The Day of the Triffids

IX. Evacuation

It was the memory of the redheaded young man who had fired on us that conditioned my choice of a route to Westminster.

Since I was sixteen my interest in weapons has decreased, but in an environment reverting to savagery it seemed that one must be prepared to behave more or less as a savage, or possibly cease to behave at all, before long. In St. James’s Street there used to be several shops which would sell you any form of lethalness, from a rook rifle to an elephant gun, with the greatest urbanity.

I left there with a mixed feeling of support and banditry. Once more I had a useful hunting knife. There was a pistol with the precise workmanship of a scientific instrument in my pocket. On the seat beside me rested a loaded twelve-bore and boxes of cartridges. I had chosen a shotgun in preference to a rifle—the bang is no less convincing, and it also decapitates a triffid with a neatness which a bullet seldom achieves. And there were triffids to be seen right in London now. They still appeared to avoid the streets when they could, but I had noticed several lumbering across Hyde Park, and there were others in the Green Park. Very likely they were ornamental, safely docked specimens—on the other hand, maybe they weren’t.

And so I came to Westminster.

The deadness, the finish of it all, was italicized there. The usual scatter of abandoned vehicles lay about the streets. Very few people were about—I saw only three who were moving. Two were tapping their way down the gutters of Whitehall, the third was in Parliament Square. He was sitting close to Lincoln’s statue and clutching to him his dearest possession— a side of bacon from which he was hacking a ragged slice with a blunt knife.

Above it all rose the Houses of Parliament, with the hands of the clock stopped at three minutes past six. It was difficult to believe that all that meant nothing any more, that it was now just a pretentious confection in uncertain stone which would decay in peace. Let it shower its crumbling pinnacles onto the terrace as it would—there would be no more indignant members complaining of the risk to their valuable lives. Into those halls which had in their day set world echoes to good intentions and sad expediencies the roofs could, in due course, fall; there would be none to stop them, and none to care. Alongside, the Thames flowed imperturbably on. So it would flow until the day the Embankments crumble and the water spread out and Westminster became once more an island in a marsh.

Some eight hours spent searching the district left me clue-less, arid despondent. The only logical place I could think of to go was back to the University Building. I reckoned Josella would think the same—and there was a hope that some others of our dispersed party might have drifted back there in an effort to reunite. It was not a very strong hope, for common sense would have caused them to leave there days ago.

Two flags still hung above the tower, limp in the warm air of the early evening. Of the two dozen or so trucks that had been accumulated in the forecourt, four still stood there, apparently untouched. I parked the car beside them and went into the building. My footsteps clattered in the silence.

“Hub! Hullo, there!” I called. “Is there anyone here?”

My voice echoed away down corridors and up wells, diminishing to the parody of a whisper and then to silence. I went to the doors of the other wing and called again. Once more the echoes died away unbroken, settling softly as dust. Only then, as I turned back, did I notice that an inscription had been chalked on the wall inside the outer door. In large letters it gave simply an address:

That was something, at least.

I looked at it, and thought. In another hour or less it would be dusk. Devizes I guessed at a hundred miles distant, probably more. I went outside again and examined the trucks. One of them was the last that I had driven in—the one in which I had stowed my despised anti-triffid gear. I recalled that the rest of its load was a useful assortment of food, supplies, and tools. It would be much better to arrive with that than empty-handed in a car. Nevertheless, if there were no urgent reason for it, I did not fancy driving anything, much less a large, heavily loaded truck, by night along roads which might reasonably be expected to produce a number of hazards. If I were to pile it up, and the odds were that I should, I would lose a lot more time in finding another and transferring the load than I would by spending the night here. An early start in the morning offered much better prospects. I moved my boxes of cartridges from the car to the cab of the truck in readiness. The gun I kept with me.

I found the room from which I had rushed to the fake fire alarm exactly as I had left it: my clothes on a chair, even the cigarette case and lighter where I had placed them beside my improvised bed.

It was still too early to think of sleep. I lit a cigarette, put the case in my pocket, and decided to go out.

Before I went into the Russell Square garden I looked it over carefully. I had already begun to become suspicious of open spaces. Sure enough, I spotted one triffid. It was in the northwest corner, standing perfectly still, but considerably taller than the bushes that surrounded it. I went closer, and blew the top of it to bits with a single shot. The noise in the silent square could scarcely have been more alarming if I had let off a howitzer. When I was sure that there were no others lurking I went into the garden and sat down with my back against a tree.

I stayed there perhaps twenty minutes. The sun was low, end half the square thrown into shadow. Soon I would have to go in. While there was light I could sustain myself; in the dark, things could steal quietly upon me. Already I was on my way back to the primitive. Before long, perhaps, I should be spending the hours of darkness in fear as my remote ancestors must have done, watching, ever distrustfully, the night outside their cave. I delayed to take one more look around the square, as if it were a page of history I would learn before it was turned. And as I stood there I heard the gritting of footsteps on the road—a slight sound but as loud in the silence as a grinding millstone.

I turned, with my gun ready. Crusoe was no more startled at the sight of a footprint than I at the sound of a footfall, for it had not the hesitancy of a blind man’s. I caught a glimpse in the dim light of the moving figure. As it left the road and entered the garden II saw that it was a man. Evidently he had seen me before I heard him, for he was coming straight toward me.

“You don’t need to shoot,” he said, holding empty hands wide apart.

I did not know him until he came within a few yards. Simultaneously, he recognized me.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said. I kept the gun raised.

“Hullo, Coker. What are you after? Wanting me to go on another of your little parties?” I asked him.

“No. You can put that thing down. Makes too much noise, anyway. That’s how I found you. No,” he repeated, “I’ve had enough. I’m getting to hell out of here.”

“So am I,” I said, and lowered the gun.

“What happened to your bunch?” he asked. I told him. He nodded.

“Same with mine. Same with the rest, I expect. Still, we tried

“The wrong way,” I said. He nodded again.

“Yes,” he admitted. “I reckon your lot did have the right idea from the start—only it didn’t look right and it didn’t sound right a week ago.”

“Six days ago,” I corrected him.

“A week,” said he.

“No, I’m sure— Oh well, what the hell’s it matter, anyway?” I said. “In the circumstances,” I went on, “what do you say to declaring an amnesty and starting over again?”

He agreed.

“I’d got it wrong,” he repeated. “I thought I was the one who was taking it seriously—but I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. I couldn’t believe that it would last, or that some kind of help wouldn’t show up. But now look at it! And it must be like this everywhere. Europe, Asia, America—think of America smitten like this! But they must be. If they weren’t, they’d have been over here, helping out and getting the place straight that’s the way it’d take them. No, I reckon your lot understood it better from the start.”

We ruminated for some moments, then I asked:

“This disease, plague—what do you reckon it is?”

“Search me, chum. I thought it must be typhoid, but someone said typhoid takes longer to develop—so I don’t know. I don’t know why I’ve not caught it myself—except that I’ve been able to keep away from those that have and to see that what I was eating was clean. I’ve been keeping to cans I’ve opened myself, and I’ve drunk bottle beer. Anyway, though I’ve been lucky so far, I don’t fancy hanging around here much longer. Where do you go now?”

I told him of the address chalked on the wall. He bad not seen it. He had been on his way to the University Building when the sound of my shot had caused him to scout round with some caution.

“It—” I began, and then stopped abruptly. From one of the streets west of us came the sound of a car starting up. It ran up its gears quickly and then diminished into the distance.

“Well, at least there’s somebody else left,” said Coker. “Andwhoever wrote up that address. Have you any idea who it was?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It was a justifiable assumption that it was a returned member of the group that Coker had raided—or possibly some sighted person that his party had failed to catch. There was no telling how long it had been there. He thought it over.

“It’ll be better if there’s two of us. I’ll tag along with you and see what’s doing. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’m for turning in flaw, and an early start tomorrow.”

He was still asleep when I awoke. I dressed myself much more comfortably in the ski suit and heavy shoes than in the garments I had been wearing since his party had provided them for me. By the time I returned with a bag of assorted cans, he was up and dressed too. Over breakfast we decided to improve our welcome at Tynsham by taking a loaded truck each rather than travel together in one.

“And see that the cab window closes,” I suggested. ‘There are quite a lot of triffid nurseries around London, particularly to the west.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve seen a few of the ugly brutes about,” he said offhandedly.

“I’ve seen them about—and in action,” I told him.

At the first garage we came to we broke open a pump and filled up. Then, sounding in the silent streets like a convoy of tanks, we set off westward with my truck in the lead.

The going was wearisome. Every few dozen yards one had to weave round some derelict vehicle. Occasionally two or three together would block the road entirely so that it was necessary to go dead slow and nudge one of them out of the way. Very few of them were wrecked. The blindness seemed to have come upon the drivers swiftly, but not too suddenly for them to keep control. Usually they had been able to draw in to the side of the road before they stopped. Had the catastrophe occurred by day, the main reads would have been quite impassable, and to work our way clear from the center by side streets might have taken days—spent mostly in reversing before impenetrable thickets of vehicles and trying to find another way round. As it was, I found that our over-all progress was less slow than it seemed in detail, and when, after a few miles, I noticed an overturned car beside the road I realized that we were by this time on a route which others had traveled, and partially cleared, ahead of us.

On the farther outskirts of Staines we could begin to feel that London was behind us at last. I stopped, and went back to Coker. As he switched off, the silence closed, thick and unnatural, with only the click of cooling metal to break it. I realized suddenly that I bad not seen a single living creature other than a few sparrows since we had started. Coker climbed out of his cab. He stood in the middle of the road, listening and looking around him.

he murmured.

I looked bard at him. His grave, reflective expression turned suddenly to a grin.

“Or do you prefer Shelley?” he asked.

Come on, let’s find some food.”

“Coker,” I said as we completed the meal sitting on a store counter and spreading marmalade on crackers, “you beat me. What are you? The first time I meet you I find you ranting— if you will forgive the appropriate word—in a kind of dockside lingo. Now you quote Marvel to me. It doesn’t make sense.”

He grinned. “It never did to me, either,” he said. “It comes of being a hybrid—you never really know what you are. My mother never really knew what I was, either—at least she never could prove it, and she always held it against me that on account of that she could not get an allowance for me. It made me kind of sour about things when I was a kid, and when I left school I used to go to meetings—more or less any kind of meetings as long as they were protesting against something. And that led to me getting mixed up with the lot that used to come to them. I suppose they found me kind of amusing. Anyway, they used to take me along to arty-political sorts of parties. After a bit I got tired of being amusing and seeing them give a kind of double laugh, half with me and half at me, whenever I said what I thought. I reckoned I needed some of the background knowledge they had, and then I’d be able to laugh at them a bit, maybe, so I started going to evening classes, and I practiced talking the way they did, for use when necessary. There’s a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously. If you talk tough and quote Shelley they think you’re cute, like a performing monkey or something, but they don’t pay any at-tendon to what you say. You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across— not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk. So I reckoned the thing to do was to make myself bilingual, and use the right one in the right place—and occasionally the wrong one in the wrong place, unexpectedly. Surprising how that jolts ‘em. Wonderful thing, the English caste system. Since then I’ve made out quite nicely in the orating business. Not what you’d call a steady job, but full of interest and variety…Wilfred Coker. Meetings addressed. Subject no object. That’s me.”

“How do you mean—subject no object?’ I inquired.

“Well, I kind of supply the spoken word just like a printer supplies the printed word. He doesn’t have to believe everything he prints.”

I left that for the moment. “How’s it happen you’re not like the rest?” I asked. “You weren’t in hospital, were you?”

“Me? No. It just so happened that I was addressing a meeting that was protesting over police partiality in a little matter of a strike. We began about six o’clock and about half-past the police themselves arrived to break it up. I found a handy trap door and went down into the cellar. They came down, too, to have a look, but they didn’t find me where I bad gone to earth, in a pile of shavings. They went on tramping around up above for a bit, then it was quiet. But I stayed put. I wasn’t walking out into any nice little trap. It was quite comfortable there, so I went to sleep. In the morning, when I took a careful nose around, I found all this had happened.” He paused thoughtfully. “Well, that racket’s finished; it certainly doesn’t look as if there’s going to be much call for my particular gifts from now on,” he added.

I did not dispute it. We finished our meal. He slid himself off the counter.

“Come on. We’d better be shifting. ‘Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new’—if you’d care for a really hackneyed quotation this time.”

“It’s more than that, it’s inaccurate,” I said. “It’s ‘woods,’ not ‘fields.’”

He frowned.

“Well, damn me, mate, so it is,” he admitted.

I began to feel the lightening of spirit that Coker was already showing. The sight of the open country gave one hope of a son. It was true that the young green crops would never be harvested when they had ripened, nor the fruit from the trees gathered; that the countryside might never again look as trim and neat as it did that day, but for all that it would go on, after its own fashion. It was not, like the towns, sterile, stopped forever. It was a place one could work and tend, and still find a future. It made my existence of the previous week seem like that of a rat living on crumbs and ferreting in garbage heaps. As I looked out over the fields I felt my spirits expanding.

Places on our route, towns like Reading or Newbury, brought back the London mood for a while, but they were no more then dips in a graph of revival.

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable. Under a wide blue sky where a few clouds sailed like celestial icebergs the cities became a less oppressive memory, and the sense of living freshened us again like a clean wind. It does not, perhaps, excuse, but it does at least explain why from time to time I was surprised to find myself singing as I drove.

At Hungerford we stopped for more food and fuel. The feeling of release continued to mount as we passed through miles of untouched country. It did not seem lonely yet, only sleeping and friendly. Even the sight of occasional little groups of triffids swaying across a field, or of others resting with their roots dug into the soil, held no hostility to spoil my mood. They were, once again, the simple objects of my professional interest.

Short of Devizes we pulled up once more to consult the map. A little farther on we turned down a side road to the right and drove into the village of Tynsham.