第25章

"What's the car?" he asked.

"A twenty-horsepower Humber."

"Why, I've driven one for years," said he."By George!" he added."I never thought I'd live to take the whole human race in one load.There's just room for five, as I remember it.Get your things on, and I'll be ready at the door by ten o'clock."Sure enough, at the hour named, the car came purring and crackling from the yard with Lord John at the wheel.I took my seat beside him, while the lady, a useful little buffer state, was squeezed in between the two men of wrath at the back.Then Lord John released his brakes, slid his lever rapidly from first to third, and we sped off upon the strangest drive that ever human beings have taken since man first came upon the earth.

You are to picture the loveliness of nature upon that August day, the freshness of the morning air, the golden glare of the summer sunshine, the cloudless sky, the luxuriant green of the Sussex woods, and the deep purple of heather-clad downs.As you looked round upon the many-coloured beauty of the scene all thought of a vast catastrophe would have passed from your mind had it not been for one sinister sign--the solemn, all-embracing silence.There is a gentle hum of life which pervades a closely-settled country, so deep and constant that one ceases to observe it, as the dweller by the sea loses all sense of the constant murmur of the waves.The twitter of birds, the buzz of insects, the far-off echo of voices, the lowing of cattle, the distant barking of dogs, roar of trains, and rattle of carts--all these form one low, unremitting note, striking unheeded upon the ear.

We missed it now.This deadly silence was appalling.So solemn was it, so impressive, that the buzz and rattle of our motor-car seemed an unwarrantable intrusion, an indecent disregard of this reverent stillness which lay like a pall over and round the ruins of humanity.It was this grim hush, and the tall clouds of smoke which rose here and there over the country-side from smoldering buildings, which cast a chill into our hearts as we gazed round at the glorious panorama of the Weald.

And then there were the dead! At first those endless groups of drawn and grinning faces filled us with a shuddering horror.So vivid and mordant was the impression that I can live over again that slow descent of the station hill, the passing by the nurse-girl with the two babes, the sight of the old horse on his knees between the shafts, the cabman twisted across his seat, and the young man inside with his hand upon the open door in the very act of springing out.Lower down were six reapers all in a litter, their limbs crossing, their dead, unwinking eyes gazing upwards at the glare of heaven.These things I see as in a photograph.But soon, by the merciful provision of nature, the over-excited nerve ceased to respond.The very vastness of the horror took away from its personal appeal.Individuals merged into groups, groups into crowds, crowds into a universal phenomenon which one soon accepted as the inevitable detail of every scene.Only here and there, where some particularly brutal or grotesque incident caught the attention, did the mind come back with a sudden shock to the personal and human meaning of it all.

Above all, there was the fate of the children.That, I remember, filled us with the strongest sense of intolerable injustice.We could have wept--Mrs.Challenger did weep--when we passed a great council school and saw the long trail of tiny figures scattered down the road which led from it.They had been dismissed by their terrified teachers and were speeding for their homes when the poison caught them in its net.Great numbers of people were at the open windows of the houses.In Tunbridge Wells there was hardly one which had not its staring, smiling face.At the last instant the need of air, that very craving for oxygen which we alone had been able to satisfy, had sent them flying to the window.The sidewalks too were littered with men and women, hatless and bonnetless, who had rushed out of the houses.Many of them had fallen in the roadway.It was a lucky thing that in Lord John we had found an expert driver, for it was no easy matter to pick one's way.Passing through the villages or towns we could only go at a walking pace, and once, I remember, opposite the school at Tonbridge, we had to halt some time while we carried aside the bodies which blocked our path.

A few small, definite pictures stand out in my memory from amid that long panorama of death upon the Sussex and Kentish high roads.One was that of a great, glittering motor-car standing outside the inn at the village of Southborough.It bore, as Ishould guess, some pleasure party upon their return from Brighton or from Eastbourne.There were three gaily dressed women, all young and beautiful, one of them with a Peking spaniel upon her lap.With them were a rakish-looking elderly man and a young aristocrat, his eyeglass still in his eye, his cigarette burned down to the stub between the fingers of his begloved hand.Death must have come on them in an instant and fixed them as they sat.Save that the elderly man had at the last moment torn out his collar in an effort to breathe, they might all have been asleep.On one side of the car a waiter with some broken glasses beside a tray was huddled near the step.On the other, two very ragged tramps, a man and a woman, lay where they had fallen, the man with his long, thin arm still outstretched, even as he had asked for alms in his lifetime.One instant of time had put aristocrat, waiter, tramp, and dog upon one common footing of inert and dissolving protoplasm.