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CHAPTER FOUR

THE DEATH OF THE CURATE


It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped for the
last time, and presently found myself alone.  Instead of keeping close
to me and trying to oust me from the slit, the curate had gone back
into the scullery.  I was struck by a sudden thought.  I went back
quickly and quietly into the scullery.  In the darkness I heard the
curate drinking.  I snatched in the darkness, and my fingers caught a
bottle of burgundy.

For a few minutes there was a tussle.  The bottle struck the floor
and broke, and I desisted and rose.  We stood panting and threatening
each other.  In the end I planted myself between him and the food, and
told him of my determination to begin a discipline.  I divided the
food in the pantry, into rations to last us ten days.  I would not let
him eat any more that day.  In the afternoon he made a feeble effort
to get at the food.  I had been dozing, but in an instant I was awake.
All day and all night we sat face to face, I weary but resolute, and
he weeping and complaining of his immediate hunger.  It was, I know, a
night and a day, but to me it seemed--it seems now--an interminable
length of time.

And so our widened incompatibility ended at last in open conflict.
For two vast days we struggled in undertones and wrestling contests.
There were times when I beat and kicked him madly, times when I
cajoled and persuaded him, and once I tried to bribe him with the last
bottle of burgundy, for there was a rain-water pump from which I could
get water.  But neither force nor kindness availed; he was indeed
beyond reason.  He would neither desist from his attacks on the food
nor from his noisy babbling to himself.  The rudimentary precautions
to keep our imprisonment endurable he would not observe.  Slowly I
began to realise the complete overthrow of his intelligence, to
perceive that my sole companion in this close and sickly darkness was
a man insane.

From certain vague memories I am inclined to think my own mind
wandered at times.  I had strange and hideous dreams whenever I slept.
It sounds paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that the weakness
and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me a sane
man.

On the eighth day he began to talk aloud instead of whispering, and
nothing I could do would moderate his speech.

"It is just, O God!" he would say, over and over again. "It is
just.  On me and mine be the punishment laid.  We have sinned, we have
fallen short.  There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in
the dust, and I held my peace.  I preached acceptable folly--my God,
what folly!--when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and
called upon them to repent-repent! . . .  Oppressors of the poor and
needy . . . !  The wine press of God!"

Then he would suddenly revert to the matter of the food I withheld
from him, praying, begging, weeping, at last threatening.  He began to
raise his voice--I prayed him not to.  He perceived a hold on me--he
threatened he would shout and bring the Martians upon us.  For a time
that scared me; but any concession would have shortened our chance of
escape beyond estimating.  I defied him, although I felt no assurance
that he might not do this thing.  But that day, at any rate, he did
not.  He talked with his voice rising slowly, through the greater part
of the eighth and ninth days--threats, entreaties, mingled with a
torrent of half-sane and always frothy repentance for his vacant sham
of God's service, such as made me pity him.  Then he slept awhile, and
began again with renewed strength, so loudly that I must needs make
him desist.

"Be still!" I implored.

He rose to his knees, for he had been sitting in the darkness near
the copper.

"I have been still too long," he said, in a tone that must have
reached the pit, "and now I must bear my witness.  Woe unto this
unfaithful city!  Woe!  Woe!  Woe!  Woe!  Woe! To the inhabitants of
the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet----"

"Shut up!" I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest the
Martians should hear us.  "For God's sake----"

"Nay," shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standing
likewise and extending his arms.  "Speak!  The word of the Lord is
upon me!"

In three strides he was at the door leading into the kitchen.

"I must bear my witness!  I go!  It has already been too long
delayed."

I put out my hand and felt the meat chopper hanging to the wall.
In a flash I was after him.  I was fierce with fear.  Before he was
halfway across the kitchen I had overtaken him.  With one last touch
of humanity I turned the blade back and struck him with the butt.  He
went headlong forward and lay stretched on the ground.  I stumbled
over him and stood panting.  He lay still.

Suddenly I heard a noise without, the run and smash of slipping
plaster, and the triangular aperture in the wall was darkened.  I
looked up and saw the lower surface of a handling-machine coming
slowly across the hole.  One of its gripping limbs curled amid the
debris; another limb appeared, feeling its way over the fallen beams.
I stood petrified, staring.  Then I saw through a sort of glass plate
near the edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and the large
dark eyes of a Martian, peering, and then a long metallic snake of
tentacle came feeling slowly through the hole.

I turned by an effort, stumbled over the curate, and stopped at the
scullery door.  The tentacle was now some way, two yards or more, in
the room, and twisting and turning, with queer sudden movements, this
way and that.  For a while I stood fascinated by that slow, fitful
advance.  Then, with a faint, hoarse cry, I forced myself across the
scullery.  I trembled violently; I could scarcely stand upright.  I
opened the door of the coal cellar, and stood there in the darkness
staring at the faintly lit doorway into the kitchen, and listening.
Had the Martian seen me?  What was it doing now?

Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every now and
then it tapped against the wall, or started on its movements with a
faint metallic ringing, like the movements of keys on a split-ring.
Then a heavy body--I knew too well what--was dragged across the floor
of the kitchen towards the opening.  Irresistibly attracted, I crept
to the door and peeped into the kitchen.  In the triangle of bright
outer sunlight I saw the Martian, in its Briareus of a handling-machine,
scrutinizing the curate's head.  I thought at once that it would infer
my presence from the mark of the blow I had given him.

I crept back to the coal cellar, shut the door, and began to cover
myself up as much as I could, and as noiselessly as possible in the
darkness, among the firewood and coal therein.  Every now and then I
paused, rigid, to hear if the Martian had thrust its tentacles through
the opening again.

Then the faint metallic jingle returned.  I traced it slowly
feeling over the kitchen.  Presently I heard it nearer--in the
scullery, as I judged.  I thought that its length might be
insufficient to reach me.  I prayed copiously.  It passed, scraping
faintly across the cellar door.  An age of almost intolerable suspense
intervened; then I heard it fumbling at the latch! It had found the
door!  The Martians understood doors!

It worried at the catch for a minute, perhaps, and then the door
opened.

In the darkness I could just see the thing--like an elephant's
trunk more than anything else--waving towards me and touching and
examining the wall, coals, wood and ceiling.  It was like a black worm
swaying its blind head to and fro.

Once, even, it touched the heel of my boot.  I was on the verge of
screaming; I bit my hand.  For a time the tentacle was silent.  I
could have fancied it had been withdrawn.  Presently, with an abrupt
click, it gripped something--I thought it had me!--and seemed to go
out of the cellar again.  For a minute I was not sure.  Apparently it
had taken a lump of coal to examine.

I seized the opportunity of slightly shifting my position, which
had become cramped, and then listened.  I whispered passionate prayers
for safety.

Then I heard the slow, deliberate sound creeping towards me again.
Slowly, slowly it drew near, scratching against the walls and tapping
the furniture.

While I was still doubtful, it rapped smartly against the cellar
door and closed it.  I heard it go into the pantry, and the biscuit-tins
rattled and a bottle smashed, and then came a heavy bump against
the cellar door.  Then silence that passed into an infinity of
suspense.

Had it gone?

At last I decided that it had.

It came into the scullery no more; but I lay all the tenth day in
the close darkness, buried among coals and firewood, not daring even
to crawl out for the drink for which I craved.  It was the eleventh day
before I ventured so far from my security.



CHAPTER FIVE

THE STILLNESS


My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the door
between the kitchen and the scullery.  But the pantry was empty; every
scrap of food had gone.  Apparently, the Martian had taken it all on
the previous day.  At that discovery I despaired for the first time.  I
took no food, or no drink either, on the eleventh or the twelfth day.

At first my mouth and throat were parched, and my strength ebbed
sensibly.  I sat about in the darkness of the scullery, in a state of
despondent wretchedness.  My mind ran on eating.  I thought I had
become deaf, for the noises of movement I had been accustomed to hear
from the pit had ceased absolutely.  I did not feel strong enough to
crawl noiselessly to the peephole, or I would have gone there.

On the twelfth day my throat was so painful that, taking the chance
of alarming the Martians, I attacked the creaking rain-water pump that
stood by the sink, and got a couple of glassfuls of blackened and
tainted rain water.  I was greatly refreshed by this, and emboldened
by the fact that no enquiring tentacle followed the noise of my
pumping.

During these days, in a rambling, inconclusive way, I thought much
of the curate and of the manner of his death.

On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and
thought disjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans of
escape.  Whenever I dozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, of the death
of the curate, or of sumptuous dinners; but, asleep or awake, I felt a
keen pain that urged me to drink again and again.  The light that came
into the scullery was no longer grey, but red.  To my disordered
imagination it seemed the colour of blood.

On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was surprised
to find that the fronds of the red weed had grown right across
the hole in the wall, turning the half-light of the place into a
crimson-coloured obscurity.

It was early on the fifteenth day that I heard a curious, familiar
sequence of sounds in the kitchen, and, listening, identified it as
the snuffing and scratching of a dog.  Going into the kitchen, I saw a
dog's nose peering in through a break among the ruddy fronds.  This
greatly surprised me.  At the scent of me he barked shortly.

I thought if I could induce him to come into the place quietly I
should be able, perhaps, to kill and eat him; and in any case, it
would be advisable to kill him, lest his actions attracted the
attention of the Martians.

I crept forward, saying "Good dog!" very softly; but he suddenly
withdrew his head and disappeared.

I listened--I was not deaf--but certainly the pit was still.  I
heard a sound like the flutter of a bird's wings, and a hoarse
croaking, but that was all.

For a long while I lay close to the peephole, but not daring to
move aside the red plants that obscured it.  Once or twice I heard a
faint pitter-patter like the feet of the dog going hither and thither
on the sand far below me, and there were more birdlike sounds, but
that was all.  At length, encouraged by the silence, I looked out.

Except in the corner, where a multitude of crows hopped and fought
over the skeletons of the dead the Martians had consumed, there was
not a living thing in the pit.

I stared about me, scarcely believing my eyes.  All the machinery
had gone.  Save for the big mound of greyish-blue powder in one
corner, certain bars of aluminium in another, the black birds, and the
skeletons of the killed, the place was merely an empty circular pit in
the sand.

Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the
mound of rubble.  I could see in any direction save behind me, to the
north, and neither Martians nor sign of Martians were to be seen.  The
pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but a little way along the rubbish
afforded a practicable slope to the summit of the ruins.  My chance of
escape had come.  I began to tremble.

I hesitated for some time, and then, in a gust of desperate
resolution, and with a heart that throbbed violently, I scrambled to
the top of the mound in which I had been buried so long.

I looked about again.  To the northward, too, no Martian was
visible.

When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight it had been
a straggling street of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed
with abundant shady trees.  Now I stood on a mound of smashed
brickwork, clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red
cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth
to dispute their footing.  The trees near me were dead and brown, but
further a network of red thread scaled the still living stems.

The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had been
burned; their walls stood, sometimes to the second story, with smashed
windows and shattered doors.  The red weed grew tumultuously in their
roofless rooms.  Below me was the great pit, with the crows struggling
for its refuse.  A number of other birds hopped about among the ruins.
Far away I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along a wall, but traces
of men there were none.

The day seemed, by contrast with my recent confinement, dazzlingly
bright, the sky a glowing blue.  A gentle breeze kept the red weed
that covered every scrap of unoccupied ground gently swaying.  And oh!
the sweetness of the air!



CHAPTER SIX

THE WORK OF FIFTEEN DAYS


For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my
safety.  Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had
thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security.  I had
not realised what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated
this startling vision of unfamiliar things.  I had expected to see
Sheen in ruins--I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of
another planet.

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of
men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well.  I
felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly
confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations
of a house.  I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew
quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of
dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an
animal among the animals, under the Martian heel.  With us it would be
as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire
of man had passed away.

But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my
dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast.  In the
direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch
of garden ground unburied.  This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep,
and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed.  The density of the
weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding.  The wall was some six feet
high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my
feet to the crest.  So I went along by the side of it, and came to a
corner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble
into the garden I coveted.  Here I found some young onions, a couple
of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I
secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through
scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew--it was like walking through an
avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with two ideas: to get more
food, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of
this accursed unearthly region of the pit.

Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which
also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow
water, where meadows used to be.  These fragments of nourishment served
only to whet my hunger.  At first I was surprised at this flood in a
hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the
tropical exuberance of the red weed.  Directly this extraordinary
growth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of
unparalleled fecundity.  Its seeds were simply poured down into the
water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water
fronds speedily choked both those rivers.

At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a
tangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in
a broad and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and
Twickenham.  As the water spread the weed followed them, until the
ruined villas of the Thames valley were for a time lost in this red
swamp, whose margin I explored, and much of the desolation the
Martians had caused was concealed.

In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had
spread.  A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of
certain bacteria, presently seized upon it.  Now by the action of
natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting
power against bacterial diseases--they never succumb without a severe
struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead.  The
fronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle.  They broke
off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early
growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.

My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake my
thirst.  I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawed
some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,
metallic taste.  I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to
wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but the
flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back to
Mortlake.  I managed to make out the road by means of occasional ruins
of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of this
spate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton and came
out on Putney Common.

Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the
wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation
of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectly
undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors
closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if
their inhabitants slept within.  The red weed was less abundant; the
tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper.  I hunted
for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple
of silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked.
I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in
my enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.

All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians.
I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried
circuitously away from the advances I made them.  Near Roehampton I
had seen two human skeletons--not bodies, but skeletons, picked
clean--and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones
of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep.  But though I
gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from
them.

After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I
think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason.  And in the
garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,
sufficient to stay my hunger.  From this garden one looked down upon
Putney and the river.  The aspect of the place in the dusk was
singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and
down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the
weed.  And over all--silence.  It filled me with indescribable terror
to think how swiftly that desolating change had come.

For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence,
and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.  Hard by the
top of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the arms
dislocated and removed several yards from the rest of the body.  As I
proceeded I became more and more convinced that the extermination of
mankind was, save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished
in this part of the world.  The Martians, I thought, had gone on and
left the country desolated, seeking food elsewhere.  Perhaps even now
they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they had gone
northward.



CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL


I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney
Hill, sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to
Leatherhead.  I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into
that house--afterwards I found the front door was on the latch--nor
how I ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of
despair, in what seemed to me to be a servant's bedroom, I found a
rat-gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple.  The place had been
already searched and emptied.  In the bar I afterwards found some
biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked.  The latter I could
not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my
hunger, but filled my pockets.  I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian
might come beating that part of London for food in the night.  Before
I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and prowled from
window to window, peering out for some sign of these monsters.  I
slept little.  As I lay in bed I found myself thinking consecutively--a
thing I do not remember to have done since my last argument with the
curate.  During all the intervening time my mental condition had been
a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid
receptivity.  But in the night my brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the
food I had eaten, grew clear again, and I thought.

Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the killing of
the curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of
my wife.  The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to
recall; I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely
disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse.  I saw myself
then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow,
the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that.  I
felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted
me.  In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of
God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood
my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear.  I
retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had
found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to
the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge.  We
had been incapable of co-operation--grim chance had taken no heed of
that.  Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford.  But I did
not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do.  And I set this down as I
have set all this story down, as it was.  There were no witnesses--all
these things I might have concealed.  But I set it down, and the
reader must form his judgment as he will.

And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate
body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the fate of my wife.  For
the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so,
unhappily, I could for the latter.  And suddenly that night became
terrible.  I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark.  I
found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and
painlessly struck her out of being.  Since the night of my return from
Leatherhead I had not prayed.  I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers,
had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now
I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with
the darkness of God.  Strange night!  Strangest in this, that so soon
as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house
like a rat leaving its hiding place--a creature scarcely larger, an
inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters
might be hunted and killed.  Perhaps they also prayed confidently to
God.  Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us
pity--pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.

The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink,
and was fretted with little golden clouds.  In the road that runs from
the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of
the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night
after the fighting began.  There was a little two-wheeled cart
inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer, New Malden, with
a smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw hat
trampled into the now hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot
of blood-stained glass about the overturned water trough.  My
movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest.  I had an idea of
going to Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest
chance of finding my wife.  Certainly, unless death had overtaken them
suddenly, my cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to
me I might find or learn there whither the Surrey people had fled.  I
knew I wanted to find my wife, that my heart ached for her and the
world of men, but I had no clear idea how the finding might be done.  I
was also sharply aware now of my intense loneliness.  From the corner
I went, under cover of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of
Wimbledon Common, stretching wide and far.

That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom;
there was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the
verge of the open, the sun rose, flooding it all with light and
vitality.  I came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place
among the trees.  I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from
their stout resolve to live.  And presently, turning suddenly, with an
odd feeling of being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a
clump of bushes.  I stood regarding this.  I made a step towards it,
and it rose up and became a man armed with a cutlass.  I approached
him slowly.  He stood silent and motionless, regarding me.

As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and
filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged
through a culvert.  Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches
mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches.  His
black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and
sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him.  There was a red cut
across the lower part of his face.

"Stop!" he cried, when I was within ten yards of him, and I
stopped.  His voice was hoarse.  "Where do you come from?" he said.

I thought, surveying him.

"I come from Mortlake," I said.  "I was buried near the pit the
Martians made about their cylinder.  I have worked my way out and
escaped."

"There is no food about here," he said.  "This is my country.  All
this hill down to the river, and back to Clapham, and up to the edge
of the common.  There is only food for one.  Which way are you going?"

I answered slowly.

"I don't know," I said.  "I have been buried in the ruins of a
house thirteen or fourteen days.  I don't know what has happened."

He looked at me doubtfully, then started, and looked with a changed
expression.

"I've no wish to stop about here," said I.  "I think I shall go to
Leatherhead, for my wife was there."

He shot out a pointing finger.

"It is you," said he; "the man from Woking.  And you weren't killed
at Weybridge?"

I recognised him at the same moment.

"You are the artilleryman who came into my garden."

"Good luck!" he said.  "We are lucky ones!  Fancy _you_!"  He put out
a hand, and I took it.  "I crawled up a drain," he said. "But they
didn't kill everyone.  And after they went away I got off towards
Walton across the fields.  But---- It's not sixteen days altogether--and
your hair is grey."  He looked over his shoulder suddenly.  "Only
a rook," he said.  "One gets to know that birds have shadows these
days.  This is a bit open.  Let us crawl under those bushes and talk."

"Have you seen any Martians?" I said.  "Since I crawled out----"

"They've gone away across London," he said.  "I guess they've got a
bigger camp there.  Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky
is alive with their lights.  It's like a great city, and in the glare
you can just see them moving.  By daylight you can't.  But nearer--I
haven't seen them--" (he counted on his fingers) "five days.  Then I
saw a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something big.  And the
night before last"--he stopped and spoke impressively--"it was just a
matter of lights, but it was something up in the air.  I believe
they've built a flying-machine, and are learning to fly."

I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.

"Fly!"

"Yes," he said, "fly."

I went on into a little bower, and sat down.

"It is all over with humanity," I said.  "If they can do that they
will simply go round the world."

He nodded.

"They will.  But---- It will relieve things over here a bit.  And
besides----"  He looked at me.  "Aren't you satisfied it _is_ up with
humanity?  I am.  We're down; we're beat."

I stared.  Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this fact--a
fact perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke.  I had still held a
vague hope; rather, I had kept a lifelong habit of mind.  He repeated
his words, "We're beat."  They carried absolute conviction.

"It's all over," he said.  "They've lost _one_--just _one_.  And they've
made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world.
They've walked over us.  The death of that one at Weybridge was an
accident.  And these are only pioneers.  They kept on coming.  These
green stars--I've seen none these five or six days, but I've no doubt
they're falling somewhere every night.  Nothing's to be done.  We're
under! We're beat!"

I made him no answer.  I sat staring before me, trying in vain to
devise some countervailing thought.

"This isn't a war," said the artilleryman.  "It never was a war,
any more than there's war between man and ants."

Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory.

"After the tenth shot they fired no more--at least, until the first
cylinder came."

"How do you know?" said the artilleryman.  I explained.  He thought.
"Something wrong with the gun," he said.  "But what if there is?
They'll get it right again.  And even if there's a delay, how can it
alter the end?  It's just men and ants.  There's the ants builds their
cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until the men want
them out of the way, and then they go out of the way.  That's what we
are now--just ants.  Only----"

"Yes," I said.

"We're eatable ants."

We sat looking at each other.

"And what will they do with us?" I said.

"That's what I've been thinking," he said; "that's what I've been
thinking.  After Weybridge I went south--thinking.  I saw what was up.
Most of the people were hard at it squealing and exciting themselves.
But I'm not so fond of squealing.  I've been in sight of death once or
twice; I'm not an ornamental soldier, and at the best and worst,
death--it's just death.  And it's the man that keeps on thinking comes
through.  I saw everyone tracking away south.  Says I, 'Food won't
last this way,' and I turned right back.  I went for the Martians like
a sparrow goes for man.  All round"--he waved a hand to the
horizon--"they're starving in heaps, bolting, treading on each other.
. . ."

He saw my face, and halted awkwardly.

"No doubt lots who had money have gone away to France," he said.  He
seemed to hesitate whether to apologise, met my eyes, and went on:
"There's food all about here.  Canned things in shops; wines, spirits,
mineral waters; and the water mains and drains are empty.  Well, I was
telling you what I was thinking.  'Here's intelligent things,' I said,
'and it seems they want us for food.  First, they'll smash us up--ships,
machines, guns, cities, all the order and organisation.  All
that will go.  If we were the size of ants we might pull through.  But
we're not.  It's all too bulky to stop.  That's the first certainty.'
Eh?"

I assented.

"It is; I've thought it out.  Very well, then--next; at present
we're caught as we're wanted.  A Martian has only to go a few miles to
get a crowd on the run.  And I saw one, one day, out by Wandsworth,
picking houses to pieces and routing among the wreckage.  But they
won't keep on doing that.  So soon as they've settled all our guns and
ships, and smashed our railways, and done all the things they are
doing over there, they will begin catching us systematic, picking the
best and storing us in cages and things.  That's what they will start
doing in a bit.  Lord!  They haven't begun on us yet.  Don't you see
that?"

"Not begun!" I exclaimed.

"Not begun.  All that's happened so far is through our not having
the sense to keep quiet--worrying them with guns and such foolery.  And
losing our heads, and rushing off in crowds to where there wasn't any
more safety than where we were.  They don't want to bother us yet.
They're making their things--making all the things they couldn't bring
with them, getting things ready for the rest of their people.  Very
likely that's why the cylinders have stopped for a bit, for fear of
hitting those who are here.  And instead of our rushing about blind,
on the howl, or getting dynamite on the chance of busting them up,
we've got to fix ourselves up according to the new state of affairs.
That's how I figure it out.  It isn't quite according to what a man
wants for his species, but it's about what the facts point to.  And
that's the principle I acted upon.  Cities, nations, civilisation,
progress--it's all over.  That game's up.  We're beat."

"But if that is so, what is there to live for?"

The artilleryman looked at me for a moment.

"There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million years or
so; there won't be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds
at restaurants.  If it's amusement you're after, I reckon the game is
up.  If you've got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating
peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck 'em away.
They ain't no further use."

"You mean----"

"I mean that men like me are going on living--for the sake of the
breed.  I tell you, I'm grim set on living.  And if I'm not mistaken,
you'll show what insides _you've_ got, too, before long.  We aren't
going to be exterminated.  And I don't mean to be caught either, and
tamed and fattened and bred like a thundering ox.  Ugh! Fancy those
brown creepers!"

"You don't mean to say----"

"I do.  I'm going on, under their feet.  I've got it planned; I've
thought it out.  We men are beat.  We don't know enough.  We've got to
learn before we've got a chance.  And we've got to live and keep
independent while we learn.  See! That's what has to be done."

I stared, astonished, and stirred profoundly by the man's
resolution.

"Great God!" cried I.  "But you are a man indeed!"  And suddenly I
gripped his hand.

"Eh!" he said, with his eyes shining.  "I've thought it out, eh?"

"Go on," I said.

"Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get ready.  I'm
getting ready.  Mind you, it isn't all of us that are made for wild
beasts; and that's what it's got to be.  That's why I watched you.  I
had my doubts.  You're slender.  I didn't know that it was you, you
see, or just how you'd been buried.  All these--the sort of people
that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used
to live down that way--they'd be no good.  They haven't any spirit in
them--no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn't one or
the other--Lord!  What is he but funk and precautions?  They just used
to skedaddle off to work--I've seen hundreds of 'em, bit of breakfast
in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket
train, for fear they'd get dismissed if they didn't; working at
businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand;
skedaddling back for fear they wouldn't be in time for dinner; keeping
indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with
the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they
had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little
miserable skedaddle through the world.  Lives insured and a bit
invested for fear of accidents.  And on Sundays--fear of the
hereafter.  As if hell was built for rabbits!  Well, the Martians will
just be a godsend to these.  Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful
breeding, no worry.  After a week or so chasing about the fields and
lands on empty stomachs, they'll come and be caught cheerful.  They'll
be quite glad after a bit.  They'll wonder what people did before
there were Martians to take care of them.  And the bar loafers, and
mashers, and singers--I can imagine them.  I can imagine them," he
said, with a sort of sombre gratification.  "There'll be any amount of
sentiment and religion loose among them.  There's hundreds of things I
saw with my eyes that I've only begun to see clearly these last few
days.  There's lots will take things as they are--fat and stupid; and
lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and
that they ought to be doing something.  Now whenever things are so
that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak,
and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make
for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and
submit to persecution and the will of the Lord.  Very likely you've
seen the same thing.  It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean
inside out.  These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety.
And those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of--what is
it?--eroticism."

He paused.

"Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train
them to do tricks--who knows?--get sentimental over the pet boy who
grew up and had to be killed.  And some, maybe, they will train to
hunt us."

"No," I cried, "that's impossible!  No human being----"

"What's the good of going on with such lies?" said the
artilleryman.  "There's men who'd do it cheerful.  What nonsense to
pretend there isn't!"

And I succumbed to his conviction.

"If they come after me," he said; "Lord, if they come after me!"
and subsided into a grim meditation.

I sat contemplating these things.  I could find nothing to bring
against this man's reasoning.  In the days before the invasion no one
would have questioned my intellectual superiority to his--I, a
professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a
common soldier; and yet he had already formulated a situation that I
had scarcely realised.

"What are you doing?" I said presently.  "What plans have you
made?"

He hesitated.

"Well, it's like this," he said.  "What have we to do?  We have to
invent a sort of life where men can live and breed, and be
sufficiently secure to bring the children up.  Yes--wait a bit, and
I'll make it clearer what I think ought to be done.  The tame ones
will go like all tame beasts; in a few generations they'll be big,
beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid--rubbish! The risk is that we who keep
wild will go savage--degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat. . . .
You see, how I mean to live is underground.  I've been thinking about
the drains.  Of course those who don't know drains think horrible
things; but under this London are miles and miles--hundreds of
miles--and a few days rain and London empty will leave them sweet and
clean. The main drains are big enough and airy enough for anyone.
Then there's cellars, vaults, stores, from which bolting passages may
be made to the drains. And the railway tunnels and subways.  Eh?  You
begin to see?  And we form a band--able-bodied, clean-minded men.
We're not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in.  Weaklings
go out again."

"As you meant me to go?"

"Well--I parleyed, didn't I?"

"We won't quarrel about that.  Go on."

"Those who stop obey orders.  Able-bodied, clean-minded women we
want also--mothers and teachers.  No lackadaisical ladies--no blasted
rolling eyes.  We can't have any weak or silly.  Life is real again,
and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die.  They
ought to die.  They ought to be willing to die.  It's a sort of
disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.  And they can't be
happy.  Moreover, dying's none so dreadful; it's the funking makes it
bad.  And in all those places we shall gather.  Our district will be
London.  And we may even be able to keep a watch, and run about in the
open when the Martians keep away.  Play cricket, perhaps.  That's how
we shall save the race.  Eh?  It's a possible thing?  But saving the
race is nothing in itself.  As I say, that's only being rats.  It's
saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing.  There men like
you come in.  There's books, there's models.  We must make great safe
places down deep, and get all the books we can; not novels and poetry
swipes, but ideas, science books.  That's where men like you come in.
We must go to the British Museum and pick all those books through.
Especially we must keep up our science--learn more.  We must watch
these Martians.  Some of us must go as spies.  When it's all working,
perhaps I will.  Get caught, I mean.  And the great thing is, we must
leave the Martians alone.  We mustn't even steal.  If we get in their
way, we clear out.  We must show them we mean no harm.  Yes, I know.
But they're intelligent things, and they won't hunt us down if they
have all they want, and think we're just harmless vermin."

The artilleryman paused and laid a brown hand upon my arm.

"After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn before--Just
imagine this: four or five of their fighting machines suddenly
starting off--Heat-Rays right and left, and not a Martian in 'em.  Not
a Martian in 'em, but men--men who have learned the way how.  It may
be in my time, even--those men.  Fancy having one of them lovely
things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free!  Fancy having it in control!
What would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the
run, after a bust like that?  I reckon the Martians'll open their
beautiful eyes!  Can't you see them, man?  Can't you see them
hurrying, hurrying--puffing and blowing and hooting to their other
mechanical affairs?  Something out of gear in every case.  And swish,
bang, rattle, swish!  Just as they are fumbling over it, _swish_ comes
the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own."

For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the
tone of assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my
mind.  I believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny
and in the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the reader
who thinks me susceptible and foolish must contrast his position,
reading steadily with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine,
crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted by
apprehension.  We talked in this manner through the early morning
time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after scanning the sky
for Martians, hurried precipitately to the house on Putney Hill where
he had made his lair.  It was the coal cellar of the place, and when I
saw the work he had spent a week upon--it was a burrow scarcely ten
yards long, which he designed to reach to the main drain on Putney
Hill--I had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his
powers.  Such a hole I could have dug in a day.  But I believed in him
sufficiently to work with him all that morning until past midday at
his digging.  We had a garden barrow and shot the earth we removed
against the kitchen range.  We refreshed ourselves with a tin of
mock-turtle soup and wine from the neighbouring pantry.  I found a
curious relief from the aching strangeness of the world in this steady
labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in my mind, and
presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all
the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again.  After
working an hour I began to speculate on the distance one had to go
before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing it
altogether.  My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long
tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one of
the manholes, and work back to the house.  It seemed to me, too, that
the house was inconveniently chosen, and required a needless length of
tunnel.  And just as I was beginning to face these things, the
artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.

"We're working well," he said.  He put down his spade. "Let us
knock off a bit" he said.  "I think it's time we reconnoitred from the
roof of the house."

I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his
spade; and then suddenly I was struck by a thought.  I stopped, and so
did he at once.

"Why were you walking about the common," I said, "instead of being
here?"

"Taking the air," he said.  "I was coming back.  It's safer by
night."

"But the work?"

"Oh, one can't always work," he said, and in a flash I saw the man
plain.  He hesitated, holding his spade.  "We ought to reconnoitre
now," he said, "because if any come near they may hear the spades and
drop upon us unawares."

I was no longer disposed to object.  We went together to the roof
and stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door.  No Martians were
to be seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, and slipped down under
shelter of the parapet.

From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney,
but we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the
low parts of Lambeth flooded and red.  The red creeper swarmed up the
trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and
dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters.  It was
strange how entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing
water for their propagation.  About us neither had gained a footing;
laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and trees of arbor-vitae, rose out of
laurels and hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the sunlight.  Beyond
Kensington dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the
northward hills.

The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who still
remained in London.

"One night last week," he said, "some fools got the electric light
in order, and there was all Regent Street and the Circus ablaze,
crowded with painted and ragged drunkards, men and women, dancing and
shouting till dawn.  A man who was there told me.  And as the day came
they became aware of a fighting-machine standing near by the Langham
and looking down at them.  Heaven knows how long he had been there.
It must have given some of them a nasty turn.  He came down the road
towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk or frightened
to run away."

Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully describe!

From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his
grandiose plans again.  He grew enthusiastic.  He talked so eloquently
of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than
half believed in him again.  But now that I was beginning to
understand something of his quality, I could divine the stress he laid
on doing nothing precipitately.  And I noted that now there was no
question that he personally was to capture and fight the great
machine.

After a time we went down to the cellar.  Neither of us seemed
disposed to resume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I was
nothing loath.  He became suddenly very generous, and when we had
eaten he went away and returned with some excellent cigars.  We lit
these, and his optimism glowed.  He was inclined to regard my coming
as a great occasion.

"There's some champagne in the cellar," he said.

"We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy," said I.

"No," said he; "I am host today.  Champagne!  Great God! We've a
heavy enough task before us!  Let us take a rest and gather strength
while we may.  Look at these blistered hands!"

And pursuant to this idea of a holiday, he insisted upon playing
cards after we had eaten.  He taught me euchre, and after dividing
London between us, I taking the northern side and he the southern, we
played for parish points.  Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to
the sober reader, it is absolutely true, and what is more remarkable,
I found the card game and several others we played extremely
interesting.

Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of
extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before
us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit following the
chance of this painted pasteboard, and playing the "joker" with vivid
delight.  Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough
chess games.  When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a
lamp.

After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the
artilleryman finished the champagne.  We went on smoking the cigars.
He was no longer the energetic regenerator of his species I had
encountered in the morning.  He was still optimistic, but it was a
less kinetic, a more thoughtful optimism.  I remember he wound up with
my health, proposed in a speech of small variety and considerable
intermittence.  I took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the
lights of which he had spoken that blazed so greenly along the
Highgate hills.

At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley.  The
northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington
glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed
up and vanished in the deep blue night.  All the rest of London
was black.  Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale,
violet-purple fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze.  For
a space I could not understand it, and then I knew that it must be
the red weed from which this faint irradiation proceeded.  With that
realisation my dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of
things, awoke again.  I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear,
glowing high in the west, and then gazed long and earnestly at the
darkness of Hampstead and Highgate.

I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the
grotesque changes of the day.  I recalled my mental states from the
midnight prayer to the foolish card-playing.  I had a violent
revulsion of feeling.  I remember I flung away the cigar with a
certain wasteful symbolism.  My folly came to me with glaring
exaggeration.  I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was
filled with remorse.  I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined
dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into
London.  There, it seemed to me, I had the best chance of learning
what the Martians and my fellowmen were doing.  I was still upon the
roof when the late moon rose.
}
 