In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to
tell of the experiences of my brother that all through the last two
chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at
Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke. There I will
resume. We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day the day
of the panic in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black Smoke
from the rest of the world. We could do nothing but wait in aching
inactivity during those two weary days.
My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife. I figured her at
Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as a dead man. I
paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off
from her, of all that might happen to her in my absence. My cousin I
knew was brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of man
to realise danger quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now was
not bravery, but circumspection. My only consolation was to believe
that the Martians were moving Londonward and away from her. Such vague
anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful. I grew very weary and
irritable with the curate s perpetual ejaculations; I tired of the
sight of his selfish despair. After some ineffectual remonstrance I
kept away from him, staying in a room evidently a children s
schoolroom containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When he followed me
thither, I went to a box room at the top of the house and, in order to
be alone with my aching miseries, locked myself in.
We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the
morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house on
Sunday evening a face at a window and moving lights, and later the
slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what
became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke
drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer
and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house
that hid us.
A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff with a
jet of superheated steam that hissed against the walls, smashed all the
windows it touched, and scalded the curate s hand as he fled out of the
front room. When at last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked
out again, the country northward was as though a black snowstorm had
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