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ever, it will destroy it."
"What do you mean?"
"I only mean what you mean," answered the unknown in a temperate
voice. "What was it that you always meant on those million and
one nights when you walked outside your Ludgate Hill shop and
shook your hand in the air?"
"Still I do not see," said Turnbull, stubbornly.
"You will soon," said the other, and abruptly bent downward one
iron handle of his huge machine. The engine stopped, stooped, and
dived almost as deliberately as a man bathing; in their downward
rush they swept within fifty yards of a big bulk of stone that
Turnbull knew only too well. The last red anger of the sunset was
ended; the dome of heaven was dark; the lanes of flaring light in
the streets below hardly lit up the base of the building. But he
saw that it was St. Paul's Cathedral, and he saw that on the top
of it the ball was still standing erect, but the cross was
stricken and had fallen sideways. Then only he cared to look down
into the streets, and saw that they were inflamed with uproar and
tossing passions.
"We arrive at a happy moment," said the man steering the ship.
"The insurgents are bombarding the city, and a cannon-ball has
just hit the cross. Many of the insurgents are simple people, and
they naturally regard it as a happy omen."
"Quite so," said Turnbull, in a rather colourless voice.
"Yes," replied the other. "I thought you would be glad to see
your prayer answered. Of course I apologize for the word prayer."
"Don't mention it," said Turnbull.
The flying ship had come down upon a sort of curve, and was now
rising again. The higher and higher it rose the broader and
broader became the scenes of flame and desolation underneath.
Ludgate Hill indeed had been an uncaptured and comparatively
quiet height, altered only by the startling coincidence of the
cross fallen awry. All the other thoroughfares on all sides of
that hill were full of the pulsation and the pain of battle, full
of shaking torches and shouting faces. When at length they had
risen high enough to have a bird's-eye view of the whole
campaign, Turnbull was already intoxicated. He had smelt
gunpowder, which was the incense of his own revolutionary
religion.
"Have the people really risen?" he asked, breathlessly. "What are
they fighting about?"
"The programme is rather elaborate," said his entertainer with
some indifference. "I think Dr. Hertz drew it up."
Turnbull wrinkled his forehead. "Are all the poor people with the
Revolution?" he asked.
The other shrugged his shoulders. "All the instructed and
class-conscious part of them without exception," he replied.
"There were certainly a few districts; in fact, we are passing
over them just now----"
Turnbull looked down and saw that the polished car was literally
lit up from underneath by the far-flung fires from below.
Underneath whole squares and solid districts were in flames, like
prairies or forests on fire.
"Dr. Hertz has convinced everybody," said Turnbull's cicerone in
a smooth voice, "that nothing can really be done with the real
slums. His celebrated maxim has been quite adopted. I mean the
three celebrated sentences: 'No man should be unemployed. Employ
the employables. Destroy the unemployables.'"
There was a silence, and then Turnbull said in a rather strained
voice: "And do I understand that this good work is going on under
here?"
"Going on splendidly," replied his companion in the heartiest
voice. "You see, these people were much too tired and weak even
to join the social war. They were a definite hindrance to it."
"And so you are simply burning them out?"
"It _does_ seem absurdly simple," said the man, with a beaming
smile, "when one thinks of all the worry and talk about helping a
hopeless slave population, when the future obviously was only
crying to be rid of them. There are happy babes unborn ready to
burst the doors when these drivellers are swept away."
"Will you permit me to say," said Turnbull, after reflection,
"that I don't like all this?"
"And will you permit me to say," said the other, with a snap,
"that I don't like Mr. Evan MacIan?"
Somewhat to the speaker's surprise this did not inflame the
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