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. 1
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. 2
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.
3
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. 4
Already they were busy with returning people; in
places even there were shops open, and I saw a
drinking fountain running water. 5
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. 6
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. 7
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. 8
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.… 9
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.
10
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. 11
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. 12
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.” 13
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.” 14
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. 15
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. 16
“I came,” she said. “I knew—knew——” 17
She put her hand to her throat—swayed. I made a step
forward, and caught her in my arms. 18
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