THE UNDER-SIDE
From the Business Quarter they presently passed by the running ways into
a remote quarter of the city, where the bulk of the manufactures was
done. On their way the platforms crossed the Thames twice, and passed in
a broad viaduct across one of the great roads that entered the city from
the North. In both cases his impression was swift and in both very vivid.
The river was a broad wrinkled glitter of black sea water, overarched by
buildings, and vanishing either way into a blackness starred with
receding lights. A string of black barges passed seaward, manned by
blue-clad men. The road was a long and very broad and high tunnel, along
which big-wheeled machines drove noiselessly and swiftly. Here, too, the
distinctive blue of the Labour Department was in abundance. The
smoothness of the double tracks, the largeness and the lightness of the
big pneumatic wheels in proportion to the vehicular body, struck Graham
most vividly. One lank and very high carriage with longitudinal metallic
rods hung with the dripping carcasses of many hundred sheep arrested his
attention unduly. Abruptly the edge of the archway cut and blotted out
the picture.
Presently they left the way and descended by a lift and traversed a
passage that sloped downward, and so came to a descending lift again. The
appearance of things changed. Even the pretence of architectural
ornament disappeared, the lights diminished in number and size, the
architecture became more and more massive in proportion to the spaces as
the factory quarters were reached. And in the dusty biscuit-making place
of the potters, among the felspar mills, in the furnace rooms of the
metal workers, among the incandescent lakes of crude Eadhamite, the blue
canvas clothing was on man, woman and child.
Many of these great and dusty galleries were silent avenues of machinery,
endless raked out ashen furnaces testified to the revolutionary
dislocation, but wherever there was work it was being done by slow-moving
workers in blue canvas. The only people not in blue canvas were the
overlookers of the work-places and the orange-clad Labour Police. And
fresh from the flushed faces of the dancing halls, the voluntary vigours
of the business quarter, Graham could note the pinched faces, the feeble
muscles, and weary eyes of many of the latter-day workers. Such as he saw
at work were noticeably inferior in physique to the few gaily dressed
managers and forewomen who were directing their labours. The burly
labourers of the old Victorian times had followed that dray horse and all
such living force producers, to extinction; the place of his costly
muscles was taken by some dexterous machine. The latter-day labourer,
male as well as female, was essentially a machine-minder and feeder, a
servant and attendant, or an artist under direction.
The women, in comparison with those Graham remembered, were as a class
distinctly plain and flat-chested. Two hundred years of emancipation
from the moral restraints of Puritanical religion, two hundred years of
city life, had done their work in eliminating the strain of feminine
beauty and vigour from the blue canvas myriads. To be brilliant
physically or mentally, to be in any way attractive or exceptional, had
been and was still a certain way of emancipation to the drudge, a line
of escape to the Pleasure City and its splendours and delights, and at
last to the Euthanasy and peace. To be steadfast against such
inducements was scarcely to be expected of meanly nourished souls. In
the young cities of Graham's former life, the newly aggregated labouring
mass had been a diverse multitude, still stirred by the tradition of
personal honour and a high morality; now it was differentiating into an
instinct class, with a moral and physical difference of its own--even
with a dialect of its own.
They penetrated downward, ever downward, towards the working places.
Presently they passed underneath one of the streets of the moving ways,
and saw its platforms running on their rails far overhead, and chinks of
white lights between the transverse slits. The factories that were not
working were sparsely lighted; to Graham they and their shrouded aisles
of giant machines seemed plunged in gloom, and even where work was going
on the illumination was far less brilliant than upon the public ways.
Beyond the blazing lakes of Eadhamite he came to the warren of the
jewellers, and, with some difficulty and by using his signature, obtained
admission to these galleries. They were high and dark, and rather cold.
In the first a few men were making ornaments of gold filigree, each man
at a little bench by himself, and with a little shaded light. The long
vista of light patches, with the nimble fingers brightly lit and moving
among the gleaming yellow coils, and the intent face like the face of a
ghost, in each shadow, had the oddest effect.
The work was beautifully executed, but without any strength of modelling
or drawing, for the most part intricate grotesques or the ringing of the
changes on a geometrical _motif_. These workers wore a peculiar white
uniform without pockets or sleeves. They assumed this on coming to work,
but at night they were stripped and examined before they left the
premises of the Department. In spite of every precaution, the Labour
policeman told them in a depressed tone, the Department was not
infrequently robbed.
Beyond was a gallery of women busied in cutting and setting slabs of
artificial ruby, and next these were men and women working together upon
the slabs of copper net that formed the basis of _cloisonné_ tiles. Many
of these workers had lips and nostrils a livid white, due to a disease
caused by a peculiar purple enamel that chanced to be much in fashion.
Asano apologised to Graham for this offensive sight, but excused himself
on the score of the convenience of this route. "This is what I wanted to
see," said Graham; "this is what I wanted to see," trying to avoid a
start at a particularly striking disfigurement.
"She might have done better with herself than that," said Asano.
Graham made some indignant comments.
"But, Sire, we simply could not stand that stuff without the purple,"
said Asano. "In your days people could stand such crudities, they were
nearer the barbaric by two hundred years."
They continued along one of the lower galleries of this _cloisonné_
factory, and came to a little bridge that spanned a vault. Looking over
the parapet, Graham saw that beneath was a wharf under yet more
tremendous archings than any he had seen. Three barges, smothered in
floury dust, were being unloaded of their cargoes of powdered felspar by
a multitude of coughing men, each guiding a little truck; the dust filled
the place with a choking mist, and turned the electric glare yellow. The
vague shadows of these workers gesticulated about their feet, and rushed
to and fro against a long stretch of white-washed wall. Every now and
then one would stop to cough.
A shadowy, huge mass of masonry rising out of the inky water, brought to
Graham's mind the thought of the multitude of ways and galleries and
lifts that rose floor above floor overhead between him and the sky. The
men worked in silence under the supervision of two of the Labour Police;
their feet made a hollow thunder on the planks along which they went to
and fro. And as he looked at this scene, some hidden voice in the
darkness began to sing.
"Stop that!" shouted one of the policemen, but the order was disobeyed,
and first one and then all the white-stained men who were working there
had taken up the beating refrain, singing it defiantly--the Song of the
Revolt. The feet upon the planks thundered now to the rhythm of the song,
tramp, tramp, tramp. The policeman who had shouted glanced at his fellow,
and Graham saw him shrug his shoulders. He made no further effort to stop
the singing.
And so they went through these factories and places of toil, seeing many
painful and grim things. That walk left on Graham's mind a maze of
memories, fluctuating pictures of swathed halls, and crowded vaults seen
through clouds of dust, of intricate machines, the racing threads of
looms, the heavy beat of stamping machinery, the roar and rattle of belt
and armature, of ill-lit subterranean aisles of sleeping places,
illimitable vistas of pin-point lights. Here was the smell of tanning,
and here the reek of a brewery, and here unprecedented reeks. Everywhere
were pillars and cross archings of such a massiveness as Graham had never
before seen, thick Titans of greasy, shining brickwork crushed beneath
the vast weight of that complex city world, even as these anemic millions
were crushed by its complexity. And everywhere were pale features, lean
limbs, disfigurement and degradation.
Once and again, and again a third time, Graham heard the song of the
revolt during his long, unpleasant research in these places, and once he
saw a confused struggle down a passage, and learnt that a number of these
serfs had seized their bread before their work was done. Graham was
ascending towards the ways again when he saw a number of blue-clad
children running down a transverse passage, and presently perceived the
reason of their panic in a company of the Labour Police armed with clubs,
trotting towards some unknown disturbance. And then came a remote
disorder. But for the most part this remnant that worked, worked
hopelessly. All the spirit that was left in fallen humanity was above in
the streets that night, calling for the Master, and valiantly and noisily
keeping its arms.
They emerged from these wanderings and stood blinking in the bright light
of the middle passage of the platforms again. They became aware of the
remote hooting and yelping of the machines of one of the General
Intelligence Offices, and suddenly came men running, and along the
platforms and about the ways everywhere was a shouting and crying. Then a
woman with a face of mute white terror, and another who gasped and
shrieked as she ran.
"What has happened now?" said Graham, puzzled, for he could not
understand their thick speech. Then he heard it in English and perceived
that the thing that everyone was shouting, that men yelled to one
another, that women took up screaming, that was passing like the first
breeze of a thunderstorm, chill and sudden through the city, was this:
"Ostrog has ordered the Black Police to London. The Black Police are
coming from South Africa.... The Black Police. The Black Police."
Asano's face was white and astonished; he hesitated, looked at Graham's
face, and told him the thing he already knew. "But how can they know?"
asked Asano.
Graham heard someone shouting. "Stop all work. Stop all work," and a
swarthy hunchback, ridiculously gay in green and gold, came leaping down
the platforms toward him, bawling again and again in good English, "This
is Ostrog's doing, Ostrog the Knave! The Master is betrayed." His voice
was hoarse and a thin foam dropped from his ugly shouting mouth. He
yelled an unspeakable horror that the Black Police had done in Paris, and
so passed shrieking, "Ostrog the Knave!"
For a moment Graham stood still, for it had come upon him again that
these things were a dream. He looked up at the great cliff of buildings
on either side, vanishing into blue haze at last above the lights, and
down to the roaring tiers of platforms, and the shouting, running people
who were gesticulating past. "The Master is betrayed!" they cried. "The
Master is betrayed!"
Suddenly the situation shaped itself in his mind real and urgent. His
heart began to beat fast and strong.
"It has come," he said. "I might have known. The hour has come."
He thought swiftly. "What am I to do?"
"Go back to the Council House," said Asano.
"Why should I not appeal--? The people are here."
"You will lose time. They will doubt if it is you. But they will mass
about the Council House. There you will find their leaders. Your strength
is there--with them."
"Suppose this is only a rumour?"
"It sounds true," said Asano.
"Let us have the facts," said Graham.
Asano shrugged his shoulders. "We had better get towards the Council
House," he cried. "That is where they will swarm. Even now the ruins may
be impassable."
Graham regarded him doubtfully and followed him.
They went up the stepped platforms to the swiftest one, and there Asano
accosted a labourer. The answers to his questions were in the thick,
vulgar speech.
"What did he say?" asked Graham.
"He knows little, but he told me that the Black Police would have arrived
here before the people knew--had not someone in the Wind-Vane Offices
learnt. He said a girl."
"A girl? Not--?"
"He said a girl--he did not know who she was. Who came out from the
Council House crying aloud, and told the men at work among the ruins."
And then another thing was shouted, something that turned an aimless
tumult into determinate movements, it came like a wind along the
street. "To your wards, to your wards. Every man get arms. Every man to
his ward!"