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 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
wind-vane 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
lying 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 farm houses had nestled
among their trees, wind-wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like
them 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,
his property, 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 Thames, 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
great aeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had ceased, and only one
little-seeming monoplane 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
suggestion 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 made one engineer the
equivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting the condition of the city
clerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of the coaly
foulness of its air, the labourers now came to the city and its life and
delights at night to leave it again in the morning. The city had
swallowed up humanity; man had entered upon a new stage in his
development. First had come the nomad, the hunter, then had followed the
agriculturist of the agricultural state, whose towns and cities and ports
were but the headquarters and markets of the countryside. And now,
logical consequence of an epoch of invention, was this huge new
aggregation of men.
Such things as these, simple statements of fact though they were to
contemporary men, strained Graham's imagination to picture. And when he
glanced "over beyond there" at the strange things that existed on the
Continent, it failed him altogether.
He had a vision of city beyond city; cities on great plains, cities
beside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margin, cities girdled by
snowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue was
spoken; taken together with its Spanish American and Hindoo and Negro and
"Pidgin" dialects, it was the everyday-language of two-thirds of
humanity. On the Continent, save as remote and curious survivals, three
other languages alone held sway--German, which reached to Antioch and
Genoa and jostled Spanish-English at Cadiz; a Gallicised Russian which
met the Indian English in Persia and Kurdistan and the "Pidgin" English
in Pekin; and French still clear and brilliant, the language of lucidity,
which shared the Mediterranean with the Indian English and German and
reached through a negro dialect to the Congo.
And everywhere now through the city-set earth, save in the administered
"black belt" territories of the tropics, the same cosmopolitan social
organisation prevailed, and everywhere from Pole to Equator his property
and his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilised; the
whole world dwelt in cities; the whole world was his property....
Out of the dim south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous, and in
some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities of which the
kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken.
Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art
and beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful
cities of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the
fierce, inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaring
labyrinth below.
Fierce he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact that these
latter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenth century
as the figure of an idyllic easy-going life. He turned his eyes to the
scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the big factories
of that intricate maze....