\documentclass[12pt,novel,nonsubmission,smart]{sffms}
\author{H. G. Wells}
\surname{Wells}
\address{47 The High Street\\ Bromley, Kent}
\title{When the Sleeper Wakes}
\runningtitle{Sleeper}
\wordcount{83,000}
\date{}
% copyright lapsed in the United States of America
%This Etext prepared by John Bean
% edited for LaTeX by m.c.d.
\begin{document}



\chapter{INSOMNIA}

One afternoon, at low water, Mr. Isbister, a young artist lodging at
Boscastle, walked from that place to the picturesque cove of
Pentargen, desiring to examine the caves there. Halfway down the
precipitous path to the Pentargen beach he came suddenly upon a man
sitting in an attitude of profound distress beneath a projecting mass
of rock. The hands of this man hung limply over his knees, his eyes
were red and staring before him, and his face was wet with tears.

He glanced round at Isbister's footfall. Both men were disconcerted,
Isbister the more so, and, to override the awkwardness of his
involuntary pause, he remarked, with an air of mature conviction, that
the weather was hot for the time of year.

"Very," answered the stranger shortly, hesitated a second, and added
in a colourless tone, "I can't sleep."

Isbister stopped abruptly. "No?" was all he said, but his bearing
conveyed his helpful impulse.

"It may sound incredible," said the stranger, turning weary eyes to
Isbister's face and emphasizing his words with a languid hand, "but I
have had no sleep---no sleep at all for six nights."

"Had advice?"

"Yes. Bad advice for the most part. Drugs. My nervous system\dots
. They are all very well for the run of people. It's hard to
explain. I dare not take\dots sufficiently powerful drugs."

"That makes it difficult," said Isbister.

He stood helplessly in the narrow path, perplexed what to do. Clearly
the man wanted to talk. An idea natural enough under the
circumstances, prompted him to keep the conversation going. "I've
never suffered from sleeplessness myself," he said in a tone of
commonplace gossip, "but in those cases I have known, people have
usually found something---"

"I dare make no experiments."

He spoke wearily. He gave a gesture of rejection, and for a space both
men were silent.

"Exercise?" suggested Isbister diffidently, with a glance from his
interlocutor's face of wretchedness to the touring costume he wore.

"That is what I have tried. Unwisely perhaps. I have followed the
coast, day after day---from New Quay. It has only added muscular
fatigue to the mental.  The cause of this unrest was
overwork---trouble.  There was something---"

He stopped as if from sheer fatigue. He rubbed his forehead with a
lean hand. He resumed speech like one who talks to himself.

"I am a lone wolf, a solitary man, wandering through a world in which
I have no part. I am wifeless---childless---who is it speaks of the
childless as the dead twigs on the tree of life? I am wifeless, I
childless---I could find no duty to do. No desire even in my
heart. One thing at last I set myself to do.

"I said, I will do this, and to do it, to overcome the inertia of this
dull body, I resorted to drugs. Great God, I've had enough of drugs! I
don't know if \emph{you} feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its
exasperating demand of time from the mind---time---life! Live! We only
live in patches. We have to eat, and then comes the dull digestive
complacencies---or irritations. We have to take the air or else our
thoughts grow sluggish, stupid, run into gulfs and blind alleys. A
thousand distractions arise from within and without, and then comes
drowsiness and sleep. Men seem to live for sleep. How little of a
man's day is his own---even at the best! And then come those false
friends, those Thug helpers, the alkaloids that stifle natural fatigue
and kill rest---black coffee, cocaine---"

"I see," said Isbister.

"I did my work," said the sleepless man with a querulous intonation.

"And this is the price?"

"Yes."  For a little while the two remained without speaking.

"You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel---a hunger and
thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a
whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts
leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady---"

He paused. "Towards the gulf."

"You must sleep," said Isbister decisively, and with an air of a
remedy discovered. "Certainly you must sleep."

"My mind is perfectly lucid. It was never clearer.  But I know I am
drawing towards the vortex.  Presently---"

"Yes?"

"You have seen things go down an eddy? Out of the light of the day,
out of this sweet world of sanity---down---"

"But," expostulated Isbister.

The man threw out a hand towards him, and his eyes were wild, and his
voice suddenly high. "I shall kill myself. If in no other way---at the
foot of yonder dark precipice there, where the waves are green, and
the white surge lifts and falls, and that little thread of water
trembles down. There at any rate is
\dots  sleep."

"That's unreasonable," said Isbister, startled at the man's
hysterical gust of emotion. "Drugs are better than that."

"There at any rate is sleep," repeated the stranger, not heeding him.

Isbister looked at him and wondered transitorily if some complex
Providence had indeed brought them together that afternoon. "It's not
a cert, you know," he remarked. " There's a cliff like that at
Lulworth Cove---as high, anyhow---and a little girl fell from top to
bottom. And lives to-day---sound and well."

"But those rocks there? "

"One might lie on them rather dismally through a cold night, broken
bones grating as one shivered, chill water splashing over you. Eh? "

Their eyes met. "Sorry to upset your ideals," said Isbister with a
sense of devil-may-careish brilliance.

"But a suicide over that cliff (or any cliff for the matter of that),
really, as an artist---" He laughed.  "It's so damned amateurish."

"But the other thing," said the sleepless man irritably, "the other
thing. No man can keep sane if night after night---"

"Have you been walking along this coast alone? "

"Yes."

"Silly sort of thing to do. If you'll excuse my saying so. Alone! As
you say; body fag is no cure for brain fag. Who told you to? No
wonder; walking! And the sun on your head, heat, fag, solitude, all
the day long, and then, I suppose, you go to bed and try very
hard---eh?"

Isbister stopped short and looked at the sufferer doubtfully.

"Look at these rocks!" cried the seated man with a sudden force of
gesture. "Look at that sea that has shone and quivered there for ever!
See the white spume rush into darkness under that great cliff. And
this blue vault, with the blinding sun pouring from the dome of it. It
is your world. You accept it, you rejoice in it. It warms and supports
and delights you.  And for me---"

He turned his head and showed a ghastly face, bloodshot pallid eyes
and bloodless lips. He spoke almost in a whisper. "It is the garment
of my misery.  The whole world\dots is the garment of my misery."

Isbister looked at all the wild beauty of the sunlit cliffs about them
and back to that face of despair For a moment he was silent.

He started, and made a gesture of impatient rejection.  "You get a
night's sleep," he said, "and you won't see much misery out here. Take
my word for it."

He was quite sure now that this was a providential encounter. Only
half an hour ago he had been feeling horribly bored. Here was
employment the bare thought of which was righteous self-applause. He
took possession forthwith. It seemed to him that the first need of
this exhausted being was companionship He flung himself down on the
steeply sloping turf beside the motionless seated figure, and deployed
forthwith into a skirmishing line of gossip.

His hearer seemed to have lapsed into apathy; he stared dismally
seaward, and spoke only in answer to Isbister's direct questions---and
not to all of those But he made no sign of objection to this
benevolent intrusion upon his despair.

In a helpless way he seemed even grateful, and when presently
Isbister, feeling that his unsupported talk was losing vigour,
suggested that they should reascend the steep and return towards
Boscastle, alleging the view into Blackapit, he submitted quietly.
Halfway up he began talking to himself, and abruptly turned a ghastly
face on his helper. "What can be happening?" he asked with a gaunt
illustrative hand.  "What can be happening? Spin, spin, spin, spin. It
goes round and round, round and round for evermore."

He stood with his hand circling

"It's all right, old chap," said Isbister with the air of an old
friend. "Don't worry yourself. Trust to me."

The man dropped his hand and turned again. They went over the brow in
single file and to the headland beyond Penally, with the sleepless man
gesticulating ever and again, and speaking fragmentary things
concerning his whirling brain. At the headland they stood for a space
by the seat that looks into the dark mysteries of Blackapit, and then
he sat down. Isbister had resumed his talk whenever the path had
widened sufficiently for them to walk abreast. He was enlarging upon
the complex difficulty of making Boscastle Harbour in bad weather,
when suddenly and quite irrelevantly his companion interrupted him
again.

"My head is not like what it was," he said, gesticulating for want of
expressive phrases. "It's not like what it was. There is a sort of
oppression, a weight.  No---not drowsiness, would God it were! It is
like a shadow, a deep shadow falling suddenly and swiftly across
something busy. Spin, spin into the darkness The tumult of thought,
the confusion, the eddy and eddy. I can't express it. I can hardly
keep my mind on it---steadily enough to tell you."

He stopped feebly.

" Don't trouble, old chap," said Isbister. "I think I can
understand. At any rate, it don't matter very much just at present
about telling me, you know."

The sleepless man thrust his knuckles into his eyes and rubbed
them. Isbister talked for awhile while this rubbing continued, and
then he had a fresh idea.  "Come down to my room," he said, "and try a
pipe.  I can show you some sketches of this Blackapit. If you'd care?
"

The other rose obediently and followed him down the steep.

Several times Isbister heard him stumble as they came down, and his
movements were slow and hesitating.  "Come in with me," said Isbister,
"and try some cigarettes and the blessed gift of alcohol. If you take
alcohol?"

The stranger hesitated at the garden gate. He seemed no longer clearly
aware of his actions. "I don't drink," he said slowly, coming up the
garden path, and after a moment's interval repeated absently, "No---I
don't drink. It goes round. Spin, it goes---spin---"

He stumbled at the doorstep and entered the room with the bearing of
one who sees nothing.

Then he sat down abruptly and heavily in the easy chair, seemed almost
to fall into it. He leant forward with his brows on his hands and
became motionless.

Presently he made a faint sound in his throat.  Isbister moved about
the room with the nervousness of an inexperienced host, making little
remarks that scarcely required answering. He crossed the room to his
portfolio, placed it on the table and noticed the mantel clock.

"I don't know if you'd care to have supper with me," he said with an
unlighted cigarette in his hand---his mind troubled with a design of
the furtive administration of chloral. "Only cold mutton, you know,
but passing sweet. Welsh. And a tart, I believe."  He repeated this
after momentary silence.

The seated man made no answer. Isbister stopped, match in hand,
regarding him.

The stillness lengthened. The match went out, the cigarette was put
down unlit. The man was certainly very still. Isbister took up the
portfolio, opened it, put it down, hesitated, seemed about to speak.
"Perhaps," he whispered doubtfully. Presently he glanced at the door
and back to the figure. Then he stole on tiptoe out of the room,
glancing at his companion after each elaborate pace.

He closed the door noiselessly. The house door was standing open, and
he went out beyond the porch, and stood where the monkshood rose at
the corner of the garden bed. From this point he could see the
stranger through the open window, still and dim, sitting head on
hand. He had not moved.

A number of children going along the road stopped and regarded the
artist curiously. A boatman exchanged civilities with him. He felt
that possibly his circumspect attitude and position seemed peculiar
and unaccountable. Smoking, perhaps, might seem more natural. He drew
pipe and pouch from his pocket, filled the pipe slowly.

"I wonder," \dots he said, with a scarcely perceptible loss of
complacency. " At any rate we must give him a chance." He struck a
match in the virile way, and proceeded to light his pipe.

Presently he heard his landlady behind him, coming with his lamp lit
from the kitchen. He turned, gesticulating with his pipe, and stopped
her at the door of his sitting-room. He had some difficulty in
explaining the situation in whispers, for she did not know he had a
visitor. She retreated again with the lamp, still a little mystified
to judge from her manner, and he resumed his hovering at the corner of
the porch, flushed and less at his ease.

Long after he had smoked out his pipe, and when the bats were abroad,
his curiosity dominated his complex hesitations, and he stole back
into his darkling sitting-room. He paused in the doorway. The stranger
was still in the same attitude, dark against the window. Save for the
singing of some sailors aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships
in the harbour, the evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of
monkshood and delphinium stood erect and motionless against the shadow
of the hillside. Something flashed into Isbister's mind; he started,
and leaning over the table, listened. An unpleasant suspicion grew
stronger; became conviction. Astonishment seized him and
became---dread!

No sound of breathing came from the seated figure!

He crept slowly and noiselessly round the table, pausing twice to
listen. At last he could lay his hand on the back of the armchair. He
bent down until the two heads were ear to ear.

Then he bent still lower to look up at his visitor's face. He started
violently and uttered an exclamation.  The eyes were void spaces of
white.

He looked again and saw that they were open and with the pupils rolled
under the lids. He was suddenly afraid. Overcome by the strangeness of
the man's condition, he took him by the shoulder and shook him. "Are
you asleep?" he said, with his voice jumping into alto, and again,
"Are you asleep?"

A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was dead. He
suddenly became active and noisy, strode across the room, blundering
against the table as he did so, and rang the bell.

"Please bring a light at once," he said in the passage.  "There is
something wrong with my friend."

Then he returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the
shoulder, shook it, and shouted. The room was flooded with yellow
glare as his astonished landlady entered with the light. His face was
white as he turned blinking towards her. "I must fetch a doctor at
once," he said. "It is either death or a fit. Is there a doctor in the
village? Where is a doctor to be found? "

\chapter{THE TRANCE}

The state of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted
for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the
flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then
it was his eyes could be closed.

He was removed from the hotel to the Boscastle surgery, and from the
surgery, after some weeks, to London. But he still resisted every
attempt at reanimation. After a time, for reasons that will appear
later, these attempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in
that strange condition, inert and still neither dead nor living but,
as it were, suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and
existence.  His was a darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or
sensation, a dreamless inanition, a vast space of peace.  The tumult
of his mind had swelled and risen to an abrupt climax of
silence. Where was the man?  Where is any man when insensibility takes
hold of him?

"It seems only yesterday," said Isbister. "I remember it all as though
it happened yesterday---clearer perhaps, than if it had happened
yesterday."

It was the Isbister of the last chapter, but he was no longer a young
man. The hair that had been brown and a trifle in excess of the
fashionable length, was iron grey and clipped close, and the face that
had been pink and white was buff and ruddy. He had a pointed beard
shot with grey. He talked to an elderly man who wore a summer suit of
drill (the summer of that year was unusually hot). This was Warming, a
London solicitor and next of kin to Graham, the man who had fallen
into the trance. And the two men stood side by side in a room in a
house in London regarding his recumbent figure.

It was a yellow figure Iying lax upon a water-bed and clad in a
flowing shirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean
limbs and lank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This
glass seemed to mark off the sleeper from the reality of life about
him, he was a thing apart, a strange, isolated abnormality.  The two
men stood close to the glass, peering in.

"The thing gave me a shock," said Isbister "I feel a queer sort of
surprise even now when I think of his white eyes. They were white, you
know, rolled up. Coming here again brings it all back to me.

"Have you never seen him since that time? " asked Warming.

"Often wanted to come," said Isbister; "but business nowadays is too
serious a thing for much holiday keeping. I've been in America most of
the time."

"If I remember rightly," said Warming, "you were an artist?"

"Was. And then I became a married man. I saw it was all up with black
and white, very soon---at least for a mediocre man, and I jumped on to
process.  Those posters on the Cliffs at Dover are by my people."

"Good posters," admitted the solicitor, "though I | was sorry to see
them there."  I

"Last as long as the cliffs, if necessary," exclaimed Isbister with
satisfaction. " The world changes.  When he fell asleep, twenty years
ago, I was down at Boscastle with a box of water-colours and a noble,
old-fashioned ambition. I didn't expect that some day my pigments
would glorify the whole blessed coast of England, from Land's End
round again to the Lizard.  Luck comes to a man very often when he's
not looking."

Warming seemed to doubt the quality of the luck.  " I just missed
seeing you, if I recollect aright."

"You came back by the trap that took me to Camelford railway
station. It was close on the Jubilee, Victoria's Jubilee, because I
remember the seats and flags in Westminster, and the row with the
cabman at Chelsea."

"The Diamond Jubilee, it was," said Warming; "the second one."

"Ah, yes ! At the proper Jubilee---the Fifty Year affair---I was down
at Wookey---a boy. I missed all that\dots . What a fuss we had with
him! My landlady wouldn't take him in, wouldn't let him stay---he
looked so queer when he was rigid. We had to carry him in a chair up
to the hotel. And the Boscastle doctor---it wasn't the present chap,
but the G.P. before him---was at him until nearly two, with, me and
the landlord holding lights and so forth."

"It was a cataleptic rigour at first, wasn't it?"

"Stiff!---wherever you bent him he stuck. You might have stood him on
his head and he'd have stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course
this"---he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his
head---" is quite different. And, of course, the little doctor---what
was his name?"

"Smithers? "

"Smithers it was---was quite wrong in trying to fetch him round too
soon, according to all accounts.  The things he did. Even now it makes
me feel all---ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those beastly
little things, not dynamos---"

"Induction coils."

"Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted
about. There was just two flaring yellow candles, and all the shadows
were shivering, and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and
him---stark and squirming in the most unnatural ways. Well, it made me
dream."

Pause.

"It's a strange state," said Warming.

" It's a sort of complete absence," said Isbister.

"Here's the body, empty. Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It's like
a seat vacant and marked 'engaged.'  No feeling, no digestion, no
beating of the heart---not a flutter. \emph{That} doesn't make me feel
as if there was a man present. In a sense it's more dead than death,
for these doctors tell me that even the hair has stopped growing. Now
with the proper dead, the hair will go on growing---"

"I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.

They peered through the glass again. Graham was indeed in a strange
state, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in
medical history.  Trances had lasted for as much as a year
before---but at the end of that time it had ever been waking or a
death; sometimes first one and then the other. Isbister noted the
marks the physicians had made in injecting nourishment, for that
device had been resorted to to postpone collapse; he pointed them out
to Warming, who had been trying not to see them.

"And while he has been Iying here," said Isbister, with the zest of a
life freely spent, " I have changed my plans in life; married, raised
a family, my eldest lad---I hadn't begun to think of sons then---is an
American citizen, and looking forward to leaving Harvard.  There's a
touch of grey in my hair. And this man, not a day older nor wiser
(practically) than I was in my downy days. It's curious to think of."

Warming turned. "And I have grown old too. I played cricket with him
when I was still only a lad.  And he looks a young man still. Yellow
perhaps.  But that is a young man nevertheless."

"And there's been the War," said Isbister.

"From beginning to end."

"And these Martians."

"I've understood," said Isbister after a pause, "that he had some
moderate property of his own?"

"That is so," said Warming. He coughed primly.  "As it happens---have
charge of it."

" Ah!" Isbister thought, hesitated and spoke: "No doubt---his keep
here is not expensive---no doubt it will have improved---accumulated?"

"It has. He will wake up very much better off---if he wakes---than
when he slept."

"As a business man," said Isbister, "that thought has naturally been
in my mind. I have, indeed, sometimes thought that, speaking
commercially, of course, this sleep may be a very good thing for
him. That he knows what he is about, so to speak, in being insensible
so long. If he had lived straight on---"

"I doubt if he would have premeditated as much," said Warming. "He was
not a far-sighted man. In fact---"

"Yes?"

"We differed on that point. I stood to him some- what in the relation
of a guardian. You have probably seen enough of affairs to recognise
that occasionally a certain friction---. But even if that was the
case, there is a doubt whether he will ever wake. This sleep exhausts
slowly, but it exhausts. Apparently he is sliding slowly, very slowly
and tediously, down a long slope, if you can understand me? "

"It will be a pity to lose his surprise. There's been a lot of change
these twenty years. It's Rip Van Winkle come real."

"It's Bellamy," said Warming. " There has been a lot of change
certainly. And, among other changes, I have changed. I am an old man."

Isbister hesitated, and then feigned a belated surprise.  "I shouldn't
have thought it."

"I was forty-three when his bankers---you remember you wired to his
bankers---sent on to me."

"I got their address from the cheque book in his pocket," said
Isbister.

"Well, the addition is not difficult," said Warming.

There was another pause, and then Isbister gave way to an unavoidable
curiosity. "He may go on for years yet," he said, and had a moment of
hesitation.  "We have to consider that. His affairs, you know, may
fall some day into the hands of---someone else, you know."

"That, if you will believe me, Mr. Isbister, is one of the problems
most constantly before my mind. We happen to be---as a matter of fact,
there are no very trustworthy connections of ours. It is a grotesque
and unprecedented position."

"It is," said Isbister. "As a matter of fact, it's a case for a public
trustee, if only we had such a functionary."

"It seems to me it's a case for some public body, some practically
undying guardian. If he really is going on living---as the doctors,
some of them, think.  As a matter of fact, I have gone to one or two
public men about it. But, so far, nothing has been done."

"It wouldn't be a bad idea to hand him over to some public body---the
British Museum Trustees, or the Royal College of Physicians. Sounds a
bit odd, of course, but the whole situation is odd."

"The difficulty is to induce them to take him."

"Red tape, I suppose? "

"Partly."

Pause. " It's a curious business, certainly," said Isbister. "And
compound interest has a way of mounting up."

"It has," said Warming. "And now the gold supplies are running short
there is a tendency towards
    \dots appreciation."

"I've felt that," said Isbister with a grimace. "But it makes it
better for him."

"If he wakes."

"If he wakes," echoed Isbister. "Do you notice the pinched-ill look of
his nose, and the way in which his eyelids sink?"

Warming looked and thought for a space. "I doubt if he will wake," he
said at last.

"I never properly understood," said Isbister, "what it was brought
this on. He told me something about overstudy. I've often been
curious."

"He was a man of considerable gifts, but spasmodic, emotional. He had
grave domestic troubles, divorced his wife, in fact, and it was as a
relief from that, I think, that he took up politics of the rabid sort.
He was a fanatical Radical---a Socialist---or typical Liberal, as they
used to call themselves,-of the advanced
school. Energetic---flighty---undisciplined. Overwork upon a
controversy did this for him. I remember the pamphlet he wrote---a
curious production. Wild, whirling stuff. There were one or two
prophecies.  Some of them are already exploded, some of them are
established facts. But for the most part to read such a thesis is to
realise how full the world is of unanticipated things. He will have
much to learn, much to unlearn, when he wakes. If ever a waking
comes."

"I'd give anything to be there," said Isbister, "just to hear what he
would say to it all."

"So would I," said Warming. "Aye! so would I," with an old man's
sudden turn to self pity. "But I shall never see him wake."

He stood looking thoughtfully at the waxen figure.  "He will never
wake," he said at last. He sighed "He will never wake again."

\chapter{THE AWAKENING}

But Warming was wrong in that. An awakening came.

What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity---the
self! Who can trace its reintegration as morning after morning we
awaken, the flux and confluence of its countless factors intenveaving,
rebuilding, the dim first stirrings of the soul, the growth and
synthesis of the unconscious to the subconscious, the sub-conscious to
dawning consciousness, until at last we recognise ourselves again. And
as it happens to most of us after the night's sleep, so it was with
Graham at the end of his vast slumber.  A dim cloud of sensation
taking shape, a cloudy dreariness, and he found himself vaguely
somewhere, recumbent, faint, but alive.

The pilgrimage towards a personal being seemed to traverse vast gulfs,
to occupy epochs. Gigantic dreams that were terrible realities at the
time, left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange
scenery, as if from another planet. There was a distinct impression,
too, of a momentous conversation, of a name---he could not tell what
name---that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten
sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort,
the effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of
dazzling unstable confluent scenes.

Graham became aware his eyes were open and regarding some unfamiliar
thing.

It was something white, the edge of something, a frame of wood. He
moved his head slightly, following the contour of this shape. It went
up beyond the top of his eyes. He tried to think where he might be.
Did it matter, seeing he was so wretched? The colour of his thoughts
was a dark depression. He felt the featureless misery of one who wakes
towards the hour of dawn. He had an uncertain sense of whispers and
footsteps hastily receding.

The movement of his head involved a perception of extreme physical
weakness. He supposed he was in bed in the hotel at the place in the
valley---but he could not recall that white edge. He must have slept.
He remembered now that he had wanted to sleep. He recalled the cliff
and waterfall again, and then recollected something about talking to a
passer-by.

How long had he slept? What was that sound of pattering feet? And that
rise and fall, like the murmur of breakers on pebbles? He put out a
languid hand to reach his watch from the chair whereon it was his
habit to place it, and touched some smooth hard surface like
glass. This was so unexpected that it startled him extremely. Quite
suddenly he rolled over, stared for a moment, and struggled into a
sitting position. The effort was unexpectedly difficult, and it left
him giddy and weak---and amazed.

He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but
his mind was quite clear---evidently his sleep had benefited him. He
was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but Iying naked on
a very soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The
mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a strange
sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him
greyly. About his arm---and he saw with a shock that his skin was
strangIy dry and yellow---was bound a curious apparatus of rubber,
bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and
below. And this strange bed was placed in a case of greenish coloured
glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had
first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of
glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite
strange appliances, though a maximum and minimum thermometer was
recognisable.

The slightly greenish tint of the glass-like substance which
surrounded him on every hand obscured what lay behind, but he
perceived it was a vast apartment of splendid appearance, and with a
very large and simple white archway facing him. Close to the walls of
the cage were articles of furniture, a table covered with a silvery
cloth, silvery like the side of a fish, a couple of graceful chairs,
and on the table a number of dishes with substances piled on them, a
bottle and two glasses. He realised that he was intensely hungry.

He could see no human being, and after a period of hesitation
scrambled off the translucent mattress and tried to stand on the clean
white floor of his little apartment. He had miscalculated his
strength, however, and staggered and put his hand against the
glasslike pane before him to steady himself. For a moment it resisted
his hand, bending outward like a distended bladder, then it broke with
a slight report and vanished---a pricked bubble. He reeled out into
the general space of the hall, greatly astonished. He caught at the
table to save himself, knocking one of the glasses to the floor---it
rang but did not break---and sat down in one of the armchairs.

When he had a little recovered he filled the remaining glass from the
bottle and drank---a colourless liquid it was, but not water, with a
pleasing faint aroma and taste and a quality of immediate support and
stimulus. He put down the vessel and looked about him.

The apartment lost none of its size and magnificence now that the
greenish transparency that had intervened was removed. The archway he
saw led to a flight of steps, going downward without the
intermediation of a door, to a spacious transverse passage.  This
passage ran between polished pillars of some white-veined substance of
deep ultramarine, and along it came the sound of human movements and
voices and a deep undeviating droning note. He sat, now fully awake,
listening alertly, forgetting the viands in his attention.

Then with a shock he remembered that he was naked, and casting about
him for covering, saw a long black robe thrown on one of the chairs
beside him.  This he wrapped about him and sat down again, trembling.

His mind was still a surging perplexity. Clearly he had slept. and had
been removed in his sleep. But here? And who were those people, the
distant crowd beyond the deep blue pillars? Boscastle? He poured out
and partially drank another glass of the colourless fluid.

What was this place?---this place that to his senses seemed subtly
quivering like a thing alive? He looked about him at the clean and
beautiful form of the apartment, unstained by ornament, and saw that
the roof was broken in one place by a circular shaft full of light,
and, as he looked, a steady, sweeping shadow blotted it out and
passed, and came again and passed.  "Beat, beat," that sweeping shadow
had a note of its own in the subdued tumult that filled the air.

He would have called out, but only a little sound came into his
throat. Then he stood up, and, with the uncertain steps of a drunkard,
made his way towards the archway. He staggered down the steps, tripped
on the corner of the black cloak he had wrapped about himself, and
saved himself by catching at one of the blue pillars.

The passage ran down a cool vista of blue and purple, and ended
remotely in a railed space like a balcony, brightly lit and projecting
into a space of haze, a space like the interior of some gigantic
building.  Beyond and remote were vast and vague architectural
forms. The tumult of voices rose now loud and clear, and on the
balcony and with their backs to him, gesticulating and apparently in
animated conversation, were three figures, richly dressed in loose and
easy garments of bright soft colourings. The noise of a great
multitude of people poured up over the balcony, and once it seemed the
top of a banner passed, and once some brightly coloured object, a pale
blue cap or garment thrown up into the air perhaps, flashed athwart
the space and fell. The shouts sounded like English, there was a
reiteration of "Wake!" He heard some indistinct shrill cry, and
abruptly the three men began laughing.

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed one---a red-haired man in a short purple
robe. "When the Sleeper wakes---\emph{When!}

He turned his eyes full of merriment along the passage.  His face
changed, the whole man changed, became rigid. The other two turned
swiftly at his exclamation and stood motionless. Their faces assumed
an expression of consternation, an expression that deepened into awe.

Suddenly Graham's knees bent beneath him, his arm against the pillar
collapsed limply, he staggered forward and fell upon his face.

\chapter{THE SOUND OF A TUMULT}

Graham's last impression before he fainted was of a clamorous ringing
of bells. He learnt afterwards that he was insensible, hanging between
life and death, for the better part of an hour. When he recovered his
senses, he was back on his translucent couch, and there was a stirring
warmth at heart and throat. The dark apparatus, he perceived, had been
removed from his arm, which was bandaged. The white framework was
still about him, but the greenish transparent substance that had
filled it was altogether gone. A man in a deep violet robe, one of
those who had been on the balcony, was looking keenly into his face.

Remote but insistent was a clamour of bells and confused sounds, that
suggested to his mind the picture of a great number of people shouting
together.  Something seemed to fall across this tumult, a door
suddenly closed.

Graham moved his head. "What does this all mean?" he said
slowly. "Where am I?"

He saw the red-haired man who had been first to discover him. A voice
seemed to be asking what he had said, and was abruptly stilled.

The man in violet answered in a soft voice, speaking English with a
slightly foreign accent, or so at least it seemed to the Sleeper's
ears, "You are quite safe.

You were brought hither from where you fell asleep.  It is quite
safe. You have been here some time---sleeping. In a trance."

He said something further that Graham could not hear, and a little
phial was handed across to him.  Graham felt a cooling spray, a
fragrant mist played over his forehead for a moment, and his sense of
refreshment increased. He closed his eyes in satisfaction.

" Better?" asked the man in violet, as Graham's eyes reopened. He was
a pleasant-faced man of thirty, perhaps, with a pointed flaxen beard,
and a clasp of gold at the neck of his violet robe.

"Yes," said Graham.

"You have been asleep some time. In a cataleptic trance. You have
heard? Catalepsy? It may seem strange to you at first, but I can
assure you everything is well."

Graham did not answer, but these words served their reassuring
purpose. His eyes went from face to face of the three people about
him. They were regarding him strangely. He knew he ought to be
somewhere in Cornwall, but he could not square these things with that
impression.

A matter that had been in his mind during his last waking moments at
Boscastle recurred, a thing resolved upon and somehow neglected. He
cleared his throat.

"Have you wired my cousin?" he asked. "E.  Warming, 27, Chancery Lane?
"

They were all assiduous to hear. But he had to repeat it. "What an odd
\emph{blurr} in his accent!"  whispered the red-haired man. "Wire,
sir?" said the young man with the flaxen beard, evidently puzzled.

"He means send an electric telegram," volunteered the third, a
pleasant-faced youth of nineteen or twenty.  The flaxen-bearded man
gave a cry of comprehension.  "How stupid of me! You may be sure
everything shall be done, sir," he said to Graham. "I am afraid it
would be difficult to---wire to your cousin. He is not in London
now. But don't trouble about arrangements yet; you have been asleep a
very long time and the important thing is to get over that, sir."
(Graham concluded the word was sir, but this man pronounced it
"Sire.")

"Oh!" said Graham, and became quiet.

It was all very puzzling, but apparently these people in unfamiliar
dress knew what they were about. Yet they were odd and the room was
odd. It seemed he was in some newly established place. He had a sudden
flash of suspicion. Surely this wasn't some hall of public exhibition!
If it was he would give Warming a piece of his mind. But it scarcely
had that character. And in a place of public exhibition he would not
have discovered himself naked.

Then suddenly, quite abruptly, he realised what had happened. There
was no perceptible interval of suspicion, no dawn to his
knowledge. Abruptly he knew that his trance had lasted for a vast
interval; as if by some processes of thought reading he interpreted
the awe in the faces that peered into his. He looked at them
strangely, full of intense emotion. It seemed they read his eyes. He
framed his lips to speak and could not. A queer impulse to hide his
knowledge came into his mind almost at the moment of his discovery.
He looked at his bare feet, regarding then silently. His impulse to
speak passed. He was trembling exceedingly.

They gave him some pink fluid with a greenish fluorescence and a meaty
taste, and the assurance of returning strength grew.

"That---that makes me feel better," he said hoarsely, and there were
murmurs of respectful approval. He knew now quite clearly. He made to
speak again, and again he could not.

He pressed his throat and tried a third time.

"How long? " he asked in a level voice. "How long have I been asleep?
"

"Some considerable time," said the flaxen-bearded man, glancing
quickly at the others.

"How long? "

"A very long time."

"Yes---yes," said Graham, suddenly testy. "But I want---Is it---it
is---some years? Many years?  There was something---I forget what. I
feel---confused. But you---" He sobbed. "You need not fence with
me. How long---?"

He stopped, breathing irregularly. He squeezed his eyes with his
knuckles and sat waiting for an answer.

They spoke in undertones.

"Five or six?" he asked faintly. "More?"

"Very much more than that."

"Morel "

"More."

He looked at them and it seemed as though imps were twitching the
muscles of his face. He looked his question.

"Many years," said the man with the red beard.

Graham struggled into a sitting position. He wiped a rheumy tear from
his face with a lean hand.  "Many years!" he repeated. He shut his
eyes tight, opened them, and sat looking about him, from one
unfamiliar thing to another.

"How many years?" he asked.

"You must be prepared to be surprised."

"Well? "

"More than a gross of years."

He was irritated at the strange word." More than a \emph{what}?"

Two of them spoke together. Some quick remarks that were made about
"decimal" he did not catch.

"How long did you say? " asked Graham. "How long? Don't look like
that. Tell me."

Among the remarks in an undertone, his ear caught six words: "More
than a couple of centuries."

\emph{"Whats?"} he cried, turning on the youth who he
thought had spoken. "Who says---? What was that? A couple of
centuries!"

"Yes," said the man with the red beard. "Two hundred years."

Graham repeated the words. He had been prepared to hear of a vast
repose, and yet these concrete centuries defeated him.

"Two hundred years," he said again, with the figure of a great gulf
opening very slowly in his mind; and then, "Oh, but---!"

They said nothing.

"You---did you say---? "

"Two hundred years. Two centuries of years," said the man with the red
beard.

There was a pause. Graham looked at their faces and saw that what he
had heard was indeed true.

"But it can't be," he said querulously. "I am
dreaming. Trances. Trances don't last. That is not right---this is a
joke you have played upon me! Tell me---some days ago, perhaps, I was
walking along the coast of Cornwall---? "

His voice failed him.

The man with the flaxen beard hesitated. "I'm not very strong in
history, sir," he said weakly, and glanced at the others.

"That was it, sir," said the youngster. "Boscastle, in the old Duchy
of Cornwall---it's in the southwest country beyond the dairy
meadows. There is a house there still. I have been there."

"Boscastle!" Graham turned his eyes to the youngster. "That was
it---Boscastle. Little Boscastle.  I fell asleep---somewhere there. I
don't exactly remember. I don't exactly remember."

He pressed his brows and whispered," More than two hundred years!"  I

He began to speak quickly with a twitching face, but his heart was
cold within him. "But if it is two hundred years, every soul I know,
every human being that ever I saw or spoke to before I went to sleep,
must be dead."

They did not answer him.

"The Queen and the Royal Family, her Ministers, of Church and
State. High and low, rich and poor, one with another---"

"Is there England still?"

"That's a comfort! Is there London?"  E "This \emph{is} London, eh?
And you are my assistant---custodian; assistant-custodian. And
these---? Eh?  Assistant-custodians to?"

He sat with a gaunt stare on his face. "But why am I here? No! Don't
talk. Be quiet. Let me---"

He sat silent, rubbed his eyes, and, uncovering them, found another
little glass of pinkish fluid held towards him. He took the dose. It
was almost immediately sustaining. Directly he had taken it he began
to weep naturally and refreshingly.

Presently he looked at their faces, suddenly laughed through his
tears, a little foolishly. "But---two---hun---dred---years ! " he
said. He grimaced hysterically and covered up his face again.

After a space he grew calm. He sat up, his hands hanging over his
knees in almost precisely the same attitude in which Isbister had
found him on the cliff at Pentargen. His attention was attracted by a
thick domineering voice, the footsteps of an advancing personage.
"What are you doing? Why was I not warned? Surely you could tell?
Someone will suffer for this. The man must be kept quiet. Are the
doorways closed? All the doorways? He must be kept perfectly quiet. He
must not be told. Has he been told anything?"

The man with the fair beard made some inaudible remark, and Graham
looking over his shoulder saw approaching a very short, fat, and
thickset beardless man, with aquiline nose and heavy neck and chin.
Very thick black and slightly sloping eyebrows that almost met over
his nose and overhung deep grey eyes, gave his face an oddly
formidable expression.  He scowled momentarily at Graham and then his
regard returned to the man with the flaxen beard.  "These others," he
said in a voice of extreme irritation. "You had better go."

"Go? " said the red-bearded man.

"Certainly---go now. But see the doorways are closed as you go."

The two men addressed turned obediently, after one reluctant glance at
Graham, and instead of going through the archway as he expected,
walked straight to the dead wall of the apartment opposite the
archway.  And then came a strange thing; a long strip of this
apparently solid wall rolled up with a snap, hung over the two
retreating men and fell again, and immediately Graham was alone with
the new comer and the purple-robed man with the flaxen beard.

For a space the thickset man took not the slightest notice of Graham,
but proceeded to interrogate the other---obviously his
subordinate---upon the treatment of their charge. He spoke clearly,
but in phrases only partially intelligible to Graham. The awakening
seemed not only a matter of surprise but of consternation and
annoyance to him. He was evidently profoundly excited.

"You must not confuse his mind by telling him things," he repeated
again and again. "You must not confuse his mind."

His questions answered, he turned quickly and eyed the awakened
sleeper with an ambiguous expression.

"Feel queer? " he asked.

"Very."

"The world, what you see of it, seems strange to you? "

"I suppose I have to live in it, strange as it seems."

"I suppose so, now."

"In the first place, hadn't I better have some clothes? "

"They---" said the thickset man and stopped, and the flaxen-bearded
man met his eye and went away.  "You will very speedily have clothes,"
said the thickset man.

"Is it true indeed, that I have been asleep two hundred---?" asked
Graham.

"They have told you that, have they? Two hundred and three, as a
matter of fact."

Graham accepted the indisputable now with raised eyebrows and
depressed mouth. He sat silent for a moment, and then asked a
question, "Is there a mill or dynamo near here?" He did not wait for
an answer. "Things have changed tremendously, I suppose?" he said.

"What is that shouting? " he asked abruptly.

"Nothing," said the thickset man impatiently.  "It's people. You'll
understand better later---perhaps.  As you say, things have changed."
He spoke shortly, his brows were knit, and he glanced about him like a
man trying to decide in an emergency.  "We must get you clothes and so
forth, at any rate.

Better wait here until some can come. No one will come near you. You
want shaving."

Graham rubbed his chin.

The man with the flaxen beard came back towards them, turned suddenly,
listened for a moment, lifted his eyebrows at the older man, and
hurried off through the archway towards the balcony. The tumult of
shouting grew louder, and the thickset man turned and listened
also. He cursed suddenly under his breath, and turned his eyes upon
Graham with an unfriendly expression. It was a surge of many voices,
rising and falling, shouting and screaming, and once came a sound like
blows and sharp cries, and then a snapping like the crackling of dry
sticks. Graham strained his ears to draw some single thread of sound
from the woven tumult.

Then he perceived, repeated again and again, a certain formula. For a
time he doubted his ears. But surely these were the words: " how us
the Sleeper!  Show us the Sleeper!"

The thickset man rushed suddenly to the archway.

"Wild! " he cried, "How do they know? Do they know? Or is it guessing?
"

There was perhaps an answer.

"I can't come," said the thickset man; "I have \emph{him} to see
to. But shout from the balcony."

There was an inaudible reply.

"Say he is not awake. Anything! I leave it to you."

He came hurrying back to Graham. "You must have clothes at once," he
said. "You cannot stop here---and it will be impossible to---"

He rushed away, Graham shouting unanswered questions after him. In a
moment he was back.

"I can't tell you what is happening. It is too complex to explain. In
a moment you shall have your clothes made. Yes---in a moment. And then
I can take you away from here. You will find out our troubles soon
enough."

"But those voices. They were shouting---?"

"Something about the Sleeper---that's you. They have some twisted
idea. I don't know what it is. I know nothing."

A shrill bell jetted acutely across the indistinct mingling of remote
noises, and this brusque person sprang to a little group of appliances
in the corner of the room. He listened for a moment, regarding a ball
of crystal, nodded, and said a few indistinct words; then he walked to
the wall through which the two men had vanished. It rolled up again
like a curtain, and he stood waiting.

Graham lifted his arm and was astonished to find what strength the
restoratives had given him. He thrust one leg over the side of the
couch and then the other. His head no longer swam. He could scarcely
credit his rapid recovery. He sat feeling his limbs.

The man with the flaxen beard re-entered from the archway, and as he
did so the cage of a lift came sliding down in front of the thickset
man, and a lean, grey-bearded man, carrying a roll, and wearing a
tightly-fitting costume of dark green, appeared therein.

"This is the tailor," said the thickset man with an introductory
gesture." It will never do for you to wear that black. I cannot
understand how it got here.  But I shall. I shall. You will be as
rapid as possible? "  he said to the tailor.

The man in green bowed, and, advancing, seated himself by Graham on
the bed. His manner was calm, but his eyes were full of
curiosity. "You will find the fashions altered, Sire," he said. He
glanced from under his brows at the thickset man.  ,

He opened the roller with a quick movement, and a confusion of
brilliant fabrics poured out over his knees.  "You lived, Sire, in a
period essentially cylindrical---the Victorian. With a tendency to the
hemisphere in hats. Circular curves always. Now---" He flicked out a
little appliance the size and appearance of a keyless watch, whirled
the knob, and behold---a little figure in white appeared kinetoscope
fashion on the dial, walking and turning. The tailor caught up a
pattern of bluish white satin. "That is my conception of your
immediate treatment," he said.

The thickset man came and stood by the shoulder of Graham.

"We have very little time," he said.

"Trust me," said the tailor. "My machine follows.  What do you think
of this? "

"What is that?" asked the man from the nineteenth century.

"In your days they showed you a fashion-plate," said the tailor," but
this is our modern development See here." The little figure repeated
its evolutions, but in a different costume. "Or this," and with a
click another small figure in a more voluminous type of robe marched
on to the dial. The tailor was very quick in his movements, and
glanced twice towards the lift as he did these things.

It rumbled again, and a crop-haired anaemic lad with features of the
Chinese type, clad in coarse pale blue canvas, appeared together with
a complicated machine, which he pushed noiselessly on little castors
into the room. Incontinently the little kinetoscope was dropped,
Graham was invited to stand in front of the machine and the tailor
muttered some instructions to the crop-haired lad, who answered in
guttural tones and with words Graham did not recognise. The boy then
went to conduct an incomprehensible monologue in the corner, and the
tailor pulled out a number of slotted arms terminating in little
discs, pulling them out until the discs were flat against the body of
Graham, one at each shoulder blade, one at the elbows, one at the neck
and so forth, so that at last there were, perhaps, two score of them
upon his body and limbs. At the same time, some other person entered
the room by the lift, behind Graham. The tailor set moving a mechanism
that initiated a faint-sounding rhythmic movement of parts in the
machine, and in another moment he was knocking up the levers and
Graham was released. The tailor replaced his cloak of black, and the
man with the flaxen beard proffered him a little glass of some
refreshing fluid. Graham saw over the rim of the glass a pale-faced
young man regarding him with a singular fixity.

The thickset man had been pacing the room fretfully, and now turned
and went through the archway towards the balcony, from which the noise
of a distant crowd still came in gusts and cadences. The cropheaded
lad handed the tailor a roll of the bluish satin and the two began
fixing this in the mechanism in a manner reminiscent of a roll of
paper in a nineteenth century printing machine. Then they ran the
entire thing on its easy, noiseless bearings across the room to a
remote corner where a twisted cable looped rather gracefully from the
wall. They made some connexion and the machine became energetic and
swift.

"What is that doing?" asked Graham, pointing with the empty glass to
the busy figures and trying to ignore the scrutiny of the new comer. "
Is that---some sort of force---laid on? "

"Yes," said the man with the flaxen beard.

"Who is that?" He indicated the archway behind him.

The man in purple stroked his little beard, hesitated, and answered in
an undertone, "He is Howard, your chief guardian. You see,
Sire,---it's a little difficult to explain. The Council appoints a
guardian and assistants. This hall has under certain restrictions been
public. In order that people might satisfy themselves.  We have barred
the doorways for the first time. But I think---if you don't mind, I
will leave him to explain."

"Odd" said Graham. " Guardian? Council?"  Then turning his back on the
new comer, he asked in an undertone, "Why is this man glaring at me?
Is he a mesmerist? "

"Mesmerist! He is a capillotomist."

"Capillotomist!"

"Yes---one of the chief. His yearly fee is sixdoz lions."

It sounded sheer nonsense. Graham snatched at the last phrase with an
unsteady mind. "Sixdoz lions?" he said.

"Didn't you have lions? I suppose not. You had the old pounds? They
are our monetary units."

"But what was that you said---sixdoz? "

"Yes. Six dozen, Sire. Of course things, even these little things,
have altered. You lived in the days of the decimal system, the Arab
system---tens, and little hundreds and thousands. We have eleven
numerals now. We have single figures for both ten and eleven, two
figures for a dozen, and a dozen dozen makes a gross, a great hundred,
you know, a dozen gross a dozand, and a dozand dozand a myriad. Very
simple?"

"I suppose so," said Graham. "But about this cap---what was it? "

The man with the flaxen beard glanced over his shoulder.

"Here are your clothes!" he said. Graham turned round sharply and saw
the tailor standing at his elbow smiling, and holding some palpably
new garments over his arm. The crop-headed boy, by means of one
finger, was impelling the complicated machine towards the lift by
which he had arrived. Graham stared at the completed suit. "You don't
mean to say---!"

"Just made," said the tailor. He dropped the garments at the feet of
Graham, walked to the bed on which Graham had so recently been Iying,
flung out the translucent mattress, and turned up the looking
glass. As he did so a furious bell summoned the thickset man to the
corner. The man with the flaxen beard rushed across to him and then
hurried out by the archway.

The tailor was assisting Graham into a dark purple combination
garment, stockings, vest, and pants in one, as the thickset man came
back from the corner to meet the man with the flaxen beard returning
from the balcony. They began speaking quickly in an undertone, their
bearing had an unmistakable quality of anxiety. Over the purple
under-garment came a I complex but graceful garment of bluish white,
and I Graham was clothed in the fashion once more and saw himself,
sallow-faced, unshaven and shaggy still, but at least naked no longer,
and in some indefinable unprecedented way graceful.

"I must shave," he said regarding himself in the glass.

"In a moment," said Howard.

The persistent stare ceased. The young man closed his eyes, reopened
them, and with a lean hand extended, advanced on Graham. Then he
stopped, with his hand slowly gesticulating, and looked about him.

"A seat," said Howard impatiently, and in a moment the flaxen-bearded
man had a chair behind Graham.  "Sit down, please," said Howard.

Graham hesitated, and in the other hand of the wildeyed man he saw the
glint of steel.

"Don't you understand, Sire?" cried the flaxen-bearded man with
hurried politeness. "He is going to cut your hair."

"Oh!" cried Graham enlightened. "But you called him--- "A
capillotomist---precisely ! He is one of the finest artists in the
world."

Graham sat down abruptly. The flaxen-bearded man disappeared. The
capillotomist came forward with graceful gestures, examined Graham's
ears and surveyed him, felt the back of his head, and would have sat
down again to regard him but for Howard's audible
impatience. Forthwith with rapid movements and a succession of deftly
handled implements he shaved Graham's chin, clipped his moustache, and
cut and arranged his hair. All this he did without a word, with
something of the rapt air of a poet inspired. And as soon as he had
finished Graham was handed a pair of shoes.

Suddenly a loud voice shouted---it seemed from a piece of machinery in
the corner---"At once---at once. The people know all over the
city. Work is being stopped. Work is being stopped. Wait for nothing,
but come."

This shout appeared to perturb Howard exceedingly.  By his gestures it
seemed to Graham that he hesitated between two directions. Abruptly he
went towards the corner where the apparatus stood about the little
crystal ball. As he did so the undertone of tumultuous shouting from
the archway that had continued during all these occurrences rose to a
mighty sound, roared as if it were sweeping past, and fell again as if
receding swiftly. It drew Graham after it with an irresistible
attraction. He glanced at the thickset man, and then obeyed his
impulse. In two strides he was down the steps and in the passage, and,
in a score he was out upon the balcony upon which | the three men had
been standing.

\chapter{THE MOVING WAYS}

He went to the railings of the balcony and stared upward. An
exclamation of surprise at his appearance, and the movements of a
number of people came from the spacious area below.

His first impression was of overwhelming architecture.  The place into
which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously
in either direction.  Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together
across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent
material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed
the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires.
Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot
passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender
cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced
upward, and the opposite facade was grey and dim and broken by great
archings, circular perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret
projections, myriads of vast windows, and an intricate scheme of
architectural relief.  Athwart these ran inscriptions horizontally and
obliquely in an unfamiliar lettering. Here and there close to the roof
cables of a peculiar stoutness were fastened, and drooped in a steep
curve to circular openings on the opposite side of the space, and even
as Graham noted these a remote and tiny figure of a man clad in pale
blue arrested his attention. This little figure was far overhead
across the space beside the higher fastening of one of these festoons,
hanging forward from a little ledge of masonry and handling some
well-nigh invisible strings dependent from the line.  Then suddenly,
with a swoop that sent Graham's heart into his mouth, this man had
rushed down the curve and vanished through a round opening on the
hither side of the way. Graham had been looking up as he came out upon
the balcony, and the things he saw above and opposed to him had at
first seized his attention to the exclusion of anything else. Then
suddenly he discovered the roadway! It was not a roadway at all, as
Graham understood such things, for in the nineteenth century the only
roads and streets were beaten tracks of motionless earth, jostling
rivulets of vehicles between narrow footways. But this roadway was
three hundred feet across, and it moved; it moved, all save the
middle, the lowest part. For a moment, the motion dazzled his
mind. Then he understood.

Under the balcony this extraordinary roadway ran swiftly to Graham's
right, an endless flow rushing along as fast as a nineteenth century
express train, an endless platform of narrow transverse overlapping
slats with little interspaces that permitted it to follow the
curvatures of the street. Upon it were seats, and here and there
little kiosks, but they swept by too swiftly for him to see what might
be therein. From this nearest and swiftest platform a series of others
descended to the centre of the space. Each moved to the right, each
perceptibly slower than the one above it, but the difference in pace
was small enough to permit anyone to step from any platform to the one
adjacent, and so walk uninterruptedly from the swiftest to the
motionless middle way. Beyond this middle way was another series of
endless platforms rushing with varying pace to Graham's left. And
seated in crowds upon the two widest and swiftest platforms, or
stepping from one to another down the steps, or swarming over the
central space, was an innumerable and wonderfully diversified
multitude of people.

"You must not stop here," shouted Howard suddenly at his side. "You
must come away at once."

Graham made no answer. He heard without hearing.  The platforms ran
with a roar and the people were shouting. He perceived women and girls
with flowing hair, beautifully robed, with bands crossing between the
breasts. These first came out of the confusion. Then he perceived that
the dominant note in that kaleidoscope of costume was the pale blue
that the tailor's boy had worn. He became aware of cries of "The
Sleeper. What has happened to the Sleeper?"  and it seemed as though
the rushing platforms before him were suddenly spattered with the pale
buff of human faces, and then still more thickly. He saw pointing
fingers. He perceived that the motionless central area of this huge
arcade just opposite to the balcony was densely crowded with blue-clad
people.  Some sort of struggle had sprung into life. People seemed to
be pushed up the running platforms on either side, and carried away
against their will. They would spring off so soon as they were beyond
the thick of the confusion, and run back towards the conflict.

"It is the Sleeper. Verily it is the Sleeper," shouted voices. "That
is never the Sleeper," shouted others. More and more faces were turned
to him. At the intervals along this central area Graham noted
openings, pits, apparently the heads of staircases going down with
people ascending out of them and descending into them. The struggle it
seemed centred about the one of these nearest to him. People were
running down the moving platforms to this, leaping dexterously from
platform to platform. The clustering people on the higher platforms
seemed to divide their interest between this point and the balcony. A
number of sturdy little figures clad in a uniform of bright red, and
working methodically together, were employed it seemed in preventing
access to this descending staircase. About them a crowd was rapidly
accumulating. Their brilliant colour contrasted vividly with the
whitish-blue of their antagonists, for the struggle was indisputable.

He saw these things with Howard shouting in his ear and shaking his
arm. And then suddenly Howard was gone and he stood alone.

He perceived that the cries of "The Sleeper" grew in volume, and that
the people on the nearer platform were standing up. The nearer swifter
platform he perceived was empty to the right of him, and far across
the space the platform running in the opposite direction was coming
crowded and passing away bare.  With incredible swiftness a vast crowd
had gathered in the central space before his eyes; a dense swaying
mass of people, and the shouts grew from a fitful crying to a
voluminous incessant clamour: "The Sleeper!"  The Sleeper!" and yells
and cheers, a waving of garments and cries of "Stop the ways!" They
were also crying another name strange to Graham. It sounded like
"Ostrog." The slower platforms were soon thick with active people,
running against the movement so as to keep themselves opposite to him.

"Stop the ways," they cried. Agile figures ran up swiftly from the
centre to the swift road nearest to him, were borne rapidly past him,
shouting strange, unintelligible things, and ran back obliquely to the
central way. One thing he distinguished: "It is indeed the Sleeper. It
is indeed the Sleeper," they testified.

For a space Graham stood without a movement.  Then he became vividly
aware that all this concerned him. He was pleased at his wonderful
popularity, he bowed, and, seeking a gesture of longer range, waved
his arm. He was astonished at the violence of uproar that this
provoked. The tumult about the descending stairway rose to furious
violence. He became aware of crowded balconies, of men sliding along
ropes, of men in trapeze-like seats hurling athwart the space.  He
heard voices behind him, a number of people descending the steps
through the archway; he suddenly perceived that his guardian Howard
was back again and gripping his arm painfully, and shouting inaudibly
in his ear.

He turned, and Howard's face was white. "Come back," he heard. "They
will stop the ways. The whole city will be in confusion."

He perceived a number of men hurrying along the passage of blue
pillars behind Howard, the red-haired man, the man with the flaxen
beard, a tall man in vivid vermilion, a crowd of others in red
carrying staves, and all these people had anxious eager faces.

"Get him away," cried Howard.

"But why?" said Graham. "I don't see---"

"You must come away!" said the man in red in a resolute voice. His
face and eyes were resolute, too.  Graham's glances went from face to
face, and he was suddenly aware of that most disagreeable flavour in
life, compulsion. Some one gripped his arm....  He was being dragged
away. It seemed as though the tumult suddenly became two, as if half
the shouts that had come in from this wonderful roadway had sprung
into the passages of the great building behind him.  Marvelling and
confused, feeling an impotent desire to resist, Graham was half led,
half thrust, along the passage of blue pillars, and suddenly he found
himself alone with Howard in a lift and moving swiftly upward.

\chapter{THE HALL OF THE ATLAS}

From the moment when the tailor had bowed his farewell to the moment
when Graham found himself in the lift, was altogether barely five
minutes. And as yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about
him, as yet the initial strangeness of his being alive at all in this
remote age touched everything with wonder, with a sense of the
irrational, with something of the quality of a realistic dream. He was
still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in
life.  What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult,
framed in the setting of the balcony, had a spectacular turn, like a
thing witnessed from the box of a theatre. "I don't understand," he
said. "What was the trouble? My mind is in a whirl. Why were they
shouting? What is the danger?"

"We have our troubles," said Howard. His eyes avoided Graham's
enquiry. "This is a time of unrest.  And, in fact, your appearance,
your waking just now, has a sort of connexion---"

He spoke jerkily, like a man not quite sure of his breathing. He
stopped abruptly.

"I don't understand," said Graham.

"It will be clearer later," said Howard.

He glanced uneasily upward, as though he found the progress of the
lift slow.

"I shall understand better, no doubt, when I have seen my way about a
little," said Graham puzzled. "It.  will be---it is bound to be
perplexing. At present it is all so strange. Anything seems
possible. Anything In the details even. Your counting, I understand,
is different."

The lift stopped, and they stepped out into a narrow but very long
passage between high walls, along which ran an extraordinary number of
tubes and big cables.

"What a huge place this is!" said Graham. "Is it all one building?
What place is it?"

"This is one of the city ways for various public services. Light and
so forth."

"Was it a social trouble---that---in the great roadway place? How are
you governed? Have you still a police?"  "Several," said Howard.

"Several? "

"About fourteen."

"I don't understand."

"Very probably not. Our social order will probably seem very complex
to you. To tell you the truth, I don't understand it myself very
clearly. Nobody does.  You will, perhaps---bye and bye. We have to go
to the Council."
  Graham's attention was divided between the urgent necessity of his
inquiries and the people in the passages and halls they were
traversing. For a moment his mind would be concentrated upon Howard
and the halting answers he made, and then he would lose the thread in
response to some vivid unexpected impression. Along the passages, in
the halls, half the people seemed to be men in the red uniform. The
pale blue canvas that had been so abundant in the aisle of moving ways
did not appear. Invariably these men looked at him, and saluted him
and Howard as they passed.

He had a clear vision of entering a long corridor, and there were a
number of girls sitting on low seats and as though in a class. He saw
no teacher, but only a novel apparatus from which he fancied a voice
proceeded.  The girls regarded him and his conductor, he thought, with
curiosity and astonishment. But he was hurried on before he could form
a clear idea of the gathering. He judged they knew Howard and not
himself, and that they wondered who he was. This Howard, it seemed,
was a person of importance. But then he was also merely Graham's
guardian. That was odd.

There came a passage in twilight, and into this passage a footway hung
so that he could see the feet and ankles of people going to and fro
thereon, but no more of them. Then vague impressions of galleries and
of casual astonished passers-by turning round to stare after the two
of them with their red-clad guard.

The stimulus of the restoratives he had taken was only temporary. He
was speedily fatigued by this excessive haste. He asked Howard to
slacken his speed. Presently he was in a lift that had a window upon
the great street space, but this was glazed and did not open, and they
were too high for him to see the moving platforms below. But he saw
people going to and fro along cables and along strange, frail-looking
ridges.

And thence they passed across the street and at a vast height above
it. They crossed by means of a narrow bridge closed in with glass, so
clear that it made him giddy even to remember it. The floor of it also
was of glass. From his memory of the cliffs between New Quay and
Boscastle, so remote in time, and so recent in his experience, it
seemed to him that they must be near four hundred feet above the
moving ways. He stopped, looked down between his legs upon the
swarming blue and red multitudes, minute and fore- shortened,
struggling and gesticulating still towards the little balcony far
below, a little toy balcony, it seemed, where he had so recently been
standing. A thin haze and the glare of the mighty globes of light
obscured everything. A man seated in a little open- work cradle shot
by from some point still higher than the little narrow bridge, rushing
down a cable as swiftly almost as if he were falling. Graham stopped
involuntarily to watch this strange passenger vanish in a great
circular opening below, and then his eyes went back to the tumultuous
struggle.

Along one of the swifter ways rushed a thick crowd of red spots. This
broke up into individuals as it approached the balcony, and went
pouring down the slower ways towards the dense struggling crowd on the
central area. These men in red appeared to be armed with sticks or
truncheons; they seemed to be striking and thrusting. A great
shouting, cries of wrath, screaming, burst out and came up to Graham,
faint and thin. "Go on," cried Howard, laying hands on him.

Another man rushed down a cable. Graham suddenly glanced up to see
whence he came, and beheld through the glassy roof and the network of
cables and girders, dim rhythmically passing forms like the vans of
windmills, and between them glimpses of a remote and pallid sky. Then
Howard had thrust him forward across the bridge, and he was in a
little narrow passage decorated with geometrical patterns.

"I want to see more of that," cried Graham, resisting.

"No, no," cried Howard, still gripping his arm.

"This way. You must go this way." And the men in red following them
seemed ready to enforce his orders.

Some negroes in a curious wasp-like uniform of black and yellow
appeared down the passage, and one hastened to throw up a sliding
shutter that had seemed a door to Graham, and led the way through it.
Graham found himself in a gallery overhanging the end of a great
chamber. The attendant in black and yellow crossed this, thrust up a
second shutter and stood waiting.

This place had the appearance of an ante-room. He saw a number of
people in the central space, and at the opposite end a large and
imposing doorway at the top of a flight of steps, heavily curtained
but giving a glimpse of some still larger hall beyond. He perceived
white men in red and other negroes in black and yellow standing
stiffly about those portals.

As they crossed the gallery he heard a whisper from below, "The
Sleeper," and was aware of a turning of heads, a hum of
observation. They entered another little passage in the wall of this
ante-chamber, and then he found himself on an iron-railed gallery of
metal that passed round the side of the great hall he had already seen
through the curtains. He entered the place at the corner, so that he
received the fullest impression of its huge proportions. The black in
the wasp uniform stood aside like a well-trained servant, and closed
the valve behind him.

Compared with any of the places Graham had see thus far, this second
hall appeared to be decorate with extreme richness. On a pedestal at
the remote end, and more brilliantly lit than any other object, was a
gigantic white figure of Atlas, strong and strenuous, the globe upon
his bowed shoulders. It was the first thing to strike his attention,
it was so vast, so patiently and painfully real, so white and
simple. Save for this figure and for a dais in the centre, the wide
floor of the place was a shining vacancy. The dais was remote in the
greatness of the area; it would have looked a mere slab of metal had
it not been for the group of seven men who stood about a table on it,
and gave an inkling of its proportions. They were all dressed in white
robes, they seemed to have arisen that moment from their seats, and
they were regarding Graham steadfastly. At the end of the table he
perceived the glitter of some mechanical appliances.

Howard led him along the end gallery until they were opposite this
mighty labouring figure. Then he stopped. The two men in red who had
followed them into the gallery came and stood on either hand of
Graham.

"You must remain here," murmured Howard, "for a few moments," and,
without waiting for a reply, hurried away along the gallery.

"But, \emph{why?"} began Graham.

He moved as if to follow Howard, and found his path obstructed by one
of the men in red. "You have to wait here, Sire," said the man in red.

\emph{"Why?"}

"Orders, Sire."

"Whose orders? "

"Our orders, Sire."

Graham looked his exasperation.

"What place is this?" he said presently. "Who are those men? "

"They are the lords of the Council, Sire."

"What Council? "

"\emph{The} Council."

"Oh!" said Graham, and after an equally ineffectual attempt at the
other man, went to the railing and stared at the distant men in white,
who stood watching him and whispering together.

The Council? He perceived there were now eight, though how the
newcomer had arrived he had not observed. They made no gestures of
greeting; they stood regarding him as in the nineteenth century a
group of men might have stood in the street regarding a distant
balloon that had suddenly floated into view.  What council could it be
that gathered there, that little body of men beneath the significant
white Atlas, secluded from every eavesdropper in this impressive
spaciousness? And why should he be brought to them, and be looked at
strangely and spoken of inaudibly? Howard appeared beneath, walking
quickly across the polished floor towards them. As he drew near he
bowed and performed certain peculiar movements, apparently of a
ceremonious nature.  Then he ascended the steps of the dais, and stood
by the apparatus at the end of the table.

Graham watched that visible inaudible conversation.  Occasionally, one
of the white-robed men would glance towards him. He strained his ears
in vain.  The gesticulation of two of the speakers became animated. He
glanced from them to the passive faces of his attendants\dots . When
he looked again Howard was extending his hands and moving his head
like a man who protests. He was interrupted, it seemed, by one of the
white-robed men rapping the table.

The conversation lasted an interminable time to Graham's sense. His
eyes rose to the still giant at whose feet the Council sat. Thence
they wandered at last to the walls of the hall. It was decorated in
long painted panels of a quasi-Japanese type, many of them very
beautiful. These panels were grouped in a great and elaborate framing
of dark metal, which passed into the metallic caryatidae of the
galleries, and the great structural lines of the interior. The facile
grace of these panels enhanced the mighty white effort that laboured
in the centre of the scheme. Graham's eyes came back to the Council,
and Howard was descending the steps. As he drew nearer his features
could be distinguished, and Graham saw that he was flushed and blowing
out his cheeks. His countenance was still disturbed when presently he
reappeared along the gallery.

"This way," he said concisely, and they went on in silence to a little
door that opened at their approach.  The two men in red stopped on
either side of this door.  Howard and Graham passed in, and Graham,
glancing back, saw the white-robed Council still standing in a close
group and looking at him. Then the door closed behind him with a heavy
thud, and for the first time since his awakening he was in
silence. The floor, even, was noiseless to his feet.

Howard opened another door, and they were in the first of two
contiguous chambers furnished in white and green. "What Council was
that? " began Graham.  "What were they discussing? What have they to
do with me?" Howard closed the door carefully, heaved a huge sigh, and
said something in an undertone. He walked slanting ways across the
room and turned, blowing out his cheeks again. "Ugh!"  he grunted, a
man relieved.

Graham stood regarding him.

"You must understand," began Howard abruptly, avoiding Graham's eyes,
"that our social order is very complex. A half explanation, a bare
unqualified statement would give you false impressions. As a matter of
fact---it is a case of compound interest partly---your small fortune,
and the fortune of your cousin Warming which was left to you---and
certain other beginnings---have become very considerable.  And in
other ways that will be hard for you to understand, you have become a
person of significance---of very considerable significance---involved
in the world's affairs."

He stopped.

"Yes?" said Graham.

"We have grave social troubles."

"Yes? "

"Things have come to such a pass that, in fact, is advisable to
seclude you here."

"Keep me prisoner! " exclaimed Graham.

"Well---to ask you to keep in seclusion."

Graham turned on him. "This is strange!" he said.

"No harm will be done you."

"No harm ! "

"But you must be kept here---"
 
"While I learn my position, I presume."

"Precisely."

"Very well then. Begin. Why \emph{harm?}"

" Not now."

"Why not? "

"It is too long a story, Sire."

"All the more reason I should begin at once. You say I am a person of
importance. What was that shouting I heard? Why is a great multitude
shouting and excited because my trance is over, and who are the men in
white in that huge council chamber? "

"All in good time, Sire," said Howard. "But not crudely, not
crudely. This is one of those flimsy times when no man has a settled
mind. Your awakening.  No one expected your awakening. The Council is
consulting."

"What council? "

"The Council you saw."

Graham made a petulant movement. " This is not right," he said. " I
should be told what is happening.

"You must wait. Really you must wait."

Graham sat down abruptly. "I suppose since I have waited so long to
resume life," he said, "that I must wait a little longer."

"That is better," said Howard. "Yes, that is much better. And I must
leave you alone. For a space.  While I attend the discussion in the
Council.  I am sorry."

He went towards the noiseless door, hesitated and vanished.

Graham walked to the door, tried it, found it securely fastened in
some way he never came to understand, turned about, paced the room
restlessly, made the circuit of the room, and sat down. He remained
sitting for some time with folded arms and knitted brow, biting his
finger nails and trying to piece together the kaleidoscopic
impressions of this first hour of awakened life; the vast mechanical
spaces, the endless series of chambers and passages, the great
struggle that roared and splashed through these strange ways, the
little group of remote unsympathetic men beneath the colossal Atlas,
Howard's mysterious behaviour. There was an inkling of some vast
inheritance already in his mind---a vast inheritance perhaps
misapplied---of some unprecedented importance and opportunity. What
had he to do? And this room's secluded silence was eloquent of
imprisonment!

It came into Graham's mind with irresistible conviction that this
series of magnificent impressions was a dream. He tried to shut his
eyes and succeeded, but that time-honoured device led to no awakening.

Presently he began to touch and examine all the unfamiliar
appointments of the two small rooms in which he found himself.

In a long oval panel of mirror he saw himself and stopped
astonished. He was clad in a graceful costume of purple and bluish
white, with a little greyshot beard trimmed to a point, and his hair,
its blackness streaked now with bands of grey, arranged over his
forehead in an unfamiliar but graceful manner. He seemed a man of
five-and-forty perhaps. For a moment he did not perceive this was
himself.

A flash of laughter came with the recognition. "To call on old Warming
like this!" he exclaimed, "and make him take me out to lunch! "

Then he thought of meeting first one and then another of the few
familiar acquaintances of his early manhood, and in the midst of his
amusement realised that every soul with whom he might jest had died
many score of years ago. The thought smote him abruptly and keenly; he
stopped short, the expression of his face changed to a white
consternation.

The tumultuous memory of the moving platforms and the huge facade of
that wonderful street reasserted itself. The shouting multitudes came
back clear and vivid, and those remote, inaudible, unfriendly
councilors in white. He felt himself a little figure, very small and
ineffectual, pitifully conspicuous. And all about him, the world
was---strange.

\chapter{IN THE SILENT ROOMS}

Presently Graham resumed his examination of his apartments. Curiosity
kept him moving in spite of his fatigue. The inner room, he perceived,
was high, and its ceiling dome shaped', with an oblong aperture in the
centre, opening into a funnel in which a wheel of broad vans seemed to
be rotating, apparently driving the air up the shaft. The faint
humming note of its easy motion was the only clear sound in that quiet
place. As these vans sprang up one after the other, Graham could get
transient glimpses of the sky. He was surprised to see a star.

This drew his attention to the fact that the bright lighting of these
rooms was due to a multitude of very faint glow lamps set about the
cornices. There were no windows. And he began to recall that along all
the vast chambers and passages he had traversed with Howard he had
observed no windows at all. Had there been windows? There were windows
on the street indeed, but were they for light? Or was the whole city
lit day and night for evermore, so that there was no night there?

And another thing dawned upon him. There was no fireplace in either
room. Was the season summer, and were these merely summer apartments,
or was the whole City uniformly heated or cooled? He became interested
in these questions, began examining the smooth texture of the walls,
the simply constructed bed, the ingenious arrangements by which the
labour of bedroom service was practically abolished. And over
everything was a curious absence of deliberate ornament, a bare grace
of form and colour, that he found very pleasing to the eye. There were
several very comfortable chairs, a light table on silent runners
carrying several bottles of fluids and glasses, and two plates bearing
a clear substance like jelly. Then he noticed there were no books, no
newspapers, no writing materials. "The world has changed indeed," he
said.

He observed one entire side of the outer room was set with rows of
peculiar double cylinders inscribed with green lettering on white that
harmonized With the decorative scheme of the room, and in the centre
of this side projected a little apparatus about a yard square and
having a white smooth face to the room. A chair faced this. He had a
transitory idea that these cylinders might be books, or a modern
substitute for books, but at first it did not seem so.

The lettering on the cylinders puzzled him. At first sight it seemed
like Russian. Then he noticed a suggestion of mutilated English about
certain of the words.
                   "oi Man huwdbi Kin"

forced itself on him as "The Man who would be King." "Phonetic
spelling," he said. He remembered reading a story with that title,
then he recalled the story vividly, one of the best stories in the
world.  But this thing before him was not a book as he understood
it. He puzzled out the titles of two adjacent cylinders. 'The Heart of
Darkness,' he had never heard of before nor 'The Madonna of the
Future'---no doubt if they were indeed stories, they were by post
Victorian authors.

He puzzled over this peculiar cylinder for some time and replaced
it. Then he turned to the square apparatus and examined that. He
opened a sort of lid and found one of the double cylinders within, and
on the upper edge a little stud like the stud of an electric bell. He
pressed this and a rapid clicking began and ceased. He became aware of
voices and music, and noticed a play of colour on the smooth front
face. He suddenly realised what this might be, and stepped back to
regard it.

On the flat surface was now a little picture, very vividly coloured,
and in this picture were figures that moved. Not only did they move,
but they were conversing in clear small voices. It was exactly like
reality viewed through an inverted opera glass and heard through a
long tube. His interest was seized at once by the situation, which
presented a man pacing up and down and vociferating angry things to a
pretty but petulant woman. Both were in the picturesque costume that
seemed so strange to Graham. "I have worked," said the man, "but what
have you been doing?"

"Ah!" said Graham. He forgot everything else, and sat down in the
chair. Within five minutes he heard himself named, heard "when the
Sleeper wakes," used jestingly as a proverb for remote postponement,
and passed himself by, a thing remote and incredible.  But in a little
while he knew those two people like l .  intimate friends.

At last the miniature drama came to an end, and the square face of the
apparatus was blank again.

It was a strange world into which he had been permitted to see,
unscrupulous, pleasure seeking, energetic, subtle, a world too of dire
economic struggle; there were allusions he did not understand,
incidents that conveyed strange suggestions of altered moral ideals,
flashes of dubious enlightenment. The blue canvas that bulked so
largely in his first impression of the city ways appeared again and
again as the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story
was contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end
had been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat staring at the
blankness.

He started and rubbed his eyes. He had been so absorbed in the
latter-day substitute for a novel, that he awoke to the little green
and white room with more than a touch of the surprise of his first
awakening.

He stood up, and abruptly he was back in his own wonderland. The
clearness of the kinetoscope drama passed, and the struggle in the
vast place of streets, the ambiguous Council, the swift phases of his
waking hour, came back. These people had spoken of the Council with
suggestions of a vague universality of power. And they had spoken of
the Sleeper; it had not really struck him vividly at the time that he
was the Sleeper. He had to recall precisely what they had said.

He walked into the bedroom and peered up through the quick intervals
of the revolving fan. As the fan swept round, a dim turmoil like the
noise of machinery came in rhythmic eddies. All else was silence.
Though the perpetual day still irradiated his apartments, he perceived
the little intermittent strip of sky was now deep blue---black almost,
with a dust of little stars.

He resumed his examination of the rooms. He could find no way of
opening the padded door, no bell nor other means of calling for
attendance. His feeling of wonder was in abeyance; but he was curious,
anxious for information. He wanted to know exactly how he stood to
these new things. He tried to compose himself to wait until someone
came to him.  Presently he became restless and eager for information,
for distraction, for fresh sensations.

He went back to the apparatus in the other room, and had soon puzzled
out the method of replacing the cylinders by others. As he did so, it
came into his mind that it must be these little appliances had fixed
the language so that it was still clear and understand- able after two
hundred years. The haphazard cylinders he substituted displayed a
musical fantasia. At first it was beautiful, and then it was
sensuous. He presently recognized what appeared to him to be an
altered version of the story of Tannhauser. The music was
unfamiliar. But the rendering was realistic, and with a contemporary
unfamiliarity. Tannhauser did not go to a Venusberg, but to a Pleasure
City. What was a Pleasure City? A dream, surely, the fancy of a
fantastic, voluptuous writer.

He became interested, curious. The story developed with a flavour of
strangely twisted sentimentality.  Suddenly he did not like it. He
liked it less as it proceeded.

He had a revulsion of feeling. These were no pictures, no
idealisations, but photographed realities. He wanted no more of the
twenty-second century Venusberg.  He forgot the part played by the
model in nineteenth century art, and gave way to an archaic
indignation. He rose, angry and half ashamed at himself for witnessing
this thing even in solitude. He pulled forward the apparatus, and with
some violence sought for a means of stopping its action. Something
snapped. A violet spark stung and convulsed his arm and the thing was
still. When he attempted next day to replace these Tannhauser
cylinders by another pair, he found the apparatus broken....

He struck out a path oblique to the room and paced to and fro,
struggling with intolerable vast impressions.  The things he had
derived from the cylinders and the things he had seen, conflicted,
confused him.  It seemed to him the most amazing thing of all that in
his thirty years of life he had never tried to shape a picture of
these coming times. "We were making the future," he said, "and hardly
any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it
is!"

"What have they got to, what has been done? How do I come into the
midst of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared
for, the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the
systematised sensuality of a class of rich men!

He thought of Bellamy, the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so
oddly anticipated this actual experience.  But here was no Utopia, no
Socialistic state.  He had already seen enough to realise that the
ancient antithesis of luxury, waste and sensuality on the one hand and
abject poverty on the other, still prevailed.  He knew enough of the
essential factors of life to understand that correlation. And not only
were the buildings of the city gigantic and the crowds in the street
gigantic, but the voices he had heard in the ways, the uneasiness of
Howard, the very atmosphere spoke of gigantic discontent. What country
was he in? Still England it seemed, and yet strangely "un-English."
His mind glanced at the rest of the world, and saw only an enigmatical
veil.

He prowled about his apartment, examining everything as a caged animal
might do. He felt very tired, felt that feverish exhaustion that does
not admit of rest.  He listened for long spaces under the ventilator
to catch some distant echo of the tumults he felt must be proceeding
in the city.

He began to talk to himself. "Two hundred and three years! " he said
to himself over and over again, laughing stupidly. "Then I am two
hundred and thirty-three years old! The oldest inhabitant. Surely they
haven't reversed the tendency of our time and gone back to the rule of
the oldest. My claims are indisputable. Mumble, mumble. I remember the
Bulgarian atrocities as though it was yesterday. 'Tis a great age! Ha
ha!" He was surprised at first to hear himself laughing, and then
laughed again deliberately and louder. Then he realised that he was
behaving foolishly. "Steady," he said. "Steady!"

His pacing became more regular. "This new world," he said. "I don't
understand it. \emph{Why?} \dots But it is all \emph{why!}"

"I suppose they can fly and do all sorts of things Let me try and
remember just how it began."

He was surprised at first to find how vague the memories of his first
thirty years had become. He remembered fragments, for the most part
trivial moments, things of no great importance that he had
observed. His boyhood seemed the most accessible at first, he recalled
school books and certain lessons in mensuration. Then he revived the
more salient features of his life, memories of the wife long since
dead, her magic influence now gone beyond corruption, of his rivals
and friends and betrayers, of the swift decision of this issue and
that, and then of his , last years of misery, of fluctuating resolves,
and at last of his strenuous studies. In a little while he perceived
he had it all again; dim perhaps, like metal long laid aside, but in
no way defective or injured, capable of re-polishing. And the hue of
it was a deepening misery.  Was it worth re-polishing? By a miracle he
had been lifted out of a life that had become intolerable.

He reverted to his present condition. He wrestled with the facts in
vain. It became an inextricable tangle.  He saw the sky through the
ventilator pink with dawn. An old persuasion came out of the dark
recesses of his memory. "I must sleep," he said. It appeared as a
delightful relief from this mental distress and from the growing pain
and heaviness of his limbs. He went to the strange little bed, lay
down and was presently asleep.

He was destined to become very familiar indeed with these apartments
before he left them, for he remained imprisoned for three days. During
that time no one, except Howard, entered his prison. The marvel of his
fate mingled with and in some way minimised the marvel of his
survival. He had awakened to mankind it seemed only to be snatched
away into this unaccountable solitude. Howard came regularly with
subtly sustaining and nutritive fluids, and light and pleasant foods,
quite strange to Graham. He always closed the door carefully as he
entered. On matters of detail he was increasingly obliging, but the
bearing of Graham on the great issues that were evidently being
contested so closely beyond the soundproof walls that enclosed him, he
would not elucidate.  He evaded, as politely as possible, every
question on the position of affairs in the outer world.

And in those three days Graham's incessant thoughts went far and
wide. All that he had seen, all this elaborate contrivance to prevent
him seeing, worked together in his mind. Almost every possible
interpretation of his position he debated---even as it chanced, the
right interpretation. Things that presently happened to him, came to
him at last credible, by virtue of this seclusion. When at length the
moment of his release arrived, it found him prepared.

Howard's bearing went far to deepen Graham's impression of his own
strange importance; the door between its opening and closing seemed to
admit with him a breath of momentous happening. His enquiries became
more definite and searching. Howard retreated through protests and
difficulties. The awakening was unforeseen, he repeated; it happened
to have fallen in with the trend of a social convulsion.

"To explain it I must tell you the history of a gross and a half of
years," protested Howard.

"The thing is this," said Graham. "You are afraid of something I shall
do. In some way I am arbitrator---I might be arbitrator."

" It is not that. But you have---I may tell you this much---the
automatic increase of your property puts great possibilities of
interference in your hands.  And in certain other ways you have
influence, with your eighteenth century notions."

"Nineteenth century," corrected Graham.

"With your old world notions, anyhow, ignorant as you are of every
feature of our State."

"Am I a fool? "

"Certainly not."

"Do I seem to be the sort of man who would act rashly?"

"You were never expected to act at all. No one counted on your
awakening. No one dreamt you would ever awake. The Council had
surrounded you with antiseptic conditions. As a matter of fact, we
thought that you were dead---a mere arrest of decay.  And---but it is
too complex. We dare not suddenly---while you are still half awake."

"It won't do," said Graham. "Suppose it is as you say---why am I not
being crammed night and day with facts and warnings and all the wisdom
of the time to fit me for my responsibilities? Am I any wiser now than
two days ago, if it is two days, when I awoke?"

Howard pulled his lip.

"I am beginning to feel---every hour I feel more clearly---a sense of
complex concealment of which you are the salient point. Is this
Council, or committee, or whatever they are, cooking the accounts of
my estate? Is that it? "

"That note of suspicion---" said Howard.

" Ugh!" said Graham. "Now, mark my words, it will be ill for those who
have put me here. It will be ill. I am alive. Make no doubt of it, I
am alive.  Every day my pulse is stronger and my mind clearer and more
vigorous. No more quiescence. I am a man come back to life. And I want
to \emph{live---}"

"\emph{Live!}"

Howard's face lit with an idea. He came towards Graham and spoke in an
easy confidential tone.

"The Council secludes you here for your good.  You are
restless. Naturally---an energetic man!  You find it dull here. But we
are anxious that everything you may desire---every desire---every sort
of desire\dots There may be something. Is there any sort of company?
"

He paused meaningly.  " Yes," said Graham thoughtfully. " There is."

"Ah! \emph{Now!} We have treated you neglectfully."

"The crowds in yonder streets of yours."

"That," said Howard, "I am afraid---. But---"

Graham began pacing the room. Howard stood near the door watching
him. The implication of Howard's suggestion was only half evident to
Graham Company? Suppose he were to accept the proposal, demand some
sort of \emph{company}? Would there be any possibilities of gathering
from the conversation o� this additional person some vague inkling of
the struggle that had broken out so vividly at his waking moment?  He
meditated again, and the suggestion took colour.  He turned on Howard
abruptly.

"What do you mean by company? "

Howard raised his eyes and shrugged his shoulders.  "Human beings," he
said, with a curious smile on his heavy face.

"Our social ideas," he said, "have a certain increased liberality,
perhaps, in comparison with your times. If a man wishes to relieve
such a tedium as this---by feminine society, for instance. We think it
no scandal. We have cleared our minds of formulae.  There is in our
city a class, a necessary class, no longer despised---discreet---"

Graham stopped dead.

"It would pass the time," said Howard. "It is a thing I should perhaps
have thought of before, but, as a matter of fact, so much is
happening---"

He indicated the exterior world.

Graham hesitated. For a moment the figure of a possible woman that his
imagination suddenly created dominated his mind with an intense
attraction. Then he flashed into anger.

"No I" he shouted.

He began striding rapidly up and down the room.

"Everything you say, everything you do, convinces me---of some great
issue in which I am concerned.  I do not want to pass the time, as you
call it. Yes, I know. Desire and indulgence are life in a sense---and
Death! Extinction! In my life before I slept I had worked out that
pitiful question. I will not begin again. There is a city, a
multitude---. And meanwhile I am here like a rabbit in a bag."

His rage surged high. He choked for a moment and began to wave his
clenched fists. He gave way to an anger fit, he swore archaic
curses. His gestures had the quality of physical threats.

"I do not know who your party may be. I am in the dark, and you keep
me in the dark. But I know this, that I am secluded here for no good
purpose.  For no good purpose. I warn you, I warn you of the
consequences. Once I come at my power---"

He realised that to threaten thus might be a danger to himself. He
stopped. Howard stood regarding him with a curious expression.

"I take it this is a message to the Council," said Howard.

Graham had a momentary impulse to leap upon the man, fell or stun
him. It must have shown upon his face; at any rate Howard's movement
was quick. In a second the noiseless door had closed again, and the
man from the nineteenth century was alone.

For a moment he stood rigid, with clenched hands half raised. Then he
flung them down. "What a fool I have been!" he said, and gave way to
his anger again, stamping about the room and shouting curses.  For a
long time he kept himself in a sort of frenzy, raging at his position,
at his own folly, at the knaves who had imprisoned him. He did this
because he did not want to look calmly at his position. He clung to
his anger---because he was afraid of Fear.

Presently he found himself reasoning with himself This imprisonment
was unaccountable, but no doubt the legal forms---new legal forms---of
the time permitted it. It must, of course, be legal. These people were
two hundred years further on in the march of civilisation than the
Victorian generation. It was not likely they would be
less---humane. Yet they had cleared their minds of formulae! Was
humanity a formula as well as chastity?

His imagination set to work to suggest things that might be done to
him. The attempts of his reason to dispose of these suggestions,
though for the most part logically valid, were quite unavailing. "Why
should anything be done to me? "

"If the worst comes to the worst," he found himself saying at last, "I
can give up what they want.  But what do they want? And why don't they
ask me for it instead of cooping me up? "

He returned to his former preoccupation with the Council's possible
intentions. He began to reconsider the details of Howard's behaviour,
sinister glances, inexplicable hesitations. Then, for a time, his mind
circled about the idea of escaping from these rooms; but whither could
he escape into this vast, crowded world? He would be worse off than a
Saxon yeoman suddenly dropped into nineteenth century London.  And
besides, how could anyone escape from these rooms?

"How can it benefit anyone if harm should happen to me? "

He thought of the tumult, the great social trouble of which he was so
unaccountably the axis. A text, irrelevant enough and yet curiously
insistent, came floating up out of the darkness of his memory. This
also a Council had said:

"It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people."

\chapter{THE ROOF SPACES}

As the fans in the circular aperture of the inner room rotated and
permitted glimpses of the night, dim sounds drifted in thereby. And
Graham, standing underneath, wrestling darkly with the unknown powers
that imprisoned him, and which he had now deliberately challenged, was
startled by the sound of a voice.

He peered up and saw in the intervals of the rotation, dark and dim,
the face and shoulders of a man regarding him. When a dark hand was
extended, the swift van struck it, swung round and beat on with a
little brownish patch on the edge of its thin blade, and something
began to fall therefrom upon the floor, dripping silently.
  Graham looked down, and there were spots of blood at his feet. He
looked up again in a strange excitement.  The figure had gone.

He remained motionless---his every sense intent upon the flickering
patch of darkness, for outside it was high night. He became aware of
some faint, remote, dark specks floating lightly through the outer
air. They came down towards him, fitfully, eddyingly, and passed aside
out of the uprush from the fan. A gleam of light flickered, the specks
flashed white, and then the darkness came again. Warmed and lit as he
was, he perceived that it was snowing within a few feet of him.

Graham walked across the room and came back to the ventilator
again. He saw the head of a man pass near. There was a sound of
whispering. Then a smart blow on some metallic substance, effort,
voices, and the vans stopped. A gust of snowflakes whirled into the
room, and vanished before they touched the floor. "Don't be afraid,"
said a voice.

Graham stood under the van. "Who are you?"  he whispered.

For a moment there was nothing but a swaying of the fan, and then the
head of a man was thrust cautiously into the opening. His face
appeared nearly inverted to Graham; his dark hair was wet with
dissolving flakes of snow upon it. His arm went up into the darkness
holding something unseen. He had a youthful face and bright eyes, and
the veins of his forehead were swollen. He seemed to be exerting
himself to maintain his position.

For several seconds neither he nor Graham spoke.

"You were the Sleeper?" said the stranger at last.

"Yes," said Graham. "What do you want with me?"

"I come from Ostrog, Sire."

"Ostrog?"

The man in the ventilator twisted his head round so that his profile
was towards Graham. He appeared to be listening. Suddenly there was a
hasty exclamation, and the intruder sprang back just in time to escape
the sweep of the released fan. And when Graham peered up there was
nothing visible but the slowly falling snow.

It was perhaps a quarter of an hour before anything returned to the
ventilator. But at last came the same metallic interference again; the
fans stopped and the face reappeared. Graham had remained all this
time in the same place, alert and tremulously excited.

"Who are you? What do you want?" he said.

"We want to speak to you, Sire," said the intruder.

"We want---I can't hold the thing. We have been trying to find a way
to you these three days."

"Is it rescue? " whispered Graham. " Escape?"

"Yes, Sire. If you will."

"You are my party---the party of the Sleeper?"

"Yes, Sire."

"What am I to do?" said Graham.

There was a struggle. The stranger's arm appeared, and his hand was
bleeding. His knees came into view over the edge of the funnel. "Stand
away from me," he said, and he dropped rather heavily on his hands and
one shoulder at Graham's feet. The released ventilator whirled
noisily. The stranger rolled over, sprang up nimbly and stood panting,
hand to a bruised shoulder, and with his bright eyes on Graham.

"You are indeed the Sleeper," he said. "I saw you asleep. When it was
the law that anyone might see you."

"I am the man who was in the trance," said Graham.  "They have
imprisoned me here. I have been here since I awoke---at least three
days."

The intruder seemed about to speak, heard something, glanced swiftly
at the door, and suddenly left Graham and ran towards it, shouting
quick incoherent words. A bright wedge of steel flashed in his hand,
and he began tap, tap, a quick succession of blows upon the
hinges. "Mind!" cried a voice. "Oh!"  The voice came from above.

Graham glanced up, saw the soles of two feet, ducked, was struck on
the shoulder by one of them, and a heavy weight bore him to the
earth. He fell on his knees and forward, and the weight went over his
head. He knelt up and saw a second man from above seated before him.

"I did not see you, Sire," panted the man. He rose and assisted Graham
to arise. "Are you hurt, Sire?"  he panted. A succession of heavy
blows on the ventilator began, something fell close to Graham's face,
and a shivering edge of white metal danced, fell over, and lay flat
upon the floor.

"What is this?" cried Graham, confused and looking at the
ventilator. "Who are you? What are you going to do? Remember, I
understand nothing."

"Stand back," said the stranger, and drew him from under the
ventilator as another fragment of metal fell heavily.

" We want you to come, Sire," panted the newcomer, and Graham glancing
at his face again, saw a new cut had changed from white to red on his
fore- head, and a couple of little trickles of blood starting
therefrom. "Your people call for you."

"Come where? My people? "

"To the hall about the markets. Your life is in danger here. We have
spies. We learned but just in time. The Council has decided---this
very day---either to drug or kill you. And everything is ready.  The
people are drilled, the wind-vane police, the engineers, and half the
way-gearers are with us. We have the halls crowded---shouting. The
whole city shouts against the Council. We have arms." He wiped the
blood with his hand. "Your life here is not worth---" "But why arms? "

"The people have risen to protect you, Sire.  What? "

He turned quickly as the man who had first come down made a hissing
with his teeth. Graham saw the latter start back, gesticulate to them
to conceal themselves, and move as if to hide behind the opening door.

As he did so Howard appeared, a little tray in one hand and his heavy
face downcast. He started, looked up, the door slammed behind him, the
tray tilted side- ways, and the steel wedge struck him behind the ear.
He went down like a felled tree, and lay as he fell athwart the floor
of the outer room. The man who had struck him bent hastily, studied
his face for a moment, rose, and returned to his work at the door.

"Your poison!" said a voice in Graham's ear.

Then abruptly they were in darkness. The innumerable cornice lights
had been extinguished. Graham saw the aperture of the ventilator with
ghostly snow whirling above it and dark figures moving hastily.  Three
knelt on the van. Some dim thing---a ladder was being lowered through
the opening, and a hand appeared holding a fitful yellow light.

He had a moment of hesitation. But the manner of these men, their
swift alacrity, their words, marched so completely with his own fears
of the Council, with his idea and hope of a rescue, that it lasted not
a moment. And his people awaited him!

"I do not understand," he said, "I trust. Tell me what to do."

The man with the cut brow gripped Graham's arm.

"Clamber up the ladder," he whispered. "Quick.  They will have
heard---"

Graham felt for the ladder with extended hands, put his foot on the
lower rung, and, turning his head, saw over the shoulder of the
nearest man, in the yellow flicker of the light, the first-comer
astride over Howard and still working at the door. Graham turned to
the ladder again, and was thrust by his conductor and helped up by
those above, and then he was standing on something hard and cold and
slippery outside the ventilating funnel.

He shivered. He was aware of a great difference in the
temperature. Half a dozen men stood about him, and light flakes of
snow touched hands and face and melted. For a moment it was dark, then
for a flash a ghastly violet white, and then everything was dark
again.

He saw he had come out upon the roof of the vast city structure which
had replaced the miscellaneous houses, streets and open spaces of
Victorian London.  The place upon which he stood was level, with huge
serpentine cables Iying athwart it in every direction.  The circular
wheels of a number of windmills loomed indistinct and gigantic through
the darkness and snowfall, and roared with a varying loudness as the
fitful white light smote up from below, touched the snow eddies with a
transient glitter, and made an evanescent spectre in the night; and
here and there, low down!  some vaguely outlined wind-driven mechanism
flickered with livid sparks.

All this he appreciated in a fragmentary manner as his rescuers stood
about him. Someone threw a thick soft cloak of fur-like texture about
him, and fastened it by buckled straps at waist and shoulders. Things
were said briefly, decisively. Someone thrust him forward.

Before his mind was yet clear a dark shape gripped his arm. "This
way," said this shape, urging him along, and pointed Graham across the
flat roof in the direction of a dim semicircular haze of light. Graham
obeyed.

"Mind!" said a voice, as Graham stumbled against a cable. "Between
them and not across them," said the voice. And, "We must hurry."

"Where are the people? " said Graham. "The people you said awaited me?
"

The stranger did not answer. He left Graham's arm as the path grew
narrower, and led the way with rapid strides. Graham followed
blindly. In a minute he found himself running. "Are the others
coming?"  he panted, but received no reply. His companion glanced back
and ran on. They came to a sort of pathway of open metal-work,
transverse to the direction they had come, and they turned aside to
follow this. Graham looked back, but the snowstorm had hidden the
others.

"Come on!" said his guide. Running now, they drew near a little
windmill spinning high in the air.  "Stoop," said Graham's guide, and
they avoided an endless band running roaring up to the shaft of the
vane. "This way!" and they were ankle deep in a gutter full of drifted
thawing snow, between two low walls of metal that presently rose waist
high. "I will go first," said the guide. Graham drew his cloak about
him and followed. Then suddenly came a narrow abyss across which the
gutter leapt to the snowy darkness of the further side. Graham peeped
over the side once and the gulf was black. For a moment he regretted
his flight. He dared not look again, and his brain spun as he waded
through the half liquid snow.

Then out of the gutter they clambered and hurried across a wide flat
space damp with thawing snow, and for half its extent dimly
translucent to lights that went to and fro underneath. He hesitated at
this unstable looking substance, but his guide ran on unheeding, and
so they came to and clambered up slippery steps to the rim of a great
dome of glass.  Round this they went. Far below a number of people
seemed to be dancing, and music filtered through the dome\dots
. Graham fancied he heard a shouting through the snowstorm, and his
guide hurried him on with a new spurt of haste. They clambered panting
to a space of huge windmills, one so vast that only the lower edge of
its vans came rushing into sight and rushed up again and was lost in
the night and the snow. They hurried for a time through the colossal
metallic tracery of its supports, and came at last above a place of
moving platforms like the place into which Graham had looked from the
balcony. They crawled across the sloping transparency that covered
this street of platforms, crawling on hands and knees because of the
slipperiness of the snowfall.

For the most part the glass was bedewed, and Graham saw only hazy
suggestions of the forms below, but near the pitch of the transparent
roof the glass was clear, and he found himself looking sheerly down
upon it all. For awhile, in spite of the urgency of his guide, he gave
way to vertigo and lay spread-eagled on the glass, sick and
paralysed. Far below, mere stirring specks and dots, went the people
of the unsleeping city in their perpetual daylight, and the moving
platforms ran on their incessant journey. Messengers and men on
unknown businesses shot along the drooping cables and the frail
bridges were crowded with men. It was like peering into a gigantic
glass hive, and it lay vertically below him with only a tough glass of
unknown thickness to save him from a fall.  The street showed warm and
lit, and Graham was wet now to the skin with thawing snow, and his
feet were numbed with cold. For a space he could not move.

"Come on!" cried his guide, with terror in his voice.  "Come on!"

Graham reached the pitch of the roof by an effort.

Over the ridge, following his guide's example, he turned about and
slid backward down the opposite slope very swiftly, amid a little
avalanche of snow While he was sliding he thought of what would happen
if some broken gap should come in his way. At the edge he stumbled to
his feet ankle deep in slush thanking heaven for an opaque footing
again. His guide was already clambering up a metal screen to a level
expanse.

Through the spare snowflakes above this loomed another line of vast
windmills, and then suddenly the amorphous tumult of the rotating
wheels was pierced with a deafening sound. It was a mechanical
shrilling of extraordinary intensity that seemed to come
simultaneously from every point of the compass.

"They have missed us already!" cried Graham's guide in an accent of
terror, and suddenly, with a blinding flash, the night became day.

Above the driving snow, from the summits of the wind-wheels, appeared
vast masts carrying globes of livid light. They receded in illimitable
vistas in every direction. As far as his eye could penetrate the
snowfall they glared.

"Get on this," cried Graham's conductor, and thrust him forward to a
long grating of snowless metal that ran like a band between two
slightly sloping expanses of snow. It felt warm to Graham's benurrled
feet, and a faint eddy of steam rose from it.

"Come on!" shouted his guide ten yards off, and, without waiting, ran
swiftly through the incandescent glare towards the iron supports of
the next range of wind-wheels. Graham, recovering from his
astonishment, followed as fast, convinced of his imminent capture.

In a score of seconds they were within a tracery of glare and black
shadows shot with moving bars beneath the monstrous wheels. Graham's
conductor ran on for some time, and suddenly darted sideways and
vanished into a black shadow in the corner of the foot of a huge
support. In another moment Graham was beside him.

They cowered panting and stared out.

The scene upon which Graham looked was very wild and strange. The snow
had now almost ceased; only a belated flake passed now and again
across the picture. But the broad stretch of level before them was a
ghastly white, broken only by gigantic masses and moving shapes and
lengthy strips of impenetrable darkness, vast ungainly Titans of
shadow. All about them, huge metallic structures, iron girders,
inhumanly vast as it seemed to him, interlaced, and the edges of
wind-wheels, scarcely moving in the lull, I passed in great shining
curves steeper and steeper up into a luminous haze. Wherever the
snow-spangled light struck down, beams and girders, and incessant
bands running with a halting, indomitable resolution passed upward and
downward into the black. And with all that mighty activity, with an
omnipresent sense of motive and design, this snow-clad desolation of
mechanism seemed void of all human presence save themselves, seemed as
trackless and deserted and unfrequented by men as some inaccessible
Alpine snowfield.

"They will be chasing us," cried the leader. "We are scarcely halfway
there yet. Cold as it is we must hide here for a space---at least
until it snows more thickly again."

His teeth chattered in his head.

"Where are the markets? " asked Graham staring out. "Where are all the
people? "

The other made no answer.


"Look!" whispered Graham, crouched close, and became very still.

The snow had suddenly become thick again, and sliding with the
whirling eddies out of the black pit of the sky came something, vague
and large and very swift. It came down in a steep curve and swept
round, wide wings extended and a trail of white condensing steam
behind it, rose with an easy swiftness and went gliding up the air,
swept horizontally forward in a wide curve, and vanished again in the
steaming specks of snow. And, through the ribs of its body, Graham saw
two little men, very minute and active, searching the snowy areas
about him, as it seemed to him, with field glasses. For a second they
were clear, then hazy through a thick whirl of snow, then small and
distant, and in a minute they were gone.

"Now!" cried his companion. "Come!"

He pulled Graham's sleeve, and incontinently the two were running
headlong down the arcade of ironwork beneath the wind-wheels. Graham,
running blindly, collided with his leader, who had turned back on him
suddenly. He found himself within a dozen yards of a black chasm. It
extended as far as he could see right and left. It seemed to cut off
their progress in either direction.

"Do as I do," whispered his guide. He lay down and crawled to the
edge, thrust his head over and twisted until one leg hung. He seemed
to feel for something with his foot, found it, and went sliding over
the edge into the gulf. His head reappeared.  "It is a ledge," he
whispered. "In the dark all the way along. Do as I did."

Graham hesitated, went down upon all fours, crawled to the edge, and
peered into a velvety blackness.  For a sickly moment he had courage
neither to go on nor retreat, then he sat and hung his leg down, felt
his guide's hands pulling at him, had a horrible sensation of sliding
over the edge into the unfathomable, splashed, and felt himself in a
slushy gutter, impenetrably dark.

"This way," whispered the voice, and he began crawling along the
gutter through the trickling thaw, pressing himself against the
wall. They continued along it for some minutes. He seemed to pass
through a hundred stages of misery, to pass minute after minute
through a hundred degrees of cold, damp, and exhaustion.  In a little
while he ceased to feel his hands and feet.

The gutter sloped downwards. He observed that they were now many feet
below the edge of the buildings.  Rows of spectral white shapes like
the ghosts of blind-drawn windows rose above them. They came to the
end of a cable fastened above one of these white windows, dimly
visible and dropping into impenetrable shadows. Suddenly his hand came
against his guide's.

"Still!" whispered the latter very softly.

He looked up with a start and saw the huge wings of the flying machine
gliding slowly and noiselessly overhead athwart the broad band of
snow-flecked grey-blue sky. In a moment it was hidden again.

"Keep still; they were just turning."

For awhile both were motionless, then Graham's companion stood up, and
reaching towards the fastenings of the cable fumbled with some
indistinct tackle.

"What is that? " asked Graham.

The only answer was a faint cry. The man crouched motionless. Graham
peered and saw his face dimly.  He was staring down the long ribbon of
sky, and Graham, following his eyes, saw the flying machine small and
faint and remote. Then he saw that the wings spread on either side,
that it headed towards them, that every moment it grew larger. It was
following the edge of the chasm towards them.

The man's movements became convulsive. He thrust two cross bars into
Graham's hand. Graham could not see them, he ascertained their form by
feeling.  They were slung by thin cords to the cable. On the cord were
hand grips of some soft elastic substance.  "Put the cross between
your legs," whispered the guide hysterically, "and grip the holdfasts.
Grip tightly, grip!"

Graham did as he was told.

"Jump," said the voice. "In heaven's name, jump!"

For one momentous second Graham could not speak. He was glad
afterwards that darkness hid his face. He said nothing. He began to
tremble violently.  He looked sideways at the swift shadow that
swallowed up the sky as it rushed upon him.

"Jump! Jump---in God's name! Or they will have us," cried Graham's
guide, and in the violence of his passion thrust him forward.

Graham tottered convulsively, gave a sobbing cry, a cry in spite of
himself, and then, as the flying machine swept over them, fell forward
into the pit of that darkness, seated on the cross wood and holding
the ropes with the clutch of death. Something cracked, something
rapped smartly against a wall.  He heard the pulley of the cradle hum
on its rope.  He heard the aeronauts shout. He felt a pair of knees
digging into his back.... He was sweeping headlong through the air,
falling through the air. All his strength was in his hands. He would
have screamed but he had no breath.

He shot into a blinding light that made him grip the tighter. He
recognised the great passage with the running ways, the hanging lights
and interlacing girders. They rushed upward and by him. He had a
momentary impression of a great circular aperture yawning to swallow
him up.

He was in the dark again, falling, falling, gripping with aching
hands, and behold! a clap of sound, a burst of light, and he was in a
brightly lit hall with a roaring multitude of people beneath his
feet. The people! His people! A proscenium, a stage rushed up towards
him, and his cable swept down to a circular aperture to the right of
this. He felt he was travelling slower, and suddenly very much
slower. He distinguished shouts of "Saved! The Master. He is safe!"
The stage rushed up towards him with rapidly diminishing
swiftness. Then---.

He heard the man clinging behind him shout as if suddenly terrified,
and this shout was echoed by a shout from below. He felt that he was
no longer gliding along the cable but falling with it. There was a
tumult of yells, screams and cries. He felt something soft against his
extended hand, and the impact of a broken fall quivering through his
arm\dots

He wanted to be still and the people were lifting him. He believed
afterwards he was carried to the platform and given some drink, but he
was never sure.  He did not notice what became of his guide. When his
mind was clear again he was on his feet; eager hands were assisting
him to stand. He was in a big alcove, occupying the position that in
his previous experience had been devoted to the lower boxes. If this
was indeed a theatre.

A mighty tumult was in his ears, a thunderous roar, the shouting of a
countless multitude." It is the Sleeper! The Sleeper is with us!"

"The Sleeper is with us! The Master---the Owner! The Master is with
us. He is safe."

Graham had a surging vision of a great hall crowded with people. He
saw no individuals, he was conscious of a froth of pink faces, of
waving arms and garments, he felt the occult influence of a vast crowd
pouring over him, buoying him up. There were balconies, galleries,
great archways giving remoter perspectives, and everywhere people, a
vast arena of people, densely packed and cheering. Across the nearer
space lay the collapsed cable like a huge snake. It had been cut by
the men of the flying machine at its upper end, and had crumpled down
into the hall. Men seemed to be hauling this out of the way. But the
whole effect was vague, the very buildings throbbed and leapt with the
roar of the voices.

He stood unsteadily and looked at those about him.  Someone supported
him by one arm. "Let me go into a little room," he said, weeping; "a
little room," and could say no more. A man in black stepped forward,
took his disengaged arm. He was aware of officious men opening a door
before him. Someone guided him to a seat. He staggered. He sat down
heavily and covered his face with his hands; he was trembling
violently, his nervous control was at an end.  He was relieved of his
cloak, he could not remember how; his purple hose he saw were black
with wet.  People were running about him, things were happening, but
for some time he gave no heed to them.

He had escaped. A myriad of cries told him that.  He was safe. These
were the people who were on his side. For a space he sobbed for
breath, and then he sat still with his face covered. The air was full
of the shouting of innumerable men.

\chapter{THE PEOPLE MARCH}

He became aware of someone urging a glass of clear fluid upon his
attention, looked up and discovered this was a dark young man in a
yellow garment. He took the dose forthwith, and in a moment he was
glowing.  A tall man in a black robe stood by his shoulder, and
pointed to the half open door into the hall. This man was shouting
close to his ear and yet what was said was indistinct because of the
tremendous uproar from the great theatre. Behind the man was a girl in
a silvery grey robe, whom Graham, even in this confusion, perceived to
be beautiful. Her dark eyes, full of wonder and curiosity,-were fixed
on him, her lips trembled apart. A partially opened door gave a
glimpse of the crowded hall, and admitted a vast uneven tumult, a
hammering, clapping and shouting that died away and began again, and
rose to a thunderous pitch, and so continued intermittently all the
time that Graham remained in the little room. He watched the lips of
the man in black and gathered that he was making some clumsy
explanation.

He stared stupidly for some moments at these things and then stood up
abruptly; he grasped the arm of this shouting person.

"Tell me !" he cried. " Who am I? Who am I?"

The others came nearer to hear his words. "Who am I?" His eyes
searched their faces.

"They have told him nothing!" cried the girl.

"Tell me, tell me !" cried Graham.

"You are the Master of the Earth. You are owner of half the world."

He did not believe he heard aright. He resisted the persuasion. He
pretended not to understand, not to hear. He lifted his voice
again. "I have been awake three days---a prisoner three days. I judge
there is some struggle between a number of people in this city---it is
London?"

"Yes," said the younger man.

"And those who meet in the great hall with the white Atlas? How does
it concern me? In some way it has to do with me. Why, I don't know.
Drugs? It seems to me that while I have slept the world has gone
mad. I have gone mad."

"Who are those Councillors under the Atlas? Why should they try to
drug me?"

"To keep you insensible," said the man in yellow.

"To prevent your interference."

" But \emph{why?}"

"Because \emph{you} are the Atlas, Sire," said the man in yellow. "The
world is on your shoulders. They rule it in your name."

The sounds from the hall had died into a silence threaded by one
monotonous voice. Now suddenly, trampling on these last words, came a
deafening tumult, a roaring and thundering, cheer crowded on cheer,
voices hoarse and shrill, beating, overlapping, and while it lasted
the people in the little room could not hear each other shout.

Graham stood, his intelligence clinging helplessly to the thing he had
just heard. "The Council," he repeated blankly, and then snatched at a
name that had struck him. "But who is Ostrog?" he said.

"He is the organiser---the organiser of the revolt.  Our Leader---in
your name."

"In my name?---And you? Why is he not here?"

"He---has deputed us. I am his brother---his half-brother, Lincoln. He
wants you to show yourself to these people and then come on to
him. That is why he has sent. He is at the wind-vane offices
directing. The people are marching."

"In your name," shouted the younger man. "They have ruled, crushed,
tyrannised. At last even---"

"In my name! My name! Master?"

The younger man suddenly became audible in a pause of the outer
thunder, indignant and vociferous, a high penetrating voice under his
red aquiline nose and bushy moustache. "No one expected you to
wake. No one expected you to wake. They were cunning. Damned tyrants!
But they were taken by surprise. They did not know whether to drug
you, hypnotise you, kill you."

Again the hall dominated everything.

"Ostrog is at the wind-vane offices ready---. Even now there is a
rumour of fighting beginning."

The man who had called himself Lincoln came close to him. "Ostrog has
it planned. Trust him. We have our organisations ready. We shall seize
the flying stages---. Even now he may be doing that.  Then---"

"This public theatre," bawled the man in yellow, "is only a
contingent. We have five myriads of drilled men---"

"We have arms," cried Lincoln. "We have plans.  A leader. Their police
have gone from the streets and are massed in the---" (inaudible)." It
is now or never. The Council is rocking---They cannot trust even their
drilled men---"

"Hear the people calling to you!"

Graham's mind was like a night of moon and swift clouds, now dark and
hopeless, now clear and ghastly.  He was Master of the Earth, he was a
man sodden with thawing snow. Of all his fluctuating impressions the
dominant ones presented an antagonism; on the one hand was the White
Council, powerful, disciplined, few, the White Council from which he
had just escaped; and on the other, monstrous crowds, packed masses of
indistinguishable people clamouring his name, hailing him Master. The
other side had imprisoned him, debated his death. These shouting
thousands beyond the little doorway had rescued him.  But why these
things should be so he could not understand.

The door opened, Lincoln's voice was swept away and drowned, and a
rush of people followed on the heels of the tumult. These intruders
came towards him and Lincoln gesticulating. The voices without
explained their soundless lips. "Show us the Sleeper, show us the
Sleeper!" was the burden of the uproar Men were bawling for "Order!
Silence!"

Graham glanced towards the open doorway, and saw a tall, oblong
picture of the hall beyond, a waving, incessant confusion of crowded,
shouting faces, men and women together, waving pale blue garments,
extended hands. Many were standing, one man in rags of dark brown, a
gaunt figure, stood on the seat and waved a black cloth. He met the
wonder and expectation of the girl's eyes. What did these people
expect from him. He was dimly aware that the tumult outside had
changed its character, was in some way beating, marching. His own
mind, too, changed.  for a space he did not recognise the influence
that was transforming him. But a moment that was near to panic
passed. He tried to make audible inquiries of what was required of
him.

Lincoln was shouting in his ear, but Graham was deafened to that. All
the others save the woman gesticulated towards the hall. He perceived
what had happened to the uproar. The whole mass of people was chanting
together. It was not simply a song, the voices were gathered together
and upborne by a torrent of instrumental music, music like the music
of an organ, a woven texture of sounds, full of trumpets, full of
flaunting banners, full of the march and pageantry of opening war. And
the feet of the people were beating time---tramp, tramp.

He was urged towards the door. He obeyed mechanically. The strength of
that chant took hold of him, stirred him, emboldened him. The hall
opened to him, a vast welter of fluttering colour swaying to the
music.

"Wave your arm to them," said Lincoln. "Wave your arm to them."

"This," said a voice on the other side," he must have this. "Arms were
about his neck detaining him in the doorway, and a black
subtly-folding mantle hung from his shoulders. He threw his arm free
of this and followed Lincoln. He perceived the girl in grey close to
him, her face lit, her gesture onward. For the instant she became to
him, flushed and eager as she was, an embodiment of the song. He
emerged in the alcove again. Incontinently the mounting waves of the
song broke upon his appearing, and flashed up into a foam of
shouting. Guided by Lincoln's hand he marched obliquely across the
centre of the stage facing the people.

The hall was a vast and intricate space---galleries, balconies, broad
spaces of amphitheatral steps, and great archways. Far away, high up,
seemed the mouth of a huge passage full of struggling humanity.  The
whole multitude was swaying in congested masses.  Individual figures
sprang out of the tumult, impressed him momentarily, and lost
definition again. Close to the platform swayed a beautiful fair woman,
carried by three men, her hair across her face and brandishing a green
staff. Next this group an old careworn man in blue canvas maintained
his place in the crush with difficulty, and behind shouted a hairless
face, a great cavity of toothless mouth. A voice called that
enigmatical word "Ostrog." All his impressions were vague save the
massive emotion of that trampling song. The multitude were beating
time with their feet---marking time, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.  The
green weapons waved, flashed and slanted. Then he saw those nearest to
him on a level space before the stage were marching in front of him,
passing towards a great archway, shouting " To the Council! " Tramp,
tramp, tramp, tramp. He raised his arm, and the roaring was
redoubled. He remembered he had to shout " March! " His mouth shaped
inaudible heroic words. He waved his arm again and pointed to the
archway, shouting " Onward! " They were no longer marking time, they
were marching; tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. In that host were bearded
men, old men, youths, fluttering robed bare-armed women, girls. Men
and women of the new age! Rich robes, grey rags fluttered together in
the whirl of their movement amidst the dominant blue. A monstrous
black banner jerked its way to the right. He perceived a blue-clad
negro, a shrivelled woman in yellow, then a group of tall fair-haired,
white-faced, blue-clad men pushed theatrically past him. He noted two
Chinamen.  A tall, sallow, dark-haired, shining-eyed youth, white clad
from top to toe, clambered up towards the platform shouting loyally,
and sprang down again and receded, looking backward. Heads, shoulders,
hands clutching weapons, all were swinging with those marching
cadences.

Faces came out of the confusion to him as he stood there, eyes met his
and passed and vanished. Men gesticulated to him, shouted inaudible
personal things.  Most of the faces were flushed, but many were
ghastly white. And disease was there, and many a hand that waved to
him was gaunt and lean. Men and women of the new age! Strange and
incredible meeting! As the broad stream passed before him to the
right, tributary gangways from the remote uplands of the hall thrust
downward in an incessant replacement of people; tramp, tramp, tramp,
tramp. The unison of the song was enriched and complicated by the
massive echoes of arches and passages. Men and women mingled in the
ranks; tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.  The whole world seemed
marching. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp; his brain was tramping. The
garments waved onward, the faces poured by more abundantly.

Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp; at Lincoln's pressure he turned towards
the archway, walking unconsciously in that rhythm, scarcely noticing
his movement for the melody and stir of it. The multitude, the gesture
and song, all moved in that direction, the flow of people smote
downward until the upturned faces were below the level of his feet. He
was aware of a path before him, of a suite about him, of guards and
dignities, and ;Lincoln on his right hand. Attendants intervened, and
ever and again blotted out the sight of the multitude to the
left. Before him went the backs of the guards in black---three and
three and three. He was marched along a little railed way, and crossed
above the archway, with the torrent dipping to flow beneath, and
shouting up to him. He did not know whither he went; he did not want
to know. He glanced back across a flaming spaciousness of hall. Tramp,
tramp, tramp, tramp.

\chapter{THE BATTLE OF THE DARKNESS}

He was no longer in the hall. He was marching along a gallery
overhanging one of the great streets of the moving platforms that
traversed the city.  Before him and behind him tramped his guards. The
whole concave of the moving ways below was a congested mass of people
marching, tramping to the left, shouting, waving hands and arms,
pouring along a huge vista, shouting as they came into view, shouting
as they passed, shouting as they receded, until the globes of electric
light receding in perspective dropped down it seemed and hid the
swarming bare heads.  Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.

The song roared up to Graham now, no longer upborne by music, but
coarse and noisy, and the beating of the marching feet, tramp, tramp,
tramp, tramp, interwove with a thunderous irregularity of footsteps
from the undisciplined rabble that poured along the higher ways.

Abruptly he noted a contrast. The buildings on the opposite side of
the way seemed deserted, the cables and bridges that laced across the
aisle were empty and shadowy. It came into Graham's mind that these
also should have swarmed with people.

He felt a curious emotion---throbbing---very fast!  He stopped
again. The guards before him marched on; those about him stopped as he
did. He saw the direction of their faces. The throbbing had something
to do with the lights. He too looked up.

At first it seemed to him a thing that affected the lights simply, an
isolated phenomenon, having no bearing on the things below. Each huge
globe of blinding whiteness was as it were clutched, compressed in a
systole that was followed by a transitory diastole, and again a
systole like a tightening grip, darkness, light, darkness, in rapid
alternation.

Graham became aware that this strange behaviour of the lights had to
do with the people below. The appearance of the houses and ways, the
appearance of the packed masses changed, became a confusion of vivid
lights and leaping shadows. He saw a multitude of shadows had sprung
into aggressive existence, seemed rushing up, broadening, widening,
growing with steady swiftness---to leap suddenly back and return
reinforced. The song and the tramping had ceased. The unanimous march,
he discovered, was arrested, there were eddies, a flow sideways,
shouts of "The lights!" Voices were crying together one thing. "The
lights!" cried these voices. "The lights!" He looked down. In this
dancing death of the lights the area of the street had suddenly become
a monstrous struggle. The huge white globes became purple-white,
purple with a reddish glow, flickered, flickered faster and faster,
fluttered between light and extinction, ceased to flicker and became
mere fading specks of glowing red in a vast obscurity. In ten seconds
the extinction was accomplished, and there was only this roaring
darkness, a black monstrosity that had suddenly swallowed up those
glittering myriads of men.

He felt invisible forms about him; his arms were gripped. Something
rapped sharply against his shin.  A voice bawled in his ear, " It is
all right---all right."

Graham shook off the paralysis of his first astonishment.  He struck
his forehead against Lincoln's and bawled, "What is this darkness?"

"The Council has cut the currents that light the city. We must
wait---stop. The people will go on.  They will---"

His voice was drowned. Voices were shouting, "Save the Sleeper. Take
care of the Sleeper." A guard stumbled against Graham and hurt his
hand by an inadvertent blow of his weapon. A wild tumult tossed and
whirled about him, growing, as it seemed, louder, denser, more furious
each moment. Fragments of recognisable sounds drove towards him, were
whirled away from him as his mind reached out to grasp them. Voices
seemed to be shouting conflicting orders, other voices answered. There
were suddenly a succession of piercing screams close beneath them.

A voice bawled in his ear, "The red police," and receded forthwith
beyond his questions.

A crackling sound grew to distinctness, and there with a leaping of
faint flashes along the edge of the further ways. By their light
Graham saw the heads and bodies of a number of men, armed with weapons
like those of his guards, leap into an instant's dim visibility. The
whole area began to crackle, to flash with little instantaneous
streaks of light, and abruptly the darkness rolled back like a
curtain.

A glare of light dazzled his eyes, a vast seething expanse of
struggling men confused his mind. A shout, a burst of cheering, came
across the ways. He looked up to see the source of the light. A man
hung far overhead from the upper part of a cable, holding by a rope
the blinding star that had driven the darkness back. He wore a red
uniform.

Graham's eyes fell to the ways again. A wedge of red a little way
along the vista caught his eye. He saw it was a dense mass of red-clad
men jammed the higher further way, their backs against the pitiless
cliff of building, and surrounded by a dense crowd of
antagonists. They were fighting. Weapons flashed and rose and fell,
heads vanished at the edge of the contest, and other heads replaced
them, the little flashes from the green weapons became little jets of
smoky grey while the light lasted.

Abruptly the flare was extinguished and the ways were an inky darkness
once more, a tumultuous mystery.

He felt something thrusting against him. He was being pushed along the
gallery. Someone was shouting---it might be at him. He was too
confused to hear. He was thrust against the wall, and a number of
people blundered past him. It seemed to him that his guards were
struggling with one another.

Suddenly the cable-hung star-holder appeared again, and the whole
scene was white and dazzling. The band of red-coats seemed broader and
nearer; 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.
\dots  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 under- stand," 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 frontges
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
sieries 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.

A man came running towards him. His self-control returned. "What have
they blown up?" asked the man breathlessly. "That was an explosion,"
and before Graham could speak he had hurried on.

The great buildings rose dimly, veiled by a perplexing twilight,
albeit the rivulet of sky above was now bright with day. He noted many
strange features, understanding none at the time; he even spelt out
many of the inscriptions in Phonetic lettering. But what profits it to
decipher a confusion of odd-looking letters resolving itself, after
painful strain of eye and mind, into "Here is Eadhamite," or, "Labour
Bureau---Little Side?" Grotesque thought, that in all probability some
or all of these cliff-like houses were his!

The perversity of his experience came to him vividly.  In actual fact
he had made such a leap in time as romancers have imagined again and
again. And that fact realised, he had been prepared, his mind had, as
it were, seated itself for a spectacle. And no spectacle, but a great
vague danger, unsympathetic shadows and veils of darkness. Somewhere
through the labyrinthine obscurity his death sought him.  Would he,
after all, be killed before he saw? It might be that even at the next
shadowy corner his destruction ambushed. A great desire to see, a
great longing to know, arose in him.

He became fearful of corners. It seemed to him that there was safety
in concealment. Where could he hide to be inconspicuous when the
lights returned?  At last he sat down upon a seat in a recess on one
of the higher ways, conceiving he was alone there.

He squeezed his knuckles into his weary eyes.  Suppose when he looked
again he found the dark through of parallel ways and that intolerable
altitude of edifice, gone? Suppose he were to discover the whole story
of these last few days, the awakening, the shouting multitudes, the
darkness and the fighting, a phantasmagoria, a new and more vivid sort
of dream. It must be a dream; it was so inconsecutive, so
reasonless. Why were the people fighting for him? Why should this
saner world regard him as Owner and Master?

So he thought, sitting blinded, and then he looked again, half hoping
in spite of his ears to see some familiar aspect of the life of the
nineteenth century, to see, perhaps, the little harbour of Boscastle
about him, the cliffs of Pentargen, or the bedroom of his home.  But
fact takes no heed of human hopes. A squad of men with a black banner
tramped athwart the nearer shadows, intent on conflict, and beyond
rose that giddy wall of frontage, vast and dark, with the dim
incomprehensible lettering showing faintly on its face.

"It is no dream," he said, "no dream." And he bowed his face upon his
hands.

\chapter{THE OLD MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING}

He was startled by a cough close at hand.

He turned sharply, and peering, saw a small, hunched-up figure sitting
a couple of yards off in the shadow of the enclosure.

"Have ye any news? " asked the high-pitched wheezy voice of a very old
man.

Graham hesitated." None," he said.

"I stay here till the lights come again," said the old man." These
blue scoundrels are everywhere---everywhere."

Graham's answer was inarticulate assent. He tried to see the old man
but the darkness hid his face. He wanted very much to respond, to
talk, but he did not know how to begin.

"Dark and damnable," said the old man suddenly.  "Dark and
damnable. Turned out of my room among all these dangers."

"That's hard," ventured Graham. "That's hard on you."

"Darkness. An old man lost in the darkness. And all the world gone
mad. War and fighting. The police beaten and rogues abroad. Why don't
they bring some negroes to protect us? \dots No more dark passages for
me. I fell over a dead man."

"You're safer with company," said the old man, "if it's company of the
right sort," and peered frankly.  He rose suddenly and came towards
Graham.

Apparently the scrutiny was satisfactoy. The old man sat down as if
relieved to be no longer alone.  "Eh!" he said, "but this is a
terrible time! War and fighting, and the dead Iying there---men,
strong men, dying in the dark. Sons! I have three sons. God knows
where they are tonight."

The voice ceased. Then repeated quavering: "God knows where they are
tonight."

Graham stood revolving a question that should not betray his
ignorance. Again the old man's voice ended the pause.

"This Ostrog will win," he said. "He will win. And what the world will
be like under him no one can tell. My sons are under the wind-vanes,
all three.  One of my daughters-in-law was his mistress for a
while. His mistress! Were not common people.  Though they've sent me
to wander tonight and take my chance\dots . I knew what was going
on. Before most people. But this darkness! And to fall over a dead
body suddenly in the dark!"

His wheezy breathing could be heard.

"Ostrog!" said Graham.

"The greatest Boss the world has ever seen," said the voice.

Graham ransacked his mind. "The Council has few friends among the
people," he hazarded.

"Few friends. And poor ones at that. They've had their time. Eh! They
should have kept to the clever ones. But twice they held election. And
Ostrog. And now it has burst out and nothing can stay it, nothing can
stay it. Twice they rejected Ostrog---Ostrog the Boss. I heard of his
rages at the time---he was terrible. Heaven save them! For nothing on
earth can now, he has raised the Labour Companies upon them. No one
else would have dared. All the blue canvas armed and marching! He will
go through with it. He will go through."

He was silent for a little while. "This Sleeper," he said, and
stopped.

"Yes," said Graham. "Well?"

The senile voice sank to a confidential whisper, the dim, pale face
came close. "The real Sleeper---"

"Yes," said Graham.

"Died years ago."

"What? " said Graham, sharply.

"Years ago. Died. Years ago."

"You don't say so!" said Graham.

"I do. I do say so. He died. This Sleeper who's woke up---they changed
in the night. A poor, drugged insensible creature. But I mustn't tell
all I know. I mustn't tell all I know."

For a little while he muttered inaudibly. His secret was too much for
him. "I don't know the ones that put him to sleep---that was before my
time---but I know the man who injected the stimulants and woke him
again. It was ten to one---wake or kill. Wake or kill. Ostrog's way."

Graham was so astonished at these things that he had to interrupt, to
make the old man repeat his words, to re-question vaguely, before he
was sure of the meaning and folly of what he heard. And his awakening
had not been natural! Was that an old man's senile superstition, too,
or had it any truth in it?  Feeling in the dark corners of his memory,
he presently came on something that might conceivably be an impression
of some such stimulating effect. It dawned upon him that he had
happened upon a lucky encounter, that at last he might learn something
of the new age. The old man wheezed a while and spat, and then the
piping, reminiscent voice resumed:

"The first time they rejected him. I've followed it all."

"Rejected whom?" said Graham. "The Sleeper?"

"Sleeper? No. Ostrog. He was terrible---terrible!  And he was promised
then, promised certainly the next time. Fools they were---not to be
more afraid of him. Now all the city's his millstone, and such as we
dust ground upon it. Dust ground upon it. Until he set to work---the
workers cut each other's throats, and murdered a Chinaman or a Labour
policeman at times, and left the rest of us in peace. Dead bodies!
Robbing! Darkness! Such a thing hasn't been this gross of
years. Eh!---but 'tis ill on small folks when the great fall out! It's
ill."

"Did you say---there had not been what?---for a gross of years? "

"Eh?" said the old man.

The old man said something about clipping his words, and made him
repeat this a third time. "Fighting and slaying, and weapons in hand,
and fools bawling freedom and the like," said the old man. "Not in all
my life has there been that. These are like the old days---for
sure---when the Paris people broke out---three gross of years
ago. That's what I mean hasn't been. But it's the world's way. It had
to come back.  I know. I know. This five years Ostrog has been
working, and there has been trouble and trouble, and hunger and
threats and high talk and arms. Blue canvas and murmurs. No one
safe. Everything sliding and slipping. And now here we are! Revolt and
fighting, and the Council come to its end."

"You are rather well-informed on these things," said Graham.

"I know what I hear. It isn't all Babble Machine with me."

"No," said Graham, wondering what Babble Machine might be. "And you
are certain this Ostrog---you are certain Ostrog organised this
rebellion and arranged for the waking of the Sleeper? Just to assert
himself---because he was not elected to the Council?

"Everyone knows that, I should think," said the old
man. "Except---just fools. He meant to be master somehow. In the
Council or not. Everyone who knows anything knows that. And here we
are with dead bodies Iying in the dark! Why, where have you been if
you haven't heard all about the trouble between Ostrog and the
Verneys? And what do you think the troubles are about? The Sleeper?
Eh?  You think the Sleeper's real and woke of his own accord---eh? "

"I'm a dull man, older than I look, and forgetful," said Graham." Lots
of things that have happened---especially of late years---. If I was
the Sleeper, to tell you the truth, I couldn't know less about them."

"Eh!" said the voice." Old, are you? You don't sound so very old! But
its not everyone keeps his memory to my time of life---truly. But
these notorious things! But you're not so old as me---not nearly so
old as me. Well! I ought not to judge other men by myself,
perhaps. I'm young---for so old a man. Maybe you're old for so young."

"That's it," said Graham. "And I've a queer history.  I know very
little. And history! Practically I know no history. The Sleeper and
Julius Caesar are all the same to me. It's interesting to hear you
talk of these things."

"I know a few things," said the old man. "I know a thing or
two. But---. Hark!"

The two men became silent, listening. There was heavy thud, a
concussion that made their seat shiver.  The passers-by stopped,
shouted to one another. The old man was full of questions; he shouted
to a man who passed near. Graham, emboldened by his example, got up
and accosted others. None knew what had happened.

He returned to the seat and found the old man muttering vague
interrogations in an undertone. For a while they said nothing to one
another.

The sense of this gigantic struggle, so near and yet so remote
oppressed Graham's imagination. Was this old man right, was the report
of the people right, and were the revolutionaries winning? Or were
they all in error, and were the red guards driving all before them? At
any time the flood of warfare might pour into this silent quarter of
the city and seize upon him again. It behooved him to learn all he
could while there was time. He turned suddenly to the old man with a
question and left it unsaid. But his motion moved the old man to
speech again.

"Eh! but how things work together!" said the old man." This Sleeper
that all the fools put their trust in! I've the whole history of
it---I was always a good one for histories. When I was a boy - I'm
that old---I used to read printed books. You'd hardly think it.
Likely you've seen none---they rot and dust so---and the Sanitary
Company burns them to make ashlarite.  But they were convenient in
their dirty way. Oh I learnt a lot. These new-fangled Babble
Machines---they don't seem new-fangled to you, eh?---they're easy to
hear, easy to forget. But I've traced all the Sleeper business from
the first."

"You will scarcely believe it," said Graham slowly, "I'm so
ignorant---I've been so preoccupied in my own little affairs, my
circumstances have been so odd---I know nothing of this Sleeper's
history. Who was he?"

"Eh!" said the old man. "I know. I know. He was a poor nobody, and set
on a playful woman, poor soul! And he fell into a trance. There's the
old things they had, those brown things---silver photo- graphs---still
showing him as he lay, a gross and a half years ago---a gross and a
half of years."

"Set on a playful woman, poor soul," said Graham softly to himself,
and then aloud, "Yes---well! go on."

"You must know he had a cousin named Warming a solitary man without
children, who made a big fortune speculating in roads---the first
Eadhamite roads.  But surely you've heard? No? Why? He bought all the
patent rights and made a big company. In those days there were grosses
of grosses of separate businesses and business companies. Grosses of
grosses! His roads killed the railroads---the old things---in two
dozen years; he bought up and Eadhaillited' the tracks. And because he
didn't want to break up his great property or let in shareholders, he
left it all to the Sleeper, and put it under a Board of Trustees that
he had picked and trained. He knew then the Sleeper wouldn't wake,
that he would go on sleeping, sleeping till he died. He knew that
quite well! And plump! a man in the United States, who had lost two
sons in a boat accident, followed that up with another great
bequest. His trustees found themselves with a dozen myriads of
lions'-worth or more of property at the very beginning."

"What was his name?"

"Graham."

"No, I mean---that American's."

"Isbister."

"Isbister!" cried Graham. "Why, I don't even know the name."

"Of course not," said the old man. "Of course not.  People don't learn
much in the schools nowadays.  But I know all about him. He was a rich
American who went from England, and he left the Sleeper even more than
Warming. How he made it? That I don't know. Something about pictures
by machinery. But he made it and left it, and so the Council had its
start.  It was just a council of trustees at first."

"And how did it grow?"

"Eh!---but you're not up to things. Money attracts money---and twelve
brains are better than one. They played it cleverly. They worked
politics with money, and kept on adding to the money by working
currency and tariffs. They grew---they grew. And for years the twelve
trustees hid the growing of the Sleeper's estate, under double names
and company titles and all that. The Council spread by title deed,
mortgage, share, every political party, every newspaper, they
bought. If you listen to the old stories you will see the Council
growing and growing Billions and billions of lions at last---the
Sleeper's estate. And all growing out of a whim---out of this
Warming's will, and an accident to Isbister's sons.

"Men are strange," said the old man. "The strange, thing to me is how
the Council worked together so long. As many as twelve. But they
worked in cliques from the first. And they've slipped back. In my
young days speaking of the Council was like an ignorant man speaking
of God. We didn't think they could do wrong. We didn't know of their
women and all that! Or else I've got wiser.

"Men are strange," said the old man. "Here are you, young and
ignorant, and me---sevendy years old, and I might reasonably be
forgetting---explaining it all to you short and clear.

"Sevendy," he said, "sevendy, and I hear and see---hear better than I
see. And reason clearly, and keep myself up to all the happenings of
things. Sevendy!

"Life is strange. I was twaindy before Ostrog was a baby. I remember
him long before he'd pushed his way to the head of the Wind Vanes
Control. I've seen many changes. Eh! I've worn the blue. And at last
I've come to see this crush and darkness and tumult and dead men
carried by in heaps on the ways.  And all his doing! All his doing! "

His voice died away in scarcely articulate praises of Ostrog

Graham thought. "Let me see," he said, "if I have it right."

He extended a hand and ticked off points upon his fingers. "The
Sleeper has been asleep---"

"Changed," said the old man.

"Perhaps. And meanwhile the Sleeper's property grew in the hands of
Twelve Trustees, until it swallowed up nearly all the great ownership
of the world. The Twelve Trustees---by virtue of this property have
become virtually masters of the world.  Because they are the paying
power---just as the old English Parliament used to be---"

"Eh!" said the old man. "That's so---that's a good comparison. You're
not so---"

"And now this Ostrog---has suddenly revolutionised the world by waking
the Sleeper---whom no one but the superstitious, common people had
ever dreamt would wake again---raising the Sleeper to claim his
property from the Council, after all these years."

The old man endorsed this statement with a cough.  "It's strange," he
said, "to meet a man who learns these things for the first time
tonight."

"Aye," said Graham, "it's strange."

"Have you been in a Pleasure City?" said the old man. "All my life
I've longed---" He laughed.  "Even now," he said, "I could enjoy a
little fun.  Enjoy seeing things, anyhow. "He mumbled a sentence
Graham did not understand.

"The Sleeper---when did he awake?" said Graham suddenly.

"Three days ago."

"Where is he? "

"Ostrog has him. He escaped from the Council not four hours ago. My
dear sir, where were you at the time? He was in the hall of the
markets---where the fighting has been. All the city was screaming
about it. All the Babble Machines! Everywhere it was shouted. Even the
fools who speak for the Council were admitting it. Everyone was
rushing off to see him---everyone was getting arms. Were you drunk or
asleep? And even then! But you're joking!  Surely you're
pretending. It was to stop the shouting of the Babble Machines and
prevent the people gathering that they turned off the
electricity---and put this damned darkness upon us. Do you mean to
say---? "

"I had heard the Sleeper was rescued," said Graham.  "But---to come
back a minute. Are you sure Ostrog has him?"

"He won't let him go," said the old man.

"And the Sleeper. Are you sure he is not genuine?  I have never
heard---"

"So all the fools think. So they think. As if there wasn't a thousand
things that were never heard. I know Ostrog too well for that. Did I
tell you? In a way I'm a sort of relation of Ostrog's. A sort of
relation. Through my daughter-in-law."

"I suppose---"

"Well? "

"I suppose there's no chance of this Sleeper asserting himself. I
suppose he's certain to be a puppet---in Ostrog's hands or the
Council's, as soon as the struggle is over."

"In Ostrog's hands---certainly. Why shouldn't he be a puppet? Look at
his position. Everything done for him, every pleasure possible. Why
should he want to assert himself? "

"What are these Pleasure Cities?" said Graham, abruptly.

The old man made him repeat the question. When at last he was assured
of Graham's words, he nudged him violently. "That's too much," said
he. "You're poking fun at an old man. I've been suspecting you know
more than you pretend."

"Perhaps I do," said Graham. "But no! why should I go on acting? No, I
do not know what a Pleasure City is."

The old man laughed in an intimate way.

"What is more, I do not know how to read your letters, I do not know
what money you use, I do not know what foreign countries there are. I
do not know where I am. I cannot count. I do not know where to get
food, nor drink, nor shelter."

"Come, come," said the old man, "if you had a glass of drink, now,
would you put it in your ear or your eye?"

"I want you to tell me all these things."

"He, he! Well, gentlemen who dress in silk must have their fun." A
withered hand caressed Graham's arm for a moment." Silk. Well, well!
But, all the same, I wish I was the man who was put up as the
Sleeper. He'll have a fine time of it. All the pomp and pleasure. He's
a queer looking face. When they used to let anyone go to see him, I've
got tickets and been. The image of the real one, as the photographs
show him, this substitute used to be. Yellow. But he'll get fed
up. It's a queer world. Think of the luck of it. The luck of it. I
expect he'll be sent to Capri.  It's the best fun for a greener."

His cough overtook him again. Then he began mumbling enviously of
pleasures and strange delights.  "The luck of it, the luck of it! All
my life I've been in London, hoping to get my chance."

"But you don't know that the Sleeper died," said Graham, suddenly.  J

The old man made him repeat his words.

"Men don't live beyond ten dozen. It's not in the order of things,"
said the old man. "I'm not a fool.  Fools may believe it, but not me."

Graham became angry with the old man's assurance.  "Whether you are a
fool or not," he said, "it happens you are wrong about the Sleeper."

"Eh? "

"You are wrong about the Sleeper. I haven't told you before, but I
will tell you now. You are wrong about the Sleeper."

"How do you know? I thought you didn't know anything---not even about
Pleasure Cities."

Graham paused.

"You don't know," said the old man. "How are you to know? It's very
few men---"

"I \emph{am} the Sleeper."

He had to repeat it.

There was a brief pause. "There's a silly thing to say, sir, if you'll
excuse me. It might get you into trouble in a time like this," said
the old man.  Graham, slightly dashed, repeated his assertion.

"I was saying I was the Sleeper. That years and years ago I did,
indeed, fall asleep, in a little stonebuilt village, in the days when
there were hedgerows, and villages, and inns, and all the countryside
cut up into little pieces, little fields. Have you never heard of
those days? And it is I---I who speak to you---who awakened again
these four days since."

"Four days since!---the Sleeper! But they've got the Sleeper. They
have him and they won't let him go. Nonsense! You've been talking
sensibly enough up to now. I can see it as though I was there. There
will be Lincoln like a keeper just behind him; they won't let him go
about alone. Trust them. You're a queer fellow. One of these fun
pokers. I see now why you have been clipping your words so oddly,
but---"

He stopped abruptly, and Graham could see his gesture.

"As if Ostrog would let the Sleeper run about alone! No, you're
telling that to the wrong man altogether. Eh! as if I should
believe. What's your game? And besides, we've been talking of the
Sleeper."

Graham stood up." Listen," he said. "I am the Sleeper."

"You're an odd man," said the old man, "to sit here in the dark,
talking clipped, and telling a lie of that sort. But---"

Graham's exasperation fell to laughter. "It is preposterous," he
cried. "Preposterous. The dream must end. It gets wilder and
wilder. Here am I---in this damned twilight---I never knew a dream in
twilight before---an anachronism by two hundred years and trying to
persuade an old fool that I am myself, and meanwhile---Ugh! "

He moved in gusty irritation and went striding. In a moment the old
man was pursuing him. "Eh! but don't go!" cried the old man. "I'm an
old fool, I know. Don't go. Don't leave me in all this darkness."

Graham hesitated, stopped. Suddenly the folly of telling his secret
flashed into his mind.

"I didn't mean to offend you---disbelieving you," said the old man
coming near. "It's no manner of harm. Call yourself the Sleeper if it
pleases you.  'Tis a foolish trick "

Graham hesitated, turned abruptly and went on his way.

For a time he heard the old man's hobbling pursuit and his wheezy
cries receding. But at last the darkness swallowed him, and Graham saw
him no more.

\chapter{OSTROG}

Graham could now take a clearer view of his position.  For a long time
yet he wandered, but after the talk of the old man his discovery of
this Ostrog was clear in his mind as the final inevitable
decision. One thing was evident, those who were at the headquarters of
the revolt had succeeded very admirably in suppressing the fact of his
disappearance. But every moment he expected to hear the report of his
death or of his recapture by the Council.

Presently a man stopped before him. "Have you heard? " he said.

"No!" said Graham starting.

" Near a dozand," said the man, "a dozand men!"  and hurried on.

A number of men and a girl passed in the darkness, gesticulating and
shouting: "Capitulated! Given up!"  A dozand of men." "Two dozand of
men."  "Ostrog, Hurrah! Ostrog, Hurrah!" These cries receded, became
indistinct.

Other shouting men followed. For a time his attention was absorbed in
the fragments of speech he heard.  He had a doubt whether all were
speaking English.  Scraps floated to him, scraps like Pigeon English,
like 'nigger' dialect, blurred and mangled distortions. He dared
accost no one with questions. The impression the people gave him
jarred altogether with his preconceptions of the struggle and
confirmed the old man's faith in Ostrog. It was only slowly he could
bring himself to believe that all these people were rejoicing at the
defeat of the Council, that the Council which had pursued him with
such power and vigour was after all the weaker of the two sides in
conflict.  And if that was so, how did it affect him? Several times he
hesitated on the verge of fundamental questions.  Once he turned and
walked for a long way after a little man of rotund inviting outline,
but he was unable to master confidence to address him.

It was only slowly that it came to him that he might ask for the
"wind-vane offices," whatever the "wind- vane offices" might be. His
first enquiry simply resulted in a direction to go on towards
Westminster.  His second led to the discovery of a short cut in which
he was speedily lost. He was told to leave the ways to which he had
hitherto confined himself knowing no other means of transit---and to
plunge down one of the middle staircases into the blackness of a
crossway. Thereupon came some trivial adventures; chief of these an
ambiguous encounter with a gruff-voiced invisible creature speaking in
a strange dialect that seemed at first a strange tongue, a thick flow
of speech with the drifting corpses of English words therein, the
dialect of the latter-day vile. Then another voice drew near, a girl's
voice singing, "tralala tralala."  She spoke to Graham, her English
touched with something of the same quality. She professed to have lost
her sister, she blundered needlessly into him he thought, caught hold
of him and laughed. But a word of vague remonstrance sent her into the
unseen again.

The sounds about him increased. Stumbling people passed him, speaking
excitedly. "They have surrendered!"  "The Council! Surely not the
Council!"  "They are saying so in the Ways." The passage seemed
wider. Suddenly the wall fell away. He was in a great space and people
were stirring remotely.  He inquired his way of an indistinct
figure. "Strike straight across," said a woman's voice. He left his
guiding wall, and in a moment had stumbled against a little table on
which were utensils of glass. Graham's eyes, now attuned to darkness,
made out a long vista with pallid tables on either side. He went down
this. At one or two of the tables he heard a clang of glass and a
sound of eating. There were people then cool enough to dine, or daring
enough to steal a meal in spite of social convulsion and darkness.
Far off and high up he presently saw a pallid light of a semi-circular
shape. As he approached this, a black edge came up and hid it. He
stumbled at steps and found himself in a gallery. He heard a sobbing,
and found two scared little girls crouched by a railing. These
children became silent at the near sound of feet. He tried to console
them, but they were very still until he left them. Then as he receded
he could hear them sobbing again.

Presently he found himself at the foot of a staircase and near a wide
opening. He saw a dim twilight above this and ascended out of the
blackness into a street of moving Ways again. Along this a disorderly
swarm of people marched shouting. They were singing snatches of the
song of the revolt, most of them out of tune. Here and there torches
flared creating brief hysterical shadows. He asked his way and was
twice puzzled by that same thick dialect. His third attempt won an
answer he could understand. He was two miles from the wind-vane
offices in Westminster, but the way was easy to follow.

When at last he did approach the district of the wind-vane offices it
seemed to him, from the cheering processions that came marching along
the Ways, from the tumult of rejoicing, and finally from the
restoration of the lighting of the city, that the overthrow of the
Council must already be accomplished. And still no news of his absence
came to his ears.

The re-illumination of the city came with startling
abruptness. Suddenly he stood blinking, all about him men halted
dazzled, and the world was incandescent.  The light found him already
upon the outskirts of the excited crowds that choked the Ways near the
wind-vane offices, and the sense of visibility and exposure that came
with it turned his colourless intention of joining Ostrog to a keen
anxiety.

For a time he was jostled, obstructed, and endangered by men hoarse
and weary with cheering his name, some of them bandaged and bloody in
his cause. The frontage of the wind-vane offices was illuminated by
some moving picture, but what it was he could not see, because in
spite of his strenuous attempts the density of the crowd prevented his
approaching it.  From the fragments of speech he caught, he judged it
conveyed news of the fighting about the Council House. Ignorance and
indecision made him slow and ineffective in his movements. For a time
he could not conceive how he was to get within the unbroken facade of
this place. He made his way slowly into the midst of this mass of
people, until he realised that the descending staircase of the central
Way led to the interior of the buildings. This gave him a goal, but
the crowding in the central path was so dense that it was long before
he could reach it. And even then he encountered intricate obstruction,
and had an hour of vivid argument first in this guard room and then in
that before he could get a note taken to the one man of all men who
was most eager to see him. His story was laughed to scorn at one
place, and wiser for that, when at last he reached a second stairway
he professed simply to have news of extraordinary importance for
Ostrog. What it was he would not say.  They sent his note
reluctantly. For a long time he waited in a little room at the foot of
the lift shaft, and thither at last came Lincoln, eager, apologetic,
astonished. He stopped in the doorway scrutinising Graham, then rushed
forward effusively.

"Yes," he cried. "It is you. And you are not dead!"

Graham made a brief explanation.

"My brother is waiting," explained Lincoln. "He is alone in the
wind-vane offices. We feared you had been killed in the theatre. He
doubted---and things are very urgent still in spite of what we are
telling them \emph{there}---or he would have come to you."

They ascended a lift, passed along a narrow passage, crossed a great
hall, empty save for two hurrying messengers, and entered a
comparatively little room, whose only furniture was a long settee and
a large oval disc of cloudy, shifting grey, hung by cables from the
wall.  There Lincoln left Graham for a space, and he remained alone
without understanding the shifting smoky shapes that drove slowly
across this disc.

His attention was arrested by a sound that began abruptly. It was
cheering, the frantic cheering of a vast but very remote crowd, a
roaring exultation.  This ended as sharply as it had begun, like a
sound heard between the opening and shutting of a door.  In the outer
room was a noise of hurrying steps and a melodious clinking as if a
loose chain was running over the teeth of a wheel.

Then he heard the voice of a woman, the rustle of unseen garments. "It
is Ostrog!" he heard her say.  A little bell rang fitfully, and then
everything was still again.

Presently came voices, footsteps and movement without. The footsteps
of some one person detached itself from the other sounds and drew
near, firm, evenly measured steps. The curtain lifted slowly. A tall,
white-haired man, clad in garments of cream coloured silk, appeared,
regarding Graham from under his raised arm.

For a moment the white form remained holding the curtain, then dropped
it and stood before it. Graham's first impression was of a very broad
forehead, very pale blue eyes deep sunken under white brows, an
aquiline nose, and a heavily-lined resolute mouth. The folds of flesh
over the eyes, the drooping of the corners of the mouth contradicted
the upright bearing, and said the man was old. Graham rose to his feet
instinctively, and for a moment the two men stood in silence,
regarding each other.

"You are Ostrog?" said Graham.

"I am Ostrog."

"The Boss?"

"So I am called."

Graham felt the inconvenience of the silence. "I have to thank you
chiefly, I understand, for my safety," he said presently.

"We were afraid you were killed," said Ostrog.

"Or sent to sleep again---for ever. We have been doing everything to
keep our secret---the secret of your disappearance. Where have you
been? How did you get here? "

Graham told him briefly.

Ostrog listened in silence.

He smiled faintly. "Do you know what I was doing when they came to
tell me you had come? "

"How can I guess?"

"Preparing your double."

"My double?"

"A man as like you as we could find. We were going to hypnotise him,
to save him the difficulty of acting. It was imperative. The whole of
this revolt depends on the idea that you are awake, alive, and with
us. Even now a great multitude of people has gathered in the theatre
clamouring to see you. They do not trust\dots You know, of
course---something of your position? "

"Very little," said Graham.

"It is like this." Ostrog walked a pace or two into the room and
turned. "You are absolute owner," he said, "of more than half the
world. As a result of that you are practically King. Your powers are
limited in many intricate ways, but you are the figure head, the
popular symbol of government. This White Council, the Council of
Trustees as it is called "

"I have heard the vague outline of these things."

"I wondered."

"I came upon a garrulous old man."

"I see\dots Our masses---the word comes from your days---you know of
course, that we still have masses---regard you as our actual
ruler. Just as a great number of people in your days regarded the
Crown as the ruler. They are discontented---the masses all over the
earth---with the rule of your Trustees. For the most part it is the
old discontent, the old quarrel of the common man with his
commonness---the misery of work and discipline and unfitness.  But
your Trustees have ruled ill. In certain matters, in the
administration of the Labour Companies, for example, they have been
unwise. They have given endless opportunities. Already we of the
popular party were agitating for reforms---when your waking
came. Came! If it had been contrived it could not have come more
opportunity." He smiled.  "The public mind, making no allowance for
your years of quiescence, had already hit on the thought of waking you
and appealing to you, and---Flash!"

He indicated the outbreak by a gesture, and Graham moved his head to
show that he understood.

"The Council muddled---quarreled. They always do. They could not
decide what to do with you.  You know how they imprisoned you?"

"I see. I see. And now---we win?"

"We win. Indeed we win. Tonight, in five swift hours. Suddenly we
struck everywhere. The windvane people, the Labour Company and its
millions, burst the bonds. We got the pull of the aeropiles."

He paused. "Yes," said Graham, guessing that aeropile meant flying
machine.

"That was, of course, essential. Or they could have got away. All the
city rose, every third man almost was in it! All the blue, all the
public services, save only just a few aeronauts and about half the red
police. You were rescued, and their own police of the Ways---not half
of them could be massed at the Council House---have been broken up,
disarmed or killed. All London is ours---now. Only the Council House
remains.

"Half of those who remain to them of the red police were lost in that
foolish attempt to recapture you. They lost their heads when they lost
you. They flung all they had at the theatre. We cut them off from the
Council House there. Truly tonight has been a night of
victory. Everywhere your star has blazed. A day ago---the White
Council ruled as it has ruled for a gross of years, for a century and
a half of years, and then, with only a little whispering, a covert
arming here and there, suddenly---So!"

"I am very ignorant," said Graham. "I suppose---.  I do not clearly
understand the conditions of this fighting. If you could
explain. Where is the Council? Where is the fight? "

Ostrog stepped across the room, something clicked, and suddenly, save
for an oval glow, they were in darkness. For a moment Graham was
puzzled.

Then he saw that the cloudy grey disc had taken depth and colour, had
assumed the appearance of an oval window looking out upon a strange
unfamiliar scene.

At the first glance he was unable to guess what this scene might
be. It was a daylight scene, the daylight of a wintry day, grey and
clear. Across the picture and halfway as it seemed between him and the
remoter view, a stout cable of twisted white wire stretched
vertically. Then he perceived that the rows of great windwheels he
saw, the wide intervals, the occasional gulfs of darkness, were akin
to those through which he had fled from the Council House. He
distinguished an orderly file of red figures marching across an open
space between files of men in black, and realised before Ostrog spoke
that he was looking down on the upper surface of latter-day
London. The overnight snows had gone. He judged that this mirror was
some modern replacement of the camera obscura, but that matter was not
explained to him. He saw that though the file of red figures was
trotting from left to right, yet they were passing out of the picture
to the left.  He wondered momentarily, and then saw that the picture
was passing slowly, panorama fashion, across the oval.

"In a moment you will see the fighting," said Ostrog at his
elbow. "Those fellows in red you notice are prisoners. This is the
roof space of London---all the houses are practically continuous now.
The streets and public squares are covered in. The gaps and chasms of
your time have disappeared."

Something out of focus obliterated half the picture.  Its form
suggested a man. There was a gleam of metal, a flash, something that
swept across the oval, as the eyelid of a bird sweeps across its eye,
and the picture was clear again. And now Graham beheld men running
down among the wind-wheels, pointing weapons from which jetted out
little smoky flashes.  They swarmed thicker and thicker to the right,
gesticulating---it might be they were shouting, but of that the
picture told nothing. They and the windwheels passed slowly and
steadily across the field of the mirror.

"Now," said Ostrog, "comes the Council House," and slowly a black edge
crept into view and gathered Graham's attention. Soon it was no longer
an edge but a cavity, a huge blackened space amidst the clustering
edifices, and from it thin spires of smoke rose into the pallid winter
sky. Gaunt ruinous masses of the building, mighty truncated piers and
girders, rose dismally out of this cavernous darkness. And over these
vestiges of some splendid place, countless minute men were clambering,
leaping, swarming.

"This is the Council House," said Ostrog. "Their last stronghold. And
the fools wasted enough ammunition to hold out for a month in blowing
up the buildings all about them---to stop our attack. You heard the
smash? It shattered half the brittle glass in the city."

And while he spoke, Graham saw that beyond this sea of ruins,
overhanging it and rising to a great height, was a ragged mass of
white building. This mass had been isolated by the ruthless
destruction of its surroundings. Black gaps marked the passages the
disaster had torn apart; big halls had been slashed open and the
decoration of their interiors showed dismally in the wintry dawn, and
down the jagged wall hung festoons of divided cables and twisted ends
of lines and metallic rods. And amidst all the vast details moved
little red specks, the red-clothed defenders of the Council. Every now
and then faint flashes illuminated the bleak shadows. At the first
sight it seemed to Graham that an attack upon this isolated white
building was in progress, but then he perceived that the party of the
revolt was not advancing, but sheltered amidst the colossal wreckage
that encircled this last ragged stronghold of the red-garbed men, was
keeping up a fitful firing.

And not ten hours ago he had stood beneath the ventilating fans in a
little chamber within that remote building wondering what was
happening in the world!

Looking more attentively as this warlike episode moved silently across
the centre of the mirror, Graham saw that the white building was
surrounded on every side by ruins, and Ostrog proceeded to describe in
concise phrases how its defenders had sought by such destruction to
isolate themselves from a storm.  He spoke of the loss of men that
huge downfall had entailed in an indifferent tone. He indicated an
improvised mortuary among the wreckage showed ambulances swarming like
cheese-mites along a ruinous groove that had once been a street of
moving ways.  He was more interested in pointing out the parts of the
Council House, the distribution of the besiegers.  In a little while
the civil contest that had convulsed London was no longer a mystery to
Graham. It was no tumultuous revolt had occurred that night, no equal
warfare, but a splendidly organised \emph{coup d'etat}.  Ostrog's
grasp of details was astonishing; he seemed to know the business of
even the smallest knot of black and red specks that crawled amidst
these places.

He stretched a huge black arm across the luminous picture, and showed
the room whence Graham had escaped, and across the chasm of ruins the
course of his flight. Graham recognised the gulf across which the
gutter ran, and the wind-wheels where he had crouched from the flying
machine. The rest of his path had succumbed to the explosion. He
looked again at the Council House, and it was already half hidden, and
on the right a hillside with a cluster of domes and pinnacles, hazy,
dim and distant, was gliding into view.

"And the Council is really overthrown?" he said.

"Overthrown," said Ostrog.

"And I---. Is it indeed true that I?"

"You are Master of the World."

"But that white flag---"

"That is the flag of the Council---the flag of the Rule of the
World. It will fall. The fight is over.  Their attack on the theatre
was their last frantic struggle. They have only a thousand men or so,
and some of these men will be disloyal. They have little
ammunition. And we are reviving the ancient arts. We are casting
guns."

"But---help. Is this city the world?"

" Practically this is all they have left to them of their
empire. Abroad the cities have either revolted with us or wait the
issue. Your awakening has perplexed them, paralysed them."

"But haven't the Council flying machines? Why is there no fighting
with them? "

"They had. But the greater part of the aeronauts were in the revolt
with us. They wouldn't take the risk of fighting on our side, but they
would not stir against us. We had to get a pull with the aeronauts.
Quite half were with us, and the others knew it.  Directly they knew
you had got away, those looking for you dropped. We killed the man who
shot at you---an hour ago. And we occupied the flying stages at the
outset in every city we could, and so stopped and captured the
airplanes, and as for the little flying machines that turned out---for
some did---we kept up too straight and steady a fire for them to get
near the Council House. If they dropped they couldn't rise again,
because there's no clear space about there for them to get up. Several
we have smashed, several others have dropped and surrendered, the rest
have gone off to the Continent to find a friendly city if they can
before their fuel runs out.  Most of these men were only too glad to
be taken prisoner and kept out of harm's way. Upsetting in a flying
machine isn't a very attractive prospect. There's no chance for the
Council that way. Its days are done."

He laughed and turned to the oval reflection again to show Graham what
he meant by flying stages.  Even the four nearer ones were remote and
obscured by a thin morning haze. But Graham could perceive they were
very vast structures, judged even by the standard of the things about
them.

And then as these dim shapes passed to the left there came again the
sight of the expanse across which the disarmed men in red had been
marching. And then the black ruins, and then again the beleaguered
white fastness of the Council. It appeared no longer a ghostly pile,
but glowing amber in the sunlight, for a cloud shadow had
passed. About it the pigmy struggle still hung in suspense, but now
the red defenders were no longer firing.

So, in a dusky stillness, the man from the nineteenth century saw the
closing scene of the great revolt, the forcible establishment of his
rule. With a quality of startling discovery it came to him that this
was his world, and not that other he had left behind; that this was no
spectacle to culminate and cease; that in this world lay whatever life
was still before him, lay all his duties and dangers and
responsibilities. He turned with fresh questions. Ostrog began to
answer them, and then broke off abruptly. "But these things I must
explain more fully later. At present there are---duties. The people
are coming by the moving ways towards this ward from every part of the
city---the markets and theatres are densely crowded. You are just in
time for them. They are clamouring to see you. And abroad they want to
see you. Paris, New York, Chicago, Denver, Capri---thousands of cities
are up and in a tumult, undecided, and clamouring to see you. They
have clamoured that you should be awakened for years, and now it is
done they will scarcely believe---"

But surely---I can't go\dots "

Ostrog answered from the other side of the room, 1.  and the picture
on the oval disc paled and vanished ' as the light jerked back again."
There are kinetotele-photographs," he said. "As you bow to the people
here---all over the world myriads of myriads of people, packed and
still in darkened halls, will see you also. In black and white, of
course---not like this.  And you will hear their shouts reinforcing
the shouting in the hall.

"And there is an optical contrivance we shall use," said Ostrog, "used
by some of the posturers and women dancers. It may be novel to
you. You stand in a very bright light, and they see not you but a
magnified image of you thrown on a screen---so that even the
furtherest man in the remotest gallery can, if he chooses, count your
eyelashes."

Graham clutched desperately at one of the questions in his mind. "What
is the population of London?"

"Eight and twaindy myriads."

"Eight and what? "

"More than thirty-three millions."

These figures went beyond Graham's imagination "You will be expected
to say something," said Ostrog. "Not what you used to call a Speech,
but what our people call a Word---just one sentence, six or seven
words. Something formal. If I might suggest---' I have awakened and my
heart is with you.'  That is the sort of thing they want."

" What was that? " asked Graham.

"'I am awakened and my heart is with you.' And bow---bow royally. But
first we must get you black robes---for black is your colour. Do you
mind?  And then they will disperse to their homes."

Graham hesitated. "I am in your hands," he said.

Ostrog was clearly of that opinion. He thought for a moment, turned to
the curtain and called brief directions to some unseen
attendants. Almost immediately a black robe, the very fellow of the
black robe Graham had worn in the theatre, was brought. And as he
threw it about his shoulders there came from the room without the
shrilling of a high-pitched bell.  Ostrog turned in interrogation to
the attendant, then suddenly seemed to change his mind, pulled the
curtain aside and disappeared.

For a moment Graham stood with the deferential attendant listening to
Ostrog's retreating steps.  There was a sound of quick question and
answer and of men running. The curtain was snatched back and Ostrog
reappeared, his massive face glowing with excitement. He crossed the
room in a stride, clicked the room into darkness, gripped Grahams arm
and pointed to the mirror.

"Even as we turned away," he said.

Graham saw his index finger, black and colossal, above the mirrored
Council House. For a moment he did not understand. And then he
perceived that the flagstaff that had carried the white banner was
bare.

"Do you mean---?" he began.

"The Council has surrendered. Its rule is at an end for evermore."

"Look!" and Ostrog pointed to a coil of black that crept in little
jerks up the vacant flagstaff, unfolding as it rose.

The oval picture paled as Lincoln pulled the curtain aside and
entered.

"They are clamourous," he said.

Ostrog kept his grip of Graham's arm.

"We have raised the people," he said. "We have given them arms. For
today at least their wishes must be law."

Lincoln held the Curtain open for Graham and Ostrog to pass through.

On his way to the markets Graham had a transitory glance of a long
narrow white-walled room in which men in the universal blue canvas
were carrying covered things like biers, and about which men in
medical purple hurried to and fro. From this room came groans and
wailing. He had an impression of an empty blood-stained couch, of men
on other couches, bandaged and blood-stained. It was just a glimpse
from a railed footway and then a buttress hid the place and they were
going on towards the markets.

The roar of the multitude was near now: it leapt to thunder. And,
arresting his attention, a fluttering of black banners, the waving of
blue canvas and brown rags, and the swarming vastness of the theatre
near the public markets came into view down a long passage. The
picture opened out. He perceived they were entering the great theatre
of his first appearance, the Freat theatre he had last seen as a
chequer-work of glare and blackness in his flight from the red police.
This time he entered it along a gallery at a level high above the
stage. The place was now brilliantly lit again. He sought the gangway
up which he had fled, but he could not tell it from among its dozens
of fellows; nor could he see anything of the smashed seats, deflated
cushions, and such like traces of the fight because of the density of
the people. Except the stage the whole place was closely
packed. Looking down the effect was a vast area of stippled pink, each
dot a still upturned face regarding him. At his appearance with Ostrog
the cheering died away, the singing died away, a common interest
stilled and unified the disorder. It seemed as though every individual
of those myriads was watching him.

\chapter{THE END OF THE OLD ORDER}

So far as Graham was able to judge, it was near midday when the white
banner of the Council fell.  But some hours had to elapse before it
was possible to effect the formal capitulation, and so after he had
spoken his "Word" he retired to his new apartments in the wind-vane
offices. The continuous excitement of the last twelve hours had left
him inordinately fatigued, even his curiosity was exhausted; for a
space he sat inert and passive with open eyes, and for a space he
slept. He was roused by two medical attendants, come prepared with
stimulants to sustain him through the next occasion. After he had
taken their drugs and bathed by their advice in cold water, he felt a
rapid return of interest and energy, and was presently able and
willing to accompany Ostrog through several miles (as it seemed) of
passages, lifts, and slides to the closing scene of the White
Council's rule.

The way ran deviously through a maze of buildings.  They came at last
to a passage that curved about, and showed broadening before him an
oblong opening, clouds hot with sunset, and the ragged skyline of the
ruinous Council House. A tumult of shouts came drifting up to him. In
another moment they had come out high up on the brow of the cliff of
torn buildings that overhung the wreckage. The vast area opened to
Graham's eyes, none the less strange and wonderful for the remote view
he had had of it in the oval mirror.

This rudely amphitheatral space seemed now the better part of a mile
to its outer edge. It was gold lit on the left hand, catching the
sunlight, and below and to the right clear and cold in the
shadow. Above the shadowy grey Council House that stood in the midst
of it, the great black banner of the surrender still hung in sluggish
folds against the blazing sunset.  Severed rooms, halls and passages
gaped strangely, broken masses of metal projected dismally from the
complex wreckage, vast masses of twisted cable dropped like tangled
seaweed, and from its base came a tumult of innumerable voices,
violent concussions, and the sound of trumpets. All about this great
white pile was a ring of desolation; the smashed and blackened masses,
the gaunt foundations and ruinous lumber of the fabric that had been
destroyed by the Council's orders, skeletons of girders, Titanic
masses of wall, forests of stout pillars. Amongst the sombre wreckage
beneath, running water flashed and glistened, and far away across the
space, out of the midst of a vague vast mass of buildings, there
thrust the twisted end of a water-main, two hundred feet in the air,
thunderously spouting a shining cascade. And everywhere great
multitudes of people.

Wherever there was space and foothold, people swarmed, little people,
small and minutely clear, except where the sunset touched them to
indistinguishable gold. They clambered up the tottering walls, they
clung in wreaths and groups about the high-standing pillars. They
swarmed along the edges of the circle of ruins. The air was full of
their shouting, and were pressing and swaying towards the central
space.

The upper storeys of the Council House seemed deserted, not a human
being was visible. Only the drooping banner of the surrender hung
heavily against the light. The dead were within the Council House, or
hidden by the swarming people, or carried away.  Graham could see only
a few neglected bodies in gaps and corners of the ruins, and amidst
the flowing water.

"Will you let them see you, Sire?" said Ostrog.  "They are very
anxious to see you."

Graham hesitated, and then walked forward to where the broken verge of
wall dropped sheer. He I stood looking down, a lonely, tall, black
figure against the sky.

Very slowly the swarming ruins became aware of him. And as they did so
little bands of black- uniformed men appeared remotely, thrusting
through the crowds towards the Council House. He saw little black
heads become pink, looking at him, saw by that means a wave of
recognition sweep across the space.  It occurred to him that he should
accord them some recognition. He held up his arm, then pointed to the
Council House and dropped his hand. The voices below became unanimous,
gathered volume, came up to him as multitudinous wavelets of cheering.

The western sky was a pallid bluish green, and Jupiter shone high in
the south, before the capitulation was accomplished. Above was a slow
insensible change, the advance of night serene and beautiful; below
was hurry, excitement, conflicting orders, pauses, spasmodic
developments of organisation, a vast ascending clamour and
confusion. Before the Council came out, toiling perspiring men,
directed by a conflict of shouts, carried forth hundreds of those who
had perished in the hand-to-hand conflict within those long passages
and chambers.

Guards in black lined the way that the Council would come, and as far
as the eye could reach into the hazy blue twilight of the ruins, and
swarming now at every possible point in the captured Council House and
along the shattered cliff of its circumadjacent buildings, were
innumerable people, and their voices even when they were not cheering,
were as the soughing of the sea upon a pebble beach. Ostrog had chosen
a huge commanding pile of crushed and over- thrown masonry, and on
this a stage of timbers and metal girders was being hastily
constructed. Its essential parts were complete, but humming and
clangorous machinery still glared fitfully in the shadows beneath this
temporary edifice.

The stage had a small higher portion on which Graham stood with Ostrog
and Lincoln close beside him, a little in advance of a group of minor
officers. A broader lower stage surrounded this quarter deck, and on
this were the black-uniformed guards of the revolt armed with the
little green weapons whose very names Graham still did not know. Those
standing about him perceived that his eyes wandered perpetually from
the swarming people in the twilight ruins about him to the darkling
mass of the White Council House, whence the Trustees would presently
come, and to the gaunt cliffs of ruin that encircled him, and so back
to the people. The voices of the crowd swelled to a deafening tumult.

He saw the Councillors first afar off in the glare of one of the
temporary lights that marked their path, a little group of white
figures blinking in a black archway. In the Council House they had
been in darkness.  He watched them approaching, drawing nearer past
first this blazing electric star and then that; the minatory roar of
the crowd over whom their power had lasted for a hundred and fifty
years marched along beside them. As they drew still nearer their faces
came out weary, white and anxious. He saw them blinking up through the
glare about him and Ostrog. He contrasted their strange cold looks in
the Hall of Atlas.. .. Presently he could recognise several of them;
the man who had rapped the table at Howard, a burly man with a red
beard, and one delicate-featured, short, dark man with a peculiarly
long skull. He noted that two were whispering together and looking
behind him at Ostrog. Next there came a tall, dark and handsome man,
walking downcast.  Abruptly he glanced up, his eyes touched Graham for
a moment, and passed beyond him to Ostrog. The way that had been made
for them was so contrived that they had to march past and curve about
before they came to the sloping path of planks that ascended to the
stage where their surrender was to be made.

"The Master, the Master! God and the Master," shouted the people." To
hell with the Council!"  Graham looked at their multitudes, receding
beyond counting into a shouting haze, and then at Ostrog beside him,
white and steadfast and still. His eye went again to the little group
of White Councillors.  And then he looked up at the familiar quiet
stars overhead. The marvellous element in his fate was suddenly
vivid. Could that be his indeed, that little life in his memory two
hundred years gone by---and this as well?

                      
\chapter{FROM THE CROW'S NEST}

And so after strange delays and through an avenue of doubt and battle,
this man from the nineteenth century came at last to his position at
the head of that complex world.

At first when he rose from the long deep sleep that followed his
rescue and the surrender of the Council, he did not recognise his
surroundings. By an effort he gained a clue in his mind, and all that
had happened came back to him, at first with a quality of insincerity
like a story heard, like something read out of a book. And even before
his memories were clear, the exultation of his escape, the wonder of
his prominence were back in his mind. He was owner of half the world;
Master of the Earth. This new great age was in the completest sense
his. He no longer hoped to discover his experiences a dream; he became
anxious now to convince himself that they were real.

An obsequious valet assisted him to dress under the direction of a
dignified chief attendant, a little man whose face proclaimed him
Japanese, albeit he spoke English like an Englishman. From the latter
he learnt something of the state of affairs. Already the revolution
was an accepted fact; already business was being resumed throughout
the city. Abroad the downfall of the Council had been received for the
most part with delight. Nowhere was the Council popular, and the
thousand cities of Western America, after two hundred years still
jealous of New York, London, and the East, had risen almost
unanimously two days before at the news of Graham's
imprisonment. Paris was fighting within itself. The rest of the world
hung in suspense.

While he was breaking his fast, the sound of a telephone bell jetted
from a corner, and his chief attendant called his attention to the
voice of Ostrog making polite enquiries. Graham interrupted his
refreshment to reply. Very shortly Lincoln arrived, and Graham at once
expressed a strong desire to talk to people and to be shown more of
the new life that was opening before him. Lincoln informed him that in
three hours' time a representative gathering of officials and their
wives would be held in the state apartments of the wind-vane
Chief. Graham's desire to traverse the ways of the city was, however,
at present impossible, because of the enormous excitement of the
people.  It was, however, quite possible for him to take a bird's eye
view of the city from the crow's nest of the windvane keeper. To this
accordingly Graham was conducted by his attendant. Lincoln, with a
graceful compliment to the attendant, apologised for not accompanying
them, on account of the present pressure of administrative work.

Higher even than the most gigantic wind-wheels hung this crow's nest,
a clear thousand feet above the roofs, a little disc-shaped speck on a
spear of metallic filigree, cable stayed. To its summit Graham was
drawn in a little wire-hung cradle. Halfway down the frail-seeming
stem was a light gallery about which hung a cluster of tubes---minute
they looked from above---rotating slowly on the ring of its outer
rail.  These were the specula, \emph{en rapport} with the wind-vane
keeper's mirrors, in one of which Ostrog had shown him the coming of
his rule. His Japanese attendant ascended before him and they spent
nearly an hour asking and answering questions.

It was a day full of the promise and quality of spring. The touch of
the wind warmed. The sky was an intense blue and the vast expanse of
London shone dazzling under the morning sun. The air was clear of
smoke and haze, sweet as the air of a mountain glen.

Save for the irregular oval of ruins about the House of the Council
and the black flag of the surrender that fluttered there, the mighty
city seen from above showed few signs of the swift revolution that
had, to his imagination, in one night and one day, changed the
destinies of the world. A multitude of people still swarmed over these
ruins, and the huge openwork stagings in the distance from which
started in times of peace the service of aeroplanes to the various
great cities of Europe and America, were also black with the
victors. Across a narrow way of planking raised on trestles that
crossed the ruins a crowd of workmen were busy restoring the
connection between the cables and wires of the Council House and the
rest of the city, preparatory to the transfer thither of Ostrog's
headquarters from the Wind-Vane buildings.

For the rest the luminous expanse was undisturbed.  So vast was its
serenity in comparison with the areas of disturbance, that presently
Graham, looking beyond them, could almost forget the thousands of men
Iying out of sight in the artificial glare within the
quasi-subterranean labyrinth, dead or dying of the overnight wounds,
forget the improvised wards with the hosts of surgeons, nurses, and
bearers feverishly busy, forget, indeed,' all the wonder,
consternation and novelty under the electric lights. Down there in the
hidden ways of the anthill he knew that the revolution triumphed, that
black everywhere carried the day, black favours, black banners, black
festoons across the streets. And out here, under the fresh sunlight,
beyond the crater of the fight, as if nothing had happened to the
earth, the forest of Wind Vanes that had grown from one or two while
the Council had ruled, roared peacefully upon their incessant duty.

Far away, spiked, jagged and indented by the wind vanes, the Surrey
Hills rose blue and faint; to the north and nearer, the sharp contours
of Highgate and Muswell Hill were similarly jagged. And all over the
countryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges
had interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farmhouses had
nestled among their trees, wind wheels similar to those he saw and
bearing like vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the
new age, cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy
that flowed away incessantly through all the arteries of the city. And
underneath these wandered the countless flocks and herds of the
British Food Trust with their lonely guards and keepers.

Not a familiar outline anywhere broke the cluster of gigantic shapes
below. St. Paul's he knew survived, and many of the old buildings in
Westminster, embedded out of sight, arched over and covered in among
the giant growths of this great age. The Themes, too, made no fall and
gleam of silver to break the wilderness of the city; the thirsty water
mains drank up every drop of its waters before they reached the
walls. Its bed and estuary scoured and sunken, was now a canal of sea
water and a race of grimy bargemen brought the heavy materials of
trade from the Pool thereby beneath the very feet of the
workers. Faint and dim in the eastward between earth and sky hung the
clustering masts of the colossal shipping in the Pool. For all the
heavy traffic, for which there was no need of haste, came in gigantic
sailing ships from the ends of the earth, and the heavy goods for
which there was urgency in mechanical ships of a smaller swifter sort.

And to the south over the hills, came vast aqueducts with sea water
for the sewers and in three separate directions, ran pallid
lines---the roads, stippled with moving grey specks. On the first
occasion that offered he was determined to go out and see these roads.
That would come after the flying ship he was presently to try. His
attendant officer described them as a pair of gently curving surfaces
a hundred yards wide, each one for the traffic going in one direction,
and made of a substance called Eadhamite---an artificial substance,.
so far as he could gather, resembling toughened glass.  Along this
shot a strange traffic of narrow rubber-shod vehicles, great single
wheels, two and four wheeled vehicles, sweeping along at velocities of
from one to six miles a minute. Railroads had vanished; a few
embankments remained as rust-crowned trenches here and there. Some few
formed the cores of Eadhamite ways.

Among the first things to strike his attention had been the great
fleets of advertisement balloons and kites that receded in irregular
vistas northward and southward along the lines of the aeroplane
journeys.  No aeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had ceased,
and only one little-seeming aeropile circled high in the blue distance
above the Surrey Hills, an unimpressive soaring speck.

A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to
imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all
the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood,
some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some
single cultivation and preserved the name of a town---as Bournemouth,
Wareham, or Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how
inevitable such a change had been. The old order had dotted the
country with farmhouses, and every two or three miles was the ruling
landlord's estate, and the place of the inn and cobbler, the grocer's
shop and church---the village. Every eight miles or so was the country
town, where lawyer, corn merchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary
surgeon, doctor, draper, milliner and so forth lived. Every eight
miles---simply because that eight mile marketing journey, four there
and back, was as much as was comfortable for the farmer. But directly
the railways came into play, and after them the light railways, and
all the swift new motor cars that had replaced waggons and horses, and
so soon as the high roads began to be made of wood, and rubber, and
Eadhamite, and all sorts of elastic durable substances---the necessity
of having such frequent market towns disappeared.  And the big towns
grew. They drew the worker with the gravitational force of seemingly
endless work, the employer with their suggestions of an infinite ocean
of labour.

And as the standard of comfort rose, as the complexity of the
mechanism of living increased life in the country had become more and
more costly, or narrow and impossible. The disappearance of vicar and
squire, the extinction of the general practitioner by the city
specialist, had robbed the village of its last touch of culture. After
telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book,
schoolmaster, and letter, to live outside the range of the electric
cables was to live an isolated savage. In the country were neither
means of being clothed nor fed (according to the refined conceptions
of the time), no efficient doctors for an emergency, no company and no
pursuits.

Moreover, mechanical appliances in agriculture made one engineer the
equivalent of thirty labourers.  So, inverting the condition of the
city clerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of
the coaly foulness of its air, the labourers now came hurrying by road
or air to the city and its life and delights at night to leave it
again in the morning.  The city had swallowed up humanity; man had
entered upon a new stage in his development. First had come the nomad,
the hunter, then had followed the agriculturist of the agricultural
state, whose towns and cities and ports were but the headquarters and
markets of the countryside. And now, logical consequence of an epoch
of invention, was this huge new aggregation of men. Save London, there
were only four other cities in Britain---Edinburgh, Portsmouth,
Manchester and Shrewsbury. Such things as these, simple statements of
fact though they were to contemporary men, strained Graham's
imagination to picture. And when he glanced "over beyond there" at the
strange things that existed on the Continent, it failed him
altogether.

He had a vision of city beyond city, cities on great plains, cities
beside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margin, cities girdled
by snowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue
was spoken; taken together with its Spanish American and Hindoo and
Negro and "Pidgin" dialects, it was the everyday language of
two-thirds of the people of the earth. On the Continent, save as
remote and curious survivals, three other languages alone held
sway---German, which reached to Antioch and Genoa and jostled
Spanish-English at Gdiz, a Gallicised Russian which met the Indian
English in Persia and Kurdistan and the "Pidgin" English in Pekin, and
French still clear and brilliant, the language of lucidity, which
shared the Mediterranean with the Indian English and German and
reached through a negro dialect to the Congo.

And everywhere now, through the city-set earth, save in the
administered "black belt" territories of the tropics, the same
cosmopolitan social organisatior prevailed, and everywhere from Pole
to Equator his property and his responsibilities extended. The whole
world was civilised; the whole world dwelt in cities; the whole world
was property. Over the British Empire and throughout America his
ownership was scarcely disguised, Congress and Parliament were usually
regarded as antique, curious gatherings. And even in the two Empires
of Russia and Germany, the influence of his wealth was conceivably of
enormous weight. There, of course, came problems---possibilities, but,
uplifted as he was, even Russia and Germany seemed sufficiently
remote. And of the quality of the black belt administration, and of
what that might mean for him he thought, after the fashion of his
former days, not at all. That it should hang like a threat over the
spacious vision before him could not enter his nineteenth century
mind. But his mind turned at once from the scenery to the thought of a
vanished dread.  "What of the yellow peril?" he asked and Asano made
him explain. The Chinese spectre had vanished.  Chinaman and European
were at peace. The twentieth century had discovered with reluctant
certainty that the average Chinaman was as civilised, more moral, and
far more intelligent than the average European serf, and had repeated
on a gigantic scale the fraternisation of Scot and Englishman that
happened in the seventeenth century. As Asano put it; "They thought it
over. They found we were white men after all."  Graham turned again to
the view and his thoughts took a new direction.

Out of the dim south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous, and in
some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities, of which the
kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken.
Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art and
beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful cities
of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the fierce,
inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaring labyrinth
below.

Fierce he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact that
these latter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenth
century as the figure of an idyllic easy-going life. He turned his
eyes to the scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the
big factories of that intricate maze.

Northward he knew were the potters, makers not only of earthenware and
china, but of the kindred pastes and compounds a subtler mineralogical
chemistry had devised; there were the makers of statuettes and wall
ornaments and much intricate furniture; there too were the factories
where feverishly competitive authors devised their phonograph
discourses and advertisements and arranged the groupings and
developments for their perpetually startling and novel kinematographic
dramatic works. Thence, too, flashed the world-wide messages, the
world-wide falsehoods of the news-tellers, the chargers of the
telephonic machines that had replaced the newspapers of the past.

To the westward beyond the smashed Council House were the voluminous
offices of municipal control and government; and to the eastward,
towards the port, the trading quarters, the huge public markets, the
theatres, houses of resort, betting palaces, miles of billiard
saloons, baseball and football circuses, wild beast rings and the
innumerable temples of the Christian and quasi-Christian sects, the
Mahomedans, Buddhists, Gnostics, Spook Worshippers, the Incubus
Worshippers, the Furniture Worshippers, and so forth; and to the south
again a vast manufacture of textiles, pickles, wines and
condiments. And from point to point tore the countless multitudes
along the roaring mechanical ways. A gigantic hive, of which the winds
were tireless servants, and the ceaseless wind-vanes an appropriate
crown and symbol.

He thought of the unprecedented population that had been sucked up by
this sponge of halls and galleries---the thirty-three million lives
that were playing out each its own brief ineffectual drama below him,
and the complacency that the brightness of the day and the space and
splendour of the view, and above all the sense of his own importance
had begotten, dwindled and perished. Looking down from this height
over the city it became at last possible to conceive this overwhelming
multitude of thirty-three millions, the reality of the responsibility
he would take upon himself, the vastness of the human Maelstron over
which his slender kingship hung.

He tried to figure the individual life. It astonished him to realise
how little the common man had changed in spite of the visible change
in his conditions. Life and property, indeed, were secure from
violence almost all over the world, zymotic diseases, bacterial
diseases of all sorts had practically vanished, everyone had a
sufficiency of food and clothing, was warmed in the city ways and
sheltered from the weather---so much the almost mechanical progress of
science and the physical organisation of society had accomplished.
But the crowd, he was already beginning to discover, was a crowd
still, helpless in the hands of demagogue and organiser, individually
cowardly, individually swayed by appetite, collectively
incalculable. The memory of countless figures in pale blue canvas came
before his mind. Millions of such men and women below him, he knew,
had never been out of the city, had never seen beyond the little round
of unintelligent grudging participation in the world's business, and
unintelligent dissatisfied sharing in its tawdrier pleasures. He
thought of the hopes of his vanished contemporaries, and for a moment
the dream of London in Morris's quaint old \emph{News from Nowhere},
and the perfect land of Hudson's beautiful \emph{Crystal
Age}---appeared before him in an atmosphere of infinite loss.  He
thought of his own hopes.

For in the latter days of that passionate life that lay now so far
behind him, the conception of a free and equal manhood had become a
very real thing to him.  He had hoped, as indeed his age had hoped,
rashly taking it for granted, that the sacrifice of the many to the
few would some day cease, that a day was near when every child born of
woman should have a fair and assured chance of happiness. And here,
after two hundred years, the same hope, still unfulfilled, cried
passionately through the city. After two hundred years, he knew,
greater than ever, grown with the city to gigantic proportions, were
poverty and helpless labour and all the sorrows of his time.

Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He
had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of
supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of
public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their
belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled
a venial world.

His Japanese attendant, Asano, in expounding the political history of
the intervening two centuries, drew an apt image from a seed eaten by
insect parasites.  First there is the original seed, ripening
vigorously enough. And then comes some insect and lays an egg under
the skin, and behold! in a little while the seed is a hollow shape
with an active grub inside that has eaten out its substance. And then
comes some secondary parasite, some ichneumon fly, and lays an egg
within this grub, and behold! that, too, is a hollow shape, and the
new living thing is inside its predecessor's skin which itself is snug
within the seed coat.  And the seed coat still keeps its shape, most
people think it a seed still, and for all one knows it may still think
itself a seed, vigorous and alive. "Your Victorian kingdom," said
Asano, "was like that---king- ship with the heart eaten out. "The
landowners---the barons and gentry---began ages ago with King John;
there were lapses, but they beheaded King Charles, and ended
practically with King George mere husk of a king\dots the real power
in the hands of their parliament. But the Parliament---the organ of
the land-holding tenant-ruling gentry---did not keep its power
long. The change had already come in the nineteenth century. The
franchises had been broadened until it included masses of ignorant
men, "urban myriads," who went in their featureless thousands to vote
together. And the natural consequence of a swarming constituency is
the rule of the party organisation. Power was passing even in the
Victorian time to the party machinery, secret, complex, and
corrupt. Very speedily power was in the hands of great men of business
who financed the machines. A time came when the real power and
interest of the Empire rested visibly between the two party councils,
ruling by newspapers and electoral organisations---two small groups of
rich and able men, working at first in opposition, then presently
together.

There was a reaction of a genteel ineffectual sort.  There were
numberless books in existence, Asano said, to prove that---the
publication of some of them was as early as Graham's sleep---a whole
literature of reaction in fact. The party of the reaction seems to
have locked itself into its study and rebelled with unflinching
determination---on paper. The urgent necessity of either capturing or
depriving the party councils of power is a common suggestion
underlying all the thoughtful work of the early twentieth century,
both in America and England. In most of these things America was a
little earlier than England, though both countries drove the same way.

That counter-revolution never came. It could never organise and keep
pure. There was not enough of the old sentimentality, the old faith in
righteousness, left among men. Any organisation that became big enough
to influence the polls became complex enough to be undermined, broken
up, or bought outright by capable rich men. Socialistic and Popular,
Reactionary and Purity Parties were all at last mere Stock Exchange
counters, selling their principles to pay for their
electioneering. And the great concern of the rich was naturally to
keep property intact, the board clear for the game of trade. Just as
the feudal concern had been to keep the board clear for hunting and
war. The whole world was exploited, a battle field of businesses; and
financial convulsions, the scourge of currency manipulation, tariff
wars, made more human misery during the twentieth century---because
the wretchedness was dreary life instead of speedy death---than had
war, pestilence and famine, in the darkest hours of earlier history.

His own part in the development of this time he now knew clearly
enough. Through the successive phases in the development of this
mechanical civilisation, aiding and presently directing its
development, there had grown a new power, the Council, the board of
his trustees. At first it had been a mere chance union of the millions
of Isbister and Warming, a mere property holding company, the creation
of two childless testators' whims, but the collective talent of its
first constitution had speedily guided it to a vast influence, until
by title deed, loan and share, under a hundred disguises and
pseudonyms it had ramified through the fabric of the American and
English States.

Wielding an enormous influence and patronage, the Council had early
assumed a political aspect; and in its development it had continually
used its wealth to tip the beam of political decisions and its
political advantages to grasp yet more and more wealth. At last the
party organisations of two hemispheres were in its hands; it became an
inner council of political control. Its last struggle was with the
tacit alliance of the great Jewish families. But these families were
linked only by a feeble sentiment, at any time inheritance might fling
a huge fragment of their resources to a minor, a woman or a fool,
marriages and legacies alienated hundreds of thousands at one
blow. The Council had no such breach in its continuity.  Steadily,
steadfastly it grew.

The original Council was not simply twelve men of exceptional ability;
they fused, it was a council of genius. It struck boldly for riches,
for political influence, and the two subserved each other. With
amazing foresight it spent great sums of money on the art of flying,
holding that invention back against an hour foreseen. It used the
patent laws, and a thousand half-legal expedients, to hamper all
investigators who refused to work with it. In the old days it never
missed a capable man. It paid his price. Its policy in those days was
vigorous---unerring, and against it as it grew steadily and
incessantly was only the chaotic selfish rule of the casually rich. In
a hundred years Graham had become almost exclusive owner of Africa, of
South America, of France, of London, of England and all its
influence---for all practical purposes, that is---a power in North
America---then the dominant power in America. The Council bought and
organised China, drilled Asia, crippled the Old World empires,
undermined them financially, fought and defeated them.

And this spreading usurpation of the world was so dexterously
performed---a proteus---hundreds of banks, companies, syndicates,
masked the Council's operations---that it was already far advanced
before common men suspected the tyranny that had come.  The Council
never hesitated, never faltered. Means of communication, land,
buildings, governments, municipalities, the territorial companies of
the tropics, every human enterprise, it gathered greedily. And it
drilled and marshalled its men, its railway police, its roadway
police, its house guards, and drain and cable guards, its hosts of
land-workers. Their unions it did not fight, but it undermined and
betrayed and bought them. It bought the world at last. And, finally,
its culminating stroke was the introduction of flying.

When the Council, in conflict with the workers in some of its huge
monopolies, did something flagrantly illegal and that without even the
ordinary civility of bribery, the old Law, alarmed for the profits of
its complaisance, looked about it for weapons. But there were no more
armies, no fighting navies; the age of Peace had' come. The only
possible war ships were the great steam vessels of the Council's
Navigation Trust. The police forces they controlled; the police of the
railways, of the ships, of their agricultural estates, their
time-keepers and order-keepers, outnumbered the neglected little
forces of the old country and municipal organisations ten to one. And
they produced flying machines. There were men alive still who could
remember the last great debate in the London House of Commons---the
legal party, the party against the Council was in a minority, but it
made a desperate fight---and how the members came crowding out upon
the terrace to see these great unfamiliar winged shapes circling
quietly overhead. The Council had soared to its power. The last sham
of a democracy that had permitted unlimited irresponsible property was
at an end.

Within one hundred and fifty years of Graham's falling asleep, his
Council had thrown off its disguises and ruled openly, supreme in his
name. Elections had become a cheerful formality, a septennial folly,
an ancient unmeaning custom; a social Parliament as inefectual as the
convocation of the Established Church in Victorian times assembled now
and then; and a legitimate King of England, disinherited, drunken and
witless, played foolishly in a second-rate music-hall. So the
magnificent dream of the nineteenth century, the noble project of
universal individual liberty and universal happiness, touched by a
disease of honour, crippled by a superstition of absolute property,
crippled by the religious feuds that had robbed the common citizens of
education, robbed men of standards of conduct, and brought the
sanctions of morality to utter contempt, had worked itself out in the
face of invention and ignoble enterprise, first to a warring
plutocracy, and finally to the rule of a supreme plutocrat. His
Council at last had ceased even to trouble to have its decrees
endorsed by the constitutional authorities, and he a motionless,
sunken, yellow-skinned figure had lain, neither dead nor living,
recognisably and immediately Master of the Earth. And awoke at last to
find himself---Master of that inheritance! Awoke to stand under the
cloudless empty sky and gaze down upon the greatness of his dominion.

To what end had he awakened? Was this city, this hive of hopeless
toilers, the final refutation of his ancient hopes? Or was the fire of
liberty, the fire that had blazed and waned in the years of his past
life, still smouldering below there? He thought of the stir and
impulse of the song of the revolution. Was that song merely the trick
of a demagogue, to be forgotten when its purpose was served? Was the
hope that still stirred within him only the memory of abandoned
things, the vestige of a creed outworn? Or had it a wider meaning, an
import interwoven with the destiny of man?  To what end had he
awakened, what was there for him to do? Humanity was spread below him
like a map.  He thought of the millions and millions of humanity
following each other unceasingly for ever out of the darkness of
non-existence into the darkness of death.  To what end? Aim there must
be, but it transcended his power of thought. He saw for the first time
clearly his own infinite littleness, saw stark and terrible the tragic
contrast of human strength and the craving of the human heart. For
that little while he knew himself for the petty accident he was, and
knew therewith the greatness of his desire. And suddenly his
littleness was intolerable, his aspiration was intolerable, and there
came to him an irresistible impulse to pray. And he prayed. He prayed
vague, incoherent, contradictory things, his soul strained up through
time and space and all the fleeting multitudinous confusion of being,
towards something---he scarcely knew what---towards something that
could comprehend his striving and endure.

A man and a woman were far below on a roof space to the southward
enjoying the freshness of the morning air. The man had brought out a
perspective glass to spy upon the Council House and he was showing her
how to use it. Presently their curiosity was satisfied, they could see
no traces of bloodshed from their position, and after a survey of the
empty sky she came round to the crow's nest. And there she saw two
little black figures, so small it was hard to believe they were men,
one who watched and one who gesticulated with hands outstretched to
the silent emptiness of Heaven.

She handed the glass to the man. He looked and exclaimed:

"I believe it is the Master. Yes. I am sure. It is the Master!"

He lowered the glass and looked at her. "Waving his hands about almost
as if he was praying. I wonder what he is up to. Worshipping the sun?
There weren't Parses in this country in his time, were there?"

He looked again. "He's stopped it now. It was a chance attitude, I
suppose." He put down the glass and became meditative. "He won't have
anything to do but enjoy himself---just enjoy himself. Ostrog will
boss the show of course. Ostrog will have to, because of leeping all
these Labourer fools in bounds. Them and their song! And got it all by
sleeping, dear eyes---just sleeping. It's a wonderful world."

\chapter{PROMINENT PEOPLE}

The state apartments of the Wind Vane Keeper would have seemed
astonishingly intricate to Graham had he entered them fresh from his
nineteenth century life, but already he was growing accustomed to the
scale of the new time. They can scarcely be described as halls and
rooms, seeing that a complicated system of arches, bridges, passages
and galleries divided and united every part of the great space. He
came out through one of the now familiar sliding panels upon a.
plateau of landing at the head of a flight of very broad and gentle
steps, with men and women far more brilliantly dressed than any he had
hitherto seen ascending and descending. From this position he looked
down a vista of intricate ornament in lustreless white and mauve and
purple, spanned by bridges that seemed wrought of porcelain and
filigree, and terminating far off in a cloudy mystery of perforated
screens.

Glancing upward, he saw tier above tier of ascending galleries with
faces looking down upon him. The air was full of the babble of
innumerable voices and of a music that descended from above, a gay and
exhilarating music whose source he never discovered.

The central aisle was thick with people, but by no means uncomfortably
crowded; altogether that assembly must have numbered many
thousands. They were brilliantly, even fantastically dressed, the men
as fancifully as the women, for the sobering influence of the Puritan
conception of dignity upon masculine dress had long since passed
away. The hair of the men, too, though it was rarely worn long, was
commonly curled in a manner that suggested the barber, and baldness
had vanished from the earth. Frizzy straight-cut masses that would
have charmed Rossetti abounded, and one gentleman, who was pointed out
to Graham under the mysterious title of an "amorist", wore his hair in
two becoming plaits a la Marguerite. The pigtail was in evidence; it
would seem that citizens of Chinese extraction were no longer ashamed
of their race. There was little uniformity of fashion apparent in the
forms of clothing worn. The more shapely men displayed their symmetry
in trunk hose, and here were puffs and slashes, and there a cloak and
there a robe. The fashions of the days of Leo the Tenth were perhaps
the prevailing influence, but the aesthetic conceptions of the far
east were also patent. Masculine embonpoint, which, in Victorian
times, would have been subjected to the tightly buttoned perils, the
ruthless exaggeration of tight-legged tight-armed evening dress, now
formed but the basis of a wealth of dignity and drooping folds.
Graceful slenderness abounded' also. To Graham, a typically stiff man
from a typically stiff period, not only did these men seem altogether
too graceful in person, but altogether too expressive in their vividly
expressive faces. They gesticulated, they expressed surprise,
interest, amusement, above all, they expressed the emotions excited in
their minds by the ladies about them with astonishing frankness. Even
at the first glance it was evident that women were in a great
majority.

The ladies in the company of these gentlemen displayed in dress,
bearing and manner alike, less emphasis and more intricacy. Some
affected a classical simplicity of robing and subtlety of fold, after
the fashion of the First French Empire, and flashed conquering arms
and shoulders as Graham passed.  Others had closely-fitting dresses
without seam or belt at the waist, sometimes with long folds falling
from the shoulders. The delightful confidences of evening dress had
not been diminished by the passage of two centuries.

Everyone's movements seemed graceful. Graham remarked to Lincoln that
he saw men as Raphael's cartoons walking, and Lincoln told him that
the attainment of an appropriate set of gestures was part of every
rich person's education. The Master's entry was greeted with a sort of
tittering applause, but these people showed their distinguished
manners by not crowding upon him nor annoying him by any persistent
scrutiny, as he descended the steps towards the floor of the aisle.

He had already learnt from Lincoln that these were the leaders of
existing London society; almost every person there that night was
either a powerful official or the immediate connexion of a powerful
official.  Many had returned from the European Pleasure Cities
expressly to welcome him. The aeronautic authorities, whose defection
had played a part in the overthrow of the Council only second to
Graham's were very prominent, and so, too, was the Wind Vane Control.
Amongst others there were several of the more prominent officers of
the Food Trust; the controller of the European Piggeries had a
particularly melancholy and interesting countenance and a daintily
cynical manner. A bishop in full canonicals passed athwart Graham's
vision, conversing with a gentleman dressed exactly like the
traditional Chaucer, including even the laurel wreath.

"Who is that?" he asked almost involuntarily

"The Bishop of London," said Lincoln.

"No---the other, I mean."

"Poet Laureate."

"You still?"

"He doesn't make poetry, of course. He's a cousin of Wotton---one of
the Councillors. But he's one of the Red Rose Royalists---a delightful
club---and they keep up the tradition of these things."

"Asano told me there was a King."

"The King doesn't belong. They had to expel him.  It's the Stuart
blood, I suppose; but really---"

"Too much?"

"Far too much."

Graham did not quite follow all this, but it seemed part of the
general inversion of the new age. He bowed condescendingly to his
first introduction. It was evident that subtle distinctions of class
prevailed even in this assembly, that only to a small proportion of
the guests, to an inner group, did Lincoln consider it appropriate to
introduce him. This first introduction was the Master Aeronaut, a man
whose suntanned face contrasted oddly with the delicate complexions
about him. Just at present his critical defection from the Council
made him a very important person indeed.

His manner contrasted very favourably, according to Graham's ideas,
with the general bearing. He made a few commonplace remarks,
assurances of loyalty and frank inquiries about the Master's health.
His manner was breezy, his accent lacked the easy staccato of
latter-day English. He made it admirably clear to Graham that he was a
bluff "aerial dog"---he used that phrase---that there was no nonsense
about him, that he was a thoroughly manly fellow and old-fashioned at
that, that he didn't profess to know much, and that what he did not
know was not worth knowing He made a manly bow, ostentatiously free
from obsequiousness and passed.

"I am glad to see that type endures," said Graham

"Phonographs and kinematographs," said Lincoln, a little
spitefully. "He has studied from the life."  Graham glanced at the
burly form again. It was oddly reminiscent.

"As a matter of fact we bought him," said Lincoln.  "Partly. And
partly he was afraid of Ostrog Everything rested with him."

He turned sharply to introduce the Surveyor-General of the Public
School Trust. This person was a willowy figure in a blue-grey academic
gown, he beamed down upon Graham through \emph{pince-nez} of a
Victorian pattern, and illustrated his remarks by gestures of a
beautifully manicured hand. Graham was immediately interested in this
gentleman's functions, and asked him a number of singularly direct
questions.  The Surveyor-General seemed quietly amused at the Master's
fundamental bluntness. He was a little vague as to the monopoly of
education his Company possessed; it was done by contract with the
syndicate that ran the numerous London Municipalities, but he waxed
enthusiastic over educational progress since the Victorian times. "We
have conquered Cram," he said, "completely conquered Cram---there is
not an examination left in the world. Aren't you glad?"

"How do you get the work done?" asked Graham.

"We make it attractive---as attractive as possible.  And if it does
not attract then---we let it go. We cover an immense field."

He proceeded to details, and they had a lengthy conversation. The
Surveyor-General mentioned the names of Pestalozzi and Froebel with
profound respect, although he displayed no intimacy with their
epoch-making works. Graham learnt that University Extension still
existed in a modified form. "There is a certain type of girl, for
example," said the Surveyor- General, dilating with a sense of his
usefulness, "with a perfect passion for severe studies---when they are
not too difficult you know. We cater for them by the thousand. At this
moment," he said with a Napoleonic touch, "nearly five hundred
phonographs are lecturing in different parts of London on the
influence exercised by Plato and Swift on the love affairs of Shelley,
Hazlitt, and Burns. And afterwards they write essays on the lectures,
and the names in order of merit are put in conspicuous places. You see
how your little germ has grown? The illiterate middle-class of your
days has quite passed away."

"About the public elementary schools," said Graham. "Do you control
them?"

The Surveyor-General did, "entirely." Now, Graham, in his later
democratic days, had taken a keen interest in these and his
questioning quickened. Certain casual phrases that had fallen from the
old man with whom he had talked in the darkness recurred to him. The
Surveyor-General, in effect, endorsed the old man's words. "We have
abolished Cram," he said, a phrase Graham was beginning to interpret
as the abolition of all sustained work. The Surveyor- General became
sentimental. "We try and make the elementary schools very pleasant for
the little children. They will have to work so soon. Just a few simple
principles---obedience---industry."

"You teach them very little?"

"Why should we? It only leads to trouble and discontent.  We amuse
them. Even as it is---there are troubles---agitations. Where the
labourers get the ideas, one cannot tell. They tell one another. There
are socialistic dreams---anarchy even! Agitators will get to work
among them. I take it---I have always taken it---that my foremost duty
is to fight against popular discontent. Why should people be made
unhappy?"

"I wonder," said Graham thoughtfully. "But there are a great many
things I want to know."

Lincoln, who had stood watching Graham's face throughout the
conversation, intervened. "There are others," he said in an undertone.

The Surveyor-General of schools gesticulated him- self
away. "Perhaps," said Lincoln, intercepting a casual glance, " you
would like to know some of these ladies?"

The daughter of the Manager of the Piggeries of the European Food
Trust was a particularly charming little person with red hair and
animated blue eyes.  Lincoln left him awhile to converse with her, and
she displayed herself as quite an enthusiast for the "dear old times,"
as she called them, that had seen the beginning of his trance. As she
talked she smiled, and her eyes smiled in a manner that demanded
reciprocity.

"I have tried," she said, "countless times---to imagine those old
romantic days. And to you they are memories. How strange and crowded
the world must seem to you! I have seen photographs and pictures of
the old times, the little isolated houses built of bricks made out of
burnt mud and all black with soot from your fires, the railway
bridges, the simple advertisements, the solemn savage Puritanical men
in strange black coats and those tall hats of theirs, iron railway
trains on iron bridges overhead, horses and cattle, and even dogs
running half wild about the streets. And suddenly, you have come into
this!"

"Into this," said Graham.

"Out of your life---out of all that was familiar."

"The old life was not a happy one," said Graham.  "I do not regret
that."

She looked at him quickly. There was a brief pause.  She sighed
encouragingly. "No? "

"No," said Graham. "It was a little life---and unmeaning. But
this---. We thought the world complex and crowded and civilised
enough. Yet I see---although in this world I am barely four days
old---looking back on my own time, that it was a queer, barbaric
time---the mere beginning of this new order.  The mere beginning of
this new order. You will find it hard to understand how little I
know."

" You may ask me what you like," she said, smiling at him.

"Then tell me who these people are. I'm still very much in the dark
about them. It's puzzling. Are there any Generals? "

"Men in hats and feathers?"

"Of course not. No. I suppose they are the men who control the great
public businesses. Who is that distinguished looking man?"

"That? He's a most important officer. That is Morden. He is managing
director of the Antibilious Pill Company. I have heard that his
workers sometimes turn out a myriad myriad pills a day in the
twenty-four hours. Fancy a myriad myriad!"

"A myriad myriad. No wonder he looks proud," said Graham. "Pills! What
a wonderful time it is!  That man in purple?"

"He is not quite one of the inner circle, you know.  But we like
him. He is really clever and very amusing.  He is one of the heads of
the Medical Faculty of our London University. All medical men, you
know, are shareholders in the Medical Faculty Company, and wear that
purple. You have to be---to be qualified.  But of course, people who
are paid' by fees for doing something---" She smiled away the social
pretensions of all such people.

"Are any of your great artists or authors here?"

"No authors. They are mostly such queer people---and so preoccupied
about themselves. And they quarrel so dreadfully! They will fight,
some of them, for precedence on staircases! Dreadful isn't it? But I
think Wraysbury, the fashionable capillotomist, is here. From Capri."

"Capillotomist," said Graham. "Ah! I remember.  An artist! Why not?"

"We have to cultivate him," she said apologetically.  "Our heads are
in his hands." She smiled.

Graham hesitated at the invited compliment, but his glance was
expressive. "Have the arts grown with the rest of civilised things?"
he said. "Who are your great painters?"

She looked at him doubtfully. Then laughed.  "For a moment," she said,
"I thought you meant---" She laughed again. "You mean, of course,
those good men you used to think so much of because they could cover
great spaces of canvas with oil-colours?  Great oblongs. And people
used to put the things in gilt frames and hang them up in rows in
their square rooms. We haven't any. People grew tired of that sort of
thing."

"But what did you think I meant?"

She put a finger significantly on a cheek whose glow was above
suspicion, and smiled and looked very arch and pretty and
inviting. "And here," and she indicated her eyelid.

Graham had an adventurous moment. Then a grotesque memory of a picture
he had somewhere seen of Uncle Toby and the Widow flashed across his
mind. An archaic shame came upon him. He became acutely aware that he
was visible to a great number of interested people. "I see," he
remarked inadequately. He turned awkwardly away from her, fascinating
facility. He looked about him to meet a number of eyes that
immediately occupied themselves with other things. Possibly he
coloured a little.  "Who is that talking with the lady in saffron?" he
asked, avoiding her eyes.

The person in question he learnt was one of the great organisers of
the American theatres just fresh from a gigantic production at
Mexico. His face reminded Graham of a bust of Caligula. Another
striking looking man was the Black Labour Master.  The phrase at the
time made no deep impression, but afterwards it recurred;---the Black
Labour Master?  The little lady, in no degree embarrassed, pointed out
to him a charming little woman as one of the subsidiary wives of the
Anglican Bishop of London. She added encomiums on the episcopal
courage---hitherto there had been a rule of clerical monogamy---"
neither a natural nor an expedient condition of things. Why should the
natural development of the affections be dwarfed and restricted
because a man is a priest?"

"And, bye the bye," she added, "are you an Anglican?" Graham was on
the verge of hesitating inquiries about the status of a "subsidiary
wife," apparently an euphemistic phrase, when Lincoln's return broke
off this very suggestive and interesting conversation.  They crossed
the aisle to where a tall man in crimson, and two charming persons in
Burmese costume (as it seemed to him) awaited him diffidently.  From
their civilities he passed to other presentations.

In a little while his multitudinous impressions began to organise
themselves into a general effect. At first the glitter of the
gathering had raised all the democrat in Graham; he had felt hostile
and satirical. But it is not in human nature to resist an atmosphere
of courteous regard. Soon the music, the light, the play of colours,
the shining arms and shoulders about him, the touch of hands, the
transient interest of smiling faces, the frothing sound of skillfully
modulated voices, the atmosphere of compliment, interest and respect,
had woven together into a fabric of indisputable pleasure.  Graham for
a time forgot his spacious resolutions.  He gave way insensibly to the
intoxication of me position that was conceded him, his manner became
less conscious, more convincingly regal, his feet walked assuredly,
the black robe fell with a bolder fold and pride ennobled his
voice. After all this was a brilliant interesting world.

His glance went approvingly over the shifting colours of the people,
it rested here and there in kindly criticism upon a face. Presently it
occurred to him that he owed some apology to the charming little
person with the red hair and blue eyes. He felt guilty of a clumsy
snub. It was not princely to ignore her advances, even if his policy
necessitated their rejection.  He wondered if he should see her
again. And suddenly a little thing touched all the glamour of this
brilliant gathering and changed its quality.

He looked up and saw passing across a bridge of porcelain and looking
down upon him, a face that was almost immediately hidden, the face of
the girl he had seen overnight in the little room beyond the theatre
after his escape from the Council. And she was looking with much the
same expression of curious expectation, of uncertain intentness, upon
his proceedings.  For the moment he did not remember when he had seen
her, and then with recognition came a vague memory of the stirring
emotions of their first encounter. But the dancing web of melody about
him kept the air of that great marching song from his memory.

The lady to whom he was talking repeated her remark, and Graham
recalled himself to the quasiregal flirtation upon which he was
engaged.

But from that moment a vague restlessness, a feeling that grew to
dissatisfaction, came into his mind.  He was troubled as if by some
half forgotten duty, by the sense of things important slipping from
him amidst this light and brilliance. The attraction that these bright
ladies who crowded about him were beginning to exercise ceased. He no
longer made vague and clumsy responses to the subtly amorous advances
that he was now assured were being made to him, and his eyes wandered
for another sight of that face that had appealed so strongly to his
sense of beauty. But he did not see her again until he was awaiting
Lincoln's return to leave this assembly. In answer to his request
Lincoln had promised that an attempt should be made to fly that
afternoon, if the weather permitted. He had gone to make certain
necessary arrangements.

Graham was in one of the upper galleries in conversation with a
bright-eyed lady on the subject of Eadhamite---the subject was his
choice and not hers.  He had interrupted her warm assurances of
personal devotion with a matter-of-fact inquiry. He found her, as he
had already found several other latter-day women that night, less well
informed than charming.  Suddenly, struggling against the eddying
drift of nearer melody, the song of the Revolt, the great song he had
heard in the Hall, hoarse and massive, came beating down to him.

He glanced up startled, and perceived above him an
\emph{oeil de boeuf} through which this song had come, and
beyond, the upper courses of cable, the blue haze, and the pendant
fabric of the lights of the public ways. He heard the song break into
a tumult of voices and cease.  But now he perceived quite clearly the
drone and tumult of the moving platforms and a murmur of many
people. He had a vague persuasion that he could not account for, a
sort of instinctive feeling that outside in the ways a huge crowd'
must be watching this place in which their Master amused himself. He
wondered what they might be thinking.

Though the song had stopped so abruptly, though the special music of
this gathering reasserted itself, the motif of the marching song, once
it had begun, lingered in his mind.

The bright-eyed lady was still struggling with the mysteries of
Eadhamite when he perceived the girl he had seen in the theatre
again. She was coming now along the gallery towards him; he saw her
first before she saw him. She was dressed in a faintly luminous grey,
her dark hair about her brows was like a cloud, and as he saw her the
cold light from the circular opening into the ways fell upon her
downcast face.

The lady in trouble about the Eadhamite saw the change in his
expression, and grasped her opportunity to escape.  Would you care to
know that girl, Sire?"  she asked boldly. "She is Helen Wotton---a
niece of Ostrog's. She knows a great many serious things.  She is one
of the most serious persons alive. I am sure you will like her."

In another moment Graham was talking to the girl, and the bright-eyed
lady had fluttered away.

"I remember you quite well," said Graham. "You were in that little
room. When all the people were singing and beating time with their
feet. Before I walked across the Hall."

Her momentary embarrassment passed. She looked up at him, and her face
was steady. "It was wonderful," she said, hesitated, and spoke with a
sudden effort. "All those people would have died for you,
Sire. Countless people did die for you that night."

Her face glowed. She glanced swiftly aside to see that no other heard
her words.

Lincoln appeared some way off along the gallery, making his way
through the press towards them. She saw him and turned to Graham
strangely eager, with a swift change to confidence and
intimacy. "Sire," she said quickly, "I cannot tell you now and
here. But the common people are very unhappy; they are
oppressed---they are misgoverned. Do not forget the people, who faced
death---death that you might live."

"I know nothing---" began Graham.

"I cannot tell you now."

Lincoln's face appeared close to them. He bowed an apology to the
girl.

"You find the new world pleasant, Sire?" asked Lincoln, with smiling
deference, and indicating the space and splendour of the gathering by
one comprehensive gesture." At any rate, you find it changed."

"Yes," said Graham, "changed. And yet, after all, not so greatly
changed."

"Wait till you are in the air," said Lincoln. "The wind has fallen;
even now an aeropile awaits you."

The girl's attitude awaited dismissal.

Graham glanced at her face, was on the verge of a question, found a
warning in her expression, bowed to her and turned to accompany
Lincoln.


\chapter{THE AEROPHILE}

For a while, as Graham went through the passages of the Wind-Vane
offices with Lincoln, he was preoccupied. But, by an effort, he
attended to the things which Lincoln was saying. Soon his
preoccupation vanished. Lincoln was talking of flying. Graham had a
strong desire to know more of this new human attainment. He began to
ply Lincoln with questions.  He had followed the crude beginnings of
aerial navigation very keenly in his previous life; he was delighted
to find the familiar names of Maxim and Pilcher, Langley and Chanute,
and, above all, of the aerial proto-martyr Lillienthal, still honoured
by men.

Even during his previous life two lines of investigation had pointed
clearly to two distinct types of contrivance as possible, and both of
these had been realised. On the one hand was the great engine-driven
aeroplane, a double row of horizontal floats with a big aerial screw
behind, and on the other the nimbler aeropile. The aeroplanes flew
safely only in a calm or moderate wind, and sudden storms, occurrences
that were now accurately predictable, rendered them for all practical
purposes useless. They were built of enormous size---the usual stretch
of wing being six hundred feet or more, and the length of the fabric a
thousand feet. They were for passenger traffic alone. The lightly
swung car they carried was from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet
in length.  It Was hung in a peculiar manner in order to minimise the
complex vibration that even a moderate wind produced, and for the same
reason the little seats within the car---each passenger remained
seated during the voyage---were slung with great freedom of movement.
The starting of the mechanism was only possible from a gigantic car on
the rail of a specially constructed stage. Graham had seen these vast
stages, the flying stages, from the crow's nest very well. Six huge
blank areas they were, with a giant "carrier" stage on each.

The choice of descent was equally circumscribed, an accurately plane
surface being needed for safe grounding.  Apart from the destruction
that would have been caused by the descent of this great expanse of
sail and metal, and the impossibility of its rising again, the
concussion of an irregular surface, a tree-set hillside, for instance,
or an embankment, would be sufficient to pierce or damage the
framework, to smash the ribs of the body, and perhaps kill those
aboard.

At first Graham felt disappointed with these cumbersome contrivances,
but he speedily grasped the fact that smaller machines would have been
unremunerative, for the simple reason that their carrying power would
be disproportionately diminished with deminished size. Moreover, the
huge size of these things enabled them---and it was a consideration of
primary importance---to traverse the air at enormous speeds, and so
run no risks of unanticipated weather. The briefest journey performed,
that from London to Paris, took about three-quarters of an hour, but
the velocity attained was not high; the leap to New York occupied
about two hours, and by timing oneself carefully at the intermediate
stations it was possible in quiet weather to go around the world in a
day.

The little aeropiles (as for no particular reason they were
distinctively called) were of an altogether different type. Several of
these were going to and fro in the air. They were designed to carry
only one or two persons, and their manufacture and maintenance was so
costly as to render them the monopoly of the richer sort of
people. Their sails, which were brilliantly coloured, consisted only
of two pairs of lateral air floats in the same plane, and of a screw
behind. Their small size rendered a descent in any open space neither
difficult nor disagreeable, and it was possible to attach pneumatic
wheels or even the ordinary motors for terrestrial tragic to them, and
so carry them to a convenient starting place. They required a special
sort of swift car to throw them into the air, but such a car was
efficient in any open place clear of high buildings or trees. Human
aeronautics, Graham perceived, were evidently still a long way behind
the instinctive gift of the albatross or the fly-catcher. One great
influence that might have brought the aeropile to a more rapid
perfection had been withheld; these inventions had never been used in
warfare. The last great international struggle had occurred before the
usurpation of the Council.

The Flying Stages of London were collected together in an irregular
crescent on the southern side of the river. They formed three groups
of two each and retained the names of ancient suburban hills or
villages. They were named in order, Roehampton, Wimhledon Park,
Streatham, Norwood, Blackheath, and Shooter's Hill. They were uniform
structures rising high above the general roof surfaces. Each was about
four thousand yards long and a thousand broad, and constructed of the
compound of aluminium and iron that had replaced iron in
architecture. Their higher tiers formed an openwork of girders through
which lifts and staircases ascended. The upper surface was a uniform
expanse, with portions---the starting carriers---that could be raised
and were then able to run on very slightly inclined rails to the end
of the fabric. Save for any aeropiles or aeroplanes that were in port
these open surfaces were kept clear for arrivals.

During the adjustment of the aeroplanes it was the custom for
passengers to wait in the system of theatres, restaurants, news-rooms,
and places of pleasure and indulgence of various sorts that interwove
with the prosperous shops below. This portion of London was in
consequence commonly the gayest of all its districts, with something
of the meretricious gaiety of a seaport or city of hotels. And for
those who took a more serious view of aeronautics, the religious
quarters had flung out an attractive colony of devotional chapels,
while a host of brilliant medical establishments competed to supply
physical preparatives for the journey. At various levels through the
mass of chambers and passages beneath these, ran, in addition to the
main moving ways of the city which laced and gathered here, a complex
system of special passages and lifts and slides, for the convenient
interchange of people and luggage between stage and stage. And a
distinctive feature of the architecture of this section was the
ostentatious massiveness of the metal piers and girders that
everywhere broke the vistas and spanned the halls and passages,
crowding and twining up to meet the weight of the stages and the
weighty impact of the aeroplanes overhead.

Graham went to the flying stages by the public ways.  He was
accompanied by Asano, his Japanese attendant.  Lincoln was called away
by Ostrog, who was busy with his administrative concerns. A strong
guard of the Wind-Vane police awaited the Master outside the Wind-Vane
offices, and they cleared a space for him on the upper moving
platform. His passage to the flying stages was unexpected,
nevertheless a considerable crowd gathered and followed him to his
destination. As he went along, he could hear the people shouting his
name, and saw numberless men and women and children in blue come
swarming up the staircases in the central path, gesticulating and
shouting. He could not hear what they shouted.  He was struck again by
the evident existence of a vulgar dialect among the poor of the
city. When at last he descended, his guards were immediately
surrounded by a dense excited crowd. Afterwards it occurred to him
that some had attempted to reach him with petitions. His guards
cleared a passage for him with difficulty.

He found an aeropile in charge of an aeronaut awaiting him on the
westward stage. Seen close this mechanism was no longer small. As it
lay on its launching carrier upon the wide expanse of the flying
stage, its aluminium body skeleton was as big as the hull of a
twenty-ton yacht. Its lateral supporting sails braced and stayed with
metal nerves almost like the nerves of a bee's wing, and made of some
sort of glassy artificial membrane, cast their shadow over many
hundreds of square yards. The chairs for the engineer and his
passenger hung free to swing by a complex tackle, within the
protecting ribs of the frame and well abaft the middle. The
passenger's chair was protected by a wind-guard and guarded about with
metallic rods carrying air cushions. It could, if desired, be
completely closed in, but Graham was anxious for novel experiences,
and desired that it should be left open. The aeronaut sat behind a
glass that sheltered his face. The passenger could secure himself
firmly in his seat, and this was almost unavoidable on landing, or he
could move along by means of a little rail and rod to a locker at the
stem of the machine, where his personal luggage, his wraps and
restoratives were placed, and which also with the seats, served as a
makeweight to the parts of the central engine that projected to the
propeller at the stern.

The engine was very simple in appearance. Asano, pointing out the
parts of this apparatus to him, told him that, like the gas-engine of
Victorian days, it was of the explosive type, burning a small drop of
a substance called "fomile" at each stroke. It consisted simply of
reservoir and piston about the long fluted crank of the propeller
shaft. So much Graham saw of the machine.

The flying stage about him was empty save for Asano and their suite of
attendants. Directed by the aeronaut he placed himself in his seat. He
then drank a mixture containing ergot---a dose, he learnt, invariably
administered to those about to fly, and designed to counteract the
possible effect of diminished air pressure upon the system. Having
done so, he declared himself ready for the journey. Asano took the
empty glass from him, stepped through the bars of the hull, and stood
below on the stage waving his hand.  Suddenly he seemed to slide along
the stage to the right and vanish.

The engine was beating, the propeller spinning, and for a second the
stage and the buildings beyond were gliding swiftly and horizontally
past Graham's eye; then these things seemed to tilt up abruptly. He
gripped the little rods on either side of him instinctively. He felt
himself moving upward, heard the air whistle over the top of the wind
screen. The propeller screw moved round with powerful rhythmic
impulses---one, two, three, pause; one, two, three---which the
engineer controlled very delicately. The machine began a quivering
vibration that continued throughout the flight, and the roof areas
seemed running away to starboard very quickly and growing rapidly
smaller. He looked from the face of the engineer through the ribs of
the machine. Looking sideways, there was nothing very startling in
what he saw---a rapid funicular railway might have given the same
sensations. He recognised the Council House and the Highgate
Ridge. And then he looked straight down between his feet.

For a moment physical terror possessed him, a passionate sense of
insecurity. He held tight. For a second or so he could not lift his
eyes. Some hundred feet or more sheer below him was one of the big
windvanes of south-west London, and beyond it the southernmost flying
stage crowded with little black dots.  These things seemed to be
falling away from him.  For a second he had an impulse to pursue the
earth.  He set his teeth, he lifted his eyes by a muscular effort, and
the moment of panic passed.

He remained for a space with his teeth set hard, his eyes staring into
the sky. Throb, throb, throb---beat, went the engine; throb, throb,
throb,---beat.  He gripped his bars tightly, glanced at the aeronaut,
and saw a smile upon his sun-tanned face. He smiled in
return---perhaps a little artificially. "A little strange at first,"
he shouted before he recalled his dignity. But he dared not look down
again for some time. He stared over the aeronaut's head to where a rim
of vague blue horizon crept up the sky. For a little while he could'
not banish the thought of possible accidents from his mind. Throb,
throb, throb---beat; suppose some trivial screw went wrong in that
supporting engine! Suppose---! He made a grim effort to dismiss all
such suppositions. After a while they did at least abandon the
foreground of his thoughts. And up he went steadily, higher and higher
into the clear air.

Once the mental shock of moving unsupported through the air was over,
his sensations ceased to be unpleasant, became very speedily
pleasurable. He had been warned of air sickness. But he found the
pulsating movement of the aeropile as it drove up the faint south-west
breeze was very little in excess of the pitching of a boat head on to
broad rollers in a moderate gale, and he was constitutionally a good
sailor. And the keenness of the more rarefied air into which they
ascended produced a sense of lightness and exhilaration.  He looked up
and saw the blue sky above fretted with cirrus clouds. His eye came
cautiously down through the ribs and bars to a shining flight of white
birds that hung in the lower sky. For a space he watched these. Then
going lower and less apprehensively, he saw the slender figure of the
Wind-Vane keeper's crow's nest shining golden in the sunlight and
growing smaller every moment. As his eye fell with more confidence
now, there came a blue line of hills, and then London, already to
leeward, an intricate space of roofing. Its near edge came sharp and
clear, and banished his last apprehensions in a shock of surprise.
For the boundary of London was like a wall, like a cliff, a steep fall
of three or four hundred feet, a frontage broken only by terraces here
and there, a complex decorative facade.

That gradual passage of town into country through an extensive sponge
of suburbs, which was so characteristic a feature of the great cities
of the nineteenth century, existed no longer. Nothing remained of it
but a waste of ruins here, variegated and dense with thickets of the
heterogeneous growths that had once adorned the gardens of the belt,
interspersed among levelled brown patches of sown ground, and verdant
stretches of winter greens. The latter even spread among the vestiges
of houses. But for the most part the reefs and skerries of ruins, the
wreckage of suburban villas, stood among their streets and roads,
queer islands amidst the levelled expanses of green and brown,
abandoned indeed by the inhabitants years since, but too substantial,
it seemed', to be cleared out of the way of the wholesale
horticultural mechanisms of the time.

The vegetation of this waste undulated and frothed amidst the
countless cells of crumbling house walls, and broke along the foot of
the city wall in a surf of bramble and holly and ivy and teazle and
tall grasses.  Here and there gaudy pleasure palaces towered amidst
the puny remains of Victorian times, and cable ways slanted to them
from the city. That winter day they seemed deserted. Deserted, too,
were the artificial gardens among the ruins. The city limits were
indeed as sharply defined as in the ancient days when the gates were
shut at nightfall and the robber foreman prowled to the very walls. A
huge semi-circular throat poured out a vigorous traffic upon the
Eadhamite Bath Road. So the first prospect of the world beyond the
city flashed on Graham, and dwindled. And when at last he could look
vertically downward again, he saw below him the vegetable fields of
the Thames valley---innumerable minute oblongs of ruddy brown,
intersected by shining threads, the sewage ditches.

His exhilaration increased rapidly, became a sort of intoxication. He
found himself drawing deep breaths of air, laughing aloud, desiring to
shout. After a time that desire became too strong for him, and he
shouted.

The machine had now risen as high as was customary with aeropiles, and
they began to curve about towards the south. Steering, Graham
perceived, was effected by the opening or closing of one or two thin
strips of membrane in one or other of the otherwise rigid wings, and
by the movement of the whole engine backward or forward along its
supports. The aeronaut set the engine gliding slowly forward along its
rail and opened the valve of the leeward wing until the stem of the
aeropile was horizontal and pointing southward. And in that direction
they drove with a slight list to leeward, and with a slow alternation
of movement, first a short, sharp ascent and' then a long downward
glide that was very swift and pleasing.  During these downward glides
the propellor was inactive altogether. These ascents gave Graham a
glorious sense of successful effort; the descents through the rarefied
air were beyond all experience.  He wanted never to leave the upper
air again.

For a time he was intent upon the minute details of the landscape that
ran swiftly northward beneath him.  Its minute, clear detail pleased
him exceedingly. He was impressed by the ruin of the houses that had
once dotted the country, by the vast treeless expanse of country from
which all farms and villages had gone, save for crumbling ruins. He
had known the thing was so, but seeing it so was an altogether
different matter. He tried to make out places he had known within the
hollow basin of the world below, but at first he could distinguish no
data now that the Thames valley was left behind. Soon, however, they
were driving over a sharp chalk hill that he recognised as the
Guildford Hog's Back, because of the familiar outline of the gorge at
its eastward end, and because of the ruins of the town that rose
steeply on either lip of this gorge.  And from that he made out other
points, Leith Hill, the sandy wastes of Aldershot, and so forth. The
Downs escarpment was set with gigantic slow-moving wind-wheels. Save
where the broad Eadhamite Portsmouth Road, thickly dotted with rushing
shapes, followed the course of the old railway, the gorge of the Wey
was choked with thickets.

The whole expanse of the Downs escarpment, so far as the grey haze
permitted him to see, was set with wind-wheels to which the largest of
the city was but a younger brother. They stirred with a stately motion
before the south-west wind. And here and there were patches dotted
with the sheep of the British Food Trust, and here and there a mounted
shepherd made a spot of black. Then rushing under the stern of the
aeropile came the Wealden Heights, the line of Hindhead, Pitch Hill,
and Leith Hill, with a second row of wind-wheels that seemed striving
to rob the downland whirlers of their share of breeze. The purple
heather was speckled with yellow gorse, and on the further side a
drove of black oxen stampeded before a couple of mounted men. Swiftly
these swept behind, and dwindled and lost colour, and became scarce
moving specks that were swallowed up in haze.

And when these had vanished in the distance Graham heard a peewit
wailing close at hand. He perceived he was now above the South Downs,
and staring over his shoulder saw the battlements of Portsmouth
Landing Stage towering over the ridge of Portsdown Hill. In another
moment there came into sight a spread of shipping like floating
cities, the little white cliffs of the Needles dwarfed and sunlit, and
the grey and glittering waters of the narrow sea. They seemed to leap
the Solent in a moment, and in a few seconds the Isle of Wight was
running past, and then beneath him spread a wider and wide extent of
sea, here purple with the shadow of a cloud, here grey, here a
burnished mirror, and here a spread of cloudy greenish blue. The Isle
of Wight grew smaller and smaller. In a few more minutes a strip of
grey haze detached itself from other strips that were clouds,
descended out of the sky and became a coast- line---sunlit and
pleasant---the coast of northern France. It rose, it took colour,
became definite and detailed, and the counterpart of the Downland of
England was speeding by below.

In a little time, as it seemed, Paris came above the horizon, and hung
there for a space, and sank out of sight again as the aeropile circled
about to the north again. But he perceived the Eiffel Tower still
standing, and beside it a huge dome surmounted by a pinpoint
Colossus. And he perceived, too, though he did not understand it at
the time, a slanting drift of smoke.  The aeronaut said something
about "trouble in the underways," that Graham did not heed at the
time.  But he marked the minarets and towers and slender masses that
streamed skyward above the city windvanes, and knew that in the matter
of grace at least Paris still kept in front of her larger rival. And
even as he looked a pale blue shape ascended very swiftly from the
city like a dead leaf driving up before a gale.  It curved round and
soared towards them growing rapidly larger and larger. The aeronaut
was saying something. "What?" said Graham, loath to take his eyes from
this. "Aeroplane, Sire," bawled the aeronaut pointing.

They rose and curved about northward as it drew nearer. Nearer it came
and nearer, larger and larger.  The throb, throb, throb---beat, of the
aeropile's flight, that had seemed so potent and so swift, suddenly
appeared slow by comparison with this tremendous rush. How great the
monster seemed, how swift and steady! It passed quite closely beneath
them, driving along silently, a vast spread of wirenetted translucent
wings, a thing alive. Graham had a momentary glimpse of the rows and
rows of wrapped-up passengers, slung in their little cradles behind
wind-screens, of a white-clothed engineer crawling against the gale
along a ladder way, of spouting engines beating together, of the
whirling wind screw, and of a wide waste of wing. He exulted in the
sight.  And in an instant the thing had passed.

It rose slightly and their own little wings swayed in the rush of its
flight. It fell and grew smaller.  Scarcely had they moved, as it
seemed, before it was again only a flat blue thing that dwindled in
the sky.  This was the aeroplane that went to and fro between London
and Paris. In fair weather and in peaceful times it came and went four
times a day.

They beat across the Channel, slowly as it seemed now, to Graham's
enlarged ideas, and Beachy Head rose greyly to the left of them.

"Land," called the aeronaut, his voice small against the whistling of
the air over the wind-screen.

"Not yet," bawled Graham, laughing. "Not land yet. I want to learn
more of this machine."

"I meant---" said the aeronaut.

"I want to learn more of this machine," repeated Graham.

"I'm coming to you," he said, and had flung himself free of his chair
and taken a step along the guarded rail between them. He stopped for a
moment, and his colour changed and his hands tightened. Another step
and he was clinging close to the aeronaut. He felt a weight on his
shoulder, the pressure of the air.  His hat was a whirling speck
behind. The wind came in gusts over his wind-screen and blew his hair
in streamers past his cheek. The aeronaut made some hasty adjustments
for the shifting of the centres of gravity and pressure.

"I want to have these things explained," said Graham." What do you do
when you move that engine forward?"

The aeronaut hesitated. Then he answered, "They are complex, Sire."

"I don't mind," shouted Graham. "I don't mind."

There was a moment's pause." Aeronautics is the secret---the
privilege---"

"I know. But I'm the Master, and I mean to know." He laughed, full of
this novel realisation of power that was his gift from the upper air.

The aeropile curved about, and the keen fresh wind cut across Graham's
face and his garment lugged at his body as the stem pointed round to
the west. The two men looked into each other's eyes.

"Sire, there are rules---"

"Not where I am concerned," said Graham. "You seem to forget."

The aeronaut scrutinised his face. "No," he said.  "I do not forget,
Sire. But in all the earth---no man who is not a sworn aeronaut---has
ever a chance.  They come as passengers---"

"I have heard something of the sort. But I'm not going to argue these
points. Do you know why I have slept two hundred years? To fly!"

"Sire," said the aeronaut, "the rules---if I break the rules---"

Graham waved the penalties aside.

"Then if you will watch me---"

"No," said Graham, swaying and gripping tight as the machine lifted
its nose again for an ascent.  "That's not my game. I want to do it
myself. Do it myself if I smash for it! No! I will. See. I am going to
clamber by this to come and share your seat. Steady! I mean to fly of
my own accord if I smash at the end of it. I will have something to
pay for my sleep. Of all other things---. In my past it was my dream
to fly. Now---keep your balance."

" A dozen spies are watching me, Sire!"

Graham's temper was at end. Perhaps he chose it should be. He
swore. He swung himself round the intervening mass of levers and the
aeropile swayed.

"Am I Master of the earth?" he said. "Or is your Society? Now. Take
your hands off those levers, and hold my wrists. Yes---so. And now,
how do we turn her nose down to the glide? "

"Sire," said the aeronaut.

"What is it? "

"You will protect me? "

"Lord! Yes! If I have to burn London. Now!"

And with that promise Graham bought his first lesson in aerial
navigation. "It's clearly to your advantage, this journey," he said
with a loud laugh---for the air was like strong wine---"to teach me
quickly and well.  Do I pull this? Ah! So! Hullo!"

"Back, Sire! Back! "

"Back---right. One---two---three---good God! Ah! Up she goes! But this
is living!"

And now the machine began to dance the strangest figures in the
air. Now it would sweep round a spiral of scarcely a hundred yards
diameter, now it would rush up into the air and swoop down again,
steeply, swiftly, falling like a hawk, to recover in a rushing loop
that swept it high again. In one of these descents it seemed driving
straight at the drifting park of balloons in the southeast, and only
curved about and cleared them by a sudden recovery of dexterity. The
extraordinary swiftness and smoothness of the motion, the
extraordinary effect of the rarefied air upon his constitution, threw
Graham into a careless fury.

But at last a queer incident came to sober him, to send him flying
down once more to the crowded life below with all its dark insoluble
riddles. As he swooped, came a tap and something flying past, and a
drop like a drop of rain. Then as he went on down he saw something
like a white rag whirling down in his wake. "What was that?" he
asked. "I did not see."

The aeronaut glanced, and then clutched at the lever to recover, for
they were sweeping down. When the aeropile was rising again he drew a
deep breath and replied. "That," and he indicated the white thing
still fluttering down, "was a swan."

"I never saw it," said Graham.

The aeronaut made no answer, and Graham saw little drops upon his
forehead.

They drove horizontally while Graham clambered back to the passenger's
place out of the lash of the wind. And then came a swift rush down,
with the wind-screw whirling to check their fall, and the flying stage
growing broad and dark before them. The sun, sinking over the chalk
hills in the west, fell with them, and left the sky a blaze of gold.

Soon men could be seen as little specks. He heard a noise coming up to
meet him, a noise like the sound of waves upon a pebbly beach, and saw
that the roofs about the flying stage were dark with his people
rejoicing over his safe return. A dark mass was crushed together under
the stage, a darkness stippled with innumerable faces, and quivering
with the minute oscillation of waved white handkerchiefs and waving
hands.


\chapter{THREE DAYS}


Lincoln awaited Graham in an apartment beneath the flying stages. He
seemed curious to learn all that had happened, pleased to hear of the
extraordinary delight and interest which Graham took in flying Graham
was in a mood of enthusiasm. "I must learn to fly," he cried. "I must
master that. I pity all poor souls who have died without this
opportunity. The sweet swift air! It is the most wonderful experience
in the world."

"You will find our new times full of wonderful experiences," said
Lincoln. "I do not know what you will care to do now. We have music
that may seem novel."

"For the present," said Graham, "flying holds me.  Let me learn more
of that. Your aeronaut was saying there is some trades union objection
to one's learning."

"There is, I believe," said Lincoln. "But for you---! If you would'
like to occupy yourself with that, we can make you a sworn aeronaut
tomorrow."

Graham expressed his wishes vividly and talked of his sensations for a
while. "And as for affairs," he asked abruptly. "How are things going
on? "

Lincoln waved affairs aside. "Ostrog will tell you that tomorrow," he
said. "Everything is settling down. The Revolution accomplishes itself
all over the world. Friction is inevitable here and there, of course;
but your rule is assured. You may rest secure with things in Ostrog's
hands."

"Would it be possible for me to be made a sworn aeronaut, as you call
it, forthwith---before I sleep?"  said Graham, pacing. "Then I could
be at it the very first thing tomorrow again.

"It would be possible," said Lincoln thoughtfully.  "Quite
possible. Indeed, it shall be done." He laughed." I came prepared to
suggest amusements, but you have found one for yourself. I will
telephone to the aeronautical offices from here and we will return to
your apartments in the Wind-Vane Control. By the time you have dined
the aeronauts will be able to come. You don't think that after you
have dined, you might prefer---?" He paused.

"Yes," said Graham.

"We had prepared a show of dancers---they have been brought from the
Capri theatre."

"I hate ballets," said Graham, shortly. "Always did. That
other---. That's not what I want to see.  We had dancers in the old
days. For the matter of that, they had them in ancient Egypt. But
flying---"

" True," said Lincoln. "Though our dancers---"

"They can afford to wait," said Graham; "they can afford to wait. I
know. I'm not a Latin. There's questions I want to ask some
expert---about your machinery. I'm keen. I want no distractions."

"You have the world to choose from," said Lincoln; " whatever you want
is yours."

Asano appeared, and under the escort of a strong guard they returned
through the city streets to Graham's apartments. Far larger crowds had
assembled to witness his return than his departure had gathered, and
the shouts and cheering of these masses of people sometimes drowned
Lincoln's answers to the endless questions Graham's aerial journey had
suggested. At first Graham had acknowledged the cheering and cries of
the crowd by bows and gestures, but Lincoln warned him that such a
recognition would be considered incorrect behaviour. Graham, already a
little wearied by rhythmic civilities, ignored his subjects for the
remainder of his public progress.

Directly they arrived at his apartments Asano departed in search of
kinematographic renderings of machinery in motion, and Lincoln
despatched Graham's commands for models of machines and small machines
to illustrate the various mechanical advances of the last two
centuries. The little group of appliances for telegraphic
communication attracted the Master so strongly that his delightfully
prepared dinner, served by a number of charmingly dexterous girls,
waited for a space. The habit of smoking had almost ceased from the
face of the earth, but when he expressed a wish for that indulgence,
inquiries were made and some excellent cigars were discovered in
Florida, and sent to him by pneumatic dispatch while the dinner was
still in progress. Afterwards came the aeronauts, and a feast of
ingenious wonders in the hands of a latter-day engineer. For the time,
at any rate, the neat dexterity of counting and numbering machines,
building machines, spinning engines, patent doorways, explosive
motors, grain and water elevators, slaughter-house machines and
harvesting appliances, was more fascinating to Graham than any
bayadere. "We were savages," was his refrain, "we were savages. We
were in the stone age---compared with this\dots . And what else have
you? "

There came also practical psychologists with some very interesting
developments in the art of hypnotism.  The names of Milne Bramwell,
Fechner, Liebault, William James, Myers and Gurney, he found, bore a
value now that would have astonished their contemporaries. Several
practical applications of psychology were now in general use; it had
largely supersceeded drugs, antiseptics and anaesthetics in medicine;
was employed by almost all who had any need of mental concentration. A
real enlargement of human faculty seemed to have been effected in this
direction.  The feats of "calculating boys," the wonders, as Graham
had been wont to regard them, of mesmerisers, were now within the
range of anyone who could afford the services of a skilled
hypnotist. Long ago the old examination methods in education had been
destroyed by these expedients. Instead of years of study, candidates
had substituted a few weeks of trances, and during the trances expert
coaches had simply to repeat all the points necessary for adequate
answering, adding a suggestion of the post hypnotic recollection of
these points. In process mathematics particularly, this aid had been
of singular service, and it was now invariably invoked by such players
of chess and games of manual dexterity as were still to be found. In
fact, all operations conducted under finite rules, of a
quasi-mechanical sort that is, were now systematically relieved from
the wanderings of imagination and emotion, and brought to an
unexampled pitch of accuracy.  Little children of the labouring
classes, so soon as they were of sufficient age to be hypnotised, were
thus converted into beautifully punctual and trustworthy machine
minders, and released forthwith from the long, long thoughts of
youth. Aeronautical pupils, who gave way to giddiness, could be
relieved from their imaginary terrors. In every street were hypnotists
ready to print permanent memories upon the mind. If anyone desired to
remember a name, a series of numbers, a song or a speech, it could be
done by this method, and conversely memories could be effaced, habits
removed, and desires eradicated---a sort of psychic surgery was, in
fact, in general use.  Indignities, humbling experiences, were thus
forgotten, amorous widows would obliterate their previous husbands,
angry lovers release themselves from their slavery. To graft desires,
however, was still impossible, and the facts of thought transference
were yet unsystematised. The psychologists illustrated their
expositions with some astounding experiments in mnemonics made through
the agency of a troupe of pale-faced children in blue.

Graham, like most of the people of his former time, distrusted the
hypnotist, or he might then and there have eased his mind of many
painful preoccupations.  But in spite of Lincoln's assurances he held
to the old theory that to be hypnotised was in some way the surrender
of his personality, the abdication of his will. At the banquet of
wonderful experiences that was beginning, he wanted very keenly to
remain absolutely himself.

The next day, and another day, and yet another day passed in such
interests as these. Each day Graham spent many hours in the glorious
entertainment of flying. On the third day he soared across middle
France, and within sight of the snow-clad Alps. These vigorous
exercises gave him restful sleep, and each day saw a great stride in
his health from the spiritless anaemia of his first awakening. And
whenever he was not in the air, and awake, Lincoln was assiduous in
the cause of his amusement; all that was novel and curious in
contemporary invention was brought to him, until at last his appetite
for novelty was well-nigh glutted.  One might fill a dozen
inconsecutive volumes with the strange things they exhibited. Each
afternoon he held his court for an hour or so. He speedily found his
interest in his contemporaries becoming personal and intimate. At
first he had been alert chiefly for unfamiliarity and peculiarity; any
foppishness in their dress, any discordance with his preconceptions of
nobility in their status and manners had jarred upon him, and it was
remarkable to him how soon that strangeness and the faint hostility
that arose from it, disappeared; how soon he came to appreciate the
true perspective of his position, and see the old Victorian days
remote and quaint. He found himself particularly amused by the
red-haired daughter of the Manager of the European Piggeries. On the
second day after dinner he made the acquaintance of a latter-day
dancing girl, and found her an astonishing artist. And after that,
more hypnotic wonders. On the third day Lincoln was moved to suggest
that the Master should repair to a Pleasure City, but this Graham
declined, nor would he accept the services of the hypnotists in his
aeronautical experiments. The link of locality held him to London; he
found a perpetual wonder in topographical identifications that he
would have missed abroad. "Here---or a hundred feet below here," he
could say, "I used to eat my midday cutlets during my London
University days. Underneath here was Waterloo and the perpetual hunt
for confusing trains.  Often have I stood waiting down there, bag in
hand, and stared up into the sky above the forest of signals, little
thinking I should walk some day a hundred yards in the air. And now in
that very sky that was once a grey smoke canopy, I circle in an
aeropile."

During those three days Graham was so occupied with such distractions
that the vast political movements in progress outside his quarters had
but a small share of his attention. Those about him told him
little. Daily came Ostrog, the Boss, his Grand Vizier, his mayor of
the palace, to report in vague terms the steady establishment of his
rule; "a little trouble" soon to be settled in this city, "a slight
disturbance" in that. The song of the social revolt came to him no
more; he never learned that it had been forbidden in the municipal
limits; and all the great emotions of the crow's nest slumbered in his
mind.

But on the second and third of the three days he found himself, in
spite of his interest in the daughter of the Pig Manager, or it may be
by, reason of the thoughts her conversation suggested, remembering the
girl Helen Wotton, who had spoken to him so oddly at the Wind-Vane
Keeper's gathering. The impression she had made was a deep one, albeit
the incessant surprise of novel circumstances had kept him from
brooding upon it for a space. But now her memory was coming to its
own.  He wondered what she had meant by those broken half-forgotten
sentences; the picture of her eyes and the earnest passion of her face
became more vivid as his mechanical interests faded. Her beauty came
compellingly between him and certain immediate temptations of ignoble
passion. But he did not see her again until three full days were past.

\chapter{GRAHAM REMEMBERS}

She came upon him at last in a little gallery that ran from the Wind
Vane Offices toward his state apartments. The gallery was long and
narrow, with a series of recesses, each with an arched fenestration
that looked upon a court of palms. He came upon her suddenly in one of
these recesses. She was seated.  She turned her head at the sound of
his footsteps and started at the sight of him. Every touch of colour
vanished from her face. She rose instantly, made a step toward him as
if to address him, and hesitated.  He stopped and stood still,
expectant. Then he perceived that a nervous tumult silenced her,
perceived too, that she must have sought speech with him to be waiting
for him in this place.

He felt a regal impulse to assist her. "I have wanted to see you," he
said. "A few days ago you wanted to tell me something---you wanted to
tell me of the people. What was it you had to tell me?"

She looked at him with troubled eyes.

"You said the people were unhappy?"

For a moment she was silent still.

"It must have seemed strange to you," she said abruptly.

"It did. And yet---"

"It was an impulse."

"Well?"

"That is all."

She looked at him with a face of hesitation. She spoke with an
effort. "You forget," she said, drawing a deep breath.

"What?"

"The people---"

"Do you mean---?"

"You forget the people."

He looked interrogative.

"Yes. I know you are surprised. For you do not understand what you
are. You do not know the things that are happening."

"Well? "

"You do not understand."

"Not clearly, perhaps. But---tell me."

She turned to him with sudden resolution." It is so hard to explain. I
have meant to, I have wanted to.  And now---I cannot. I am not ready
with words.  But about you---there is something. It is Wonder.  Your
sleep---your awakening. These things are miracles. To me at
least---and to all the common people. You who lived and suffered and
died, you who were a common citizen, wake again, live again, to find
yourself Master almost of the earth."

"Master of the earth," he said. "So they tell me.  But try and imagine
how little I know of it."

"Cities---Trusts---the Labour Company---"

"Principalities, powers, dominions---the power and the glory. Yes, I
have heard them shout. I know.  I am Master. King, if you wish. With
Ostrog, the Boss---"

He paused.

She turned upon him and surveyed his face with a curious
scrutiny. "Well?"

He smiled. "To take the responsibility."

"That is what we have begun to fear." For a moment she said no
more. "No," she said slowly. "You will take the responsibility. You
will take the responsibility. The people look to you."

She spoke softly." Listen! For at least half the years of your
sleep---in every generation---multitudes of people, in every
generation greater multitudes of people, have prayed that you might
awake---prayed."

Graham moved to speak and did not.

She hesitated, and a faint colour crept back to her cheek. "Do you
know that you have been to myriads---King Arthur, Barbarossa---the
King who would come in his own good time and put the world right for
them?"

"I suppose the imagination of the people---"

"Have you not heard our proverb, 'When the Sleeper wakes?' While you
lay insensible and motionless there---thousands came. Thousands. Every
first of the month you lay in state with a white robe upon you and the
people filed by you. When I was a little girl I saw you like that,
with your face white and calm."

She turned her face from him and looked steadfastly at the painted
wall before her. Her voice fell. "When I was a little girl I used to
look at your face\dots .it seemed to me fixed and waiting, like the
patience of God."

"That is what we thought of you," she said. "That is how you seemed to
us."

She turned shining eyes to him, her voice was clear and strong." In
the city, in the earth, a myriad myriad men and women are waiting to
see what you will do, full of strange incredible expectations."

"Yes? "

"Ostrog---no one---can take that responsibility."

Graham looked at her in surprise, at her face lit with emotion. She
seemed at first to have spoken with an effort, and to have fired
herself by speaking.

"Do you think," she said, "that you who have lived that little life so
far away in the past, you who have fallen into and risen out of this
miracle of sleep---do you think that the wonder and reverence and hope
of half the world has gathered about you only that you may live
another little life? \dots That you may shift the responsibility to
any other man?"

"I know how great this kingship of mine is," he said haltingly. "I
know how great it seems. But is it real? It is
incredible---dreamlike. Is it real, or is it only a great delusion?"

"It is real," she said; "if you dare."

"After all, like all kingship, my kingship is Belief.  It is an
illusion in the minds of men."

"If you dare!" she said.

"But---"

"Countless men," she said, "and while it is in their minds---they will
obey."

"But I know nothing. That is what I had in mind.  I know nothing. And
these others---the Councillors, Ostrog. They are wiser, cooler, they
know so much, every detail. And, indeed, what are these miseries of
which you speak? What am I to know? Do you mean---"

He stopped blankly.

"I am still hardly more than a girl," she said. "But to me the world
seems full of wretchedness. The world has altered since your day,
altered very strangely. I have prayed that I might see you and tell
you these things. The world has changed. As if a canker had seized
it---and robbed life of---everything worth having."

She turned a flushed face upon him, moving suddenly.  "Your days were
the days of freedom. Yes---I have thought. I have been made to think,
for my life---has not been happy. Men are no longer free---no greater,
no better than the men of your time. That is not all. This city---is a
prison. Every city now is a prison. Mammon grips the key in his hand.
Myriads, countless myriads, toil from the cradle to the grave. Is that
right? Is that to be---for ever?  Yes, far worse than in your
time. All about us, beneath us, sorrow and pain. All the shallow
delight of such life as you find about you, is separated by just a
little from a life of wretchedness beyond any telling Yes, the poor
know it---they know they suffer. These countless multitudes who faced
death for you two nights since---! You owe your life to them."

"Yes," said Graham, slowly. "Yes. I owe my life to them."

"You come," she said, "from the days when this new tyranny of the
cities was scarcely beginning.  It is a tyranny---a tyranny. In your
days the feudal war lords had gone, and the new lordship of wealth had
still to come. Half the men in the world still lived out upon the free
countryside. The cities had still to devour them. I have heard the
stories out of the old books---there was nobility! Common men led
lives of love and faithfulness then---they did a thousand things. And
you---you come from that time."

"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 staning 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 millenium, but I am resolved now that I will rule. What you
have said has awakened me\dots . You are right. Ostrog must know his
place. And I will learn---\dots . 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{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\dots 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{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 fragmeary.  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.

"\emph{This!} Surely the essence of religion is reverence."

"Oh \emph{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, \emph{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 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 harangne 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 \emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{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 whitelimbed 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 diferently."

" 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{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\dots . 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{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,
curved, ran rapidly towards the framework, and in a moment the Council
chamber stood open to the air. A chilly gust blew in by the gap,
bringing with it a war of voices from the ruinous spaces without, an
elvish babblement, "Save the Master!" "What are they doing to the
Master?"  "The Master is betrayed! "

And then he realised that Ostrog's attention was distracted, that
Ostrog's grip had relaxed, and, wrenching his arms free, he struggled
to his knees.  In another moment he had thrust Ostrog back, and he was
on one foot, his hand gripping Ostrog's throat, and Ostrog's hands
clutching the silk about his neck.  But now men were coming towards
them from the dais---men whose intentions he misunderstood. He had a
glimpse of someone running in the distance towards the curtains of the
antechamber, and then Ostrog had slipped from him and these newcomers
were upon him. To his infinite astonishment, they seized him. They
obeyed the shouts of Ostrog.

He was lugged a dozen yards before he realised that they were not
friends---that they were dragging him towards the open panel. When he
saw this he pulled back, he tried to fling himself down, he shouted
for help with all his strength. And this time there were answering
cries.

The grip upon his neck relaxed, and behold! in the lower corner of the
rent upon the wall, first one and then a number of little black
figures appeared shouting and waving arms. They came leaping down from
the gap into the light gallery that had led to the Silent Rooms. They
ran along it, so near were they that Graham could see the weapons in
their hands, Then Ostrog was shouting in his ear to the men who held
him, and once more he was struggling with all his strength against
their endeavours to thrust him towards the opening that yawned to
receive him. "They can't come down," panted Ostrog. "They daren't
fire.  It's all right." "We'll save him from them yet."

For long minutes as it seemed to Graham that inglorious struggle
continued. His clothes were rent in a dozen places, he was covered in
dust, one hand had been trodden upon. He could hear the shouts of his
supporters, and once he heard shots. He could feel his strength giving
way, feel his efforts wild and aimless. But no help came, and surely,
irresistibly, that black, yawning opening came nearer.

The pressure upon him relaxed and he struggled up. He saw Ostrog's
grey head receding and perceived that he was no longer held. He turned
about and came full into a man in black. One of the green weapons
cracked close to him, a drift of pungent smoke came into his face, and
a steel blade flashed.  The huge chamber span about him.

He saw a man in pale blue stabbing one of the black and yellow
attendants not three yards from his face.  Then hands were upon him
again.

He was being pulled in two, directions now. It seemed as though people
were shouting to him. He wanted to understand and could not. Someone
was clutching about his thighs, he was being hoisted in spite of his
vigorous efforts. He understood suddenly, he ceased to struggle. He
was lifted up on men's shoulders and carried away from that devouring
panel.  Ten thousand throats were cheering.

He saw men in blue and black hurrying after the retreating Ostrogites
and firing. Lifted up, he saw now across the whole expanse of the hall
beneath the Atlas image, saw that he was being carried towards the
raised platform in the centre of the place. The far end of the hall
was already full of people running towards him. They were looking at
him and cheering.

He became aware that a sort of body-guard surrounded him. Active men
about him shouted vague orders. He saw close at hand the black
moustached man in yellow who had been among those who had greeted him
in the public theatre, shouting directions.  The hall was already
densely packed with swaying people, the little metal gallery sagged
with a shouting load, the curtains at the end had been torn away, and
the ante-chamber was revealed densely crowded. He could scarcely make
the man near him hear for the tumult about them. "Where has Ostrog
gone?" he asked.

The man he questioned pointed over the heads towards the lower panels
about the hall on the side opposite the gap. They stood open and armed
men, blue clad with black sashes, were running through them and
vanishing into the chambers and passages beyond.  It seemed to Graham
that a sound of firing drifted through the riot. He was carried in a
staggering curve across the great hall towards an opening beneath the
gap.

He perceived men working with a sort of rude discipline to keep the
crowd off him, to make a space clear about him. He passed out of the
hall, and saw a crude, new wall rising blankly before him topped by
blue sky. He was swung down to his feet; someone gripped his arm and
guided him. He found the man in yellow close at hand. They were taking
him up a narrow stairway of brick, and close at hand rose the great
red painted masses, the cranes and levers and the still engines of the
big building machine.

He was at the top of the steps. He was hurried across a narrow railed
footway, and suddenly with a vast shouting the amphitheatre of ruins
opened again before him. "The Master is with us! The Master!  The
Master!" The shout swept athwart the lake of faces like a wave, broke
against the distant cliff of ruins, and came back in a welter of
cries. "The Master is on our side! "

Graham perceived that he was no longer encompassed by people, that he
was standing upon a little temporary platform of white metal, part of
a flimsy seeming scaffolding that laced about the great mass of the
Council House. Over all the huge expanse of the ruins, swayed and
eddied the shouting people; and here and there the black banners of
the revolutionary societies ducked and swayed and formed rare nuclei
of organisation in the chaos. Up the steep stairs of wall and
scaffolding by which his rescuers had reached the opening in the Atlas
Chamber, clung a solid crowd, and little energetic black figures
clinging to pillars and projections were strenuous to induce these
congested masses to stir. Behind him, at a higher point on the
scaffolding, a number of men struggled upwards with the flapping folds
of a huge black standard. Through the yawning gap in the walls below
him he could look down upon the packed attentive multitudes in the
Hall of the Atlas. The distant flying stages to the south came out
bright and vivid, brought nearer as it seemed by an unusual
translucency of the air. A solitary aeropile beat up from the central
stage as if to meet the coming aeroplanes.

"What had become of Ostrog?" asked Graham, and even as he spoke he saw
that all eyes were turned from him towards the crest of the Council
House building. He looked also in this direction of universal
attention. For a moment he saw nothing but the jagged corner of a
wall, hard and clear against the sky. Then in the shadow he perceived
the interior of a room and recognised with a start the green and white
decorations of his former prison. And coming quickly across this
opened room and up to the very verge of the cliff of the ruins came a
little white clad figure followed by two other smaller seeming figures
in black and yellow. He heard the man beside him exclaim "Ostrog," and
turned to ask a question. But he never did, because of the startled
exclamation of another of those who were with him and a lank finger
suddenly pointing. He looked, and behold the aeropile that had been
rising from the flying stage when last he had looked in that
direction, was driving towards them. The swift steady flight was still
novel enough to hold his attention.

Nearer it came, growing rapidly larger and larger, until it had swept
over the further edge of the ruins and into view of the dense
multitudes below. It drooped across the space and rose and passed
overhead, rising to clear the mass of the Council House, a filmy
translucent shape with the solitary aeronaut peering down through its
ribs. It vanished beyond the skyline of the ruins.

Graham transferred his attention to Ostrog. He was signalling with his
hands, and his attendants busy breaking down the wall beside him. In
another moment the aeropile came into view again, a little thing far
away, coming round in a wide curve and going slower.

Then suddenly the man in yellow shouted: "What are they doing? What
are the people doing? Why is Ostrog left there? Why is he not
captured? They will lift him---the aeropile will lift him! Ah!"

The exclamation was echoed by a shout from the ruins. The rattling
sound of the green weapons drifted across the intervening gulf to
Graham, and, looking down, he saw a number of black and yellow
uniforms running along one of the galleries that lay open to the air
below the promontory upon which Ostrog stood. They fired as they ran
at men unseen, and then emerged a number of pale blue figures in
pursuit. These minute fighting figures had the oddest effect; they
seemed as they ran like little model soldiers in a toy. This queer
appearance of a house cut open gave that struggle amidst furniture and
passages a quality of unreality. It was perhaps two hundred yards away
from him, and very nearly fifty above the heads in the ruins
below. The black and yellow men ran into an open archway, and turned
and fired a volley. One of the blue pursuers striding forward close to
the edge, flung up his arms, staggered sideways, seemed to Graham's
sense to hang over the edge for several seconds, and fell headlong
down. Graham saw him strike a projecting corner, fly out, head over
heels, head over heels, and vanish behind the red arm of the building
machine.

And then a shadow came between Graham and the sun. He looked up and
the sky was clear, but he knew the aeropile had passed. Ostrog had
vanished.  The man in yellow thrust before him, zealous and
perspiring, pointing and blatent.

"They are grounding!" cried the man in yellow.  "They are
grounding. Tell the people to fire at him.  Tell them to fire at him!"

Graham could not understand. He heard loud voices repeating these
enigmatical orders.

Suddenly over the edge of the ruins he saw the prow of the aeropile
come gliding and stop with a jerk. In a moment Graham understood that
the thing had grounded in order that Ostrog might escape by it.  He
saw a blue haze climbing out of the gulf, perceived that the people
below him were now firing up at the projecting stem.

A man beside him cheered hoarsely, and he saw that the blue rebels had
gained the archway that had been contested by the men in black and
yellow a moment before, and were running in a continual stream along
the open passage.

And suddenly the aeropile slipped over the edge of the Council House
and fell. It dropped, tilting at an angle of forty-five degrees, and
dropping so steeply that it seemed to Graham, it seemed perhaps to
most of these below, that it could not possibly rise again.

It fell so closely past him that he could see Ostrog clutching the
guides of the seat, with his grey hair streaming; see the white-faced
aeronaut wrenching over the lever that drove the engine along its
guides.  He heard the apprehensive vague cry of innumerable men below.

Graham clutched the railing before him and gasped.  The second seemed
an age. The lower van of the aeropile passed within an ace of touching
the people, who yelled and screamed and trampled one another below.

And then it rose.

For a moment it looked as if it could not possibly clear the opposite
cliff, and then that it could not possibly clear the wind-wheel that
rotated beyond.

And behold! it was clear and soaring, still heeling sideways, upward,
upward into the wind-swept sky.

The suspense of the moment gave place to a fury of exasperation as the
swarming people realised that Ostrog had escaped them. With belated
activity they renewed their fire, until the rattling wove into a roar,
until the whole area became dim and blue and the air pungent with the
thin smoke of their weapons.

Too late! The aeropile dwindled smaller and smaller, and curved about
and swept gracefully downward to the flying stage from which it had so
lately risen. Ostrog had escaped.

For a while a confused babblement arose from the ruins, and then the
universal attention came back to Graham, perched high among the
scaffolding. He saw the faces of the people turned towards him, heard
their shouts at his rescue. From the throat of the ways came the song
of the revolt spreading like a breeze across that swaying sea of men.

The little group of men about him shouted congratulations on his
escape. The man in yellow was close to him, with a set face and
shining eyes. And the song was rising, louder and louder; tramp,
tramp, tramp, tramp.

Slowly the realisation came of the full meaning of these things to
him, the perception of the swift change in his position. Ostrog, who
had stood beside him whenever he had faced that shouting multitude
before, was beyond there---the antagonist. There was no one to rule
for him any longer. Even the people about him, the leaders and
organisers of the multitude, looked to see what he would do, looked to
him to act, awaited his orders. He was King indeed. His puppet reign
was at an end.

He was very intent to do the thing that was expected of him. His
nerves and muscles were quivering, his mind was perhaps a little
confused, but he felt neither fear nor anger. His hand that had been
trodden upon throbbed and was hot. He was a little nervous about his
bearing. He knew he was not afraid, but he was anxious not to seem
afraid. In his former life he had often been more excited in playing
games of skill. He was desirous of immediate action, he knew he must
not think too much in detail of the huge complexity of the struggle
about him lest he should be paralysed by the sense of its intricacy.
Over there those square blue shapes, the flying stages, meant Ostrog;
against Ostrog he was fighting for the world.

\chapter{WHILE THE AEROLANES WERE COMING}

For a time the Master of the Earth was not even master of his own
mind. Even his will seemed a will not his own, his own acts surprised
him and were but a part of the confusion of strange experiences that
poured across his being. These things were definite, the aeroplanes
were coming, Helen Wotton had warned the people of their coming, and
he was Master of the Earth. Each of these facts seemed struggling for
complete possession of his thoughts. They protruded from a background
of swarming halls, elevated passages, rooms jammed with ward leaders
in council kinematograph and telephone rooms, and windows looking out
on a seething sea of marching men. The man in yellow, and men whom he
fancied were called Ward Leaders, were either propelling him forward
or following him obediently; it was hard to tell.  Perhaps they were
doing a little of both. Perhaps some power unseen and unsuspected,
propelled them all.  He was aware that he was going to make a
proclamation to the People of the Earth, aware of certain grandiose
phrases floating in his mind as the thing he meant to say. Many little
things happened, and then he found himself with the man in yellow
entering a little room where this proclamation of his was to be made.

This room was grotesquely latter-day in its appointments.  In the
centre was a bright oval lit by shaded electric lights from above. The
rest was in shadow, and the double finely fitting doors through which
he came from the swarming Hall of the Atlas made the place very
still. The dead thud of these as they closed behind him, the sudden
cessation of the tumult in which he had been living for hours, the
quivering circle of light, the whispers and quick noiseless movements
of vaguely visible attendants in the shadows, had a strange effect
upon Graham. The huge ears of a phonographic mechanism gaped in a
battery for his words, the black eyes of great photographic cameras
awaited his beginning, beyond metal rods and coils glittered dimly,
and something whirled about with a droning hum. He walked into the
centre of the light, and his shadow drew together black and sharp to a
little blot at his feet.

The vague shape of the thing he meant to say was already in his
mind. But this silence, this isolation, the sudden withdrawal from
that contagious crowd, this silent audience of gaping, glaring
machines had not been in his anticipation. All his supports seemed
withdrawn together; he seemed to have dropped into this suddenly,
suddenly to have discovered himself. In a moment he was changed. He
found that he now feared to be inadequate, he feared to be theatrical,
he feared the quality of his voice, the quality of his wit,
astonished, he turned to the man in yellow with a propitiatory
gesture. "For a moment," he said, "I must wait. I did not think it
would be like this. I must think of the thing I have to say.

While he was still hesitating there came an agitated messenger with
news that the foremost aeroplanes were passing over Arawan.

"Arawan?" he said." Where is that? But anyhow, they are coming. They
will be here. When?"

"By twilight."

"Great God! In only a few hours. What news of the flying stages?" he
asked.

"The people of the south-west wards are ready."

"Ready! "

He turned impatiently to the blank circles of the lenses again.

"I suppose it must be a sort of speech. Would to God I knew certainly
the thing that should be said!  Aeroplanes at Arawan! They must have
started before the main fleet. And the people only ready!  Surely
\dots "

"Oh! what does it matter whether I speak well or ill?" he said, and
felt the light grow brighter.

He had framed some vague sentence of democratic sentiment when
suddenly doubts overwhelmed him.  His belief in his heroic quality and
calling he found had altogether lost its assured conviction. The
picture of a little strutting futility in a windy waste of
incomprehensible destinies replaced it. Abruptly it was perfectly
clear to him that this revolt against Ostrog was premature, foredoomed
to failure, the impulse of passionate inadequacy against inevitable
things. He thought of that swift flight of aeroplanes like the swoop
of Fate towards him. He was astonished that he could have seen things
in any other light. In that final emergency he debated, thrust debate
resolutely aside, determined at all costs to go through with the thing
he had undertaken. And he could find no word to begin. Even as he
stood, awkward, hesitating, with an indiscrete apology for his
inability trembling on his lips, came the noise of many people crying
out, the running to and fro of feet. "Wait," cried someone, and a door
opened. "She is coming," said the voices.  Graham turned, and the
watching lights waned.

Through the open doorway he saw a slight grey figure advancing across
a spacious hall. His heart leapt. It was Helen Wotton. Behind and
about her marched a riot of applause. The man in yellow came out of
the nearer shadows into the circle of light.

"This is the girl who told us what Ostrog had dune," he said.

Her face was aflame, and the heavy coils of her black hair fell about
her shoulders. The folds of the soft silk robe she wore streamed from
her and floated in the rhythm of her advance. She drew nearer and
nearer, and his heart was beating fast. All his doubts were gone. The
shadow of the doorway fell athwart her face and she was near him. "You
have not betrayed us? " she cried. "You are with us? "

"Where have you been? " said Graham.

"At the office of the south-west wards. Until ten minutes since I did
not know you had returned. I went to the office of the south-west
wards to find the Ward Leaders in order that they might tell the
people."

"I came back so soon as I heard---."

"I knew," she cried, " knew you would be with us.  And it was I---it
was I that told them. They have risen. All the world is rising. The
people have awakened. Thank God that I did not act in vain!  You are
Master still."

"You told them " he said slowly, and he saw that in spite of her
steady eyes her lips trembled and her throat rose and fell.

"I told them. I knew of the order. I was here.  I heard that the
negroes were to come to London to guard you and to keep the people
down---to keep you a prisoner. And I stopped it. I came out and told
the people. And you are Master still."

Graham glanced at the black lenses of the cameras, the vast listening
ears, and back to her face. "I am Master still," he said slowly, and
the swift rush of a fleet of aeroplanes passed across his thoughts.

"And you did this? You, who are the niece of Ostrog."

"For you," she cried. "For you! That you for whom the world has waited
should not be cheated of your power."

Graham stood for a space, wordless, regarding her.  His doubts and
questionings had fled before her presence. He remembered the things
that he had meant to say. He faced the cameras again and the light
about him grew brighter. He turned again towards her.

"You have saved me," he said; "you have saved my power. And the battle
is beginning. God knows.  what this night will see---but not
dishonour."

He paused. He addressed himself to the unseen multitudes who stared
upon him through those grotesque black eyes. At first he spoke slowly.
"Men and women of the new age," he said; "You have arisen to do battle
for the race\dots There is no easy victory before us."

He stopped to gather words. The thoughts that had been in his mind
before she came returned, but transfigured, no longer touched with the
shadow of a possible irrelevance. "This night is a beginning," he
cried. "This battle that is coming, this battle that rushes upon us
to-night, is only a beginning. All your lives, it may be, you must
fight. Take no thought though I am beaten, though I am utterly
overthrown."

He found the thing in his mind too vague for words.  He paused
momentarily, and broke into vague exhortations, and then a rush of
speech came upon him.  Much that he said was but the humanitarian
commonplace of a vanished age, but the conviction of his voice touched
it to vitality. He stated the case of the old days to the people of
the new age, to the woman at his side. "I come out of the past to
you," he said, "with the memory of an age that hoped. My age was an
age of dreams---of beginnings, an age of noble hopes; throughout the
world we had made an end of slavery; throughout the world we had
spread the desire and anticipation that wars might cease, that all men
and women might live nobly, in freedom and peace.
\dots  So we hoped in the days that are past. And
what of those hopes? How is it with man after two hundred years?

"Great cities, vast powers, a collective greatness beyond our
dreams. For that we did not work, and that has come. But how is it
with the little lives that make up this greater life? How is it with
the common lives? As it has ever been---sorrow and labour, lives
cramped and unfulfilled, lives tempted by power, tempted by wealth,
and gone to waste and folly. The old faiths have faded and changed,
the new faith---.  Is there a new faith? "

Things that he had long wished to believe, he found that he
believed. He plunged at belief and seized it, and clung for a time at
her level. He spoke gustily, in broken incomplete sentences, but with
all his heart and strength, of this new faith within him. He spoke of
the greatness of self-abnegation, of his belief in an immortal life of
Humanity in which we live and move and have our being. His voice rose
and fell, and the recording appliances hummed their hurried applause,
dim attendants watched him out of the shadow.  Through all those
doubtful places his sense of that silent spectator beside him
sustained his sincerity.  For a few glorious moments he was carried
away; he felt no doubt of his heroic quality, no doubt of his heroic
words, he had it all straight and plain. His eloquence limped no
longer. And at last he made an end to speaking. "Here and now," he
cried, "I make my will. All that is mine in the world I give to the
people of the world. All that is mine in the world I give to the
people of the world. I give it to you, and myself I give to you. And
as God wills, I will live for you, or I will die."

He ended with a florid gesture and turned about.  He found the light
of his present exaltation reflected in the face of the girl. Their
eyes met; her eyes were swimming with tears of enthusiasm. They seemed
to be urged towards each other. They clasped hands and stood gripped,
facing one another, in an eloquent silence. She whispered. "I knew,"
she whispered.  "I knew." He could not speak, he crushed her hand in
his. His mind was the theatre of gigantic passions.

The man in yellow was beside them. Neither had noted his coming. He
was saying that the south-west wards were marching. "I never expected
it so soon," he cried. "They have done wonders. You must send them a
word to help them on their way."

Graham dropped Helen's hand and stared at him absent-mindedly. Then
with a start he returned to his previous preoccupation about the
flying stages.

"Yes," he said. "That is good, that is good." He weighed a
message. "Tell them;---well done South West."

He turned his eyes to Helen Wotton again. His face expressed his
struggle between conflicting ideas.  "We must capture the flying
stages," he explained.  "Unless we can do that they will land
negroes. At all costs we must prevent that."

He felt even as he spoke that this was not what had been in his mind
before the interruption. He saw a touch of surprise in her eyes. She
seemed about to speak and a shrill bell drowned her voice.

It occurred to Graham that she expected him to lead these marching
people, that that was the thing he had to do. He made the offer
abruptly. He addressed the man in yellow, but he spoke to her. He saw
her face respond. "Here I am doing nothing," he said.

"It is impossible," protested the man in yellow.

"It is a fight in a warren. Your place is here."

He explained elaborately. He motioned towards the room where Graham
must wait, he insisted no other course was possible. "We must know
where you are," he said. "At any moment a crisis may arise needing
your presence and decision. "The room was a luxurious little apartment
with news machines and a broken mirror that had once been en
\emph{rapport} with the crow's nest specula. It seemed a matter of
course to Graham that Helen should stop with him.

A picture had drifted through his mind of such a vast dramatic
struggle as the masses in the ruins had suggested. But here was no
spectacular battle-field such as he imagined. Instead was
seclusion---and suspense.  It was only as the afternoon wore on that
he pieced together a truer picture of the fight that was raging,
inaudibly and invisibly, within four miles of him, beneath the
Roehampton stage. A strange and unprecedented contest it was, a battle
that was a hundred thousand little battles, a battle in a sponge of
ways and channels, fought out of sight of sky or sun under the
electric glare, fought out in a vast confusion by multitudes untrained
in arms, led chiefly by acclamation, multitudes dulled by mindless
labour and enervated by the tradition of two hundred years of servile
security against multitudes demolised by lives of venial privilege and
sensual indulgence. They had no artillery, no differentiation into
this force or that; the only weapon on either side was the little
green metal carbine, whose secret manufacture and sudden distribution
in enormous quantities had been one of Ostrog's culminating moves
against the Council. Few had had any experience with this weapon, many
had never discharged one, many who carried it came unprovided with
ammunition; never was wilder firing in the history of warfare. It was
a battle of amateurs, a hideous experimental warfare, armed rioters
fighting armed rioters, armed rioters swept forward by the words and
fury of a song, by the tramping sympathy of their numbers, pouring in
countless myriads towards the smaller ways, the disabled lifts, the
galleries slippery with blood, the halls and passages choked with
smoke, beneath the flying stages, to learn there when retreat was
hopeless the ancient mysteries of warfare. And overhead save for a few
sharpshooters upon the roof spaces and for a few bands and threads of
vapour that multiplied and darkened towards the evening, the day was a
clear serenity. Ostrog it seems had no bombs at command and in all the
earlier phases of the battle the aeropiles played no part. Not the
smallest cloud was there to break the empty brilliance of the sky. It
seemed as though it held itself vacant until the aeroplanes should
come.

Ever and again there was news of these, drawing nearer, from this
Mediterranean port and then that, and presently from the south of
France. But of the new guns that Ostrog had made and which were known
to be in the city came no news in spite of Graham's urgency, nor any
report of successes from the dense felt of fighting strands about the
flying stages.  Section after section of the Labour Societies reported
itself assembled, reported itself marching, and vanished from
knowledge into the labyrinth of that warfare What was happening there?
Even the busy ward leaders did not know. In spite of the opening and
closing of doors, the hasty messengers, the ringing of bells and the
perpetual clitter-clack of recording implements, Graham felt isolated,
strangely inactive, inoperative.

Their isolation seemed at times the strangest, the most unexpected of
all the things that had happened since his awakening. It had something
of the quality of that inactivity that comes in dreams. A tumult, the
stupendous realisation of a world struggle between Ostrog and himself,
and then this confined quiet little room with its mouthpieces and
bells and broken mirror!

Now the door would be closed and they were alone together; they seemed
sharply marked off then from all the unprecedented world storm that
rushed together without, vividly aware of one another, only concerned
with one another. Then the door would open again, messengers would
enter, or a sharp bell would stab their quiet privacy, and it was like
a window in a well built brightly lit house flung open suddenly to a
hurricane.  The dark hurry and tumult, the stress and vehemence of the
battle rushed in and overwhelmed them. They were no longer persons but
mere spectators, mere impressions of a tremendous convulsion.  They
became unreal even to themselves, miniatures of personality,
indescribably small, and the two antagonistic realities, the only
realities in being were first the city, that throbbed and roared
yonder in a belated frenzy of defence and secondly the aeroplanes
hurling inexorably towards them over the round shoulder of the world.

At first their mood had been one of exalted confidence, a great pride
had possessed them, a pride in one another for the greatness of the
issues they had challenged. At first he had walked the room eloquent
with a transitory persuasion of his tremendous destiny.  But slowly
uneasy intimations of their coming defeat touched his spirit. There
came a long period in which they were alone. He changed his theme,
became egotistical, spoke of the wonder of his sleep, of the little
life of his memories, remote yet minute and clear, like something seen
through an inverted opera- glass, and all the brief play of desires
and errors that had made his former life. She said little, but the
emotion in her face followed the tones in his voice, and it seemed to
him he had at last a perfect understanding.  He reverted from pure
reminiscence to that sense of greatness she imposed upon him. "And
through it all, this destiny was before me," he said; "this vast
inheritance of which I did not dream."

Insensibly their heroic preoccupation with the revlutionary struggle
passed to the question of their relationship. He began to question
her. She told him of the days before his awakening, spoke with a brief
vividness of the girlish dreams that had given a bias to her life, of
the incredulous emotions his awakening had aroused. She told him too
of a tragic circumstance of her girlhood that had darkened her life,
quickened her sense of injustice and opened her heart prematurely to
the wider sorrows of the world. For a little time, so far as he was
concerned, the great war about them was but the vast ennobling
background to these personal things.

In an instant these personal relations were submerged.  There came
messengers to tell that a great fleet of aeroplanes was rushing
between the sky and Avignon. He went to the crystal dial in the corner
and assured himself that the thing was so. He went to the chart room
and consulted a map to measure the distances of Avignon, New Arawan,
and London. He made swift calculations. He went to the room of the
Ward Leaders to ask for news of the fight for the stages---and there
was no one there. After a time he came back to her.

His face had changed. It had dawned upon him that the struggle was
perhaps more than half over, that Ostrog was holding his own, that the
arrival of the aeroplanes would mean a panic that might leave him
helpless. A chance phrase in the message had given him a glimpse of
the reality that came. Each of these soaring giants bore its thousand
half savage negroes to the death grapple of the city. Suddenly his
humanitarian enthusiasm showed flimsy. Only two of the Ward Leaders
were in their room, when presently he repaired thither, the Hall of
the Atlas seemed empty. He fancied a change in the bearing of the
attendants in the outer rooms. A sombre disillusionment darkened his
mind. She looked at him anxiously when he returned to her.

"No news," he said with an assumed carelessness in answer to her eyes.

Then he was moved to frankness. "Or rather---bad news. We are
losing. We are gaining no ground and the aeroplanes draw nearer and
nearer."

He walked the length of the room and turned.

"Unless we can capture those flying stages in the next hour---there
will be horrible things. We shall be beaten.

"No!" she said. "We have justice---we have the people. We have God on
our side."

"Ostrog has discipline---he has plans. Do you know, out there just now
I felt---. When I heard that these aeroplanes were a stage nearer. I
felt as if I were fighting the machinery of fate."

She made no answer for a while. "We have done right," she said at
last.

He looked at her doubtfully. "We have done what we could. But does
this depend upon us? Is it not an older sin, a wider sin?"

"What do you mean? " she asked.

"These blacks are savages, ruled by force, used as force. And they
have been under the rule of the whites two hundred years. Is it not a
race quarrel?  The race sinned---the race pays."

"But these labourers, these poor people of London---! "

"Vicarious atonement. To stand wrong is to share the guilt."

She looked keenly at him, astonished at the new aspect he presented.

Without came the shrill ringing of a bell, the sound of feet and the
gabble of a phonographic message.  The man in yellow appeared. "Yes?"
said Graham.

"They are at Vichy."

"Where are the attendants who were in the great Hall of the Atlas? "
asked Graham abruptly.

Presently the Babble Machine rang again. "We may win yet," said the
man in yellow, going out to it.  "If only we can find where Ostrog has
hidden his guns. Everything hangs on that now. Perhaps this---"

Graham followed him. But the only news was of the aeroplanes. They had
reached Orleans.

Graham returned to Helen. "No news," he said "No news."

"And we can do nothing?"

" Nothing."

He paced impatiently. Suddenly the swift anger that was his nature
swept upon him. "Curse this complex world!" he cried, "and all the
inventions of men! That a man must die like a rat in a snare and never
see his foe! Oh, for one blow! \dots"

He turned with an abrupt change in his manner.  "That's nonsense," he
said. "I am a savage."

He paced and stopped. "After all London and Paris are only two
cities. All the temperate zone has risen. What if London is doomed and
Paris destroyed? These are but accidents. "Again came the mockery of
news to call him to fresh enquiries. He returned with a graver face
and sat down beside her.

"The end must be near," he said. "The people it seems have fought and
died in tens of thousands, the ways about Roehampton must be like a
smoked beehive.  And they have died in vain. They are still only at
the sub stage. The aeroplanes are near Paris.  Even were a gleam of
success to come now, there would be nothing to do, there would be no
time to do anything before they were upon us. The guns that might have
saved us are mislaid. Mislaid! Think of the disorder of things! Think
of this foolish tumult, that cannot even find its weapons! Oh, for one
aeropile---just one! For the want of that I am beaten.  Humanity is
beaten and our cause is lost! My kingship, my headlong foolish
kingship will not last a night. And I have egged on the people to
fight---."

"They would have fought anyhow."

"I doubt it. I have come among them---"

"No," she cried," not that. If defeat comes---if you die---. But even
that cannot be, it cannot be, after all these years."

"Ah! We have meant well. But---do you indeed believe---?"

"If they defeat you," she cried, "you have spoken.  Your word has gone
like a great wind through the world, fanning liberty into a
flame. What if the flame sputters a little! Nothing can change the
spoken word. Your message will have gone forth. .. ."

"To what end? It may be. It may be. You know I said, when you told me
of these things dear God! but that was scarcely a score of hours
ago!---I said that I had not your faith. Well---at any rate there is
nothing to do now\dots ."

"You have not my faith! Do you mean---? You are sorry?"

"No," he said hurriedly, "no! Before God---no!"  His voice
changed. "But---. I think---I have been indiscreet. I knew little---I
grasped too hastily.. .."

He paused. He was ashamed of this avowal.  "There is one thing that
makes up for all. I have known you. Across this gulf of time I have
come to you. The rest is done. It is done. With you, too, it has been
something more---or something less---"

He paused with his face searching hers, and without clamoured the
unheeded message that the aeroplanes were rising into the sky of
Amiens.

She put her hand to her throat, and her lips were .  white. She stared
before her as if she saw some horrible possibility. Suddenly her
features changed.  "Oh, but I have been honest!" she cried, and then,
"Have I been honest? I loved the world and freedom, I hated cruelty
and oppression. Surely it was that."

"Yes," he said, "yes. And we have done what it lay in us to do. We
have given our message, our message! We have started Armageddon! But
now---. Now that we have, it may be our last hour, together, now that
all these greater things are done\dots ."

He stopped. She sat in silence. Her face was a white riddle.

For a moment they heeded nothing of a sudden stir outside, a running
to and fro, and cries. Then Helen started to an attitude of tense
attention. "It is---," she cried and stood up, speechless,
incredulous, triumphant. And Graham, too, heard. Metallic voices were
shouting "Victory!" Yes it was "Victory!"  He stood up also with the
light of a desperate hope in his eyes.

Bursting through the curtains appeared the man in yellow, startled and
dishevelled with excitement.  "Victory," he cried, "victory! The
people are winning.  Ostrog's people have collapsed."

She rose." Victory? " And her voice was hoarse and faint.

"What do you mean? " asked Graham. "Tell me!  What?"

"We have driven them out of the under galleries at Norwood, Streatham
is afire and burning wildly, and Roehampton is ours. Ours!---and we
have taken the aeropile that lay thereon."

For an instant Graham and Helen stood in silence, their hearts were
beating fast, they looked at one another. For one last moment there
gleamed in Graham his dream of empire, of kingship, with Helen by his
side. It gleamed, and passed.

A shrill bell rang. An agitated grey-headed man appeared from the room
of the Ward Leaders." It is all over," he cried.

"What matters it now that we have Roehampton?  The aeroplanes have
been sighted at Boulogne!"

"The Channel! " said the man in yellow. He calculated swiftly." Half
an hour."

"They still have three of the flying stages," said the old man.

"Those guns?" cried Graham.

" We cannot mount them---in half an hour."

" Do you mean they are found?"

"Too late," said the old man.

"If we could stop them another hour! " cried the man in yellow.

"Nothing can stop them now," said the old man.  they have near a
hundred aeroplanes in the first fleet."

"Another hour? " asked Graham.

"To be so near!" said the Ward Leader. "Now that we have found those
guns. To be so near---.  If once we could get them out upon the roof
spaces."

"How long would that take? " asked Graham suddenly.

" An hour---certainly."

"Too late," cried the Ward Leader, " too late."

"Is it too late?" said Graham. "Even now---.  An hour! "

He had suddenly perceived a possibility. He tried to speak calmly, but
his face was white. "There is one chance. You said there was an
aeropile---? "

"On the Roehampton stage, Sire."

"Smashed? "

"No. It is Iying crossways to the carrier. It might be got upon the
guides---easily. But there is no aeronaut---."

Graham glanced at the two men and then at Helen.  He spoke after a
long pause. "We have no aeronauts? "

"None."

"The aeroplanes are clumsy," he said thoughtfully, "compared with the
aeropiles."

He turned suddenly to Helen. His decision was made. "I must do it."

"Do what? "

"Go to this flying stage---to this aeropile."

"What do you mean?"

"I am an aeronaut. After all---. Those days for which you reproached
me were wasted."

He turned to the old man in yellow.  put the aeropile upon the
guides."

The man in yellow hesitated.

"What do you mean to do?" cried Helen.

"This aeropile---it is a chance---."

"You don't mean---?"

"To fight---yes. To fight in the air. I have thought before---. An
aeroplane is a clumsy thing.  A resolute man---!"

"But---never since flying began---" cried the man in yellow.

"There has been no need. But now the time has come. Tell them
now---send them my message---to put it upon the guides."

The old man dumbly interrogated the man in yellow, nodded, and hurried
out.

Helen made a step towards Graham. Her face was white." But---How can
one fight? You will be killed."

"Perhaps. Yet, not to do it---or to let someone else attempt it---."

He stopped, he could speak no more, he swept the alternative aside by
a gesture, and they stood looking at one another.

"You are right," she said at last in a low tone.  "You are right. If
it can be done\dots must go."

Those days for not altogether

He moved a step towards her, and she stepped back, her white face
struggled against him and resisted him.  "No," she gasped. "I cannot
bear---. Go now."

He extended his hands stupidly. She clenched her fists. "Go now," she
cried. "Go now."

He hesitated and understood. He threw his hands up in a queer
half-theatrical gesture. He had no word to say. He turned from her.

The man in yellow moved towards the door with clumsy belated tact. But
Graham stepped past him.  He went striding through the room where the
Ward Leader bawled at a telephone directing that the aeropile should
be put upon the guides.

The man in yellow glanced at Helen's still figure, hesitated and
hurried after him. Graham did not once look back, he did not speak
until the curtain of the ante-chamber of the great hall fell behind
him. Then he turned his head with curt swift directions upon his
bloodless lips.

\chapter{THE COMING OF THE AEROPLANES}

Two men in pale blue were Iying in the irregular line that stretched
along the edge of the captured Roehampton stage from end to end,
grasping their carbines and peering into the shadows of the stage
called Wimbledon Park. Now and then they spoke to one another. They
spoke the mutilated English of their class and period. The fire of the
Ostrogites had dwindled and ceased, and few of the enemy had been seen
for some time. But the echoes of the fight that was going on now far
below in the lower galleries of that stage, came every now and then
between the staccato of shots from the popular side. One of these men
was describing to the other how he had seen a man down below there
dodge behind a girder, and had aimed at a guess and hit him cleanly as
he dodged too far "He's down there still," said the marksman.  "See
that little patch. Yes. Between those bars."  A few yards behind them
lay a dead stranger, face upward to the sky, with the blue canvas of
his jacket smoldering in a circle about the neat bullet hole on his
chest. Close beside him a wounded man, with a leg swathed about, sat
with an expressionless face and watched the progress of that
burning. Gigantic behind them, athwart the carrier lay the captured
aeropile.

"I can't see him now," said the second man in a ton of provocation.

The marksman became foul-mouthed and high- voiced in his earnest
endeavour to make things plain And suddenly, interrupting him, came a
noisy shouting from the substage.

"What's going on now," he said, and raised himself on one arm to stare
at the stairheads in the central groove of the stage. A number of blue
figures were coming up these, and swarming across the stage to the
aeropile.

"We don't want all these fools," said his friend.  "They only crowd up
and spoil shots. What are they after? "

"Ssh!---they're shouting something."

The two men listened. The swarming new-comers had crowded densely
about the aeropile. Three Ward Leaders, conspicuous by their black
mantles and badges, clambered into the body and appeared above it. The
rank and file flung themselves upon the vans, gripping hold of the
edges, until the entire outline of the thing was manned, in some
places three deep. One of the marksmen knelt up. "They're putting it
on the carrier---that's what they're after."

He rose to his feet, his friend rose also. "What's the good? " said
his friend. "We've got no aeronauts."

"That's what they're doing anyhow." He looked at his rifle, looked at
the struggling crowd, and suddenly turning to the wounded man. "Mind
these, mate," he said, handing his carbine and cartridge belt; and in
a moment he was running towards the aeropile. For a quarter of an hour
he was a perspiring Titan, lugging, thrusting, shouting and heeding
shouts, and then the thing was done, and he stood with a multitude of
others cheering their own achievement. By this time he knew, what
indeed everyone in the city knew, that the Master, raw learner though
he was, intended to fly this machine himself, was coming even now to
take control of it, would let no other man attempt it. "He who takes
the greatest danger, he who bears the heaviest burden, that man is
King," so the Master was reported to have spoken. And even as this man
cheered, and while the beads of sweat still chased one another from
the disorder of his hair, he heard the thunder of a greater tumult,
and in fitful snatches the beat and impulse of the revolutionary
song. He saw through a gap in the people that a thick stream of heads
still poured up the stairway. "The Master is coming," shouted voices,
"the Master is coming," and the crowd about him grew denser and
denser. He began to thrust himself towards the central groove. "The
Master is coming!" "The Sleeper, the Master!" "God and the Master!"
roared the Voices.

And suddenly quite close to him were the black uniforms o f the
revolutionary guard, and for the first and last time in his life he
saw Graham, saw him quite nearly. A tall, dark man in a flowing black
robe, with a white, resolute face and eyes fixed steadfastly before
him; a man who for all the little things about him held neither ears
nor eyes nor thoughts\dots.  For all his days that man remembered the
passing of Graham's bloodless face. In a moment it had gone and he was
fighting in the swaying crowd. A lad weeping with terror thrust
against him, pressing towards the stairways, yelling "Clear for the
aeropile!" The bell that clears the flying stage became a loud
unmelodious clanging.

With that clanging in his ears Graham drew near the aeropile, marched
into the shadow of its tilting wing. He became aware that a number of
people about him were offering to accompany him, and waved their
offers aside. He wanted to think how one started the engine. The bell
clanged faster and faster, and the feet of the retreating people
roared faster and louder. The man in yellow was assisting him to mount
through the ribs of the body. He clambered into the aeronaut's place,
fixing himself very carefully and deliberately. What was it? The man
in yellow was pointing to two aeropiles driving upward in the southern
sky. No doubt they were looking for the coming
aeroplanes. That---presently---the thing to do now was to
start. Things were being shouted at him, questions, warnings. They
bothered him. He wanted to think about the aeropile, to recall every
item of his previous experience. He waved the people from him, saw the
man in yellow dropping off through the ribs, saw the crowd cleft down
the line of the girders by his gesture.

For a moment he was motionless, staring at the levers, the wheel by
which the engine shifted, and all the delicate appliances of which he
knew so little. His eye caught a spirit level with the bubble towards
him, and he remembered something, spent a dozen seconds in swinging
the engine forward until the bubble floated in the centre of the
tube. He noted that the people were not shouting, knew they watched
his deliberation.  A bullet smashed on the bar above his head. Who
fired? Was the line clear of people? He stood up to see and sat down
again.

In another second the propeller was spinning, and he was rushing down
the guides. He gripped the wheel and swung the engine back to lift the
stem.  Then it was the people shouted. In a moment he was throbbing
with the quiver of the engine, and the shouts dwindled swiftly behind,
rushed down to silence.  The wind whistled over the edges of the
screen, and the world sank away from him very swiftly.

Throb, throb, throb---throb, throb, throb; up he drove. He fancied
himself free of all excitement, felt cool and deliberate. He lifted
the stem still more, opened one valve on his left wing and swept round
and up. He looked down with a steady head, and up. One of the
Ostrogite aeropiles was driving across his course, so that he drove
obliquely towards it and would pass below it at a steep angle. Its
little aeronauts were peering down at him. What did they mean to do?
His mind became active. One, he saw held a weapon pointing, seemed
prepared to fire. What did they think he meant to do? In a moment he
understood their tactics, and his resolution was taken. His momentary
lethargy was past. He opened two more valves to his left, swung round,
end on to this hostile machine, closed his valves, and shot straight
at it, stem and wind-screen shielding him from the shot. They tilted a
little as if to clear him. He flung up his stem.

Throb, throb, throb---pause---throb, throb---he set his teeth, his
face into an involuntary grimace, and crash! He struck it! He struck
upward beneath the nearer wing.

Very slowly the wing of his antagonist seemed to broaden as the
impetus of his blow turned it up. He saw the full breadth of it and
then it slid downward out of his sight.

He felt his stem going down, his hands tightened on the levers,
whirled and rammed the engine back. He felt the jerk of a clearance,
the nose of the machine jerked upward steeply, and for a moment he
seemed to be Iying on his back. The machine was reeling and
staggering, it seemed to be dancing on its screw. He made a huge
effort, hung for a moment on the levers, and slowly the engine came
forward again. He was driving upward but no longer so steeply. He
gasped for a moment and flung himself at the levers again. The wind
whistled about him. One further effort and he was almost level. He
could breathe. He turned his head for the first time to see what had
become of his antagonists. Turned back to the levers for a moment and
looked again. For a moment he could have believed they were
annihilated.  And then he saw between the two stages to the east was a
chasm, and down this something, a slender edge, fell swiftly and
vanished, as a sixpence falls down a crack.

At first he did not understand, and then a wild joy possessed him. He
shouted at the top of his voice, an inarticulate shout, and drove
higher and higher up the sky. Throb, throb, throb, pause, throb,
throb, throb.  "Where was the other aeropile?" he thought. "They
too---." As he looked round the empty heavens he had a momentary fear
that this machine had risen above him, and then he saw it alighting on
the Norwood stage. They had meant shooting. To risk being rammed
headlong two thousand feet in the air was beyond their latter-day
courage. The combat was declined.

For a little while he circled, then swooped in a steep descent towards
the westward stage. Throb throb throb, throb throb throb. The twilight
was creeping on apace, the smoke from the Streatham stage that had
been so dense and dark, was now a pillar of fire, and all the laced
curves of the moving ways and the translucent roofs and domes and the
chasms between the buildings were glowing softly now, lit by the
tempered radiance of the electric light that the glare of the way
overpowered. The three efficient stages that the Ostrogites held---for
Wimbledon Park was useless because of the fire from Roehampton, and
Streatham was a furnace---were glowing with guide lights for the
coming aeroplanes. As he swept over the Roehampton stage he saw the
dark masses of the people thereon. He heard a clap of frantic
cheering, heard a bullet from the Wimbledon Park stage tweet through
the air, and went beating up above the Surrey wastes.  He felt a
breath of wind from the south-west, and lifted his westward wing as he
had learnt to do, and so drove upward heeling into the rare swift
upper air.  Throb throb throb---throb throb throb.

Up he drove and up, to that pulsating rhythm, until the country
beneath was blue and indistinct, and London spread like a little map
traced in light, like the mere model of a city near the brim of the
horizon.  The south-west was a sky of sapphire over the shadowy rim of
the world, and ever as he drove upward the multitude of stars
increased.

And behold! In the southward, low down and glittering swiftly nearer,
were two little patches of nebulous light. And then two more, and then
a nebulous glow of swiftly driving shapes. Presently he could count
them. There were four and twenty. The first fleet of aeroplanes had
come! Beyond appeared a yet greater glow.

He swept round in a half circle, staring at this advancing fleet. It
flew in a wedge-like shape, a triangular flight of gigantic
phosphorescent shapes sweeping nearer through the lower air. He made a
swift calculation of their pace, and spun the little wheel that
brought the engine forward. He touched a lever and the throbbing
effort of the engine ceased. He began to fall, fell swifter and
swifter. He aimed at the apex of the wedge. He dropped like a stone
through the whistling air. It seemed scarce a second from that soaring
moment before he struck the foremost aeroplane.

No man of all that black multitude saw the coming of his fate, no man
among them dreamt of the hawk that struck downward upon him out of the
sky. Those who were not limp in the agonies of air-sickness, were
craning their black necks and staring to see the filmy city that was
rising out of the haze, the rich and splendid city to which "Massa
Boss" had brought their obedient muscles. Bright teeth gleamed and the
glossy faces shone. They had heard of Paris. They knew they were to
have lordly times among the "poor white" trash. And suddenly Graham
struck them.

He had aimed at the body of the aeroplane, but at the very last
instant a better idea had flashed into his mind. He twisted about and
struck near the edge of the starboard wing with all his accumulated
weight.  He was jerked back as he struck. His prow went gliding across
its smooth expanse towards the rim.  He felt the forward rush of the
huge fabric sweeping him and his aeropile along with it, and for a
moment that seemed an age he could not tell what was happening.  He
heard a thousand throats yelling, and perceived that his machine was
balanced on the edge of the gigantic float, and driving down, down;
glanced over his shoulder and saw the backbone of the aeroplane and
the opposite float swaying up. He had a vision through the ribs of
sliding chairs, staring faces, and hands clutching at the tilting
guide bars.  The fenestrations in the further float flashed open as
the aeronaut tried to right her. Beyond, he saw a second aeroplane
leaping steeply to escape the whirl of its heeling fellow. The broad
area of swaying wings seemed to jerk upward. He felt his aeropile had
dropped clear, that the monstrous fabric, clean overturned, hung like
a sloping wall above him.

He did not clearly understand that he had struck the side float of the
aeroplane and slipped off, but he perceived that he was flying free on
the down glide and rapidly nearing earth. What had he done? His heart
throbbed like a noisy engine in his throat and for a perilous instant
he could not move his levers because of the paralysis of his hands. He
wrenched the levers to throw his engine back, fought for two seconds
against the weight of it, felt himself righting driving horizontally,
set the engine beating again.

He looked upward and saw two aeroplanes glide shouting far overhead,
looked back, and saw the main body of the fleet opening out and
rushing upward and . .  outward; saw the one he had struck fall
edgewise on and strike like a gigantic knife-blade along the wind-
wheels below it.

He put down his stern and looked again. He drove up heedless of his
direction as he watched. He saw the wind-vanes give, saw the huge
fabric strike the earth, saw its downward vans crumple with the weight
of its descent, and then the whole mass turned over and smashed,
upside down, upon the sloping wheels.  Throb, throb, throb,
pause. Suddenly from the heaving wreckage a thin tongue of white fire
licked up towards the zenith. And then he was aware of a huge mass
flying through the air towards him, and turned upwards just in time to
escape the charge---if it was a charge---of a second aeroplane. It
whirled by below, sucked him down a fathom, and nearly turned him over
in the gust of its close passage.

He became aware of three others rushing towards him, aware of the
urgent necessity of beating above them. Aeroplanes were all about him,
circling wildly to avoid him, as it seemed. They drove past him,
above, below, eastward and westward. Far away to the westward was the
sound of a collision, and two falling flares. Far away to the
southward a second squadron was coming. Steadily he beat upward.
Presently all the aeroplanes were below him, but for a moment he
doubted the height he had of them, and did not swoop again. And then
he came down upon a second victim and all its load of soldiers saw him
coming.  The big machine heeled and swayed as the fear maddened men
scrambled to the stern for their weapons. A score of bullets sung
through the air, and there flashed a star in the thick glass
wind-screen that protected him. The aeroplane slowed and dropped to
foil his stroke, and dropped too low. Just in time he saw the
wind-wheels of Bromley hill rushing up towards him, and spun about and
up as the aeroplane he had chased crashed among them. All its voices
wove into a felt of yelling. The great fabric seemed to be standing on
end for a second among the heeling and splintering vans, and then it
flew to pieces.  Huge splinters came flying through the air, its
engines burst like shells. A hot rush of flame shot overhead into the
darkling sky.

"\emph{Two!}" he cried, with a bomb from overhead bursting as it fell,
and forthwith he was beating up again.  A glorious exhilaration
possessed him now, a giant activity. His troubles about humanity,
about his inadaquacy, were gone for ever. He was a man in battle
rejoicing in his power. Aeroplanes seemed radiating from him in every
direction, intent only upon avoiding him, the yelling of their packed
passengers came in short gusts as they swept by. He chose his third
quarry, struck hastily and did but turn it on edge. It escaped him, to
smash against the tall cliff of London wall. FIying from that impact
he skimmed the darkling ground so nearly he could see a frightened
rabbit bolting up a slope. He jerked up steeply, and found himself
driving over south London with the air about him vacant. To the right
of him a wild riot of signal rockets from the Ostrogites banged
tumultuously in the sky. To the south the wreckage of half a dozen air
ships flamed, and east and west and north the air ships fled before
him. They drove away to the east and north, and went about in the
south, for they could not pause in the air. In their present confusion
any attempt at evolution would have meant disastrous collisions. He
could scarcely realize the thing he had done. In every quarter
aeroplanes were receding.  They were receding. They dwindled smaller
and smaller. They were in flight!

He passed two hundred feet or so above the Roehampton stage. It was
black with people and noisy with their frantic shouting. But why was
the Wimbledon Park stage black and cheering, too? The smoke and flame
of Streatham now hid the three further stages. He curved about and
rose to see them and the northern quarters. First came the square
masses of Shooter's Hill into sight from behind the smoke, lit and
orderly with the aeroplane that had landed and its disembarking
negroes. Then came Blackheath, and then under the corner of the reek
the Norwood stage. On Blackheath no aeroplane had landed but an
aeropile lay upon the guides. Norwood was covered by a swarm of little
figures running to and fro in a passionate confusion. Why? Abruptly he
understood. The stubborn defence of the flying stages was over, the
people were pouring into the under-ways of these last strongholds of
Ostrog's usurpation. And then, from far away on the northern border of
the city, full of glorious import to him, came a sound, a signal, a
note of triumph, the leaden thud of a gun. His lips fell apart, his
face was disturbed with emotion.

He drew an immense breath. "They win," he shouted to the empty air;
"the people win!" The sound of a second gun came like an answer. And
then he saw the aeropile on Blackheath was running down its guides to
launch. It lifted clean and rose.  It shot up into the air, driving
straight southward and away from him.

In an instant it came to him what this meant. It must needs be Ostrog
in flight. He shouted and dropped towards it. He had the momentum of
his elevation and fell slanting down the air and very swiftly. It rose
steeply at his approach. He allowed for its velocity and drove
straight upon it.

It suddenly became a mere flat edge, and behold! he was past it, and
driving headlong down with all the force of his futile blow.

He was furiously angry. He reeled the engine back along its shaft and
went circling up. He saw Ostrog's machine beating up a spiral before
him. He rose straight towards it, won above it by virtue of the
impetus of his swoop and by the advantage and weight of a man. He
dropped headlong---dropped and missed again! As he rushed past he saw
the face of Ostrog's aeronaut confident and cool and in Ostrog's
attitude a wincing resolution. Ostrog was looking steadfastly away
from him---to the south.  He realized with a gleam of wrath how
bungling his flight must be. Below he saw the Croyden hills. He jerked
upward and once more he gained on his enemy.

He glanced over his shoulder and his attention was arrested by a
strange thing. The eastward stage, the one on Shooter's Hill, appeared
to lift; a flash changing to a tall grey shape, a cowled figure of
smoke and duct, jerked into the air. For a moment this cowled figure
stood motionless, dropping huge masses of metal from its shoulders,
and then it began to uncoil a dense head of smoke. The people had
blown it up, aeroplane and all! As suddenly a second flash and grey
shape sprang up from the Norwood stage. And even as he stared at this
came a dead report, and the air wave of the first explosion struck
him. He was flung up and sideways.

For a moment the aeropile fell nearly edgewise with her nose down, and
seemed to hesitate whether to overset altogether. He stood on his
wind-shield wrenching the wheel that swayed up over his head.  And
then the shock of the second explosion took his machine sideways.

He found himself clinging to one of the ribs of his machine, and the
air was blowing past him and upward. He seemed to be hanging quite
still in the air, with the wind blowing up past him. It occurred to
him that he was falling. Then he was sure that he was falling. He
could not look down.

He found himself recapitulating with incredible swiftness all that had
happened since his awakening, the days of doubt the days of Empire,
and at last the tumultuous discovery of Ostrog's calculated treachery.
he was beaten but London was saved. London was saved!

The thought had a quality of utter unreality. Who was he? Why was he
holding so tightly with his hands? Why could he not leave go? In such
a fall as this countless dreams have ended. But in a moment he would
wake....

His thoughts ran swifter and swifter. He wondered if he should see
Helen again. It seemed so unreasonable that he should not see her
again. It \emph{must} be a dream! Yet surely he would meet her. She at
least was real. She was real. He would wake and meet her.

Although he could not look at it, he was suddenly aware that the earth
was very near.


\end{document}
