第 13 页

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 facade 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 cars, 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