第 15 页

granaries, and ripening root crops with arms in their hands. A number

of people now, like my brother, had their faces eastward, and there

were some desperate souls even going back towards London to get food.

These were chiefly people from the northern suburbs, whose knowledge

of the Black Smoke came by hearsay. He heard that about half the

members of the government had gathered at Birmingham, and that

enormous quantities of high explosives were being prepared to be used

in automatic mines across the Midland counties.

He was also told that the Midland Railway Company had replaced the

desertions of the first day's panic, had resumed traffic, and was

running northward trains from St. Albans to relieve the congestion of

the home counties. There was also a placard in Chipping Ongar

announcing that large stores of flour were available in the northern

towns and that within twenty-four hours bread would be distributed

among the starving people in the neighbourhood. But this intelligence

did not deter him from the plan of escape he had formed, and the three

pressed eastward all day, and heard no more of the bread distribution

than this promise. Nor, as a matter of fact, did anyone else hear

more of it. That night fell the seventh star, falling upon Primrose

Hill. It fell while Miss Elphinstone was watching, for she took that

duty alternately with my brother. She saw it.

On Wednesday the three fugitives--they had passed the night in a

field of unripe wheat--reached Chelmsford, and there a body of the

inhabitants, calling itself the Committee of Public Supply, seized the

pony as provisions, and would give nothing in exchange for it but the

promise of a share in it the next day. Here there were rumours of

Martians at Epping, and news of the destruction of Waltham Abbey

Powder Mills in a vain attempt to blow up one of the invaders.

People were watching for Martians here from the church towers. My

brother, very luckily for him as it chanced, preferred to push on at

once to the coast rather than wait for food, although all three of

them were very hungry. By midday they passed through Tillingham,

which, strangely enough, seemed to be quite silent and deserted, save

for a few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they

suddenly came in sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of

shipping of all sorts that it is possible to imagine.

For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came

on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and

afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They

lay in a huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last

towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing

smacks--English, Scotch, French, Dutch, and Swedish; steam launches

from the Thames, yachts, electric boats; and beyond were ships of large

burden, a multitude of filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle ships,

passenger boats, petroleum tanks, ocean tramps, an old white transport

even, neat white and grey liners from Southampton and Hamburg; and

along the blue coast across the Blackwater my brother could make out

dimly a dense swarm of boats chaffering with the people on the beach,

a swarm which also extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.

About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water,

almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship. This

was the ram _Thunder Child_. It was the only warship in sight, but far

away to the right over the smooth surface of the sea--for that day

there was a dead calm--lay a serpent of black smoke to mark the next

ironclads of the Channel Fleet, which hovered in an extended line,

steam up and ready for action, across the Thames estuary during the

course of the Martian conquest, vigilant and yet powerless to prevent

it.

At the sight of the sea, Mrs. Elphinstone, in spite of the

assurances of her sister-in-law, gave way to panic. She had never

been out of England before, she would rather die than trust herself

friendless in a foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor woman,

to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar.

She had been growing increasingly hysterical, fearful, and depressed

during the two days' journeyings. Her great idea was to return to

Stanmore. Things had been always well and safe at Stanmore. They

would find George at Stanmore.

It was with the greatest difficulty they could get her down to the

beach, where presently my brother succeeded in attracting the

attention of some men on a paddle steamer from the Thames. They sent

a boat and drove a bargain for thirty-six pounds for the three. The

steamer was going, these men said, to Ostend.

It was about two o'clock when my brother, having paid their fares

at the gangway, found himself safely aboard the steamboat with his

charges. There was food aboard, albeit at exorbitant prices, and the

three of them contrived to eat a meal on one of the seats forward.

There were already a couple of score of passengers aboard, some of

whom had expended their last money in securing a passage, but the

captain lay off the Blackwater until five in the afternoon, picking up

passengers until the seated decks were even dangerously crowded. He

would probably have remained longer had it not been for the sound of

guns that began about that hour in the south. As if in answer, the

ironclad seaward fired a small gun and hoisted a string of flags. A

jet of smoke sprang out of her funnels.

Some of the passengers were of opinion that this firing came from

Shoeburyness, until it was noticed that it was growing louder. At the

same time, far away in the southeast the masts and upperworks of three

ironclads rose one after the other out of the sea, beneath clouds of

black smoke. But my brother's attention speedily reverted to the

distant firing in the south. He fancied he saw a column of smoke

rising out of the distant grey haze.

The little steamer was already flapping her way eastward of the big

crescent of shipping, and the low Essex coast was growing blue and

hazy, when a Martian appeared, small and faint in the remote distance,

advancing along the muddy coast from the direction of Foulness. At

that the captain on the bridge swore at the top of his voice with fear

and anger at his own delay, and the paddles seemed infected with his

terror. Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the seats of

the steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher than the trees or

church towers inland, and advancing with a leisurely parody of a human

stride.

It was the first Martian my brother had seen, and he stood, more

amazed than terrified, watching this Titan advancing deliberately

towards the shipping, wading farther and farther into the water as the

coast fell away. Then, far away beyond the Crouch, came another,

striding over some stunted trees, and then yet another, still farther

off, wading deeply through a shiny mudflat that seemed to hang halfway

up between sea and sky. They were all stalking seaward, as if to

intercept the escape of the multitudinous vessels that were crowded

between Foulness and the Naze. In spite of the throbbing exertions of

the engines of the little paddle-boat, and the pouring foam that her

wheels flung behind her, she receded with terrifying slowness from

this ominous advance.

Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large crescent of

shipping already writhing with the approaching terror; one ship

passing behind another, another coming round from broadside to end on,

steamships whistling and giving off volumes of steam, sails being let

out, launches rushing hither and thither. He was so fascinated by

this and by the creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes

for anything seaward. And then a swift movement of the steamboat (she

had suddenly come round to avoid being run down) flung him headlong

from the seat upon which he was standing. There was a shouting all

about him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that seemed to be answered

faintly. The steamboat lurched and rolled him over upon his hands.

He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards

from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of

a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge

waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles

helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the

waterline.

A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes

were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing

landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure,

and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot

with fire. It was the torpedo ram, _Thunder Child_, steaming headlong,

coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping.

Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks,

my brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again,

and he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far

out to sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged.

Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less

formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was

pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new

antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the

giant was even such another as themselves. The _Thunder Child_ fired no

gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her

not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They

did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent

her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.

She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway

between the steamboat and the Martians--a diminishing black bulk

against the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a

canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side

and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an

unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear.

To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in

their eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.

They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water

as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like

generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward,

and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have

driven through the iron of the ship's side like a white-hot iron rod

through paper.

A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the

Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and

a great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the

_Thunder Child_ sounded through the reek, going off one after the other,

and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer, ricocheted

towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a smack to

matchwood.

But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian's

collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the

crowding passengers on the steamer's stern shouted together. And then

they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove

something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts,

its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.

She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and

her engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and

was within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then

with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped

upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and

in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the

impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing

of cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of

steam hid everything again.

"Two!" yelled the captain.

Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with

frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the

crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.

The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third

Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was

paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last

the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened,

and nothing of the _Thunder Child_ could be made out, nor could the

third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite

close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.

The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the

ironclads receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by

a marbled bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and

combining in the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was scattering

to the northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads

and the steamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking

cloud bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went

about and passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The

coast grew faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of

clouds that were gathering about the sinking sun.

Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the

vibration of guns, and a form of black shadows moving. Everyone

struggled to the rail of the steamer and peered into the blinding

furnace of the west, but nothing was to be distinguished clearly. A

mass of smoke rose slanting and barred the face of the sun. The

steamboat throbbed on its way through an interminable suspense.

The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the

evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the

captain cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes.

Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness--rushed