The War Of The Worlds ~
By H.G. Wells
couple of silent houses, but they had already been broken
into and ransacked. I rested for the remainder of the day-
light 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 quan-
tity 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 over-
looked. 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 think-
ing consecutively--a thing I do not remember to have done
since my last argument with the curate. During all the inter-
vening time my mental condition had been a hurrying suc-
cession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid recep-
tivity. 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 sensa-
tion 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 near-
ness 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 con-
cealed. 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 my-
self 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, plead-
ing 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 noth-
ing 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 sud-
denly, 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.
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