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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 25. THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL, Part 2
I stared, astonished, and I was deeply moved by the man's determination.
"Great God!" I cried.
"But you're a real man!" And suddenly I grabbed his hand.
"Eh!" he said, with his eyes shining.
"I've thought it all out, haven't I?"
"Go on," I said.
"Well, those who want to escape being caught must get ready."
"I'm getting ready."
"Mind you, not all of us are made for being wild beasts, and that's what it's got to be."
"That's why I watched you. I had my doubts because you're thin and I didn't know it was you or how you'd been buried."
"All those people who lived in these houses and the damn little office workers down that way would be no good, they have no spirit."
"A man without proud dreams or proud desires is only fear and caution, the Martians will be a gift for such people, easy cages and fattening food".
He said, with a sort of dark satisfaction.
"There'll be plenty of sentiment and religion loose among them."
"There are hundreds of things I saw with my eyes that I've only begun to see clearly these last few days."
"There are lots who will take things as they're - fat and stupid."
"And lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something."
"Many people feel they ought to do something."
"The weak, and those who overthink, turn to a do-nothing religion."
"They act pious and superior."
"They accept persecution and the will of the Lord."
"Very likely you've seen the same thing."
"It's energy in a storm of fear, and turned completely inside out."
"These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety."
"And those of a less simple sort will add a bit of - what's it? - eroticism."
He paused, looking out over the dark city, his face troubled and silent.
"Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them."
"Train them to do tricks - who knows? - get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed."
"And some, maybe, they'll train to hunt us."
"No," I cried, "that's impossible! No human being - "
"What's the good of going on with such lies?" said the artilleryman.
"There are men who'd do it cheerfully. What nonsense to pretend there aren't!"
And I gave in to his belief.
"If they come after me," he said.
"Lord, if they come after me!" And he fell into a dark silence.
I sat thinking about these things, I couldn't find anything to argue against this man's reasoning.
Before the invasion, no one would have doubted my mental superiority over him, I, a known writer on philosophy, he, a common soldier.
And yet he had already formed an idea of the situation that I had hardly understood.
"What are you doing?" I said after a while.
"What plans have you made?"
He hesitated, staring at the spade in his hands, unsure what to say next.
"Well, it's like this," he said.
"What do we have to do?"
"We have to invent a sort of life where men can live and have children and be safe enough to raise them."
"Yes - wait a bit, and I'll make it clearer what I think ought to be done."
"The tame ones will go like all tame animals, and in a few generations they'll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid - rubbish!"
"The risk is that we who stay wild will go savage and degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat."
"You see, how I mean to live is underground. I've been thinking about the drains, cellars, vaults, stores, railway tunnels and subways under this London".
"We form a group - strong, clean-minded men. We're not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again."
"As you meant me to go?"
"Well - I talked it over, didn't I?"
"We won't argue about that. Go on."
"Those who stay obey orders."
"We also want strong, clean-minded women - mothers and teachers."
"No lazy ladies - no blasted rolling eyes."
"We can't have any weak or silly people."
"Life is real again, and the useless and troublesome and harmful have to die."
"They ought to die."
"They ought to be willing to die."
"It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and damage the race."
"And they can't be happy."
"Besides, dying isn't so terrible."
"It's the fear that makes it bad."
"And in all those places we'll gather."
"Our district will be London."
"We may even be able to keep watch and go out in the open when the Martians stay away."
"We might play cricket then, that is how we'll try to save the race."
"But saving the race alone is nothing, that would be only being rats, saving our knowledge matters more."
"That's where men like you come in, there are books and models, and we must make great safe places deep down and get those books."
"We must go to the British Museum and collect science books and ideas, not novels and poetry rubbish, and keep up our science."
"We must also watch the Martians, send some as spies who may be caught, and most importantly leave the Martians alone and not steal."
"And they won't hunt us down if they have all they want, and think we're just harmless pests."
The artilleryman paused and put a brown hand on my arm.
After all, we may not have much to learn before.
Just imagine this, four or five of their fighting machines suddenly starting off.
Heat-Rays would fire right and left, with not a Martian inside them.
Not a Martian in them, but men - men who have learned how.
It may be in my time, even - those men.
Imagine having one of those lovely things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free! Imagine having it under control!
What would it matter if you smashed to pieces at the end of the run, after a wild adventure like that?
I reckon the Martians'll open their beautiful eyes!
Can't you see them, man? Can't you see them hurrying, hurrying - puffing and blowing and shouting to their other mechanical things?
Something out of order in every case, and swish, bang, rattle, swish!
"Just as they're fumbling with it, swish comes the Heat-Ray, and, look! man has come back to his own."
For a while, the bold imagination of the artilleryman, and the tone of confidence and courage he took, completely controlled my mind.
I believed without hesitation both in his prediction of human destiny and in the possibility of his astonishing plan.
And the reader who thinks me weak and foolish must compare his steady position reading with all his thoughts on his subject.
Mine was hiding fearfully in the bushes, listening and distracted by worry.
We talked in this way through the early morning hours.
Later, we crept out of the bushes.
After scanning the sky for Martians, we hurried quickly to the house on Putney Hill.
That was where he had made his hiding place.
It was the coal cellar of the place.
I saw the work he had spent a week on.
It was a hole hardly ten yards long, which he planned to reach to the main drain on Putney Hill.
I had my first idea of the gap between his dreams and his abilities.
I could have dug such a hole in a day.
But I believed in him enough to work with him all that morning until past midday at his digging.
We had a garden wheelbarrow and threw the earth we removed against the kitchen stove.
We refreshed ourselves with a tin of mock-turtle soup and wine from the nearby pantry.
I found a strange relief from the painful strangeness of the world in this steady work.
As we worked, I turned his plan over in my mind, and soon objections and doubts began to appear.
But I worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again.
After an hour's work, I began to wonder how far we had to dig to reach the sewer and if we'd miss it.
My immediate problem was why we should dig such a long tunnel.
It seemed possible to enter the drain at once through a manhole and work back to the house.
It also seemed to me that the house was badly chosen, and required an unnecessary length of tunnel.
And just as I was beginning to face these things, the artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.
"We're working well," he said.
He put down his spade and wiped the sweat from his brow, breathing hard.
"Let's take a break," he said.
"I think it's time we looked around from the roof of the house."
I wanted to continue, and after a little hesitation he picked up his spade again.
And then suddenly I was struck by a thought.
I stopped, and so did he at once.
"Why were you walking around the common," I said, "instead of being here?"
"Getting some air," he said.
"I was coming back. It's safer at night."
"But the work?"
"Oh, one can't always work," he said, and in a flash I saw the man clearly.
He hesitated, holding his spade, eyes fixed on the dark street below.
"We ought to look around now," he said, "because if any come near, they may hear the spades and drop on us without warning."
I no longer felt like arguing, we went together to the roof and stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door.
No Martians were to be seen anywhere in the sky or on the ground.
And we dared to go out on the tiles, and slipped down under the shelter of the low wall.
From this position, a group of bushes hid the greater part of Putney.
But we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the low parts of Lambeth flooded and red.
The red creeper climbed the trees around the old palace, their branches were thin and dead, covered with dried leaves.
It was strange how completely both these things depended on flowing water for their growth.
Around us, neither had gained a foothold.
Laburnums, pink mayflowers, snowballs, and trees of arbor-vitae, rose out of laurels and hydrangeas, green and bright in the sunlight.
Beyond Kensington, thick smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northward hills.
The artilleryman began to tell me about the sort of people who still remained in London.
"One night last week," he said, "some fools got the electric light working".
All Regent Street and the Circus were blazing, crowded with painted and ragged drunkards.
"Men and women danced and shouted until dawn." A man who was there told me.
And as the day came, they became aware of a fighting-machine standing near the Langham and looking down at them.
Heaven knows how long he had been there.
It must have given some of them a nasty shock.
"He came down the road towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk or frightened to run away."
A strange glimpse of a time that no history will ever fully describe!
From that, in answer to my questions, he came back to his grand plans again.
He grew enthusiastic, he talked so well about the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than half believed in him again.
But now that I was beginning to understand something of his character, I could guess the importance he placed on doing nothing too quickly.
And I noticed that now there was no question that he personally was to capture and fight the great machine.
After a time, we went down to the cellar.
Neither of us seemed ready to start digging again, and when he suggested a meal, I was happy to agree.
He suddenly became very generous, and when we had eaten, he went away and returned with some excellent cigars.
We lit these, and his optimism glowed.
He was inclined to see my coming as a great event.
"There's some champagne in the cellar," he said.
"We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy," I said.
"No," he said.
"I'm host today. Champagne! Great God! We've a heavy enough task ahead of us! Let's take a rest and gather strength while we can. Look at these blistered hands!"
And following this idea of a holiday, he insisted on playing cards after we had eaten.
He taught me euchre, and after dividing London between us - I taking the northern side.
He the southern - we played for parish points.
As strange and foolish as this will seem to the serious reader, it's absolutely true.
And what's more remarkable, I found the card game and several others we played extremely interesting.
Strange mind of man! Our species was on the edge of destruction or terrible degradation.
We had no clear future ahead except the chance of a horrible death.
Yet we could sit following the chance of this painted cardboard.
We played the "joker" with vivid delight.
Afterwards, he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough chess games.
When dark came, we decided to take the risk, and lit a lamp.
After an endless series of games, we had supper, and the artilleryman finished the champagne.
We went on smoking the cigars, he was no longer the energetic savior of his species that I had met in the morning.
He was still optimistic, but it was a less active, more thoughtful optimism.
I remember he ended with a toast to my health, given in a speech of little variety and many pauses.
I took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the lights he had spoken of that blazed so greenly along the Highgate hills.
At first, I stared without understanding across the London valley.
The northern hills were covered in darkness.
The fires near Kensington glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed up and vanished in the deep blue night.
All the rest of London was black.
Then, nearer, I saw a strange light, a pale, violet-purple glowing light, shaking under the night breeze.
For a moment I couldn't understand it, and then I knew that it must be the red weed from which this weak light came.
With that realization, my sleeping sense of wonder, my sense of the size of things, woke up again.
I looked from that to Mars, red clear, glowing high in the west, then gazed long at the darkness of Hampstead and Highgate.
I stayed a very long time on the roof, wondering at the strange changes of the day.
I remembered my mental states from the midnight prayer to the foolish card-playing.
I had a violent change of feeling.
I remember I threw away the cigar with a certain wasteful symbolism.
My foolishness came to me with glaring exaggeration.
I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind, I was filled with regret.
I decided to leave this strange, undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and greed, and to go on into London.
There, it seemed to me, I had the best chance of learning what the Martians and my fellow men were doing.
I was still on the roof when the late moon rose.