay black and
still, ground and crushed under the rolling wheels. "Let us go back!" he
shouted, and began turning the pony round. "We cannot cross this--hell," he said
and they went back a hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting
crowd was hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw the face of
the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white and drawn, and shining
with perspiration. The two women sat silent, crouching in their seat and
shivering.
Then beyond the bend my brother
stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat
weeping, too wretched even to call upon "George." My brother was horrified and
perplexed. So soon as they had retreated he realised how urgent and unavoidable
it was to attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone, suddenly
resolute.
"We must go that way," he said,
and led the pony round again.
For the second time that day
this girl proved her quality. To force their way into the torrent of people, my
brother plunged into the traffic and held back a cab horse, while she drove the
pony across its head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long
splinter from the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept forward
by the stream. My brother, with the cabman's whip marks red across his face and
hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from her.
"Point the revolver at the man
behind," he said, giving it to her, "if he presses us too hard. No!--point it at
his horse."
Then he began to look out for a
chance of edging to the right across the road. But once in the stream he seemed
to lose volition, to become a part of that dusty rout. They swept through
Chipping Barnet with the torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of
the town before they had fought across to the opposite side of the way. It was
din and confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the town the road forks
repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the stress.
They struck eastward through
Hadley, and there on either side of the road, and at another place farther on
they came upon a great multitude of people drinking at the stream, some fighting
to come at the water. And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw two
trains running slowly one after the other without signal or order--trains
swarming with people, with men even among the coals behind the engines--going
northward along the Great Northern Railway. My brother supposes they must have
filled outside London, for at that time the furious terror of the people had
rendered the central termini impossible.
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