The War of the Wenuses | Page 9

II.
THE MAN AT UXBRIDGE ROAD.
At the corner a happy thought struck me: the landlord of the "Dog and
Measles" kept a motor car. I found him in his bar and killed him. Then
I broke open the stable and let loose the motor car. It was very restive,
and I had to pat it. "Goo' Tea Rose," I said soothingly, "goo'
Rockefeller, then." It became quiet, and I struck a match and started the
paraffinalia, and in a moment we were under weigh.
I am not an expert motist, although at school I was a fairly good
hoop-driver, and the pedestrians I met and overtook had a bad time.
One man said, as he bound up a punctured thigh, that the Heat Ray of
the Martians was nothing compared with me. I was moting towards
Leatherhead, where my cousin lived, when the streak of light caused by
the Third Crinoline curdled the paraffin tank. Vain was it to throw
water on the troubled oil; the mischief was done. Meanwhile a storm
broke. The lightning flashed, the rain beat against my face, the night
was exceptionally dark, and to add to my difficulties the motor took the
wick between its teeth and fairly bolted.
No one who has never seen an automobile during a spasm of motor
ataxy can have any idea of what I suffered. I held the middle of the way
for a few yards, but just opposite Uxbridge Road Station I turned the
wheel hard a-port, and the motor car overturned. Two men sprang from
nowhere, as men will, and sat on its occiput, while I crawled into
Uxbridge Road Station and painfully descended the stairs.
I found the platform empty save for a colony of sturdy little newsboys,

whose stalwart determination to live filled me with admiration, which I
was enjoying until a curious sibillation beneath the bookstall stirred me
with panic.
Suddenly, from under a bundle of British Weeklies, there emerged a
head, and gradually a man crawled out. It was the Artilleryman.
"I'm burning hot," he said; "it's a touch of--what is it?--erethism."
His voice was hoarse, and his Remarks, like the Man of Kent's, were
Rambling.
"Where do you come from?" he said.
"I come from Woking," I replied, "and my nature is Wobbly. I love my
love with a W because she is Woluptuous. I took her to the sign of the
Wombat and read her The War of the Worlds, and treated her to
Winkles, Winolia and Wimbos. Her name is Wenus, and she comes
from the Milky Way."
He looked at me doubtfully, then shot out a pointed tongue.
"It is you," he said, "the man from Woking. The Johnny what writes for
Nature. By the way," he interjected, "don't you think some of your stuff
is too--what is it?--esoteric? The man," he continued, "as killed the
curate in the last book. By the way, it was you as killed the curate?"
"Artilleryman," I replied, "I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little
meat-chopper. And you, I presume, are the Artilleryman who attended
my lectures on the Eroticism of the Elasmobranch?"
"That's me," he said; "but Lord, how you've changed. Only a fortnight
ago, and now you're stone-bald!"
I stared, marvelling at his gift of perception.
"What have you been living on?" I asked.
"Oh," he said, "immature potatoes and Burgundy" (I give the catalogue

so precisely because it has nothing to do with the story), "uncooked
steak and limp lettuces, precocious carrots and Bartlett pears, and
thirteen varieties of fluid beef, which I cannot name except at the usual
advertisement rates."
"But can you sleep after it?" said I.
"Blimy! yes," he replied; "I'm fairly--what is it?--eupeptic."
"It's all over with mankind," I muttered.
"It is all over," he replied. "The Wenuses 'ave only lost one Crinoline,
just one, and they keep on coming; they're falling somewhere every
night. Nothing's to be done. We're beat!"
I made no answer. I sat staring, pulverised by the colossal
intellectuality of this untutored private. He had attended only three of
my lectures, and had never taken any notes.
"This isn't a war," he resumed; "it never was a war. These 'ere Wenuses
they wants to be Mas, that's the long and the short of it. Only----"
"Yes?" I said, more than ever impressed by the man's pyramidal
intuition.
"They can't stand the climate. They're too--what is it?--exotic."
We sat staring at each other.
"And what will they do?" I humbly asked, grovelling unscientifically at
his feet.
"That's what I've been thinking," said the gunner. "I ain't an ornamental
soldier, but I've a good deal of cosmic kinetic optimism, and it's the
cosmic kinetic optimist what comes through. Now these Wenuses don't
want to wipe us all out. It's the