第 14 页

men, sometimes helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side

by side with them pushed some weary street outcast in faded black

rags, wide-eyed, loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy

workmen thrusting their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed like

clerks or shopmen, struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my

brother noticed, men dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one

wretched creature in a nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.

But varied as its composition was, certain things all that host had

in common. There were fear and pain on their faces, and fear behind

them. A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a waggon, sent

the whole host of them quickening their pace; even a man so scared and

broken that his knees bent under him was galvanised for a moment into

renewed activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon

this multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and cracked.

They were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the various

cries one heard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue;

the voices of most of them were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a

refrain:

"Way! Way! The Martians are coming!"

Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened

slantingly into the main road with a narrow opening, and had a

delusive appearance of coming from the direction of London. Yet a

kind of eddy of people drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of

the stream, who for the most part rested but a moment before plunging

into it again. A little way down the lane, with two friends bending

over him, lay a man with a bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags.

He was a lucky man to have friends.

A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black

frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his

boot--his sock was blood-stained--shook out a pebble, and hobbled on

again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw

herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.

"I can't go on! I can't go on!"

My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted her up,

speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone. So soon

as my brother touched her she became quite still, as if frightened.

"Ellen!" shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her

voice--"Ellen!" And the child suddenly darted away from my brother,

crying "Mother!"

"They are coming," said a man on horseback, riding past along the

lane.

"Out of the way, there!" bawled a coachman, towering high; and my

brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.

The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My

brother pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the man

drove by and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, with

a pole for a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces. My

brother saw dimly through the dust that two men lifted out something

on a white stretcher and put it gently on the grass beneath the privet

hedge.

One of the men came running to my brother.

"Where is there any water?" he said. "He is dying fast, and very

thirsty. It is Lord Garrick."

"Lord Garrick!" said my brother; "the Chief Justice?"

"The water?" he said.

"There may be a tap," said my brother, "in some of the houses. We

have no water. I dare not leave my people."

The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the corner

house.

"Go on!" said the people, thrusting at him. "They are coming! Go

on!"

Then my brother's attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced

man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother's

eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to

break up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled

hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The

man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab

struck his shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged

back, and a cartwheel shaved him narrowly.

"Way!" cried the men all about him. "Make way!"

So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands

open, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his

pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half

rising, he had been borne down under the horse's hoofs.

"Stop!" screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way,

tried to clutch the bit of the horse.

Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels, and

saw through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch's back. The

driver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother, who ran round

behind the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused his ears. The

man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to

rise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp

and dead. My brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a

man on a black horse came to his assistance.

"Get him out of the road," said he; and, clutching the man's collar

with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he still

clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering

at his arm with a handful of gold. "Go on! Go on!" shouted angry

voices behind.

"Way! Way!"

There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart

that the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and the man

with the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his

collar. There was a concussion, and the black horse came staggering

sideways, and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed my

brother's foot by a hair's breadth. He released his grip on the

fallen man and jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on the face

of the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my

brother was borne backward and carried past the entrance of the lane,

and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it.

He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with

all a child's want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated

eyes at a dusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushed

under the rolling wheels. "Let us go back!" he shouted, and began

turning the pony round. "We cannot cross this--hell," he said and they

went back a hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting

crowd was hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw

the face of the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white

and drawn, and shining with perspiration. The two women sat silent,

crouching in their seat and shivering.

Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone

was white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched

even to call upon "George." My brother was horrified and perplexed.

So soon as they had retreated he realised how urgent and unavoidable

it was to attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone,

suddenly resolute.

"We must go that way," he said, and led the pony round again.

For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. To force

their way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into the

traffic and held back a cab horse, while she drove the pony across its

head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long splinter

from the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept forward

by the stream. My brother, with the cabman's whip marks red across

his face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from

her.

"Point the revolver at the man behind," he said, giving it to her,

"if he presses us too hard. No!--point it at his horse."

Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right

across the road. But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition,

to become a part of that dusty rout. They swept through Chipping

Barnet with the torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of

the town before they had fought across to the opposite side of the

way. It was din and confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the

town the road forks repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the

stress.

They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side of

the road, and at another place farther on they came upon a great

multitude of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to come at

the water. And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw

two trains running slowly one after the other without signal or

order--trains swarming with people, with men even among the coals

behind the engines--going northward along the Great Northern Railway.

My brother supposes they must have filled outside London, for at that

time the furious terror of the people had rendered the central

termini impossible.

Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for the

violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them.

They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and

none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many people came

hurrying along the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing from

unknown dangers before them, and going in the direction from which my

brother had come.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE "THUNDER CHILD"

Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday

have annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself

slowly through the home counties. Not only along the road through

Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey, and along the

roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness, and south of the Thames

to Deal and Broadstairs, poured the same frantic rout. If one could

have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above

London every northward and eastward road running out of the tangled

maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming

fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. I

have set forth at length in the last chapter my brother's account of

the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise

how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those concerned.

Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human

beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and

Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop

in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a

stampede--a stampede gigantic and terrible--without order and without

a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving

headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the

massacre of mankind.

Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of

streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents,

gardens--already derelict--spread out like a huge map, and in the

southward _blotted_. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would

have seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart.

Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out

ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising

ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley,

exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.

And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river,

the glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically

spreading their poison cloud over this patch of country and then over

that, laying it again with their steam jets when it had served its

purpose, and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not

seem to have aimed at extermination so much as at complete

demoralisation and the destruction of any opposition. They exploded

any stores of powder they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked

the railways here and there. They were hamstringing mankind. They

seemed in no hurry to extend the field of their operations, and did

not come beyond the central part of London all that day. It is

possible that a very considerable number of people in London stuck to

their houses through Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at

home suffocated by the Black Smoke.

Until about midday the Pool of London was an astonishing scene.

Steamboats and shipping of all sorts lay there, tempted by the

enormous sums of money offered by fugitives, and it is said that many

who swam out to these vessels were thrust off with boathooks and

drowned. About one o'clock in the afternoon the thinning remnant of a

cloud of the black vapour appeared between the arches of Blackfriars

Bridge. At that the Pool became a scene of mad confusion, fighting,

and collision, and for some time a multitude of boats and barges

jammed in the northern arch of the Tower Bridge, and the sailors and

lightermen had to fight savagely against the people who swarmed upon

them from the riverfront. People were actually clambering down the

piers of the bridge from above.

When, an hour later, a Martian appeared beyond the Clock Tower and

waded down the river, nothing but wreckage floated above Limehouse.

Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to tell. The

sixth star fell at Wimbledon. My brother, keeping watch beside the

women in the chaise in a meadow, saw the green flash of it far beyond

the hills. On Tuesday the little party, still set upon getting across

the sea, made its way through the swarming country towards Colchester.

The news that the Martians were now in possession of the whole of

London was confirmed. They had been seen at Highgate, and even, it

was said, at Neasden. But they did not come into my brother's view

until the morrow.

That day the scattered multitudes began to realise the urgent need

of provisions. As they grew hungry the rights of property ceased to

be regarded. Farmers were out to defend their cattle-sheds,