War of the Worlds

rising, he had been borne down under the horse's hoofs.

"Stop!" screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way,
tried to clutch the bit of the horse.

Before he could get to it, he 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 his whip at my brother, who ran round
behind the cart.  The multitudinous shouting confused his ears.  The
man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to
rise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp
and dead.  My brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a
man on a black horse came to his assistance.

"Get him out of the road," said he; and, clutching the man's collar
with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways.  But he still
clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering
at his 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 man on horseback stopped.  My brother looked up, and the man
with the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his
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.  He released his grip on the
fallen man and jumped back.  He saw anger change to terror on the face
of the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my
brother was borne backward and carried past the entrance of the lane,
and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it.

He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her 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!" he shouted, and began
turning the pony round. "We cannot cross this--hell," he 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 brother saw
the face of the dying man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white
and drawn, and shining with perspiration.  The two women sat silent,
crouching in their seat and shivering.

Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again.  Miss Elphinstone
was white and pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched
even to call upon "George."  My brother was horrified and perplexed.
So soon as they had retreated he realised how urgent and unavoidable
it was to attempt this crossing.  He turned to Miss Elphinstone,
suddenly resolute.

"We must go that way," he said, and led the pony round again.

For the second time that day this girl proved her quality.  To force
their way into the torrent of people, my brother plunged into the
traffic and held back a cab horse, while she 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 brother, with the cabman's whip marks red across
his face and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from
her.

"Point the revolver at the man behind," he said, giving it to her,
"if he presses us too hard.  No!--point it at his horse."

Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right
across the road.  But once in the stream he 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 men even among the coals
behind the engines--going northward along the Great Northern Railway.
My brother 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
brother had come.



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE "THUNDER CHILD"