The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

  “‘If you have a can of gas to spare, throw some of it their way, and follow it up with a bit of burning rag,’ he suggested. ‘That ought to shift ’em.’

  “It did. Since then I’ve been using a garden syringe. The wonder is that I’ve not set the place on fire.”

  With the aid of a cookbook Josella had managed to produce meals of a kind, and had set about putting the place more or less to rights. Working, learning, and improvising had kept her too busy to worry about a future which lay beyond the next few weeks. She had seen no one else at all during those days, but, certain that there must be others somewhere, she had scanned the whole valley for signs of smoke by day or lights by night.

  She had seen no smoke, and in all the miles within her view there had not been a gleam of light until the evening I came.

  In a way, the worst affected of the original trio was Dennis. Joyce was still weak and in a semi-invalid state. Mary held herself withdrawn and seemed capable of finding endless mental occupation and compensation in the contemplation of prospective motherhood. But Dennis was like an animal in a trap. He did not curse in the futile way I had heard so many others do; he resented it with a vicious bitterness, as if it had forced him into a cage where he did not intend to stay. Already, before I arrived, he had prevailed upon Josella to find the Braille system in the encyclopedia and make an indented copy of the alphabet for him to learn. He spent dogged hours each day making notes in it and attempting to read them back. Most of the rest of the time he fretted over his own useless-ness, though he scarcely mentioned it. He would keep on trying to do this or that with a grim persistence that was painful to watch, and it required all my self-control to stop me offering him help—one experience of the bitterness which unasked help could arouse in him was quite enough. I began to be astonished at the things he was painfully teaching himself to do, though still the most impressive to me was his construction of an efficient mesh helmet on only the second day of his blindness.

  It took him out of himself to accompany me on some of my foraging expeditions, and it pleased him that he could be useful in helping to move the heavier cases. He was anxious for books in Braille, but those, we decided, would have to wait until there was less risk of contamination in towns large enough to be likely sources.

  The days began to pass quickly, certainly for the three of us who could see. Josella was kept busy mostly in the house, and Susan was learning to help her. There were plenty of jobs, too, waiting to be done by me. Joyce recovered sufficiently to make a shaky first appearance, and then began to pick up more rapidly. Soon after that Mary’s pains began.

  That was a bad night for everyone. Worst, perhaps, for Dennis in knowing that everything depended on the care of two willing but inexperienced girls. His self-control aroused my helpless admiration.

  In the early hours of the morning Josella came down to us, looking very tired:

  “It’s a girl. They’re both all right,” she said, and led Dennis up.

  She returned a few moments later and took the drink I had ready for her.

  “It was quite simple, thank heaven,” she said. “Poor Mary was horribly afraid it might be blind too, but of course it’s not. Now she’s crying quite dreadfully because she can’t see it.”

  We drank.

  “It’s queer,” I said, “the way things go on, I mean. Like a seed—it looks all shriveled and finished, you’d think it was dead, but it isn’t. And now a new life starting, coming into all this …”

  Josella put her face in her hands.

  “Oh God! Bill. Does it have to go on being like this? On—and on—and on?”

  And she, too, collapsed in tears.

  Three weeks later I went over to Tynsham to see Coker and make arrangements for our move. I took an ordinary car, in order to do the double journey in a day. When I got back Josella met me in the hall. She gave one look at my face.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Just that we shan’t be going there after all,” I told her. “Tynsham is finished.”

  She stared back at me.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure. It looks as if the plague got there.”

  I described the state of affairs briefly. It had not needed much investigation. The gates were open when I arrived, and the sight of triffids loose in the park half warned me what to expect. The smell when I got out of the car confirmed it. I made myself go into the house. By the look of it, it had been deserted two weeks or more before. I put my head into two of the rooms. They were enough for me. I called, and my voice ran right away through the hollowness of the house.

  I went no farther.

  There had been a notice of some kind pinned to the front door, but only one blank corner remained. I spent a long time searching for the rest of the sheet that must have blown away. I did not find it. The yard at the back was empty of trucks, and most of the stores had gone with them, but where to I could not tell.

  There was nothing to be done but get into my car again and come back.

  “And so—what?” asked Josella when I had finished.

  “And so, my dear, we stay here. We learn how to support ourselves. And we go on supporting ourselves—unless help comes. There may be an organization somewhere …”

  Josella shook her head.

  “I think we’d better forget all about help. Millions and millions of people have been waiting and hoping for help that hasn’t come.”

  “There’ll be something,” I said. “There must be thousands of little groups like this dotted all over Europe—all over the world. Some of them will get together. They’ll begin to rebuild.”

  “In how long?” said Josella. “Generations? Perhaps not until after our time. No—the world’s gone, and we’re left…. We must make our own lives. We’ll have to plan them as though help will never come …” She paused. There was an odd blank look on her face that I had never seen before. It puckered.

  “Darling …” I said.

  “Oh, Bill, Bill, I wasn’t meant for this kind of life. If you weren’t here I’d—”

  “Hush, my sweet,” I said gently. “Hush.” I stroked her hair.

  A few moments later she recovered herself.

  “I’m sorry, Bill. Self-pity … revolting. Never again.”

  She patted her eyes with her handkerchief and sniffed a little.

  “So I’m to be a farmer’s wife. Anyway, I like being married to you, Bill—even if it isn’t a very proper, authentic kind of marriage.”

  Suddenly she gave the smiling chuckle that I had not heard for some time.

  “What is it?”

  “I was only thinking how much I used to dread my wedding.”

  “That was very maidenly and proper of you—if a little unexpected,” I told her.

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly that. It was my publishers, and the newspapers, and the film people. What fun they would have had with it. There’d have been a new edition of my silly book—probably a new release of the film—and pictures in all the papers. I don’t think you’d have liked that much.”

  “I can think of another thing I’d not have liked much,” I told her. “Do you remember—that night in the moonlight you made a condition?”

  She looked at me.

  “Well, maybe some things haven’t turned out so badly,” she said, smiling.

  WORLD NARROWING

  From then on I kept a journal. It is a mixture of diary, stock list, and commonplace book. In it there are notes of the places to which my expeditions took me, particulars of the supplies collected, estimates of quantities available, observations on the states of the premises, with memos on which should be cleared first to avoid deterioration. Foodstuffs, fuel, and seed were constant objects of search, but by no means the only ones. There are entries detailing loads of clothing, tools, household linen, harness, kitchenware, loads of stakes, and wire, wire, and more wire, also books.

  I can see there that within a week of my return from Tynsham I had start
ed on the work of erecting a wire fence to keep the triffids out. Already we had barriers to hold them away from the garden and the immediate neighborhood of the house. Now I began a more ambitious plan of making some hundred acres or so free from them. It involved a stout wire fence which took advantage of the natural features and standing barriers, and, inside it, a lighter fence to prevent either the stock or ourselves from coming inadvertently within sting range of the main fence. It was a heavy, tedious job which took me a number of months to complete.

  At the same time I was endeavoring to learn the A B C of farming. It is not the kind of thing that is easily learned from books. For one thing, it has never occurred to any writer on the subject that any potential farmer could be starting from absolute zero. I found, therefore, that all works started, as it were, in the middle, taking for granted both a basis and a vocabulary that I did not have. My specialized biological knowledge was all but useless to me in the face of practical problems. Much of the theory called for materials and substances which were either unavailable to me or unrecognizable by me if I could find them. I began to see quite soon that by the time I had dismissed the things that would shortly be unprocurable, such as chemical fertilizers, imported feeding stuffs, and all but the simpler kinds of machinery, there was going to be much expenditure of sweat for problematical returns.

  Nor is book-installed knowledge of horse management, dairy work, or slaughterhouse procedure by any means an adequate groundwork for these arts. There are so many points where one cannot break off to consult the relevant chapter. Moreover, the realities persistently present baffling dissimilarities from the simplicities of print.

  Luckily there was plenty of time to make mistakes, and to learn from them. The knowledge that several years could pass before we should be thrown anywhere near on our own resources saved us from desperation over our disappointments. There was the reassuring thought, too, that by living on preserved stores we were being quite provident really in preventing them from being wasted.

  For safety’s sake I let a whole year pass before I went to London again. It was the most profitable area for my forays, but it was the most depressing. The place still contrived to give the impression that a touch of a magic wand would bring it awake again, though many of the vehicles in the streets were beginning to turn rusty. A year later the change was more noticeable. Large patches of plaster detached from house fronts had begun to litter the sidewalks. Dislodged tiles and chimney pots could be found in the streets. Grass and weeds had a good hold in the gutters and were choking the drains. Leaves had blocked downspoutings so that more grass, and even small bushes, grew in cracks and in the silt in the roof gutterings. Almost every building was beginning to wear a green wig beneath which its roofs would damply rot. Through many a window one had glimpses of fallen ceilings, curves of peeling paper, and walls glistening with damp. The gardens of the parks and squares were wildernesses creeping out across the bordering streets. Growing things seemed, indeed, to press out everywhere, rooting in the crevices between the paving stones, springing from cracks in concrete, finding lodgments even in the seats of the abandoned cars. On all sides they were incroaching to repossess themselves of the arid spaces that man had created. And, curiously, as the living things increasingly took charge, the effect of the place became less oppressive. As it passed beyond the scope of any magic wand, most of the ghosts were going with it, withdrawing slowly into history.

  Once—not that year, not the next, but later on—I stood in Piccadilly Circus again, looking round at the desolation and trying to re-create in my mind’s eye the crowds that once swarmed there. I could no longer do it. Even in my memory they lacked reality. There was no tincture of them now. They had become as much a back cloth of history as the audiences in the Roman Colosseum or the army of the Assyrians, and, somehow, just as far removed from me. The nostalgia that crept over me sometimes in the quiet hours was able to move me to more regret than the crumbling scene itself. When I was by myself in the country I could recall the pleasantness of the former life: among the scabrous, slowly perishing buildings I seemed able to recall only the muddle, the frustration, the unaimed drive, the all-pervading clangor of empty vessels, and I became uncertain how much we had lost….

  My first tentative trip there I took alone, returning with cases of triffid bolts, paper, engine parts, the Braille books and writing machine that Dennis so much desired, the luxuries of drinks, candies, records, and yet more books for the rest of us. A week later Josella came with me on a more practical search for clothing, not only, or even chiefly, for the adults of the party so much as for Mary’s baby and the one she herself was now expecting. It upset her, and it remained the only visit she made.

  It was at the end of the fourth year that I made my last trip, and found that there were now risks which I was not justified in taking. The first intimation of that was a thunderous crash behind me somewhere in the inner suburbs. I stopped the truck, and looked back to see the dust rising from a heap of rubble which lay across the road. Evidently my rumbling passage had given the last shake to a tottering house front. I brought no more buildings down that day, but I spent it in apprehension of a descending torrent of bricks and mortar. Thereafter I confined my attention to smaller towns, and usually went about them on foot.

  Brighton, which should have been our largest convenient source of supplies, I let alone. By the time I had thought it fit for a visit, others were in charge there. Who or how many there were, I did not know. I simply found a rough wall of stones piled across the road and painted with the instruction:

  KEEP OUT!

  The advice was backed up by the crack of a rifle and a spurt of dust just in front of me. There was no one in sight to argue with—besides, it wasn’t an arguing kind of gambit.

  I turned the truck round and drove away thoughtfully. I wondered if a time might come when the man Stephen’s preparations for defense might turn out to be not so misplaced after all. Just to be on the safe side, I laid in several machine guns and mortars from the source which had already provided us with the flame throwers we used against the triffids.

  In the November of that second year Josella’s first baby was born. We called him David. My pleasure in him was at times alloyed with misgivings over the state of things we had created him to face. But that worried Josella much less than it did me. She adored him. He seemed to be a compensation to her for much that she had lost, and, paradoxically, she started to worry less over the condition of the bridges ahead than she had before. Anyway, he had a lustiness which argued well for his future capacity to take care of himself, so I repressed my misgivings and increased the work I was putting into that land which would one day have to support all of us.

  It must have been not so very long after that that Josella turned my attention more closely to the triffids. I had for years been so used to taking precautions against them in my work that their becoming a regular part of the landscape was far less noticeable to me than it was to the others. I had been accustomed, too, to wearing meshed masks and gloves when I dealt with them, so that there was little novelty for me in donning these things whenever I drove out. I had, in fact, got into the habit of paying little more attention to them than one would to mosquitoes in a known malarial area. Josella mentioned it as we lay in bed one night when almost the only sound was the intermittent, distant rattling of their hard little sticks against their stems.

  “They’re doing a lot more of that lately,” she said.

  I did not grasp at first what she was talking about. It was a sound that had been a usual background to the places where I had lived and worked for so long that unless I deliberately listened for it I could not say whether it was going on or not. I listened now.

  “It doesn’t sound any different to me,” I said.

  “It’s not different. It’s just that there’s a lot more of it—because there are a lot more of them than there used to be.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” I said indifferently.

  Once I
had the fence fixed up, my interest had lain in the ground within it, and I had not bothered about what went on beyond it. My impression on my expeditions was that the incidence of triffids in most parts was much the same as before. I recalled that their numbers locally had caught my attention when I had first arrived, and that I had supposed that there must have been several large triffid nurseries in the district.

  “There certainly are. You take a look at them tomorrow,” she said.

  I remembered in the morning, and looked out of the window as I was dressing. I saw that Josella was right. One could count over a hundred of them behind the quite small stretch visible from the window. I mentioned it at breakfast. Susan looked suprised.

  “But they’ve been getting more all the time,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “I’ve got plenty of other things to bother about,” I said, a little irritated by her tone. “They don’t matter outside the fence, anyway. As long as we take care to pull up all the seeds that root in here, they can do what they like outside.”

  “All the same,” Josella remarked with a trace of uneasiness, “is there any particular reason why they should come to just this part in such numbers? I’m sure they do—and I’d like to know just why it is.”

  Susan’s face took on its irritating expression of surprise again.