BOOK TWO 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 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--knew----"
She put her hand to her throat--swayed. I made a step forward, and
caught her in my arms.