ng that will take a hundred years
or ten thousand years? It will never come in our lives, White. Not soon
enough for that. But after that everything will be soon--when one comes
to death then everything is at one's fingertips--I can feel that greater
world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through the last
darkness...."

16

The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at lunch
in the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the burning
of the STAR office. The Sherborough dining-room was on the first floor,
and the Venetian window beside their table opened on to a verandah
above a piazza. As they talked they became aware of an excitement in the
street below, shouting and running and then a sound of wheels and the
tramp of a body of soldiers marching quickly. White stood up and looked.
"They're seizing the stuff in the gunshops," he said, sitting down
again. "It's amazing they haven't done it before."

They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at
Mukden that had won Benham's admiration....

A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass
smashing. Then more revolver shots. "That's at the big club at the
corner, I think," said Benham and went out upon the verandah.

Up and down the street mischief was afoot. Outside the Rand Club in
the cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and
was being hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers. Down the street
people were looking in the direction of the market-place and then
suddenly a rush of figures flooded round the corner, first a froth
of scattered individuals and then a mass, a column, marching with an
appearance of order and waving a flag. It was a poorly disciplined body,
it fringed out into a swarm of sympathizers and spectators upon the
side walk, and at the head of it two men disputed. They seemed to be
differing about the direction of the whole crowd. Suddenly one smote the
other with his fist, a blow that hurled him sideways, and then turned
with a triumphant gesture to the following ranks, waving his arms in
the air. He was a tall lean man, hatless and collarless, greyhaired and
wild-eyed. On he came, gesticulating gauntly, past the hotel.

And then up the street something happened. Benham's attention was turned
round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath, on the part
of the advancing procession under the verandah.

The roadway beyond the cl