The Day of the Triffids

XIV. Shirning

The sense with which I arrived at Shirning Farm—the one that told me that most of my troubles were now over—is interesting only in showing how wide of the mark a sense can be. The sweeping of Josella into my arms went off pretty well, but its corollary of carrying her away forthwith .to join the others at Tynsham did not, for several reasons.

Ever since her possible location had occurred to me I had pictured her—in, I must admit, a rather cinematic way—as battling bravely against all the forces of nature, et cetera, et cetera. In a fashion, I suppose she was, but the setup was a lot dilierent from my imaginings. My simple plan of saying:

“Jump aboard. We’re off to join Coker and his little gang,” had to go by the board. One might have known that things would not turn out so simply—on the other hand, it is surprising how often the better thing is disguised as the worse.

Not that I didn’t from the start prefer Shirning to the thought of Tynsham—yet to join a larger group was obviously a sounder move. But Shirning was charming. The word “f arm” had become a courtesy title for the place. It had been a farm until some twenty-five years before, and it still looked like a farm, but in reality it had changed into a country house. Sussex and the neighboring counties were well dotted with such houses and cottages which tired Londoners had found adaptable to their needs. Internally the building bad been modernized and reconstructed to a point where it was doubtful whether its previous tenants would be able to recognize a single room. Outside it had become spick. The yards and sheds had a suburban rather than a rural tidiness and had for years known no form of animal life rougher than a few riding horses and ponies. The farmyard showed no utilitarian sights and gave forth no rustic smells; it had been laid over with close green turf like a bowling green. The fields across which the windows of the house gazed from beneath weathered red tiles had long been worked by the occupiers of other and more earthy farmhouses. But the sheds and barns remained in good condition.

With its own well and its own power plant, the place had plenty to recommend it—but as I looked it over I understood Coker’s wisdom in speaking of co—operative effort. I knew nothing of farming, but I could feel that if we had intended to stay there it would take a lot of work to feed six of us.

The other three had been there already when Josella had arrived. There were Dennis and Mary Brent, and Joyce Taylor. Dennis was the owner of the house. Joyce had been there on an indefinite visit, at first to keep Mary company and then to keep the house running when Mary’s expected baby should be born.

On the night of the green flashes—of the comet you would say If you were one who still believes in that comet—there had been two other guests, Joan and Ted Danton, spending a week’s holiday there. All five of them had gone Out into the garden to watch the display. In the morning all five awoke to a world that was perpetually dark. First they had tried to telephone; when they found that impossible they waited hopefully for the arrival of the daily help. She, too, failing them, Ted had volunteered to try to find Out what had happened. Dennis would have accompanied him but for his wife’s almost hysterical state. Ted, therefore, had set out alone. He did not come back. At some time late in the day, and without saying a word to anyone, Joan had slipped off, presumably to try to find her husband. She, too, disappeared completely.

Dennis had kept track of time by touching the hands of the clock. By late afternoon it was impossible to sit any longer doing nothing. He wanted to try to get down to the village. Both the women bad objected to that. Because of Mary’s state he had yielded, and Joyce determined to try. She went to the door and began to feel her way with a stick outstretched before her. She was barely over the threshold when something fell with a swish across her left hand, burning like a hot wire. She jumped back with a cry and collapsed in the hall, where Dennis had found her. Luckily she was conscious, and able to moan of the pain in her hand. Dennis, feeling the raised weal, had guessed it for what it was. In spite of their blindness, ho and Mary had somehow contrived to apply hot fomentations, she heating the kettle while he put on a tourniquet and did his best to suck out the poison. After that they had had to carry her up to bed, where she stayed for several days while the effect of the poison wore off.

Meanwhile Dennis had made tests, first at the front and then at the back of the house. With the door slightly open, he cautiously thrust out a broom at head level. Each time there was the whistle of a sting, and he felt the broom handle tremble slightly in his grip. At one of the garden windows the same thing happened; the others seemed to be clear. He would have tried to leave by one of them but for Mary’s distress. She was sure that if there were triffids close round the house there must be others about, and would not let him take the risk.

Luckily they had food enough to last them some time, though it was difficult to prepare it. Also, Joyce, in spite of a high temperature, appeared to be holding her own against the triffid poison, so that the situation was less urgent than it might have been. Most of the next day Dennis devoted to contriving a kind of helmet for himself. He had wire net only of large mesh, so that he had to construct it of several layers overlapped and tied together. It took him some time, but, equipped with this and a pair of heavy gauntlet gloves, he was able to start Out for the village late in the day. A triffid had struck at him before he was three paces away from the house. He groped for it until he found it, and twisted its stem for it, A minute or two later another sting thudded across his helmet He could not find that triffid to grapple with it, though it made half a dozen slashes before it gave up. He found his way to the tool shed, and thence across to the lane, encumbered now with three large balls of gardening twine which he payed out as he went, to guide him back.

Several times in the lane more stings whipped at him. It took an immensely long time for him to cover the mile or so to the village, and before he reached it his supply of twine had given out. And all the way, he walked and stumbled through a silence so complete that it frightened him. From time to time he would stop and call, but no one answered. More than once he was afraid that he had lost his way, but when his feet discovered a better-laid road surface he knew where he was and was able to confirm it by locating a signpost. He groped his way farther on.

After a seemingly vast distance he had become, aware that his footsteps were sounding differently: their fall had a faint echo. Making to one side, he found a footpath and then a wall. A little farther along he discovered a postbox let into the brickwork, and knew that he must be actually in the village at last. He called out once more. A voice, a woman’s voice, called back, but it was some distance ahead, and the words were indistinguishable. He called again, and began to move toward it. Its reply was suddenly cut off by a scream. After that there was silence again. Only then, and still half incredulously, did he realize the village was in no better plight than his own household. He sat down on the grassed verge of the path to think out what he should do.

By the feeling in the air he guessed that night had come. He must have been away fully four hours—and there was nothing to do but go back. All the same, there was no reason why he should go back empty-handed… With his stick he rapped his way along the wall until it rang on one of the tin-plate advertisements which adorned the village shop. Three times in the last fifty or sixty yards stings had slapped on his helmet. Another struck as he opened the gate, and he tipped over a body lying on the path. A man’s body, quite cold.

He had the impression that there had been others in the shop before him. Nevertheless, he found a sizable piece of bacon. He dropped it, along with packets of butter or margarine, biscuits and sugar, into a sack and added an assortment of cans which came from a shelf that, to the best of his recollection, was devoted to food—the sardine cans, at any rate, were unmistakable. Then he sought for, and found, a dozen or more balls of string, shouldered his sack, and set off for home.

He had missed his way once, and it had been hard to keep down panic while he retraced his steps and reorientated him-self. But at last he knew that he was again in the familiar lane. By groping right across it he managed to locate the twine of his outward journey and join it to the string. From there the rest of the journey back had been comparatively easy.

Twice more in the week that followed he had made the journey to the village shop again, and each time the triffids round the house and on the way had seemed more numerous. There had been nothing for the isolated trio to do but wait in hope. And then, like a miracle, Josella had arrived.

It was clear at once, then, that the notion of an immediate move to Tynsham was out. For one thing, Joyce Taylor was still in an extremely weak state—when I looked at her I was surprised that she was alive at all. Dennis’s promptness had saved her life, but their inability to give her the proper restoratives or even suitable food during the following week had slowed down her recovery. It would be folly to try to move her a long distance in a truck for a week or two yet. And then, too, Mary’s confinement was close enough to make the journey inadvisable for her, so that the only course seemed to be for us all to remain where we were until these crises should have passed.

Once more it became my task to scrounge and forage. This time I had to work on a more elaborate scale, to include not merely food, but gas for the lighting system, hens that were laying, to cows that had recently calved (and still survived, though their ribs were sticking out), medical necessities for Mary, and a surprising list of sundries. The area was more beset with triffids than any other I had yet seen. Almost every morning revealed one or two new ones lurking close to the house, and the first task of the day was to shoot the tops off them, until I had constructed a netting fence to keep them out of the garden. Even then they would come right up and loiter suggestively against it until something was done about them.

I opened some of the cases of gear and taught young Susan how to use a triffid gun. She quite rapidly became an expert at disarming the things, as she continued to call them. It became her department to work daily vengeance on them. From Josella I learned what had happened to her after the fire alarm at the University Building.

She had been shipped off with her party much as I with mine, but her manner of dealing with the two women to whom she was attached had been summary. She had issued a fiat ultimatum: either she became free of all restraints, in which case she would help them as far as she was able; or, if they continued to coerce her, there would likely come a time when they would find themselves drinking prussic acid or eating cyanide of potassium, on her recommendation. They could take their choice. They had chosen sensibly. There was little difference in what we had to tell one another about the days that followed. When her group had in the end dissolved, she had reasoned much as I had. She took a car and went up to Hampstead to look for me. She had not encountered any survivors from my group, or run across that led I by the quick-triggered, redheaded man. She had kept on there until almost sunset and then decided to make for the University Building. Not knowing what to expect, she had cautiously stopped the car a couple of streets away and approached on foot. When she was still some distance from the gates she heard a shot. Wondering what that might indicate, she had taken cover in the garden that had sheltered us before. From there she had observed Coker also making a circumspect advance. Without knowing that I had fired at the triffid in the square, and that the sound of the shot was the cause of Coker’s caution, she suspected some kind of trap. Determined not to fall into one a second time, she had returned to the car. She had no idea where the rest had gone—if they had gone at all. The only place of refuge she could think of that would be known to anyone at all was the one she had mentioned almost casually to me. She had decided to make for it, in the hope that I, if I were still in existence, would remember and try to find it.

“I curled up and slept in the back of the car once I was clear of London,” she said. “It was still quite early when I got here the next morning. The sound of the car brought Dennis to an upstairs window, warning me to look out for triffids. Then I saw that there were half a dozen or more of them close around the house, for all the world as if they were waiting for someone to come out of it. Dennis and I shouted back and forth. The triffids stirred, and one of them began to move toward me, so I nipped back into the car for safety. When it kept on coming, I started up the car and ran it down. But there were still the others, and I had no kind of weapon but my knife. It was Dennis who solved that difficulty.

“‘If you have a can of gas to spare, throw some of it their way, and follow it up with a bit of burning rag,’ he suggested. That ought to shift ‘em.’

“It did. Since then I’ve been using a garden syringe. The wonder is that I’ve not set the place on fire.”

With the aid of a cookbook Josella had managed to produce meals of a kind, and had set about putting the place more or less to rights. Working, learning, and improvising bad kept her too busy to worry about a future which lay beyond the next few weeks. She had seen no one else at all during those days, but, certain that there must be others somewhere, she had scanned the whale valley for signs of smoke by day or lights by night.

She bad seen no smoke, and in all the miles within her view there had not been a gleam of light until the evening I came.

In a way, the worst affected of the original trio was Dennis.

Joyce was still weak and in a semi-invalid state. Mary held herself withdrawn and seemed capable of finding endless mental occupation and compensation in the Contemplation of prospective motherhood. But Dennis was like an animal in a trap. He did not curse in the futile way I had beard so many others do; he resented it with a vicious bitterness, as if it had forced him into a cage where he did not intend to stay. Already, before I arrived, he had prevailed upon Josella to find the Braille system in the encyclopedia and make an indented copy of the alphabet for him to learn. He spent dogged hours each day making notes in it and attempting to read them back. Most of the rest of the time he fretted over his own uselessness, though he scarcely mentioned it. He would keep on trying to do this or that with a grim persistence that was painful to watch, and it required all my self-control to stop me offering him help—one experience of the bitterness which unasked help could arouse in him was quite enough. I began to be astonished at the things he was painfully teaching himself to do, though still the most impressive to me was his construction of an efficient mesh helmet on only the second day of his blindness.

It took him out of himself to accompany me on some of my foraging expeditions, and it pleased him that he could be useful in helping to move the heavier cases. He was anxious for books in Braille, but those, we decided, would have to wait until there was less risk of contamination in towns large enough to be likely sources.

The days began to pass quickly, certainly for the three of us who could see. Josella was kept busy mostly in the house, and Susan was learning to help her. There were plenty of jobs, too, waiting to be done by me. Joyce recovered sufficiently to make a shaky first appearance, and then began to pick up more rapidly. Soon after that Mary’s pains began.

That was a bad night for everyone. Worst, perhaps, for Dennis in knowing that everything depended on the care of two willing but inexperienced girls. His self-control aroused my helpless admiration.

In the early hours of the morning Josella came down to us, looking very tired:

“It’s a girl. They’re both all right,” she said, and led Dennis up.

She returned a few moments later and took the drink I had ready for her.

“It was quite simple, thank heaven,” she said. “Poor Mary was horribly afraid it might be blind too, but of course it’s not.

Now she’s crying quite dreadfully because she can’t see it.” We drank.

“It’s queer,” I said, “the way things go on, I mean. Like a seed—it looks all shriveled and finished, you’d think it was dead, but it isn’t. And now a new life starting, coming into all this…”

Josella put her face in her hands.

“Oh God! Bill. Does it have to go on being like this? On— and on—and on?”

And she, too, collapsed in tears.

Three weeks later I went over to Tynsham to see Coker and make arrangements for our move. I took an ordinary car, in order to do the double journey in a day. When I got back Josella met me in the hall. She gave one look at my face.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Just that we shan’t be going there after all,” I told her. “Tynsham is finished.”

She stared back at me.

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure. It looks as if the plague got there.”

I described the state of affairs briefly. It had not needed much investigation. The gates were open when I arrived, and the sight of triffids loose in the park half warned me what to expect. The smell when I got out of the car confirmed it. I made myself go into the house. By the look of it, it had been deserted two weeks or more before. I put my head into two of the rooms. They were enough for me. I called, and my voice ran right away through the hollowness of the house.

I went no farther.

There had been a notice of some kind pinned to the front door, but only one blank corner remained. I spent a long time searching for the rest of the sheet that must have blown away. I did not find it. The yard at the back was empty of trucks, and most of the stores had gone with them, but where to I could not tell.

There was nothing to be done but get into my car again and come back.

“And so—what?” asked Josella when I had finished.

“And so, my dear, we stay here. We learn how to support ourselves. And we go on supporting ourselves—unless help comes. There may be an organization somewhere…”

Josella shook her head.

“I think we’d better forget all about help. Millions and millions of people have been waiting and hoping for help that hasn’t come.”

“There’ll be something,” I said. ‘There must be thousands of little groups like this dotted all over Europe—all over the world. Some of them will get together. They’ll begin to rebuild.”

“In how long?” said Josella. “Generations? Perhaps not until after our time. No—the world’s gone, and we’re left We must make our own lives. Well have to plan them as though help will never come—” She paused. There was an odd blank look on her face that I had never seen before, It puckered.

“Darling…” I said.

“Oh, Bill, Bill, I wasn’t meant for this kind of life, If you

weren’t here I’d—”

“Hush, my sweet,” I said gently. “Hush.” I stroked her hair.

A few moments later she recovered herself.

“I’m sorry, Bill. Self-pity… revolting. Never again.”

She patted her eyes with her handkerchief and sniffed a

little.

“So I’m to be a farmer’s wife. Anyway, I like being married

to you, Bill—even if it isn’t a very proper, authentic kind of

marriage.”

Suddenly she gave the smiling chuckle that I had not heard

for some time.

“What is it?”

“I was only thinking how much I used to dread my wed-

ding.”

‘That was very maidenly and proper of you—if a little unexpected,” I told her.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly that. It was my publishers, and the

newspapers, and the film people. What fun they would have

had with it. There’d have been a new edition of my silly book

—probably a new release of the film—and pictures in all the

papers. I don’t think you’d have liked that much.”

“I can think of another thing I’d not have liked much,” I told her. “Do you remember—that night in the moonlight you made a condition?”

She looked at me.

“Well, maybe some things haven’t turned out so badly,” she said, smiling.