Ostrog stood watching him from under his drooping brows.  “I am not bringing negroes to London,” he said slowly.  “But if—­”

“You are not to bring armed negroes to London, whatever happens,” said Graham.  “In that matter I am quite decided.”

Ostrog resolved not to speak, and bowed deferentially.

CHAPTER XX

IN THE CITY WAYS

And that night, unknown and unsuspected, Graham, dressed in the costume of an inferior wind-vane official keeping holiday, and accompanied by Asano in Labour Department canvas, surveyed the city through which he had wandered when it was veiled in darkness.  But now he saw it lit and waking, a whirlpool of life.  In spite of the surging and swaying of the forces of revolution, in spite of the unusual discontent, the mutterings of the greater struggle of which the first revolt was but the prelude, the myriad streams of commerce still flowed wide and strong.  He knew now something of the dimensions and quality of the new age, but he was not prepared for the infinite surprise of the detailed view, for the torrent of colour and vivid impressions that poured past him.

This was his first real contact with the people of these latter days.  He realised that all that had gone before, saving his glimpses of the public theatres and markets, had had its element of seclusion, had been a movement within the comparatively narrow political quarter, that all his previous experiences had 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.