BOOK ONE: THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
CHAPTER 14: IN LONDON
(continued)
For a long time my brother stared out of the window in
blank astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at
door after door, and delivering their incomprehensible message. Then the door behind him opened, and the man who
lodged across the landing came in, dressed only in shirt,
trousers, and slippers, his braces loose about his waist, his
hair disordered from his pillow.
"What the devil is it?" he asked. "A fire? What a devil of a
row!"
They both craned their heads out of the window, straining
to hear what the policemen were shouting. People were coming out of the side streets, and standing in groups at the
corners talking.
"What the devil is it all about?" said my brother's fellow
lodger.
My brother answered him vaguely and began to dress,
running with each garment to the window in order to miss
nothing of the growing excitement. And presently men selling
unnaturally early newspapers came bawling into the street:
"London in danger of suffocation! The Kingston and Richmond defences forced! Fearful massacres in the Thames
Valley!"
And all about him--in the rooms below, in the houses on
each side and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne Park district and St. Pancras, and
westward and northward in Kilburn and St. John's Wood and
Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and
Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness
of London from Ealing to East Ham--people were rubbing
their eyes, and opening windows to stare out and ask aimless
questions, dressing hastily as the first breath of the coming
storm of Fear blew through the streets. It was the dawn of
the great panic. London, which had gone to bed on Sunday
night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours
of Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger.
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