H. Wells - The World Set Free

the world-to seek first the luck of a meal and then shelter.'

He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in

which a year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.

London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of

visible smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine,

had already ceasedto be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the

Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was, constantly being

rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take on

those characteristics that distinguished them throughout the

latter half of the twentieth century. The insanitary horse and

the plebeian bicycle had been banished from the roadway, which

was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlessly clean; and

the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the

ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the

risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People

descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went

through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways

for pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses

at the level of the first story, and, beingjoined by frequent

bridges, gave the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian

appearance. In some streets there were upper and even third-story

Rows. For most of the day and all night the shop windows were

lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as it

were, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order

to increase their window space.

Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively

since the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour

Card of any indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to

show he was in employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement

below.

But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet's

appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too,

had other things to thinkof that night, and he was permitted to

reach the galleries about Leicester Square-that great focus of

London life and pleasure.

He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the

centre was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights

and connected with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath

which hummed the interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating

as the current alternated between east and west and north and

south. Above rose great frontages of intricate rather than

beautiful reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by

bold illuminated advertisements, and glowing with reflections.

There were the two historical music halls of this place, the

Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal players

revolved perpetually through the cycleof Shakespeare's plays,

and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment

whose pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night.

The south side of the square was in dark contrast to the others;

it was still beingrebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars

surmounted by the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes rose over

the excavated sites of vanished Victorian buildings.

This framework attracted Barnet's attention for a time to the

exclusion of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a

dead rigidity, a stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it

and all its machinery was quiet; but the constructor's globes of

vacuum light filled its every interstice with a quivering green

moonshine and showed alert but motionless-soldier sentinels!

He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck

that day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have

doubled the individual efficiency and halved the number of steel

workers.

'Shouldn't wonder if they didn't get chucking bombs,' said

Barnet's informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his

way to the Alhambra music hall.

Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at

the corners of the square. Something very sensational had been

flashed upon the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his

penniless condition, he made his way over a bridge to buy a

paper, for in those days the papers, which were printed upon thin

sheets of metallic foil, were sold at determinate points by

specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he stopped short at a

change in the traffic below; and was astonished to seethat the

police signals were restricting vehicles to the half roadway.

When presently he got within sightof the transparencies that had

replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great

March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the

West End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand

what was coming.

He watched, and his book describes this procession which the

police had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been

spontaneously organised in imitation of the Unemployed

Processions of earlier times. He had expected a mob but there was

a kind of sullen discipline about the procession when at last it

arrived. What seemed for a time an unending column of men

marched wearily, marched with a kind of implacable futility,

along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says, moved to join

them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,

shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part

incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour.

They bore a few banners with the time-honoured inscription:

'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.

They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was

nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no

definite objectivethey were just marching and showing themselves

in the more prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of

that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still

cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were

being'scrapped'-as horses had been 'scrapped.'

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mindquickened

by his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt

nothing but despairat the sight; what should be done, what could

be done for this gathering surplus of humanity? They were so

manifestly useless-and incapable-and pitiful.

What were they asking for?

They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had

foreseen--

It flashed suddenly into his mindjust what the multitudinous

shambling enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the

unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed

wiserand more powerful, for something-for INTELLIGENCE. This

mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its

persuasion that some of these others must have foreseenthese

dislocations-that anyhow they ought to have foreseen-and

arranged.

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feelingand seeking so

dumbly to assert.

'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened

room,' he says. 'These men were praying to their fellow

creatures as once they prayed to God! The last thing that men

will realise about anything is that it is inanimate. They had

transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed

there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or

malignant… It had only to be aroused to be

conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion… And I saw, too,