XV - WHAT HAD HAPPENED IN
SURREY.
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 a milky 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.
XVI - THE EXODUS FROM LONDON.
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 façade 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-carts, 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.
Near this place they halted for the rest of the
afternoon, for the violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three
of them. They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and
none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many people came hurrying along
the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing from unknown dangers before them,
and going in the direction from which my brother had come.
