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
anxiety and fear in 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 therewith 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.
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 on 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 façade 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 façade, 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 reds 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.
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.... 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 grey, 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 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 unquestionably. 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 the world, and great political parties were fighting to possess
him. On the one hand was the 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
understand," 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
red-clad men as busily hunting him, driving the black-badged
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 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 streets became deserted. The frontages 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
sit down on one of the numerous benches of the upper ways. But a feverish
restlessness, the knowledge of his vital implication in this 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 series 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 profit is 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 all 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 unfolded itself, 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
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 trough 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.