Graham stared at him absent-mindedly.  Then with a start he returned to his previous preoccupation about the flying stages.

“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.”

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 Ostrog’s culminating moves against the Council.  Few had had any experience with this weapon, many had never discharged one, many who carried it came unprovided with ammunition; never was wilder firing in the history of warfare.  It was a battle of amateurs, a hideous experimental warfare, armed rioters fighting armed rioters, armed rioters swept forward by the words and fury of a song, by the tramping sympathy of their numbers, pouring in countless myriads towards the smaller ways, the disabled lifts, the galleries slippery with blood, the halls and passages