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The fact is that we had absolutely incompatible dispositions
and habits of thought and action, and our danger and isolation
only accentuated the incompatibility. At Halliford I had already
come to hate the curate's trick of helpless exclamation,
his stupid rigidity of mind. His endless muttering monologue
vitiated every effort I made to think out a line of action, and
drove me at times, thus pent up and intensified, almost to the
verge of craziness. He was as lacking in restraint as a silly
woman. He would weep for hours together, and I verily
believe that to the very end this spoiled child of life thought
his weak tears in some way efficacious. And I would sit in
the darkness unable to keep my mind off him by reason of
his importunities. He ate more than I did, and it was in vain
I pointed out that our only chance of life was to stop in the
house until the Martians had done with their pit, that in that
long patience a time might presently come when we should
need food. He ate and drank impulsively in heavy meals at
long intervals. He slept little.
As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any consideration
so intensified our distress and danger that I had, much as
I loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows.
That brought him to reason for a time. But he was one of
those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful
souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man,
who face not even themselves.
It is disagreeable for me to recall and write these things,
but I set them down that my story may lack nothing. Those
who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will
find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy
enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as
any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who
have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to
elemental things, will have a wider charity.
And while within we fought out our dark, dim contest of
whispers, snatched food and drink, and gripping hands and
blows, without, in the pitiless sunlight of that terrible June,
was the strange wonder, the unfamiliar routine of the
Martians in the pit. Let me return to those first new experiences
of mine. After a long time I ventured back to the
peephole, to find that the new-comers had been reinforced
by the occupants of no fewer than three of the fighting-machines.
These last had brought with them certain fresh
appliances that stood in an orderly manner about the cylinder.
The second handling-machine was now completed, and was
busied in serving one of the novel contrivances the big
machine had brought. This was a body resembling a milk can
in its general form, above which oscillated a pear-shaped
receptacle, and from which a stream of white powder flowed
into a circular basin below.
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