第 30 页

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 is Helen Wotton?"

They did not know.

"Then where is Ostrog? I must see Ostrog forthwith. He has disobeyed me.

I have come back to take things out of his hands." Without waiting for

Asano, he went straight across the place, ascended the steps at the

further end, and, pulling the curtain aside, found himself facing the

perpetually labouring Titan.

The hall was empty. Its appearance had changed very greatly since

his first sight of it. It had suffered serious injury in the violent

struggle of the first outbreak. On the right hand side of the great

figure the upper half of the wall had been torn away for nearly two

hundred feet of its length, and a sheet of the same glassy film that

had enclosed Graham at his awakening had been drawn across the gap. This

deadened, but did not altogether exclude the roar of the people outside.

"Wards! Wards! Wards!" they seemed to be saying. Through it there were

visible the beams and supports of metal scaffoldings that rose and

fell according to the requirements of a great crowd of workmen. An idle

building machine, with lank arms of red painted metal that caught

the still plastic blocks of mineral paste and swung them neatly into

position, stretched gauntly across this green tinted picture. On it were

still a number of workmen staring at the crowd below. For a moment he

stood regarding these things, and Asano overtook him.

"Ostrog," said Asano, "will be in the small offices beyond there." The

little man looked livid now and his eyes searched Graham's face.

They had scarcely advanced ten paces from the curtain before a little

panel to the left of the Atlas rolled up, and Ostrog, accompanied by

Lincoln and followed by two black and yellow clad negroes, appeared

crossing the remote corner of the hall, towards a second panel that was

raised and open. "Ostrog," shouted Graham, and at the sound of his voice

the little party turned astonished.

Ostrog said something to Lincoln and advanced alone.

Graham was the first to speak. His voice was loud and dictatorial. "What

is this I hear?" he asked. "Are you bringing negroes here--to keep the

people down?"

"It is none too soon," said Ostrog. "They have been getting out of hand

more and more, since the revolt. I under-estimated--"

"Do you mean that these infernal negroes are on the way?"

"On the way. As it is, you have seen the people--outside?"

"No wonder! But--after what was said. You have taken too much on

yourself, Ostrog."

Ostrog said nothing, but drew nearer.

"These negroes must not come to London," said Graham. "I am Master and

they shall not come."

Ostrog glanced at Lincoln, who at once came towards them with his two

attendants close behind him. "Why not?" asked Ostrog.

"White men must be mastered by white men. Besides--"

"The negroes are only an instrument."

"But that is not the question. I am the Master. I mean to be the Master.

And I tell you these negroes shall not come."

"The people--"

"I believe in the people."

"Because you are an anachronism. You are a man out of the Past--an

accident. You are Owner perhaps of half the property in the world. But

you are not Master. You do not know enough to be Master."

He glanced at Lincoln again. "I know now what you think--I can guess

something of what you mean to do. Even now it is not too late to warn

you. You dream of human equality--of a socialistic order--you have all

those worn-out dreams of the nineteenth century fresh and vivid in your

mind, and you would rule this age that you do not understand."

"Listen!" said Graham. "You can hear it--a sound like the sea. Not

voices--but a voice. Do you altogether understand?"

"We taught them that," said Ostrog.

"Perhaps. Can you teach them to forget it? But enough of this! These

negroes must not come."

There was a pause and Ostrog looked him in the eyes.

"They will," he said.

"I forbid it," said Graham.

"They have started."

"I will not have it."

"No," said Ostrog. "Sorry as I am to follow the method of the Council--.

For your own good--you must not side with disorder. And now that you are

here--. It was kind of you to come here."

Lincoln laid his hand on Graham's shoulder. Abruptly Graham realized

the enormity of his blunder in coming to the Council House. He turned

towards the curtains that separated the hall from the antechamber.

The clutching hand of Asano intervened. In another moment Lincoln had

grasped Graham's cloak.

He turned and struck at Lincoln's face, and incontinently a negro

had him by collar and arm. He wrenched himself away, his sleeve tore

noisily, and he stumbled back, to be tripped by the other attendant.

Then he struck the ground heavily and he was staring at the distant

ceiling of the hall.

He shouted, rolled over, struggling fiercely, clutched an attendant's

leg and threw him headlong, and struggled to his feet.

Lincoln appeared before him, went down heavily again with a blow under

the point of the jaw and lay still. Graham made two strides, stumbled.

And then Ostrog's arm was round his neck, he was pulled over backward,

fell heavily, and his arms were pinned to the ground. After a few

violent efforts he ceased to struggle and lay staring at Ostrog's

heaving throat.

"You--are--a prisoner," panted Ostrog, exulting. "You--were rather a

fool--to come back."

Graham turned his head about and perceived through the irregular

green window in the walls of the hall the men who had been working the

building cranes gesticulating excitedly to the people below them. They

had seen!

Ostrog followed his eyes and started. He shouted something to Lincoln,

but Lincoln did not move. A bullet smashed among the mouldings above

the Atlas The two sheets of transparent matter that had been stretched

across this gap were rent, the edges of the torn aperture darkened,