By the look of Charcott Old House it had once been a fortified manor. Refortification was now under way. At some time in the past the encircling moat had been drained. Stephen, however, was of the opinion that he had successfully ruined the drainage system so that it would fill up again by degrees. It was his plan to blow up such parts as had been filled in, and thus complete the re-encirclement. Our news, suggesting that this might not be necessary, induced a slight wistfulness in him, and a look of disappointment. The stone walls of the house were thick. At least three of the windows in the front displayed machine guns, and he pointed out two more mounted on the roof. Inside the main door was stacked a small arsenal of mortars and bombs, and, as he proudly showed us, several flame-throwers.
‘We found an arms depot,’ he explained, ‘and spent a day getting this lot together.’
As I looked over the stuff I realized for the first time that the catastrophe by its very thoroughness had been more merciful than the things that would have followed a slightly lesser disaster. Had ten or fifteen per cent of the population remained unharmed it was very likely that little communities like this would indeed have found themselves fighting off starving gangs in order to preserve their own lives. As things were, however, Stephen had probably made his warlike preparations in vain. But there was one appliance that could be put to good use. I pointed to the flame-throwers.
‘Those might be handy for triffids,’ I said.
He grinned.
‘You’re right. Very effective. The one thing we’ve used them for. And incidentally the one thing I know that really makes a triffid beat it. You can go on firing at them until they’re shot to bits, and they don’t budge. I suppose they don’t know where the destruction’s coming from. But one warm lick from this, and they’re plunging off fit to bust themselves.’
‘Have you had a lot of trouble with them?’ I asked.
It seemed that they had not. From time to time one, perhaps two or three would approach, and be scorched away. On their expeditions they had had several lucky escapes, but usually they were out of their vehicles only in built-up areas where there was little likelihood of prowling triffids.
That night after dark we all went up to the roof. It was too early for the moon. We looked out upon an utterly black landscape. Search it as we would, not one of us was able to discover the least pinpoint of a tell-tale light. Nor could any of the party recall ever having seen a trace of smoke by day. I was feeling depressed when we descended again to the lamplit living-room.
‘There’s only one thing for it, then,’ Coker said. ‘We’ll have to divide the district up into areas, and search them.’
But he did not say it with conviction. I suspected that he was thinking it likely, as I was, that the Beadley party would continue to show a deliberate light by night, and some other sign – probably a smoke column – by day.
However, no one had any better suggestion to make, so we got down to the business of dividing the map up into sections, doing our best to contrive that each should include some high ground to give an extensive view beyond it.
The following day we went into the town in a lorry, and from there dispersed in smaller cars for the search.
That was, without a doubt, the most melancholy day I had spent since I had wandered about Westminster searching for traces of Josella there.
Just at first it wasn’t too bad. There was the open road in the sunlight, the fresh green of early summer. There were signposts which pointed to ‘Exeter and The West’, and other places as if they still pursued their habitual lives. There were sometimes, though rarely, birds to be seen. And there were wild flowers beside the lanes, looking as they had always looked.
But the other side of the picture was not so good. There were fields in which cattle lay dead or wandered blindly, and untended cows lowed in pain; where sheep in their easy discouragement had stood resignedly to die rather than pull themselves free from bramble or barbed wire, and other sheep grazed erratically, or starved with looks of reproach in their blind eyes.
Farms were becoming unpleasant places to pass closely. For safety’s sake I was giving myself only an inch of ventilation at the top of the window, but I closed even that whenever I saw a farm beside the road ahead.
Triffids were at large. Sometimes I saw them crossing fields or noticed them inactive against hedges. In more than one farmyard they had found the middens to their liking and enthroned themselves there while they waited for the dead stock to attain the right stage of putrescence. I saw them now with a disgust that they had never roused in me before. Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created and which the rest of us in our careless greed had cultured all over the world. One could not even blame nature for them. Somehow they had been bred – just as we bred ourselves beautiful flowers, or grotesque parodies of dogs…I began to loathe them now for more than their carrion-eating habits – they, more than anything else, seemed able to profit and flourish on our disaster…
As the day went on, my sense of loneliness grew. On any hill or rise I stopped to examine the country as far as field-glasses would show me. Once I saw smoke and went to the source to find a small railway train burnt out on the line – I still do not know how that could be, for there was no one near it. Another time a flag upon a staff sent me hurrying to a house to find it silent – though not empty. Yet another time a white flutter of movement on a distant hillside caught my eye, but when I turned the glasses on it I found it to be half a dozen sheep milling in panic while a triffid struck continually and ineffectively across their woolly backs. Nowhere could I see a sign of living human beings.
When I stopped for food I did not linger longer than I needed. I ate it quickly, listening to a silence that was beginning to get on my nerves, and anxious to be on my way again with at least the sound of the car for company.
One began to fancy things. Once I saw an arm waving from a window, but when I got there it was only a branch swaying in front of the window. I saw a man stop in the middle of a field and turn to watch me go by; but the glasses showed me that he couldn’t have stopped or turned: he was a scarecrow. I heard voices calling to me, just discernible above the engine noise; I stopped and switched off. There were no voices, nothing; but far, far away, the plaint of an unmilked cow.
It came to me that here and there, dotted about the country, there must be men and women who were believing themselves to be utterly alone, sole survivors. I felt as sorry for them as for anyone else in the disaster.
During the afternoon, with lowered spirits and little hope, I kept doggedly on quartering my section of the map because I dared not risk failing to make my inner certainty sure. At last, however, I satisfied myself that if any sizeable party did exist in the area I had been allotted it was deliberately hiding. It had not been possible for me to cover every lane and by-road, but I was willing to swear that the sound of my by no means feeble horn had been heard in every acre of my sector. I finished up, and drove back to the place where we had parked the lorry, in the gloomiest mood I had yet known. I found that none of the others had shown up yet, so to pass the time, and because I needed it to keep out the spiritual cold, I turned into the nearby pub and poured myself a good brandy.
Stephen was the next. The expedition seemed to have affected him much as it had me, for he shook his head in answer to my questioning look, and made straight for the bottle I had opened. Ten minutes later the radio-ambitionist joined us. He brought with him a dishevelled, wild-eyed young man who appeared not to have washed or shaved for several weeks. This person had been on the road; it was, it seemed, his only profession. One evening, he could not say for certain of what day, he had found a fine comfortable barn in which to spend the night. Having done somewhat more than his usual quota of miles that day he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he lay down. The next morning he had awakened in a nightmare, and he still seemed a little uncertain whether it was the world or himself that was crazy. We reckoned he was, a little, anyway, but he still retained a clear knowledge of the use of beer.
Another half hour or so passed, and then Coker arrived. He was accompanied by an Alsatian puppy and an unbelievable old lady. She was dressed in what was obviously her best. Her cleanliness and precision were as notable as were the lack of them in our other recruit. She paused with a genteel hesitation on the threshold of the bar-parlour. Coker performed the introduction.
‘This is Mrs Forcett, sole proprietor of Forcett’s Universal Stores, in a collection of about ten cottages, two pubs, and a church, known as Chippington Durney – and Mrs Forcett can cook. Boy, can she cook!’
Mrs Forcett acknowledged us with dignity, advanced with confidence, seated herself with circumspection, and consented to be pressed to a glass of port, followed by another glass of port.
In answer to our questions she confessed to sleeping with unusual soundness during the fatal evening and the night that followed. Into the precise cause of this she did not enter, and we did not inquire. She had continued to sleep, since nothing had occurred to awaken her, through half the following day. When she awoke she was feeling unwell, and so did not attempt to get up until mid-afternoon. It had seemed to her curious but providential that no one had required her in the shop. When she did get up and go to the door she had seen ‘one of them horrid triffid things’ standing in her garden, and a man lying on the path just outside her gate – at least, she could see his legs. She had been about to go out to him when she had seen the triffid stir, and she had slammed the door to just in time. It had clearly been a nasty moment for her, and the recollection of it agitated her into pouring herself a third glass of port.
After that, she had settled down to wait until someone should come to remove both the triffid and the man. They seemed a strangely long time in coming, but she had been able to live comfortably enough upon the contents of her shop. She had still been waiting, she explained as she poured herself a fourth glass of port with a nice absentmindedness, when Coker, interested by the smoke from her fire, had shot the top off the triffid, and investigated.
She had given Coker a meal, and he in return had given her advice. It had not been easy to make her understand the true state of things. In the end he had suggested that she should take a look up the village, keeping a wary eye for triffids, and that he would be back at five o’clock to see how she felt about it. He had returned to find her dressed up, her bag packed, and herself quite ready to leave.
Back in Charcott Old House that evening we gathered again around the map. Coker started to mark out new areas of search. We watched him without enthusiasm. It was Stephen who said what all of us, including, I think, Coker himself, were thinking:
‘Look here, we’ve been over all the ground for a circle of some fifteen miles between us. It’s clear they aren’t in the immediate neighbourhood. Either your information is wrong, or they decided not to stop here, and went on. In my view it would be a waste of time to go on searching the way we did today.’
Coker laid down the compasses he was using.
‘Then what do you suggest?’
‘Well, it seems to me we could cover a lot of the district pretty quickly from the air, and well enough. You can bet your life that anyone who hears an aircraft engine is going to turn out and make a sign of some kind.’
Coker shook his head. ‘Now, why didn’t we think of that before. It ought to be a helicopter, of course – but where do we get one, and who’s going to fly it?’
‘Oh, I can make one of them things go all right,’ said the radio man, confidently.
There was something in his tone.
‘Have you ever flown one?’ asked Coker.
‘No,’ admitted the radio man, ‘but I reckon there’d not be a lot to it, once you got the knack.’
‘H’m,’ said Coker, looking at him with reserve.
Stephen recalled the locations of two RAF stations not far away, and that there had been an air-taxi business operating from Yeovil.
In spite of our doubts the radio man was as good as his word. He seemed to have complete confidence that his instinct for mechanism would not let him down. After practising for half an hour he took the helicopter off, and flew it back to Charcott.
For four days the machine hovered around in widening circles. On two of them Coker observed, on the other two I replaced him. In all, we discovered ten little groups of people. None of them knew anything of the Beadley party, and none of them contained Josella. As we found each lot we landed. Usually they were in twos and threes. The largest was seven. They would greet us in hopeful excitement, but soon, when they found that we represented only a group similar to their own, and were not the spearhead of a rescue party on the grand scale their interest would lapse. We could offer them little that they had not got already. Some of them became irrationally abusive and threatening in their disappointment, but most simply dropped back into despondency. As a rule they showed little wish to join up with other parties, and were inclined rather to lay hands on what they could, building themselves into refugees as comfortably as possible while they waited for the arrival of the Americans who were bound to find a way. There seemed to be a widespread and fixed idea about this. Our suggestions that any surviving Americans would be likely to have their hands more than full at home was received as so much wet-blanketry. The Americans, they assured us, would never have allowed such a thing to happen in their country. Nevertheless, and in spite of this Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers, we left each party with a map showing them the approximate positions of groups we had already discovered in case they should change their minds, and think about getting together for self-help.
As a task, the flights were far from enjoyable, but at least they were to be preferred to lonely scouting on the ground. However, at the end of the fruitless fourth day it was decided to abandon the search.
At least, that was what the rest of them decided. I did not feel the same way about it. My quest was personal, theirs was not. Whoever they found, now or eventually, would be strangers to them. I was searching for Beadley’s party as a means, not an end in itself. If I should find them and discover that Josella was not with them, then I should go on searching. But I could not expect the rest to devote any more time to searching purely on my behalf.
Curiously I realized that in all this I had met no other person who was searching for someone else. Every one of them had been, save for the accident of Stephen and his girl friend, snapped clean away from friends or relatives to link him with the past, and was beginning a new life with people who were strangers. Only I, as far as I could see, had promptly formed a new link – and that so briefly that I had scarcely been aware how important it was to me at the time…
Once the decision to abandon the search had been taken, Coker said:
‘All right. Then that brings us to thinking about what we are going to do for ourselves.’
‘Which means laying in stores against the winter, and just going on as we are. What else should we do?’ asked Stephen.
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Coker told him. ‘Maybe it’d be all right for a while – but what happens afterwards?’
‘If we do run short of stocks, well, there’s plenty more lying around,’ said the radio man.
‘The Americans will be here before Christmas,’ said Stephen’s girl friend.
‘Listen,’ Coker told her patiently. ‘Just put the Americans in the jam-tomorrow-pie-in-the-sky department awhile, will you. Try to imagine a world in which there aren’t any Americans – can you do that?’
The girl stared at him.
‘But there must be,’ she said.
Coker sighed sadly. He turned his attention to the radio man.
‘There won’t always be those stores. The way I see it, we’ve been given a flying start in a new kind of world. We’re endowed with a capital of enough of everything to begin with, but that isn’t going to last for ever. We couldn’t eat up all the stuff that’s there for the taking, not in generations – if it would keep. But it isn’t going to keep. A lot of it is going to go bad pretty rapidly. And not only food. Everything is going, more slowly, but quite surely, to drop in pieces. If we want fresh stuff to eat next year we shall have to grow it ourselves, and it may seem a long way off now, but there’s going to come a time when we shall have to grow everything ourselves. There’ll come a time, too, when all the tractors are worn out or rusted, and there’s no more petrol to run them, anyway – when we’ll come right down to nature and bless horses – if we’ve got ’em.
‘This is a pause – just a heaven-sent pause – while we get over the first shock and start to collect ourselves, but it’s no more than a pause. Later, we’ll have to plough, still later we’ll have to learn how to make plough-shares, later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt iron to make the shares. What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we can – if we can – make good all that we wear out. Not until then shall we be able to stop ourselves on the trail that’s leading down to savagery. But once we can do that, then maybe we’ll begin to crawl slowly up again.’
He looked round the circle to see if we were following him.
‘We can do that – if we will. The most valuable part of our flying start is knowledge. That’s the short cut to save us starting where our ancestors did. We’ve got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.’
The rest were looking at Coker curiously. It was the first time they had heard him in one of his oratorical moods.
‘Now,’ he went on, ‘from my reading of history, the thing you have to have to use knowledge is leisure. Where everybody has to work hard just to get a living and there is no leisure to think, knowledge stagnates, and people with it. The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive – by people who appear to be living almost entirely on the work of others, but are, in fact, a long-term investment. Learning grew up in the cities and in great institutions – it was the labour of the countryside that supported them. Do you agree with that?’
Stephen knitted his brows.
‘More or less – but I don’t see what you’re getting at.’
‘It’s this – the economic size. A community of our present size cannot hope to do more than exist and decline. If we stay here as we are, just ten of us now, the end is, quite inevitably, a gradual and useless fade-out. If there are children we shall be able to spare only enough time from our labour to give them just a rudimentary education; one generation further, and we shall have savages or clods. To hold our own, to make any use at all of the knowledge in the libraries we must have the teacher, the doctor, and the leader, and we must be able to support them while they help us.’
‘Well?’ said Stephen, after a pause.
‘I’ve been thinking of that place Bill and I saw at Tynsham. We’ve told you about it. The woman who is trying to run it wanted help, and she wanted it badly. She has about fifty, or sixty people on her hands, and a dozen or so of them able to see. That way she can’t do it. She knows she can’t – but she wasn’t going to admit it to us. She wasn’t going to put herself in our debt by asking us to stay. But she’d be very glad if we were to go back there after all, and ask to be admitted.’
‘Good Lord,’ I said. ‘You don’t think she deliberately put us on the wrong track?’
‘I don’t know. I may be doing her an injustice, but it is an odd thing that we’ve not seen or heard a single sign of Beadley and Co., isn’t it? Anyhow, whether she meant it or not, that’s the way it works, because I’ve decided to go back there. If you want my reasons, here they are – the two main ones. First, unless that place is taken in hand it’s going to crash, which would be a waste and a shame for all those people there. The other is that it is much better situated than this. It has a farm which should not take a lot of putting in order; it is practically self-contained, but could be extended if necessary. This place would cost a lot more labour to start and to work.
‘More important, it is big enough to afford time for teaching – teaching both the present blind there, and the sighted children they’ll have later on. I believe it can be done, and I’ll do my best to do it – and if the haughty Miss Durrant can’t take it, she can go jump in the river.
‘Now the point is this. I think I could do it as it stands – but I know that if the lot of us were to go we could get the place reorganized and running in a few weeks. Then we’d be living in a community that’s going to grow and make a damned good attempt to hold its own. The alternative is to stay in a small party which is going to decline and get more desperately lonely as time goes on. So, how about it?’
There was some debate and inquiry for details, but not much doubt. Those of us who had been out on the search had a glimpse of the awful loneliness that might come. No one was attached to the present house. It had been chosen for its defensible qualities, and had little more to commend it. Most of them could feel the oppression of isolation growing round them already. The thought of wider and more varied company was in itself attractive. The end of an hour found the discussion dealing with questions of transport and details of the removal, and the decision to adopt Coker’s suggestion had more or less made itself. Only Stephen’s girl friend was doubtful.
‘This place Tynsham – it’s pretty much off the map?’ she asked, uneasily.
‘Don’t you worry,’ Coker reassured her. ‘It’s marked on all the best American maps.’
It was some time in the early hours of the following morning that I knew I was not going to Tynsham with the rest. Later, perhaps I would, but not yet…
My first inclination had been to accompany them if only for the purpose of choking the truth out of Miss Durrant regarding the Beadley party’s destination. But then I had to make again the disturbing admission that I did not know that Josella was with them – and, indeed, that all the information I had been able to collect so far suggested that she was not. She had pretty certainly not passed through Tynsham. But if she had not gone in search of them, then where had she gone? It was scarcely likely that there had been a second direction in the University Building, one that I had missed…
And then, as if it had been a flash of light, I recalled the discussion we had had in our commandeered flat. I could see her sitting there in her blue party frock, with the light of the candles catching the diamonds as we talked…‘What about the Sussex Downs? – I know a lovely old farmhouse on the north side…’ And then I knew what I must do…
I told Coker about it in the morning. He was sympathetic, but obviously anxious not to raise my hopes too much.
‘Okay. You do as you think best,’ he agreed. ‘I hope – well, anyway, you’ll know where we are, and you can both come on to Tynsham and help to put that woman through the hoop until she sees sense.’
That morning the weather broke. The rain was falling in sheets as I climbed once more into the familiar lorry. Yet I was feeling elated and hopeful; it could have rained ten times harder without depressing me or altering my plan. Coker came out to see me off. I knew why he made a point of it, for I was aware without his telling me that the memory of his first rash plan and its consequences troubled him. He stood beside the cab with his hair flattened and the water trickling down his neck, and held up his hand.
‘Take it easy, Bill. There aren’t any ambulances these days, and she’ll prefer you to arrive all in one piece. Good luck – and my apologies for everything to the lady when you find her.’
The word was ‘when’, but the tone was ‘if’.
I wished them well at Tynsham. Then I let in the clutch and splashed away down the muddy drive.
13
Journey in Hope
The morning was infected with minor mishaps. First it was water in the carburettor. Then I contrived to travel a dozen miles north under the impression I was going east, and before I had that fully rectified I was in trouble with the ignition system on a bleak upland road miles from anywhere. Either these delays or a natural reaction did a lot to spoil the hopeful mood in which I had started. By the time I had the trouble straightened out it was one o’clock, and the day had cleared up.
The sun came out. Everything looked bright and refreshed, but even that, and the fact that for the next twenty miles all went smoothly, did not shift the mood of depression that was closing over me again. Now I was really on my own I could not shut out the sense of loneliness. It came upon me again as it had on that day when we had split up to search for Michael Beadley – only with double the force…Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative – an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary…That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary, and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly – that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do…
To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.
It needed far more resistance now than it had before. Only the strength of my hope that I would find companionship at my journey’s end kept me from turning back to find relief from the strain in the presence of Coker and the others.
The sights which I saw by the way had little or nothing to do with it. Horrible though some of them were, I was hardened to such things by now. The horror had left them just as the horror which broods over great battlefields fades into history. Nor did I any longer see these things as part of a vast, impressive tragedy. My struggle was all a personal conflict with the instincts of my kind. A continual defensive action, with no victory possible. I knew in my very heart that I would not be able to sustain myself for long alone.
To give myself occupation I drove faster than I should. In some small town with a forgotten name I rounded a corner and ran straight into a van which blocked the whole street. Luckily my own tough lorry suffered no more than scratches, but the two vehicles managed to hitch themselves together with diabolical ingenuity so that it was an awkward business singlehanded, and in a confined space, to separate them. It was a problem which took me a full hour to solve, and did me good by turning my mind to practical matters.
After that I kept to a more cautious pace except for a few minutes soon after I entered the New Forest. The cause of that was a glimpse through the trees of a helicopter cruising at no great height. It was set to cross my course some way ahead. By ill luck the trees there grew close to the sides of the road, and must have hidden it almost completely from the air. I put on a spurt, but by the time I reached more open ground the machine was no more than a speck floating away in the distance to the north. Nevertheless, even the sight of it seemed to give me some support.
A few miles further on I ran through a small village which was disposed neatly about a triangular green. At first sight it was as charming in its mixture of thatched and red-tiled cottages with their flowering gardens as something out of a picture-book. But I did not look too closely into the gardens as I passed; too many of them showed the alien shape of a triffid towering incongruously among the flowers. I was almost clear of the place when a small figure bounded out of one of the last garden gates and came running up the road towards me, waving both arms. I pulled up, looking around for triffids in a way that was becoming instinctive, picked up my gun, and climbed down.
The child was dressed in a blue cotton frock, white socks, and sandals. She looked about nine or ten years old. A pretty little girl – I could see that even though her dark brown curls were now uncared for, and her face dirtied with smeared tears. She pulled at my sleeve.
‘Please, please,’ she said, urgently, ‘please come and see what’s happened to Tommy.’
I stood staring down at her. The awful loneliness of the day lifted. My mind seemed to break out of the case I had made for it. I wanted to pick her up and hold her to me. I could feel tears close behind my eyes. I held out my hand to her, and she took it. Together we walked back to the gate through which she had gone.
‘Tommy’s there,’ she said, pointing.
A little boy about four years of age lay on the diminutive patch of lawn between the flower-beds. It was quite obvious at a glance why he was there.
‘The thing hit him,’ she said. ‘It hit him and he fell down. And it wanted to hit me when I tried to help him. Horrible thing!’
I looked up and saw the top of a triffid rising above the fence that bordered the garden.
‘Put your hands over your ears. I’m going to make a bang,’ I said.
She did so, and I blasted the top off the triffid.
‘Horrible thing,’ she repeated. ‘Is it dead now?’
I was about to assure her that it was when it began to rattle the little sticks against its stem, just as the one at Steeple Honey had done. As then, I gave it the other barrel to shut it up.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s dead now.’