The complete works, p.92
The Complete Works, page 92
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 XIV
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, __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
