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

left, he whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.

My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among the

houses in front of them, and veiling the white facade of a terrace

beyond the road that appeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs.

Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red

flame leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot,

blue sky. The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the

disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the

creaking of waggons, and the staccato of hoofs. The lane came round

sharply not fifty yards from the crossroads.

“Good heavens!” cried Mrs. Elphinstone. “What is this you are

driving us into?”

My brother stopped.

For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of

human beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. A great bank

of dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything

within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and was

perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses

and of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every

description.

“Way!” my brother heard voices crying. “Make way!”

It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meeting

point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and the dust

was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way up the road a villa

was burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across the road

to add to the confusion.

Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy

bundle and weeping. A lost retriever dog, with hanging tongue,

circled dubiously round them, scared and wretched, and fled at my

brother’s threat.

So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the houses

to the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pent

in between the villas on either side; the black heads, the crowded

forms, grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the corner,

hurried past, and merged their individuality again in a receding

multitude that was swallowed up at last in a cloud of dust.

“Go on! Go on!” cried the voices. “Way! Way!”

One man’s hands pressed on the back of another. My brother stood

at the pony’s head. Irresistibly attracted, he advanced slowly, pace

by pace, down the lane.

Edgware had been a scene of confusion, Chalk Farm a riotous tumult,

but this was a whole population in movement. It is hard to imagine

that host. It had no character of its own. The figures poured out

past the corner, and receded with their backs to the group in the

lane. Along the margin came those who were on foot threatened by the

wheels, stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another.

The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, making

little way for those swifter and more impatient vehicles that darted

forward every now and then when an opportunity showed itself of doing

so, sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of the

villas.

“Push on!” was the cry. “Push on! They are coming!”

In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army,

gesticulating with his crooked fingers and bawling, “Eternity!

Eternity!” His voice was hoarse and very loud so that my brother

could hear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some of

the people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horses

and quarrelled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at

nothing with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, or

lay prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances. The horses’ bits

were covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot.

There were cabs, carriages, shop cars, waggons, beyond counting; a

mail cart, a road-cleaner’s cart marked “Vestry of St. Pancras,” a

huge timber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer’s dray rumbled by

with its two near wheels splashed with fresh blood.

“Clear the way!” cried the voices. “Clear the way!”

“Eternity! Eternity!” came echoing down the road.

There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with

children that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in

dust, their weary faces smeared with tears. With many of these came

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 bloodstained—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