The Day of the Triffids

XIII. 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 bad cleared “p.

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 bad on that day when we bad 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 nil around, stretching the nerves and twang-big 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 from turning hack 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 honor had left them, just as the honor 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 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.

Alter 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 ttle 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 bands 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.”

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.

“I’m hungry,” said Susan.

Food was a matter of trifling interest to me just then. Now that I was so near, my anxiety to know whether my guess had been right overcame everything else. While Susan was still eating I took the truck a little way up the hill behind us to get a more extensive view. In between showers, and in a worsening light, we scanned the opposite hills again, without result. There was no life or movement in the whole valley, save for a few cattle and sheep and an occasional triffid lurching across the fields below.

An idea came to me, and I decided to go down to the village. I was reluctant to take Susan, for I knew the place would be unpleasant, but I could not leave her where she was. When we got there I found that the sights affected her less than they did me: children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at. The depression was all mine. Susan found more to interest than to disgust her. Any somberness was quite offset by her delight in a scarlet silk macintosh with which she equipped herself in spite of its being several sizes too large. My search, too, was rewarding. I returned to the truck laden with a head lamp like a minor searchlight, which we had found upon an illustrious-looking Rolls-Royce.

I rigged the thing up on a kind of pivot beside the cab window and made it ready to plug in. When that was ready there was nothing to do but wait for darkness and hope that the rain would let up.

By the time it was fully dark the raindrops had become a mere spatter. I switched on, and sent a magnificent beam piercing the night. Slowly I turned the lamp from side to side, keeping its ray leveled toward the hills, while I anxiously tried to watch the whole line of them simultaneously for an answering light. A dozen times or more I traversed it steadily, switching off for a few seconds at the end of each sweep while we sought the least flicker in the darkness. But each time the night over the hills remained pitchy black. Then the rain came on more heavily again. I set the beam full ahead and sat waiting, listening to the drumming of the drops on the roof of the cab while Susan fell asleep leaning against my ann. An hour passed before the drumming dwindled to a patter, and ceased.

Susan woke up as I started the beam taking across again. I had completed the sixth travel when she called out:

“Look, Bill! There it is! There’s a light!”

She was pointing a few degrees left of our front. I switched

off our lamp and followed the line of her finger. It was difficult to be sure. If it were not a trick of our eyes, it was something as dim as a distant glowworm. And even as we were looking at it the rain came down on us again in sheets. By the time I had my glasses in my hand there was no view at all. I hesitated to move. It might be that the light, if it had been a light, would not be visible from lower ground. Once more I trained our light forward and settled down to wait with as much patience as I could manage. Almost another hour passed before the rain cleared again. The moment it did, I switched off our lamp.

“It is!” Susan cried excitedly. “Look! Look!”

It was. And bright enough now to banish any doubts, though the glasses showed me no details.

I switched on again, and gave the V sign in Morse—it is the only Morse I know except 5 0 S, so it had to do. While we watched the other light it blinked and then began a series of slow, deliberate longs and shorts which unfortunately meant nothing to me. I gave a couple more Vs for good measure, drew the approximate line of the far light on our map, and switched on the driving lights.

“Is that the lady?” asked Susan.

“It’s got to be,” I said. “It’s got to be.”

That was a poorish trip. To cross the low marshland it was necessary to take a road a little to the west of us and then work back to the east along the foot of the hills. Before we had gone more than a mile something cut off the sight of the light from us altogether, and to add to the difficulty of finding our way in the dark lanes, the rain began again in earnest. With no one to care for the drainage sluices, some fields were already flooded, and the water was over the road in places.

I had to drive with a tedious care when all my urge was to put my foot flat down.

Once we reached the farther side of the valley we were free of floodwater, but we made little better speed, for the lanes were full of primitive wanderings and improbable turns. I had to give the wheel all my attention while the child peered up at the hills beside us, watching for the reappearance of the light. We reached the point where the line on my map intersected with what appeared to be our present road without seeing a sign of it. I tried the next uphill turning.

It took about half an hour to get back to the road again from the chalk pit into which it led us.

We ran on farther along the lower road. Then Susan caught a glimmer between the branches to our right. The next turning was luckier. It took us back at a slant up the side of the hill until we were able to see a small, brilliantly lit square of window half a mile or more along the slope.

Even then, and with the map to help, it was not easy to find the lane that led to it. We lurched along, still climbing in low gear, but each time we caught sight of the window again it was a little closer. The lane had not been designed for ponderous trucks. In the narrower parts we had to push our way along it between bushes and brambles which scrabbled along the sides as though they tried to pull us back.

But at last there was a lantern waving in the road ahead. It moved on, swinging to show us the turn through a gate.

Then it was set stationary on the ground. I drove to within a yard or two of it and stopped.

As I opened the door a flashlight shone suddenly into my eyes. I had a glimpse of a figure behind it in a raincoat shining with wetness.

A slight break marred the intended calm of the voice that spoke.

“Hullo, Bill. You’ve been a long time.”

I jumped down.

“Oh, Bill. I can’t----Oh, my dear, I’ve been hoping so much… Oh, Bill…“ said Josella.

I had forgotten all about Susan until a voice came from above.

“You are getting wet, you silly. Why don’t you kiss her indoors?” it asked.