And then another thing was shouted, something that turned an aimless tumult into determinate movements, it came like a wind along the street.  “To your wards, to your wards.  Every man get arms.  Every man to his ward!”

CHAPTER XXII

THE STRUGGLE IN THE COUNCIL HOUSE

As Asano and Graham hurried along to the ruins about the Council House, they saw everywhere the excitement of the people rising.  “To your wards!  To your wards!” Everywhere men and women in blue were hurrying from unknown subterranean employments, up the staircases of the middle path; at one place Graham saw an arsenal of the revolutionary committee besieged by a crowd of shouting men, at another a couple of men in the hated yellow uniform of the Labour Police, pursued by a gathering crowd, fled precipitately along the swift way that went in the opposite direction.

The cries of “To your wards!” became at last a continuous shouting as they drew near the Government quarter.  Many of the shouts were unintelligible.  “Ostrog has betrayed us,” one man bawled in a hoarse voice, again and again, dinning that refrain into Graham’s ear until it haunted him.  This person stayed close beside Graham and Asano on the swift way, shouting to the people who swarmed on the lower platforms as he rushed past them.  His cry about Ostrog alternated with some incomprehensible orders.  Presently he went leaping down and disappeared.

Graham’s mind was filled with the din.  His plans were vague and unformed.  He had one picture of some commanding position from which he could address the multitudes, another of meeting Ostrog face to face.  He was full of rage, of tense muscular excitement, his hands gripped, his lips were pressed together.

The way to the Council House across the ruins was impassable, but Asano met that difficulty and took Graham into the premises of the central post-office.  The post-office was nominally at work, but the blue-clothed porters moved sluggishly or had stopped to stare through the arches of their galleries at the shouting men who were going by outside.  “Every man to his ward!  Every man to his ward!” Here, by Asano’s advice, Graham revealed his identity.

They crossed to the Council House by a cable cradle.  Already in the brief interval since the capitulation of the Councillors a great change had been wrought in the appearance of the ruins.  The spurting cascades of the ruptured sea-water mains had been captured and tamed, and huge temporary pipes ran overhead along a flimsy looking fabric of girders.  The sky was laced with restored cables and wires that served the Council House, and a mass of new fabric with cranes and other building machines going to and fro upon it projected to the left of the white pile.

The moving ways that ran across this area had been restored, albeit for once running under the open sky.  These were the ways that Graham had seen from the little balcony in the hour of his awakening, not nine days since, and the hall of his Trance had been on the further side, where now shapeless piles of smashed and shattered masonry were heaped together.