The complete works, p.100
The Complete Works, page 100
disguise for this excursion Asano will be able to manage.
He would go with you. After all it is not a bad idea of yours."
"You will not want to consult me in any matter?"
asked Graham suddenly, struck by an odd suspicion.
"Oh, dear no! No! I think you may trust affairs to me for a time, at any rate," said Ostrog, smiling.
"Even if we differ--"
Graham glanced; at him sharply.
"There is no fighting likely to happen soon?" he asked abruptly.
"Certainly not."
"I have been thinking about these negroes. I don't believe the people intend any hostility to me, and, after all, I am the Master. I do not want any negroes
brought to London. It is an archaic prejudice perhaps, but I have peculiar feelings about Europeans and
the subject races. Even about Paris---"
Ostrog stood watching him from under his drooping
brows." I am not bringing negroes to London,"
he said slowly." But if--"
"You are not to bring armed negroes to London,
whatever happens," said Graham. "In that matter I am quite decided."
Ostrog, after a pause, decided not to speak, and
bowed deferentially.
CHAPTER XX
IN THE CITY WAYS
And that night, unknown and unsuspected, Graham,
dressed in the costume of an inferior wind-vane
official keeping holiday, and accompanied by Asano in Labour Company canvas, surveyed the city through
which he had wandered when it was veiled in darkness.
But now he saw it lit and waking, a whirlpool of life.
In spite of the surging and swaying of the forces of revolution, in spite of the unusual discontent,
the mutterings of the greater struggle of which the first revolt was but the prelude, the myriad streams of commerce
still flowed wide and strong. He knew now something
of the dimensions and quality of the new age, but
he was not prepared for the infinite surprise of the detailed view, for the torrent of colour and vivid
impressions that poured past him.
This was his first real contact with the people of
these latter days. He realised that all that had gone before, saving his glimpses of the public theatres and markets, had had its element of seclusion, had been a movement within the comparatively narrow political
quarter, that all his previous experiences had revolved immediately about the question of his own position.
But here was the city at the busiest hours of night, the people to a large extent returned to their own immediate interests, the resumption of the real informal life, he common habits of the new time.
They emerged at first into a street whose opposite
ways were crowded with the blue canvas liveries. This swarm Graham saw was a portion of a procession--
it was odd to see a procession parading the city seated They carried banners of coarse red stuff with red
letters. "No disarmament," said the banners, for the most part in crudely daubed letters and with variant spelling, and "Why should we disarm?" "No disarming."
"No disarming." Banner after banner
went by, a stream of banners flowing past, and at last at the end, the song of the revolt and a noisy band of strange instruments." They all ought to be at work,"
said Asano. "They have had no food these two days, or they have stolen it."
Presently Asano made a detour to avoid the congested crowd that gaped upon the occasional passage
of dead bodies from hospital to a mortuary, the
gleanings after death's harvest of the first revolt.
That night few people were sleeping, everyone was
abroad. A vast excitement, perpetual crowds perpetually changing, surrounded Graham; his mind was confused
and darkened by an incessant tumult, by the
cries and enigmatical fragments of the social struggle that was as yet only beginning. Everywhere festoons
and banners of black and strange decorations,
intensified the quality of his popularity.
Everywhere he caught snatches of that crude thick
dialect that served the illiterate class, the class, that is, beyond the reach of phonograph culture, in their
common-place intercourse. Everywhere this trouble of disarmament was in the air, with a quality of
immediate stress of which he had no inkling during his seclusion in the Wind-Vane quarter. He perceived
that as soon as he returned he must discuss this with Ostrog, this and the greater issues of which it was the expression, in a far more conclusive way than he had so far done. Perpetually that night, even in the earlier hours of their wanderings about the city, the spirit of unrest and revolt swamped his attention, to the
exclusion of countless strange things he might
otherwise have observed.
This preoccupation made his impressions 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.
"__This!__ Surely the essence of religion is reverence."
"Oh __that!__" Asano looked at Graham. "Does it shock you?" he said in the tone of one who makes a discovery. "I suppose it would, of course. I had forgotten. Nowadays the competition for attention is so keen. and people simply haven't the leisure to attend to their souls, you know, as they used to do." He smiled.
"In the old days you had quiet Sabbaths and the countryside. Though somewhere I've read of Sunday
afternoons that--"
"But, __that__," said Graham, glancing back at the receding blue and white. "That is surely not the only--"
"There are hundreds of different ways. But, of
course, if a sect doesn't tell it doesn't pay. Worship has moved with the times. There are high class sects with quieter ways--costly incense and personal
attentions and all that. These people are extremely
popular and prosperous. They pay several dozen lions for those apartments to the Council--to you, I should
say."
Graham still felt a difficulty with the coinage, and this mention of a dozen lions brought him abruptly
to that matter. In a moment the screaming temples
and their swarming touts were forgotten in this new
interest. A turn of a phrase suggested, and an answer confirmed the idea that gold and silver were both
demonetised, that stamped gold which had begun its
reign amidst the merchants of Phoenicia was at last
dethroned. The change had been graduated but swift,
brought about by an extension of the system of
cheques that had even in his previous life already
practically superseded gold in all the larger business transactions. The common traffic of the city, the common currency indeed of all the world, was conducted by
means of the little brown, green and pink council
cheques for small amounts, printed with a blank payee.
Asano had several with him, and at the first
opportunity he supplied the gaps in his set. They were printed not on tearable paper, but on a semi-transparent fabric of silken, flexibility, interwoven with silk.
Across them all sprawled a facsimile of Graham's
signature, his first encounter with the curves and turns of that familiar autograph for two hundred and three
years.
Some intermediary experiences made no impression
sufficiently vivid to prevent the matter of the
disarmament claiming his thoughts again; a blurred picture of a Theosophist temple that promised MIRACLES
in enormous letters of unsteady fire was least
submerged perhaps, but then came the view of the dining hall in Northumberland Avenue. That interested him
very greatly.
By the energy and thought of Asano he was able to
view this place from a little screened gallery reserved for the attendants of the tables. The building was
pervaded by a distant muffled hooting, piping and
bawling, of which he did not at first understand the import, but which recalled a certain mysterious
leathery voice he had heard after the resumption of the lights on the night of his solitary wandering.
He had grown accustomed now to vastness and
great numbers of people, nevertheless this spectacle held him for a long time. It was as he watched the
table service more immediately beneath, and
interspersed with many questions and answers concerning details, that the realisation of the full significance of the feast of several thousand people came to him.
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!"
