CHAPTER XIV
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 thehead of that complex world.
At first when he rose from the long deep sleep that followed his rescueand 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 cameback 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 wereclear, the exultation of his escape, the wonder of his prominence wereback in his mind. He was owner of the world; Master of the Earth. Thisnew great age was in the completest sense his. He no longer hoped todiscover his experiences a dream; he became anxious now to convincehimself that they were real.
An obsequious valet assisted him to dress under the direction of adignified chief attendant, a little man whose face proclaimed himJapanese, albeit he spoke English like an Englishman. From the latter helearnt something of the state of affairs. Already the revolution was anaccepted fact; already business was being resumed throughout the city.Abroad the downfall of the Council had been received for the most partwith delight. Nowhere was the Council popular, and the thousand citiesof Western America, after two hundred years still jealous of New York,London, and the East, had risen almost unanimously two days before at thenews of Graham's imprisonment. Paris was fighting within itself. The restof the world hung in suspense.
While he was breaking his fast, the sound of a telephone bell jetted froma corner, and his chief attendant called his attention to the voice ofOstrog making polite enquiries. Graham interrupted his refreshment toreply. Very shortly Lincoln arrived, and Graham at once expressed astrong desire to talk to people and to be shown more of the new life thatwas opening before him. Lincoln informed him that in three hours' time arepresentative gathering of officials and their wives would be held inthe state apartments of the wind-vane Chief. Graham's desire to traversethe ways of the city was, however, at present impossible, because of theenormous excitement of the people. It was, however, quite possible forhim to take a bird's-eye view of the city from the crow's nest of thewind-vane keeper. To this accordingly Graham was conducted by hisattendant. Lincoln; with a graceful compliment to the attendant,apologised for not accompanying them, on account of the present pressureof administrative work.
Higher even than the most gigantic, wind-wheels hung this crow's nest, aclear thousand feet above the roofs, a little disc-shaped speck on aspear of metallic filigree, cable stayed. To its summit Graham was drawnin a little wire-hung cradle. Halfway down the frail-seeming stem was alight gallery about which hung a cluster of tubes--minute they lookedfrom above--rotating slowly on the ring of its outer rail. These were thespecula, _en rapport_ with the wind-vane keeper's mirrors, in one ofwhich Ostrog had shown him the coming of his rule. His Japanese attendantascended before him and they spent nearly an hour asking and answeringquestions.
It was a day full of the promise and quality of spring. The touch of thewind warmed. The sky was an intense blue and the vast expanse of Londonshone dazzling under the morning sun. The air was clear of smoke andhaze, sweet as the air of a mountain glen.
Save for the irregular oval of ruins about the House of the Council andthe black flag of the surrender that fluttered there, the mighty cityseen from above showed few signs of the swift revolution that had, to hisimagination, in one night and one day, changed the destinies of theworld. A multitude of people still swarmed over these ruins, and the hugeopenwork stagings in the distance from which started in times of peacethe service of aeroplanes to the various great cities of Europe andAmerica, were also black with the victors. Across a narrow way ofplanking raised on trestles that crossed the ruins a crowd of workmenwere busy restoring the connection between the cables and wires of theCouncil House and the rest of the city, preparatory to the transferthither of Ostrog's headquarters from the Wind-Vane buildings.
For the rest the luminous expanse was undisturbed. So vast was itsserenity in comparison with the areas of disturbance, that presentlyGraham, looking beyond them, could almost forget the thousands of menlying out of sight in the artificial glare within the quasi-subterraneanlabyrinth, dead or dying of the overnight wounds, forget the improvisedwards with the hosts of surgeons, nurses, and bearers feverishly busy,forget, indeed, all the wonder, consternation and novelty under theelectric lights. Down there in the hidden ways of the anthill he knewthat the revolution triumphed, that black everywhere carried the day,black favours, black banners, black festoons across the streets. And outhere, under the fresh sunlight, beyond the crater of the fight, as ifnothing had happened to the earth, the forest of wind vanes that hadgrown from one or two while the Council had ruled, roared peacefully upontheir incessant duty.
Far away, spiked, jagged and indented by the wind vanes, the Surrey Hillsrose blue and faint; to the north and nearer, the sharp contours ofHighgate and Muswell Hill were similarly jagged. And all over thecountryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges hadinterlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farm houses had nestledamong their trees, wind-wheels similar to those he saw and bearing likethem vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age,cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowedaway incessantly through all the arteries of the city. And underneaththese 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 shapesbelow. St. Paul's he knew survived, and many of the old buildings inWestminster, embedded out of sight, arched over and covered in among thegiant growths of this great age. The Thames, too, made no fall and gleamof silver to break the wilderness of the city; the thirsty water mainsdrank up every drop of its waters before they reached the walls. Its bedand estuary, scoured and sunken, was now a canal of sea water, and a raceof grimy bargemen brought the heavy materials of trade from the Poolthereby beneath the very feet of the workers. Faint and dim in theeastward between earth and sky hung the clustering masts of the colossalshipping in the Pool. For all the heavy traffic, for which there was noneed 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 asmaller swifter sort.
And to the south over the hills came vast aqueducts with sea water forthe sewers, and in three separate directions ran pallid lines--the roads,stippled with moving grey specks. On the first occasion that offered hewas determined to go out and see these roads. That would come after theflying ship he was presently to try. His attendant officer described themas a pair of gently curving surfaces a hundred yards wide, each one forthe traffic going in one direction, and made of a substance calledEadhamite--an artificial substance, so far as he could gather, resemblingtoughened glass. Along this shot a strange traffic of narrow rubber-shodvehicles, great single wheels, two and four wheeled vehicles, sweepingalong at velocities of from one to six miles a minute. Railroads hadvanished; a few embankments remained as rust-crowned trenches here andthere. Some few formed the cores of Eadhamite ways.
Among the first things to strike his attention had been the great fleetsof advertisement balloons and kites that receded in irregular vistasnorthward and southward along the lines of the aeroplane journeys. Nogreat aeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had ceased, and only onelittle-seeming monoplane circled high in the blue distance above theSurrey Hills, an unimpressive soaring speck.
A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard toimagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all thevillages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood, somegigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some singlecultivation and preserved the name of a town--as Bournemouth, Wareham, orSwanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitable such achange had been. The old order had dotted the country with farm
houses,and every two or three miles was the ruling landlord's estate, and theplace of the inn and cobbler, the grocer's shop and church--the village.Every eight miles or so was the country town, where lawyer, cornmerchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon, doctor, draper,milliner and so forth lived. Every eight miles--simply because that eightmile marketing journey, four there and back, was as much as wascomfortable for the farmer. But directly the railways came into play, andafter them the light railways, and all the swift new motor cars that hadreplaced waggons and horses, and so soon as the high roads began to bemade of wood, and rubber, and Eadhamite, and all sorts of elastic durablesubstances--the necessity of having such frequent market townsdisappeared. And the big towns grew. They drew the worker with thegravitational force of seemingly endless work, the employer with theirsuggestion of an infinite ocean of labour.
And as the standard of comfort rose, as the complexity of the mechanismof living increased, life in the country had become more and more costly,or narrow and impossible. The disappearance of vicar and squire, theextinction of the general practitioner by the city specialist; had robbedthe village of its last touch of culture. After telephone, kinematographand phonograph had replaced newspaper, book, schoolmaster, and letter, tolive outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolatedsavage. In the country were neither means of being clothed nor fed(according to the refined conceptions of the time), no efficient doctorsfor an emergency, no company and no pursuits.
Moreover, mechanical appliances in agriculture made one engineer theequivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting the condition of the cityclerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of the coalyfoulness of its air, the labourers now came to the city and its life anddelights at night to leave it again in the morning. The city hadswallowed up humanity; man had entered upon a new stage in hisdevelopment. First had come the nomad, the hunter, then had followed theagriculturist of the agricultural state, whose towns and cities and portswere but the headquarters and markets of the countryside. And now,logical consequence of an epoch of invention, was this huge newaggregation of men.
Such things as these, simple statements of fact though they were tocontemporary men, strained Graham's imagination to picture. And when heglanced "over beyond there" at the strange things that existed on theContinent, it failed him altogether.
He had a vision of city beyond city; cities on great plains, citiesbeside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margin, cities girdled bysnowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue wasspoken; taken together with its Spanish American and Hindoo and Negro and"Pidgin" dialects, it was the everyday-language of two-thirds ofhumanity. On the Continent, save as remote and curious survivals, threeother languages alone held sway--German, which reached to Antioch andGenoa and jostled Spanish-English at Cadiz; a Gallicised Russian whichmet the Indian English in Persia and Kurdistan and the "Pidgin" Englishin Pekin; and French still clear and brilliant, the language of lucidity,which shared the Mediterranean with the Indian English and German andreached 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 socialorganisation prevailed, and everywhere from Pole to Equator his propertyand his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilised; thewhole world dwelt in cities; the whole world was his property....
Out of the dim south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous, and insome way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities of which thekinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken.Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of artand beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderfulcities of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by thefierce, inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaringlabyrinth below.
Fierce he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact that theselatter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenth centuryas the figure of an idyllic easy-going life. He turned his eyes to thescene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the big factoriesof that intricate maze....