OSTROG
Graham could now take a clearer view of his position. For a long time yet
he wandered, but after the talk of the old man his discovery of this
Ostrog was clear in his mind as the final inevitable decision. One thing
was evident, those who were at the headquarters of the revolt had
succeeded very admirably in suppressing the fact of his disappearance.
But every moment he expected to hear the report of his death or of his
recapture by the Council.
Presently a man stopped before him. "Have you heard?" he said.
"No!" said Graham, starting.
"Near a dozand," said the man, "a dozand men!" and hurried on.
A number of men and a girl passed in the darkness, gesticulating and
shouting: "Capitulated! Given up!" "A dozand of men." "Two dozand of
men." "Ostrog, Hurrah! Ostrog, Hurrah!" These cries receded, became
indistinct.
Other shouting men followed. For a time his attention was absorbed in the
fragments of speech he heard. He had a doubt whether all were speaking
English. Scraps floated to him, scraps like Pigeon English, like "nigger"
dialect, blurred and mangled distortions. He dared accost no one with
questions. The impression the people gave him jarred altogether with his
preconceptions of the struggle and confirmed the old man's faith in
Ostrog. It was only slowly he could bring himself to believe that all
these people were rejoicing at the defeat of the Council, that the
Council which had pursued him with such power and vigour was after all
the weaker of the two sides in conflict. And if that was so, how did it
affect him? Several times he hesitated on the verge of fundamental
questions. Once he turned and walked for a long way after a little man of
rotund inviting outline, but he was unable to master confidence to
address him.
It was only slowly that it came to him that he might ask for the
"wind-vane offices" whatever the "wind-vane offices" might be. His first
enquiry simply resulted in a direction to go on towards Westminster. His
second led to the discovery of a short cut in which he was speedily lost.
He was told to leave the ways to which he had hitherto confined
himself--knowing no other means of transit--and to plunge down one of the
middle staircases into the blackness of a cross-way. Thereupon came some
trivial adventures; chief of these an ambiguous encounter with a
gruff-voiced invisible creature speaking in a strange dialect that seemed
at first a strange tongue, a thick flow of speech with the drifting
corpses of English Words therein, the dialect of the latter-day vile.
Then another voice drew near, a girl's voice singing, "tralala tralala."
She spoke to Graham, her English touched with something of the same
quality. She professed to have lost her sister, she blundered needlessly
into him he thought, caught hold of him and laughed. But a word of vague
remonstrance sent her into the unseen again.
The sounds about him increased. Stumbling people passed him, speaking
excitedly. "They have surrendered!" "The Council! Surely not the
Council!" "They are saying so in the Ways." The passage seemed wider.
Suddenly the wall fell away. He was in a great space and people were
stirring remotely. He inquired his way of an indistinct figure. "Strike
straight across," said a woman's voice. He left his guiding wall, and in
a moment had stumbled against a little table on which were utensils of
glass. Graham's eyes, now attuned to darkness, made out a long vista with
tables on either side. He went down this. At one or two of the tables he
heard a clang of glass and a sound of eating. There were people then cool
enough to dine, or daring enough to steal a meal in spite of social
convulsion and darkness. Far off and high up he presently saw a pallid
light of a semi-circular shape. As he approached this, a black edge came
up and hid it. He stumbled at steps and found himself in a gallery. He
heard a sobbing, and found two scared little girls crouched by a railing.
These children became silent at the near sound of feet. He tried to
console them, but they were very still until he left them. Then as he
receded he could hear them sobbing again.
Presently he found himself at the foot of a staircase and near a wide
opening. He saw a dim twilight above this and ascended out of the
blackness into a street of moving ways again. Along this a disorderly
swarm of people marched shouting. They were singing snatches of the song
of the revolt, most of them out of tune. Here and there torches flared
creating brief hysterical shadows. He asked his way and was twice puzzled
by that same thick dialect. His third attempt won an answer he could
understand. He was two miles from the wind-vane offices in Westminster,
but the way was easy to follow.
When at last he did approach the district of the wind-vane offices it
seemed to him, from the cheering processions that came marching along the
Ways, from the tumult of rejoicing, and finally from the restoration of
the lighting of the city, that the overthrow of the Council must already
be accomplished. And still no news of his absence came to his ears.
The re-illumination of the city came with startling abruptness. Suddenly
he stood blinking, all about him men halted dazzled, and the world was
incandescent. The light found him already upon the outskirts of the
excited crowds that choked the ways near the wind-vane offices, and the
sense of visibility and exposure that came with it turned his colourless
intention of joining Ostrog to a keen anxiety.
For a time he was jostled, obstructed, and endangered by men hoarse and
weary with cheering his name, some of them bandaged and bloody in his
cause. The frontage of the wind-vane offices was illuminated by some
moving picture, but what it was he could not see, because in spite of his
strenuous attempts the density of the crowd prevented his approaching it.
From the fragments of speech he caught, he judged it conveyed news of the
fighting about the Council House. Ignorance and indecision made him slow
and ineffective in his movements. For a time he could not conceive how he
was to get within the unbroken façade of this place. He made his way
slowly into the midst of this mass of people, until he realised that the
descending staircase of the central way led to the interior of the
buildings. This gave him a goal, but the crowding in the central path
was so dense that it was long before he could reach it. And even then he
encountered intricate obstruction, and had an hour of vivid argument
first in this guard room and then in that before he could get a note
taken to the one man of all men who was most eager to see him. His story
was laughed to scorn at one place, and wiser for that, when at last he
reached a second stairway he professed simply to have news of
extraordinary importance for Ostrog. What it was he would not say. They
sent his note reluctantly. For a long time he waited in a little room at
the foot of the lift shaft, and thither at last came Lincoln, eager,
apologetic, astonished. He stopped in the doorway scrutinising Graham,
then rushed forward effusively.
"Yes," he cried. "It is you. And you are not dead!"
Graham made a brief explanation.
"My brother is waiting," explained Lincoln. "He is alone in the wind-vane
offices. We feared you had been killed in the theatre. He doubted--and
things are very urgent still in spite of what we are telling them
_there_--or he would have come to you."
They ascended a lift, passed along a narrow passage, crossed a great
hall, empty save for two hurrying messengers, and entered a comparatively
little room, whose only furniture was a long settee and a large oval disc
of cloudy, shifting grey, hung by cables from the wall. There Lincoln
left Graham for a space, and he remained alone without understanding the
smoky shapes that drove slowly across this disc.
His attention was arrested by a sound that began abruptly. It was
cheering, the frantic cheering of a vast but very remote crowd, a roaring
exultation. This ended as sharply as it had begun, like a sound heard
between the opening and shutting of a door. In the outer room was a noise
of hurrying steps and a melodious clinking as if a loose chain was
running over the teeth of a wheel.
Then he heard the voice of a woman, the rustle of unseen garments. "It is
Ostrog!" he heard her say. A little bell rang fitfully, and then
everything was still again.
Presently came voices, footsteps and movement without. The footsteps of
some one person detached itself from the other sounds, and drew near,
firm, evenly measured steps. The curtain lifted slowly. A tall,
white-haired man, clad in garments of cream-coloured silk, appeared,
regarding Graham from under his raised arm.
For a moment the white form remained holding the curtain, then dropped it
and stood before it. Graham's first impression was of a very broad
forehead, very pale blue eyes deep sunken under white brows, an aquiline
nose, and a heavily-lined resolute mouth. The folds of flesh over the
eyes, the drooping of the corners of the mouth contradicted the upright
bearing, and said the man was old. Graham rose to his feet instinctively,
and for a moment the two men stood in silence, regarding each other.
"You are Ostrog?" said Graham.
"I am Ostrog."
"The Boss?"
"So I am called."
Graham felt the inconvenience of the silence. "I have to thank you
chiefly, I understand, for my safety," he said presently.
"We were afraid you were killed," said Ostrog. "Or sent to sleep
again--for ever. We have been doing everything to keep our secret--the
secret of your disappearance. Where have you been? How did you get here?"
Graham told him briefly.
Ostrog listened in silence.
He smiled faintly. "Do you know what I was doing when they came to tell
me you had come?"
"How can I guess?"
"Preparing your double."
"My double?"
"A man as like you as we could find. We were going to hypnotise him, to
save him the difficulty of acting. It was imperative. The whole of this
revolt depends on the idea that you are awake, alive, and with us. Even
now a great multitude of people has gathered in the theatre clamouring to
see you. They do not trust.... You know, of course--something of your
position?"
"Very little," said Graham.
"It is like this." Ostrog walked a pace or two into the room and turned.
"You are absolute owner," he said, "of the world. You are King of the
Earth. Your powers are limited in many intricate ways, but you are the
figure-head, the popular symbol of government. This White Council, the
Council of Trustees as it is called--"
"I have heard the vague outline of these things."
"I wondered."
"I came upon a garrulous old man."
"I see.... Our masses--the word comes from your days--you know, of
course, that we still have masses--regard you as our actual ruler. Just
as a great number of people in your days regarded the Crown as the
ruler. They are discontented--the masses all over the earth--with the
rule of your Trustees. For the most part it is the old discontent, the
old quarrel of the common man with his commonness--the misery of work and
discipline and unfitness. But your Trustees have ruled ill. In certain
matters, in the administration of the Labour Companies, for example, they
have been unwise. They have given endless opportunities. Already we of
the popular party were agitating for reforms--when your waking came.
Came! If it had been contrived it could not have come more
opportunely." He smiled. "The public mind, making no allowance for
your years of quiescence, had already hit on the thought of waking you
and appealing to you, and--Flash!"
He indicated the outbreak by a gesture, and Graham moved his head to show
that he understood.
"The Council muddled--quarrelled. They always do. They could not decide
what to do with you. You know how they imprisoned you?"
"I see. I see. And now--we win?"
"We win. Indeed we win. To-night, in five swift hours. Suddenly we struck
everywhere. The wind-vane people, the Labour Company and its millions,
burst the bonds. We got the pull of the aeroplanes."
"Yes," said Graham.
"That was, of course, essential. Or they could have got away. All the
city rose, every third man almost was in it! All the blue, all the public
services, save only just a few aeronauts and about half the red police.
You were rescued, and their own police of the ways--not half of them
could be massed at the Council House--have been broken up, disarmed or
killed. All London is ours--now. Only the Council House remains.
"Half of those who remain to them of the red police were lost in that
foolish attempt to recapture you. They lost their heads when they lost
you. They flung all they had at the theatre. We cut them off from the
Council House there. Truly to-night has been a night of victory.
Everywhere your star has blazed. A day ago--the White Council ruled as it
has ruled for a gross of years, for a century and a half of years, and
then, with only a little whispering, a covert arming here and there,
suddenly--So!"
"I am very ignorant," said Graham. "I suppose--I do not clearly
understand the conditions of this fighting. If you could explain. Where
is the Council? Where is the fight?"
Ostrog stepped across the room, something clicked, and suddenly, save for
an oval glow, they were in darkness. For a moment Graham was puzzled.
Then he saw that the cloudy grey disc had taken depth and colour, had
assumed the appearance of an oval window looking out upon a strange
unfamiliar scene.
At the first glance he was unable to guess what this scene might be. It
was a daylight scene, the daylight of a wintry day, grey and clear.
Across the picture, and halfway as it seemed between him and the remoter
view, a stout cable of twisted white wire stretched vertically. Then he
perceived that the rows of great wind-wheels he saw, the wide intervals,
the occasional gulfs of darkness, were akin to those through which he had
fled from the Council House. He distinguished an orderly file of red
figures marching across an open space between files of men in black, and
realised before Ostrog spoke that he was looking down on the upper
surface of latter-day London. The overnight snows had gone. He judged
that this mirror was some modern replacement of the camera obscura, but
that matter was not explained to him. He saw that though the file of red
figures was trotting from left to right, yet they were passing out of the
picture to the left. He wondered momentarily, and then saw that the
picture was passing slowly, panorama fashion, across the oval.
"In a moment you will see the fighting," said Ostrog at his elbow. "Those
fellows in red you notice are prisoners. This is the roof space of
London--all the houses are practically continuous now. The streets and
public squares are covered in. The gaps and chasms of your time have
disappeared."
Something out of focus obliterated half the picture. Its form suggested a
man. There was a gleam of metal, a flash, something that swept across the
oval, as the eyelid of a bird sweeps across its eye, and the picture was
clear again. And now Graham beheld men running down among the
wind-wheels, pointing weapons from which jetted out little smoky flashes.
They swarmed thicker and thicker to the right, gesticulating--it might be
they were shouting, but of that the picture told nothing. They and the
wind-wheels passed slowly and steadily across the field of the mirror.
"Now," said Ostrog, "comes the Council House," and slowly a black edge
crept into view and gathered Graham's attention. Soon it was no longer an
edge but a cavity, a huge blackened space amidst the clustering edifices,
and from it thin spires of smoke rose into the pallid winter sky. Gaunt
ruinous masses of the building, mighty truncated piers and girders, rose
dismally out of this cavernous darkness. And over these vestiges of some
splendid place, countless minute men were clambering, leaping, swarming.
"This is the Council House," said Ostrog. "Their last stronghold. And the
fools wasted enough ammunition to hold out for a month in blowing up the
buildings all about them--to stop our attack. You heard the smash? It
shattered half the brittle glass in the city."
And while he spoke, Graham saw that beyond this area of ruins,
overhanging it and rising to a great height, was a ragged mass of white
building. This mass had been isolated by the ruthless destruction of its
surroundings. Black gaps marked the passages the disaster had torn apart;
big halls had been slashed open and the decoration of their interiors
showed dismally in the wintry dawn, and down the jagged walls hung
festoons of divided cables and twisted ends of lines and metallic rods.
And amidst all the vast details moved little red specks, the red-clothed
defenders of the Council. Every now and then faint flashes illuminated
the bleak shadows. At the first sight it seemed to Graham that an attack
upon this isolated white building was in progress, but then he perceived
that the party of the revolt was not advancing, but sheltered amidst the
colossal wreckage that encircled this last ragged stronghold of the
red-garbed men, was keeping up a fitful firing.
And not ten hours ago he had stood beneath the ventilating fans in a
little chamber within that remote building wondering what was happening
in the world!
Looking more attentively as this warlike episode moved silently across
the centre of the mirror, Graham saw that the white building was
surrounded on every side by ruins, and Ostrog proceeded to describe in
concise phrases how its defenders had sought by such destruction to
isolate themselves from a storm. He spoke of the loss of men that huge
downfall had entailed in an indifferent tone. He indicated an improvised
mortuary among the wreckage, showed ambulances swarming like cheese-mites
along a ruinous groove that had once been a street of moving ways. He was
more interested in pointing out the parts of the Council House, the
distribution of the besiegers. In a little while the civil contest that
had convulsed London was no longer a mystery to Graham. It was no
tumultuous revolt had occurred that night, no equal warfare, but a
splendidly organised _coup d'état_. Ostrog's grasp of details was
astonishing; he seemed to know the business of even the smallest knot of
black and red specks that crawled amidst these places.
He stretched a huge black arm across the luminous picture, and showed the
room whence Graham had escaped, and across the chasm of ruins the course
of his flight. Graham recognised the gulf across which the gutter ran,
and the wind-wheels where he had crouched from the flying machine. The
rest of his path had succumbed to the explosion. He looked again at the
Council House, and it was already half hidden, and on the right a
hillside with a cluster of domes and pinnacles, hazy, dim and distant,
was gliding into view.
"And the Council is really overthrown?" he said.
"Overthrown," said Ostrog.
"And I--. Is it indeed true that I--?"
"You are Master of the World."
"But that white flag--"
"That is the flag of the Council--the flag of the Rule of the World. It
will fall. The fight is over. Their attack on the theatre was their last
frantic struggle. They have only a thousand men or so, and some of these
men will be disloyal. They have little ammunition. And we are reviving
the ancient arts. We are casting guns."
"But--help. Is this city the world?"
"Practically this is all they have left to them of their empire. Abroad
the cities have either revolted with us or wait the issue. Your awakening
has perplexed them, paralysed them."
"But haven't the Council flying machines? Why is there no fighting
with them?"
"They had. But the greater part of the aeronauts were in the revolt with
us. They wouldn't take the risk of fighting on our side, but they would
not stir against us. We _had_ to get a pull with the aeronauts. Quite
half were with us, and the others knew it. Directly they knew you had got
away, those looking for you dropped. We killed the man who shot at
you--an hour ago. And we occupied the flying stages at the outset in
every city we could, and so stopped and captured the greater aeroplanes,
and as for the little flying machines that turned out--for some did--we
kept up too straight and steady a fire for them to get near the Council
House. If they dropped they couldn't rise again, because there's no clear
space about there for them to get up. Several we have smashed, several
others have dropped and surrendered, the rest have gone off to the
Continent to find a friendly city if they can before their fuel runs out.
Most of these men were only too glad to be taken prisoner and kept out of
harm's way. Upsetting in a flying machine isn't a very attractive
prospect. There's no chance for the Council that way. Its days are done."
He laughed and turned to the oval reflection again to show Graham what he
meant by flying stages. Even the four nearer ones were remote and
obscured by a thin morning haze. But Graham could perceive they were very
vast structures, judged even by the standard of the things about them.
And then as these dim shapes passed to the left there came again the
sight of the expanse across which the disarmed men in red had been
marching. And then the black ruins, and then again the beleaguered white
fastness of the Council. It appeared no longer a ghostly pile, but
glowing amber in the sunlight, for a cloud shadow had passed. About it
the pigmy struggle still hung in suspense, but now the red defenders were
no longer firing.
So, in a dusky stillness, the man from the nineteenth century saw the
closing scene of the great revolt, the forcible establishment of his
rule. With a quality of startling discovery it came to him that this was
his world, and not that other he had left behind; that this was no
spectacle to culminate and cease; that in this world lay whatever life
was still before him, lay all his duties and dangers and
responsibilities. He turned with fresh questions. Ostrog began to answer
them, and then broke off abruptly. "But these things I must explain more
fully later. At present there are--duties. The people are coming by the
moving ways towards this ward from every part of the city--the markets
and theatres are densely crowded. You are just in time for them. They are
clamouring to see you. And abroad they want to see you. Paris, New York,
Chicago, Denver, Capri--thousands of cities are up and in a tumult,
undecided, and clamouring to see you. They have clamoured that you should
be awakened for years, and now it is done they will scarcely believe--"
"But surely--I can't go ..."
Ostrog answered from the other side of the room, and the picture on the
oval disc paled and vanished as the light jerked back again. "There are
kineto-telephoto-graphs," he said. "As you bow to the people here--all
over the world myriads of myriads of people, packed and still in darkened
halls, will see you also. In black and white, of course--not like this.
And you will hear their shouts reinforcing the shouting in the hall.
"And there is an optical contrivance we shall use," said Ostrog, "used by
some of the posturers and women dancers. It may be novel to you. You
stand in a very bright light, and they see not you but a magnified image
of you thrown on a screen--so that even the furtherest man in the
remotest gallery can, if he chooses, count your eyelashes."
Graham clutched desperately at one of the questions in his mind. "What is
the population of London?" he said.
"Eight and twaindy myriads."
"Eight and what?"
"More than thirty-three millions."
These figures went beyond Graham's imagination.
"You will be expected to say something," said Ostrog. "Not what you used
to call a Speech, but what our people call a word--just one sentence, six
or seven words. Something formal. If I might suggest--'I have awakened
and my heart is with you.' That is the sort of thing they want."
"What was that?" asked Graham.
"'I am awakened and my heart is with you.' And bow--bow royally. But
first we must get you black robes--for black is your colour. Do you mind?
And then they will disperse to their homes."
Graham hesitated. "I am in your hands," he said.
Ostrog was clearly of that opinion. He thought for a moment, turned to
the curtain and called brief directions to some unseen attendants. Almost
immediately a black robe, the very fellow of the black robe Graham had
worn in the theatre, was brought. And as he threw it about his shoulders
there came from the room without the shrilling of a high-pitched bell.
Ostrog turned in interrogation to the attendant, then suddenly seemed to
change his mind, pulled the curtain aside and disappeared.
For a moment Graham stood with the deferential attendant listening to
Ostrog's retreating steps. There was a sound of quick question and answer
and of men running. The curtain was snatched back and Ostrog reappeared,
his massive face glowing with excitement. He crossed the room in a
stride, clicked the room into darkness, gripped Graham's arm and pointed
to the mirror.
"Even as we turned away," he said.
Graham saw his index finger, black and colossal, above the mirrored
Council House. For a moment he did not understand. And then he perceived
that the flagstaff that had carried the white banner was bare.
"Do you mean--?" he began.
"The Council has surrendered. Its rule is at an end for evermore."
"Look!" and Ostrog pointed to a coil of black that crept in little jerks
up the vacant flagstaff, unfolding as it rose.
The oval picture paled as Lincoln pulled the curtain aside and entered.
"They are clamorous," he said.
Ostrog kept his grip of Graham's arm.
"We have raised the people," he said. "We have given them arms. For
to-day at least their wishes must be law."
Lincoln held the curtain open for Graham and Ostrog to pass through....
On his way to the markets Graham had a transitory glance of a long narrow
white-walled room in which men in the universal blue canvas were carrying
covered things like biers, and about which men in medical purple hurried
to and fro. From this room came groans and wailing. He had an impression
of an empty blood-stained couch, of men on other couches, bandaged and
blood-stained. It was just a glimpse from a railed footway and then a
buttress hid the place and they were going on towards the markets....
The roar of the multitude was near now: it leapt to thunder. And,
arresting his attention, a fluttering of black banners, the waving of
blue canvas and brown rags, and the swarming vastness of the theatre near
the public markets came into view down a long passage. The picture opened
out. He perceived they were entering the great theatre of his first
appearance, the great theatre he had last seen as a chequer-work of glare
and blackness in his flight from the red police. This time he entered it
along a gallery at a level high above the stage. The place was now
brilliantly lit again. His eyes sought the gangway up which he had fled,
but he could not tell it from among its dozens of fellows; nor could he
see anything of the smashed seats, deflated cushions, and such like
traces of the fight because of the density of the people. Except the
stage the whole place was closely packed. Looking down the effect was a
vast area of stippled pink, each dot a still upturned face regarding him.
At his appearance with Ostrog the cheering died away, the singing died
away, a common interest stilled and unified the disorder. It seemed as
though every individual of those myriads was watching him.