The Purple Cloud
Page 22
streams. When Icame to a long tunnel near Slough, I saw round the foot of the arch anextraordinary quantity of wooden _debris_, and as I went very slowlythrough, was alarmed by the continuous bumping of the train, which, Iknew, was passing over bodies; at the other end were more _debris_; andI easily guessed that a company of desperate people had made the tunnelair-tight at the two arches, and provisioned themselves, with the hopeto live there till the day of destiny was passed; whereupon theirbarricades must have been crashed through by some up-train andthemselves crushed, or else, other crowds, mad to share their cave ofrefuge, had stormed the boardings. This latter, as I afterwards found,was a very usual event.
I should very soon have got to London now, but, as my bad luck wouldhave it, I met a long up-train on the metals, with not one creature inany part of it. There was nothing to do but to tranship, with all mythings, to its engine, which I found in good condition with plenty ofcoal and water, and to set it going, a hateful labour: I being alreadyjet-black from hair to toes. However, by half-past ten I found myselfstopped by another train only a quarter of a mile from Paddington, andwalked the rest of the way among trains in which the standing dead stillstood, propped by their neighbours, and over metals where bodies were asordinary and cheap as waves on the sea, or twigs in a forest. I believethat wild crowds had given chase on foot to moving trains, or fore-runthem in the frenzied hope of inducing them to stop.
I came to the great shed of glass and girders which is the station, thenight being perfectly soundless, moonless, starless, and the hour abouteleven.
I found later that all the electric generating-stations, or all that Ivisited, were intact; that is to say, must have been shut down beforethe arrival of the doom; also that the gas-works had almost certainlybeen abandoned some time previously: so that this city of dreadfulnight, in which, at the moment when Silence choked it, not less thanforty to sixty millions swarmed and droned, must have more resembledTartarus and the foul shades of Hell than aught to which my fancy canliken it.
For, coming nearer the platforms, I saw that trains, in order to move atall, must have moved through a slough of bodies pushed from behind, andforming a packed homogeneous mass on the metals: and I knew that they_had_ moved. Nor could _I_ now move, unless I decided to wade: for fleshwas everywhere, on the roofs of trains, cramming the interval betweenthem, on the platforms, splashing the pillars like spray, piled ontrucks and lorries, a carnal quagmire; and outside, it filled the spacebetween a great host of vehicles, carpeting all that region of London.And all here that odour of blossoms, which nowhere yet, save on one vileship, had failed, was now wholly overcome by another: and the thoughtwas in my head, my God, that if the soul of man had sent up to Heaventhe odour which his body gave to me, then it was not so strange thatthings were as they were.
I got out from the station, with ears, God knows, that still awaited theaccustomed noising of this accursed town, habituated as I now was to allthe dumb and absent void of Soundlessness; and I was overwhelmed in anew awe, and lost in a wilder woesomeness, when, instead of lights andbusiness, I saw the long street which I knew brood darker than Babylonslong desolate, and in place of its ancient noising, heard, my God, ashocking silence, rising higher than I had ever heard it, and blendingwith the silence of the inane, eternal stars in heaven.
* * * * *
I could not get into any vehicle for some time, for all thereabouts waspractically a mere block; but near the Park, which I attained bystooping among wheels, and selecting my foul steps, I overhauled aDaimler car, found in it two cylinders of petrol, lit the ignition-lamp,removed with averted abhorrence three bodies, mounted, and broke thatpopulous stillness. And through streets nowhere empty of bodies I wenturging eastward my jolting, and spattered, and humming way.
That I should have persisted, with so much pains, to come to thisunbounded catacomb, seems now singular to me: for by that time I couldnot have been sufficiently daft to expect to find another being likemyself on the earth, though I cherished, I remember, the irrational hopeof yet somewhere finding dog, or cat, or horse, to be with me, and wouldanon think bitterly of Reinhardt, my Arctic dog, which my own hand hadshot. But, in reality, a morbid curiosity must have been within me allthe time to read the real truth of what had happened, so far as it wasknown, or guessed, and to gloat upon all that drama, and cup oftrembling, and pouring out of the vials of the wrath of God, which musthave preceded the actual advent of the end of Time. This inquisitivenesshad, at every town which I reached, made the search for newspapersuppermost in my mind; but, by bad luck, I had found only four, all ofthem ante-dated to the one which I had read at Dover, though their datesgave me some idea of the period when printing must have ceased, viz.soon after the 17th July--about three months subsequent to my arrival atthe Pole--for none I found later than this date; and these containednothing scientific, but only orisons and despairings. On arriving,therefore, at London, I made straight for the office of the _Times_,only stopping at a chemist's in Oxford Street for a bottle of antisepticto hold near my nose, though, having once left the neighbourhood ofPaddington, I had hardly much need of this.
I made my way to the square where the paper was printed, to find that,even there, the ground was closely strewn with calpac and pugaree, blackabayeh and fringed praying-shawl, hob-nail and sandal, figured lungi andstriped silk, all very muddled and mauled. Through the dark square tothe twice-dark building I passed, and found open the door of anadvertisement-office; but on striking a match, saw that it had beenlighted by electricity, and had therefore to retrace my stumbling steps,till I came to a shop of lamps in a near alley, walking meantime withtimid cares that I might hurt no one--for in this enclosed neighbourhoodI began to feel strange tremors, and kept striking matches, which, sostill was the black air, hardly flickered.
When I returned to the building with a little lighted lamp, I at oncesaw a file on a table, and since there were a number of dead there, andI wished to be alone, I took the heavy mass of paper between my left armand side, and the lamp in my right hand; passed then behind a counter;and then, to the right, up a stair which led me into a very greatbuilding and complexity of wooden steps and corridors, where I wentpeering, the lamp visibly trembling in my hand, for here also were thedead. Finally, I entered a good-sized carpeted room with a baize-coveredtable in the middle, and large smooth chairs, and on the table manymanuscripts impregnated with purple dust, and around were books inshelves. This room had been locked upon a single man, a tall man in afrock-coat, with a pointed grey beard, who at the last moment haddecided to fly from it, for he lay at the threshold, apparently fallendead the moment he opened the door. Him, by drawing his feet aside, Iremoved, locked the door upon myself, sat at the table before the dustyfile, and, with the little lamp near, began to search.
I searched and read till far into the morning. But God knows, Healone....
I had not properly filled the little reservoir with oil, and at aboutthree in the fore-day, it began to burn sullenly lower, letting sparks,and turning the glass grey: and in my deepest chilly heart was thequestion: 'Suppose the lamp goes out before the daylight....'
I knew the Pole, and cold, I knew them well: but to be frozen by panic,my God! I read, I say, I searched, I would not stop: but I read thatnight racked by terrors such as have never yet entered into the heartof man to conceive. My flesh moved and crawled like a lake which, hereand there, the breeze ruffles. Sometimes for two, three, four minutes,the profound interest of what I read would fix my mind, and then I wouldperuse an entire column, or two, without consciousness of the meaning ofone single word, my brain all drawn away to the innumerable host of thewan dead that camped about me, pierced with horror lest they shouldstart, and stand, and accuse me: for the grave and the worm was theworld; and in the air a sickening stirring of cerements and shrouds; andthe taste of the pale and insubstantial grey of ghosts seemed to infectmy throat, and faint odours of the loathsome tomb my nostrils, and thetoll of deep-toned passing-bells my ears; finally the lamp smoulderedve
ry low, and my charnel fancy teemed with the screwing-down of coffins,lych-gates and sextons, and the grating of ropes that lower down thedead, and the first sound of the earth upon the lid of that strait andgloomy home of the mortal; that lethal look of cold dead fingers Iseemed to see before me, the insipidness of dead tongues, the pout ofthe drowned, and the vapid froths that ridge their lips, till my fleshwas moist as with the stale washing-waters of morgues and mortuaries,and with such sweats as corpses sweat, and the mawkish tear that lieson dead men's cheeks; for what is one poor insignificant man in hisflesh against a whole world of the disembodied, he alone with them, andnowhere, nowhere another of his kind, to whom to appeal against them? Iread, and I searched: but God, God knows ... If a leaf of the paper,which I slowly, warily, stealingly turned, made but one faintest rustle,how did that _reveille_ boom in echoes through the vacant and hauntedchambers of my poor aching heart, my God! and there was a cough in mythroat which for a