When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it had been a
straggling street of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed
with abundant shady trees. Now I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork,
clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped
plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute
their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but further a
network of red thread scaled the still living stems.
The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had been burned;
their walls stood, sometimes to the second story, with smashed windows
and shattered doors. The red weed grew tumultuously in their roofless
rooms. Below me was the great pit, with the crows struggling for its
refuse. A number of other birds hopped about among the ruins. Far away
I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along a wall, but traces of men
there were none.
The day seemed, by contrast with my recent confinement, dazzlingly
bright, the sky a glowing blue. A gentle breeze kept the red weed that
covered every scrap of unoccupied ground gently swaying. And oh! the
sweetness of the air!
VI.
THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS.
For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my safety.
Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had thought with a
narrow intensity only of our immediate security. I had not realised
what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated this
startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had expected to see Sheen in
ruins—I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another
planet.
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men,
yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as
a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by
the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I
felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my
mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a
persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the
animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to
lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed
away.
But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my
dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the
direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch
of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep,
and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of the weed gave
me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six feet high, and
when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my feet to the
crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to a corner and a
rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble into the garden
I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs,
and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I secured, and,
scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through scarlet and
crimson trees towards Kew—it was like walking through an avenue of
gigantic blood drops—possessed with two ideas: to get more food, and to
limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of this accursed
unearthly region of the pit.
Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which
also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow
water, where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment served
only to whet my hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a
hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the
tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary growth
encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled
fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the Wey
and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water fronds speedily
choked both those rivers.
At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a tangle
of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in a broad
and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and Twickenham. As the
water spread the weed followed them, until the ruined villas of the
Thames valley were for a time lost in this red swamp, whose margin I
explored, and much of the desolation the Martians had caused was
concealed.
In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A
cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain
bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural
selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power
against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe
struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The fronds
became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They broke off at the
least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early growth
carried their last vestiges out to sea.
My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake my
thirst. I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawed
some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,
metallic taste. I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to
wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but the
flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back to
Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of occasional ruins
of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of this
spate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton and came
out on Putney Common.
Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the
wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation
of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectly
undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors
closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if
their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the
tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. I hunted for
food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple of
silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked. I
rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in my
enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.
All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians. I
encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried
circuitously away from the advances I made them. Near Roehampton I had
seen two human skeletons—not bodies, but skeletons, picked clean—and in
the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones of several cats
and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though I gnawed parts of
these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from them.
After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I
think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason. And in the
garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,
sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon
Putney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was
singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and
down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the
weed. And over all—silence. It filled me with indescribable terror to
think how swiftly that desolating change had come.
For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and
that I stood there alone, the last man left alive. Hard by the top of
Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the arms dislocated and
removed several yards from the rest of the body. As I proceeded I
became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind was,
save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished in this part
of the world. The Martians, I thought, had gone on and left the country
desolated, seeking food elsewhere. Perhaps even now they were
destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they had gone northward.
VII.
THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL.
I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill,
sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to
Leatherhead. I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into
that house—afterwards I found the front door was on the latch—nor how I
ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of despair, in
what seemed to me to be a servant’s bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust
and two tins of pineapple. The place had been already searched and
emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches
that had been overlooked. The latter I could not eat, they were too
rotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filled my
pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that
part of London for food in the night. Before I went to bed I had an
interval of restlessness, and prowled from window to window, peering
out for some sign of these monsters. I slept little. As I lay in bed I
found myself thinking consecutively—a thing I do not remember to have
done since my last argument with the curate. During all the intervening
time my mental condition had been a hurrying succession of vague
emotional states or a sort of stupid receptivity. But in the night my
brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew clear
again, and I thought.
Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the killing of the
curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of my
wife. The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall; I
saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but
quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself
now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a
sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no
condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the
silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that
sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial,
my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step
of our conversation from the moment when I had found him crouching
beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke
that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of
co-operation—grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I
should have left him at Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime is
to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story
down, as it was. There were no witnesses—all these things I might have
concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as
he will.
And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate
body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the fate of my wife. For
the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so,
unhappily, I could for the latter. And suddenly that night became
terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I
found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and
painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return from
Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers,
had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now I
prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the
darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn
had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat
leaving its hiding place—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior
animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be
hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely,
if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity—pity for
those witless souls that suffer our dominion.
The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink, and
was fretted with little golden clouds. In the road that runs from the
top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the
panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night
after the fighting began. There was a little two-wheeled cart inscribed
with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer, New Malden, with a smashed
wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw hat trampled into
the now hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot of
blood-stained glass about the overturned water trough. My movements
were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I had an idea of going to
Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest chance of
finding my wife. Certainly, unless death had overtaken them suddenly,
my cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to me I might
find or learn there whither the Surrey people had fled. I knew I wanted
to find my wife, that my heart ached for her and the world of men, but
I had no clear idea how the finding might be done. I was also sharply
aware now of my intense loneliness. From the corner I went, under cover
of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of Wimbledon Common,
stretching wide and far.
That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom; there
was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the verge
of the open, the sun rose, flooding it all with light and vitality. I
came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place among the
trees. I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from their stout
resolve to live. And presently, turning suddenly, with an odd feeling
of being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a clump of bushes.
I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it, and it rose up and
became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached him slowly. He stood
silent and motionless, regarding me.
As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and
filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged
through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches
mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His
black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and
sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut
across the lower part of his face.
“Stop!” he cried, when I was within ten yards of him, and I stopped.
His voice was hoarse. “Where do you come from?” he said.