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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