Bab Bab 25 · DEAD LONDON.

. DEAD LONDON.

After I had parted from the artilleryman, I went down the hill, and by

the High Street across the bridge to Fulham. The red weed was

tumultuous at that time, and nearly choked the bridge roadway; but its

fronds were already whitened in patches by the spreading disease that

presently removed it so swiftly.

At the corner of the lane that runs to Putney Bridge station I found a

man lying. He was as black as a sweep with the black dust, alive, but

helplessly and speechlessly drunk. I could get nothing from him but

curses and furious lunges at my head. I think I should have stayed by

him but for the brutal expression of his face.

There was black dust along the roadway from the bridge onwards, and it

grew thicker in Fulham. The streets were horribly quiet. I got

food—sour, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable—in a baker’s shop here.

Some way towards Walham Green the streets became clear of powder, and I

passed a white terrace of houses on fire; the noise of the burning was

an absolute relief. Going on towards Brompton, the streets were quiet

again.

Here I came once more upon the black powder in the streets and upon

dead bodies. I saw altogether about a dozen in the length of the Fulham

Road. They had been dead many days, so that I hurried quickly past

them. The black powder covered them over, and softened their outlines.

One or two had been disturbed by dogs.

Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a Sunday in the

City, with the closed shops, the houses locked up and the blinds drawn,

the desertion, and the stillness. In some places plunderers had been at

work, but rarely at other than the provision and wine shops. A

jeweller’s window had been broken open in one place, but apparently the

thief had been disturbed, and a number of gold chains and a watch lay

scattered on the pavement. I did not trouble to touch them. Farther on

was a tattered woman in a heap on a doorstep; the hand that hung over

her knee was gashed and bled down her rusty brown dress, and a smashed

magnum of champagne formed a pool across the pavement. She seemed

asleep, but she was dead.

The farther I penetrated into London, the profounder grew the

stillness. But it was not so much the stillness of death—it was the

stillness of suspense, of expectation. At any time the destruction that

had already singed the northwestern borders of the metropolis, and had

annihilated Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these houses and

leave them smoking ruins. It was a city condemned and derelict. . . .

In South Kensington the streets were clear of dead and of black powder.

It was near South Kensington that I first heard the howling. It crept

almost imperceptibly upon my senses. It was a sobbing alternation of

two notes, “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” keeping on perpetually. When I

passed streets that ran northward it grew in volume, and houses and

buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off again. It came in a full tide

down Exhibition Road. I stopped, staring towards Kensington Gardens,

wondering at this strange, remote wailing. It was as if that mighty

desert of houses had found a voice for its fear and solitude.

“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” wailed that superhuman note—great waves of

sound sweeping down the broad, sunlit roadway, between the tall

buildings on each side. I turned northwards, marvelling, towards the

iron gates of Hyde Park. I had half a mind to break into the Natural

History Museum and find my way up to the summits of the towers, in

order to see across the park. But I decided to keep to the ground,

where quick hiding was possible, and so went on up the Exhibition Road.

All the large mansions on each side of the road were empty and still,

and my footsteps echoed against the sides of the houses. At the top,

near the park gate, I came upon a strange sight—a bus overturned, and

the skeleton of a horse picked clean. I puzzled over this for a time,

and then went on to the bridge over the Serpentine. The voice grew

stronger and stronger, though I could see nothing above the housetops

on the north side of the park, save a haze of smoke to the northwest.

“Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” cried the voice, coming, as it seemed to me,

from the district about Regent’s Park. The desolating cry worked upon

my mind. The mood that had sustained me passed. The wailing took

possession of me. I found I was intensely weary, footsore, and now

again hungry and thirsty.

It was already past noon. Why was I wandering alone in this city of the

dead? Why was I alone when all London was lying in state, and in its

black shroud? I felt intolerably lonely. My mind ran on old friends

that I had forgotten for years. I thought of the poisons in the

chemists’ shops, of the liquors the wine merchants stored; I recalled

the two sodden creatures of despair, who so far as I knew, shared the

city with myself. . . .

I came into Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, and here again were black

powder and several bodies, and an evil, ominous smell from the gratings

of the cellars of some of the houses. I grew very thirsty after the

heat of my long walk. With infinite trouble I managed to break into a

public-house and get food and drink. I was weary after eating, and went

into the parlour behind the bar, and slept on a black horsehair sofa I

found there.

I awoke to find that dismal howling still in my ears, “Ulla, ulla,

ulla, ulla.” It was now dusk, and after I had routed out some biscuits

and a cheese in the bar—there was a meat safe, but it contained nothing

but maggots—I wandered on through the silent residential squares to

Baker Street—Portman Square is the only one I can name—and so came out

at last upon Regent’s Park. And as I emerged from the top of Baker

Street, I saw far away over the trees in the clearness of the sunset

the hood of the Martian giant from which this howling proceeded. I was

not terrified. I came upon him as if it were a matter of course. I

watched him for some time, but he did not move. He appeared to be

standing and yelling, for no reason that I could discover.

I tried to formulate a plan of action. That perpetual sound of “Ulla,

ulla, ulla, ulla,” confused my mind. Perhaps I was too tired to be very

fearful. Certainly I was more curious to know the reason of this

monotonous crying than afraid. I turned back away from the park and

struck into Park Road, intending to skirt the park, went along under

the shelter of the terraces, and got a view of this stationary, howling

Martian from the direction of St. John’s Wood. A couple of hundred

yards out of Baker Street I heard a yelping chorus, and saw, first a

dog with a piece of putrescent red meat in his jaws coming headlong

towards me, and then a pack of starving mongrels in pursuit of him. He

made a wide curve to avoid me, as though he feared I might prove a

fresh competitor. As the yelping died away down the silent road, the

wailing sound of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” reasserted itself.

I came upon the wrecked handling-machine halfway to St. John’s Wood

station. At first I thought a house had fallen across the road. It was

only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this

mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and

twisted, among the ruins it had made. The forepart was shattered. It

seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been

overwhelmed in its overthrow. It seemed to me then that this might have

happened by a handling-machine escaping from the guidance of its

Martian. I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and the

twilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its seat was

smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs had left,

were invisible to me.

Wondering still more at all that I had seen, I pushed on towards

Primrose Hill. Far away, through a gap in the trees, I saw a second

Martian, as motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the

Zoological Gardens, and silent. A little beyond the ruins about the

smashed handling-machine I came upon the red weed again, and found the

Regent’s Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.

As I crossed the bridge, the sound of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” ceased.

It was, as it were, cut off. The silence came like a thunderclap.

The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees

towards the park were growing black. All about me the red weed

clambered among the ruins, writhing to get above me in the dimness.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. But while

that voice sounded the solitude, the desolation, had been endurable; by

virtue of it London had still seemed alive, and the sense of life about

me had upheld me. Then suddenly a change, the passing of something—I

knew not what—and then a stillness that could be felt. Nothing but this

gaunt quiet.

London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white houses

were like the eye sockets of skulls. About me my imagination found a

thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized me, a horror of my

temerity. In front of me the road became pitchy black as though it was

tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying across the pathway. I could

not bring myself to go on. I turned down St. John’s Wood Road, and ran

headlong from this unendurable stillness towards Kilburn. I hid from

the night and the silence, until long after midnight, in a cabmen’s

shelter in Harrow Road. But before the dawn my courage returned, and

while the stars were still in the sky I turned once more towards

Regent’s Park. I missed my way among the streets, and presently saw

down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early dawn, the curve of

Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the fading stars, was a

third Martian, erect and motionless like the others.

An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I would

save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on recklessly

towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light grew, I

saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and clustering about

the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running along the

road.

I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund’s Terrace (I

waded breast-high across a torrent of water that was rushing down from

the waterworks towards the Albert Road), and emerged upon the grass

before the rising of the sun. Great mounds had been heaped about the

crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it—it was the final and

largest place the Martians had made—and from behind these heaps there

rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the sky line an eager dog

ran and disappeared. The thought that had flashed into my mind grew

real, grew credible. I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling exultation,

as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster. Out of the hood

hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and tore.

In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon

its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space

it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of

material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in

their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines,

and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the

Martians—_dead!_—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against

which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being

slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest

things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen

had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease

have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of

our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this

natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no

germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause

putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are

altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly

these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic

allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they

were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and

fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought

his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would

still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For

neither do men live nor die in vain.

Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that

great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have seemed to

them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also at that time

this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that

had been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment I

believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that

God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night.

I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even

as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The

pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful

in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms,

rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light.

A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay

darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its

farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine

with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when

decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon. At

the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine

that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered red shreds of flesh

that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of Primrose

Hill.

I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now

in birds, stood those other two Martians that I had seen overnight,

just as death had overtaken them. The one had died, even as it had been

crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last to die, and its voice

had gone on perpetually until the force of its machinery was exhausted.

They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in the

brightness of the rising sun.

All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting

destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have only

seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine

the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.

Eastward, over the blackened ruins of the Albert Terrace and the

splintered spire of the church, the sun blazed dazzling in a clear sky,

and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs caught

the light and glared with a white intensity.

Northward were Kilburn and Hampsted, blue and crowded with houses;

westward the great city was dimmed; and southward, beyond the Martians,

the green waves of Regent’s Park, the Langham Hotel, the dome of the

Albert Hall, the Imperial Institute, and the giant mansions of the

Brompton Road came out clear and little in the sunrise, the jagged

ruins of Westminster rising hazily beyond. Far away and blue were the

Surrey hills, and the towers of the Crystal Palace glittered like two

silver rods. The dome of St. Paul’s was 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.