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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 7. HOW I REACHED HOME
For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress of bumping into trees and falling through the heather.
All around me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians.
That pitiless sword of heat seemed to spin back and forth, waving overhead before it came down and struck me dead.
I came to the road between the crossroads and Horsell, and I ran along it to the crossroads.
At last I could go no further.
I was exhausted by the violence of my emotion and my flight, and I staggered and fell by the roadside.
That was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the gasworks, I fell and lay still.
I must have stayed there some time.
I sat up, strangely confused, For a moment, perhaps, I couldn't clearly understand how I came there.
My terror had fallen from me like a piece of clothing.
My hat was gone, and my collar had burst from its fastener.
A few minutes before there had been only three real things before me, the immensity of the night, space and nature.
The other two were my own weakness and pain, and the near approach of death.
Now it was as if something turned over, and the point of view changed suddenly.
There was no clear 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 if these latter things had really happened, I couldn't believe it.
I rose and walked unsteadily up the steep slope of the bridge.
My mind was blank with wonder, My muscles and nerves seemed drained of their strength.
I dare say I staggered like a drunk man.
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 wanted to speak to him, but I didn't.
I answered his greeting with a meaningless mumble and went on over the bridge.
Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing cloud of white, fire-lit smoke, and a long line of lighted windows went flying south.
Clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it was 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, couldn't be.
Perhaps I'm a man of unusual moods.
I don't know how far my experience is common.
At times I suffer from the strangest sense of separation from myself and the world around me.
I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere far away, out of time, out of space, out of stress and tragedy.
This feeling was very strong upon me that night.
Here was another side to my dream.
But the trouble was the strange mismatch of this peace 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 lit.
I stopped at the group of people.
"What news from the common?" I said.
There were two men and a woman at the gate.
"Eh?" said one of the men, turning.
"What news from the common?" I said.
"Aren't you just been there?" asked the man.
"People seem fairly silly about the common," said the woman over the gate.
"What's it all about?"
"Haven't you heard of the men from Mars?" I said.
"The creatures from Mars?"
"Quite enough," said the woman over the gate.
"Thanks." And all three of them laughed.
I felt foolish and angry, I tried and found I couldn't 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 tired and worn was I.
I went into the dining room, sat, drank wine, and when I could collect myself I told her what I had seen.
The dinner, which was a cold one, had already been served, and it stayed untouched on the table while I told my story.
"There's one thing," I said, to calm the fears I had raised.
"They're the slowest things I ever saw crawl."
"They may keep the pit and kill people who come near them, but they can't 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 didn't find my experience unbelievable.
When I saw how deadly white her face was, I stopped suddenly.
"They may come here," she said again and again.
I urged her to drink some wine, and I tried to reassure her.
"They can barely move," I said.
I began to comfort her and myself by repeating all that Ogilvy had told me about the impossibility of the Martians establishing themselves on the earth.
In particular I stressed the gravitational difficulty.
On the surface of the earth, the force of gravity is three times what it's on the surface of Mars.
A Martian, therefore, would weigh three times more than on Mars, although his muscular strength would be the same.
His own body would be a heavy weight to him, that, indeed, was the general opinion.
Both The Times and the Daily Telegraph, for example, 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 than Mars's does.
The energizing effects of this extra oxygen on the Martians did much to balance the increased weight of their bodies.
Secondly, we overlooked that the Martians' mechanical intelligence could do without muscle power.
But I didn't consider these points at the time, and so my reasoning was strongly against the chances of the invaders.
With wine and food, the comfort of my own table, and the need to reassure my wife, I grew by small degrees brave and secure.
"They have done a foolish thing," I said, touching my wineglass.
"They're dangerous because, no doubt, they're mad with terror. Perhaps they expected to find no living things, certainly no intelligent living things."
"A shell in the pit," I said, "if the worst comes to the worst, will kill them all."
The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my senses in a state of high alert.
I remember that dinner table with extraordinary clearness even now.
My dear wife looked at me from under the pink lamp shade.
Her sweet, anxious face was clear in my mind.
The white cloth had silver and glass tableware.
In those days, even philosophical writers had many little luxuries.
The deep red wine in my glass was also clear.
At the end of it I sat, cracking nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and criticizing the short-sighted fear of the Martians.
So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have ruled in its nest and discussed the arrival of that ship of pitiless sailors.
"We'll peck them to death tomorrow, my dear."
I didn't know it, but that was the last civilized dinner I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days.