Latest / Adventure Books Library / 26 - The War of The Worlds - H G Wells
Transcript
- 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 Saint Martin's La Grande, and while I sheltered in the cabman'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 crew 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 faces 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 London Wood 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 Saint 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. Trouble 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 organization 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 the train, and I was in no mood for casual conversation. I got a compartment to myself and sat with folded arms, looking grayly 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 thunder storms 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 over 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 grays 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 Huzzahs, and on by the spot where the Martian had appeared to me in the thunder storm. 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 head 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 discolored, where I had crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunder storm 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 sullenite 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 civilizing 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 with 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 folly of the faint hope I had cherished so long. And then a strange thing occurred. It is no use, said a voice. The house is deserted. No one has been here these ten days. Do not stay here to torment yourself. No one escaped but you. I was startled, had I spoken my thought aloud? I turned, and the French window was open behind me. I made a step to it and stood looking out, and there, amazed and afraid. Even as I stood amazed and afraid were my cousin and my wife. My wife, white and tearless. She gave a faint cry. I came, she said, I knew new. She put her hand to her throat, swayed. I made a step forward and caught her in my arms. End of Section twenty six.