“Great God!” cried I. “But you are a man indeed!” And suddenly I
gripped his hand.
“Eh!” he said, with his eyes shining. “I’ve thought it out, eh?”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get ready. I’m
getting ready. Mind you, it isn’t all of us that are made for wild
beasts; and that’s what it’s got to be. That’s why I watched you. I had
my doubts. You’re slender. I didn’t know that it was you, you see, or
just how you’d been buried. All these—the sort of people that lived in
these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down
_that_ way—they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them—no proud
dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other—Lord!
What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to
work—I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild
and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d
get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to
take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t
be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the
back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because
they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make
for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world.
Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on
Sundays—fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well,
the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages,
fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing
about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be
caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what
people did before there were Martians to take care of them. And the bar
loafers, and mashers, and singers—I can imagine them. I can imagine
them,” he said, with a sort of sombre gratification. “There’ll be any
amount of sentiment and religion loose among them. There’s hundreds of
things I saw with my eyes that I’ve only begun to see clearly these
last few days. There’s lots will take things as they are—fat and
stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it’s all
wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things
are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the
weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always
make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and
submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you’ve seen
the same thing. It’s energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside
out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety. And those
of a less simple sort will work in a bit of—what is it?—eroticism.”
He paused.
“Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train them
to do tricks—who knows?—get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up
and had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us.”
“No,” I cried, “that’s impossible! No human being——”
“What’s the good of going on with such lies?” said the artilleryman.
“There’s men who’d do it cheerful. What nonsense to pretend there
isn’t!”
And I succumbed to his conviction.
“If they come after me,” he said; “Lord, if they come after me!” and
subsided into a grim meditation.
I sat contemplating these things. I could find nothing to bring against
this man’s reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one would have
questioned my intellectual superiority to his—I, a professed and
recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a common soldier;
and yet he had already formulated a situation that I had scarcely
realised.
“What are you doing?” I said presently. “What plans have you made?”
He hesitated.
“Well, it’s like this,” he said. “What have we to do? We have to invent
a sort of life where men can live and breed, and be sufficiently secure
to bring the children up. Yes—wait a bit, and I’ll make it clearer what
I think ought to be done. The tame ones will go like all tame beasts;
in a few generations they’ll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded,
stupid—rubbish! The risk is that we who keep wild will go
savage—degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat. . . . You see, how I
mean to live is underground. I’ve been thinking about the drains. Of
course those who don’t know drains think horrible things; but under
this London are miles and miles—hundreds of miles—and a few days rain
and London empty will leave them sweet and clean. The main drains are
big enough and airy enough for anyone. Then there’s cellars, vaults,
stores, from which bolting passages may be made to the drains. And the
railway tunnels and subways. Eh? You begin to see? And we form a
band—able-bodied, clean-minded men. We’re not going to pick up any
rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again.”
“As you meant me to go?”
“Well—I parleyed, didn’t I?”
“We won’t quarrel about that. Go on.”
“Those who stop obey orders. Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want
also—mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies—no blasted rolling
eyes. We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the
useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die.
They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all,
to live and taint the race. And they can’t be happy. Moreover, dying’s
none so dreadful; it’s the funking makes it bad. And in all those
places we shall gather. Our district will be London. And we may even be
able to keep a watch, and run about in the open when the Martians keep
away. Play cricket, perhaps. That’s how we shall save the race. Eh?
It’s a possible thing? But saving the race is nothing in itself. As I
say, that’s only being rats. It’s saving our knowledge and adding to it
is the thing. There men like you come in. There’s books, there’s
models. We must make great safe places down deep, and get all the books
we can; not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books. That’s
where men like you come in. We must go to the British Museum and pick
all those books through. Especially we must keep up our science—learn
more. We must watch these Martians. Some of us must go as spies. When
it’s all working, perhaps I will. Get caught, I mean. And the great
thing is, we must leave the Martians alone. We mustn’t even steal. If
we get in their way, we clear out. We must show them we mean no harm.
Yes, I know. But they’re intelligent things, and they won’t hunt us
down if they have all they want, and think we’re just harmless vermin.”
The artilleryman paused and laid a brown hand upon my arm.
“After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn before—Just
imagine this: four or five of their fighting machines suddenly starting
off—Heat-Rays right and left, and not a Martian in ’em. Not a Martian
in ’em, but men—men who have learned the way how. It may be in my time,
even—those men. Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its
Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! What would it
matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the run, after a
bust like that? I reckon the Martians’ll open their beautiful eyes!
Can’t you see them, man? Can’t you see them hurrying, hurrying—puffing
and blowing and hooting to their other mechanical affairs? Something
out of gear in every case. And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they
are fumbling over it, _swish_ comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has
come back to his own.”
For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the tone of
assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my mind. I
believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny and in
the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the reader who thinks
me susceptible and foolish must contrast his position, reading steadily
with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine, crouching fearfully
in the bushes and listening, distracted by apprehension. We talked in
this manner through the early morning time, and later crept out of the
bushes, and, after scanning the sky for Martians, hurried precipitately
to the house on Putney Hill where he had made his lair. It was the coal
cellar of the place, and when I saw the work he had spent a week
upon—it was a burrow scarcely ten yards long, which he designed to
reach to the main drain on Putney Hill—I had my first inkling of the
gulf between his dreams and his powers. Such a hole I could have dug in
a day. But I believed in him sufficiently to work with him all that
morning until past midday at his digging. We had a garden barrow and
shot the earth we removed against the kitchen range. We refreshed
ourselves with a tin of mock-turtle soup and wine from the neighbouring
pantry. I found a curious relief from the aching strangeness of the
world in this steady labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in
my mind, and presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I
worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a
purpose again. After working an hour I began to speculate on the
distance one had to go before the cloaca was reached, the chances we
had of missing it altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should
dig this long tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at
once down one of the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to
me, too, that the house was inconveniently chosen, and required a
needless length of tunnel. And just as I was beginning to face these
things, the artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.
“We’re working well,” he said. He put down his spade. “Let us knock off
a bit,” he said. “I think it’s time we reconnoitred from the roof of
the house.”
I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his spade;
and then suddenly I was struck by a thought. I stopped, and so did he
at once.
“Why were you walking about the common,” I said, “instead of being
here?”
“Taking the air,” he said. “I was coming back. It’s safer by night.”
“But the work?”
“Oh, one can’t always work,” he said, and in a flash I saw the man
plain. He hesitated, holding his spade. “We ought to reconnoitre now,”
he said, “because if any come near they may hear the spades and drop
upon us unawares.”
I was no longer disposed to object. We went together to the roof and
stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door. No Martians were to be
seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, and slipped down under shelter
of the parapet.
From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney, but
we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the low
parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The red creeper swarmed up the trees
about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and
set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters. It was strange how
entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing water for their
propagation. About us neither had gained a footing; laburnums, pink
mays, snowballs, and trees of arbor-vitae, rose out of laurels and
hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the sunlight. Beyond Kensington
dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northward
hills.
The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who still
remained in London.
“One night last week,” he said, “some fools got the electric light in
order, and there was all Regent Street and the Circus ablaze, crowded
with painted and ragged drunkards, men and women, dancing and shouting
till dawn. A man who was there told me. And as the day came they became
aware of a fighting-machine standing near by the Langham and looking
down at them. Heaven knows how long he had been there. It must have
given some of them a nasty turn. He came down the road towards them,
and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk or frightened to run away.”
Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully describe!
From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his grandiose
plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently of the
possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than half
believed in him again. But now that I was beginning to understand
something of his quality, I could divine the stress he laid on doing
nothing precipitately. And I noted that now there was no question that
he personally was to capture and fight the great machine.
After a time we went down to the cellar. Neither of us seemed disposed
to resume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I was nothing loath.
He became suddenly very generous, and when we had eaten he went away
and returned with some excellent cigars. We lit these, and his optimism
glowed. He was inclined to regard my coming as a great occasion.
“There’s some champagne in the cellar,” he said.
“We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy,” said I.
“No,” said he; “I am host today. Champagne! Great God! We’ve a heavy
enough task before us! Let us take a rest and gather strength while we
may. Look at these blistered hands!”
And pursuant to this idea of a holiday, he insisted upon playing cards
after we had eaten. He taught me euchre, and after dividing London
between us, I taking the northern side and he the southern, we played
for parish points. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober
reader, it is absolutely true, and what is more remarkable, I found the
card game and several others we played extremely interesting.
Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of
extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before
us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit following the
chance of this painted pasteboard, and playing the “joker” with vivid
delight. Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough
chess games. When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a
lamp.
After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the artilleryman
finished the champagne. We went on smoking the cigars. He was no longer
the energetic regenerator of his species I had encountered in the
morning. He was still optimistic, but it was a less kinetic, a more
thoughtful optimism. I remember he wound up with my health, proposed in
a speech of small variety and considerable intermittence. I took a
cigar, and went upstairs to look at the lights of which he had spoken
that blazed so greenly along the Highgate hills.
At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley. The
northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington
glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed up
and vanished in the deep blue night. All the rest of London was black.
Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale, violet-purple
fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze. For a space I could
not understand it, and then I knew that it must be the red weed from
which this faint irradiation proceeded. With that realisation my
dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of things, awoke
again. I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear, glowing high in the
west, and then gazed long and earnestly at the darkness of Hampstead
and Highgate.
I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the grotesque
changes of the day. I recalled my mental states from the midnight
prayer to the foolish card-playing. I had a violent revulsion of
feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a certain wasteful
symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring exaggeration. I seemed a
traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was filled with remorse. I
resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to
his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London. There, it seemed to
me, I had the best chance of learning what the Martians and my
fellowmen were doing. I was still upon the roof when the late moon
rose.
VIII.
DEAD LONDON.
After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the hill, and by
the High Street across the bridge to Fulham. The red weed was
tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge roadway; but its
fronds were already whitened in patches by the spreading disease that
presently removed it so swiftly.
At the corner of the lane that runs to Putney Bridge station I found a
man lying. He was as black as a sweep with the black dust, alive, but
helplessly and speechlessly drunk. I could get nothing from him but
curses and furious lunges at my head. I think I should have stayed by
him but for the brutal expression of his face.
There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge onwards, and it
grew thicker in Fulham. The streets were horribly quiet. I got
food—sour, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable—in a baker’s shop here.
Some way towards Walham Green the streets became clear of powder, and I
passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of the burning was
an absolute relief. Going on towards Brompton, the streets were quiet
again.
Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets and upon
dead bodies. I saw altogether about a dozen in the length of the Fulham
Road. They had been dead many days, so that I hurried quickly past
them. The black powder covered them over, and softened their outlines.
One or two had been disturbed by dogs.
Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a Sunday in the
City, with the closed shops, the houses locked up and the blinds drawn,
the desertion, and the stillness. In some places plunderers had been at
work, but rarely at other than the provision and wine shops. A
jeweller’s window had been broken open in one place, but apparently the
thief had been disturbed, and a number of gold chains and a watch lay
scattered on the pavement. I did not trouble to touch them. Farther on
was a tattered woman in a heap on a doorstep; the hand that hung over
her knee was gashed and bled down her rusty brown dress, and a smashed
magnum of champagne formed a pool across the pavement. She seemed
asleep, but she was dead.
The farther I penetrated into London, the profounder grew the
stillness. But it was not so much the stillness of death—it was the
stillness of suspense, of expectation. At any time the destruction that
had already singed the northwestern borders of the metropolis, and had
annihilated Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these houses and
leave them smoking ruins. It was a city condemned and derelict. . . .
In South Kensington the streets were clear of dead and of black powder.
It was near South Kensington that I first heard the howling. It crept
almost imperceptibly upon my senses. It was a sobbing alternation of
two notes, “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” keeping on perpetually. When I
passed streets that ran northward it grew in volume, and houses and
buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off again. It came in a full tide
down Exhibition Road. I stopped, staring towards Kensington Gardens,
wondering at this strange, remote wailing. It was as if that mighty
desert of houses had found a voice for its fear and solitude.
“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” wailed that superhuman note—great waves of
sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit roadway, between the tall
buildings on each side. I turned northwards, marvelling, towards the
iron gates of Hyde Park. I had half a mind to break into the Natural
History Museum and find my way up to the summits of the towers, in
order to see across the park. But I decided to keep to the ground,
where quick hiding was possible, and so went on up the Exhibition Road.
All the large mansions on each side of the road were empty and still,
and my footsteps echoed against the sides of the houses. At the top,
near the park gate, I came upon a strange sight—a bus overturned, and
the skeleton of a horse picked clean. I puzzled over this for a time,
and then went on to the bridge over the Serpentine. The voice grew
stronger and stronger, though I could see nothing above the housetops
on the north side of the park, save a haze of smoke to the northwest.
“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” cried the voice, coming, as it seemed to me,
from the district about Regent’s Park. The desolating cry worked upon
my mind. The mood that had sustained me passed. The wailing took
possession of me. I found I was intensely weary, footsore, and now
again hungry and thirsty.
It was already past noon. Why was I wandering alone in this city of the
dead? Why was I alone when all London was lying in state, and in its
black shroud? I felt intolerably lonely. My mind ran on old friends
that I had forgotten for years. I thought of the poisons in the
chemists’ shops, of the liquors the wine merchants stored; I recalled
the two sodden creatures of despair, who so far as I knew, shared the
city with myself. . . .
I came into Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, and here again were black
powder and several bodies, and an evil, ominous smell from the gratings
of the cellars of some of the houses. I grew very thirsty after the
heat of my long walk. With infinite trouble I managed to break into a
public-house and get food and drink. I was weary after eating, and went
into the parlour behind the bar, and slept on a black horsehair sofa I
found there.
I awoke to find that dismal howling still in my ears, “Ulla, ulla,
ulla, ulla.” It was now dusk, and after I had routed out some biscuits
and a cheese in the bar—there was a meat safe, but it contained nothing
but maggots—I wandered on through the silent residential squares to
Baker Street—Portman Square is the only one I can name—and so came out
at last upon Regent’s Park. And as I emerged from the top of Baker
Street, I saw far away over the trees in the clearness of the sunset
the hood of the Martian giant from which this howling proceeded. I was
not terrified. I came upon him as if it were a matter of course. I
watched him for some time, but he did not move. He appeared to be
standing and yelling, for no reason that I could discover.
I tried to formulate a plan of action. That perpetual sound of “Ulla,
ulla, ulla, ulla,” confused my mind. Perhaps I was too tired to be very
fearful. Certainly I was more curious to know the reason of this
monotonous crying than afraid. I turned back away from the park and
struck into Park Road, intending to skirt the park, went along under
the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this stationary, howling
Martian from the direction of St. John’s Wood. A couple of hundred
yards out of Baker Street I heard a yelping chorus, and saw, first a
dog with a piece of putrescent red meat in his jaws coming headlong
towards me, and then a pack of starving mongrels in pursuit of him. He
made a wide curve to avoid me, as though he feared I might prove a
fresh competitor. As the yelping died away down the silent road, the
wailing sound of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” reasserted itself.
I came upon the wrecked handling-machine halfway to St. John’s Wood
station. At first I thought a house had fallen across the road. It was
only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this
mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and
twisted, among the ruins it had made. The forepart was shattered. It
seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been
overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this might have
happened by a handling-machine escaping from the guidance of its
Martian. I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and the
twilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its seat was
smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs had left,
were invisible to me.
Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on towards
Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the trees, I saw a second
Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the
Zoological Gardens, and silent. A little beyond the ruins about the
smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed again, and found the
Regent’s Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.
As I crossed the bridge, the sound of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” ceased.
It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a thunderclap.
The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees
towards the park were growing black. All about me the red weed
clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dimness.
Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while
that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by
virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about
me had upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of something—I
knew not what—and then a stillness that could be felt. Nothing but this
gaunt quiet.
London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white houses
were like the eye sockets of skulls. About me my imagination found a
thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized me, a horror of my
temerity. In front of me the road became pitchy black as though it was
tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying across the pathway. I could
not bring myself to go on. I turned down St. John’s Wood Road, and ran
headlong from this unendurable stillness towards Kilburn. I hid from
the night and the silence, until long after midnight, in a cabmen’s
shelter in Harrow Road. But before the dawn my courage returned, and
while the stars were still in the sky I turned once more towards
Regent’s Park. I missed my way among the streets, and presently saw
down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early dawn, the curve of
Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the fading stars, was a
third Martian, erect and motionless like the others.
An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I would
save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on recklessly
towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light grew, I
saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and clustering about
the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running along the
road.
I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund’s Terrace (I
waded breast-high across a torrent of water that was rushing down from
the waterworks towards the Albert Road), and emerged upon the grass
before the rising of the sun. Great mounds had been heaped about the
crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it—it was the final and
largest place the Martians had made—and from behind these heaps there
rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the sky line an eager dog
ran and disappeared. The thought that had flashed into my mind grew
real, grew credible. I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling exultation,
as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster. Out of the hood
hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and tore.
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon
its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space
it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of
material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in
their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines,
and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the
Martians—_dead!_—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against
which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being
slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest
things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen
had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease
have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of
our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this
natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no
germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause
putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are
altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly
these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic
allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they
were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and
fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought
his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would
still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For
neither do men live nor die in vain.
Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that
great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have seemed to
them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also at that time
this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that
had been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment I
believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that
God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night.
I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even
as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The
pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful
in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms,
rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light.
A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay
darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its
farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine
with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when
decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon. At
the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine
that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered red shreds of flesh
that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of Primrose
Hill.
I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now
in birds, stood those other two Martians that I had seen overnight,
just as death had overtaken them. The one had died, even as it had been
crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to die, and its voice
had gone on perpetually until the force of its machinery was exhausted.
They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in the
brightness of the rising sun.
All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting
destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have only
seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine
the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.
Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the
splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear sky,
and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs caught
the light and glared with a white intensity.
Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses;
westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the Martians,
the green waves of Regent’s Park, the Langham Hotel, the dome of the
Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant mansions of the
Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged
ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far away and blue were the
Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace glittered like two
silver rods. The dome of St. Paul’s was dark against the sunrise, and
injured, I saw for the first time, by a huge gaping cavity on its
western side.
And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and
churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes
and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this
human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung
over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and
that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city
of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of emotion that
was near akin to tears.
The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin. The
survivors of the people scattered over the country—leaderless, lawless,
foodless, like sheep without a shepherd—the thousands who had fled by
sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing stronger and
stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour across the
vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of the
destroyer was stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened skeletons of
houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass of the hill, would
presently be echoing with the hammers of the restorers and ringing with
the tapping of their trowels. At the thought I extended my hands
towards the sky and began thanking God. In a year, thought I—in a year.
. . .
With overwhelming force came the thought of myself, of my wife, and the
old life of hope and tender helpfulness that had ceased for ever.
IX.
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.
X.
THE EPILOGUE.
I cannot but regret, now that I am concluding my story, how little I am
able to contribute to the discussion of the many debatable questions
which are still unsettled. In one respect I shall certainly provoke
criticism. My particular province is speculative philosophy. My
knowledge of comparative physiology is confined to a book or two, but
it seems to me that Carver’s suggestions as to the reason of the rapid
death of the Martians is so probable as to be regarded almost as a
proven conclusion. I have assumed that in the body of my narrative.
At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after
the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species
were found. That they did not bury any of their dead, and the reckless
slaughter they perpetrated, point also to an entire ignorance of the
putrefactive process. But probable as this seems, it is by no means a
proven conclusion.
Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the Martians
used with such deadly effect, and the generator of the Heat-Rays
remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South
Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further
investigations upon the latter. Spectrum analysis of the black powder
points unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a
brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is possible that it
combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once with deadly
effect upon some constituent in the blood. But such unproven
speculations will scarcely be of interest to the general reader, to
whom this story is addressed. None of the brown scum that drifted down
the Thames after the destruction of Shepperton was examined at the
time, and now none is forthcoming.
The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far as the
prowling dogs had left such an examination possible, I have already
given. But everyone is familiar with the magnificent and almost
complete specimen in spirits at the Natural History Museum, and the
countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that the
interest of their physiology and structure is purely scientific.
A question of graver and universal interest is the possibility of
another attack from the Martians. I do not think that nearly enough
attention is being given to this aspect of the matter. At present the
planet Mars is in conjunction, but with every return to opposition I,
for one, anticipate a renewal of their adventure. In any case, we
should be prepared. It seems to me that it should be possible to define
the position of the gun from which the shots are discharged, to keep a
sustained watch upon this part of the planet, and to anticipate the
arrival of the next attack.
In that case the cylinder might be destroyed with dynamite or artillery
before it was sufficiently cool for the Martians to emerge, or they
might be butchered by means of guns so soon as the screw opened. It
seems to me that they have lost a vast advantage in the failure of
their first surprise. Possibly they see it in the same light.
Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the Martians
have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet Venus.
Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the sun;
that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of view of an
observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sinuous marking
appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet, and almost
simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar sinuous character was
detected upon a photograph of the Martian disk. One needs to see the
drawings of these appearances in order to appreciate fully their
remarkable resemblance in character.
At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of
the human future must be greatly modified by these events. We have
learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a
secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good
or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in
the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not
without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene
confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of
decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and
it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of
mankind. It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians have
watched the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson,
and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer settlement. Be
that as it may, for many years yet there will certainly be no
relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery
darts of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall
an unavoidable apprehension to all the sons of men.
The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be
exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion
that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty
surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the Martians can
reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible
for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth
uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life
that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet
within its toils.
Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life
spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system
throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a
remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the
Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the
future ordained.
I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding
sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by
lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with
writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and
desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a
butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle,
children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal,
and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding
silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent
streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise
upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler,
uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and
wretched, in the darkness of the night.
I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the
Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the
past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going
to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a
galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as
I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great
province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and
mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people
walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the
sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear
the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it
all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last
great day. . . .
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think
that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.