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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.