revolved immediately about the question of his
own position. But here was the city at the busiest hours of night, the
people to a large extent returned to their own immediate interests, the
resumption of the real informal life, the common habits of the new time.

They emerged at first into a street whose opposite ways were crowded
with the blue canvas liveries. This swarm Graham saw was a portion of a
procession--it was odd to see a procession parading the city _seated_.
They carried banners of coarse black stuff with red letters. "No
disarmament," said the banners, for the most part in crudely daubed
letters and with variant spelling, and "Why should we disarm?" "No
disarming." "No disarming." Banner after banner went by, a stream of
banners flowing past, and at last at the end, the song of the revolt and
a noisy band of strange instruments. "They all ought to be at work," said
Asano. "They have had no food these two days, or they have stolen it."

Presently Asano made a detour to avoid the congested crowd that gaped
upon the occasional passage of dead bodies from hospital to a mortuary,
the gleanings after death's harvest of the first revolt.

That night few people were sleeping, everyone was abroad. A vast
excitement, perpetual crowds perpetually changing, surrounded Graham; his
mind was confused and darkened by an incessant tumult, by the cries and
enigmatical fragments of the social struggle that was as yet only
beginning. Everywhere festoons and banners of black and strange
decorations, intensified the quality of his popularity. Everywhere he
caught snatches of that crude thick dialect that served the illiterate
class, the class, that is, beyond the reach of phonograph culture, in
their commonplace intercourse. Everywhere this trouble of disarmament was
in the air, with a quality of immediate stress of which he had no inkling
during his seclusion in the Wind-Vane quarter. He perceived that as soon
as he returned he must discuss this with Ostrog, this and the greater
issues of which it was the expression, in a far more conclusive way than
he had so far done. Perpetually that night, even in the earlier hours of
their wanderings about the city, the spirit of unrest and revolt swamped
his attention, to the exclusion of countless strange things he might
otherwise have observed.

This preoccupation made his impressions fragmentary. Yet amidst so much
that was strange and vivid, no subject, however personal and insist