It was Walter’s discovery again that the quality of the extracts was improved if the plants retained their stings. In consequence, the practice of docking was discontinued on farms throughout the trade, and we had to wear protective devices when working among the plants.
At the time or the accident that had landed me in hospital I was actually with Walter. We were examining some specimens which were showing unusual deviations. Both of us were wearing wire-mesh masks. I did not see exactly what happened. All I know is that as I bent forward a sting slashed viciously at my face and smacked against the wire of the mask. Ninety-nine times in a hundred it would not have mattered; that was what the masks were for. But this one came with such force that some of the little poison sacs were burst open, and a few drops from them went into my eyes. Walter got me back into his lab and administered the antidote in a few seconds. It was entirely due to his quick work that they had the chance of saving my sight at all. But even so it had meant over a week in bed, in the dark.
While I lay there I had quite decided that when-and if-I had my sight back I was going to apply for a transfer to another side of the business. And if that did not go through, I’d quit the job altogether.
I had built up a considerable resistance to triffid poison since my first sting in the garden. I could take, and had taken, without very much harm, stings which would have laid an inexperienced man out very cold indeed. But an old saying about a pitcher and a well kept on recurring to me. I was taking my warning.
I spent, I remember, a good many of my enforcedly dark hours deciding what kind of job I would try for if they would not give me that transfer.
Considering what was just around the corner for us all, I could scarcely have found a contemplation more idle.
THE GROPING CITY
I left the pub door swinging behind me as I made my way to the corner of the main road. There I hesitated.
To the left, through miles of suburban streets, lay the open county; to the right, the West End of London, with the City beyond. I was feeling somewhat restored, but curiously detached now, and rudderless. I had no glimmering of a plan, and in the face of what I had at last begun to perceive as a vast and not merely local catastrophe, if was still too stunned to begin to reason one out. What plan could there be to deal with such a thing? I felt forlorn, cast into desolation, and yet not quite real, not quite myself here and now. In no direction was there any traffic, nor any sound of it. The only signs of life were a few people here and there cautiously groping their way along the shop fronts.
The day was perfect for early summer. The sun poured down from a deep blue sky set with tufts of white woolly clouds. All of it was clean and fresh save for a smear made by a single column of greasy smoke coming from somewhere behind the houses to the north.
I stood there indecisively for a few minutes. Then I turned east, Londonward.
To this day I cannot say quite why. Perhaps it was an instinct to seek familiar places, or the feeling that if there were authority anywhere it must be somewhere in that direction.
The brandy had made me feel more hungry than ever, but I did not find the problem of feeding as easy to deal with as it should have been. And yet there were the shops, untenanted and unguarded, with food in the windows-and here was I, with hunger and the means to pay. Or, if I did not wish to pay, I had only to smash a window and take what I wanted.
Nevertheless, it was hard to persuade oneself to do that. I was not yet ready to admit, after nearly thirty years of a reasonably right-respecting existence and law-abiding life, that things had changed in any fundamental way. There was, too, a feeling that as long as I remained my normal self things might even yet, in some inconceivable way, return to their normal, Absurd it undoubtedly was, but I had a very strong sense that the moment I should stove in one of those sheets of plate glass I would leave the old order behind me forever: I should become a looter, a sacker, a low scavenger upon the dead body of the system that had nourished me. Such a foolish niceness of sensibility in a stricken world! And yet it still pleases me to remember that civilized usage did not slide off me at once, and that for a time, at least, I wandered along past displays which made my mouth water while my already obsolete conventions kept me hungry.
The problem resolved itself in a sophistical way after perhaps half a mile. A taxi, after mounting the sidewalk, had finished up with its radiator buried in a pile of delicatessen. That made it seem different from doing my own breaking in. I climbed past the taxi and collected the makings of a good meal. But even then something of the old standards still clung:
I conscientiously left a fair price for what I had taken lying on the counter.
Almost across the road there was a garden. It was the kind that had once been the graveyard of a vanished church. The old headstones had been taken up and set back against the surrounding brick wall, the cleared space turfed over and laid out with graveled paths. It looked pleasant under the freshly leafed trees, and to one of the seats there I took my lunch.
The place was withdrawn and peaceful. No one else came in, though occasionally a figure would shuffle past the railings at the entrance. I threw some crumbs to a few sparrows, the first birds I had seen that day, and felt all the better for watching their perky indifference to calamity.
When I had finished eating I lit a cigarette. While I sat there smoking it, wondering where I should go and what I should do, the quiet was broken by the sound of a piano played somewhere in a block of apartments that overlooked the garden. Presently a girl’s voice began to sing. The song was Byron’s ballad;
So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast.
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
Arid the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
I listened, looking up at the pattern that the tender young leaves and the branches made against the fresh blue sky. The song finished. The notes of the piano died away. Then there was a sound of sobbing. No passion: softly, helplessly, forlorn, heartbroken. Who she was, whether it was the singer or another weeping her hopes away, I do not know. But to listen longer was more than I could endure. I went quietly back into the street, unable to see anything more than mistily for a while.
Even Hyde Park Corner, when I reached it, was almost deserted. A few derelict cars and trucks stood about on the roads. Very little, it seemed, had gone out of control when it was in motion. One bus had run across the path and come to rest in the Green Park; a runaway horse with shafts still attached to it lay beside the artillery memorial against which it had cracked its skull. The only moving things were a few men and a lesser number of women feeling their way carefully with hands and feet where there were railings and shuffling forward with protectively outstretched arms where there were not. Also, and rather unexpectedly, there were one or two cats, apparently intact visually and treating the whole situation with that self-possession common to cats. They had poor prowling through the eerie quietness-the sparrows were few, and the pigeons had vanished.
Still magnetically drawn toward the old center of things, I crossed in the direction of Piccadilly. I was just about to start along it when I noticed a sharp new sound-a steady tapping not far away, and coming closer. Looking up Park Lane, I discovered its source. A man, more neatly dressed than any other I had seen that morning, was walking rapidly toward me, hitting the wall beside him with a white stick. As he caught the sound of my steps he stopped, listening alertly.