CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE EXODUS FROM LONDON
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through thegreatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning--the stream offlight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult roundthe railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about theshipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channelnorthward and eastward. By ten o'clock the police organisation, andby midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency,losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last inthat swift liquefaction of the social body.
All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Easternpeople at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, andtrains were being filled. People were fighting savagely forstanding-room in the carriages even at two o'clock. By three, peoplewere being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a coupleof hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers werefired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to directthe traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of thepeople they were called out to protect.
And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refusedto return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in anever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along thenorthward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes,and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames andacross the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridgesin its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, andsurrounded a little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, butunable to escape.
After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train atChalk Farm--the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goodsyard there _ploughed_ through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart menfought to keep the crowd from crushing the driver against hisfurnace--my brother emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged acrossthrough a hurrying swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremostin the sack of a cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got waspunctured in dragging it through the window, but he got up and off,notwithstanding, with no further injury than a cut wrist. The steepfoot of Haverstock Hill was impassable owing to several overturnedhorses, and my brother struck into Belsize Road.
So he got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the EdgwareRoad, reached Edgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but well aheadof the crowd. Along the road people were standing in the roadway,curious, wondering. He was passed by a number of cyclists, somehorsemen, and two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of thewheel broke, and the machine became unridable. He left it by theroadside and trudged through the village. There were shops halfopened in the main street of the place, and people crowded on thepavement and in the doorways and windows, staring astonished at thisextraordinary procession of fugitives that was beginning. Hesucceeded in getting some food at an inn.
For a time he remained in Edgware not knowing what next to do. Theflying people increased in number. Many of them, like my brother,seemed inclined to loiter in the place. There was no fresh news ofthe invaders from Mars.
At that time the road was crowded, but as yet far from congested.Most of the fugitives at that hour were mounted on cycles, but therewere soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and carriages hurrying along, andthe dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to St. Albans.
It was perhaps a vague idea of making his way to Chelmsford, wheresome friends of his lived, that at last induced my brother to strikeinto a quiet lane running eastward. Presently he came upon a stile,and, crossing it, followed a footpath northeastward. He passed nearseveral farmhouses and some little places whose names he did notlearn. He saw few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards HighBarnet, he happened upon two ladies who became his fellow travellers.He came upon them just in time to save them.
He heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw acouple of men struggling to drag them out of the little pony-chaise inwhich they had been driving, while a third with difficulty held thefrightened pony's head. One of the ladies, a short woman dressed inwhite, was simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure,slashed at the man who gripped her arm with a whip she held in herdisengaged hand.
My brother immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and hurriedtowards the struggle. One of the men desisted and turned towards him,and my brother, realising from his antagonist's face that a fight wasunavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into him forthwith andsent him down against the wheel of the chaise.
It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my brother laid himquiet with a kick, and gripped the collar of the man who pulled at theslender lady's arm. He heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip stungacross his face, a third antagonist struck him between the eyes, andthe man he held wrenched himself free and made off down the lane inthe direction from which he had come.
Partly stunned, he found himself facing the man who had held thehorse's head, and became aware of the chaise receding from him downthe lane, swaying from side to side, and with the women in it lookingback. The man before him, a burly rough, tried to close, and hestopped him with a blow in the face. Then, realising that he wasdeserted, he dodged round and made off down the lane after the chaise,with the sturdy man close behind him, and the fugitive, who had turnednow, following remotely.
Suddenly he stumbled and fell; his immediate pursuer went headlong,and he rose to his feet to find himself with a couple of antagonistsagain. He would have had little chance against them had not theslender lady very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help. Itseems she had had a revolver all this time, but it had been under theseat when she and her companion were attacked. She fired at sixyards' distance, narrowly missing my brother. The less courageous ofthe robbers made off, and his companion followed him, cursing hiscowardice. They both stopped in sight down the lane, where the thirdman lay insensible.
"Take this!" said the slender lady, and she gave my brother herrevolver.
"Go back to the chaise," said my brother, wiping the blood from hissplit lip.
She turned without a word--they were both panting--and they wentback to where the lady in white struggled to hold back the frightenedpony.
The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my brother lookedagain they were retreating.
"I'll sit here," said my brother, "if I may"; and he got upon theempty front seat. The lady looked over her shoulder.
"Give me the reins," she said, and laid the whip along the pony'sside. In another moment a bend in the road hid the three men from mybrother's eyes.
So, quite unexpectedly, my brother found himself, panting, with acut mouth, a bruised jaw, and bloodstained knuckles, driving along anunknown lane with these two women.
He learned they were the wife and the younger sister of a surgeonliving at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours from a dangerouscase at Pinner, and heard at some railway station on his way of theMartian advance. He had hurried home, roused the women--their servanthad left them two days before--packed some provisions, put hisrevolver under the seat--luckily for my brother--and told them todrive on to Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there. Hestopped behind to tell the neighbours. He would overtake them, hesaid, at about half past four in the morning, and now it was nearlynine and they had seen nothing of him. They could not stop in Edgwarebecause of the growing traffic through the place, and so they had comeinto this side lane.
That was the story they told my brother in fragments when presentlythey stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. He promised to stay withthem, at least until they could determine what to do, or until themissing man arrived, and professed to be an expert shot with therevolver--a weapon strange to him--in order to give them confidence.
They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony becamehappy in the hedge. He told them of his own escape out of London, andall that he knew of these Martians and their ways. The sun crepthigher in the sky, and after a time their tal
k died out and gave placeto an uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along thelane, and of these my brother gathered such news as he could. Everybroken answer he had deepened his impression of the great disasterthat had come on humanity, deepened his persuasion of the immediatenecessity for prosecuting this flight. He urged the matter upon them.
"We have money," said the slender woman, and hesitated.
Her eyes met my brother's, and her hesitation ended.
"So have I," said my brother.
She explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold,besides a five-pound note, and suggested that with that they might getupon a train at St. Albans or New Barnet. My brother thought that washopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the trains,and broached his own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich andthence escaping from the country altogether.
Mrs. Elphinstone--that was the name of the woman in white--wouldlisten to no reasoning, and kept calling upon "George"; but hersister-in-law was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at lastagreed to my brother's suggestion. So, designing to cross the GreatNorth Road, they went on towards Barnet, my brother leading the ponyto save it as much as possible. As the sun crept up the sky the daybecame excessively hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grewburning and blinding, so that they travelled only very slowly. Thehedges were grey with dust. And as they advanced towards Barnet atumultuous murmuring grew stronger.
They began to meet more people. For the most part these werestaring before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard,unclean. One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes onthe ground. They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw onehand clutched in his hair and the other beating invisible things. Hisparoxysm of rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.
As my brother's party went on towards the crossroads to the southof Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across some fields ontheir left, carrying a child and with two other children; and thenpassed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand and asmall portmanteau in the other. Then round the corner of the lane,from between the villas that guarded it at its confluence with thehigh road, came a little cart drawn by a sweating black pony anddriven by a sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust. There werethree girls, East End factory girls, and a couple of little childrencrowded in the cart.
"This'll tike us rahnd Edgware?" asked the driver, wild-eyed,white-faced; and when my brother told him it would if he turned to theleft, he whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.
My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among thehouses in front of them, and veiling the white facade of a terracebeyond the road that appeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs.Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky redflame leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot,blue sky. The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into thedisorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, thecreaking of waggons, and the staccato of hoofs. The lane came roundsharply not fifty yards from the crossroads.
"Good heavens!" cried Mrs. Elphinstone. "What is this you aredriving us into?"
My brother stopped.
For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent ofhuman beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. A great bankof dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everythingwithin twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and wasperpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horsesand of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of everydescription.
"Way!" my brother heard voices crying. "Make way!"
It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meetingpoint of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and the dustwas hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way up the road a villawas burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across the roadto add to the confusion.
Two men came past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavybundle and weeping. A lost retriever dog, with hanging tongue,circled dubiously round them, scared and wretched, and fled at mybrother's threat.
So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the housesto the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pentin between the villas on either side; the black heads, the crowdedforms, grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the corner,hurried past, and merged their individuality again in a recedingmultitude 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 stoodat the pony's head. Irresistibly attracted, he advanced slowly, paceby 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 imaginethat host. It had no character of its own. The figures poured outpast the corner, and receded with their backs to the group in thelane. Along the margin came those who were on foot threatened by thewheels, stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another.
The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, makinglittle way for those swifter and more impatient vehicles that dartedforward every now and then when an opportunity showed itself of doingso, sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of thevillas.
"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 brothercould hear him long after he was lost to sight in the dust. Some ofthe people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horsesand quarrelled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring atnothing with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, orlay prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances. The horses' bitswere covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot.
There were cabs, carriages, shop cars, waggons, beyond counting; amail cart, a road-cleaner's cart marked "Vestry of St. Pancras," ahuge timber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer's dray rumbled bywith its two near wheels splashed with fresh blood.
"Clear the way!" cried the voices. "Clear the way!"
"Eter-nity! Eter-nity!" came echoing down the road.
There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, withchildren that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered indust, their weary faces smeared with tears. With many of these camemen, sometimes helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting sideby side with them pushed some weary street outcast in faded blackrags, wide-eyed, loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdyworkmen thrusting their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed likeclerks or shopmen, struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier mybrother noticed, men dressed in the clothes of railway porters, onewretched creature in a nightshirt with a coat thrown over it.
But varied as its composition was, certain things all that host hadin common. There were fear and pain on their faces, and fear behindthem. A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a waggon, sentthe whole host of them quickening their pace; even a man so scared andbroken that his knees bent under him was galvanised for a moment intorenewed activity. The heat and dust had already been at work uponthis multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and cracked.They were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the variouscries one heard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue;the voices of most of them were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran arefrain:
"Way! Way! The Martians are coming!"
Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane openedslantingly into the main road with a narrow opening, and had adelusive appearance of coming from the direction of London. Yet akind of eddy of people drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out ofthe stream, who for the most part rested but a moment before plunginginto it again. A little way down the lane, with two friends bendingover him, lay a man with a bare leg, wrapp
ed about with bloody rags.He was a lucky man to have friends.
A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy blackfrock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed hisboot--his sock was blood-stained--shook out a pebble, and hobbled onagain; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threwherself 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 soonas my brother touched her she became quite still, as if frightened.
"Ellen!" shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in hervoice--"Ellen!" And the child suddenly darted away from my brother,crying "Mother!"
"They are coming," said a man on horseback, riding past along thelane.
"Out of the way, there!" bawled a coachman, towering high; and mybrother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.
The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. Mybrother pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the mandrove by and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, witha pole for a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces. Mybrother saw dimly through the dust that two men lifted out somethingon a white stretcher and put it gently on the grass beneath the privethedge.
One of the men came running to my brother.
"Where is there any water?" he said. "He is dying fast, and verythirsty. 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. Wehave no water. I dare not leave my people."
The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the cornerhouse.
"Go on!" said the people, thrusting at him. "They are coming! Goon!"
Then my brother's attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-facedman lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother'seyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed tobreak up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolledhither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. Theman stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cabstruck his shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodgedback, 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 handsopen, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in hispocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, halfrising, 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, andsaw through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch's back. Thedriver of the cart slashed his whip at my brother, who ran roundbehind the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused his ears. Theman was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable torise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limpand dead. My brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and aman on a black horse came to his assistance.
"Get him out of the road," said he; and, clutching the man's collarwith his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he stillclutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammeringat his arm with a handful of gold. "Go on! Go on!" shouted angryvoices behind.
"Way! Way!"
There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cartthat the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and the manwith the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held hiscollar. There was a concussion, and the black horse came staggeringsideways, and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed mybrother's foot by a hair's breadth. He released his grip on thefallen man and jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on the faceof the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and mybrother 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, withall a child's want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilatedeyes at a dusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushedunder the rolling wheels. "Let us go back!" he shouted, and beganturning the pony round. "We cannot cross this--hell," he said and theywent back a hundred yards the way they had come, until the fightingcrowd was hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother sawthe face of the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly whiteand 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 Elphinstonewas white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretchedeven to call upon "George." My brother was horrified and perplexed.So soon as they had retreated he realised how urgent and unavoidableit was to attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone,suddenly resolute.
"We must go that way," he said, and led the pony round again.
For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. To forcetheir way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into thetraffic and held back a cab horse, while she drove the pony across itshead. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long splinterfrom the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept forwardby the stream. My brother, with the cabman's whip marks red acrosshis face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins fromher.
"Point the revolver at the man behind," he said, giving it to her,"if he presses us too hard. No!--point it at his horse."
Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the rightacross the road. But once in the stream he seemed to lose volition,to become a part of that dusty rout. They swept through ChippingBarnet with the torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre ofthe town before they had fought across to the opposite side of theway. It was din and confusion indescribable; but in and beyond thetown the road forks repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved thestress.
They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side ofthe road, and at another place farther on they came upon a greatmultitude of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to come atthe water. And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they sawtwo trains running slowly one after the other without signal ororder--trains swarming with people, with men even among the coalsbehind the engines--going northward along the Great Northern Railway.My brother supposes they must have filled outside London, for at thattime the furious terror of the people had rendered the centraltermini impossible.
Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for theviolence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them.They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, andnone of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many people camehurrying along the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing fromunknown dangers before them, and going in the direction from which mybrother had come.