CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE EXODUS FROM LONDON
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning--the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward. By ten o'clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body.
All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were being filled. People were fighting savagely for standing- room in the carriages even at two o'clock. By three, people were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect.
And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused to return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes, and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in its sluggish advance. Another bank drove over Ealing, and surrounded a little island of survivors on Castle Hill, alive, but unable to escape.
After a fruitless struggle to get aboard a North-Western train at Chalk Farm--the engines of the trains that had loaded in the goods yard there PLOUGHED through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart women fought to keep the crowd from crushing the driver against her furnace--my sister emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a cycle shop. The front tire of the machine she got was punctured in dragging it through the window, but she got up and off, notwithstanding, with no further injury than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock Hill was impassable owing to several overturned horses, and my sister struck into Belsize Road.
So she got out of the fury of the panic, and, skirting the Edgware Road, reached Edgware about seven, fasting and wearied, but well ahead of the crowd. Along the road people were standing in the roadway, curious, wondering. She was passed by a number of cyclists, some horsewomen, and two motor cars. A mile from Edgware the rim of the wheel broke, and the machine became unridable. She left it by the roadside and trudged through the village. There were shops half opened in the main street of the place, and people crowded on the pavement and in the doorways and windows, staring astonished at this extraordinary procession of fugitives that was beginning. She succeeded in getting some food at an inn.
For a time she remained in Edgware not knowing what next to do. The flying people increased in number. Many of them, like my sister, seemed inclined to loiter in the place. There was no fresh news of the 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 there were soon motor cars, hansom cabs, and carriages hurrying along, and the dust hung in heavy clouds along the road to St. Albans.
It was perhaps a vague idea of making her way to Chelmsford, where some friends of her lived, that at last induced my sister to strike into a quiet lane running eastward. Presently she came upon a stile, and, crossing it, followed a footpath northeastward. She passed near several farmhouses and some little places whose names she did not learn. She saw few fugitives until, in a grass lane towards High Barnet, she happened upon two ladies who became her fellow travellers. She came upon them just in time to save them.
She heard their screams, and, hurrying round the corner, saw a couple of women struggling to drag them out of the little pony-chaise in which they had been driving, while a third with difficulty held the frightened pony's head. One of the ladies, a short man dressed in white, was simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the woman who gripped his arm with a whip he held in his disengaged hand.
My sister immediately grasped the situation, shouted, and hurried towards the struggle. One of the women desisted and turned towards her, and my sister, realising from her antagonist's face that a fight was unavoidable, and being an expert boxer, went into her forthwith and sent her down against the wheel of the chaise.
It was no time for pugilistic chivalry and my sister laid her quiet with a kick, and gripped the collar of the woman who pulled at the slender lady's arm. She heard the clatter of hoofs, the whip stung across her face, a third antagonist struck her between the eyes, and the woman she held wrenched herself free and made off down the lane in the direction from which she had come.
Partly stunned, she found herself facing the woman who had held the horse's head, and became aware of the chaise receding from her down the lane, swaying from side to side, and with the men in it looking back. The woman before her, a burly rough, tried to close, and she stopped her with a blow in the face. Then, realising that she was deserted, she dodged round and made off down the lane after the chaise, with the sturdy woman close behind her, and the fugitive, who had turned now, following remotely.
Suddenly she stumbled and fell; her immediate pursuer went headlong, and she rose to her feet to find herself with a couple of antagonists again. She would have had little chance against them had not the slender sir very pluckily pulled up and returned to her help. It seems he had had a revolver all this time, but it had been under the seat when he and his companion were attacked. He fired at six yards' distance, narrowly missing my sister. The less courageous of the robbers made off, and her companion followed her, cursing her cowardice. They both stopped in sight down the lane, where the third woman lay insensible.
'Take this!' said the slender sir, and he gave my sister his revolver.
'Go back to the chaise,' said my sister, wiping the blood from her split lip.
He turned without a word--they were both panting--and they went back to where the sir in white struggled to hold back the frightened pony.
The robbers had evidently had enough of it. When my sister looked again they were retreating.
'I'll sit here,' said my sister, 'if I may'; and she got upon the empty front seat. The sir looked over him shoulder.
'Give me the reins,' he said, and laid the whip along the pony's side. In another moment a bend in the road hid the three women from my brother's eyes.
So, quite unexpectedly, my sister found herself, panting, with a cut mouth, a bruised jaw, and bloodstained knuckles, driving along an unknown lane with these two men.
She learned they were the husband and the younger brother of a surgeon living at Stanmore, who had come in the small hours from a dangerous case at Pinner, and heard at some railway station on her way of the Martian advance. She had hurried home, roused the women--their servant had left them two days before--packed some provisions, put her revolver under the seat--luckily for my brother--and told them to drive on to Edgware, with the idea of getting a train there. She stopped behind to tell the neighbours. She would overtake them, she said, at about half past four in the morning, and now it was nearly nine and they had seen nothing of her. They could not stop in Edgware because of the growing traffic through the place, and so they had come into this side lane.
That was the story they told my sister in fragments when presently they stopped again, nearer to New Barnet. She promised to stay with them, at least until they could determine what to do, or until the missing woman arrived, and professed to be an expert shot with the revolver--a weapon strange to her--in order to give them confidence.
They made a sort of encampment by the wayside, and the pony became happy in the hedge. She told them of her own escape out of London, and all that she knew of th
ese Martians and their ways. The sun crept higher in the sky, and after a time their talk died out and gave place to an uneasy state of anticipation. Several wayfarers came along the lane, and of these my sister gathered such news as she could. Every broken answer she had deepened her impression of the great disaster that had come on humanity, deepened her persuasion of the immediate necessity for prosecuting this flight. She urged the matter upon them.
'We have money,' said the slender man, and hesitated.
His eyes met my brother's, and his hesitation ended.
'So have I,' said my sister.
He explained that they had as much as thirty pounds in gold, besides a five-pound note, and suggested that with that they might get upon a train at St. Albans or New Barnet. My sister thought that was hopeless, seeing the fury of the Londoners to crowd upon the trains, and broached her own idea of striking across Essex towards Harwich and thence escaping from the country altogether.
Elphinstone--that was the name of the man in white--would listen to no reasoning, and kept calling upon 'Georgette'; but his sister-in-law was astonishingly quiet and deliberate, and at last agreed to my brother's suggestion. So, designing to cross the Great North Road, they went on towards Barnet, my sister leading the pony to save it as much as possible. As the sun crept up the sky the day became excessively hot, and under foot a thick, whitish sand grew burning and blinding, so that they travelled only very slowly. The hedges were grey with dust. And as they advanced towards Barnet a tumultuous murmuring grew stronger.
They began to meet more people. For the most part these were staring before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean. One woman in evening dress passed them on foot, her eyes on the ground. They heard her voice, and, looking back at her, saw one hand clutched in her hair and the other beating invisible things. Her paroxysm of rage over, she went on her way without once looking back.
As my brother's party went on towards the crossroads to the south of Barnet they saw a man approaching the road across some fields on their left, carrying a child and with two other children; and then passed a woman in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand and a small portmanteau in the other. Then round the corner of the lane, from between the villas that guarded it at its confluence with the high road, came a little cart drawn by a sweating black pony and driven by a sallow youth in a bowler hat, grey with dust. There were three girls, East End factory girls, and a couple of little children crowded in the cart.
'This'll tike us rahnd Edgware?' asked the driver, wild-eyed, white-faced; and when my sister told her it would if she turned to the left, she whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.
My sister 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. 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 Elphinstone. 'What is this you are driving us into?'
My sister 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 women and men on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every description.
'Way!' my sister 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 women came past them. Then a dirty man, 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 woman's hands pressed on the back of another. My sister stood at the pony's head. Irresistibly attracted, she 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 woman in the uniform of the Salvation Army, gesticulating with her crooked fingers and bawling, 'Eternity! Eternity!' Her voice was hoarse and very loud so that my sister could hear her long after she 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!'
'Eter-nity! Eter-nity!' came echoing down the road.
There were sad, haggard men 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 women, 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 workwomen thrusting their way along, wretched, unkempt women, clothed like clerks or shopwomen, struggling spasmodically; a wounded soldier my sister noticed, women 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 woman so scared and broken that her knees bent under hers 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 her, lay a woman with a bare leg, wrapped about with bloody rags. She was a lucky woman to have friends.
A little old woman, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed her boot--his sock was blood-stained--shook out a pebble, and hobbled on again; and then a little boy of eight or nine, all alone, threw himself under the hedge close by my sister, weeping.
'I can't go on! I can't go on!'
My sister woke from her torpor of astonishment and lifted his up, speaking gently to him, and carried his to Mister Elphinstone. So soon as my sister touched his he became quite still, as if frightened.
'Ellen!' shrieked a man in the crowd, with tears in his voice--'Ellen!' And the child suddenly darted away from my sister, crying 'Mother!'
'They are coming,' said a woman on horseback, riding past along the lane.
'Out of the way, there!' bawled a coachwoman, towering high; and my sister saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.
The people crushed back on one another to avoid the horse. My sister pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the woman 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 sister saw dimly through the dust that two women lifted out something on a white stretcher and put it gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge.
One of the women came running to my sister.
'Where is there any water?' she said. 'She is dying fast, and very thirsty. It is Lady Garrick.'
'Lady Garrick!' said my brother; 'the Chief Justice?'
'The water?' she said.
'There may be a tap,' said my sister, 'in some of the houses. We have no water. I dare not leave my people.'
The woman pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the corner house.
'Go on!' said the people, thrusting at her. 'They are coming! Go on!'
Then my brother's attention was distracted by a smooth, eagle- faced woman 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 women and horses. The woman stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck her shoulder and sent her reeling. She gave a shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved her narrowly.
'Way!' cried the women all about her. 'Make way!'
So soon as the cab had passed, she flung herself, with both hands open, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in her pocket. A horse rose close upon her, and in another moment, half rising, she had been borne down under the horse's hoofs.
'Stop!' screamed my sister, and pushing a man out of her way, tried to clutch the bit of the horse.
Before she could get to it, she 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 her whip at my sister, who ran round behind the cart. The multitudinous shouting confused her ears. The woman was writhing in the dust among her scattered money, unable to rise, for the wheel had broken her back, and her lower limbs lay limp and dead. My sister stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a woman on a black horse came to her assistance.
'Get her out of the road,' said she; and, clutching the woman's collar with her free hand, my sister lugged her sideways. But she still clutched after her money, and regarded my sister fiercely, hammering at her 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 woman on horseback stopped. My sister looked up, and the woman with the gold twisted her head round and bit the wrist that held her 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. She released her grip on the fallen woman and jumped back. She saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment she was hidden and my sister was borne backward and carried past the entrance of the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it.
She saw Mister Elphinstone covering his 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!' she shouted, and began turning the pony round. 'We cannot cross this--hell,' she 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 sister saw the face of the dying woman in the ditch under the privet, deadly white and drawn, and shining with perspiration. The two men sat silent, crouching in their seat and shivering.
Then beyond the bend my sister stopped again. Mister Elphinstone was white and pale, and his sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched even to call upon 'Georgette.' My sister was horrified and perplexed. So soon as they had retreated she realised how urgent and unavoidable it was to attempt this crossing. She turned to Mister Elphinstone, suddenly resolute.
'We must go that way,' she said, and led the pony round again.
For the second time that day this boy proved his quality. To force their way into the torrent of people, my sister plunged into the traffic and held back a cab horse, while he drove the pony across its head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped a long splinter from the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept forward by the stream. My sister, with the cabman's whip marks red across her face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from him.
'Point the revolver at the woman behind,' she said, giving it to him, 'if she presses us too hard. No!--point it at her horse.'
Then she began to look out for a chance of edging to the right across the road. But once in the stream she seemed to lose volition, to become a part of that dusty rout. They swept through Chipping Barnet with the torrent; they were nearly a mile beyond the centre of the town before they had fought across to the opposite side of the way. It was din and confusion indescribable; but in and beyond the town the road forks repeatedly, and this to some extent relieved the stress.
They struck eastward through Hadley, and there on either side of the road, and at another place farther on they came upon a great multitude of people drinking at the stream, some fighting to come at the water. And farther on, from a lull near East Barnet, they saw two trains running slowly one after the other without signal or order-- trains swarming with people, with women even among the coals behind the engines--going northward along the Great Northern Railway. My sister supposes they must have filled outside London, for at that time the furious terror of the people had rendered the central termini impossible.
Near this place they halted for the rest of the afternoon, for the violence of the day had already utterly exhausted all three of them. They began to suffer the beginnings of hunger; the night was cold, and none of them dared to sleep. And in the evening many people came hurrying along the road nearby their stopping place, fleeing from unknown dangers before them, and going in the direction from which my sister had come.