第 12 页

its apex was half-way down the ways towards the central aisle. And

raising his eyes Graham saw that a number of these men had also appeared

now in the darkened lower galleries of the opposite building, and were

firing over the heads of their fellows below at the boiling confusion of

people on the lower ways. The meaning of these things dawned upon him.

The march of the people had come upon an ambush at the very outset.

Thrown into confusion by the extinction of the lights they were now

being attacked by the red police. Then he became aware that he was

standing alone, that his guards and Lincoln were along the gallery in

the direction along which he had come before the darkness fell. He saw

they were gesticulating to him wildly, running back towards him. A great

shouting came from across the ways. Then it seemed as though the whole

face of the darkened building opposite was lined and speckled with

red-clad men. And they were pointing over to him and shouting. "The

Sleeper! Save the Sleeper!" shouted a multitude of throats.

Something struck the wall above his head. He looked up at the impact and

saw a star-shaped splash of silvery metal. He saw Lincoln near him. Felt

his arm gripped. Then, pat, pat; he had been missed twice.

For a moment he did not understand this. The street was hidden,

everything was hidden, as he looked. The second flare had burned out.

Lincoln had gripped Graham by the arm, was lugging him along the

gallery. "Before the next light!" he cried. His haste was contagious.

Graham's instinct of self-preservation overcame the paralysis of his

incredulous astonishment. He became for a time the blind creature of

the fear of death. He ran, stumbling because of the uncertainty of the

darkness, blundered into his guards as they turned to run with him.

Haste was his one desire, to escape this perilous gallery upon which he

was exposed. A third glare came close on its predecessors. With it came

a great shouting across the ways, an answering tumult from the ways.

The red-coats below, he saw, had now almost gained the central passage.

Their countless faces turned towards him, and they shouted. The white

facade opposite was densely stippled with red. All these wonderful

things concerned him, turned upon him as a pivot. These were the guards

of the Council attempting to recapture him.

Lucky it was for him that these shots were the first fired in anger for

a hundred and fifty years. He heard bullets whacking over his head, felt

a splash of molten metal sting his ear, and perceived without looking

that the whole opposite facade, an unmasked ambuscade of red police, was

crowded and bawling and firing at him.

Down went one of his guards before him, and Graham, unable to stop,

leapt the writhing body.

In another second he had plunged, unhurt, into a black passage, and

incontinently someone, coming, it may be, in a transverse direction,

blundered violently into him. He was hurling down a staircase in

absolute darkness. He reeled, and was struck again, and came against a

wall with his hands. He was crushed by a weight of struggling bodies,

whirled round, and thrust to the right. A vast pressure pinned him.

He could not breathe, his ribs seemed cracking. He felt a momentary

relaxation, and then the whole mass of people moving together, bore him

back towards the great theatre from which he had so recently come.

There were moments when his feet did not touch the ground. Then he was

staggering and shoving. He heard shouts of "They are coming!" and a

muffled cry close to him. His foot blundered against something soft, he

heard a hoarse scream under foot. He heard shouts of "The Sleeper!" but

he was too confused to speak. He heard the green weapons crackling. For

a space he lost his individual will, became an atom in a panic, blind,

unthinking, mechanical. He thrust and pressed back and writhed in the

pressure, kicked presently against a step, and found himself ascending

a slope. And abruptly the faces all about him leapt out of the black,

visible, ghastly-white and astonished, terrified, perspiring, in a livid

glare. One face, a young man's, was very near to him, not twenty inches

away. At the time it was but a passing incident of no emotional value,

but afterwards it came back to him in his dreams. For this young man,

wedged upright in the crowd for a time, had been shot and was already

dead.

A fourth white star must have been lit by the man on the cable. Its

light came glaring in through vast windows and arches and showed Graham

that he was now one of a dense mass of flying black figures pressed back

across the lower area of the great theatre. This time the picture was

livid and fragmentary slashed and barred with black shadows. He saw that

quite near to him the red guards were fighting their way through the

people. He could not tell whether they saw him. He looked for Lincoln

and his guards. He saw Lincoln near the stage of the theatre surrounded

in a crowd of black-badged revolutionaries, lifted up and staring to

and fro as if seeking him. Graham perceived that he himself was near

the opposite edge of the crowd, that behind him, separated by a barrier,

sloped the now vacant seats of the theatre. A sudden idea came to him,

and he began fighting his way towards the barrier. As he reached it the

glare came to an end.

In a moment he had thrown off the great cloak that not only impeded

his movements but made him conspicuous, and had slipped it from his

shoulders. He heard someone trip in its folds. In another he was scaling

the barrier and had dropped into the blackness on the further side. Then

feeling his way he came to the lower end of an ascending gangway. In

the darkness the sound of firing ceased and the roar of feet and voices

lulled. Then suddenly he came to an unexpected step and tripped and

fell. As he did so pools and islands amidst the darkness about him leapt

to vivid light again, the uproar surged louder and the glare of the

fifth white star shone through the vast fenestrations of the theatre

walls.

He rolled over among some seats, heard a shouting and the whirring

rattle of weapons, struggled up and was knocked back again, perceived

that a number of black-badged men were all about him firing at the

rebels below, leaping from seat to seat, crouching among the seats

to reload. Instinctively he crouched amidst the seats, as stray shots

ripped the pneumatic cushions and cut bright slashes on their soft metal

frames. Instinctively he marked the direction of the gangways, the most

plausible way of escape for him so soon as the veil of darkness fell

again.

A young man in faded blue garments came vaulting over the seats.

"Hullo!" he said, with his flying feet within six inches of the

crouching Sleeper's face.

He stared without any sign of recognition, turned to fire, fired, and,

shouting, "To hell with the Council!" was about to fire again. Then it

seemed to Graham that the half of this man's neck had vanished. A

drop of moisture fell on Graham's cheek. The green weapon stopped

half raised. For a moment the man stood still with his face suddenly

expressionless, then he began to slant forward. His knees bent. Man and

darkness fell together. At the sound of his fall Graham rose up and ran

for his life until a step down to the gangway tripped him. He scrambled

to his feet, turned up the gangway and ran on.

When the sixth star glared he was already close to the yawning throat of

a passage. He ran on the swifter for the light, entered the passage

and turned a corner into absolute night again. He was knocked sideways,

rolled over, and recovered his feet. He found himself one of a crowd of

invisible fugitives pressing in one direction. His one thought now

was their thought also; to escape out of this fighting. He thrust and

struck, staggered, ran, was wedged tightly, lost ground and then was

clear again.

For some minutes he was running through the darkness along a winding

passage, and then he crossed some wide and open space, passed down a

long incline, and came at last down a flight of steps to a level place.

Many people were shouting, "They are coming! The guards are coming. They

are firing. Get out of the fighting. The guards are firing. It will be

safe in Seventh Way. Along here to Seventh Way!" There were women and

children in the crowd as well as men. Men called names to him. The crowd

converged on an archway, passed through a short throat and emerged on a

wider space again, lit dimly. The black figures about him spread out and

ran up what seemed in the twilight to be a gigantic series of steps. He

followed. The people dispersed to the right and left.... He perceived

that he was no longer in a crowd. He stopped near the highest step.

Before him, on that level, were groups of seats and a little kiosk. He

went up to this and, stopping in the shadow of its eaves, looked about

him panting.

Everything was vague and gray, but he recognised that these great steps

were a series of platforms of the "ways," now motionless again. The

platform slanted up on either side, and the tall buildings rose beyond,

vast dim ghosts, their inscriptions and advertisements indistinctly

seen, and up through the girders and cables was a faint interrupted

ribbon of pallid sky. A number of people hurried by. From their shouts

and voices, it seemed they were hurrying to join the fighting. Other

less noisy figures flitted timidly among the shadows.

From very far away down the street he could hear the sound of a

struggle. But it was evident to him that this was not the street into

which the theatre opened. That former fight, it seemed, had suddenly

dropped out of sound and hearing. And--grotesque thought!--they were

fighting for him!

For a space he was like a man who pauses in the reading of a vivid book,

and suddenly doubts what he has been taking unquestioningly. At that

time he had little mind for details; the whole effect was a huge

astonishment. Oddly enough, while the flight from the Council prison,

the great crowd in the hall, and the attack of the red police upon the

swarming people were clearly present in his mind, it cost him an effort

to piece in his awakening and to revive the meditative interval of the

Silent Rooms. At first his memory leapt these things and took him back

to the cascade at Pentargen quivering in the wind, and all the sombre

splendours of the sunlit Cornish coast. The contrast touched everything

with unreality. And then the gap filled, and he began to comprehend his

position.

It was no longer absolutely a riddle, as it had been in the Silent

Rooms. At least he had the strange, bare outline now. He was in some way

the owner of half the world, and great political parties were fighting

to possess him. On the one hand was the White Council, with its red

police, set resolutely, it seemed, on the usurpation of his property and

perhaps his murder; on the other, the revolution that had liberated him,

with this unseen "Ostrog" as its leader. And the whole of this gigantic

city was convulsed by their struggle. Frantic development of his

world! "I do not understand," he cried. "I do not understand!"

He had slipped out between the contending parties into this liberty of

the twilight. What would happen next? What was happening? He figured

the redclad men as busily hunting him, driving the blackbadged

revolutionists before them.

At any rate chance had given him a breathing space. He could lurk

unchallenged by the passers-by, and watch the course of things. His eye

followed up the intricate dim immensity of the twilight buildings, and

it came to him as a thing infinitely wonderful, that above there the

sun was rising, and the world was lit and glowing with the old familiar

light of day. In a little while he had recovered his breath. His

clothing had already dried upon him from the snow.

He wandered for miles along these twilight ways, speaking to no one,

accosted by no one--a dark figure among dark figures--the coveted man

out of the past, the inestimable unintentional owner of half the world.

Wherever there were lights or dense crowds, or exceptional excitement

he was afraid of recognition, and watched and turned back or went up and

down by the middle stairways, into some transverse system of ways at a

lower or higher level. And though he came on no more fighting, the

whole city stirred with battle. Once he had to run to avoid a marching

multitude of men that swept the street. Everyone abroad seemed involved.

For the most part they were men, and they carried what he judged were

weapons. It seemed as though the struggle was concentrated mainly in

the quarter of the city from which he came. Ever and again a distant

roaring, the remote suggestion of that conflict, reached his ears.

Then his caution and his curiosity struggled together. But his caution

prevailed, and he continued wandering away from the fighting--so far as

he could judge. He went unmolested, unsuspected through the dark. After

a time he ceased to hear even a remote echo of the battle, fewer and

fewer people passed him, until at last the Titanic streets became

deserted. The frontages of the buildings grew plain and harsh; he seemed

to have come to a district of vacant warehouses. Solitude crept upon

him--his pace slackened.

He became aware of a growing fatigue. At times he would turn aside

and seat himself on one of the numerous seats of the upper ways. But

a feverish restlessness, the knowledge of his vital implication in his

struggle, would not let him rest in any place for long. Was the struggle

on his behalf alone?

And then in a desolate place came the shock of an earthquake--a roaring

and thundering--a mighty wind of cold air pouring through the city,

the smash of glass, the slip and thud of falling masonry--a series of

gigantic concussions. A mass of glass and ironwork fell from the remote

roofs into the middle gallery, not a hundred yards away from him, and

in the distance were shouts and running. He, too, was startled to an

aimless activity, and ran first one way and then as aimlessly back.