ls of
this place, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal
players revolved perpetually through the cycle of 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
being rebuilt, 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 see that the police signals were restricting vehicles to the half
roadway. When presently he got within sight of 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 m