“It was not — . But never mind. How is it now — ?”
“Gain and the Pleasure Cities! Or slavery — unthanked, unhonoured, slavery.”
“Slavery!” he said.
“Slavery.”
“You don’t mean to say that human beings are chattels.”
“Worse. That is what I want you to know, what I want you to see. I know you do not know. They will keep things from you, they will take you presently to a Pleasure City. But you have noticed men and women and children in pale blue canvas, with thin yellow faces and dull eyes?”
“Everywhere.”
“Speaking a horrible dialect, coarse and weak.”
“I have heard it.”
“They are the slaves — your slaves. They are the slaves of the Labour Company you own.”
“The Labour Company! In some way — that is familiar. Ah! now I remember. I saw it when I was wandering about the city, after the lights returned, great fronts of buildings coloured pale blue. Do you really mean — ?”
“Yes. How can I explain it to you? Of course the blue uniform struck you. Nearly a third of our people wear it — more assume it now every day. This Labour Company has grown imperceptibly.”
“What is this Labour Company?” asked Graham.
“In the old times, how did you manage with starving people?”
“There was the workhouse — which the parishes maintained.”
“Workhouse! Yes — there was something. In our history lessons. I remember now. The Labour Company ousted the workhouse. It grew — partly — out of something — you, perhaps, may remember it — an emotional religious organisation called the Salvation Army — that became a business company. In the first place it was almost a charity. To save people from workhouse rigours. Now I come to think of it, it was one of the earliest properties your Trustees acquired. They bought the Salvation Army and reconstructed it as this. The idea in the first place was to give work to starving homeless people.”
“Yes.”
“Nowadays there are no workhouses, no refuges and charities, nothing but that Company. Its offices are everywhere. That blue is its colour. And any man, woman or child who comes to be hungry and weary and with neither home nor friend nor resort, must go to the Company in the end — or seek some way of death. The Euthanasy is beyond their means — for the poor there is no easy death. And at any hour in the day or night there is food, shelter and a blue uniform for all comers — that is the first condition of the Company s incorporation — and in return for a day’s shelter the Company extracts a day’s work, and then returns the visitor’s proper clothing and sends him or her out again.”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps that does not seem so terrible to you. In your days men starved in your streets. That was bad. But they died — men. These people in blue — . The proverb runs: ‘Blue canvas once and ever.’ The Company trades in their labour, and it has taken care to assure itself of the supply. People come to it starving and helpless — they eat and sleep for a night and day, they -work for a day, and at the end of the day they go out again. If they have worked well they have a penny or so — enough for a theatre or a cheap dancing place, or a kinematograph story, or a dinner or a bet. They wander about after that is spent. Begging is prevented by the police of the ways. Besides, no one gives. They come back again the next day or the day after — brought back by the same incapacity that brought them first. At last their proper clothing wears out, or their rags get so shabby that they are ashamed. Then they must work for months to get fresh. If they want fresh. A great number of children are born under the Company’s care. The mother owes them a month thereafter — the children they cherish and educate until they are fourteen, and they pay two years’ service. You may be sure these children are educated for the blue canvas. And so it is the Company works.”
“And none are destitute in the city?”
“None. They are either in blue canvas or in prison.”
“If they will not work?”
“Most people will work at that pitch, and the Company has powers. There are stages of unpleasantness in the work — stoppage of food — and a man or woman who has refused to work once is known by a thumb-marking system in the Company’s offices all over the world. Besides, who can leave the city poor? To go to Paris costs two Lions. And for insubordination there are the prisons — dark and miserable — out of sight below. There are prisons now for many things.”
“And a third of the people wear this blue canvas?”
“More than a third. Toilers, living without pride or delight or hope, with the stories of Pleasure Cities ringing in their ears, mocking their shameful lives, their privations and hardships. Too poor even for the Euthanasy, the rich man’s refuge from life. Dumb, crippled millions, countless millions, all the world about, ignorant of anything but limitations and unsatisfied desires. They are born, they are thwarted and they die. That is the state to which we have come.”
For a space Graham sat downcast.
“But there has been a revolution,” he said. “All these things will be changed.” Ostrog –“
“That is our hope. That is the hope of the world. But Ostrog will not do it. He is a politician. To him it seems things must be like this. He does not mind. He takes it for granted. All the rich, all the influential, all who are happy, come at last to take these miseries for granted. They use the people in their politics, they live in ease by their degradation. But you — you who come from a happier age — it is to you the people look. To you.”
He looked at her face. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. He felt a rush of emotion. For a moment he forgot this city, he forgot the race, and all those vague remote voices, in the immediate humanity of her beauty.
“But what am I to do?” he said with his eyes upon her.
“Rule,” she answered, bending towards him and speaking in a low tone. “Rule the world as it has never been ruled, for the good and happiness of men. For you might rule it — you could rule it.
“The people are stirring. All over the world the people are stirring. It wants but a word — but a word from you — to bring them all together. Even the middle sort of people are restless unhappy.
“They are not telling you the things that are happening. The people will not go back to their drudgery — they refuse to be disarmed. Ostrog has awakened something greater than he dreamt of — he has awakened hopes.”
His heart was beating fast. He tried to seem judicial,
to weigh considerations.
“They only want their leader,” she said.
“And then?”
“You could do what you would; — the world is yours.”
He sat, no longer regarding her. Presently he spoke.” The old dreams, and the thing I have dreamt, liberty, happiness. Are they dreams? Could one man — one man — ?” His voice sank and ceased.
“Not one man, but all men — give them only a leader to speak the desire of their hearts.”
He shook his head, and for a time there was silence.
He looked up suddenly, and their eyes met. “I have not your faith,” he said.” I have not your youth. I am here with power that mocks me. No — let me speak. I want to do — not right — I have not the strength for that — but something rather right than wrong. It will bring no millennium, but I am resolved now that I will rule. What you have said has awakened me. . . . You are right. Ostrog must know his place. And I will learn — . . . . One thing I promise you. This Labour slavery shall end.”
“And you will rule?”
“Yes. Provided — . There is one thing.”
“Yes?”
“That you will help me.”
“I! — a girl!”
“Yes. Does it not occur to you I am absolutely alone?”
She started and for an instant her eyes had pity. “Need you ask whether I will help you?” she said.
She stood before him, beautiful, worshipful, and her enthusiasm and the greatness of their theme was like a great gulf fixed between them. To touch her, to clasp her hand, was a thing beyond hope. “Then I will rule indeed,” he said slowly. “I will rule-” He paused. “With you.”
There came a tense silence, and then the beating a clock striking the hour. She made him no answer. Graham rose.
“Even now,” he said, “Ostrog will be waiting.” He hesitated, facing her. “When I have asked him certain questions — . There is much I do not know. It may be, that I will go to see with my own eyes the things of which you have spoken. And when I return — ?”
“I shall know of your going and coming. I will wait for you here again.”
He stood for a moment regarding her.
“I knew,” she said, and stopped.
He waited, but she said no more. They regarded one another steadfastly, questioningly, and then he turned from her towards the Wind Vane office.
CHAPTER XIX
OSTROG’S POINT OF VIEW
Graham found Ostrog waiting to give a formal account of his day’s stewardship. On previous occasions he had passed over this ceremony as speedily as possible, in order to resume his aerial experiences, but now he began to ask quick short questions. He was very anxious to take up his empire forthwith. Ostrog brought flattering reports of the development of affairs abroad. In Paris and Berlin, Graham perceived that he was saying, there had been trouble, not organised resistance indeed, but insubordinate proceedings. “After all these years,” said Ostrog, when Graham pressed enquiries, “the Commune has lifted its head again. That is the real nature of the struggle, to be explicit.” But order had been restored in these cities. Graham, the more deliberately judicial for the stirring emotions he felt, asked if there had been any fighting. “A little,” said Ostrog. “In one quarter only. But the Senegalese division of our African agricultural police — the Consolidated African Companies have a very well drilled police — was ready, and so were the aeroplanes. We expected a little trouble in the continental cities, and in America. But things are very quiet in America. They are satisfied with the overthrow of the Council For the time.”
“Why should you expect trouble?” asked Graham abruptly.
“There is a lot of discontent — social discontent.”
“The Labour Company?”
“You are learning,” said Ostrog with a touch of surprise. “Yes. It is chiefly the discontent with the Labour Company. It was that discontent supplied the motive force of this overthrow — that and your awakening.”
“Yes?”
Ostrog smiled. He became explicit. “We had to stir up their discontent, we had to revive the old ideals of universal happiness — all men equal — all men happy — no luxury that everyone may not share — ideas that have slumbered for two hundred years. You know that? We had to revive these ideals, impossible as they are — in order to overthrow the Council. And now –“
“Well?”
“Our revolution is accomplished, and the Council is overthrown, and people whom we have stirred up remain surging. There was scarcely enough fighting . . . We made promises, of course. It is extraordinary how violently and rapidly this vague out-of-date humanitarianism has revived and spread. We who sowed the seed even, have been astonished. In Paris, as I say — we have had to call in a little external help.”
“And here?”
“There is trouble. Multitudes will not go back to work. There is a general strike. Half the factories are empty and the people are swarming in the Ways. They are talking of a Commune. Men in silk and satin have been insulted in the streets. The blue canvas is expecting all sorts of things from you…. Of course there is no need for you to trouble. We are setting the Babble Machines to work with counter suggestions in the cause of law and order. We must keep the grip tight; that is all.”
Graham thought. He perceived a way of asserting himself. But he spoke with restraint.
“Even to the pitch of bringing a negro police,” he said.
“They are useful,” said Ostrog. “They are fine loyal brutes, with no wash of ideas in their heads — such as our rabble has. The Council should have had them as police of the Ways, and things might have been different. Of course, there is nothing to fear except rioting and wreckage. You can manage your own wings now, and you can soar away to Capri if there is any smoke or fuss. We have the pull of all the great things; the aeronauts are privileged and rich, the closest trades union in the world, and so are the engineers of the wind vanes. We have the air, and the mastery of the air is the mastery of the earth. No one of any ability is organising against us. They have no leaders — only the sectional leaders of the secret society we organised before your very opportune awakening. Mere busy bodies and sentimentalists they are and bitterly jealous of each other. None of them is man enough for a central figure. The only trouble will be a disorganised upheaval. To be frank — that may happen. But it won’t interrupt your aeronautics. The days when the People could make revolutions are past.”
“I suppose they are,” said Graham. “I suppose they are.” He mused. “This world of yours has been full of surprises to me. In the old days we dreamt of a wonderful democratic life, of a time when all men would be equal and happy.”
Ostrog looked at him steadfastly. “The day of democracy is past,” he said. “Past for ever. That day began with the bowmen of Crecy, it ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of the world, when costly cannon, great ironclads, and strategic railways became the means of power. To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before — it commands earth and sea and sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth…. You must accept facts, and these are facts. The world for the Crowd! The Crowd as Ruler! Even in your days that creed had been tried and condemned. To-day it has only one believer — a multiplex, silly one — the mall in the Crowd.”
Graham did not answer immediately. He stood lost in sombre preoccupations.
“No,” said Ostrog.” The day of the common man is past. On the open countryside one man is as good as another, or nearly as good. The earlier aristocracy had a precarious tenure of strength and audacity. They were tempered — tempered. There were insurrections, duels, riots. The first real aristocracy, the first permanent aristocracy, came in with castles and armour, and vanished before the musket and bow. But this is the second aristocracy. The real one. Those days of gunpowder and democracy were only an eddy in the stream. The common man now is a helpless unit. In these days we have this great
machine of the city, and an organisation complex beyond his understanding.”
“Yet,” said Graham, “there is something resists, something you are holding down — something that stirs and presses.”
“You will see,” said Ostrog, with a forced smile that
would brush these difficult questions aside. “I have not roused the force to destroy myself — trust me.”
“I wonder,” said Graham.
Ostrog stared.
“Must the world go this way?” said Graham, with his emotions at the speaking point. “Must it indeed
go in this way? Have all our hopes been vain?”
“What do you mean?” said Ostrog. “Hopes?”
“I came from a democratic age. And I find an aristocratic tyranny!”
“Well, — but you are the chief tyrant.”
Graham shook his head.
“Well,” said Ostrog, “take the general question. It is the way that change has always travelled. Aristocracy, the prevalence of the best — the suffering and extinction of the unfit, and so to better things.”
“But aristocracy! those people I met –“
“Oh! not those!” said Ostrog. “But for the most part they go to their death. Vice and pleasure! They have no children. That sort of stuff will die out. If the world keeps to one road, that is, if there is no turning back. An easy road to excess, convenient Euthanasia for the pleasure seekers singed in the flame, that is the way to improve the race!”
“Pleasant extinction,” said Graham. “Yet — .” He thought for an instant.” There is that other thing — the Crowd, the great mass of poor men. Will that die out? That will not die out. And it suffers, its suffering is a force that even you –“
Ostrog moved impatiently, and when he spoke, he spoke rather less evenly than before.
“Don’t you trouble about these things,” he said. Everything will be settled in a few days now. The Crowd is a huge foolish beast. What if it does not die out? Even if it does not die, it can still be tamed and driven. I have no sympathy with servile men. You heard those people shouting and singing two nights ago. They were taught that song. If you had taken any man there in cold blood and asked why he shouted, he could not have told you. They think they are shouting for you, that they are loyal and devoted to you. Just then they were ready to slaughter the Council. To-day — they are already murmuring against those who have overthrown the Council.”
“No, no,” said Graham. “They shouted because their lives were dreary, without joy or pride, and because in me — in me — they hoped.”
“And what was their hope? What is their hope? What right have they to hope? They work ill and they want the reward of those who work well. The hope of mankind — what is it? That some day the Over-man may come, that some day the inferior, the weak and the bestial may be subdued or eliminated. Subdued if not eliminated. The world is no place for the bad, the stupid, the enervated. Their duty — it’s a fine duty too! — is to die. The death of the failure! That is the path by which the beast rose to manhood, by which man goes on to higher things.”
Ostrog took a pace, seemed to think, and turned on Graham. “I can imagine how this great world state of ours seems to a Victorian Englishman. You regret all the old forms of representative government — their spectres still haunt the world, the voting councils and parliaments and all that eighteenth century tomfoolery You feel moved against our Pleasure Cities. I might have thought of that, — had I not been busy. But you will learn better. The people are mad with envy — they would be in sympathy with you. Even in the streets now, they clamour to destroy the Pleasure Cities. But the Pleasure Cities are the excretory organs of the State, attractive places that year after year draw together all that is weak and vicious, all that is lascivious and lazy, all the easy roguery of the world, to a graceful destruction. They go there, they have their time, they die childless, all the pretty silly lascivious women die childless, and mankind is the better. If the people were sane they would not envy the rich
their way of death. And you would emancipate the silly brainless workers that we have enslaved, and try to make their lives easy and pleasant again. Just as they have sunk to what they are fit for. “He smiled a smile that irritated Graham oddly. “You
will learn better. I know those ideas; in my boyhood I read your Shelley and dreamt of Liberty. There is no liberty, save wisdom and self control. Liberty is within — not without. It is each man’s own affair. Suppose — which is impossible — that these swarming yelping fools in blue get the upper hand of us, what then? They will only fall to other masters. So long as there are sheep Nature will insist on beasts of prey. It would mean but a few hundred years’ delay. The coming of the aristocrat is fatal and assured. The end will be the Over-man — for all the mad protests of humanity. Let them revolt, let them win and kill me and my like. Others will arise — other masters. The end will be the same.”
“I wonder,” said Graham doggedly.
For a moment he stood downcast.
“But I must see these things for myself,” he said, suddenly assuming a tone of confident mastery. “Only by seeing can I understand. I must learn. That is what I want to tell you, Ostrog. I do not want to be King in a Pleasure City; that is not my, pleasure. I have spent enough time with aeronautics — and those other things. I must learn how people live now, how the common life has developed. Then I shall understand these things better. I must learn how common people live — the labour people more especially — how they work, marry, bear children, die –“
“You get that from our realistic novelists,” suggested Ostrog, suddenly preoccupied.
“I want reality,” said Graham, “not realism.”
“There are difficulties,” said Ostrog, and thought.
“On the whole perhaps —
“I did not expect — .
“I had thought — . And yet, perhaps — . You say you want to go through the Ways of the city and see the common people.”
Suddenly he came to some conclusion. “You would need to go disguised,” he said. “The city is intensely excited, and the discovery of your presence among them might create a fearful tumult. Still this wish of yours to go into this city — this idea of yours — . Yes, now I think the thing over it seems to me not altogether — . It can be contrived. If you would really find an interest in that! You are, of course, Master. You can go soon if you like. A disguise for this excursion Asano will be able to manage. He would go with you. After all it is not a bad idea of yours.”
“You will not want to consult me in any matter?” asked Graham suddenly, struck by an odd suspicion.
“Oh, dear no! No! I think you may trust affairs to me for a time, at any rate,” said Ostrog, smiling. “Even if we differ –“
Graham glanced; at him sharply.
“There is no fighting likely to happen soon?” he asked abruptly.
“Certainly not.”
“I have been thinking about these negroes. I don’t believe the people intend any hostility to me, and, after all, I am the Master. I do not want any negroes brought to London. It is an archaic prejudice perhaps, but I have peculiar feelings about Europeans and the subject races. Even about Paris –“
Ostrog stood watching him from under his drooping brows.” I am not bringing negroes to London,” he said slowly.” But if –“
“You are not to bring armed negroes to London, whatever happens,” said Graham. “In that matter I am quite decided.”
Ostrog, after a pause, decided not to speak, and bowed deferentially.
CHAPTER XX
IN THE CITY WAYS
And that night, unknown and unsuspected, Graham, dressed in the costume of an inferior wind-vane official keeping holiday, and accompanied by Asano in Labour Company canvas, surveyed the city through which he had wandered when it was veiled in darkness. But now he saw it lit and waking, a whirlpool of life. In spite of the surging and swaying of the forces of revolution, in spite of the unusual discontent, the mutterings of the greater struggle of which the first revolt was but the prelude, the myriad streams of commerce still flowed wide and strong. He knew now something of the dimensions and quality of the new age, but he was not prepared for the infinite surprise of the detailed view, for the torrent of colour and vivid impressions that poured past him.
This was his first real contact with the people of these latter days. He realised that all that had gone before, saving his glimpses of the public theatres and markets, had had its element of seclusion, had been a movement within the comparatively narrow political quarter, that all his previous experiences had revolved immediately about the question of his own position. But here was the city at the busiest hours of night, the people to a large extent returned to their own immediate interests, the resumption of the real informal life, he common habits of the new time.
They emerged at first into a street whose opposite ways were crowded with the blue canvas liveries. This swarm Graham saw was a portion of a procession — it was odd to see a procession parading the city seated They carried banners of coarse red stuff with red letters. “No disarmament,” said the banners, for the most part in crudely daubed letters and with variant spelling, and “Why should we disarm?” “No disarming.” “No disarming.” Banner after banner
went by, a stream of banners flowing past, and at last at the end, the song of the revolt and a noisy band of strange instruments.” They all ought to be at work,” said Asano. “They have had no food these two days, or they have stolen it.”
Presently Asano made a detour to avoid the congested crowd that gaped upon the occasional passage of dead bodies from hospital to a mortuary, the gleanings after death’s harvest of the first revolt.
That night few people were sleeping, everyone was abroad. A vast excitement, perpetual crowds perpetually changing, surrounded Graham; his mind was confused and darkened by an incessant tumult, by the cries and enigmatical fragments of the social struggle that was as yet only beginning. Everywhere festoons and banners of black and strange decorations, intensified the quality of his popularity. Everywhere he caught snatches of that crude thick dialect that served the illiterate class, the class, that is, beyond the reach of phonograph culture, in their common-place intercourse. Everywhere this trouble of disarmament was in the air, with a quality of immediate stress of which he had no inkling during his seclusion in the Wind-Vane quarter. He perceived that as soon as he returned he must discuss this with Ostrog, this and the greater issues of which it was the expression, in a far more conclusive way than he had so far done. Perpetually that night, even in the earlier hours of their wanderings about the city, the spirit of unrest and revolt swamped his attention, to the exclusion of countless strange things he might otherwise have observed.
This preoccupation made his impressions fragmentary. Yet amidst so much that was strange and vivid, no subject, however personal and insistent, could exert undivided sway. There were spaces when the revolutionary movement passed clean out of his mind, was drawn aside like a curtain from before some startling new aspect of the time. Helen had swayed his mind to this intense earnestness of enquiry, but there came times when she, even, receded beyond his conscious thoughts. At one moment, for example, he found they were traversing the religious quarter, for the easy transit about the city afforded by the moving ways rendered sporadic churches and chapels no longer necessary — and his attention was vividly arrested by the facade of one of the Christian sects.
They were travelling seated on one of the swift upper ways, the place leapt upon them at a bend and advanced rapidly towards them. It was covered with inscriptions from top to base, in vivid white and blue, save where a vast and glaring kinematograph transparency presented a realistic New Testament scene, and where a vast festoon of black to show that the popular religion followed the popular politics, hung across the lettering Graham had already become familiar with the phonotype writing and these inscriptions arrested him, being to his sense for the most part almost incredible blasphemy. Among the less offensive were “Salvation on the First Floor and turn to the Right.” “Put your Money on your Maker.” “The Sharpest Conversion in London, Expert Operators! Look Slippy!” “What Christ would say to the Sleeper; — Join the Up-to-date Saints!” “Be a Christian — without hindrance to your present Occupation.” “All the Brightest Bishops on the Bench to-night and Prices as Usual.” “Brisk Blessings for Busy Business Men.”
“But this is appalling!” said Graham, as that deafening scream of mercantile piety towered above them.
“What is appalling?” asked his little officer, apparently seeking vainly for anything unusual in this shrieking enamel.
“_This!_ Surely the essence of religion is reverence.”
“Oh _that!_” Asano looked at Graham. “Does it shock you?” he said in the tone of one who makes a discovery. “I suppose it would, of course. I had forgotten. Nowadays the competition for attention is so keen. and people simply haven’t the leisure to attend to their souls, you know, as they used to do.” He smiled. “In the old days you had quiet Sabbaths and the countryside. Though somewhere I’ve read of Sunday afternoons that –“
“But, _that_,” said Graham, glancing back at the receding blue and white. “That is surely not the only –“
“There are hundreds of different ways. But, of course, if a sect doesn’t tell it doesn’t pay. Worship has moved with the times. There are high class sects with quieter ways — costly incense and personal attentions and all that. These people are extremely popular and prosperous. They pay several dozen lions for those apartments to the Council — to you, I should say.”
Graham still felt a difficulty with the coinage, and this mention of a dozen lions brought him abruptly to that matter. In a moment the screaming temples and their swarming touts were forgotten in this new interest. A turn of a phrase suggested, and an answer confirmed the idea that gold and silver were both demonetised, that stamped gold which had begun its reign amidst the merchants of Phoenicia was at last dethroned. The change had been graduated but swift, brought about by an extension of the system of cheques that had even in his previous life already practically superseded gold in all the larger business transactions. The common traffic of the city, the common currency indeed of all the world, was conducted by means of the little brown, green and pink council cheques for small amounts, printed with a blank payee. Asano had several with him, and at the first opportunity he supplied the gaps in his set. They were printed not on tearable paper, but on a semi-transparent fabric of silken, flexibility, interwoven with silk. Across them all sprawled a facsimile of Graham’s signature, his first encounter with the curves and turns of that familiar autograph for two hundred and three years.
Some intermediary experiences made no impression sufficiently vivid to prevent the matter of the disarmament claiming his thoughts again; a blurred picture of a Theosophist temple that promised MIRACLES in enormous letters of unsteady fire was least submerged perhaps, but then came the view of the dining hall in Northumberland Avenue. That interested him very greatly.
By the energy and thought of Asano he was able to view this place from a little screened gallery reserved for the attendants of the tables. The building was pervaded by a distant muffled hooting, piping and bawling, of which he did not at first understand the import, but which recalled a certain mysterious leathery voice he had heard after the resumption of the lights on the night of his solitary wandering.
He had grown accustomed now to vastness and great numbers of people, nevertheless this spectacle held him for a long time. It was as he watched the table service more immediately beneath, and interspersed with many questions and answers concerning details, that the realisation of the full significance of the feast of several thousand people came to him.
It was his constant surprise to find that points that one might have expected to strike vividly at the very outset never occurred to him until some trivial detail suddenly shaped as a riddle and pointed to the obvious thing he had overlooked. In this matter, for instance, it had not occurred to him that this continuity of the city, this exclusion of weather, these vast halls and ways, involved the disappearance of the household; that the typical Victorian “home,” the little brick cell containing kitchen and scullery, living rooms and bedrooms, had, save for the ruins that diversified the countryside, vanished as surely as the wattle hut. But now he saw what had indeed been manifest from the first, that London, regarded as a living place, was no longer an aggregation of houses but a prodigious hotel, an hotel with a thousand classes of accommodation, thousands of dining halls, chapels, theatres, markets and places of assembly, a synthesis of enterprises, of which he chiefly was the owner. People had their sleeping rooms, with, it might be, antechambers, rooms that were always sanitary at least whatever the degree of comfort and privacy, and for the rest they lived much as many people had lived in the new-made giant hotels of the Victorian days, eating, reading, thinking, playing, conversing, all in places of public resort, going to their work in the industrial quarters of the city or doing business in their offices in the trading section.
He perceived at once how necessarily this state of affairs had developed from the Victorian city. The fundamental reason for the modern city had ever been the economy of co-operation. The chief thing to prevent the merging of the separate households in his own generation was simply the still imperfect civilisation of the people, the strong barbaric pride, passions, and prejudices, the jealousies, rivalries, and violence of the middle and lower classes, which had necessitated the entire separation of contiguous households. But the change, the taming of the people, had been in rapid progress even then. In his brief thirty years of previous life he had seen an enormous extension of the habit of consuming meals from home, the casually patronised horse-box coffee-house had given place to the open and crowded Aerated Bread Shop for instance, women’s clubs had had their beginning, and an immense development of reading rooms, lounges and libraries had witnessed to the growth of social confidence. These promises had by this time attained to their complete fulfillment. The locked and barred household had passed away.
These people below him belonged, he learnt, to the lower middle class, the class just above the blue labourers, a class so accustomed in the Victorian period to feed with every precaution of privacy that its members, when occasion confronted them with a public meal, would usually hide their embarrassment under horseplay or a markedly militant demeanour. But these gaily, if lightly dressed people below, albeit vivacious, hurried and uncommunicative, were dexterously mannered and certainly quite at their ease with regard to one another.
He noted a slight significant thing; the table, as far as he could see, was and remained delightfully neat, there was nothing to parallel the confusion, the broadcast crumbs, the splashes of viand and condiment, the overturned drink and displaced ornaments, which would have marked the stormy progress of the Victorian meal. The table furniture was very different. There were no ornaments, no flowers, and the table was without a cloth, being made, he learnt, of a solid substance having the texture and appearance of damask. He discerned that this damask substance was patterned with gracefully designed trade advertisements.
In a sort of recess before each diner was a complete apparatus of porcelain and metal. There was one plate of white porcelain, and by means of taps for hot and cold volatile fluids the diner washed this himself between the courses; he also washed his elegant white metal knife and fork and spoon as occasion required.
Soup and the chemical wine that was the common drink were delivered by similar taps, and the remaining covers travelled automatically in tastefully arranged dishes down the table along silver rails. The diner stopped these and helped himself at his discretion. They appeared at a little door at one end of the table, and vanished at the other. That turn of democratic sentiment in decay, that ugly pride of menial souls, which renders equals loth to wait on one another, was very strong he found among these people. He was so preoccupied with these details that it was only just as he was leaving the place that he remarked the huge advertisement dioramas that marched majestically along the upper walls and proclaimed the most remarkable commodities.
Beyond this place they came into a crowded hall, and he discovered the cause of the noise that had perplexed him. They paused at a turnstile at which a payment was made.
Graham’s attention was immediately arrested by a violent, loud hoot, followed by a vast leathery voice. “The Master is sleeping peacefully,” it said vociferately. “He is in excellent health. He is going to devote the rest of his life to aeronautics. He says women are more beautiful than ever. Galloop! Wow! Our wonderful civilisation astonishes him beyond measure. Beyond all measure. Galloop. He puts great trust in Boss Ostrog, absolute confidence in Boss Ostrog. Ostrog is to be his chief minister; is authorised to remove or reinstate public officers — all patronage will be in his hands. All patronage in the hands of Boss Ostrog! The Councillors have been sent back to their own prison above the Council House.”
Graham stopped at the first sentence, and, looking up, beheld a foolish trumpet face from which this was brayed. This was the General Intelligence Machine. For a space it seemed to be gathering breath, and a regular throbbing from its cylindrical body was audible. Then it trumpeted “Galloop, Galloop,” and broke out again.
“Paris is now pacified. All resistance is over. Galloop! The black police hold every position of importance in the city. They fought with great bravery, singing songs written in praise of their ancestors by the poet Kipling. Once or twice they got out of hand, and tortured and mutilated wounded and captured insurgents, men and women. Moral — don’t go rebelling. Haha! Galloop, Galloop! They are lively fellows. Lively brave fellows. Let this be a lesson to the disorderly banderlog of this city. Yah! Banderlog! Filth of the earth! Galloop, Galloop!”
The voice ceased. There was a confused murmur of disapproval among the crowd. “Damned niggers.” A man began to harangue near them. “Is
this the Master’s doing, brothers? Is this the Master’s doing?”
“Black police!” said Graham.” What is that? You don’t mean –“
Asano touched his arm and gave him a warning look, and forthwith another of these mechanisms I screamed deafeningly and gave tongue in a shrill voice. “Yahaha, Yahah, Yap! Hear a live paper yelp! Live paper. Yaha! Shocking outrage in Paris. Yahahah! The Parisians exasperated by the black police to the pitch of assassination. Dreadful reprisals. Savage times come again. Blood! Blood! Yaha!” The nearer Babble Machine hooted stupendously, “Galloop, Galloop,” drowned the end of the sentence, and proceeded in a rather flatter note than before with novel comments on the horrors of disorder. “Law and order must be maintained,” said the nearer
Babble Machine.
“But,” began Graham.
“Don’t ask questions here,” said Asano, “or you will be involved in an argument.”
“Then let us go on,” said Graham, “for I want to know more of this.”
As he and his companion pushed their way through the excited crowd that swarmed beneath these voices, towards the exit, Graham conceived more clearly the proportion and features of this room. Altogether, great and small, there must have been nearly a thousand of these erections, piping, hooting, bawling and gabbling in that great space, each with its crowd of excited listeners, the majority of them men dressed in blue canvas. There were all sizes of machines, from the little gossipping mechanisms that chuckled out mechanical sarcasm in odd corners, through a number of grades to such fifty-foot giants as that which had first hooted over Graham.
This place was unusually crowded, because of the intense public interest in the course of affairs in Paris. Evidently the struggle had been much more savage than Ostrog had represented it. All the mechanisms were discoursing upon that topic, and the repetition of the people made the huge hive buzz with such phrases as “Lynched policemen,” “Women burnt alive,” “Fuzzy Wuzzy.” “But does the Master allow such things?” asked a man near him. “Is this the beginning of the Master’s rule?”
Is _this_ the beginning of the Master’s rule? For a long time after he had left the place, the hooting, whistling and braying of the machines pursued him; “Galloop, Galloop,” “Yahahah, Yaha, Yap! Yaha!” Is this the beginning of the Master’s rule?
Directly they were out upon the ways he began to question Asano closely on the nature of the Parisian struggle. “This disarmament! What was their trouble? What does it all mean?” Asano seemed chiefly anxious to reassure him that it was “all right.” “But these outrages!” “You cannot have an omelette,” said Asano, “without breaking eggs. It is only the rough people. Only in one part of the city. All the rest is all right. The Parisian labourers are the wildest in the world, except ours.”
“What! the Londoners?”
“No, the Japanese. They have to be kept in order.” “But burning women alive!”
“A Commune!” said Asano. “They would rob you of your property. They would do away with property and give the world over to mob rule. You are Master, the world is yours. But there will be no Commune here. There is no need for black police here.
“And every consideration has been shown. It is their own negroes — French speaking negroes. Senegal regiments, and Niger and Timbuctoo.”
“Regiments?” said Graham, “I thought there was only one — .”
“No,” said Asano, and glanced at him. “There is more than one.”
Graham felt unpleasantly helpless.
“I did not think,” he began and stopped abruptly He went off at a tangent to ask for information about these Babble Machines. For the most part, the crowd present had been shabbily or even raggedly dressed, and Graham learnt that so far as the more prosperous classes were concerned, in all the more comfortable private apartments of the city were fixed Babble Machines that would speak directly a lever was pulled. The tenant of the apartment could connect this with the cables of any of the great News Syndicates that he preferred. When he learnt this presently, he demanded the reason of their absence from his own suite of apartments. Asano stared. “I never thought,” he said. “Ostrog must have had them removed.”
Graham stared. “How was I to know?” he exclaimed.
“Perhaps he thought they would annoy you,” said Asano.
“They must be replaced directly I return,” said Graham after an interval.
He found a difficulty in understanding that this news room and the dining hall were not great central places, that such establishments were repeated almost beyond counting all over the city. But ever and again during the night’s expedition his ears, in some new quarter would pick out from the tumult of the ways the peculiar hooting of the organ of Boss Ostrog, “Galloop, Galloop!” or the shrill “Yahaha, Yaha, Yap! — Hear a live paper yelp!” of its chief rival.
Repeated, too, everywhere, were such _creches_ as the one he now entered. It was reached by a lift, and by a glass bridge that flung across the dining hall and traversed the ways at a slight upward angle. To enter the first section of the place necessitated the use of his solvent signature under Asano’s direction. They were immediately attended to by a man in a violet robe and gold clasp, the insignia of practising medical men. He perceived from this man’s manner that his identity was known, and proceeded to ask questions on the strange arrangements of the place without reserve.
On either side of the passage, which was silent and padded, as if to deaden the footfall, were narrow little doors, their size and arrangement suggestive of the cells of a Victorian prison. But the upper portion of each door was of the same greenish transparent stuff that had enclosed him at his awakening, and within, dimly seen, lay, in every case, a very young baby in a little nest of wadding. Elaborate apparatus watched the atmosphere and rang a bell far away in the central office at the slightest departure from the optimum of temperature and moisture. A
system of such _creches_ had almost entirely replaced the hazardous adventures of the old-world nursing. The attendant presently called Graham’s attention to the wet nurses, a vista of mechanical figures, with arms, shoulders and breasts of astonishingly realistic modelling, articulation, and texture, but mere brass tripods below, and having in the place of features a flat disc bearing advertisements likely to be of interest to mothers.
Of all the strange things that Graham came upon that night, none jarred more upon his habits of thought than this place. The spectacle of the little pink creatures, their feeble limbs swaying uncertainly in vague first movements, left alone, without embrace or endearment, was wholly repugnant to him. The attendant doctor was of a different opinion. His statistical evidence showed beyond dispute that in the Victorian times the most dangerous passage of life was the arms of the mother, that there human mortality had ever been most terrible. On the other hand this _creche_ company, the International Creche Syndicate, lost not one-half per cent of the million babies or so that formed its peculiar care. But Graham’s prejudice was too strong even for those figures.
Along one of the many passages of the place they presently came upon a young couple in the usual blue canvas peering through the transparency and laughing hysterically at the bald head of their first-born. Graham’s face must have showed his estimate of them, for their merriment ceased and they looked abashed. But this little incident accentuated his sudden realisation of the gulf between his habits of thought and the ways of the new age. He passed on to the crawling rooms and the Kindergarten, perplexed and distressed. He found the endless long playrooms were empty! the latter-day children at least still spent their nights in sleep. As they went through these, the little officer pointed out the nature of the toys, developments of those devised by that inspired sentimentalist
Froebel.
There were nurses here, but much was done by machines that sang and danced and dandled.
Graham was still not clear upon many points. “But so many orphans,” he said perplexed, reverting to a first misconception, and learnt again that they were not orphans.
So soon as they had left the _creche_ he began to speak of the horror the babies in their incubating cases had caused him. “Is motherhood gone?” he said. “Was it a cant? Surely it was an instinct. This seems so unnatural — abominable almost.”
“Along here we shall come to the dancing place,” said Asano by way of reply. “It is sure to be crowded. In spite of all the political unrest it will be crowded. The women take no great interest in politics — except a few here and there. You will see the mothers — most young women in London are mothers. In that class it is considered a creditable thing to have one child — a proof of animation. Few middle class people have more than one. With the Labour Company it is different. As for motherhood They still take an immense pride in the children. They come here to look at them quite often.”
“Then do you mean that the population of the world — ?”
“Is falling? Yes. Except among the people under the Labour Company. They are reckless — .”
The air was suddenly dancing with music, and down a way they approached obliquely, set with gorgeous pillars as it seemed of clear amethyst, flowed a concourse of gay people and a tumult of merry cries and laughter. He saw curled heads, wreathed brows, and a happy intricate flutter of gamboge pass triumphant across the picture.
“You will see,” said Asano with a faint smile “The world has changed. In a moment you will see the mothers of the new age. Come this way. We shall see those yonder again very soon.”
They ascended a certain height in a swift lift, and changed to a slower one. As they went on the music grew upon them, until it was near and full and splendid, and, moving with its glorious intricacies they could distinguish the beat of innumerable dancing feet. They made a payment at a turnstile, and emerged upon the wide gallery that overlooked the dancing place, and upon the full enchantment of sound and sight.
“Here,” said Asano, “are the fathers and mothers of the little ones you saw.”
The hall was not so richly decorated as that of the Atlas, but saving that, it was, for its size, the most splendid Graham had seen. The beautiful white limbed figures that supported the galleries reminded him once more of the restored magnificence of sculpture; they seemed to writhe in engaging attitudes, their faces laughed. The source of the music that filled the place was hidden, and the whole vast shining floor was thick with dancing couples. “Look at them,” said the little officer, “see how much they show of motherhood.”
The gallery they stood upon ran along the upper edge of a huge screen that cut the dancing hall on one side from a sort of outer hall that showed through broad arches the incessant onward rush of the city ways. In this outer hall was a great crowd of less brilliantly dressed people, as numerous almost as those who danced within, the great majority wearing the blue uniform of the Labour Company that was now so familiar to Graham. Too poor to pass the turnstiles to the festival, they were yet unable to keep away from the sound of its seductions. Some of them even had cleared spaces, and were dancing also, fluttering their rags in the air. Some shouted as they danced, jests and odd allusions Graham did not understand. Once someone began whistling the refrain of the revolutionary song, but it seemed as though that beginning was promptly suppressed. The corner was dark and Graham could not see. He turned to the hall again. Above the caryatidae were marble busts of men whom that age esteemed great moral emancipators and pioneers; for the most part their names were strange to Graham, though he recognised Grant Allen, Le Gallienne, Nietzsche, Shelley and Goodwin. Great black festoons and eloquent sentiments reinforced the huge inscription that partially defaced the upper end of the dancing place, and asserted that “The Festival of the Awakening” was in progress.
“Myriads are taking holiday or staying from work because of that, quite apart from the labourers who refuse to go back,” said Asano. “These people are always ready for holidays.”
Graham walked to the parapet and stood leaning over, looking down at the dancers. Save for two or three remote whispering couples, who had stolen apart, he and his guide had the gallery to themselves. A warm breath of scent and vitality came up to him. Both men and women below were lightly clad, bare-armed, open-necked, as the universal warmth of the city permitted. The hair of the men was often a mass of effeminate curls, their chins were always shaven, and many of them had flushed or coloured cheeks. Many of the women were very pretty, and all were dressed with elaborate coquetry. As they swept by beneath, he saw ecstatic faces with eyes half closed in pleasure.
“What sort of people are these?” he asked abruptly.
“Workers — prosperous workers. What you would have called the middle class. Independent tradesmen with little separate businesses have vanished long ago, but there are store servers, managers, engineers of a hundred sorts. Tonight is a holiday of course, and every dancing place in the city will be crowded, and every place of worship.”
“But — the women?”
“The same. There’s a thousand forms of work for women now. But you had the beginning of the independent working-woman in your days. Most women are independent now. Most of these are married more or less — there are a number of methods of contract — and that gives them more money, and enables them to enjoy themselves.”
“I see,” said Graham looking at the flushed faces, the flash and swirl of movement, and still thinking of that nightmare of pink helpless limbs.” And these are — mothers.”
“Most of them.”
“The more I see of these things the more complex I find your problems. This, for instance, is a surprise. That news from Paris was a surprise.”
In a little while he spoke again:
“These are mothers. Presently, I suppose, I shall get into the modern way of seeing things. I have old habits of mind clinging about me — habits based, I suppose, on needs that are over and done with. Of course, in our time, a woman was supposed not only to bear children, but to cherish them, to devote herself to them, to educate them — all the essentials of moral and mental education a child owed its mother. Or went without. Quite a number, I admit, went without. Nowadays, clearly, there is no more need for such care than if they were butterflies. I see that! Only there was an ideal — that figure of a grave, patient woman, silently and serenely mistress of a home, mother and maker of men — to love her was a sort of worship –“
He stopped and repeated, “A sort of worship.”
“Ideals change,” said the little man, “as needs change.”
Graham awoke from an instant reverie and Asano repeated his words. Graham’s mind returned to the thing at hand.
“Of course I see the perfect reasonableness of this Restraint, soberness, the matured thought, the unselfish a act, they are necessities of the barbarous state, the life of dangers. Dourness is man’s tribute to unconquered nature. But man has conquered nature now for all practical purposes — his political affairs are managed by Bosses with a black police — and life is joyous.”
He looked at the dancers again. “Joyous,” he said.
“There are weary moments,” said the little officer, reflectively.
“They all look young. Down there I should be visibly the oldest man. And in my own time I should have passed as middle-aged.”
“They are young. There are few old people in this class in the work cities.”
“How is that?”
“Old people’s lives are not so pleasant as they used to be, unless they are rich to hire lovers and helpers. And we have an institution called Euthanasy.”
“Ah! that Euthanasy!” said Graham. “The easy death?”
“The easy death. It is the last pleasure. The Euthanasy Company does it well. People will pay the sum — it is a costly thing — long beforehand, go off to some pleasure city and return impoverished and weary, very weary.”
“There is a lot left for me to understand,” said Graham after a pause. “Yet I see the logic of it all. Our array of angry virtues and sour restraints was the consequence of danger and insecurity. The Stoic, the Puritan, even in my time, were vanishing types. In the old days man was armed against Pain, now he is eager for Pleasure. There lies the difference. Civilisation has driven pain and danger so far off — for well-to-do people. And only well-to-do people matter now. I have been asleep two hundred years.”
For a minute they leant on the balustrading, following the intricate evolution of the dance. Indeed the scene was very beautiful.
“Before God,” said Graham, suddenly, “I would rather be a wounded sentinel freezing in the snow than one of these painted fools!”
“In the snow,” said Asano, “one might think differently.”
“I am uncivilised,” said Graham, not heeding him. “That is the trouble. I am primitive — Palaeolithic. Their fountain of rage and fear and anger is sealed
and closed, the habits of a lifetime make them cheerful and easy and delightful. You must bear with my nineteenth century shocks and disgusts. These people, you say, are skilled workers and so forth. And while these dance, men are fighting — men are dying in Paris to keep the world — that they may dance.”
Asano smiled faintly. “For that matter, men are dying in London,” he said.
There was a moment’s silence.
“Where do these sleep?” asked Graham.
“Above and below — an intricate warren.”
“And where do they work? This is — the domestic life.”
“You will see little work to-night. Half the workers are out or under arms. Half these people are keeping holiday. But we will go to the work places if you wish it.”
For a time Graham watched the dancers, then suddenly turned away. “I want to see the workers. I have seen enough of these,” he said.
Asano led the way along the gallery across the dancing hall. Presently they came to a transverse passage that brought a breath of fresher, colder air.
Asano glanced at this passage as they went past, stopped, went back to it, and turned to Graham with a smile. “Here, Sire,” he said, “is something — will be familiar to you at least — and yet — . But I will not tell you. Come!”
He led the way along a closed passage that presently became cold. The reverberation of their feet told that this passage was a bridge. They came into a circular gallery that was glazed in from the outer weather, and so reached a circular chamber which seemed familiar, though Graham could not recall distinctly when he had entered it before. In this was a ladder — the first ladder he had seen since his awakening — up which they went, and came into a high, dark, cold place in which was another almost vertical ladder. This they ascended, Graham still perplexed.
But at the top he understood, and recognized the metallic bars to which he clung. He was in the cage under the ball of St. Paul’s. The dome rose but a little way above the general contour of the city, into the still twilight, and sloped away, shining greasily under a few distant lights, into a circumambient ditch of darkness.
Out between the bars he looked upon the wind-clear northern sky and saw the starry constellations all unchanged. Capella hung in the west, Vega was rising, and the seven glittering points of the Great Bear swept overhead in their stately circle about the Pole.
He saw these stars in a clear gap of sky. To the east and south the great circular shapes of complaining wind-wheels blotted out the heavens, so that the glare about the Council House was hidden. To the south-west hung Orion, showing like a pallid ghost through a tracery of iron-work and interlacing shapes above a dazzling coruscation of lights. A bellowing and siren screaming that came from the flying stages warned the world that one of the aeroplanes was ready to start. He remained for a space gazing towards the glaring stage. Then his eyes went back to the northward constellations.
For a long time he was silent. “This,” he said at last, smiling in the shadow, “seems the strangest thing of all. To stand in the dome of Saint Paul’s and look once more upon these familiar, silent stars!”
Thence Graham was taken by Asano along devious ways to the great gambling and business quarters where the bulk of the fortunes in the city were lost and made. It impressed him as a well-nigh interminable series of very high halls, surrounded by tiers upon tiers of galleries into which opened thousands of
offices, and traversed by a complicated multitude of bridges, footways, aerial motor rails, and trapeze and cable leaps. And here more than anywhere the note of vehement vitality, of uncontrollable, hasty activity. rose high. Everywhere was violent advertisement, until his brain swam at the tumult of light and colour. And Babble Machines of a peculiarly rancid tone were abundant and filled the air with strenuous squealing and an idiotic slang. “Skin your eyes and slide,” “Gewhoop, Bonanza,” “Gollipers come and hark!”
The place seemed to him to be dense with people either profoundly agitated or swelling with obscure cunning, yet he learnt that the place was comparatively empty, that the great political convulsion of the last few days had reduced transactions to an unprecedented minimum. In one huge place were long avenues of roulette tables, each with an excited, undignified crowd about it; in another a yelping Babel of white-faced women and red-necked leathery-lunged men bought and sold the
shares of an absolutely fictitious business undertaking which, every five minutes, paid a dividend of ten per cent and cancelled a certain proportion of its shares by means of a lottery wheel.
These business activities were prosecuted with an energy that readily passed into violence, and Graham approaching a dense crowd found at its centre a couple of prominent merchants in violent controversy with teeth and nails on some delicate point of business etiquette. Something still remained in life to be fought for. Further he had a shock at a vehement announcement in phonetic letters of scarlet flame, each twice the height of a man, that “WE ASSURE THE PROPRAIET’R. WE ASSURE THE PROPRAIET’R.”
“Who’s the proprietor?” he asked.
“You.”
“But what do they assure me?” he asked. “What do they assure me?”
“Didn’t you have assurance?”
Graham thought. “Insurance?”
“Yes — Insurance. I remember that was the older word. They are insuring your life. Dozands of people are taking out policies, myriads of lions are being put on you. And further on other people are buying annuities. They do that on everybody who is at all prominent. Look there!”
A crowd of people surged and roared, and Graham saw a vast black screen suddenly illuminated in still larger letters of burning purple. “Anuetes on the Propraiet’r — x 5 pr. G.” The people began to boo and shout at this, a number of hard breathing, wildeyed men came running past, clawing with hooked fingers at the air. There was a furious crush about a little doorway.
Asano did a brief calculation. “Seventeen per cent per annum is their annuity on you. They would not pay so much per cent if they could see you now, Sire. But they do not know. Your own annuities used to be a very safe investment, but now you are sheer gambling, of course. This is probably a desperate bid. I doubt if people will get their money.”
The crowd of would-be annuitants grew so thick about them that for some time they could move neither forward no backward. Graham noticed what appeared to him to be a high proportion of women among the speculators, and was reminded again of the economical independence of their sex. They seemed remarkably well able to take care of themselves in the crowd, using their elbows with particular skill, as he learnt to his cost. One curly-headed person caught in the pressure for a space, looked steadfastly at him several times, almost as if she recognized him, and then, edging deliberately towards him, touched his hand
with her arm in a scarcely accidental manner, and made it plain by a look as ancient as Chaldea that he had found favour in her eyes. And then a lank, grey-bearded man, perspiring copiously in a noble passion of self-help, blind to all earthly things save that glaring, bait, thrust between them in a cataclysmal rush towards that alluring “x 5 pr. G.”
“I want to get out of this,” said Graham to Asano. “This is not what I came to see. Show me the workers. I want to see the people in blue. These parasitic lunatics –“
He found himself wedged in a struggling mass c people, and this hopeful sentence went unfinished.
CHAPTER XXI
THE UNDER SIDE
From the Business Quarter they presently passed by the running ways into a remote quarter of the city, where the bulk of the manufactures was done. On their way the platforms crossed the Thames twice, and passed in a broad viaduct across one of the great roads that entered the city from the North. In both cases his impression was swift and in both very vivid. The river was a broad wrinkled glitter of black sea water, overarched by buildings, and vanishing either way into a blackness starred with receding lights. A string of black barges passed seaward, manned by blue-clad men. The road was a long and very broad and high tunnel, along which big-wheeled machines drove noiselessly and swiftly. Here, too, the distinctive blue of the Labour Company was in abundance. The smoothness of the double tracks, the largeness and the lightness of the big pneumatic wheels in proportion to the vehicular body, struck Graham most vividly. One lank and very high carriage with longitudinal metallic rods hung with the dripping carcasses of many hundred sheep arrested his attention unduly. Abruptly the edge of the archway cut and blotted out the picture.
Presently they left the way and descended by a lift and traversed a passage that sloped downward, and so came to a descending lift again. The appearance of things changed. Even the pretence of architectural ornament disappeared, the lights diminished in number and size, the architecture became more and more massive in proportion to the spaces as the factory quarters were reached. And in the dusty biscuit-making place of the potters, among the felspar mills in the furnace rooms of the metal workers, among the incandescent lakes of crude Eadhamite, the blue canvas clothing was on man, woman and child.
Many of these great and dusty galleries were silent avenues of machinery, endless raked out ashen furnaces testified to the revolutionary dislocation, but wherever there was work it was being done by slow-moving workers in blue canvas. The only people not in blue canvas were the overlookers of the work-places and the orange-clad Labour Police. And fresh from the flushed faces of the dancing halls, the voluntary vigours of the business quarter, Graham could note the pinched faces, the feeble muscles, and weary eyes of many of the latter-day workers. Such as he saw at work were noticeably inferior in physique to the few gaily dressed managers and forewomen who were directing their labours. The burly labourers of the Victorian times had followed the dray horse and all such living force producers, to extinction; the place of his costly muscles was taken by some dexterous machine. The latter-day labourer, male as well as female, was essentially a machine-minder and feeder, a servant and attendant, or an artist under direction.
The women, in comparison with those Graham remembered, were as a class distinctly plain and flat-chested. Two hundred years of emancipation from
the moral restraints of Puritanical religion, two hundred years of city life, had done their work in eliminating the strain of feminine beauty and vigour from the blue canvas myriads. To be brilliant physically or mentally, to be in any way attractive or exceptional, had been and was still a certain way of emancipation to the drudge, a line of escape to the Pleasure City and its splendours and delights, and at last to the Euthanasy and peace. To be steadfast against such inducements was scarcely to be expected of meanly nourished souls. In the young cities of Graham’s former life, the newly aggregated labouring mass had been a diverse multitude, still stirred by the tradition of personal honour and a high morality; now it was differentiating into a distinct class, with a moral and physical difference of its own — even with a dialect of its own.
They penetrated downward, ever downward, towards the working places. Presently they passed underneath one of the streets of the moving ways, and saw its platforms running on their rails far overhead, and chinks of white lights between the transverse slits. The factories that were not working were sparsely lighted; to Graham they and their shrouded aisles of giant machines seemed plunged in gloom, and even where work was going on the illumination was far less brilliant than upon the public ways.
Beyond the blazing lakes of Eadhamite he came to the warren of the jewellers, and, with some difficulty and by using his signature, obtained admission to these galleries. They were high and dark, and rather cold. In the first a few men were making ornaments of gold filigree, each man at a little bench by himself, and with a little shaded light. The long vista of light patches, with the nimble fingers brightly lit and moving among the gleaming yellow coils, and the intent face like the face of a ghost, in each shadow had the oddest effect.
The work was beautifully executed, but without any strength of modelling or drawing, for the most part intricate grotesques or the ringing of the changes on a geometrical motif. These workers wore a peculiar white uniform without pockets or sleeves. They assumed this on coming to work, but at night they were stripped and examined before they left the premises of the Company. In spite of every precaution, the Labour policeman told them in a depressed tone, the Company was not infrequently robbed.
Beyond was a gallery of women busied in cutting and setting slabs of artificial ruby, and next these were men and women busied together upon the slabs of copper net that formed the basis of cloisonne tiles. Many of these workers had lips and nostrils a livid white, due to a disease caused by a peculiar purple enamel that chanced to be much in fashion. Asano apologised to Graham for the offence of their faces, but excused himself on the score of the convenience of this route. “This is what I wanted to see,” said Graham; “this is what I wanted to see,” trying to avoid a start at a particularly striking disfigurement that suddenly stared him in the face.
“She might have done better with herself than that,” said Asano.
Graham made some indignant comments.
“But, Sire, we simply could not stand that stuff without the purple,” said Asano. “In your days people could stand such crudities, they were nearer the barbaric by two hundred years.”
They continued along one of the lower galleries of this cloisonne factory, and came to a little bridge that spanned a vault. Looking over the parapet, Graham saw that beneath was a wharf under yet more tremendous archings than any he had seen. Three
barges, smothered in floury dust, were being unloaded of their cargoes of powdered felspar by a multitude of coughing men, each guiding a little truck; the dust filled the place with a choking mist, and turned the electric glare yellow. The vague shadows of these workers gesticulated about their feet, and rushed to and fro against a long stretch of white-washed wall. Every now and then one would stop to cough.
A shadowy, huge mass of masonry rising out of the inky water, brought to Graham’s mind the thought of the multitude of ways and galleries and lifts, that rose floor above floor overhead between him and the sky. The men worked in silence under the supervision of two of the Labour Police; their feet made a hollow thunder on the planks along which they went to and fro. And as he looked at this scene, some hidden voice in the darkness began to sing.
“Stop that!” shouted one of the policemen, but the order was disobeyed, and first one and then all the white-stained men who were working there had taken up the beating refrain, singing it defiantly, the Song of the Revolt. The feet upon the planks thundered now to the rhythm of the song, tramp, tramp, tramp. The policeman who had shouted glanced at his fellow, and Graham saw him shrug his shoulders. He made no further effort to stop the singing.
And so they went through these factories and places of toil, seeing many painful and grim things. But why should the gentle reader be depressed? Surely to a refined nature our present world is distressing enough without bothering ourselves about these miseries to come. We shall not suffer anyhow. Our children may, but what is that to us? That walk left on Graham’s mind a maze of memories, fluctuating pictures of swathed halls, and crowded vaults seen through clouds of dust, of intricate machines, the racing threads of looms, the heavy beat of stamping machinery, the roar and rattle of belt and armature, of ill-lit subterranean aisles of sleeping places, illimitable vistas of pin-point lights. And here the smell of tanning, and here the reek of a brewery and here, unprecedented reeks. And everywhere were pillars and cross archings of such a massiveness as Graham had never before seen, thick Titans of greasy, shining brickwork crushed beneath the vast weight of that complex city world, even as these anemic millions were crushed by its complexity. And everywhere were pale features, lean limbs, disfigurement and degradation.
Once and again, and again a third time, Graham heard the song of the revolt during his long,
unpleasant research in these places, and once he saw a confused struggle down a passage, and learnt that a number of these serfs had seized their bread before their work was done. Graham was ascending towards the ways again when he saw a number of blue-clad children running down a transverse passage, and presently perceived the reason of their panic in a company of the Labour Police armed with clubs, trotting towards some unknown disturbance. And then came a remote disorder. But for the most part
this remnant that worked, worked hopelessly. All the spirit that was left in fallen humanity was above in the streets that night, calling for the Master, and valiantly and noisily keeping its arms.
They emerged from these wanderings and stood blinking in the bright light of the middle passage of the platforms again. They became aware of the remote hooting and yelping of the machines of one of the General Intelligence Offices, and suddenly came men running, and along the platforms and about the ways everywhere was a shouting and crying. Then a woman with a face of mute white terror, and another who gasped and shrieked as she ran.
“What has happened now?” said Graham, puzzled, for he could not understand their thick speech. Then he heard it in English and perceived that the thing that everyone was shouting, that men yelled to one another, that women took up screaming, that was passing like the first breeze of a thunderstorm, chill and sudden through the city, was this: “Ostrog has ordered the Black Police to London. The Black Police are coming from South Africa. . . . The Black Police. The Black Police.”
Asano’s face was white and astonished; he hesitated, looked at Graham’s face, and told him the thing he already knew. “But how can they know?” asked Asano.
Graham heard someone shouting. “Stop all work. Stop all work,” and a swarthy hunchback, ridiculously gay in green and gold, came leaping down the platforms toward him, bawling again and again in good English, “This is Ostrog’s doing, Ostrog, the Knave! The Master is betrayed.” His voice was hoarse and a thin foam dropped from his ugly shouting mouth. He yelled an unspeakable horror that the Black Police had done in Paris, and so passed shrieking, “Ostrog the Knave!”
For a moment Graham stood still, for it had come upon him again that these things were a dream. He looked up at the great cliff of buildings on either side, vanishing into blue haze at last above the lights, and down to the roaring tiers of platforms, and the shouting, running people who were gesticulating past. “The Master is betrayed!” they cried. “The Master is betrayed!”
Suddenly the situation shaped itself in his mind real and urgent. His heart began to beat fast and strong.
“It has come,” he said.” I might have known. The hour has come.”
He thought swiftly. “What am I to do?”
“Go back to the Council House,” said Asano.
“Why should I not appeal — ? The people are here.”
“You will lose time. They will doubt if it is you. But they will mass about the Council House. There you will find’ their leaders. Your strength is there with them.”
“Suppose this is only a rumour?”
“It sounds true,” said Asano.
“Let us have the facts,” said Graham.
Asano shrugged his shoulders. “We had better get towards the Council House,” he cried. “That is where they will swarm. Even now the ruins may be impassable.”
Graham regarded him doubtfully and followed him.
They went up the stepped platforms to the swiftest one, and there Asano accosted a labourer. The answers to his questions were in the thick, vulgar speech.
“What did he say?” asked Graham.
“He knows little, but he told me that the Black Police would have arrived here before the people knew — had not someone in the Wind-Vane Offices Learnt. He said a girl.”
“A girl? Not?”
“He said a girl — he did not know who she was. Who came out from the Council House crying aloud, and told the men at work among the ruins.”
And then another thing was shouted, something that turned an aimless tumult into determinate movements, it came like a wind along the street. “To your Wards, to your Wards. Every man get arms. Every man to his Ward!”
CHAPTER XXII
THE STRUGGLE IN THE COUNCIL HOUSE
As Asano and Graham hurried along to the ruins about the Council House, they saw everywhere the excitement of the people rising. “To your Wards To your Wards!” Everywhere men and women in blue were hurrying from unknown subterranean employments, up the staircases of the middle path — at one place Graham saw an arsenal of the revolutionary committee besieged by a crowd of shouting men, at another a couple of men in the hated yellow uniform of the Labour Police, pursued by a gathering crowd, fled precipitately along the swift way that went in the opposite direction.
The cries of “To your Wards!” became at last a continuous shouting as they drew near the Government quarter. Many of the shouts were unintelligible. “Ostrog has betrayed us,” one man bawled in a hoarse voice, again and again, dinning that refrain into Graham’s ear until it haunted him. This person stayed close beside Graham and Asano on the swift way, shouting to the people who swarmed on the lower platforms as he rushed past them. His cry about
Ostrog alternated with some incomprehensible orders Presently he went leaping down and disappeared.
Graham’s mind was filled with the din. His plans were vague and unformed. He had one picture of some commanding position from which he could address the multitudes, another of meeting Ostrog face to face. He was full of rage, of tense muscular excitement, his hands gripped, his lips were pressed together.
The way to the Council House across the ruins was impassable, but Asano met that difficulty and took Graham into the premises of the central post-office. The post-office was nominally at work, but the blue-clothed porters moved sluggishly or had stopped to stare through the arches of their galleries at the shouting men who were going by outside. “Every man to his Ward! Every man to his Ward!” Here, by Asano’s advice, Graham revealed his identity.
They crossed to the Council House by a cable cradle. Already in the brief interval since the capitulation of the Councillors a great change had been wrought in the appearance of the ruins. The spurting cascades of the ruptured sea water-mains had been captured and tamed, and huge temporary pipes ran overhead along a flimsy looking fabric of girders. The sky was laced with restored cables and wires that served the Council House, and a mass of new fabric with cranes and other building machines going to and fro upon it, projected to the left of the white pile.
The moving ways that ran across this area had been restored, albeit for once running under the open sky. These were the ways that Graham had seen from the little balcony in the hour of his awakening, not nine days since, and the hall of his Trance had been on the further side, where now shapeless piles of smashed and shattered masonry were heaped together.
It was already high day and the sun was shining brightly. Out of their tall caverns of blue electric light came the swift ways crowded with multitudes of people, who poured off them and gathered ever denser over the wreckage and confusion of the ruins. The air was full of their shouting, and they were pressing and swaying towards the central building. For the most part that shouting mass consisted of shapeless swarms, but here and there Graham could see that a rude discipline struggled to establish itself. And every voice clamoured for order in the chaos. “To your Wards! Every man to his Ward!”
The cable carried them into a hall which Graham recognised as the ante-chamber to the Hall of the Atlas, about the gallery of which he had walked days ago with Howard to show himself to the vanished Council, an hour from his awakening. Now the place was empty except for two cable attendants. These men seemed hugely astonished to recognise the Sleeper in the man who swung down from the cross seat.
“Where is Helen Wotton?” he demanded. “Where