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

CHAPTER NINE

WRECKAGE

 

And now comes the strangest thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, it is

not altogether strange. I remember, clearly and coldly and vividly,

all that I did that day until the time that I stood weeping and

praising God upon the summit of Primrose Hill. And then I forget.

 

Of the next three days I know nothing. I have learned since that,

so far from my being the first discoverer of the Martian overthrow,

several such wanderers as myself had already discovered this on the

previous night. One man—the first—had gone to St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and, while I sheltered in the cabmen’s hut, had contrived to

telegraph to Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the

world; a thousand cities, chilled by ghastly apprehensions, suddenly

flashed into frantic illuminations; they knew of it in Dublin,

Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, at the time when I stood upon the

verge of the pit. Already men, weeping with joy, as I have heard,

shouting and staying their work to shake hands and shout, were making

up trains, even as near as Crewe, to descend upon London. The church

bells that had ceased a fortnight since suddenly caught the news,

until all England was bell-ringing. Men on cycles, lean-faced,

unkempt, scorched along every country lane shouting of unhoped

deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of despair. And for

the food! Across the Channel, across the Irish Sea, across the

Atlantic, corn, bread, and meat were tearing to our relief. All the

shipping in the world seemed going Londonward in those days. But of

all this I have no memory. I drifted—a demented man. I found myself

in a house of kindly people, who had found me on the third day

wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. John’s Wood.

They have told me since that I was singing some insane doggerel about

“The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!” Troubled

as they were with their own affairs, these people, whose name, much as

I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may not even give

here, nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered me, and

protected me from myself. Apparently they had learned something of my

story from me during the days of my lapse.

 

Very gently, when my mind was assured again, did they break to me

what they had learned of the fate of Leatherhead. Two days after I

was imprisoned it had been destroyed, with every soul in it, by a

Martian. He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any

provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness

of power.

 

I was a lonely man, and they were very kind to me. I was a lonely

man and a sad one, and they bore with me. I remained with them four

days after my recovery. All that time I felt a vague, a growing

craving to look once more on whatever remained of the little life that

seemed so happy and bright in my past. It was a mere hopeless desire

to feast upon my misery. They dissuaded me. They did all they could

to divert me from this morbidity. But at last I could resist the

impulse no longer, and, promising faithfully to return to them, and

parting, as I will confess, from these four-day friends with tears, I

went out again into the streets that had lately been so dark and

strange and empty.

 

Already they were busy with returning people; in places even there

were shops open, and I saw a drinking fountain running water.

 

I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went back on my

melancholy pilgrimage to the little house at Woking, how busy the

streets and vivid the moving life about me. So many people were

abroad everywhere, busied in a thousand activities, that it seemed

incredible that any great proportion of the population could have been

slain. But then I noticed how yellow were the skins of the people I

met, how shaggy the hair of the men, how large and bright their eyes,

and that every other man still wore his dirty rags. Their faces

seemed all with one of two expressions—a leaping exultation and

energy or a grim resolution. Save for the expression of the faces,

London seemed a city of tramps. The vestries were indiscriminately

distributing bread sent us by the French government. The ribs of the

few horses showed dismally. Haggard special constables with white

badges stood at the corners of every street. I saw little of the

mischief wrought by the Martians until I reached Wellington Street,

and there I saw the red weed clambering over the buttresses of

Waterloo Bridge.

 

At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts

of that grotesque time—a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket

of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was

the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication—the DAILY

MAIL. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket.

Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing

had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement

stereo on the back page. The matter he printed was emotional; the

news organisation had not as yet found its way back. I learned

nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the

Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other

things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time,

that the “Secret of Flying,” was discovered. At Waterloo I found the

free trains that were taking people to their homes. The first rush

was already over. There were few people in the train, and I was in no

mood for casual conversation. I got a compartment to myself, and sat

with folded arms, looking greyly at the sunlit devastation that flowed

past the windows. And just outside the terminus the train jolted over

temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses were

blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy

with powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms

and rain, and at Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again;

there were hundreds of out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by

side with the customary navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty

relaying.

 

All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt

and unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered. Walton, by virtue

of its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place along

the line. The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a heaped

mass of red weed, in appearance between butcher’s meat and pickled

cabbage. The Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the festoons

of the red climber. Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, in

certain nursery grounds, were the heaped masses of earth about the

sixth cylinder. A number of people were standing about it, and some

sappers were busy in the midst of it. Over it flaunted a Union Jack,

flapping cheerfully in the morning breeze. The nursery grounds were

everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of livid colour cut

with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye. One’s gaze went

with infinite relief from the scorched greys and sullen reds of the

foreground to the blue-green softness of the eastward hills.

 

The line on the London side of Woking station was still undergoing

repair, so I descended at Byfleet station and took the road to

Maybury, past the place where I and the artilleryman had talked to the

hussars, and on by the spot where the Martian had appeared to me in

the thunderstorm. Here, moved by curiosity, I turned aside to find,

among a tangle of red fronds, the warped and broken dog cart with the

whitened bones of the horse scattered and gnawed. For a time I stood

regarding these vestiges… .

 

Then I returned through the pine wood, neck-high with red weed here

and there, to find the landlord of the Spotted Dog had already found

burial, and so came home past the College Arms. A man standing at an

open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.

 

I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded

immediately. The door had been forced; it was unfast and was opening

slowly as I approached.

 

It slammed again. The curtains of my study fluttered out of the

open window from which I and the artilleryman had watched the dawn. No

one had closed it since. The smashed bushes were just as I had left

them nearly four weeks ago. I stumbled into the hall, and the house

felt empty. The stair carpet was ruffled and discoloured where I had

crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the

catastrophe. Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the stairs.

 

I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table

still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had

left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a space I

stood reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the

probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the

civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a

prophecy: “In about two hundred years,” I had written, “we may

expect–-” The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my inability

to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had

broken off to get my DAILY CHRONICLE from the newsboy. I remembered

how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had

listened to his odd story of “Men from Mars.”

 

I came down and went into the dining room. There were the mutton

and the bread, both far gone now in decay, and a beer bottle

overturned, just as I and the artilleryman had left them. My home was

desolate. I perceived the