The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (digital book reader .txt) 📕

about two. He was now very anxious on my account, and disturbed at

the evident magnitude of the trouble. His mind was inclined to run,

even as mine had run on Saturday, on military details. He thought of

all those silent, expectant guns, of the suddenly nomadic countryside;

he tried to imagine “boilers on stilts” a hundred feet high.

There were one or two cartloads of refugees passing along Oxford

Street, and several in the Marylebone Road, but so slowly was the news

spreading that Regent Street and Portland Place were full of their

usual Sunday-night promenaders, albeit they talked in groups, and

along the edge of Regent’s Park there were as many silent couples

“walking out” together under the scattered gas lamps as ever there had

been. The night was warm and still, and a little oppressive; the

sound of guns continued intermittently, and after midnight there

seemed to be sheet lightning in the south.

He read and re-read the paper, fearing the worst had happened to

me. He was restless, and after supper prowled out again aimlessly. He

returned and tried in vain to divert his attention to his examination

notes. He went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from

lurid dreams in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door

knockers, feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour

of bells. Red reflections danced on the ceiling. For a moment he lay

astonished, wondering whether day had come or the world gone mad.

Then he jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

His room was an attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down

the street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash,

and heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were

being shouted. “They are coming!” bawled a policeman, hammering at

the door; “the Martians are coming!” and hurried to the next door.

The sound of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street

Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing

sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin. There was a noise of doors

opening, and window after window in the houses opposite flashed from

darkness into yellow illumination.

Up the street came galloping a closed carriage, bursting abruptly

into noise at the corner, rising to a clattering climax under the

window, and dying away slowly in the distance. Close on the rear of

this came a couple of cabs, the forerunners of a long procession of

flying vehicles, going for the most part to Chalk Farm station, where

the NorthWestern special trains were loading up, instead of coming

down the gradient into Euston.

For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank

astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and

delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind him

opened, and the man who lodged across the landing came in, dressed

only in shirt, trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his

waist, his hair disordered from his pillow.

“What the devil is it?” he asked. “A fire? What a devil of a

row!”

They both craned their heads out of the window, straining to hear

what the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side

streets, and standing in groups at the corners talking.

“What the devil is it all about?” said my brother’s fellow lodger.

My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress, running with

each garment to the window in order to miss nothing of the growing

excitement. And presently men selling unnaturally early newspapers

came bawling into the street:

“London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond

defences forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames Valley!”

And all about him—in the rooms below, in the houses on each side

and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the

hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne

Park district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn

and St. John’s Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and

Highbury and Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the

vastness of London from Ealing to East Ham—people were rubbing their

eyes, and opening windows to stare out and ask aimless questions,

dressing hastily as the first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew

through the streets. It was the dawn of the great panic. London,

which had gone to bed on Sunday night oblivious and inert, was

awakened, in the small hours of Monday morning, to a vivid sense of

danger.

Unable from his window to learn what was happening, my brother went

down and out into the street, just as the sky between the parapets of

the houses grew pink with the early dawn. The flying people on foot

and in vehicles grew more numerous every moment. “Black Smoke!” he

heard people crying, and again “Black Smoke!” The contagion of such a

unanimous fear was inevitable. As my brother hesitated on the doorstep, he saw another news vender approaching, and got a paper

forthwith. The man was running away with the rest, and selling his

papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit

and panic.

And from this paper my brother read that catastrophic dispatch of

the Commander-in-Chief:

“The Martians are able to discharge enormous clouds of a black and

poisonous vapour by means of rockets. They have smothered our

batteries, destroyed Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon, and are

advancing slowly towards London, destroying everything on the way. It

is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Black Smoke

but in instant flight.”

That was all, but it was enough. The whole population of the great

six-million city was stirring, slipping, running; presently it would

be pouring EN MASSE northward.

“Black Smoke!” the voices cried. “Fire!”

The bells of the neighbouring church made a jangling tumult, a cart

carelessly driven smashed, amid shrieks and curses, against the water

trough up the street. Sickly yellow lights went to and fro in the

houses, and some of the passing cabs flaunted unextinguished lamps.

And overhead the dawn was growing brighter, clear and steady and calm.

He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down

stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in

dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.

As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he

turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money—some ten

pounds altogether—into his pockets, and went out again into the

streets.