The War of the Worlds
By H.G. Wells
| Day 7 Audio |
After eating we crept back to
the scullery, and there I must have dozed again, for when presently I looked
round I was alone. The thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence.
I whispered for the curate several times, and at last felt my way to the door of
the kitchen. It was still daylight, and I perceived him across the room, lying
against the triangular hole that looked out upon the Martians. His shoulders
were hunched, so that his head was hidden from me.
I could hear a number of noises
almost like those in an engine shed; and the place rocked with that beating
thud. Through the aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched
with gold and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. For a minute or so I
remained watching the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and stepping with
extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the floor.
I touched the curate's leg, and
he started so violently that a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and
fell with a loud impact. I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a
long time we crouched motionless. Then I turned to see how much of our rampart
remained. The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open in the
debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a beam I was able to see out of
this gap into what had been overnight a quiet suburban roadway. Vast, indeed,
was the change that we beheld.
The fifth cylinder must have
fallen right into the midst of the house we had first visited. The building had
vanished, completely smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. The
cylinder lay now far beneath the original foundations--deep in a hole, already
vastly larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round it
had splashed under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the only word--and lay
in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. It had behaved
exactly like mud under the violent blow of a hammer. Our house had collapsed
backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed
completely; by a chance the kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried
now under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards
the cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great
circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating sound was
evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green vapour drove up like
a veil across our peephole.
The cylinder was already opened
in the centre of the pit, and on the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed
and gravel-heaped shrubbery, one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by its
occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I scarcely
noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been convenient to describe
them first, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy in
the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling
slowly and painfully across the heaped mould near it.
The mechanism it certainly was
that held my attention first. It was one of those complicated fabrics that have
since been called handling-machines, and the study of which has already given
such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first,
it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with
an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching
tentacles about its body. Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long
tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the
covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it
extracted them, were lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth
behind it.
Its motion was so swift,
complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine, in spite of
its metallic glitter. The fighting-machines were co-ordinated and animated to an
extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never
seen these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or the
imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon, scarcely
realise that living quality.
I recall particularly the
illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the
war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the
fighting-machines, and there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted,
stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether
misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a
considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn the reader against
the impression they may have created. They were no more like the Martians I saw
in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the pamphlet
would have been much better without them.
At first, I say, the
handling-machine did not impress me as a machine, but as a crablike creature
with a glittering integument, the controlling Martian whose delicate tentacles
actuated its movements seeming to be simply the equivalent of the crab's
cerebral portion. But then I perceived the resemblance of its grey-brown, shiny,
leathery integument to that of the other sprawling bodies beyond, and the true
nature of this dexterous workman dawned upon me. With that realisation my
interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Martians. Already I had had
a transient impression of these, and the first nausea no longer obscured my
observation. Moreover, I was concealed and motionless, and under no urgency of
action.
They were, I now saw, the most
unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies--or,
rather, heads--about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a
face. This face had no nostrils--indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had
any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just
beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body--I scarcely
know how to speak of it--was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to
be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense
air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles,
arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named
rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, thehands.
Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring
to raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of
terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to suppose that on
Mars they may have progressed upon them with some facility.
The internal anatomy, I may
remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The
greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the
eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which
the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused
by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too
evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.
And this was the sum of the
Martian organs. Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex
apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in
the Martians. They were heads--merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did
not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other
creatures, and injected it into their own veins. I have myself seen
this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem,
I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to continue
watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in
most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette
into the recipient canal....
The bare idea of this is no
doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should
remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent
rabbit.
The physiological advantages of
the practice of injection are undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste
of human time and energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process. Our
bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning
heterogeneous food into blood. The digestive processes and their reaction upon
the nervous system sap our strength and colour our minds. Men go happy or
miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. But
the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations of mood and
emotion.
Their undeniable preference for
men as their source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the
remains of the victims they had brought with them as provisions from Mars. These
creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human
hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the
silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high and
having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. Two or three of
these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and all were killed before
earth was reached. It was just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand
upright upon our planet would have broken every bone in their bodies.
And while I am engaged in this
description, I may add in this place certain further details which, although
they were not all evident to us at the time, will enable the reader who is
unacquainted with them to form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.
In three other points their
physiology differed strangely from ours. Their organisms did not sleep, any more
than the heart of man sleeps. Since they had no extensive muscular mechanism to
recuperate, that periodical extinction was unknown to them. They had little or
no sense of fatigue, it would seem. On earth they could never have moved without
effort, yet even to the last they kept in action. In twenty-four hours they did
twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants.
In the next place, wonderful as
it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and
therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference
among men. A young Martian, there can now be no dispute, was really born upon
earth during the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partiallybudded
off, just as young lilybulbs bud off, or like the young animals in the
fresh-water polyp.
In man, in all the higher
terrestrial animals, such a method of increase has disappeared; but even on this
earth it was certainly the primitive method. Among the lower animals, up even to
those first cousins of the vertebrated animals, the Tunicates, the two processes
occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its competitor
altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has apparently been the case.
It is worthy of remark that a
certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the
Martian invasion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual
Martian condition. His prophecy, I remember, appeared in November or December,
1893, in a long-defunct publication, the Pall Mall Budget, and I recall
a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called Punch. He pointed
out--writing in a foolish, facetious tone--that the perfection of mechanical
appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices,
digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were
no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural
selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the
coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part
of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, "teacher and
agent of the brain." While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow
larger.
There is many a true word
written in jest, and here in the Martians we have beyond dispute the actual
accomplishment of such a suppression of the animal side of the organism by the
intelligence. To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from
beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the
latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the
expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would, of course,
become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of
the human being.
The last salient point in which
the systems of these creatures differed from ours was in what one might have
thought a very trivial particular. Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease
and pain on earth, have either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary
science eliminated them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers and
contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities,
never enter the scheme of their life. And speaking of the differences between
the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may allude here to the curious
suggestions of the red weed.
Apparently the vegetable kingdom
in Mars, instead of having green for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red
tint. At any rate, the seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally)
brought with them gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths. Only that
known popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition with
terrestrial forms. The red creeper was quite a transitory growth, and few people
have seen it growing. For a time, however, the red weed grew with astonishing
vigour and luxuriance. It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth
day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to
the edges of our triangular window. And afterwards I found it broadcast
throughout the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.
The Martians had what appears to
have been an auditory organ, a single round drum at the back of the head-body,
and eyes with a visual range not very different from ours except that, according
to Philips, blue and violet were as black to them. It is commonly supposed that
they communicated by sounds and tentacular gesticulations; this is asserted, for
instance, in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet (written evidently by
someone not an eye-witness of Martian actions) to which I have already alluded,
and which, so far, has been the chief source of information concerning them. Now
no surviving human being saw so much of the Martians in action as I did. I take
no credit to myself for an accident, but the fact is so. And I assert that I
watched them closely time after time, and that I have seen four, five, and
(once) six of them sluggishly performing the most elaborately complicated
operations together without either sound or gesture. Their peculiar hooting
invariably preceded feeding; it had no modulation, and was, I believe, in no
sense a signal, but merely the expiration of air preparatory to the suctional
operation. I have a certain claim to at least an elementary knowledge of
psychology, and in this matter I am convinced--as firmly as I am convinced of
anything--that the Martians interchanged thoughts without any physical
intermediation. And I have been convinced of this in spite of strong
preconceptions. Before the Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or
there may remember, I had written with some little vehemence against the
telepathic theory.
The Martians wore no clothing.
Their conceptions of ornament and decorum were necessarily different from ours;
and not only were they evidently much less sensible of changes of temperature
than we are, but changes of pressure do not seem to have affected their health
at all seriously. Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the other
artificial additions to their bodily resources that their great superiority over
man lay. We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal
soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of
the evolution that the Martians have worked out. They have become practically
mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs just as men wear
suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. And of
their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious
fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism
is absent--the wheel is absent; among all the things they brought to
earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One would have at
least expected it in locomotion. And in this connection it is curious to remark
that even on this earth Nature has never hit upon the wheel, or has preferred
other expedients to its development. And not only did the Martians either not
know of (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their
apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed
pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the
joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving
over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter
of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in
most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic
sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together
when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism
to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder,
was attained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine
which, on my first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. It
seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the
sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving feebly after
their vast journey across space.
While I was still watching their
sluggish motions in the sunlight, and noting each strange detail of their form,
the curate reminded me of his presence by pulling violently at my arm. I turned
to a scowling face, and silent, eloquent lips. He wanted the slit, which
permitted only one of us to peep through; and so I had to forego watching them
for a time while he enjoyed that privilege.
When I looked again, the busy
handling-machine had already put together several of the pieces of apparatus it
had taken out of the cylinder into a shape having an unmistakable likeness to
its own; and down on the left a busy little digging mechanism had come into
view, emitting jets of green vapour and working its way round the pit,
excavating and embanking in a methodical and discriminating manner. This it was
which had caused the regular beating noise, and the rhythmic shocks that had
kept our ruinous refuge quivering. It piped and whistled as it worked. So far as
I could see, the thing was without a directing Martian at all.
The arrival of a second
fighting-machine drove us from our peephole into the scullery, for we feared
that from his elevation the Martian might see down upon us behind our barrier.
At a later date we began to feel less in danger of their eyes, for to an eye in
the dazzle of the sunlight outside our refuge must have been blank blackness,
but at first the slightest suggestion of approach drove us into the scullery in
heart-throbbing retreat. Yet terrible as was the danger we incurred, the
attraction of peeping was for both of us irresistible. And I recall now with a
sort of wonder that, in spite of the infinite danger in which we were between
starvation and a still more terrible death, we could yet struggle bitterly for
that horrible privilege of sight. We would race across the kitchen in a
grotesque way between eagerness and the dread of making a noise, and strike each
other, and thrust add kick, within a few inches of exposure.
The fact is that we had
absolutely incompatible dispositions and habits of thought and action, and our
danger and isolation only accentuated the incompatibility. At Halliford I had
already come to hate the curate's trick of helpless exclamation, his stupid
rigidity of mind. His endless muttering monologue vitiated every effort I made
to think out a line of action, and drove me at times, thus pent up and
intensified, almost to the verge of craziness. He was as lacking in restraint as
a silly woman. He would weep for hours together, and I verily believe that to
the very end this spoiled child of life thought his weak tears in some way
efficacious. And I would sit in the darkness unable to keep my mind off him by
reason of his importunities. He ate more than I did, and it was in vain I
pointed out that our only chance of life was to stop in the house until the
Martians had done with their pit, that in that long patience a time might
presently come when we should need food. He ate and drank impulsively in heavy
meals at long intervals. He slept little.
As the days wore on, his utter
carelessness of any consideration so intensified our distress and danger that I
had, much as I loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows.
That brought him to reason for a time. But he was one of those weak creatures,
void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who
face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.
It is disagreeable for me to
recall and write these things, but I set them down that my story may lack
nothing. Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find
my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for
they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured
men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to
elemental things, will have a wider charity.
And while within we fought out
our dark, dim contest of whispers, snatched food and drink, and gripping hands
and blows, without, in the pitiless sunlight of that terrible June, was the
strange wonder, the unfamiliar routine of the Martians in the pit. Let me return
to those first new experiences of mine. After a long time I ventured back to the
peephole, to find that the new-comers had been reinforced by the occupants of no
fewer than three of the fighting-machines. These last had brought with them
certain fresh appliances that stood in an orderly manner about the cylinder. The
second handling-machine was now completed, and was busied in serving one of the
novel contrivances the big machine had brought. This was a body resembling a
milk can in its general form, above which oscillated a pear-shaped receptacle,
and from which a stream of white powder flowed into a circular basin below.
The oscillatory motion was
imparted to this by one tentacle of the handling-machine. With two spatulate
hands the handling-machine was digging out and flinging masses of clay into the
pear-shaped receptacle above, while with another arm it periodically opened a
door and removed rusty and blackened clinkers from the middle part of the
machine. Another steely tentacle directed the powder from the basin along a
ribbed channel towards some receiver that was hidden from me by the mound of
bluish dust. From this unseen receiver a little thread of green smoke rose
vertically into the quiet air. As I looked, the handling-machine, with a faint
and musical clinking, extended, telescopic fashion, a tentacle that had been a
moment before a mere blunt projection, until its end was hidden behind the mound
of clay. In another second it had lifted a bar of white aluminium into sight,
untarnished as yet, and shining dazzlingly, and deposited it in a growing stack
of bars that stood at the side of the pit. Between sunset and starlight this
dexterous machine must have made more than a hundred such bars out of the crude
clay, and the mound of bluish dust rose steadily until it topped the side of the
pit.
The contrast between the swift
and complex movements of these contrivances and the inert panting clumsiness of
their masters was acute, and for days I had to tell myself repeatedly that these
latter were indeed the living of the two things.
The curate had possession of the
slit when the first men were brought to the pit. I was sitting below, huddled
up, listening with all my ears. He made a sudden movement backward, and I,
fearful that we were observed, crouched in a spasm of terror. He came sliding
down the rubbish and crept beside me in the darkness, inarticulate,
gesticulating, and for a moment I shared his panic. His gesture suggested a
resignation of the slit, and after a little while my curiosity gave me courage,
and I rose up, stepped across him, and clambered up to it. At first I could see
no reason for his frantic behaviour. The twilight had now come, the stars were
little and faint, but the pit was illuminated by the flickering green fire that
came from the aluminium-making. The whole picture was a flickering scheme of
green gleams and shifting rusty black shadows, strangely trying to the eyes.
Over and through it all went the bats, heeding it not at all. The sprawling
Martians were no longer to be seen, the mound of blue-green powder had risen to
cover them from sight, and a fighting-machine, with its legs contracted,
crumpled, and abbreviated, stood across the corner of the pit. And then, amid
the clangour of the machinery, came a drifting suspicion of human voices, that I
entertained at first only to dismiss.
I crouched, watching this
fighting-machine closely, satisfying myself now for the first time that the hood
did indeed contain a Martian. As the green flames lifted I could see the oily
gleam of his integument and the brightness of his eyes. And suddenly I heard a
yell, and saw a long tentacle reaching over the shoulder of the machine to the
little cage that hunched upon its back. Then something--something struggling
violently--was lifted high against the sky, a black, vague enigma against the
starlight; and as this black object came down again, I saw by the green
brightness that it was a man. For an instant he was clearly visible. He was a
stout, ruddy, middle-aged man, well dressed; three days before, he must have
been walking the world, a man of considerable consequence. I could see his
staring eyes and gleams of light on his studs and watch chain. He vanished
behind the mound, and for a moment there was silence. And then began a shrieking
and a sustained and cheerful hooting from the Martians.
I slid down the rubbish,
struggled to my feet, clapped my hands over my ears, and bolted into the
scullery. The curate, who had been crouching silently with his arms over his
head, looked up as I passed, cried out quite loudly at my desertion of him, and
came running after me.
That night, as we lurked in the
scullery, balanced between our horror and the terrible fascination this peeping
had, although I felt an urgent need of action I tried in vain to conceive some
plan of escape; but afterwards, during the second day, I was able to consider
our position with great clearness. The curate, I found, was quite incapable of
discussion; this new and culminating atrocity had robbed him of all vestiges of
reason or forethought. Practically he had already sunk to the level of an
animal. But as the saying goes, I gripped myself with both hands. It grew upon
my mind, once I could face the facts, that terrible as our position was, there
was as yet no justification for absolute despair. Our chief chance lay in the
possibility of the Martians making the pit nothing more than a temporary
encampment. Or even if they kept it permanently, they might not consider it
necessary to guard it, and a chance of escape might be afforded us. I also
weighed very carefully the possibility of our digging a way out in a direction
away from the pit, but the chances of our emerging within sight of some sentinel
fighting-machine seemed at first too great. And I should have had to do all the
digging myself. The curate would certainly have failed me.
It was on the third day, if my
memory serves me right, that I saw the lad killed. It was the only occasion on
which I actually saw the Martians feed. After that experience I avoided the hole
in the wall for the better part of a day. I went into the scullery, removed the
door, and spent some hours digging with my hatchet as silently as possible; but
when I had made a hole about a couple of feet deep the loose earth collapsed
noisily, and I did not dare continue. I lost heart, and lay down on the scullery
floor for a long time, having no spirit even to move. And after that I abandoned
altogether the idea of escaping by excavation.
It says much for the impression
the Martians had made upon me that at first I entertained little or no hope of
our escape being brought about by their overthrow through any human effort. But
on the fourth or fifth night I heard a sound like heavy guns.
It was very late in the night,
and the moon was shining brightly. The Martians had taken away the
excavating-machine, and, save for a fighting-machine that stood in the remoter
bank of the pit and a handling-machine that was buried out of my sight in a
corner of the pit immediately beneath my peephole, the place was deserted by
them. Except for the pale glow from the handling-machine and the bars and
patches of white moonlight the pit was in darkness, and, except for the clinking
of the handling-machine, quite still. That night was a beautiful serenity; save
for one planet, the moon seemed to have the sky to herself. I heard a dog
howling, and that familiar sound it was that made me listen. Then I heard quite
distinctly a booming exactly like the sound of great guns. Six distinct reports
I counted, and after a long interval six again. And that was all.
It was on the sixth day of our
imprisonment that I peeped for the last time, and presently found myself alone.
Instead of keeping close to me and trying to oust me from the slit, the curate
had gone back into the scullery. I was struck by a sudden thought. I went back
quickly and quietly into the scullery. In the darkness I heard the curate
drinking. I snatched in the darkness, and my fingers caught a bottle of
burgundy.
For a few minutes there was a
tussle. The bottle struck the floor and broke, and I desisted and rose. We stood
panting and threatening each other. In the end I planted myself between him and
the food, and told him of my determination to begin a discipline. I divided the
food in the pantry, into rations to last us ten days. I would not let him eat
any more that day. In the afternoon he made a feeble effort to get at the food.
I had been dozing, but in an instant I was awake. All day and all night we sat
face to face, I weary but resolute, and he weeping and complaining of his
immediate hunger. It was, I know, a night and a day, but to me it seemed--it
seems now--an interminable length of time.
And so our widened
incompatibility ended at last in open conflict. For two vast days we struggled
in undertones and wrestling contests. There were times when I beat and kicked
him madly, times when I cajoled and persuaded him, and once I tried to bribe him
with the last bottle of burgundy, for there was a rain-water pump from which I
could get water. But neither force nor kindness availed; he was indeed beyond
reason. He would neither desist from his attacks on the food nor from his noisy
babbling to himself. The rudimentary precautions to keep our imprisonment
endurable he would not observe. Slowly I began to realise the complete overthrow
of his intelligence, to perceive that my sole companion in this close and sickly
darkness was a man insane.
From certain vague memories I am
inclined to think my own mind wandered at times. I had strange and hideous
dreams whenever I slept. It sounds paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that
the weakness and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me a sane
man.
On the eighth day he began to
talk aloud instead of whispering, and nothing I could do would moderate his
speech.
"It is just, O God!" he would
say, over and over again. "It is just. On me and mine be the punishment laid. We
have sinned, we have fallen short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were
trodden in the dust, and I held my peace. I preached acceptable folly--my God,
what folly!--when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and called upon
them to repent-repent!... Oppressors of the poor and needy... ! The wine press
of God!"
Then he would suddenly revert to
the matter of the food I withheld from him, praying, begging, weeping, at last
threatening. He began to raise his voice--I prayed him not to. He perceived a
hold on me--he threatened he would shout and bring the Martians upon us. For a
time that scared me; but any concession would have shortened our chance of
escape beyond estimating. I defied him, although I felt no assurance that he
might not do this thing. But that day, at any rate, he did not. He talked with
his voice rising slowly, through the greater part of the eighth and ninth
days--threats, entreaties, mingled with a torrent of half-sane and always frothy
repentance for his vacant sham of God's service, such as made me pity him. Then
he slept awhile, and began again with renewed strength, so loudly that I must
needs make him desist.
"Be still!" I implored.
He rose to his knees, for he had
been sitting in the darkness near the copper.
"I have been still too long," he
said, in a tone that must have reached the pit, "and now I must bear my witness.
Woe unto this unfaithful city! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! To the inhabitants of
the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet----"
"Shut up!" I said, rising to my
feet, and in a terror lest the Martians should hear us. "For God's sake----"
"Nay," shouted the curate, at
the top of his voice, standing likewise and extending his arms. "Speak! The word
of the Lord is upon me!"
In three strides he was at the
door leading into the kitchen.
"I must bear my witness! I go!
It has already been too long delayed."
I put out my hand and felt the
meat chopper hanging to the wall. In a flash I was after him. I was fierce with
fear. Before he was halfway across the kitchen I had overtaken him. With one
last touch of humanity I turned the blade back and struck him with the butt. He
went headlong forward and lay stretched on the ground. I stumbled over him and
stood panting. He lay still.
Suddenly I heard a noise
without, the run and smash of slipping plaster, and the triangular aperture in
the wall was darkened. I looked up and saw the lower surface of a
handling-machine coming slowly across the hole. One of its gripping limbs curled
amid the debris; another limb appeared, feeling its way over the fallen beams. I
stood petrified, staring. Then I saw through a sort of glass plate near the edge
of the body the face, as we may call it, and the large dark eyes of a Martian,
peering, and then a long metallic snake of tentacle came feeling slowly through
the hole.
I turned by an effort, stumbled
over the curate, and stopped at the scullery door. The tentacle was now some
way, two yards or more, in the room, and twisting and turning, with queer sudden
movements, this way and that. For a while I stood fascinated by that slow,
fitful advance. Then, with a faint, hoarse cry, I forced myself across the
scullery. I trembled violently; I could scarcely stand upright. I opened the
door of the coal cellar, and stood there in the darkness staring at the faintly
lit doorway into the kitchen, and listening. Had the Martian seen me? What was
it doing now?
Something was moving to and fro
there, very quietly; every now and then it tapped against the wall, or started
on its movements with a faint metallic ringing, like the movements of keys on a
split-ring. Then a heavy body--I knew too well what--was dragged across the
floor of the kitchen towards the opening. Irresistibly attracted, I crept to the
door and peeped into the kitchen. In the triangle of bright outer sunlight I saw
the Martian, in its Briareus of a handling-machine, scrutinizing the curate's
head. I thought at once that it would infer my presence from the mark of the
blow I had given him.
I crept back to the coal cellar,
shut the door, and began to cover myself up as much as I could, and as
noiselessly as possible in the darkness, among the firewood and coal therein.
Every now and then I paused, rigid, to hear if the Martian had thrust its
tentacles through the opening again.
Then the faint metallic jingle
returned. I traced it slowly feeling over the kitchen. Presently I heard it
nearer--in the scullery, as I judged. I thought that its length might be
insufficient to reach me. I prayed copiously. It passed, scraping faintly across
the cellar door. An age of almost intolerable suspense intervened; then I heard
it fumbling at the latch! It had found the door! The Martians understood doors!
It worried at the catch for a
minute, perhaps, and then the door opened.
In the darkness I could just see
the thing--like an elephant's trunk more than anything else--waving towards me
and touching and examining the wall, coals, wood and ceiling. It was like a
black worm swaying its blind head to and fro.
Once, even, it touched the heel
of my boot. I was on the verge of screaming; I bit my hand. For a time the
tentacle was silent. I could have fancied it had been withdrawn. Presently, with
an abrupt click, it gripped something--I thought it had me!--and seemed to go
out of the cellar again. For a minute I was not sure. Apparently it had taken a
lump of coal to examine.
I seized the opportunity of
slightly shifting my position, which had become cramped, and then listened. I
whispered passionate prayers for safety.
Then I heard the slow,
deliberate sound creeping towards me again. Slowly, slowly it drew near,
scratching against the walls and tapping the furniture.
While I was still doubtful, it
rapped smartly against the cellar door and closed it. I heard it go into the
pantry, and the biscuit-tins rattled and a bottle smashed, and then came a heavy
bump against the cellar door. Then silence that passed into an infinity of
suspense.
Had it gone?
At last I decided that it had.
It came into the scullery no
more; but I lay all the tenth day in the close darkness, buried among coals and
firewood, not daring even to crawl out for the drink for which I craved. It was
the eleventh day before I ventured so far from my security.
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