Kabanata Kabanata 7 · HOW I REACHED HOME.

. HOW I REACHED HOME.

For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress of

blundering against trees and stumbling through the heather. All about

me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless sword

of heat seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before it

descended and smote me out of life. I came into the road between the

crossroads and Horsell, and ran along this to the crossroads.

At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the violence of my

emotion and of my flight, and I staggered and fell by the wayside. That

was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the gasworks. I fell and

lay still.

I must have remained there some time.

I sat up, strangely perplexed. For a moment, perhaps, I could not

clearly understand how I came there. My terror had fallen from me like

a garment. My hat had gone, and my collar had burst away from its

fastener. A few minutes before, there had only been three real things

before me—the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own

feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death. Now it was as

if something turned over, and the point of view altered abruptly. There

was no sensible transition from one state of mind to the other. I was

immediately the self of every day again—a decent, ordinary citizen. The

silent common, the impulse of my flight, the starting flames, were as

if they had been in a dream. I asked myself had these latter things

indeed happened? I could not credit it.

I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep incline of the bridge. My

mind was blank wonder. My muscles and nerves seemed drained of their

strength. I dare say I staggered drunkenly. A head rose over the arch,

and the figure of a workman carrying a basket appeared. Beside him ran

a little boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I was minded to

speak to him, but did not. I answered his greeting with a meaningless

mumble and went on over the bridge.

Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of white, firelit

smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying

south—clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of

people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little row

of gables that was called Oriental Terrace. It was all so real and so

familiar. And that behind me! It was frantic, fantastic! Such things, I

told myself, could not be.

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my

experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of

detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all

from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out

of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was

very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.

But the trouble was the blank incongruity of this serenity and the

swift death flying yonder, not two miles away. There was a noise of

business from the gasworks, and the electric lamps were all alight. I

stopped at the group of people.

“What news from the common?” said I.

There were two men and a woman at the gate.

“Eh?” said one of the men, turning.

“What news from the common?” I said.

“Ain’t yer just _been_ there?” asked the men.

“People seem fair silly about the common,” said the woman over the

gate. “What’s it all abart?”

“Haven’t you heard of the men from Mars?” said I; “the creatures from

Mars?”

“Quite enough,” said the woman over the gate. “Thenks;” and all three

of them laughed.

I felt foolish and angry. I tried and found I could not tell them what

I had seen. They laughed again at my broken sentences.

“You’ll hear more yet,” I said, and went on to my home.

I startled my wife at the doorway, so haggard was I. I went into the

dining room, sat down, drank some wine, and so soon as I could collect

myself sufficiently I told her the things I had seen. The dinner, which

was a cold one, had already been served, and remained neglected on the

table while I told my story.

“There is one thing,” I said, to allay the fears I had aroused; “they

are the most sluggish things I ever saw crawl. They may keep the pit

and kill people who come near them, but they cannot get out of it. . .

. But the horror of them!”

“Don’t, dear!” said my wife, knitting her brows and putting her hand on

mine.

“Poor Ogilvy!” I said. “To think he may be lying dead there!”

My wife at least did not find my experience incredible. When I saw how

deadly white her face was, I ceased abruptly.

“They may come here,” she said again and again.

I pressed her to take wine, and tried to reassure her.

“They can scarcely move,” I said.

I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had told

me of the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves on the

earth. In particular I laid stress on the gravitational difficulty. On

the surface of the earth the force of gravity is three times what it is

on the surface of Mars. A Martian, therefore, would weigh three times

more than on Mars, albeit his muscular strength would be the same. His

own body would be a cope of lead to him, therefore. That, indeed, was

the general opinion. Both _The Times_ and the _Daily Telegraph_, for

instance, insisted on it the next morning, and both overlooked, just as

I did, two obvious modifying influences.

The atmosphere of the earth, we now know, contains far more oxygen or

far less argon (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars’. The

invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians

indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight of their

bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that such

mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able to

dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch.

But I did not consider these points at the time, and so my reasoning

was dead against the chances of the invaders. With wine and food, the

confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I

grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.

“They have done a foolish thing,” said I, fingering my wineglass. “They

are dangerous because, no doubt, they are mad with terror. Perhaps they

expected to find no living things—certainly no intelligent living

things.”

“A shell in the pit,” said I, “if the worst comes to the worst, will

kill them all.”

The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive

powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with

extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife’s sweet anxious face

peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white cloth with its

silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical

writers had many little luxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass,

are photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts

with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy’s rashness, and denouncing the

short-sighted timidity of the Martians.

So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his

nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in

want of animal food. “We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.”

I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to eat

for very many strange and terrible days.