The Day of the Triffids(47)

I told him of the address chalked on the wall. He had not seen it. He had been on his way to the University Building when the sound of my shot had caused him to scout round with some caution.

“It——” I began, and then stopped abruptly. From one of the streets west of us came the sound of a car starting up. It ran up its gears quickly and then diminished into the distance.

“Well, at least there’s somebody else left,” said Coker. “And whoever wrote up that address. Have you any idea who it was?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It was a justifiable assumption that it was a returned member of the group that Coker had raided—or possibly some sighted person that his party had failed to catch. There was no telling how long it had been there. He thought it over.

“It’ll be better if there’s two of us. I’ll tag along with you and see what’s doing. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’m for turning in now, and an early start tomorrow.”

He was still asleep when I awoke. I dressed myself much more comfortably in the ski suit and heavy shoes than in the garments I had been wearing since his party had provided them for me. By the time I returned with a bag of assorted cans, he was up and dressed too. Over breakfast we decided to improve our welcome at Tynsham by taking a loaded truck each rather than travel together in one.

“And see that the cab window closes,” I suggested. “There are quite a lot of triffid nurseries around London, particularly to the west.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve seen a few of the ugly brutes about,” he said offhandedly.

“I’ve seen them about—and in action,” I told him.

At the first garage we came to we broke open a pump and filled up. Then, sounding in the silent streets like a convoy of tanks, we set off westward with my truck in the lead.

The going was wearisome. Every few dozen yards one had to weave round some derelict vehicle. Occasionally two or three together would block the road entirely so that it was necessary to go dead slow and nudge one of them out of the way. Very few of them were wrecked. The blindness seemed to have come upon the drivers swiftly, but not too suddenly for them to keep control. Usually they had been able to draw in to the side of the road before they stopped. Had the catastrophe occurred by day, the main roads would have been quite impassable, and to work our way clear from the center by side streets might have taken days—spent mostly in reversing before impenetrable thickets of vehicles and trying to find another way round. As it was, I found that our over-all progress was less slow than it seemed in detail, and when, after a few miles, I noticed an overturned car beside the road I realized that we were by this time on a route which others had traveled, and partially cleared, ahead of us.

On the farther outskirts of Staines we could begin to feel that London was behind us at last. I stopped, and went back to Coker. As he switched off, the silence closed, thick and unnatural, with only the click of cooling metal to break it. I realized suddenly that I had not seen a single living creature other than a few sparrows since we had started. Coker climbed out of his cab. He stood in the middle of the road, listening and looking around him.

“And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity,”



he murmured.

I looked hard at him. His grave, reflective expression turned suddenly to a grin.

“Or do you prefer Shelley?” he asked.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!



Come on, let’s find some food.”

“Coker,” I said as we completed the meal sitting on a store counter and spreading marmalade on crackers, “you beat me. What are you? The first time I meet you I find you ranting—if you will forgive the appropriate word—in a kind of dockside lingo. Now you quote Marvell to me. It doesn’t make sense.”

He grinned. “It never did to me, either,” he said. “It comes of being a hybrid—you never really know what you are. My mother never really knew what I was, either—at least she never could prove it, and she always held it against me that on account of that she could not get an allowance for me. It made me kind of sour about things when I was a kid, and when I left school I used to go to meetings—more or less any kind of meetings as long as they were protesting against something. And that led to me getting mixed up with the lot that used to come to them. I suppose they found me kind of amusing. Anyway, they used to take me along to arty-political sorts of parties. After a bit I got tired of being amusing and seeing them give a kind of double laugh, half with me and half at me, whenever I said what I thought. I reckoned I needed some of the background knowledge they had, and then I’d be able to laugh at them a bit, maybe, so I started going to evening classes, and I practiced talking the way they did, for use when necessary. There’s a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously. If you talk tough and quote Shelley they think you’re cute, like a performing monkey or something, but they don’t pay any attention to what you say. You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across—not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk. So I reckoned the thing to do was to make myself bilingual, and use the right one in the right place—and occasionally the wrong one in the wrong place, unexpectedly. Surprising how that jolts ’em. Wonderful thing, the English caste system. Since then I’ve made out quite nicely in the orating business. Not what you’d call a steady job, but full of interest and variety…. Wilfred Coker. Meetings addressed. Subject no object. That’s me.”