The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (best large ereader TXT) 📖

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 NorthWestern 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