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.