CHAPTER X. THE BATTLE OF THE DARKNESS
He was no longer in the hall. He was marching along a galleryoverhanging one of the great streets of the moving platforms thattraversed the city. Before him and behind him tramped his guards. Thewhole concave of the moving ways below was a congested mass of peoplemarching, tramping to the left, shouting, waving hands and arms, pouringalong a huge vista, shouting as they came into view, shouting as theypassed, shouting as they receded, until the globes of electric lightreceding in perspective dropped down it seemed and hid the swarming bareheads. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.
The song roared up to Graham now, no longer upborne by music, but coarseand noisy, and the beating of the marching feet, tramp, tramp, tramp,tramp, interwove with a thunderous irregularity of footsteps from theundisciplined rabble that poured along the higher ways.
Abruptly he noted a contrast. The buildings on the opposite side of theway seemed deserted, the cables and bridges that laced across the aislewere empty and shadowy. It came into Graham's mind that these alsoshould have swarmed with people.
He felt a curious emotion--throbbing--very fast! He stopped again. Theguards before him marched on; those about him stopped as he did. He sawthe direction of their faces. The throbbing had something to do with thelights. He too looked up.
At first it seemed to him a thing that affected the lights simply, anisolated phenomenon, having no bearing on the things below. Each hugeglobe of blinding whiteness was as it were clutched, compressed in asystole that was followed by a transitory diastole, and again a systolelike a tightening grip, darkness, light, darkness, in rapid alternation.
Graham became aware that this strange behaviour of the lights had todo with the people below. The appearance of the houses and ways, theappearance of the packed masses changed, became a confusion of vividlights and leaping shadows. He saw a multitude of shadows had sprunginto aggressive existence, seemed rushing up, broadening, widening,growing with steady swiftness--to leap suddenly back and returnreinforced. The song and the tramping had ceased. The unanimous march,he discovered, was arrested, there were eddies, a flow sideways, shoutsof "The lights!" Voices were crying together one thing. "The lights!"cried these voices. "The lights!" He looked down. In this dancing deathof the lights the area of the street had suddenly become a monstrousstruggle. The huge white globes became purple-white, purple with areddish glow, flickered, flickered faster and faster, fluttered betweenlight and extinction, ceased to flicker and became mere fading specksof glowing red in a vast obscurity. In ten seconds the extinctionwas accomplished, and there was only this roaring darkness, a blackmonstrosity that had suddenly swallowed up those glittering myriads ofmen.
He felt invisible forms about him; his arms were gripped. Somethingrapped sharply against his shin. A voice bawled in his ear, "It is allright--all right."
Graham shook off the paralysis of his first astonishment. He struck hisforehead against Lincoln's and bawled, "What is this darkness?"
"The Council has cut the currents that light the city. We mustwait--stop. The people will go on. They will--"
His voice was drowned. Voices were shouting, "Save the Sleeper. Takecare of the Sleeper." A guard stumbled against Graham and hurt his handby an inadvertent blow of his weapon. A wild tumult tossed and whirledabout him, growing, as it seemed, louder, denser, more furious eachmoment. Fragments of recognisable sounds drove towards him, were whirledaway from him as his mind reached out to grasp them. Voices seemed to beshouting conflicting orders, other voices answered. There were suddenlya succession of piercing screams close beneath them.
A voice bawled in his ear, "The red police," and receded forthwithbeyond his questions.
A crackling sound grew to distinctness, and there with a leaping offaint flashes along the edge of the further ways. By their light Grahamsaw the heads and bodies of a number of men, armed with weapons likethose of his guards, leap into an instant's dim visibility. The wholearea began to crackle, to flash with little instantaneous streaks oflight, and abruptly the darkness rolled back like a curtain.
A glare of light dazzled his eyes, a vast seething expanse of strugglingmen confused his mind. A shout, a burst of cheering, came across theways. He looked up to see the source of the light. A man hung faroverhead from the upper part of a cable, holding by a rope the blindingstar that had driven the darkness back. He wore a red uniform.
Graham's eyes fell to the ways again. A wedge of red a little way alongthe vista caught his eye. He saw it was a dense mass of red-clad menjammed the higher further way, their backs against the pitiless cliffof building, and surrounded by a dense crowd of antagonists. They werefighting. Weapons flashed and rose and fell, heads vanished at the edgeof the contest, and other heads replaced them, the little flashes fromthe green weapons became little jets of smoky grey while the lightlasted.
Abruptly the flare was extinguished and the ways were an inky darknessonce more, a tumultuous mystery.
He felt something thrusting against him. He was being pushed along thegallery. Someone was shouting--it might be at him. He was too confusedto hear. He was thrust against the wall, and a number of peopleblundered past him. It seemed to him that his guards were strugglingwith one another.
Suddenly the cable-hung star-holder appeared again, and the whole scenewas white and dazzling. The band of red-coats seemed broader and nearer;its apex was half-way down the ways towards the central aisle. Andraising his eyes Graham saw that a number of these men had also appearednow in the darkened lower galleries of the opposite building, and werefiring over the heads of their fellows below at the boiling confusion ofpeople 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 nowbeing attacked by the red police. Then he became aware that he wasstanding alone, that his guards and Lincoln were along the gallery inthe direction along which he had come before the darkness fell. He sawthey were gesticulating to him wildly, running back towards him. A greatshouting came from across the ways. Then it seemed as though the wholeface of the darkened building opposite was lined and speckled withred-clad men. And they were pointing over to him and shouting. "TheSleeper! Save the Sleeper!" shouted a multitude of throats.
Something struck the wall above his head. He looked up at the impact andsaw a star-shaped splash of silvery metal. He saw Lincoln near him. Felthis 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 thegallery. "Before the next light!" he cried. His haste was contagious.Graham's instinct of self-preservation overcame the paralysis of hisincredulous astonishment. He became for a time the blind creature ofthe fear of death. He ran, stumbling because of the uncertainty of thedarkness, blundered into his guards as they turned to run with him.Haste was his one desire, to escape this perilous gallery upon which hewas exposed. A third glare came close on its predecessors. With it camea 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 whitefacade opposite was densely stippled with red. All these wonderfulthings concerned him, turned upon him as a pivot. These were the guardsof the Council attempting to recapture him.
Lucky it was for him that these shots were the first fired in anger fora hundred and fifty years. He heard bullets whacking over his head, felta splash of molten metal sting his ear, and perceived without lookingthat the whole opposite facade, an unmasked ambuscade of red police, wascrowded 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, andincontinently someone, coming, it may be, in a transverse direction,blundered viol
ently into him. He was hurling down a staircase inabsolute darkness. He reeled, and was struck again, and came against awall 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 momentaryrelaxation, and then the whole mass of people moving together, bore himback towards the great theatre from which he had so recently come.
There were moments when his feet did not touch the ground. Then he wasstaggering and shoving. He heard shouts of "They are coming!" and amuffled cry close to him. His foot blundered against something soft, heheard a hoarse scream under foot. He heard shouts of "The Sleeper!" buthe was too confused to speak. He heard the green weapons crackling. Fora space he lost his individual will, became an atom in a panic, blind,unthinking, mechanical. He thrust and pressed back and writhed in thepressure, kicked presently against a step, and found himself ascendinga slope. And abruptly the faces all about him leapt out of the black,visible, ghastly-white and astonished, terrified, perspiring, in a lividglare. One face, a young man's, was very near to him, not twenty inchesaway. 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 alreadydead.
A fourth white star must have been lit by the man on the cable. Itslight came glaring in through vast windows and arches and showed Grahamthat he was now one of a dense mass of flying black figures pressed backacross the lower area of the great theatre. This time the picture waslivid and fragmentary slashed and barred with black shadows. He saw thatquite near to him the red guards were fighting their way through thepeople. He could not tell whether they saw him. He looked for Lincolnand his guards. He saw Lincoln near the stage of the theatre surroundedin a crowd of black-badged revolutionaries, lifted up and staring toand fro as if seeking him. Graham perceived that he himself was nearthe 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 theglare came to an end.
In a moment he had thrown off the great cloak that not only impededhis movements but made him conspicuous, and had slipped it from hisshoulders. He heard someone trip in its folds. In another he was scalingthe barrier and had dropped into the blackness on the further side. Thenfeeling his way he came to the lower end of an ascending gangway. Inthe darkness the sound of firing ceased and the roar of feet and voiceslulled. Then suddenly he came to an unexpected step and tripped andfell. As he did so pools and islands amidst the darkness about him leaptto vivid light again, the uproar surged louder and the glare of thefifth white star shone through the vast fenestrations of the theatrewalls.
He rolled over among some seats, heard a shouting and the whirringrattle of weapons, struggled up and was knocked back again, perceivedthat a number of black-badged men were all about him firing at therebels below, leaping from seat to seat, crouching among the seatsto reload. Instinctively he crouched amidst the seats, as stray shotsripped the pneumatic cushions and cut bright slashes on their soft metalframes. Instinctively he marked the direction of the gangways, the mostplausible way of escape for him so soon as the veil of darkness fellagain.
A young man in faded blue garments came vaulting over the seats."Hullo!" he said, with his flying feet within six inches of thecrouching 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 itseemed to Graham that the half of this man's neck had vanished. Adrop of moisture fell on Graham's cheek. The green weapon stoppedhalf raised. For a moment the man stood still with his face suddenlyexpressionless, then he began to slant forward. His knees bent. Man anddarkness fell together. At the sound of his fall Graham rose up and ranfor his life until a step down to the gangway tripped him. He scrambledto his feet, turned up the gangway and ran on.
When the sixth star glared he was already close to the yawning throat ofa passage. He ran on the swifter for the light, entered the passageand turned a corner into absolute night again. He was knocked sideways,rolled over, and recovered his feet. He found himself one of a crowd ofinvisible fugitives pressing in one direction. His one thought nowwas their thought also; to escape out of this fighting. He thrust andstruck, staggered, ran, was wedged tightly, lost ground and then wasclear again.
For some minutes he was running through the darkness along a windingpassage, and then he crossed some wide and open space, passed down along 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. Theyare firing. Get out of the fighting. The guards are firing. It will besafe in Seventh Way. Along here to Seventh Way!" There were women andchildren in the crowd as well as men. Men called names to him. The crowdconverged on an archway, passed through a short throat and emerged on awider space again, lit dimly. The black figures about him spread out andran up what seemed in the twilight to be a gigantic series of steps. Hefollowed. The people dispersed to the right and left.... He perceivedthat 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. Hewent up to this and, stopping in the shadow of its eaves, looked abouthim panting.
Everything was vague and gray, but he recognised that these great stepswere a series of platforms of the "ways," now motionless again. Theplatform slanted up on either side, and the tall buildings rose beyond,vast dim ghosts, their inscriptions and advertisements indistinctlyseen, and up through the girders and cables was a faint interruptedribbon of pallid sky. A number of people hurried by. From their shoutsand voices, it seemed they were hurrying to join the fighting. Otherless noisy figures flitted timidly among the shadows.
From very far away down the street he could hear the sound of astruggle. But it was evident to him that this was not the street intowhich the theatre opened. That former fight, it seemed, had suddenlydropped out of sound and hearing. And--grotesque thought!--they werefighting 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 unquestioningly. At thattime he had little mind for details; the whole effect was a hugeastonishment. Oddly enough, while the flight from the Council prison,the great crowd in the hall, and the attack of the red police upon theswarming people were clearly present in his mind, it cost him an effortto piece in his awakening and to revive the meditative interval of theSilent Rooms. At first his memory leapt these things and took him backto the cascade at Pentargen quivering in the wind, and all the sombresplendours of the sunlit Cornish coast. The contrast touched everythingwith unreality. And then the gap filled, and he began to comprehend hisposition.
It was no longer absolutely a riddle, as it had been in the SilentRooms. At least he had the strange, bare outline now. He was in some waythe owner of half the world, and great political parties were fightingto possess him. On the one hand was the White Council, with its redpolice, set resolutely, it seemed, on the usurpation of his property andperhaps his murder; on the other, the revolution that had liberated him,with this unseen "Ostrog" as its leader. And the whole of this giganticcity was convulsed by their struggle. Frantic development of hisworld! "I do not understand," he cried. "I do not understand!"
He had slipped out between the contending parties into this liberty ofthe twilight. What would happen next? What was happening? He figuredthe redclad men as busily hunting him, driving the blackbadgedrevolutionists before them.
At any rate chance had given him a breathing space. He could lurkunchallenged by the passers-by, and watch the course of things. His eyefollowed up the intricate dim immensity of the twilight buildings, andit came to him as a thing infinitely wonderful, that above there thesun was rising, and the world was lit and glowing with the old familiarlight of day. In a little while he had recovered his breath. Hisclothing had al
ready 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 manout of the past, the inestimable unintentional owner of half the world.Wherever there were lights or dense crowds, or exceptional excitementhe was afraid of recognition, and watched and turned back or went up anddown by the middle stairways, into some transverse system of ways at alower or higher level. And though he came on no more fighting, thewhole city stirred with battle. Once he had to run to avoid a marchingmultitude of men that swept the street. Everyone abroad seemed involved.For the most part they were men, and they carried what he judged wereweapons. It seemed as though the struggle was concentrated mainly inthe quarter of the city from which he came. Ever and again a distantroaring, the remote suggestion of that conflict, reached his ears.Then his caution and his curiosity struggled together. But his cautionprevailed, and he continued wandering away from the fighting--so far ashe could judge. He went unmolested, unsuspected through the dark. Aftera time he ceased to hear even a remote echo of the battle, fewer andfewer people passed him, until at last the Titanic streets becamedeserted. The frontages of the buildings grew plain and harsh; he seemedto have come to a district of vacant warehouses. Solitude crept uponhim--his pace slackened.
He became aware of a growing fatigue. At times he would turn asideand seat himself on one of the numerous seats of the upper ways. Buta feverish restlessness, the knowledge of his vital implication in hisstruggle, would not let him rest in any place for long. Was the struggleon his behalf alone?
And then in a desolate place came the shock of an earthquake--a roaringand thundering--a mighty wind of cold air pouring through the city,the smash of glass, the slip and thud of falling masonry--a series ofgigantic concussions. A mass of glass and ironwork fell from the remoteroofs into the middle gallery, not a hundred yards away from him, andin the distance were shouts and running. He, too, was startled to anaimless activity, and ran first one way and then as aimlessly back.
A man came running towards him. His self-control returned. "What havethey blown up?" asked the man breathlessly. "That was an explosion," andbefore Graham could speak he had hurried on.
The great buildings rose dimly, veiled by a perplexing twilight, albeitthe rivulet of sky above was now bright with day. He noted many strangefeatures, understanding none at the time; he even spelt out many of theinscriptions in Phonetic lettering. But what profits it to decipher aconfusion of odd-looking letters resolving itself, after painful strainof eye and mind, into "Here is Eadhamite," or, "Labour Bureau--LittleSide?" Grotesque thought, that in all probability some or all of thesecliff-like houses were his!
The perversity of his experience came to him vividly. In actual fact hehad 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, but a great vaguedanger, unsympathetic shadows and veils of darkness. Somewhere throughthe labyrinthine obscurity his death sought him. Would he, after all, bekilled before he saw? It might be that even at the next shadowy cornerhis destruction ambushed. A great desire to see, a great longing toknow, arose in him.
He became fearful of corners. It seemed to him that there was safetyin concealment. Where could he hide to be inconspicuous when the lightsreturned? At last he sat down upon a seat in a recess on one of thehigher ways, conceiving he was alone there.
He squeezed his knuckles into his weary eyes. Suppose when he lookedagain he found the dark through of parallel ways and that intolerablealtitude of edifice, gone? Suppose he were to discover the whole storyof these last few days, the awakening, the shouting multitudes, thedarkness and the fighting, a phantasmagoria, a new and more vivid sortof dream. It must be a dream; it was so inconsecutive, so reasonless.Why were the people fighting for him? Why should this saner world regardhim as Owner and Master?
So he thought, sitting blinded, and then he looked again, half hopingin spite of his ears to see some familiar aspect of the life of thenineteenth century, to see, perhaps, the little harbour of Boscastleabout him, the cliffs of Pentargen, or the bedroom of his home. But facttakes no heed of human hopes. A squad of men with a black banner trampedathwart the nearer shadows, intent on conflict, and beyond rose thatgiddy wall of frontage, vast and dark, with the dim incomprehensiblelettering showing faintly on its face.
"It is no dream," he said, "no dream." And he bowed his face upon hishands.