Page:Amazing Stories Volume 02 Number 06.pdf/53

lation in movement. It is hard to imagine that host. It had no character of its own. The figures poured out past the corner, and receded with their hacks to the group in the lane. Along the margin came those who were on foot, threatened by the wheels, stumbling in the ditches, blundering into one another. The carts and carriages crowded close upon one another, making little way for those swifter and more impatient vehicles that darted forward every now and then when an opportunity showed itself of doing so, sending the people scattering against the fences and gates of the villas.

"Push on!" was the cry. "Push on! they are coming!"

In one cart stood a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army, gesticulating with his crooked fingers and hawling, "Eternity, eternity!" His voice was hoarse and very loud, so that my brother could hear him long after he was lost to sight in the southward dust. Some of the people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horses and quarreled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst or lay prostrate in the hottoms of the conveyances. The horses' bits were covered with foam, their eyes bloodshot. There were cabs, carriages, shop-carts, waggons, beyond counting; a mail-cart, a road-cleaner's cart marked "Vestry of St. Pancras," a huge timber waggon crowded with roughs. A brewer's dray rumbled by with its two near wheels splashed with recent blood.

"Clear the way!" cried the voices. "Clear the way!"

"Eter-nity! eter-nity!" came echoing up the road.

There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with children that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in dust, their weary faces smeared with tears. With many of these came men, sometimes helpful, sometimes lowering and savage. Fighting side by side with them pushed some weary street outcast in faded hlack rags, wide-eyed, loud-voiced, and foul-mouthed. There were sturdy work. men thrusting their way along, wretched unkempt men clothed like clerks or shopmen, struggling spasmodically, a wounded soldier my brother noticed, men dressed in the clothes of railway porters, one wretched creature in a night-shirt with a coat thrown over it.

BUT, varied as its composition was, certain things all that host had in common. There was fear and pain on their faces, and fear behind them. A tumult up the road, a quarrel for a place in a waggon, sent the whole host of them quickening their pace; even a man so scared and broken that his knees hent under him was galvanized for a moment into renewed activity. The heat and dust had already been at work upon this multitude. Their skins were dry, their lips black and cracked. They were all thirsty, weary, and footsore. And amid the various cries one heard disputes, reproaches, groans of weariness and fatigue; the voices of most of them were hoarse and weak. Through it all ran a refrain:

"Way! way! The Martians are coming!"

Few stopped and came aside from that flood. The lane opened slantingly into the main road with a narrow opening, and had a delusive appearance of coming from the direction of London. Yet a kind of eddy of people drove into its mouth; weaklings elbowed out of the stream, who for the most part rested but a moment hefore plunging into it again. A little way down the lane, with two friends bending over him, lay a man with a bare leg, wrapped ahout with bloody rags. He was a lucky man to have friends.

A little old man, with a gray military moustache and a filthy hlack frock-coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his boot-his sock was hlood-stained-shook out a pehhle, and hobbled on again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw herself under the hedge close hy my hrother, weeping.

"I can't go on! I can't go on!"

My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment, and lifted her up, speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone. So soon as my hrother touched her she hecame quite still, as if frightened.

"Ellen!" shrieked a woman in the crowd, with tears in her voice. "Ellen!" And the child suddenly darted away from my hrother, crying: "Mother!"

"They are coming," said a man on horseback, riding past along the lane.

"Out of the way, there!" bawled a coachman, towering high; and my brother saw a closed carriage turning into the lane.

The people crushed hack on one another to avoid the horse. My hrother pushed the pony and chaise back into the hedge, and the man drove by and stopped at the turn of the way. It was a carriage, with a pole for a pair of horses, but only one was in the traces.

My brother saw dimly through the dust that two men lifted out something on a white stretcher, and put this gently on the grass beneath the privet hedge.

One of the men came running to my brother.

"Where is there any water?" he said. "He is dying fast, and very thirsty. It is Lord Garrick."

"Lord Garrick!" said my brother, "the Chief Justice?"

"The water?" he said.

"There may be a tap," said my brother, "in some of the houses. We have no water. I dare not leave my people."

The man pushed against the crowd towards the gate of the corner house.

"Go on!" said the people, thrusting at him. "They are coming! Go on!"

Then my brother's attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man lugging a small hand-bag, which split even as my brother's eyes rested on it, and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to hreak up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped, and looked