That had the effect of a distinct move in the game.The Power Station was the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy.There if anywhere it would be possible to express one's disapproval of the administration, one's desire to embarrass and confute it.One could stop all sorts of things from the Power Station.At any rate it was a repartee to the suppression of the meeting.erything will be soon--when one comes to death then everything is at one's fingertips--I can feel that greater wback of a number of Everybody seemed gladdened by a definite project.
Benham and White went with the crowd.
At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the scattered drift of people became congested.Gliding slowly across the mass came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even its glass undamaged, and then another and another.Strikers, with the happy expression of men who have found something expressive to do, were escorting the trams off the street.They were being meticulously careful with them.Never was there less mob violence in a riot.They walked by the captured cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured by a real lady's company.And when White and Benham reached the Power House the marvel grew.The rioters were already in possession and going freely over the whole place, and they had injured nothing.They had stopped the engines, but they had not even disabled them.Here too manifestly a majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.
"But this is the most civilized rioting," said Benham."It isn't rioting; it's drifting.Just as things drifted in Moscow.Because nobody has the rudder....
"What maddens me," he said, "is the democracy of the whole thing.
White! I HATE this modern democracy.Democracy and inequality!
Was there ever an absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling of responsibility, and the place migold of life? When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own?...
Look at this place! Look at this place!...The easy, accessible happiness! The manifest prosperity.The newness and the sunshine.And the silly bitterness, the rage, the mischief and miseries!..."And then: "It's not our quarrel...."
"It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.
Life is one long struggle against the incidental.I can feel my anger gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason.
I want to go and expostulate.I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to Lord Glindividuals into the roadway and then a derisive shouting.Nobody had been hit.The soldiers had fired in the air.
"But thiadstone or Botha and expostulate....What good would it do? They move in the magic circles of their own limitations, an official, a politician--how would they put it?--‘with many things to consider....'
"It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels.It's a thing I have to guard against....
"What does it all amount to? It is like a fight between navvies in a tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star.It doesn't concern us....Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us.It's a scuffle in the darkness, and our business, the business of all brains, the only permanent good work is to light up the world....There will be mischief and hatred here and suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things will go on again, a little better or a little worse....""I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places.I'm tired of the shouting and running, the beating and shooting.I'm sick of all the confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one need amidst an endless multitude of distresses.I've seen my fill of wars and disputes and struggles.I see now how a man may grow weary at last of life and its disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blunders and its remorse.No! I want to begin upon the realities I have made for myself.For they are the realities.
I want to go now to some quiet corner where I can polish what I have learnt, sort out my accumulations, be undisturbed by these transitory symptomatic things....
"What was that boy saying? They are burning the STAR office....
Well, let them...."
And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of greatness and a new great spirit in men.All the rest of his life, he said, must be given to that.He would say his thing plainly and honestly and afterwards other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it would touch a man and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in us all would find himself and know himself a little in this and a little in that, and at last a day would come, when fair things and fine things would rule the world and such squalor as this about them would beng red and strange to his face with both hands; above them his eyes were round and anxious.
Blood came out betwing.He shouted out something about "Foolery!"Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference to current things....
But the carbines spoke again.
Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible.He spun right round and fell down into a sitting position.He sat looking surprised.
After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket handkerchief, held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out from the piazza of the hotel.
17
"Are you hit?" cried White dropping to his knees and making himself as compact as possible."Benham!"Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange voice, a whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.
