Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (70 page)

‘What did they talk about?’ said Takahira.

‘First, how badly things were managed in the city. That pleased us Four – we were on the platform – because we hoped to catch one or two good men for City work. You know how rare executive capacity is. Even if we didn’t, it’s – it’s refreshing to find anyone interested enough in our job to damn our eyes.
You
don’t know what it means to work, year in, year out, without a spark of difference with a living soul.’

‘Oh, don’t we!’ said De Forest. ‘There are times on the Board when we’d give our positions if anyone would lack us out and take hold of things themselves.’

‘But they don’t,’ said the Mayor ruefully. ‘I assure you, sir, we Four have done things in Chicago, in the hope of rousing people, that would have discredited Nero. But what do they say? “Very good, Andy. Have it your own way. Anything’s better than a crowd. I’ll go back to my land.” You
can’t
do anything with folk who can go where they please, and don’twant anything on God’s earth except their own way. There isn’t a kick or a kicker left on the Planet.’

‘Then I suppose that little shed yonder fell down by itself?’ said De Forest. We could see the bare and still smoking acre of ruins, and hear the slag-pools crackle as they hardened and set.

‘Oh, that’s only amusement. ’Tell you later. As I was saying, our Seniles held the meeting, and pretty soon we had to ground-circuit the platform to save ’em from being killed. And
that
didn’t make our people any more pacific.’

‘How d’you mean?’ I ventured to ask.

‘If you’ve ever been ground-circuited,’ said the Mayor, ‘you’ll know it don’t improve any man’s temper to be held up straining against nothing. No, sir! Eight or nine hundred folk kept pawing and buzzing like flies in treacle for two hours, while a pack of perfectly safe Seniles invades their mental and spiritual privacy, may be amusing to watch, but they are not pleasant to handle afterwards.’

Pirolo chuckled.

‘Our folk own themselves. They were of opinion things were going too far and too fiery. I warned the Seniles; but they’re born house-dwellers. Unless a fact hits ’em on the head, they cannot see it. Would you believe me, they went on to talk of what they called “popular government”! They did! They wanted us to go back to the old Voodoo-business of voting with papers and wooden boxes, and word-drunk people and printed formulas,
and
news-sheets. They said they practised it among themselves about what they’d have to eat in their flats and hotels.

‘Yes, sir! They stood up behind Bluthner’s doubled ground-circuits, and they said
that,
in this present year of grace, to self-owning men and women, on that very spot! Then they finished’ – he lowered his voice cautiously – ‘by talking about “The People.” And then Bluthner he had to sit up all night in charge of the circuits because he couldn’t trust his men to keep ’em shut.’

‘It was trying ’em too high,’ said the Chief of Police. ‘But we couldn’t hold the crowd ground-circuited for ever. I gatheredin all the Serviles on charge of crowd-making, and put ’em in the water-tower, and then I let things cut loose. I had to! The District lit like a sparked gas-tank!’

‘The news was out over thirty degrees of country,’ said the Mayor; ‘and when once it’s a question of invasion of privacy, goodbye to right and reason in Illinois! They began turning out traffic-lights and locking up landing-towers on Thursday night. Friday, they stopped all through traffic, and asked for the Board to take over. Then they wanted to clean Chicago off the side of the lake and rebuild elsewhere – just for a souvenir of “The People” that the Serviles talked about. I suggested that they should slag the Old Market where the meeting was held, while I turned in a call to you all on the Board. That kept ’em quiet till you came along. And – and now you can take hold of the situation.’

‘Any chance of their quieting down?’ De Forest asked.

‘You can try,’ said the Mayor.

De Forest raised his voice in the face of the reviving crowd that had edged in towards us. Day was come.

‘Don’t you think this business can be arranged?’ he began. But there was a roar of angry voices:

‘We’ve finished with crowds! We aren’t going back to the Old Days! Take us over! Take the Serviles away! Administer direct, or we’ll kill ’em! Down with The People!’

An attempt was made to begin Macdonough’s Song. It got no further than the first line, for the
Victor Pirolo
sent down a warning drone on one stopped horn. A wrecked side-wall of the Old Market tottered and fell inwards on the slag-pools. None spoke or moved till the last of the dust had settled down again, turning the steel case of Salati’s Statue ashy grey.

‘You see, you’ll just
have to
take us over,’ the Mayor whispered.

De Forest shrugged his shoulders.

‘You talk as if executive capacity could be snatched out of the air like so much horse-power. Can’t you manage yourselves on any terms?’ he said.

‘We can, if you say so. It will cost those few lives to begin with.’

The Mayor pointed across the square, where Arnott’s men guided a stumbling group of ten or twelve men and women to the lake front, and halted them under the Statue.

‘Now I think,’ said Takahira, under his breath, ‘there will be trouble.’

The mass in front of us growled like beasts.

At that moment the sun rose clear, and revealed the blinking assembly to itself. As soon as it realised that it was a crowd, we saw the shiver of horror and mutual repulsion shoot across it precisely as the steely flaws shot across the lake outside. Nothing was said, and, being half blind, of course it moved but slowly. Yet in less than fifteen minutes most of that vast, multitude – five thousand, at the lowest count – melted away like frost on south eaves. The remnant stretched themselves on the grass, where a crowd feels and looks less like a crowd.

‘
These
mean business,’ the Mayor whispered to Takahira. ‘There are a goodish few women there who’ve borne children. I don’t like it.’

The morning draught off the lake stirred the trees round us with promise of a hot day; the sun reflected itself dazzlingly off the canister-shaped covering of Salati’s Statue; cocks crew in the gardens, and we could hear gate-latches clicking in the distance as people stumblingly resought their homes.

‘I’m afraid there won’t be any morning deliveries,’ said De Forest. ‘We rather upset things in the country last night.’

‘That makes no odds,’ the Mayor returned. ‘We’re all provisioned for six months.
We
take no chances.’

Nor, when you come to think of it, does anyone else. It must be three-quarters of a generation since any house or city faced a food shortage. Yet is there house or city on the Planet to-day that has not half a year’s provisions laid in? We are like the shipwrecked seamen in the old books, who, having once nearly starved to death, ever afterwards hide away bits of food and biscuit. Truly we trust no crowds, nor system based on crowds!

De Forest waited till the last footstep had died away. Meantime the prisoners at the base of the Statue shuffled, posed andfidgeted, with the shamelessness of quite little children. None of them were more than six feet high, and many of them were as grey-haired as the ravaged, harassed heads of old pictures. They huddled together in actual touch, while the crowd, spaced at large intervals, looked at them with congested eyes.

Suddenly a man among them began to talk. The Mayor had not in the least exaggerated. It appeared that our Planet lay sunk in slavery beneath the heel of the Aerial Board of Control. The orator urged us to arise in our might, burst our prison doors and break our fetters (all his metaphors, by the way, were of the most mediaeval). Next he demanded that every matter of daily life, including most of the physical functions, should be submitted for decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I gathered, anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a certain radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns to settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the crowds made, and, lastly, by describing crosses on pieces of paper, which rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic ceremonies and oaths. Out of this amazing play, he assured us, would automatically rise a higher, nobler and kinder world, based – he demonstrated this with the awful lucidity of the insane – based on the sanctity of the Crowd and the villainy of the single person. In conclusion, he called loudly upon God to testify to his personal merits and integrity. When the flow ceased, I turned, bewildered, to Takahira, who was nodding solemnly.

‘Quite correct,’ said he. ‘It is all in the old books. He has left out nothing, not even the war-talk.’

‘But I don’t see how this stuff can upset a child, much less a district,’ I replied.

‘Ah, you are too young!’ said Dragomiroff. ‘For another, you are not a mamma. Please look at the mammas.’

Ten or fifteen women who remained had separated themselves from the silent men, and were drawing in towards the prisoners. It reminded one of the stealthy encircling, before the rush in at the quarry, of wolves round musk-oxen in the North. The prisoners saw, and drew together more closely.The Mayor covered his face with his hands for an instant. De Forest, bare-headed, stepped forward between the prisoners and the slowly, stiffly moving line.

‘That’s all very interesting,’ he said to the dry-lipped orator. ‘But the point seems that you’ve been making crowds and invading privacy.’

A woman stepped forward, and would have spoken, but there was a quick assenting murmur from the men, who realised that De Forest was trying to pull the situation down to ground-line.

‘Yes! Yes!’ they cried. ‘We cut out because they made crowds and invaded privacy! Stick to that! Keep on that switch! Lift the Serviles out of this! The Board’s in charge! Hsh!’

‘Yes, the Board’s in charge,’ said De Forest. ‘I’ll take formal evidence of crowd-making if you like, but the Members of the Board can testify to it. Will that do?’

The women had moved in another pace, with hands that clenched and unclenched at their sides.

‘Good! Good enough!’ the men cried. ‘We’re content. Only take them away quickly.’

‘Come along up!’ said De Forest to the captives. ‘Breakfast is quite ready.’

It appeared, however, that they did not wish to go. They intended to remain in Chicago and make crowds. They pointed out that De Forest’s proposal was gross invasion of privacy.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Pirolo to the most voluble of the leaders, ‘you hurry, or your crowd that can’t be wrong will kill you!’

‘But that would be murder,’ answered the believer in crowds; and there was a roar of laughter from all sides that seemed to show the crisis had broken.

A woman stepped forward from the line of women, laughing, I protest, as merrily as any of the company. One hand, of course, shaded her eyes, the other was at her throat.

‘Oh, they needn’t be afraid of being killed!’ she called.

‘Not in the least,’ said De Forest. ‘But don’t you think thatnow the Board’s in charge you might go home while we get these people away?’

‘I shall be home long before that. It – it has been rather a trying day.’

She stood up to her full height, dwarfing even De Forest’s six-foot-eight, and smiled, with eyes closed against the fierce light.

‘Yes, rather,’ said De Forest. ‘I’m afraid you feel the glare a little. We’ll have the ship down.’

He motioned to the
Pirolo
to drop between us and the sun, and at the same time to loop-circuit the prisoners, who were a trifle unsteady. We saw them stiffen to the current where they stood. The woman’s voice went on, sweet and deep and unshaken:

‘I don’t suppose you men realise how much this – this sort of thing means to a woman. I’ve borne three. We women don’t want our children given to Crowds. It must be an inherited instinct. Crowds make trouble. They bring back the Old Days. Hate, fear, blackmail, publicity, “The People.”
That! That! That!
’She pointed to the Statue, and the crowd growled once more.

‘Yes, if they are allowed to go on,’ said De Forest. ‘But this little affair—’

‘It means so much to us women that this little affair should never happen again. Of course, never’s a long word, but one feels so strongly that it is important to stop crowds at the very beginning. Those creatures’ – she pointed with her left hand at the prisoners swaying like seaweed in a tideway as the circuit pulled them – ‘those people have friends and wives and children in the city and elsewhere. One doesn’t want anything done to
them,
you know. It’s terrible to force a human being out of fifty or sixty years of good life. I’m only forty myself.
I
know. But, at the same time, one feels no price is too heavy to pay if – if these people and
all that they imply
can be put an end to. Do you quite understand, or would you be kind enough to tell your men to take the casing off the Statue? It’s worth looking at.’

‘I understand perfectly. But I don’t think anyone here wantsto see the Statue on an empty stomach. Excuse me one moment.’ De Forest called up to the ship. ‘A flying loop ready on the port side, if you please.’ Then to the woman he said with some stiffness: ‘You might leave us a little discretion in the matter.’

‘Oh, of course. Thank you for being so patient. I know my arguments are silly, but—’ She half turned away, and went on in a changed voice: ‘Perhaps this will help you to decide.’

She threw out her right arm, with a knife in it. Before the blade could be returned to her throat or bosom it was twitched from her grip, sparked as it flew out of the shadow of the ship above, and fell flashing in the sunshine at the foot of the Statue, fifty yards away. The outflung arm was arrested, rigid as a bar for an instant, till the releasing circuit permitted her to bring it slowly to her side. The other women shrank back silent among the men.

Pirolo rubbed his hands, and Takahira nodded.

‘That was clever of you, De Forest,’ said he.

‘What a glorious pose!’ Dragomiroff murmured, for the frightened woman was on the edge of tears.