by John Wyndham
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 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 labor of the countryside that supported them. Similarly, we must become big enough to support at very least the leader, the teacher, and the doctor.”
“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 Company, 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 labor 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 had a glimpse of the awful loneliness that might come. No one was attached to the present house. It had been chosen for 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 assured her. “It’s marked on all the best American maps.”
It was sometime 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, 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 apartment. 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 truck, yet I was feeling elated and hopeful; it could have rained ten times harder without depressing me or altering my intention. 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.
JOURNEY IN HOPE
The morning was infected with minor mishaps. First it was water in the carburetor. 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 everything 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 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 onto his reason, then he is lost indeed: most utterly and 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 fro
m 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 truck suffered no more than scratches, but two vehicles managed to hitch themselves together with diabolical ingenuity, so that it was an awkward business single-handed, 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 side 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 farther 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 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 toward me, waving both arms. I pulled up, looked 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 close to me. I could feel tears 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 come.
“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 bad done. As then, I gave it the other barrel to shut it up.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s dead now.”
We walked across to the little boy. The scarlet slash of the sting was vivid on his pale cheek. It must have happened some hours before. She knelt beside him.
“It isn’t any good,” I told her gently.
She looked up, fresh tears in her eyes.
“Is Tommy dead too?”
I squatted down beside her and shook my head.
“I’m afraid he is.”
After a while she said:
“Poor Tommy! Will we bury him—like the puppies?”
“Yes,” I told her.
In all the overwhelming disaster, that was the only grave I dug—and it was a very small one. She gathered a little bunch of flowers and laid them on top of it. Then we drove away.
Susan was her name. A long time ago, as it seemed to her, something had happened to her father and mother so that they could not see. Her father had gone out to try to get some help, and he had not come back. Her mother went out later, leaving the children with strict instructions not to leave the house. She had come back crying. The next day she went out again: this time she did not come back. The children had eaten what they could find, and then began to grow hungry. At last Susan was hungry enough to disobey instructions and seek help from Mrs. Walton at the shop. The shop itself was open, but Mrs. Walton was not there. No one came when Susan called, so she had decided to take some cakes and biscuits and candies and tell Mrs. Walton about it later.
She had seen some of the things about as she came back. One of them had struck at her, but it had misjudged her height, and the sting passed over her head. It frightened her, and she ran the rest of the way home. After that she had been very careful about the things, and on further expeditions had taught Tommy to be careful about them too. But Tommy had been so little he had not been able to see the one that was hiding in the next garden when he went out to play that morning. Susan had tried half a dozen times to get to him, but each time, however careful she was, she had seen the top of the triffid tremble and stir slightly….
An hour or so later I decided it was time to stop for the night. I left her in the truck while I prospected a cottage or two until I found one that was fit, and then we set about getting a meal together. I did not know much of small girls, but this one seemed to be able to dispose of an astonishing quantity of the result, confessing while she did so that a diet consisting almost entirely of biscuits, cake, and candies had proved less completely satisfying than she had expected. After we had cleaned her up a bit, and I, under instruction, had wielded her hairbrush, I began to feel rather pleased with the results. She, for her part, seemed able for a time to forget all that had happened in her pleasure at having someone to talk to.
I could understand that. I was feeling exactly the same way myself.
But not long after I had seen her to bed, and come downstairs again, I heard the sound of sobbing. I went back to her.
“It’s all right, Susan,” I said. “It’s all right. It didn’t really hurt poor Tommy, you know—it was so quick.” I sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand. She stopped crying.
“It wasn’t just Tommy,” she said. “It was after Tommy—when there was nobody, nobody at all. I was so frightened …”
“I know,” I told her. “I do know. I was frightened too.”
She looked up at me.
“But you aren’t frightened now?”
“No. And you aren’t either. So you see, we’ll just have to keep together to stop one another being frightened.”
“Yes,” she agreed with serious consideration. “I think that’ll be all right—”
So we went on to discuss a number of things until she fell asleep.
“Where are we going?” Susan asked as we started off again the following morning.
I said that we were looking for a lady.
“Where is she?” asked Susan.
I wasn’t sure of that.
“When shall we find her?” asked Susan.
I was pretty unsatisfactory about that too.
“Is she a pretty lady?” asked Susan.
“Yes,” I said, glad to be more definite this time.
It seemed, for some reason, to give Susan satisfaction.
“Good,” she remarked approvingly, and we passed
to other subjects.
Because of her, I tried to skirt the larger towns, but it was impossible to avoid many unpleasant sights in the country. After a while I gave up pretending that they did not exist. Susan regarded them with the same detached interest as she gave to the normal scenery. They did not alarm her, though they puzzled her and prompted questions. Reflecting that the world in which she was going to grow up would have little use for the overniceties and euphemisms that I had learned as a child, I did my best to treat the various horrors and curiosities in the same objective fashion. That was really very good for me too.
By midday the clouds had gathered and rain began once more. When, at five o’clock, we pulled up on the road just short of Pulborough, it was still pouring hard.
“Where do we go now?” inquired Susan.
“That,” I acknowledged, “is just the trouble. It’s somewhere over there.” I waved my arm toward the misty line of the Downs, to the south.
I had been trying hard to recall just what else Josella had said of the place, but I could remember no more than that the house stood on the north side of the hills, and I had the impression that it faced across the low, marshy country that separated them from Pulborough. Now that I had come so far, it seemed a pretty vague instruction: the Downs stretched away for miles to the east and to the west.
“Maybe the first thing to do is to see if we can find any smoke across there,” I suggested.
“It’s awfully difficult to see anything at all in the rain,” Susan said practically, and quite rightly.
Half an hour later the rain obligingly held off for a while. We left the truck and sat on a wall side by side. We studied the lower slopes of the hills carefully for some time, but neither Susan’s sharp eyes nor my field glasses could discover any trace of smoke or signs of activity. Then it started to rain again.
