The complete works, p.105
The Complete Works, page 105
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 All his supports seemed withdrawn together; he seemed to have dropped into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 . . ."
"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. . . 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.
. . . 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 __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
