The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells (tohfa e dulha read online .TXT) 📗
- Author: H. G. Wells
- Performer: 1590171586
Book online «The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells (tohfa e dulha read online .TXT) 📗». Author H. G. Wells
dark against the sunrise, and injured, I saw for the first time, by a
huge gaping cavity on its western side.
And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and
churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous
hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to
build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that
had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled
back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast
dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of
emotion that was near akin to tears.
The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin. The
survivors of the people scattered over the country—leaderless,
lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd—the thousands who
had fled by sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing
stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour
across the vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of
the destroyer was stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened
skeletons of houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass of the
hill, would presently be echoing with the hammers of the restorers and
ringing with the tapping of their trowels. At the thought I extended
my hands towards the sky and began thanking God. In a year, thought
I—in a year…
With overwhelming force came the thought of myself, of my wife, and
the old life of hope and tender helpfulness that had ceased for ever.
WRECKAGE
And now comes the strangest thing in my story. Yet, perhaps, it is
not altogether strange. I remember, clearly and coldly and vividly,
all that I did that day until the time that I stood weeping and
praising God upon the summit of Primrose Hill. And then I forget.
Of the next three days I know nothing. I have learned since that,
so far from my being the first discoverer of the Martian overthrow,
several such wanderers as myself had already discovered this on the
previous night. One man—the first—had gone to St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and, while I sheltered in the cabmen’s hut, had contrived to
telegraph to Paris. Thence the joyful news had flashed all over the
world; a thousand cities, chilled by ghastly apprehensions, suddenly
flashed into frantic illuminations; they knew of it in Dublin,
Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, at the time when I stood upon the
verge of the pit. Already men, weeping with joy, as I have heard,
shouting and staying their work to shake hands and shout, were making
up trains, even as near as Crewe, to descend upon London. The church
bells that had ceased a fortnight since suddenly caught the news,
until all England was bell-ringing. Men on cycles, lean-faced,
unkempt, scorched along every country lane shouting of unhoped
deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of despair. And for
the food! Across the Channel, across the Irish Sea, across the
Atlantic, corn, bread, and meat were tearing to our relief. All the
shipping in the world seemed going Londonward in those days. But of
all this I have no memory. I drifted—a demented man. I found myself
in a house of kindly people, who had found me on the third day
wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. John’s Wood.
They have told me since that I was singing some insane doggerel about
“The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!” Troubled
as they were with their own affairs, these people, whose name, much as
I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may not even give
here, nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered me, and
protected me from myself. Apparently they had learned something of my
story from me during the days of my lapse.
Very gently, when my mind was assured again, did they break to me
what they had learned of the fate of Leatherhead. Two days after I
was imprisoned it had been destroyed, with every soul in it, by a
Martian. He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any
provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness
of power.
I was a lonely man, and they were very kind to me. I was a lonely
man and a sad one, and they bore with me. I remained with them four
days after my recovery. All that time I felt a vague, a growing
craving to look once more on whatever remained of the little life that
seemed so happy and bright in my past. It was a mere hopeless desire
to feast upon my misery. They dissuaded me. They did all they could
to divert me from this morbidity. But at last I could resist the
impulse no longer, and, promising faithfully to return to them, and
parting, as I will confess, from these four-day friends with tears, I
went out again into the streets that had lately been so dark and
strange and empty.
Already they were busy with returning people; in places even there
were shops open, and I saw a drinking fountain running water.
I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went back on my
melancholy pilgrimage to the little house at Woking, how busy the
streets and vivid the moving life about me. So many people were
abroad everywhere, busied in a thousand activities, that it seemed
incredible that any great proportion of the population could have been
slain. But then I noticed how yellow were the skins of the people I
met, how shaggy the hair of the men, how large and bright their eyes,
and that every other man still wore his dirty rags. Their faces
seemed all with one of two expressions—a leaping exultation and
energy or a grim resolution. Save for the expression of the faces,
London seemed a city of tramps. The vestries were indiscriminately
distributing bread sent us by the French government. The ribs of the
few horses showed dismally. Haggard special constables with white
badges stood at the corners of every street. I saw little of the
mischief wrought by the Martians until I reached Wellington Street,
and there I saw the red weed clambering over the buttresses of
Waterloo Bridge.
At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts
of that grotesque time—a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket
of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was
the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication—the DAILY
MAIL. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket.
Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing
had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement
stereo on the back page. The matter he printed was emotional; the
news organisation had not as yet found its way back. I learned
nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the
Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other
things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time,
that the “Secret of Flying,” was discovered. At Waterloo I found the
free trains that were taking people to their homes. The first rush
was already over. There were few people in the train, and I was in no
mood for casual conversation. I got a compartment to myself, and sat
with folded arms, looking greyly at the sunlit devastation that flowed
past the windows. And just outside the terminus the train jolted over
temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses were
blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy
with powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms
and rain, and at Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again;
there were hundreds of out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by
side with the customary navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty
relaying.
All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt
and unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered. Walton, by virtue
of its unburned pine woods, seemed the least hurt of any place along
the line. The Wandle, the Mole, every little stream, was a heaped
mass of red weed, in appearance between butcher’s meat and pickled
cabbage. The Surrey pine woods were too dry, however, for the festoons
of the red climber. Beyond Wimbledon, within sight of the line, in
certain nursery grounds, were the heaped masses of earth about the
sixth cylinder. A number of people were standing about it, and some
sappers were busy in the midst of it. Over it flaunted a Union Jack,
flapping cheerfully in the morning breeze. The nursery grounds were
everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of livid colour cut
with purple shadows, and very painful to the eye. One’s gaze went
with infinite relief from the scorched greys and sullen reds of the
foreground to the blue-green softness of the eastward hills.
The line on the London side of Woking station was still undergoing
repair, so I descended at Byfleet station and took the road to
Maybury, past the place where I and the artilleryman had talked to the
hussars, and on by the spot where the Martian had appeared to me in
the thunderstorm. Here, moved by curiosity, I turned aside to find,
among a tangle of red fronds, the warped and broken dog cart with the
whitened bones of the horse scattered and gnawed. For a time I stood
regarding these vestiges… .
Then I returned through the pine wood, neck-high with red weed here
and there, to find the landlord of the Spotted Dog had already found
burial, and so came home past the College Arms. A man standing at an
open cottage door greeted me by name as I passed.
I looked at my house with a quick flash of hope that faded
immediately. The door had been forced; it was unfast and was opening
slowly as I approached.
It slammed again. The curtains of my study fluttered out of the
open window from which I and the artilleryman had watched the dawn. No
one had closed it since. The smashed bushes were just as I had left
them nearly four weeks ago. I stumbled into the hall, and the house
felt empty. The stair carpet was ruffled and discoloured where I had
crouched, soaked to the skin from the thunderstorm the night of the
catastrophe. Our muddy footsteps I saw still went up the stairs.
I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table
still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had
left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a space I
stood reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the
probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the
civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a
prophecy: “In about two hundred years,” I had written, “we may
expect–-” The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my inability
to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had
broken off to get my DAILY CHRONICLE from the newsboy. I remembered
how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had
listened to his odd story of “Men from Mars.”
I came down and went into the dining room. There were the mutton
and the bread, both far gone now in decay, and a beer bottle
overturned, just as I and the artilleryman had left them. My home was
desolate. I perceived the
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