The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells [little red riding hood ebook free .txt] 📗
- Author: H. G. Wells
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it, gained it, and so escaped out of that destruction. There were no
oars in the boat, but I contrived to paddle, as well as my parboiled
hands would allow, down the river towards Halliford and Walton, going
very tediously and continually looking behind me, as you may well
understand. I followed the river, because I considered that the water
gave me my best chance of escape should these giants return.
The hot water from the Martian’s overthrow drifted downstream with
me, so that for the best part of a mile I could see little of either
bank. Once, however, I made out a string of black figures hurrying
across the meadows from the direction of Weybridge. Halliford, it
seemed, was deserted, and several of the houses facing the river were
on fire. It was strange to see the place quite tranquil, quite
desolate under the hot blue sky, with the smoke and little threads of
flame going straight up into the heat of the afternoon. Never before
had I seen houses burning without the accompaniment of an obstructive
crowd. A little farther on the dry reeds up the bank were smoking and
glowing, and a line of fire inland was marching steadily across a late
field of hay.
For a long time I drifted, so painful and weary was I after the
violence I had been through, and so intense the heat upon the water.
Then my fears got the better of me again, and I resumed my paddling.
The sun scorched my bare back. At last, as the bridge at Walton was
coming into sight round the bend, my fever and faintness overcame my
fears, and I landed on the Middlesex bank and lay down, deadly sick,
amid the long grass. I suppose the time was then about four or five
o’clock. I got up presently, walked perhaps half a mile without
meeting a soul, and then lay down again in the shadow of a hedge. I
seem to remember talking, wanderingly, to myself during that last
spurt. I was also very thirsty, and bitterly regretful I had drunk no
more water. It is a curious thing that I felt angry with my wife; I
cannot account for it, but my impotent desire to reach Leatherhead
worried me excessively.
I do not clearly remember the arrival of the curate, so that
probably I dozed. I became aware of him as a seated figure in soot-smudged shirt sleeves, and with his upturned, clean-shaven face
staring at a faint flickering that danced over the sky. The sky was
what is called a mackerel sky—rows and rows of faint down-plumes of
cloud, just tinted with the midsummer sunset.
I sat up, and at the rustle of my motion he looked at me quickly.
“Have you any water?” I asked abruptly.
He shook his head.
“You have been asking for water for the last hour,” he said.
For a moment we were silent, taking stock of each other. I dare
say he found me a strange enough figure, naked, save for my water-soaked trousers and socks, scalded, and my face and shoulders
blackened by the smoke. His face was a fair weakness, his chin
retreated, and his hair lay in crisp, almost flaxen curls on his low
forehead; his eyes were rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring.
He spoke abruptly, looking vacantly away from me.
“What does it mean?” he said. “What do these things mean?”
I stared at him and made no answer.
He extended a thin white hand and spoke in almost a complaining
tone.
“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The
morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my
brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it
were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work–- What
are these Martians?”
“What are we?” I answered, clearing my throat.
He gripped his knees and turned to look at me again. For half a
minute, perhaps, he stared silently.
“I was walking through the roads to clear my brain,” he said. “And
suddenly—fire, earthquake, death!”
He relapsed into silence, with his chin now sunken almost to his
knees.
Presently he began waving his hand.
“All the work—all the Sunday schools—What have we done—what has
Weybridge done? Everything gone—everything destroyed. The church!
We rebuilt it only three years ago. Gone! Swept out of existence!
Why?”
Another pause, and he broke out again like one demented.
“The smoke of her burning goeth up for ever and ever!” he shouted.
His eyes flamed, and he pointed a lean finger in the direction of
Weybridge.
By this time I was beginning to take his measure. The tremendous
tragedy in which he had been involved—it was evident he was a
fugitive from Weybridge—had driven him to the very verge of his
reason.
“Are we far from Sunbury?” I said, in a matter-of-fact tone.
“What are we to do?” he asked. “Are these creatures everywhere?
Has the earth been given over to them?”
“Are we far from Sunbury?”
“Only this morning I officiated at early celebration–-”
“Things have changed,” I said, quietly. “You must keep your head.
There is still hope.”
“Hope!”
“Yes. Plentiful hope—for all this destruction!”
I began to explain my view of our position. He listened at first,
but as I went on the interest dawning in his eyes gave place to their
former stare, and his regard wandered from me.
“This must be the beginning of the end,” he said, interrupting me.
“The end! The great and terrible day of the Lord! When men shall
call upon the mountains and the rocks to fall upon them and hide
them—hide them from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne!”
I began to understand the position. I ceased my laboured
reasoning, struggled to my feet, and, standing over him, laid my hand
on his shoulder.
“Be a man!” said I. “You are scared out of your wits! What good
is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes
and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you
think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.”
For a time he sat in blank silence.
“But how can we escape?” he asked, suddenly. “They are
invulnerable, they are pitiless.”
“Neither the one nor, perhaps, the other,” I answered. “And the
mightier they are the more sane and wary should we be. One of them
was killed yonder not three hours ago.”
“Killed!” he said, staring about him. “How can God’s ministers be
killed?”
“I saw it happen.” I proceeded to tell him. “We have chanced to
come in for the thick of it,” said I, “and that is all.”
“What is that flicker in the sky?” he asked abruptly.
I told him it was the heliograph signalling—that it was the sign
of human help and effort in the sky.
“We are in the midst of it,” I said, “quiet as it is. That flicker
in the sky tells of the gathering storm. Yonder, I take it are the
Martians, and Londonward, where those hills rise about Richmond and
Kingston and the trees give cover, earthworks are being thrown up and
guns are being placed. Presently the Martians will be coming this way
again.”
And even as I spoke he sprang to his feet and stopped me by a
gesture.
“Listen!” he said.
From beyond the low hills across the water came the dull resonance
of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still.
A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the
west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of
Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, still splendour of the sunset.
“We had better follow this path,” I said, “northward.”
IN LONDON
My younger brother was in London when the Martians fell at Woking.
He was a medical student working for an imminent examination, and he
heard nothing of the arrival until Saturday morning. The morning
papers on Saturday contained, in addition to lengthy special articles
on the planet Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and
vaguely worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.
The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had killed a
number of people with a quick-firing gun, so the story ran. The
telegram concluded with the words: “Formidable as they seem to be, the
Martians have not moved from the pit into which they have fallen, and,
indeed, seem incapable of doing so. Probably this is due to the
relative strength of the earth’s gravitational energy.” On that last
text their leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.
Of course all the students in the crammer’s biology class, to which
my brother went that day, were intensely interested, but there were no
signs of any unusual excitement in the streets. The afternoon papers
puffed scraps of news under big headlines. They had nothing to tell
beyond the movements of troops about the common, and the burning of
the pine woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then the
ST. JAMES’S GAZETTE, in an extra-special edition, announced the bare
fact of the interruption of telegraphic communication. This was
thought to be due to the falling of burning pine trees across the
line. Nothing more of the fighting was known that night, the night of
my drive to Leatherhead and back.
My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the
description in the papers that the cylinder was a good two miles from
my house. He made up his mind to run down that night to me, in order,
as he says, to see the Things before they were killed. He dispatched
a telegram, which never reached me, about four o’clock, and spent the
evening at a music hall.
In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm, and my
brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the platform from which the
midnight train usually starts he learned, after some waiting, that an
accident prevented trains from reaching Woking that night. The nature
of the accident he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway
authorities did not clearly know at that time. There was very little
excitement in the station, as the officials, failing to realise that
anything further than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking junction
had occurred, were running the theatre trains which usually passed
through Woking round by Virginia Water or Guildford. They were busy
making the necessary arrangements to alter the route of the
Southampton and Portsmouth Sunday League excursions. A nocturnal
newspaper reporter, mistaking my brother for the traffic manager, to
whom he bears a slight resemblance, waylaid and tried to interview
him. Few people, excepting the railway officials, connected the
breakdown with the Martians.
I have read, in another account of these events, that on Sunday
morning “all London was electrified by the news from Woking.” As a
matter of fact, there was nothing to justify that very extravagant
phrase. Plenty of Londoners did not hear of the Martians until the
panic of Monday morning. Those who did took some time to realise all
that the hastily worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed. The
majority of people in London do not read Sunday papers.
The habit of personal security, moreover, is so deeply fixed in the
Londoner’s mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course
in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors:
“About seven o’clock last night the Martians came out of the cylinder,
and, moving about
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