es.

"Yes," he said. "That is good, that is good." He weighed a message.
"Tell them;--well done South West."

He turned his eyes to Helen Wotton again. His face expressed his
struggle between conflicting ideas. "We must capture the flying stages,"
he explained. "Unless we can do that they will land negroes. At all
costs we must prevent that."

He felt even as he spoke that this was not what had been in his mind
before the interruption. He saw a touch of surprise in her eyes. She
seemed about to speak and a shrill bell drowned her voice.

It occurred to Graham that she expected him to lead these marching
people, that that was the thing he had to do. He made the offer
abruptly. He addressed the man in yellow, but he spoke to her. He saw
her face respond. "Here I am doing nothing," he said.

"It is impossible," protested the man in yellow.

"It is a fight in a warren. Your place is here."

He explained elaborately. He motioned towards the room where Graham must
wait, he insisted no other course was possible. "We must know where you
are," he said. "At any moment a crisis may arise needing your presence
and decision." The room was a luxurious little apartment with news
machines and a broken mirror that had once been en _rapport_ with the
crow's nest specula. It seemed a matter of course to Graham that Helen
should stop with him.

A picture had drifted through his mind of such a vast dramatic struggle
as the masses in the ruins had suggested. But here was no spectacular
battle-field such as he imagined. Instead was seclusion--and suspense.
It was only as the afternoon wore on that he pieced together a truer
picture of the fight that was raging, inaudibly and invisibly,
within four miles of him, beneath the Roehampton stage. A strange and
unprecedented contest it was, a battle that was a hundred thousand
little battles, a battle in a sponge of ways and channels, fought out
of sight of sky or sun under the electric glare, fought out in a vast
confusion by multitudes untrained in arms, led chiefly by acclamation,
multitudes dulled by mindless labour and enervated by the tradition of
two hundred years of servile security against multitudes demoralised by
lives of venial privilege and sensual indulgence. They had no artillery,
no differentiation into this force or that; the only weapon on either
side was the little green metal carbine, whose secret manufacture and
sudden distribution in enormous quantities had been one of