Free Wyndham, John by The Day Of The Triffids (v2) [htm]

The New Gallery cinema’s just behind
you,” she told him, and turned to go.
    “Just show me where the curb is, miss, will you?’ he said.
She hesitated, and in that moment he came close. The outstretched hand sought
and touched her sleeve. He lunged forward and caught both her arms in a painful
grip.
    “So you can see, can you!” he said. “Why the hell
should you be able to see when I can’t—nor anyone else?”
    Before she realized what was happening he had turned her and
tripped her, and she was lying in the road with his knee in her back. He caught
both her wrists in the grasp of one large hand and proceeded to tie them
together with a piece of string from his pocket. Then he stood up and pulled
her onto her feet again.
    “All right,” he said. “From now on you can do your seeing
for me. I’m hungry. Take me where there’s a bit of good grub. Get on with it.”

    “I think, Bill,” she said, “that though you wouldn’t have guessed
it to look at him, he wasn’t perhaps too bad a man really. Only he was
frightened. Deep down inside him he was much more frightened than I was. He
gave me some food and something to drink. He only started beating me like that
because he was drunk and I wouldn’t go into his house with him. I don’t know
what would have happened if you hadn’t come along.” She paused. Then she added:
“But I am pretty ashamed of myself. Shows you what a modern young woman can
come to after all, doesn’t it? Screaming, and collapsing with the vapors Hell!”
    She was looking, and obviously feeling, rather better,
though she winced as she reached for her glass.
    “I think,” I said, “that I’ve been fairly dense over this
business—and pretty lucky. I ought to have made more of the implications when I
saw that woman with the child in Piccadilly. It’s only been chance that’s
stopped me from falling into the same kind of mess that you did.”
    “Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a
precarious existence,” she said reflectively.

    “I’ll go on bearing that in mind henceforth,” I told her.
    “It’s already very well impressed on mine,” she remarked. We
sat listening to the uproar from the other pub for a few minutes.
    “And what,” I said at last, “just what, do we propose to do
now?”
    “I must get back home. There’s my father. It’s obviously no
good going on to try to find the doctor now—even if he has been one of the
lucky ones.”
    She seemed about to add something, but hesitated.
    “Do you mind if I come too?” I asked. “This doesn’t seem to
me the sort of time when anyone like us should be wandering about on his or
her own.”
    She turned with a grateful look.
    “Thank you. I almost asked, but I thought there might be
somebody you’d he wanting to look for.”
    “There isn’t,” I said. “Not in London, at any rate.”
    “Im glad. It’s not so much that I’m afraid of getting caught
again—I’ll be much too careful for that. But, to he honest, it’s the loneliness
I’m afraid of. I’m beginning to feel so—so cut off and stranded.”
    I was beginning to see things in another new light. The
sense of release was tempered with a growing realization of the grimness that
might lie ahead of us. It had been impossible at first not to feel some
superiority, and, therefore, confidence. Our chances of surviving the catastrophe
were a million times greater than those of the rest. Where they must fumble,
grope, and guess, we had simply to walk in and take. Butt here were going to be
a lot of things beyond that.
    I said: “I wonder just how many of us have escaped and can
still see? I’ve come across one other man, a child, and a baby; you’ve met
none. It looks to me as if we are going to find out that sight is very rare
indeed. Some of the others have evidently grasped already that their only
chance of survival is to get hold of someone who can see. When they all understand
that, the outlooks going to he none too good.”
    The future seemed to me at that time a choice between a
lonely existence,