In The City Ways

: When The Sleeper Wakes

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 fragmentary. 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 said 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 harangue 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 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 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 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 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 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 white limbed 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 differently."



"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.