← catalogue

When the Sleeper Wakes

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #775 · 491,062 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of When the Sleeper Wakes
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: When the Sleeper Wakes

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: January 1, 1997 [eBook #775]
                Most recently updated: February 26, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/775

Credits: Produced by John Bean, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES ***




WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES

By Herbert George Wells




CHAPTER I. INSOMNIA

One afternoon, at low water, Mr. Isbister, a young artist lodging at
Boscastle, walked from that place to the picturesque cove of Pentargen,
desiring to examine the caves there. Halfway down the precipitous
path to the Pentargen beach he came suddenly upon a man sitting in an
attitude of profound distress beneath a projecting mass of rock. The
hands of this man hung limply over his knees, his eyes were red and
staring before him, and his face was wet with tears.

He glanced round at Isbister’s footfall. Both men were disconcerted,
Isbister the more so, and, to override the awkwardness of his
involuntary pause, he remarked, with an air of mature conviction, that
the weather was hot for the time of year.

“Very,” answered the stranger shortly, hesitated a second, and added in
a colourless tone, “I can’t sleep.”

Isbister stopped abruptly. “No?” was all he said, but his bearing
conveyed his helpful impulse.

“It may sound incredible,” said the stranger, turning weary eyes to
Isbister’s face and emphasizing his words with a languid hand, “but I
have had no sleep--no sleep at all for six nights.”

“Had advice?”

“Yes. Bad advice for the most part. Drugs. My nervous system.... They
are all very well for the run of people. It’s hard to explain. I dare
not take... sufficiently powerful drugs.”

“That makes it difficult,” said Isbister.

He stood helplessly in the narrow path, perplexed what to do. Clearly
the man wanted to talk. An idea natural enough under the circumstances,
prompted him to keep the conversation going. “I’ve never suffered from
sleeplessness myself,” he said in a tone of commonplace gossip, “but in
those cases I have known, people have usually found something--”

“I dare make no experiments.”

He spoke wearily. He gave a gesture of rejection, and for a space both
men were silent.

“Exercise?” suggested Isbister diffidently, with a glance from his
interlocutor’s face of wretchedness to the touring costume he wore.

“That is what I have tried. Unwisely perhaps. I have followed the coast,
day after day--from New Quay. It has only added muscular fatigue to
the mental. The cause of this unrest was overwork--trouble. There was
something--”

He stopped as if from sheer fatigue. He rubbed his forehead with a lean
hand. He resumed speech like one who talks to himself.

“I am a lone wolf, a solitary man, wandering through a world in which
I have no part. I am wifeless--childless--who is it speaks of the
childless as the dead twigs on the tree of life? I am wifeless, I
childless--I could find no duty to do. No desire even in my heart. One
thing at last I set myself to do.

“I said, I will do this, and to do it, to overcome the inertia of this
dull body, I resorted to drugs. Great God, I’ve had enough of drugs!
I don’t know if _you_ feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its
exasperating demand of time from the mind--time--life! Live! We only
live in patches. We have to eat, and then comes the dull digestive
complacencies--or irritations. We have to take the air or else our
thoughts grow sluggish, stupid, run into gulfs and blind alleys. A
thousand distractions arise from within and without, and then comes
drowsiness and sleep. Men seem to live for sleep. How little of a man’s
day is his own--even at the best! And then come those false friends,
those Thug helpers, the alkaloids that stifle natural fatigue and kill
rest--black coffee, cocaine--”

“I see,” said Isbister.

“I did my work,” said the sleepless man with a querulous intonation.

“And this is the price?”

“Yes.”

For a little while the two remained without speaking.

“You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel--a hunger and
thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a
whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts
leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady--”

He paused. “Towards the gulf.”

“You must sleep,” said Isbister decisively, and with an air of a remedy
discovered. “Certainly you must sleep.”

“My mind is perfectly lucid. It was never clearer. But I know I am
drawing towards the vortex. Presently--”

“Yes?”

“You have seen things go down an eddy? Out of the light of the day, out
of this sweet world of sanity--down--”

“But,” expostulated Isbister.

The man threw out a hand towards him, and his eyes were wild, and his
voice suddenly high. “I shall kill myself. If in no other way--at the
foot of yonder dark precipice there, where the waves are green, and the
white surge lifts and falls, and that little thread of water trembles
down. There at any rate is ... sleep.”

“That’s unreasonable,” said Isbister, startled at the man’s hysterical
gust of emotion. “Drugs are better than that.”

“There at any rate is sleep,” repeated the stranger, not heeding him.

Isbister looked at him and wondered transitorily if some complex
Providence had indeed brought them together that afternoon. “It’s not
a cert, you know,” he remarked. “There’s a cliff like that at Lulworth
Cove--as high, anyhow--and a little girl fell from top to bottom. And
lives to-day--sound and well.”

“But those rocks there?”

“One might lie on them rather dismally through a cold night, broken
bones grating as one shivered, chill water splashing over you. Eh?”

Their eyes met. “Sorry to upset your ideals,” said Isbister with a sense
of devil-may-careish brilliance.

“But a suicide over that cliff (or any cliff for the matter of that),
really, as an artist--” He laughed. “It’s so damned amateurish.”

“But the other thing,” said the sleepless man irritably, “the other
thing. No man can keep sane if night after night--”

“Have you been walking along this coast alone?”

“Yes.”

“Silly sort of thing to do. If you’ll excuse my saying so. Alone! As
you say; body fag is no cure for brain fag. Who told you to? No wonder;
walking! And the sun on your head, heat, fag, solitude, all the day
long, and then, I suppose, you go to bed and try very hard--eh?”

Isbister stopped short and looked at the sufferer doubtfully.

“Look at these rocks!” cried the seated man with a sudden force of
gesture. “Look at that sea that has shone and quivered there for ever!
See the white spume rush into darkness under that great cliff. And this
blue vault, with the blinding sun pouring from the dome of it. It is
your world. You accept it, you rejoice in it. It warms and supports and
delights you. And for me--”

He turned his head and showed a ghastly face, bloodshot pallid eyes and
bloodless lips. He spoke almost in a whisper. “It is the garment of my
misery. The whole world... is the garment of my misery.”

Isbister looked at all the wild beauty of the sunlit cliffs about them
and back to that face of despair. For a moment he was silent.

He started, and made a gesture of impatient rejection. “You get a
night’s sleep,” he said, “and you won’t see much misery out here. Take
my word for it.”

He was quite sure now that this was a providential encounter. Only half
an hour ago he had been feeling horribly bored. Here was employment the
bare thought of which was righteous self-applause. He took possession
forthwith. It seemed to him that the first need of this exhausted being
was companionship He flung himself down on the steeply sloping turf
beside the motionless seated figure, and deployed forthwith into a
skirmishing line of gossip.

His hearer seemed to have lapsed into apathy; he stared dismally
seaward, and spoke only in answer to Isbister’s direct questions--and
not to all of those. But he made no sign of objection to this benevolent
intrusion upon his despair.

In a helpless way he seemed even grateful, and when presently Isbister,
feeling that his unsupported talk was losing vigour, suggested that they
should reascend the steep and return towards Boscastle, alleging the
view into Blackapit, he submitted quietly. Halfway up he began talking
to himself, and abruptly turned a ghastly face on his helper. “What can
be happening?” he asked with a gaunt illustrative hand. “What can be
happening? Spin, spin, spin, spin. It goes round and round, round and
round for evermore.”

He stood with his hand circling

“It’s all right, old chap,” said Isbister with the air of an old friend.
“Don’t worry yourself. Trust to me.”

The man dropped his hand and turned again. They went over the brow in
single file and to the headland beyond Penally, with the sleepless man
gesticulating ever and again, and speaking fragmentary things concerning
his whirling brain. At the headland they stood for a space by the seat
that looks into the dark mysteries of Blackapit, and then he sat down.
Isbister had resumed his talk whenever the path had widened sufficiently
for them to walk abreast. He was enlarging upon the complex difficulty
of making Boscastle Harbour in bad weather, when suddenly and quite
irrelevantly his companion interrupted him again.

“My head is not like what it was,” he said, gesticulating for want
of expressive phrases. “It’s not like what it was. There is a sort of
oppression, a weight. No--not drowsiness, would God it were! It is like
a shadow, a deep shadow falling suddenly and swiftly across something
busy. Spin, spin into the darkness. The tumult of thought, the confusion,
the eddy and eddy. I can’t express it. I can hardly keep my mind on
it--steadily enough to tell you.”

He stopped feebly.

“Don’t trouble, old chap,” said Isbister. “I think I can understand. At
any rate, it don’t matter very much just at present about telling me,
you know.”

The sleepless man thrust his knuckles into his eyes and rubbed them.
Isbister talked for awhile while this rubbing continued, and then he had
a fresh idea. “Come down to my room,” he said, “and try a pipe. I can
show you some sketches of this Blackapit. If you’d care?”

The other rose obediently and followed him down the steep.

Several times Isbister heard him stumble as they came down, and his
movements were slow and hesitating. “Come in with me,” said Isbister,
“and try some cigarettes and the blessed gift of alcohol. If you take
alcohol?”

The stranger hesitated at the garden gate. He seemed no longer clearly
aware of his actions. “I don’t drink,” he said slowly, coming up the
garden path, and after a moment’s interval repeated absently, “No--I
don’t drink. It goes round. Spin, it goes--spin--”

He stumbled at the doorstep and entered the room with the bearing of one
who sees nothing.

Then he sat down abruptly and heavily in the easy chair, seemed almost
to fall into it. He leant forward with his brows on his hands and became
motionless.

Presently he made a faint sound in his throat. Isbister moved about
the room with the nervousness of an inexperienced host, making little
remarks that scarcely required answering. He crossed the room to his
portfolio, placed it on the table and noticed the mantel clock.

“I don’t know if you’d care to have supper with me,” he said with an
unlighted cigarette in his hand--his mind troubled with a design of
the furtive administration of chloral. “Only cold mutton, you know, but
passing sweet. Welsh. And a tart, I believe.” He repeated this after
momentary silence.

The seated man made no answer. Isbister stopped, match in hand,
regarding him.

The stillness lengthened. The match went out, the cigarette was put down
unlit. The man was certainly very still. Isbister took up the portfolio,
opened it, put it down, hesitated, seemed about to speak. “Perhaps,” he
whispered doubtfully. Presently he glanced at the door and back to
the figure. Then he stole on tiptoe out of the room, glancing at his
companion after each elaborate pace.

He closed the door noiselessly. The house door was standing open, and
he went out beyond the porch, and stood where the monkshood rose at
the corner of the garden bed. From this point he could see the stranger
through the open window, still and dim, sitting head on hand. He had not
moved.

A number of children going along the road stopped and regarded the
artist curiously. A boatman exchanged civilities with him. He felt
that possibly his circumspect attitude and position seemed peculiar and
unaccountable. Smoking, perhaps, might seem more natural. He drew pipe
and pouch from his pocket, filled the pipe slowly.

“I wonder,”... he said, with a scarcely perceptible loss of complacency.
“At any rate we must give him a chance.” He struck a match in the virile
way, and proceeded to light his pipe.

Presently he heard his landlady behind him, coming with his lamp lit
from the kitchen. He turned, gesticulating with his pipe, and stopped
her at the door of his sitting-room. He had some difficulty in
explaining the situation in whispers, for she did not know he had a
visitor. She retreated again with the lamp, still a little mystified to
judge from her manner, and he resumed his hovering at the corner of the
porch, flushed and less at his ease.

Long after he had smoked out his pipe, and when the bats were abroad,
his curiosity dominated his complex hesitations, and he stole back into
his darkling sitting-room. He paused in the doorway. The stranger
was still in the same attitude, dark against the window. Save for the
singing of some sailors aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships
in the harbour, the evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of
monkshood and delphinium stood erect and motionless against the shadow
of the hillside. Something flashed into Isbister’s mind; he started, and
leaning over the table, listened. An unpleasant suspicion grew stronger;
became conviction. Astonishment seized him and became--dread!

No sound of breathing came from the seated figure!

He crept slowly and noiselessly round the table, pausing twice to
listen. At last he could lay his hand on the back of the armchair. He
bent down until the two heads were ear to ear.

Then he bent still lower to look up at his visitor’s face. He started
violently and uttered an exclamation. The eyes were void spaces of
white.

He looked again and saw that they were open and with the pupils rolled
under the lids. He was suddenly afraid. Overcome by the strangeness of
the man’s condition, he took him by the shoulder and shook him. “Are you
asleep?” he said, with his voice jumping into alto, and again, “Are you
asleep?”

A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was dead. He
suddenly became active and noisy, strode across the room, blundering
against the table as he did so, and rang the bell.

“Please bring a light at once,” he said in the passage. “There is
something wrong with my friend.”

Then he returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the shoulder,
shook it, and shouted. The room was flooded with yellow glare as his
astonished landlady entered with the light. His face was white as he
turned blinking towards her. “I must fetch a doctor at once,” he said.
“It is either death or a fit. Is there a doctor in the village? Where is
a doctor to be found?”




CHAPTER II. THE TRANCE

The state of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted
for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the
flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it
was his eyes could be closed.

He was removed from the hotel to the Boscastle surgery, and from the
surgery, after some weeks, to London. But he still resisted every
attempt at reanimation. After a time, for reasons that will appear
later, these attempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in
that strange condition, inert and still neither dead nor living but, as
it were, suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence.
His was a darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a
dreamless inanition, a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had
swelled and risen to an abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man?
Where is any man when insensibility takes hold of him?

“It seems only yesterday,” said Isbister. “I remember it all as
though it happened yesterday--clearer perhaps, than if it had happened
yesterday.”

It was the Isbister of the last chapter, but he was no longer a
young man. The hair that had been brown and a trifle in excess of the
fashionable length, was iron grey and clipped close, and the face that
had been pink and white was buff and ruddy. He had a pointed beard shot
with grey. He talked to an elderly man who wore a summer suit of drill
(the summer of that year was unusually hot). This was Warming, a London
solicitor and next of kin to Graham, the man who had fallen into the
trance. And the two men stood side by side in a room in a house in
London regarding his recumbent figure.

It was a yellow figure lying lax upon a water-bed and clad in a flowing
shirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean limbs and
lank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This glass seemed
to mark off the sleeper from the reality of life about him, he was a
thing apart, a strange, isolated abnormality. The two men stood close to
the glass, peering in.

“The thing gave me a shock,” said Isbister “I feel a queer sort of
surprise even now when I think of his white eyes. They were white, you
know, rolled up. Coming here again brings it all back to me.

“Have you never seen him since that time?” asked Warming.

“Often wanted to come,” said Isbister; “but business nowadays is too
serious a thing for much holiday keeping. I’ve been in America most of
the time.”

“If I remember rightly,” said Warming, “you were an artist?”

“Was. And then I became a married man. I saw it was all up with black
and white, very soon--at least for a mediocre man, and I jumped on to
process. Those posters on the Cliffs at Dover are by my people.”

“Good posters,” admitted the solicitor, “though I was sorry to see them
there.”

“Last as long as the cliffs, if necessary,” exclaimed Isbister with
satisfaction. “The world changes. When he fell asleep, twenty years
ago, I was down at Boscastle with a box of water-colours and a noble,
old-fashioned ambition. I didn’t expect that some day my pigments would
glorify the whole blessed coast of England, from Land’s End round again
to the Lizard. Luck comes to a man very often when he’s not looking.”

Warming seemed to doubt the quality of the luck. “I just missed seeing
you, if I recollect aright.”

“You came back by the trap that took me to Camelford railway station.
It was close on the Jubilee, Victoria’s Jubilee, because I remember the
seats and flags in Westminster, and the row with the cabman at Chelsea.”

“The Diamond Jubilee, it was,” said Warming; “the second one.”

“Ah, yes! At the proper Jubilee--the Fifty Year affair--I was down at
Wookey--a boy. I missed all that.... What a fuss we had with him! My
landlady wouldn’t take him in, wouldn’t let him stay--he looked so queer
when he was rigid. We had to carry him in a chair up to the hotel. And
the Boscastle doctor--it wasn’t the present chap, but the G.P. before
him--was at him until nearly two, with, me and the landlord holding
lights and so forth.”

“It was a cataleptic rigour at first, wasn’t it?”

“Stiff!--wherever you bent him he stuck. You might have stood him on
his head and he’d have stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course
this”--he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his head--“is
quite different. And, of course, the little doctor--what was his name?”

“Smithers?”

“Smithers it was--was quite wrong in trying to fetch him round too soon,
according to all accounts. The things he did. Even now it makes me feel
all--ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those beastly little
things, not dynamos--”

“Induction coils.”

“Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about.
There was just two flaring yellow candles, and all the shadows were
shivering, and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and
him--stark and squirming in the most unnatural ways. Well, it made me
dream.”

Pause.

“It’s a strange state,” said Warming.

“It’s a sort of complete absence,” said Isbister.

“Here’s the body, empty. Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It’s like a
seat vacant and marked ‘engaged.’ No feeling, no digestion, no beating
of the heart--not a flutter. _That_ doesn’t make me feel as if there was
a man present. In a sense it’s more dead than death, for these doctors
tell me that even the hair has stopped growing. Now with the proper
dead, the hair will go on growing--”

“I know,” said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.

They peered through the glass again. Graham was indeed in a strange
state, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in
medical history. Trances had lasted for as much as a year before--but at
the end of that time it had ever been waking or a death; sometimes first
one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had
made in injecting nourishment, for that device had been resorted to to
postpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been trying
not to see them.

“And while he has been lying here,” said Isbister, with the zest of a
life freely spent, “I have changed my plans in life; married, raised
a family, my eldest lad--I hadn’t begun to think of sons then--is an
American citizen, and looking forward to leaving Harvard. There’s
a touch of grey in my hair. And this man, not a day older nor wiser
(practically) than I was in my downy days. It’s curious to think of.”

Warming turned. “And I have grown old too. I played cricket with him
when I was still only a lad. And he looks a young man still. Yellow
perhaps. But that is a young man nevertheless.”

“And there’s been the War,” said Isbister.

“From beginning to end.”

“And these Martians.”

“I’ve understood,” said Isbister after a pause, “that he had some
moderate property of his own?”

“That is so,” said Warming. He coughed primly. “As it happens--have
charge of it.”

“Ah!” Isbister thought, hesitated and spoke: “No doubt--his keep here is
not expensive--no doubt it will have improved--accumulated?”

“It has. He will wake up very much better off--if he wakes--than when he
slept.”

“As a business man,” said Isbister, “that thought has naturally been in
my mind. I have, indeed, sometimes thought that, speaking commercially,
of course, this sleep may be a very good thing for him. That he knows
what he is about, so to speak, in being insensible so long. If he had
lived straight on--”

“I doubt if he would have premeditated as much,” said Warming. “He was
not a far-sighted man. In fact--”

“Yes?”

“We differed on that point. I stood to him somewhat in the relation of
a guardian. You have probably seen enough of affairs to recognise that
occasionally a certain friction--. But even if that was the case, there
is a doubt whether he will ever wake. This sleep exhausts slowly, but
it exhausts. Apparently he is sliding slowly, very slowly and tediously,
down a long slope, if you can understand me?”

“It will be a pity to lose his surprise. There’s been a lot of change
these twenty years. It’s Rip Van Winkle come real.”

“It’s Bellamy,” said Warming. “There has been a lot of change certainly.
And, among other changes, I have changed. I am an old man.”

Isbister hesitated, and then feigned a belated surprise. “I shouldn’t
have thought it.”

“I was forty-three when his bankers--you remember you wired to his
bankers--sent on to me.”

“I got their address from the cheque book in his pocket,” said Isbister.

“Well, the addition is not difficult,” said Warming.

There was another pause, and then Isbister gave way to an unavoidable
curiosity. “He may go on for years yet,” he said, and had a moment of
hesitation. “We have to consider that. His affairs, you know, may fall
some day into the hands of--someone else, you know.”

“That, if you will believe me, Mr. Isbister, is one of the problems most
constantly before my mind. We happen to be--as a matter of fact, there
are no very trustworthy connections of ours. It is a grotesque and
unprecedented position.”

“It is,” said Isbister. “As a matter of fact, it’s a case for a public
trustee, if only we had such a functionary.”

“It seems to me it’s a case for some public body, some practically
undying guardian. If he really is going on living--as the doctors, some
of them, think. As a matter of fact, I have gone to one or two public
men about it. But, so far, nothing has been done.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to hand him over to some public body--the
British Museum Trustees, or the Royal College of Physicians. Sounds a
bit odd, of course, but the whole situation is odd.”

“The difficulty is to induce them to take him.”

“Red tape, I suppose?”

“Partly.”

Pause. “It’s a curious business, certainly,” said Isbister. “And
compound interest has a way of mounting up.”

“It has,” said Warming. “And now the gold supplies are running short
there is a tendency towards ... appreciation.”

“I’ve felt that,” said Isbister with a grimace. “But it makes it better
for him.”

“If he wakes.”

“If he wakes,” echoed Isbister. “Do you notice the pinched-ill look of
his nose, and the way in which his eyelids sink?”

Warming looked and thought for a space. “I doubt if he will wake,” he
said at last.

“I never properly understood,” said Isbister, “what it was brought this
on. He told me something about overstudy. I’ve often been curious.”

“He was a man of considerable gifts, but spasmodic, emotional. He had
grave domestic troubles, divorced his wife, in fact, and it was as a
relief from that, I think, that he took up politics of the rabid sort.
He was a fanatical Radical--a Socialist--or typical Liberal,
as they used to call themselves, of the advanced school.
Energetic--flighty--undisciplined. Overwork upon a controversy did this
for him. I remember the pamphlet he wrote--a curious production. Wild,
whirling stuff. There were one or two prophecies. Some of them are
already exploded, some of them are established facts. But for the
most part to read such a thesis is to realise how full the world is of
unanticipated things. He will have much to learn, much to unlearn, when
he wakes. If ever a waking comes.”

“I’d give anything to be there,” said Isbister, “just to hear what he
would say to it all.”

“So would I,” said Warming. “Aye! so would I,” with an old man’s sudden
turn to self pity. “But I shall never see him wake.”

He stood looking thoughtfully at the waxen figure. “He will never wake,”
 he said at last. He sighed “He will never wake again.”



CHAPTER III. THE AWAKENING

But Warming was wrong in that. An awakening came.

What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity--the self!
Who can trace its reintegration as morning after morning we awaken, the
flux and confluence of its countless factors interweaving, rebuilding,
the dim first stirrings of the soul, the growth and synthesis of
the unconscious to the subconscious, the sub-conscious to dawning
consciousness, until at last we recognise ourselves again. And as it
happens to most of us after the night’s sleep, so it was with Graham at
the end of his vast slumber. A dim cloud of sensation taking shape, a
cloudy dreariness, and he found himself vaguely somewhere, recumbent,
faint, but alive.

The pilgrimage towards a personal being seemed to traverse vast gulfs,
to occupy epochs. Gigantic dreams that were terrible realities at the
time, left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange
scenery, as if from another planet. There was a distinct impression,
too, of a momentous conversation, of a name--he could not tell what
name--that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten
sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the
effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of
dazzling unstable confluent scenes.

Graham became aware his eyes were open and regarding some unfamiliar
thing.

It was something white, the edge of something, a frame of wood. He
moved his head slightly, following the contour of this shape. It went up
beyond the top of his eyes. He tried to think where he might be. Did it
matter, seeing he was so wretched? The colour of his thoughts was a dark
depression. He felt the featureless misery of one who wakes towards
the hour of dawn. He had an uncertain sense of whispers and footsteps
hastily receding.

The movement of his head involved a perception of extreme physical
weakness. He supposed he was in bed in the hotel at the place in the
valley--but he could not recall that white edge. He must have slept. He
remembered now that he had wanted to sleep. He recalled the cliff and
waterfall again, and then recollected something about talking to a
passer-by.

How long had he slept? What was that sound of pattering feet? And that
rise and fall, like the murmur of breakers on pebbles? He put out a
languid hand to reach his watch from the chair whereon it was his habit
to place it, and touched some smooth hard surface like glass. This was
so unexpected that it startled him extremely. Quite suddenly he rolled
over, stared for a moment, and struggled into a sitting position. The
effort was unexpectedly difficult, and it left him giddy and weak--and
amazed.

He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his
mind was quite clear--evidently his sleep had benefited him. He was not
in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very
soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress
was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a strange sense of
insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. About
his arm--and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and
yellow--was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that
it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this strange bed
was placed in a case of greenish coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a
bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention.
In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made
apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum
and minimum thermometer was recognisable.

The slightly greenish tint of the glass-like substance which surrounded
him on every hand obscured what lay behind, but he perceived it was a
vast apartment of splendid appearance, and with a very large and simple
white archway facing him. Close to the walls of the cage were articles
of furniture, a table covered with a silvery cloth, silvery like the
side of a fish, a couple of graceful chairs, and on the table a number
of dishes with substances piled on them, a bottle and two glasses. He
realised that he was intensely hungry.

He could see no human being, and after a period of hesitation scrambled
off the translucent mattress and tried to stand on the clean white floor
of his little apartment. He had miscalculated his strength, however,
and staggered and put his hand against the glasslike pane before him to
steady himself. For a moment it resisted his hand, bending outward like
a distended bladder, then it broke with a slight report and vanished--a
pricked bubble. He reeled out into the general space of the hall,
greatly astonished. He caught at the table to save himself, knocking one
of the glasses to the floor--it rang but did not break--and sat down in
one of the armchairs.

When he had a little recovered he filled the remaining glass from the
bottle and drank--a colourless liquid it was, but not water, with a
pleasing faint aroma and taste and a quality of immediate support and
stimulus. He put down the vessel and looked about him.

The apartment lost none of its size and magnificence now that the
greenish transparency that had intervened was removed. The archway he
saw led to a flight of steps, going downward without the intermediation
of a door, to a spacious transverse passage. This passage ran between
polished pillars of some white-veined substance of deep ultramarine,
and along it came the sound of human movements and voices and a deep
undeviating droning note. He sat, now fully awake, listening alertly,
forgetting the viands in his attention.

Then with a shock he remembered that he was naked, and casting about him
for covering, saw a long black robe thrown on one of the chairs beside
him. This he wrapped about him and sat down again, trembling.

His mind was still a surging perplexity. Clearly he had slept, and had
been removed in his sleep. But here? And who were those people, the
distant crowd beyond the deep blue pillars? Boscastle? He poured out and
partially drank another glass of the colourless fluid.

What was this place?--this place that to his senses seemed subtly
quivering like a thing alive? He looked about him at the clean and
beautiful form of the apartment, unstained by ornament, and saw that the
roof was broken in one place by a circular shaft full of light, and, as
he looked, a steady, sweeping shadow blotted it out and passed, and came
again and passed. “Beat, beat,” that sweeping shadow had a note of its
own in the subdued tumult that filled the air.

He would have called out, but only a little sound came into his throat.
Then he stood up, and, with the uncertain steps of a drunkard, made his
way towards the archway. He staggered down the steps, tripped on the
corner of the black cloak he had wrapped about himself, and saved
himself by catching at one of the blue pillars.

The passage ran down a cool vista of blue and purple, and ended remotely
in a railed space like a balcony, brightly lit and projecting into a
space of haze, a space like the interior of some gigantic building.
Beyond and remote were vast and vague architectural forms. The tumult of
voices rose now loud and clear, and on the balcony and with their backs
to him, gesticulating and apparently in animated conversation, were
three figures, richly dressed in loose and easy garments of bright soft
colourings. The noise of a great multitude of people poured up over the
balcony, and once it seemed the top of a banner passed, and once some
brightly coloured object, a pale blue cap or garment thrown up into the
air perhaps, flashed athwart the space and fell. The shouts sounded like
English, there was a reiteration of “Wake!” He heard some indistinct
shrill cry, and abruptly the three men began laughing.


“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed one--a red-haired man in a short purple robe.
“When the Sleeper wakes--_When!_”

He turned his eyes full of merriment along the passage. His face
changed, the whole man changed, became rigid. The other two turned
swiftly at his exclamation and stood motionless. Their faces assumed an
expression of consternation, an expression that deepened into awe.

Suddenly Graham’s knees bent beneath him, his arm against the pillar
collapsed limply, he staggered forward and fell upon his face.



CHAPTER IV. THE SOUND OF A TUMULT

Graham’s last impression before he fainted was of a clamorous ringing of
bells. He learnt afterwards that he was insensible, hanging between life
and death, for the better part of an hour. When he recovered his senses,
he was back on his translucent couch, and there was a stirring warmth
at heart and throat. The dark apparatus, he perceived, had been removed
from his arm, which was bandaged. The white framework was still about
him, but the greenish transparent substance that had filled it was
altogether gone. A man in a deep violet robe, one of those who had been
on the balcony, was looking keenly into his face.

Remote but insistent was a clamour of bells and confused sounds, that
suggested to his mind the picture of a great number of people shouting
together. Something seemed to fall across this tumult, a door suddenly
closed.

Graham moved his head. “What does this all mean?” he said slowly. “Where
am I?”

He saw the red-haired man who had been first to discover him. A voice
seemed to be asking what he had said, and was abruptly stilled.

The man in violet answered in a soft voice, speaking English with a
slightly foreign accent, or so at least it seemed to the Sleeper’s ears,
“You are quite safe. You were brought hither from where you fell asleep.
It is quite safe. You have been here some time--sleeping. In a trance.”

He said something further that Graham could not hear, and a little phial
was handed across to him. Graham felt a cooling spray, a fragrant mist
played over his forehead for a moment, and his sense of refreshment
increased. He closed his eyes in satisfaction.

“Better?” asked the man in violet, as Graham’s eyes reopened. He was a
pleasant-faced man of thirty, perhaps, with a pointed flaxen beard, and
a clasp of gold at the neck of his violet robe.

“Yes,” said Graham.

“You have been asleep some time. In a cataleptic trance. You have heard?
Catalepsy? It may seem strange to you at first, but I can assure you
everything is well.”

Graham did not answer, but these words served their reassuring purpose.
His eyes went from face to face of the three people about him. They were
regarding him strangely. He knew he ought to be somewhere in Cornwall,
but he could not square these things with that impression.

A matter that had been in his mind during his last waking moments at
Boscastle recurred, a thing resolved upon and somehow neglected. He
cleared his throat.

“Have you wired my cousin?” he asked. “E. Warming, 27, Chancery Lane?”

They were all assiduous to hear. But he had to repeat it. “What an odd
_blurr_ in his accent!” whispered the red-haired man. “Wire, sir?” said
the young man with the flaxen beard, evidently puzzled.

“He means send an electric telegram,” volunteered the third, a
pleasant-faced youth of nineteen or twenty. The flaxen-bearded man gave
a cry of comprehension. “How stupid of me! You may be sure everything
shall be done, sir,” he said to Graham. “I am afraid it would be
difficult to--wire to your cousin. He is not in London now. But don’t
trouble about arrangements yet; you have been asleep a very long time
and the important thing is to get over that, sir.” (Graham concluded the
word was sir, but this man pronounced it “Sire.”)

“Oh!” said Graham, and became quiet.

It was all very puzzling, but apparently these people in unfamiliar
dress knew what they were about. Yet they were odd and the room was odd.
It seemed he was in some newly established place. He had a sudden flash
of suspicion. Surely this wasn’t some hall of public exhibition! If it
was he would give Warming a piece of his mind. But it scarcely had
that character. And in a place of public exhibition he would not have
discovered himself naked.

Then suddenly, quite abruptly, he realised what had happened. There was
no perceptible interval of suspicion, no dawn to his knowledge. Abruptly
he knew that his trance had lasted for a vast interval; as if by some
processes of thought reading he interpreted the awe in the faces that
peered into his. He looked at them strangely, full of intense emotion.
It seemed they read his eyes. He framed his lips to speak and could not.
A queer impulse to hide his knowledge came into his mind almost at the
moment of his discovery. He looked at his bare feet, regarding then
silently. His impulse to speak passed. He was trembling exceedingly.

They gave him some pink fluid with a greenish fluorescence and a meaty
taste, and the assurance of returning strength grew.

“That--that makes me feel better,” he said hoarsely, and there were
murmurs of respectful approval. He knew now quite clearly. He made to
speak again, and again he could not.

He pressed his throat and tried a third time.

“How long?” he asked in a level voice. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Some considerable time,” said the flaxen-bearded man, glancing quickly
at the others.

“How long?”

“A very long time.”

“Yes--yes,” said Graham, suddenly testy. “But I want--Is it--it is--some
years? Many years? There was something--I forget what. I feel--confused.
But you--” He sobbed. “You need not fence with me. How long--?”

He stopped, breathing irregularly. He squeezed his eyes with his
knuckles and sat waiting for an answer.

They spoke in undertones.

“Five or six?” he asked faintly. “More?”

“Very much more than that.”

“More!”

“More.”

He looked at them and it seemed as though imps were twitching the
muscles of his face. He looked his question.

“Many years,” said the man with the red beard.

Graham struggled into a sitting position. He wiped a rheumy tear from
his face with a lean hand. “Many years!” he repeated. He shut his eyes
tight, opened them, and sat looking about him, from one unfamiliar thing
to another.

“How many years?” he asked.

“You must be prepared to be surprised.”

“Well?”

“More than a gross of years.”

He was irritated at the strange word. “More than a _what_?”

Two of them spoke together. Some quick remarks that were made about
“decimal” he did not catch.

“How long did you say?” asked Graham. “How long? Don’t look like that.
Tell me.”

Among the remarks in an undertone, his ear caught six words: “More than
a couple of centuries.”


_“What?”_ he cried, turning on the youth who he thought had spoken. “Who
says--? What was that? A couple of centuries!”

“Yes,” said the man with the red beard. “Two hundred years.”

Graham repeated the words. He had been prepared to hear of a vast
repose, and yet these concrete centuries defeated him.

“Two hundred years,” he said again, with the figure of a great gulf
opening very slowly in his mind; and then, “Oh, but--!”

They said nothing.

“You--did you say--?”

“Two hundred years. Two centuries of years,” said the man with the red
beard.

There was a pause. Graham looked at their faces and saw that what he had
heard was indeed true.

“But it can’t be,” he said querulously. “I am dreaming. Trances. Trances
don’t last. That is not right--this is a joke you have played upon
me! Tell me--some days ago, perhaps, I was walking along the coast of
Cornwall--?”

His voice failed him.

The man with the flaxen beard hesitated. “I’m not very strong in
history, sir,” he said weakly, and glanced at the others.

“That was it, sir,” said the youngster. “Boscastle, in the old Duchy of
Cornwall--it’s in the southwest country beyond the dairy meadows. There
is a house there still. I have been there.”

“Boscastle!” Graham turned his eyes to the youngster. “That was
it--Boscastle. Little Boscastle. I fell asleep--somewhere there. I don’t
exactly remember. I don’t exactly remember.”

He pressed his brows and whispered, “More than two hundred years!”

He began to speak quickly with a twitching face, but his heart was cold
within him. “But if it is two hundred years, every soul I know, every
human being that ever I saw or spoke to before I went to sleep, must be
dead.”

They did not answer him.

“The Queen and the Royal Family, her Ministers, of Church and State.
High and low, rich and poor, one with another--”

“Is there England still?”

“That’s a comfort! Is there London? Eh?” “This _is_ London, eh? And you
are my assistant--custodian; assistant-custodian. And these--? Eh?
Assistant-custodians to?”

He sat with a gaunt stare on his face. “But why am I here? No! Don’t
talk. Be quiet. Let me--”

He sat silent, rubbed his eyes, and, uncovering them, found another
little glass of pinkish fluid held towards him. He took the dose. It was
almost immediately sustaining. Directly he had taken it he began to weep
naturally and refreshingly.

Presently he looked at their faces, suddenly laughed through his tears,
a little foolishly. “But--two--hun--dred--years!” he said. He grimaced
hysterically and covered up his face again.

After a space he grew calm. He sat up, his hands hanging over his knees
in almost precisely the same attitude in which Isbister had found him
on the cliff at Pentargen. His attention was attracted by a thick
domineering voice, the footsteps of an advancing personage. “What are
you doing? Why was I not warned? Surely you could tell? Someone will
suffer for this. The man must be kept quiet. Are the doorways closed?
All the doorways? He must be kept perfectly quiet. He must not be told.
Has he been told anything?”

The man with the fair beard made some inaudible remark, and Graham
looking over his shoulder saw approaching a very short, fat, and
thickset beardless man, with aquiline nose and heavy neck and chin. Very
thick black and slightly sloping eyebrows that almost met over his
nose and overhung deep grey eyes, gave his face an oddly formidable
expression. He scowled momentarily at Graham and then his regard
returned to the man with the flaxen beard. “These others,” he said in a
voice of extreme irritation. “You had better go.”

“Go?” said the red-bearded man.

“Certainly--go now. But see the doorways are closed as you go.”

The two men addressed turned obediently, after one reluctant glance at
Graham, and instead of going through the archway as he expected, walked
straight to the dead wall of the apartment opposite the archway. And
then came a strange thing; a long strip of this apparently solid wall
rolled up with a snap, hung over the two retreating men and fell again,
and immediately Graham was alone with the new comer and the purple-robed
man with the flaxen beard.

For a space the thickset man took not the slightest notice of Graham,
but proceeded to interrogate the other--obviously his subordinate--upon
the treatment of their charge. He spoke clearly, but in phrases only
partially intelligible to Graham. The awakening seemed not only a matter
of surprise but of consternation and annoyance to him. He was evidently
profoundly excited.

“You must not confuse his mind by telling him things,” he repeated again
and again. “You must not confuse his mind.”

His questions answered, he turned quickly and eyed the awakened sleeper
with an ambiguous expression.

“Feel queer?” he asked.

“Very.”

“The world, what you see of it, seems strange to you?”

“I suppose I have to live in it, strange as it seems.”

“I suppose so, now.”

“In the first place, hadn’t I better have some clothes?”

“They--” said the thickset man and stopped, and the flaxen-bearded man
met his eye and went away. “You will very speedily have clothes,” said
the thickset man.

“Is it true indeed, that I have been asleep two hundred--?” asked
Graham.

“They have told you that, have they? Two hundred and three, as a matter
of fact.”

Graham accepted the indisputable now with raised eyebrows and depressed
mouth. He sat silent for a moment, and then asked a question, “Is there
a mill or dynamo near here?” He did not wait for an answer. “Things have
changed tremendously, I suppose?” he said.

“What is that shouting?” he asked abruptly.

“Nothing,” said the thickset man impatiently. “It’s people. You’ll
understand better later--perhaps. As you say, things have changed.” He
spoke shortly, his brows were knit, and he glanced about him like a man
trying to decide in an emergency. “We must get you clothes and so forth,
at any rate. Better wait here until some can come. No one will come near
you. You want shaving.”

Graham rubbed his chin.

The man with the flaxen beard came back towards them, turned suddenly,
listened for a moment, lifted his eyebrows at the older man, and hurried
off through the archway towards the balcony. The tumult of shouting
grew louder, and the thickset man turned and listened also. He cursed
suddenly under his breath, and turned his eyes upon Graham with an
unfriendly expression. It was a surge of many voices, rising and
falling, shouting and screaming, and once came a sound like blows and
sharp cries, and then a snapping like the crackling of dry sticks.
Graham strained his ears to draw some single thread of sound from the
woven tumult.

Then he perceived, repeated again and again, a certain formula. For a
time he doubted his ears. But surely these were the words: “Show us the
Sleeper! Show us the Sleeper!”

The thickset man rushed suddenly to the archway.

“Wild!” he cried, “How do they know? Do they know? Or is it guessing?”

There was perhaps an answer.

“I can’t come,” said the thickset man; “I have _him_ to see to. But
shout from the balcony.”

There was an inaudible reply.

“Say he is not awake. Anything! I leave it to you.”

He came hurrying back to Graham. “You must have clothes at once,” he
said. “You cannot stop here--and it will be impossible to--”

He rushed away, Graham shouting unanswered questions after him. In a
moment he was back.

“I can’t tell you what is happening. It is too complex to explain. In
a moment you shall have your clothes made. Yes--in a moment. And then
I can take you away from here. You will find out our troubles soon
enough.”

“But those voices. They were shouting--?”

“Something about the Sleeper--that’s you. They have some twisted idea. I
don’t know what it is. I know nothing.”

A shrill bell jetted acutely across the indistinct mingling of remote
noises, and this brusque person sprang to a little group of appliances
in the corner of the room. He listened for a moment, regarding a ball of
crystal, nodded, and said a few indistinct words; then he walked to the
wall through which the two men had vanished. It rolled up again like a
curtain, and he stood waiting.

Graham lifted his arm and was astonished to find what strength the
restoratives had given him. He thrust one leg over the side of the couch
and then the other. His head no longer swam. He could scarcely credit
his rapid recovery. He sat feeling his limbs.

The man with the flaxen beard re-entered from the archway, and as he did
so the cage of a lift came sliding down in front of the thickset
man, and a lean, grey-bearded man, carrying a roll, and wearing a
tightly-fitting costume of dark green, appeared therein.

“This is the tailor,” said the thickset man with an introductory
gesture. “It will never do for you to wear that black. I cannot
understand how it got here. But I shall. I shall. You will be as rapid
as possible?” he said to the tailor.

The man in green bowed, and, advancing, seated himself by Graham on the
bed. His manner was calm, but his eyes were full of curiosity. “You will
find the fashions altered, Sire,” he said. He glanced from under his
brows at the thickset man.

He opened the roller with a quick movement, and a confusion of brilliant
fabrics poured out over his knees. “You lived, Sire, in a period
essentially cylindrical--the Victorian. With a tendency to the
hemisphere in hats. Circular curves always. Now--” He flicked out a
little appliance the size and appearance of a keyless watch, whirled the
knob, and behold--a little figure in white appeared kinetoscope fashion
on the dial, walking and turning. The tailor caught up a pattern of
bluish white satin. “That is my conception of your immediate treatment,”
 he said.

The thickset man came and stood by the shoulder of Graham.

“We have very little time,” he said.

“Trust me,” said the tailor. “My machine follows. What do you think of
this?”

“What is that?” asked the man from the nineteenth century.

“In your days they showed you a fashion-plate,” said the tailor, “but
this is our modern development See here.” The little figure repeated
its evolutions, but in a different costume. “Or this,” and with a click
another small figure in a more voluminous type of robe marched on to
the dial. The tailor was very quick in his movements, and glanced twice
towards the lift as he did these things.

It rumbled again, and a crop-haired anaemic lad with features of the
Chinese type, clad in coarse pale blue canvas, appeared together with a
complicated machine, which he pushed noiselessly on little castors into
the room. Incontinently the little kinetoscope was dropped, Graham was
invited to stand in front of the machine and the tailor muttered some
instructions to the crop-haired lad, who answered in guttural tones and
with words Graham did not recognise. The boy then went to conduct an
incomprehensible monologue in the corner, and the tailor pulled out a
number of slotted arms terminating in little discs, pulling them out
until the discs were flat against the body of Graham, one at each
shoulder blade, one at the elbows, one at the neck and so forth, so that
at last there were, perhaps, two score of them upon his body and limbs.
At the same time, some other person entered the room by the lift,
behind Graham. The tailor set moving a mechanism that initiated a
faint-sounding rhythmic movement of parts in the machine, and in another
moment he was knocking up the levers and Graham was released. The tailor
replaced his cloak of black, and the man with the flaxen beard proffered
him a little glass of some refreshing fluid. Graham saw over the rim of
the glass a pale-faced young man regarding him with a singular fixity.


The thickset man had been pacing the room fretfully, and now turned and
went through the archway towards the balcony, from which the noise of
a distant crowd still came in gusts and cadences. The cropheaded lad
handed the tailor a roll of the bluish satin and the two began fixing
this in the mechanism in a manner reminiscent of a roll of paper in a
nineteenth century printing machine. Then they ran the entire thing on
its easy, noiseless bearings across the room to a remote corner where
a twisted cable looped rather gracefully from the wall. They made some
connexion and the machine became energetic and swift.

“What is that doing?” asked Graham, pointing with the empty glass to
the busy figures and trying to ignore the scrutiny of the new comer. “Is
that--some sort of force--laid on?”

“Yes,” said the man with the flaxen beard.

“Who is that?” He indicated the archway behind him.

The man in purple stroked his little beard, hesitated, and answered in
an undertone, “He is Howard, your chief guardian. You see, Sire,--it’s
a little difficult to explain. The Council appoints a guardian and
assistants. This hall has under certain restrictions been public. In
order that people might satisfy themselves. We have barred the doorways
for the first time. But I think--if you don’t mind, I will leave him to
explain.”

“Odd” said Graham. “Guardian? Council?” Then turning his back on the new
comer, he asked in an undertone, “Why is this man glaring at me? Is he a
mesmerist?”

“Mesmerist! He is a capillotomist.”

“Capillotomist!”

“Yes--one of the chief. His yearly fee is sixdoz lions.”

It sounded sheer nonsense. Graham snatched at the last phrase with an
unsteady mind. “Sixdoz lions?” he said.

“Didn’t you have lions? I suppose not. You had the old pounds? They are
our monetary units.”

“But what was that you said--sixdoz?”

“Yes. Six dozen, Sire. Of course things, even these little things,
have altered. You lived in the days of the decimal system, the Arab
system--tens, and little hundreds and thousands. We have eleven numerals
now. We have single figures for both ten and eleven, two figures for
a dozen, and a dozen dozen makes a gross, a great hundred, you know, a
dozen gross a dozand, and a dozand dozand a myriad. Very simple?”

“I suppose so,” said Graham. “But about this cap--what was it?”

The man with the flaxen beard glanced over his shoulder.

“Here are your clothes!” he said. Graham turned round sharply and saw
the tailor standing at his elbow smiling, and holding some palpably new
garments over his arm. The crop-headed boy, by means of one finger,
was impelling the complicated machine towards the lift by which he had
arrived. Graham stared at the completed suit. “You don’t mean to say--!”

“Just made,” said the tailor. He dropped the garments at the feet of
Graham, walked to the bed on which Graham had so recently been lying,
flung out the translucent mattress, and turned up the looking glass. As
he did so a furious bell summoned the thickset man to the corner. The
man with the flaxen beard rushed across to him and then hurried out by
the archway.

The tailor was assisting Graham into a dark purple combination garment,
stockings, vest, and pants in one, as the thickset man came back from
the corner to meet the man with the flaxen beard returning from the
balcony. They began speaking quickly in an undertone, their bearing had
an unmistakable quality of anxiety. Over the purple under-garment came a
complex but graceful garment of bluish white, and I Graham was clothed
in the fashion once more and saw himself, sallow-faced, unshaven and
shaggy still, but at least naked no longer, and in some indefinable
unprecedented way graceful.

“I must shave,” he said regarding himself in the glass.

“In a moment,” said Howard.

The persistent stare ceased. The young man closed his eyes, reopened
them, and with a lean hand extended, advanced on Graham. Then he
stopped, with his hand slowly gesticulating, and looked about him.

“A seat,” said Howard impatiently, and in a moment the flaxen-bearded
man had a chair behind Graham. “Sit down, please,” said Howard.

Graham hesitated, and in the other hand of the wildeyed man he saw the
glint of steel.

“Don’t you understand, Sire?” cried the flaxen-bearded man with hurried
politeness. “He is going to cut your hair.”

“Oh!” cried Graham enlightened. “But you called him--

“A capillotomist--precisely! He is one of the finest artists in the
world.”

Graham sat down abruptly. The flaxen-bearded man disappeared. The
capillotomist came forward with graceful gestures, examined Graham’s
ears and surveyed him, felt the back of his head, and would have sat
down again to regard him but for Howard’s audible impatience. Forthwith
with rapid movements and a succession of deftly handled implements he
shaved Graham’s chin, clipped his moustache, and cut and arranged his
hair. All this he did without a word, with something of the rapt air of
a poet inspired. And as soon as he had finished Graham was handed a pair
of shoes.

Suddenly a loud voice shouted--it seemed from a piece of machinery in
the corner--“At once--at once. The people know all over the city. Work
is being stopped. Work is being stopped. Wait for nothing, but come.”

This shout appeared to perturb Howard exceedingly. By his gestures it
seemed to Graham that he hesitated between two directions. Abruptly
he went towards the corner where the apparatus stood about the little
crystal ball. As he did so the undertone of tumultuous shouting from the
archway that had continued during all these occurrences rose to a mighty
sound, roared as if it were sweeping past, and fell again as if receding
swiftly. It drew Graham after it with an irresistible attraction. He
glanced at the thickset man, and then obeyed his impulse. In two strides
he was down the steps and in the passage, and, in a score he was out
upon the balcony upon which the three men had been standing.



CHAPTER V. THE MOVING WAYS

He went to the railings of the balcony and stared upward. An exclamation
of surprise at his appearance, and the movements of a number of people
came from the spacious area below.

His first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into
which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in
either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the
huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out
the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams
that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a
gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the
chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice
hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite
facade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circular
perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vast
windows, and an intricate scheme of architectural relief. Athwart these
ran inscriptions horizontally and obliquely in an unfamiliar lettering.
Here and there close to the roof cables of a peculiar stoutness were
fastened, and drooped in a steep curve to circular openings on the
opposite side of the space, and even as Graham noted these a remote
and tiny figure of a man clad in pale blue arrested his attention.
This little figure was far overhead across the space beside the higher
fastening of one of these festoons, hanging forward from a little ledge
of masonry and handling some well-nigh invisible strings dependent from
the line. Then suddenly, with a swoop that sent Graham’s heart into his
mouth, this man had rushed down the curve and vanished through a round
opening on the hither side of the way. Graham had been looking up as he
came out upon the balcony, and the things he saw above and opposed to
him had at first seized his attention to the exclusion of anything else.
Then suddenly he discovered the roadway! It was not a roadway at all,
as Graham understood such things, for in the nineteenth century the
only roads and streets were beaten tracks of motionless earth, jostling
rivulets of vehicles between narrow footways. But this roadway was three
hundred feet across, and it moved; it moved, all save the middle,
the lowest part. For a moment, the motion dazzled his mind. Then he
understood.

Under the balcony this extraordinary roadway ran swiftly to Graham’s
right, an endless flow rushing along as fast as a nineteenth century
express train, an endless platform of narrow transverse overlapping
slats with little interspaces that permitted it to follow the curvatures
of the street. Upon it were seats, and here and there little kiosks,
but they swept by too swiftly for him to see what might be therein. From
this nearest and swiftest platform a series of others descended to the
centre of the space. Each moved to the right, each perceptibly slower
than the one above it, but the difference in pace was small enough to
permit anyone to step from any platform to the one adjacent, and so walk
uninterruptedly from the swiftest to the motionless middle way. Beyond
this middle way was another series of endless platforms rushing with
varying pace to Graham’s left. And seated in crowds upon the two widest
and swiftest platforms, or stepping from one to another down the steps,
or swarming over the central space, was an innumerable and wonderfully
diversified multitude of people.

“You must not stop here,” shouted Howard suddenly at his side. “You must
come away at once.”

Graham made no answer. He heard without hearing. The platforms ran with
a roar and the people were shouting. He perceived women and girls
with flowing hair, beautifully robed, with bands crossing between the
breasts. These first came out of the confusion. Then he perceived that
the dominant note in that kaleidoscope of costume was the pale blue that
the tailor’s boy had worn. He became aware of cries of “The Sleeper.
What has happened to the Sleeper?” and it seemed as though the rushing
platforms before him were suddenly spattered with the pale buff of
human faces, and then still more thickly. He saw pointing fingers. He
perceived that the motionless central area of this huge arcade just
opposite to the balcony was densely crowded with blue-clad people. Some
sort of struggle had sprung into life. People seemed to be pushed up the
running platforms on either side, and carried away against their will.
They would spring off so soon as they were beyond the thick of the
confusion, and run back towards the conflict.

“It is the Sleeper. Verily it is the Sleeper,” shouted voices. “That is
never the Sleeper,” shouted others. More and more faces were turned to
him. At the intervals along this central area Graham noted openings,
pits, apparently the heads of staircases going down with people
ascending out of them and descending into them. The struggle it seemed
centred about the one of these nearest to him. People were running
down the moving platforms to this, leaping dexterously from platform to
platform. The clustering people on the higher platforms seemed to divide
their interest between this point and the balcony. A number of sturdy
little figures clad in a uniform of bright red, and working methodically
together, were employed it seemed in preventing access to this
descending staircase. About them a crowd was rapidly accumulating.
Their brilliant colour contrasted vividly with the whitish-blue of their
antagonists, for the struggle was indisputable.

He saw these things with Howard shouting in his ear and shaking his arm.
And then suddenly Howard was gone and he stood alone.

He perceived that the cries of “The Sleeper” grew in volume, and that
the people on the nearer platform were standing up. The nearer swifter
platform he perceived was empty to the right of him, and far across the
space the platform running in the opposite direction was coming crowded
and passing away bare. With incredible swiftness a vast crowd had
gathered in the central space before his eyes; a dense swaying mass
of people, and the shouts grew from a fitful crying to a voluminous
incessant clamour: “The Sleeper! The Sleeper!” and yells and cheers, a
waving of garments and cries of “Stop the ways!” They were also crying
another name strange to Graham. It sounded like “Ostrog.” The slower
platforms were soon thick with active people, running against the
movement so as to keep themselves opposite to him.

“Stop the ways,” they cried. Agile figures ran up swiftly from the
centre to the swift road nearest to him, were borne rapidly past him,
shouting strange, unintelligible things, and ran back obliquely to the
central way. One thing he distinguished: “It is indeed the Sleeper. It
is indeed the Sleeper,” they testified.

For a space Graham stood without a movement. Then he became vividly
aware that all this concerned him. He was pleased at his wonderful
popularity, he bowed, and, seeking a gesture of longer range, waved his
arm. He was astonished at the violence of uproar that this provoked. The
tumult about the descending stairway rose to furious violence. He
became aware of crowded balconies, of men sliding along ropes, of men
in trapeze-like seats hurling athwart the space. He heard voices behind
him, a number of people descending the steps through the archway; he
suddenly perceived that his guardian Howard was back again and gripping
his arm painfully, and shouting inaudibly in his ear.

He turned, and Howard’s face was white. “Come back,” he heard. “They
will stop the ways. The whole city will be in confusion.”

He perceived a number of men hurrying along the passage of blue pillars
behind Howard, the red-haired man, the man with the flaxen beard, a tall
man in vivid vermilion, a crowd of others in red carrying staves, and
all these people had anxious eager faces.

“Get him away,” cried Howard.

“But why?” said Graham. “I don’t see--”

“You must come away!” said the man in red in a resolute voice. His face
and eyes were resolute, too. Graham’s glances went from face to face,
and he was suddenly aware of that most disagreeable flavour in life,
compulsion. Some one gripped his arm.... He was being dragged away. It
seemed as though the tumult suddenly became two, as if half the shouts
that had come in from this wonderful roadway had sprung into the
passages of the great building behind him. Marvelling and confused,
feeling an impotent desire to resist, Graham was half led, half thrust,
along the passage of blue pillars, and suddenly he found himself alone
with Howard in a lift and moving swiftly upward.



CHAPTER VI. THE HALL OF THE ATLAS

From the moment when the tailor had bowed his farewell to the moment
when Graham found himself in the lift, was altogether barely five
minutes. And as yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about
him, as yet the initial strangeness of his being alive at all in
this remote age touched everything with wonder, with a sense of the
irrational, with something of the quality of a realistic dream. He was
still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in
life. What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult, framed
in the setting of the balcony, had a spectacular turn, like a thing
witnessed from the box of a theatre. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“What was the trouble? My mind is in a whirl. Why were they shouting?
What is the danger?”

“We have our troubles,” said Howard. His eyes avoided Graham’s enquiry.
“This is a time of unrest. And, in fact, your appearance, your waking
just now, has a sort of connexion--”

He spoke jerkily, like a man not quite sure of his breathing. He stopped
abruptly.

“I don’t understand,” said Graham.

“It will be clearer later,” said Howard.

He glanced uneasily upward, as though he found the progress of the lift
slow.

“I shall understand better, no doubt, when I have seen my way about
a little,” said Graham puzzled. “It will be--it is bound to be
perplexing. At present it is all so strange. Anything seems possible.
Anything. In the details even. Your counting, I understand, is
different.”

The lift stopped, and they stepped out into a narrow but very long
passage between high walls, along which ran an extraordinary number of
tubes and big cables.

“What a huge place this is!” said Graham. “Is it all one building? What
place is it?”

“This is one of the city ways for various public services. Light and so
forth.”

“Was it a social trouble--that--in the great roadway place? How are you
governed? Have you still a police?” “Several,” said Howard.

“Several?”

“About fourteen.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Very probably not. Our social order will probably seem very complex to
you. To tell you the truth, I don’t understand it myself very clearly.
Nobody does. You will, perhaps--bye and bye. We have to go to the
Council.”

Graham’s attention was divided between the urgent necessity of his
inquiries and the people in the passages and halls they were traversing.
For a moment his mind would be concentrated upon Howard and the halting
answers he made, and then he would lose the thread in response to some
vivid unexpected impression. Along the passages, in the halls, half the
people seemed to be men in the red uniform. The pale blue canvas
that had been so abundant in the aisle of moving ways did not appear.
Invariably these men looked at him, and saluted him and Howard as they
passed.

He had a clear vision of entering a long corridor, and there were a
number of girls sitting on low seats and as though in a class. He saw
no teacher, but only a novel apparatus from which he fancied a voice
proceeded. The girls regarded him and his conductor, he thought, with
curiosity and astonishment. But he was hurried on before he could form a
clear idea of the gathering. He judged they knew Howard and not himself,
and that they wondered who he was. This Howard, it seemed, was a person
of importance. But then he was also merely Graham’s guardian. That was
odd.

There came a passage in twilight, and into this passage a footway hung
so that he could see the feet and ankles of people going to and fro
thereon, but no more of them. Then vague impressions of galleries and
of casual astonished passers-by turning round to stare after the two of
them with their red-clad guard.

The stimulus of the restoratives he had taken was only temporary. He was
speedily fatigued by this excessive haste. He asked Howard to slacken
his speed. Presently he was in a lift that had a window upon the great
street space, but this was glazed and did not open, and they were too
high for him to see the moving platforms below. But he saw people going
to and fro along cables and along strange, frail-looking ridges.

And thence they passed across the street and at a vast height above it.
They crossed by means of a narrow bridge closed in with glass, so clear
that it made him giddy even to remember it. The floor of it also was of
glass. From his memory of the cliffs between New Quay and Boscastle, so
remote in time, and so recent in his experience, it seemed to him that
they must be near four hundred feet above the moving ways. He stopped,
looked down between his legs upon the swarming blue and red multitudes,
minute and fore-shortened, struggling and gesticulating still towards
the little balcony far below, a little toy balcony, it seemed, where he
had so recently been standing. A thin haze and the glare of the mighty
globes of light obscured everything. A man seated in a little open-work
cradle shot by from some point still higher than the little narrow
bridge, rushing down a cable as swiftly almost as if he were falling.
Graham stopped involuntarily to watch this strange passenger vanish in
a great circular opening below, and then his eyes went back to the
tumultuous struggle.

Along one of the swifter ways rushed a thick crowd of red spots. This
broke up into individuals as it approached the balcony, and went pouring
down the slower ways towards the dense struggling crowd on the central
area. These men in red appeared to be armed with sticks or truncheons;
they seemed to be striking and thrusting. A great shouting, cries of
wrath, screaming, burst out and came up to Graham, faint and thin. “Go
on,” cried Howard, laying hands on him.

Another man rushed down a cable. Graham suddenly glanced up to see
whence he came, and beheld through the glassy roof and the network of
cables and girders, dim rhythmically passing forms like the vans of
windmills, and between them glimpses of a remote and pallid sky. Then
Howard had thrust him forward across the bridge, and he was in a little
narrow passage decorated with geometrical patterns.

“I want to see more of that,” cried Graham, resisting.

“No, no,” cried Howard, still gripping his arm.

“This way. You must go this way.” And the men in red following them
seemed ready to enforce his orders.

Some negroes in a curious wasp-like uniform of black and yellow appeared
down the passage, and one hastened to throw up a sliding shutter that
had seemed a door to Graham, and led the way through it. Graham found
himself in a gallery overhanging the end of a great chamber. The
attendant in black and yellow crossed this, thrust up a second shutter
and stood waiting.

This place had the appearance of an ante-room. He saw a number of people
in the central space, and at the opposite end a large and imposing
doorway at the top of a flight of steps, heavily curtained but giving a
glimpse of some still larger hall beyond. He perceived white men in
red and other negroes in black and yellow standing stiffly about those
portals.

As they crossed the gallery he heard a whisper from below, “The
Sleeper,” and was aware of a turning of heads, a hum of observation.
They entered another little passage in the wall of this ante-chamber,
and then he found himself on an iron-railed gallery of metal that
passed round the side of the great hall he had already seen through the
curtains. He entered the place at the corner, so that he received
the fullest impression of its huge proportions. The black in the wasp
uniform stood aside like a well-trained servant, and closed the valve
behind him.

Compared with any of the places Graham had see thus far, this second
hall appeared to be decorate with extreme richness. On a pedestal at
the remote end, and more brilliantly lit than any other object, was a
gigantic white figure of Atlas, strong and strenuous, the globe upon his
bowed shoulders. It was the first thing to strike his attention, it was
so vast, so patiently and painfully real, so white and simple. Save for
this figure and for a dais in the centre, the wide floor of the place
was a shining vacancy. The dais was remote in the greatness of the area;
it would have looked a mere slab of metal had it not been for the group
of seven men who stood about a table on it, and gave an inkling of its
proportions. They were all dressed in white robes, they seemed to have
arisen that moment from their seats, and they were regarding Graham
steadfastly. At the end of the table he perceived the glitter of some
mechanical appliances.

Howard led him along the end gallery until they were opposite this
mighty labouring figure. Then he stopped. The two men in red who had
followed them into the gallery came and stood on either hand of Graham.

“You must remain here,” murmured Howard, “for a few moments,” and,
without waiting for a reply, hurried away along the gallery.

“But, _why?_” began Graham.

He moved as if to follow Howard, and found his path obstructed by one of
the men in red. “You have to wait here, Sire,” said the man in red.

_“Why?”_

“Orders, Sire.”

“Whose orders?”

“Our orders, Sire.”

Graham looked his exasperation.

“What place is this?” he said presently. “Who are those men?”

“They are the lords of the Council, Sire.”

“What Council?”

“_The_ Council.”

“Oh!” said Graham, and after an equally ineffectual attempt at the other
man, went to the railing and stared at the distant men in white, who
stood watching him and whispering together.

The Council? He perceived there were now eight, though how the newcomer
had arrived he had not observed. They made no gestures of greeting; they
stood regarding him as in the nineteenth century a group of men might
have stood in the street regarding a distant balloon that had suddenly
floated into view. What council could it be that gathered there, that
little body of men beneath the significant white Atlas, secluded from
every eavesdropper in this impressive spaciousness? And why should he
be brought to them, and be looked at strangely and spoken of inaudibly?
Howard appeared beneath, walking quickly across the polished floor
towards them. As he drew near he bowed and performed certain peculiar
movements, apparently of a ceremonious nature. Then he ascended the
steps of the dais, and stood by the apparatus at the end of the table.

Graham watched that visible inaudible conversation. Occasionally, one
of the white-robed men would glance towards him. He strained his ears
in vain. The gesticulation of two of the speakers became animated. He
glanced from them to the passive faces of his attendants.... When he
looked again Howard was extending his hands and moving his head like
a man who protests. He was interrupted, it seemed, by one of the
white-robed men rapping the table.

The conversation lasted an interminable time to Graham’s sense. His
eyes rose to the still giant at whose feet the Council sat. Thence they
wandered at last to the walls of the hall. It was decorated in long
painted panels of a quasi-Japanese type, many of them very beautiful.
These panels were grouped in a great and elaborate framing of dark
metal, which passed into the metallic caryatidae of the galleries, and
the great structural lines of the interior. The facile grace of these
panels enhanced the mighty white effort that laboured in the centre
of the scheme. Graham’s eyes came back to the Council, and Howard
was descending the steps. As he drew nearer his features could be
distinguished, and Graham saw that he was flushed and blowing out his
cheeks. His countenance was still disturbed when presently he reappeared
along the gallery.

“This way,” he said concisely, and they went on in silence to a little
door that opened at their approach. The two men in red stopped on either
side of this door. Howard and Graham passed in, and Graham, glancing
back, saw the white-robed Council still standing in a close group and
looking at him. Then the door closed behind him with a heavy thud, and
for the first time since his awakening he was in silence. The floor,
even, was noiseless to his feet.

Howard opened another door, and they were in the first of two contiguous
chambers furnished in white and green. “What Council was that?” began
Graham. “What were they discussing? What have they to do with me?”
 Howard closed the door carefully, heaved a huge sigh, and said something
in an undertone. He walked slanting ways across the room and turned,
blowing out his cheeks again. “Ugh!” he grunted, a man relieved.

Graham stood regarding him.

“You must understand,” began Howard abruptly, avoiding Graham’s eyes,
“that our social order is very complex. A half explanation, a bare
unqualified statement would give you false impressions. As a matter of
fact--it is a case of compound interest partly--your small fortune, and
the fortune of your cousin Warming which was left to you--and certain
other beginnings--have become very considerable. And in other ways
that will be hard for you to understand, you have become a person of
significance--of very considerable significance--involved in the world’s
affairs.”

He stopped.

“Yes?” said Graham.

“We have grave social troubles.”

“Yes?”

“Things have come to such a pass that, in fact, is advisable to seclude
you here.”

“Keep me prisoner!” exclaimed Graham.

“Well--to ask you to keep in seclusion.”

Graham turned on him. “This is strange!” he said.

“No harm will be done you.”

“No harm!”

“But you must be kept here--”

“While I learn my position, I presume.”

“Precisely.”

“Very well then. Begin. Why _harm?_”

“Not now.”

“Why not?”

“It is too long a story, Sire.”

“All the more reason I should begin at once. You say I am a person of
importance. What was that shouting I heard? Why is a great multitude
shouting and excited because my trance is over, and who are the men in
white in that huge council chamber?”

“All in good time, Sire,” said Howard. “But not crudely, not crudely.
This is one of those flimsy times when no man has a settled mind. Your
awakening. No one expected your awakening. The Council is consulting.”

“What council?”

“The Council you saw.”

Graham made a petulant movement. “This is not right,” he said. “I should
be told what is happening.

“You must wait. Really you must wait.”

Graham sat down abruptly. “I suppose since I have waited so long to
resume life,” he said, “that I must wait a little longer.”

“That is better,” said Howard. “Yes, that is much better. And I must
leave you alone. For a space. While I attend the discussion in the
Council. I am sorry.”

He went towards the noiseless door, hesitated and vanished.

Graham walked to the door, tried it, found it securely fastened in
some way he never came to understand, turned about, paced the room
restlessly, made the circuit of the room, and sat down. He remained
sitting for some time with folded arms and knitted brow, biting his
finger nails and trying to piece together the kaleidoscopic impressions
of this first hour of awakened life; the vast mechanical spaces, the
endless series of chambers and passages, the great struggle that roared
and splashed through these strange ways, the little group of remote
unsympathetic men beneath the colossal Atlas, Howard’s mysterious
behaviour. There was an inkling of some vast inheritance already in
his mind--a vast inheritance perhaps misapplied--of some unprecedented
importance and opportunity. What had he to do? And this room’s secluded
silence was eloquent of imprisonment!

It came into Graham’s mind with irresistible conviction that this series
of magnificent impressions was a dream. He tried to shut his eyes and
succeeded, but that time-honoured device led to no awakening.

Presently he began to touch and examine all the unfamiliar appointments
of the two small rooms in which he found himself.

In a long oval panel of mirror he saw himself and stopped astonished. He
was clad in a graceful costume of purple and bluish white, with a little
greyshot beard trimmed to a point, and his hair, its blackness streaked
now with bands of grey, arranged over his forehead in an unfamiliar but
graceful manner. He seemed a man of five-and-forty perhaps. For a moment
he did not perceive this was himself.

A flash of laughter came with the recognition. “To call on old Warming
like this!” he exclaimed, “and make him take me out to lunch!”

Then he thought of meeting first one and then another of the few
familiar acquaintances of his early manhood, and in the midst of his
amusement realised that every soul with whom he might jest had died
many score of years ago. The thought smote him abruptly and keenly;
he stopped short, the expression of his face changed to a white
consternation.

The tumultuous memory of the moving platforms and the huge facade of
that wonderful street reasserted itself. The shouting multitudes came
back clear and vivid, and those remote, inaudible, unfriendly councilors
in white. He felt himself a little figure, very small and ineffectual,
pitifully conspicuous. And all about him, the world was--strange.



CHAPTER VII. IN THE SILENT ROOMS

Presently Graham resumed his examination of his apartments. Curiosity
kept him moving in spite of his fatigue. The inner room, he perceived,
was high, and its ceiling dome shaped, with an oblong aperture in the
centre, opening into a funnel in which a wheel of broad fans seemed to
be rotating, apparently driving the air up the shaft. The faint humming
note of its easy motion was the only clear sound in that quiet place. As
these vans sprang up one after the other, Graham could get transient
glimpses of the sky. He was surprised to see a star.

This drew his attention to the fact that the bright lighting of these
rooms was due to a multitude of very faint glow lamps set about the
cornices. There were no windows. And he began to recall that along
all the vast chambers and passages he had traversed with Howard he had
observed no windows at all. Had there been windows? There were windows
on the street indeed, but were they for light? Or was the whole city lit
day and night for evermore, so that there was no night there?

And another thing dawned upon him. There was no fireplace in either
room. Was the season summer, and were these merely summer apartments, or
was the whole City uniformly heated or cooled? He became interested in
these questions, began examining the smooth texture of the walls, the
simply constructed bed, the ingenious arrangements by which the labour
of bedroom service was practically abolished. And over everything was a
curious absence of deliberate ornament, a bare grace of form and
colour, that he found very pleasing to the eye. There were several very
comfortable chairs, a light table on silent runners carrying several
bottles of fluids and glasses, and two plates bearing a clear substance
like jelly. Then he noticed there were no books, no newspapers, no
writing materials. “The world has changed indeed,” he said.

He observed one entire side of the outer room was set with rows of
peculiar double cylinders inscribed with green lettering on white that
harmonized with the decorative scheme of the room, and in the centre of
this side projected a little apparatus about a yard square and having a
white smooth face to the room. A chair faced this. He had a transitory
idea that these cylinders might be books, or a modern substitute for
books, but at first it did not seem so.

The lettering on the cylinders puzzled him. At first sight it seemed
like Russian. Then he noticed a suggestion of mutilated English about
certain of the words.

                   “oi Man huwdbi Kin”

forced itself on him as “The Man who would be King.” “Phonetic
spelling,” he said. He remembered reading a story with that title, then
he recalled the story vividly, one of the best stories in the world. But
this thing before him was not a book as he understood it. He puzzled out
the titles of two adjacent cylinders. ‘The Heart of Darkness,’ he had
never heard of before nor ‘The Madonna of the Future’--no doubt if they
were indeed stories, they were by post Victorian authors.

He puzzled over this peculiar cylinder for some time and replaced it.
Then he turned to the square apparatus and examined that. He opened a
sort of lid and found one of the double cylinders within, and on the
upper edge a little stud like the stud of an electric bell. He pressed
this and a rapid clicking began and ceased. He became aware of voices
and music, and noticed a play of colour on the smooth front face. He
suddenly realised what this might be, and stepped back to regard it.

On the flat surface was now a little picture, very vividly coloured,
and in this picture were figures that moved. Not only did they move, but
they were conversing in clear small voices. It was exactly like reality
viewed through an inverted opera glass and heard through a long tube.
His interest was seized at once by the situation, which presented a
man pacing up and down and vociferating angry things to a pretty but
petulant woman. Both were in the picturesque costume that seemed so
strange to Graham. “I have worked,” said the man, “but what have you
been doing?”

“Ah!” said Graham. He forgot everything else, and sat down in the chair.
Within five minutes he heard himself named, heard “when the Sleeper
wakes,” used jestingly as a proverb for remote postponement, and passed
himself by, a thing remote and incredible. But in a little while he knew
those two people like intimate friends.

At last the miniature drama came to an end, and the square face of the
apparatus was blank again.

It was a strange world into which he had been permitted to see,
unscrupulous, pleasure seeking, energetic, subtle, a world too of dire
economic struggle; there were allusions he did not understand, incidents
that conveyed strange suggestions of altered moral ideals, flashes of
dubious enlightenment. The blue canvas that bulked so largely in his
first impression of the city ways appeared again and again as
the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story was
contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end had
been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat staring at the blankness.

He started and rubbed his eyes. He had been so absorbed in the
latter-day substitute for a novel, that he awoke to the little green
and white room with more than a touch of the surprise of his first
awakening.

He stood up, and abruptly he was back in his own wonderland. The
clearness of the kinetoscope drama passed, and the struggle in the vast
place of streets, the ambiguous Council, the swift phases of his waking
hour, came back. These people had spoken of the Council with suggestions
of a vague universality of power. And they had spoken of the Sleeper; it
had not really struck him vividly at the time that he was the Sleeper.
He had to recall precisely what they had said.

He walked into the bedroom and peered up through the quick intervals of
the revolving fan. As the fan swept round, a dim turmoil like the noise
of machinery came in rhythmic eddies. All else was silence.


Though the perpetual day still irradiated his apartments, he perceived
the little intermittent strip of sky was now deep blue--black almost,
with a dust of little stars.

He resumed his examination of the rooms. He could find no way of opening
the padded door, no bell nor other means of calling for attendance.
His feeling of wonder was in abeyance; but he was curious, anxious for
information. He wanted to know exactly how he stood to these new things.
He tried to compose himself to wait until someone came to him. Presently
he became restless and eager for information, for distraction, for fresh
sensations.

He went back to the apparatus in the other room, and had soon puzzled
out the method of replacing the cylinders by others. As he did so, it
came into his mind that it must be these little appliances had fixed the
language so that it was still clear and understandable after two hundred
years. The haphazard cylinders he substituted displayed a musical
fantasia. At first it was beautiful, and then it was sensuous. He
presently recognized what appeared to him to be an altered version of
the story of Tannhauser. The music was unfamiliar. But the rendering was
realistic, and with a contemporary unfamiliarity. Tannhauser did not
go to a Venusberg, but to a Pleasure City. What was a Pleasure City? A
dream, surely, the fancy of a fantastic, voluptuous writer.

He became interested, curious. The story developed with a flavour of
strangely twisted sentimentality. Suddenly he did not like it. He liked
it less as it proceeded.

He had a revulsion of feeling. These were no pictures, no idealisations,
but photographed realities. He wanted no more of the twenty-second
century Venusberg. He forgot the part played by the model in nineteenth
century art, and gave way to an archaic indignation. He rose, angry and
half ashamed at himself for witnessing this thing even in solitude. He
pulled forward the apparatus, and with some violence sought for a means
of stopping its action. Something snapped. A violet spark stung and
convulsed his arm and the thing was still. When he attempted next day
to replace these Tannhauser cylinders by another pair, he found the
apparatus broken....

He struck out a path oblique to the room and paced to and fro,
struggling with intolerable vast impressions. The things he had derived
from the cylinders and the things he had seen, conflicted, confused him.
It seemed to him the most amazing thing of all that in his thirty years
of life he had never tried to shape a picture of these coming times.
“We were making the future,” he said, “and hardly any of us troubled to
think what future we were making. And here it is!”

“What have they got to, what has been done? How do I come into the midst
of it all?” The vastness of street and house he was prepared for,
the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the
systematised sensuality of a class of rich men!

He thought of Bellamy, the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so
oddly anticipated this actual experience. But here was no Utopia,
no Socialistic state. He had already seen enough to realise that the
ancient antithesis of luxury, waste and sensuality on the one hand and
abject poverty on the other, still prevailed. He knew enough of the
essential factors of life to understand that correlation. And not only
were the buildings of the city gigantic and the crowds in the street
gigantic, but the voices he had heard in the ways, the uneasiness of
Howard, the very atmosphere spoke of gigantic discontent. What country
was he in? Still England it seemed, and yet strangely “un-English.” His
mind glanced at the rest of the world, and saw only an enigmatical veil.

He prowled about his apartment, examining everything as a caged animal
might do. He felt very tired, felt that feverish exhaustion that does
not admit of rest. He listened for long spaces under the ventilator to
catch some distant echo of the tumults he felt must be proceeding in the
city.

He began to talk to himself. “Two hundred and three years!” he said to
himself over and over again, laughing stupidly. “Then I am two hundred
and thirty-three years old! The oldest inhabitant. Surely they haven’t
reversed the tendency of our time and gone back to the rule of the
oldest. My claims are indisputable. Mumble, mumble. I remember the
Bulgarian atrocities as though it was yesterday. ‘Tis a great age!
Ha ha!” He was surprised at first to hear himself laughing, and then
laughed again deliberately and louder. Then he realised that he was
behaving foolishly. “Steady,” he said. “Steady!”

His pacing became more regular. “This new world,” he said. “I don’t
understand it. _Why?_... But it is all _why!_”

“I suppose they can fly and do all sorts of things Let me try and
remember just how it began.”

He was surprised at first to find how vague the memories of his first
thirty years had become. He remembered fragments, for the most part
trivial moments, things of no great importance that he had observed. His
boyhood seemed the most accessible at first, he recalled school books
and certain lessons in mensuration. Then he revived the more salient
features of his life, memories of the wife long since dead, her magic
influence now gone beyond corruption, of his rivals and friends and
betrayers, of the swift decision of this issue and that, and then of
his, last years of misery, of fluctuating resolves, and at last of his
strenuous studies. In a little while he perceived he had it all again;
dim perhaps, like metal long laid aside, but in no way defective or
injured, capable of re-polishing. And the hue of it was a deepening
misery. Was it worth re-polishing? By a miracle he had been lifted out
of a life that had become intolerable.

He reverted to his present condition. He wrestled with the facts in
vain. It became an inextricable tangle. He saw the sky through the
ventilator pink with dawn. An old persuasion came out of the dark
recesses of his memory. “I must sleep,” he said. It appeared as a
delightful relief from this mental distress and from the growing pain
and heaviness of his limbs. He went to the strange little bed, lay down
and was presently asleep.

He was destined to become very familiar indeed with these apartments
before he left them, for he remained imprisoned for three days. During
that time no one, except Howard, entered his prison. The marvel of his
fate mingled with and in some way minimised the marvel of his survival.
He had awakened to mankind it seemed only to be snatched away into this
unaccountable solitude. Howard came regularly with subtly sustaining and
nutritive fluids, and light and pleasant foods, quite strange to Graham.
He always closed the door carefully as he entered. On matters of detail
he was increasingly obliging, but the bearing of Graham on the great
issues that were evidently being contested so closely beyond the
soundproof walls that enclosed him, he would not elucidate. He evaded,
as politely as possible, every question on the position of affairs in
the outer world.

And in those three days Graham’s incessant thoughts went far and wide.
All that he had seen, all this elaborate contrivance to prevent
him seeing, worked together in his mind. Almost every possible
interpretation of his position he debated--even as it chanced, the right
interpretation. Things that presently happened to him, came to him at
last credible, by virtue of this seclusion. When at length the moment of
his release arrived, it found him prepared.

Howard’s bearing went far to deepen Graham’s impression of his own
strange importance; the door between its opening and closing seemed to
admit with him a breath of momentous happening. His enquiries became
more definite and searching. Howard retreated through protests and
difficulties. The awakening was unforeseen, he repeated; it happened to
have fallen in with the trend of a social convulsion.

“To explain it I must tell you the history of a gross and a half of
years,” protested Howard.

“The thing is this,” said Graham. “You are afraid of something I shall
do. In some way I am arbitrator--I might be arbitrator.”

“It is not that. But you have--I may tell you this much--the automatic
increase of your property puts great possibilities of interference in
your hands. And in certain other ways you have influence, with your
eighteenth century notions.”

“Nineteenth century,” corrected Graham.

“With your old world notions, anyhow, ignorant as you are of every
feature of our State.”

“Am I a fool?”

“Certainly not.”

“Do I seem to be the sort of man who would act rashly?”

“You were never expected to act at all. No one counted on your
awakening. No one dreamt you would ever awake. The Council had
surrounded you with antiseptic conditions. As a matter of fact, we
thought that you were dead--a mere arrest of decay. And--but it is too
complex. We dare not suddenly--while you are still half awake.”

“It won’t do,” said Graham. “Suppose it is as you say--why am I not
being crammed night and day with facts and warnings and all the wisdom
of the time to fit me for my responsibilities? Am I any wiser now than
two days ago, if it is two days, when I awoke?”

Howard pulled his lip.

“I am beginning to feel--every hour I feel more clearly--a sense of
complex concealment of which you are the salient point. Is this Council,
or committee, or whatever they are, cooking the accounts of my estate?
Is that it?”

“That note of suspicion--” said Howard.

“Ugh!” said Graham. “Now, mark my words, it will be ill for those who
have put me here. It will be ill. I am alive. Make no doubt of it, I
am alive. Every day my pulse is stronger and my mind clearer and more
vigorous. No more quiescence. I am a man come back to life. And I want
to _live_--”

“_Live!_”

Howard’s face lit with an idea. He came towards Graham and spoke in an
easy confidential tone.

“The Council secludes you here for your good. You are restless.
Naturally--an energetic man! You find it dull here. But we are anxious
that everything you may desire--every desire--every sort of desire...
There may be something. Is there any sort of company?”

He paused meaningly.

“Yes,” said Graham thoughtfully. “There is.”

“Ah! _Now!_ We have treated you neglectfully.”

“The crowds in yonder streets of yours.”

“That,” said Howard, “I am afraid--. But--”

Graham began pacing the room. Howard stood near the door watching him.
The implication of Howard’s suggestion was only half evident to Graham.
Company? Suppose he were to accept the proposal, demand some sort
of _company_? Would there be any possibilities of gathering from
the conversation of this additional person some vague inkling of
the struggle that had broken out so vividly at his waking moment? He
meditated again, and the suggestion took colour. He turned on Howard
abruptly.

“What do you mean by company?”

Howard raised his eyes and shrugged his shoulders. “Human beings,” he
said, with a curious smile on his heavy face.

“Our social ideas,” he said, “have a certain increased liberality,
perhaps, in comparison with your times. If a man wishes to relieve such
a tedium as this--by feminine society, for instance. We think it no
scandal. We have cleared our minds of formulae. There is in our city a
class, a necessary class, no longer despised--discreet--”

Graham stopped dead.

“It would pass the time,” said Howard. “It is a thing I should
perhaps have thought of before, but, as a matter of fact, so much is
happening--”

He indicated the exterior world.

Graham hesitated. For a moment the figure of a possible woman that
his imagination suddenly created dominated his mind with an intense
attraction. Then he flashed into anger.

“No!” he shouted.

He began striding rapidly up and down the room.

“Everything you say, everything you do, convinces me--of some great
issue in which I am concerned. I do not want to pass the time, as you
call it. Yes, I know. Desire and indulgence are life in a sense--and
Death! Extinction! In my life before I slept I had worked out
that pitiful question. I will not begin again. There is a city, a
multitude--. And meanwhile I am here like a rabbit in a bag.”

His rage surged high. He choked for a moment and began to wave his
clenched fists. He gave way to an anger fit, he swore archaic curses.
His gestures had the quality of physical threats.

“I do not know who your party may be. I am in the dark, and you keep
me in the dark. But I know this, that I am secluded here for no
good purpose. For no good purpose. I warn you, I warn you of the
consequences. Once I come at my power--”

He realised that to threaten thus might be a danger to himself. He
stopped. Howard stood regarding him with a curious expression.

“I take it this is a message to the Council,” said Howard.

Graham had a momentary impulse to leap upon the man, fell or stun him.
It must have shown upon his face; at any rate Howard’s movement was
quick. In a second the noiseless door had closed again, and the man from
the nineteenth century was alone.

For a moment he stood rigid, with clenched hands half raised. Then he
flung them down. “What a fool I have been!” he said, and gave way to
his anger again, stamping about the room and shouting curses. For a long
time he kept himself in a sort of frenzy, raging at his position, at his
own folly, at the knaves who had imprisoned him. He did this because
he did not want to look calmly at his position. He clung to his
anger--because he was afraid of Fear.

Presently he found himself reasoning with himself. This imprisonment was
unaccountable, but no doubt the legal forms--new legal forms--of the
time permitted it. It must, of course, be legal. These people were two
hundred years further on in the march of civilisation than the Victorian
generation. It was not likely they would be less--humane. Yet they
had cleared their minds of formulae! Was humanity a formula as well as
chastity?

His imagination set to work to suggest things that might be done to him.
The attempts of his reason to dispose of these suggestions, though
for the most part logically valid, were quite unavailing. “Why should
anything be done to me?”

“If the worst comes to the worst,” he found himself saying at last, “I
can give up what they want. But what do they want? And why don’t they
ask me for it instead of cooping me up?”

He returned to his former preoccupation with the Council’s possible
intentions. He began to reconsider the details of Howard’s behaviour,
sinister glances, inexplicable hesitations. Then, for a time, his mind
circled about the idea of escaping from these rooms; but whither could
he escape into this vast, crowded world? He would be worse off than
a Saxon yeoman suddenly dropped into nineteenth century London. And
besides, how could anyone escape from these rooms?

“How can it benefit anyone if harm should happen to me?”

He thought of the tumult, the great social trouble of which he was so
unaccountably the axis. A text, irrelevant enough and yet curiously
insistent, came floating up out of the darkness of his memory. This also
a Council had said:

“It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people.”



CHAPTER VIII. THE ROOF SPACES

As the fans in the circular aperture of the inner room rotated and
permitted glimpses of the night, dim sounds drifted in thereby. And
Graham, standing underneath, wrestling darkly with the unknown powers
that imprisoned him, and which he had now deliberately challenged, was
startled by the sound of a voice.

He peered up and saw in the intervals of the rotation, dark and dim,
the face and shoulders of a man regarding him. When a dark hand was
extended, the swift fan struck it, swung round and beat on with a little
brownish patch on the edge of its thin blade, and something began to
fall therefrom upon the floor, dripping silently.

Graham looked down, and there were spots of blood at his feet. He looked
up again in a strange excitement. The figure had gone.

He remained motionless--his every sense intent upon the flickering patch
of darkness, for outside it was high night. He became aware of some
faint, remote, dark specks floating lightly through the outer air. They
came down towards him, fitfully, eddyingly, and passed aside out of
the uprush from the fan. A gleam of light flickered, the specks flashed
white, and then the darkness came again. Warmed and lit as he was, he
perceived that it was snowing within a few feet of him.

Graham walked across the room and came back to the ventilator again. He
saw the head of a man pass near. There was a sound of whispering. Then
a smart blow on some metallic substance, effort, voices, and the fans
stopped. A gust of snowflakes whirled into the room, and vanished before
they touched the floor. “Don’t be afraid,” said a voice.

Graham stood under the fan. “Who are you?” he whispered.

For a moment there was nothing but a swaying of the fan, and then the
head of a man was thrust cautiously into the opening. His face appeared
nearly inverted to Graham; his dark hair was wet with dissolving flakes
of snow upon it. His arm went up into the darkness holding something
unseen. He had a youthful face and bright eyes, and the veins of his
forehead were swollen. He seemed to be exerting himself to maintain his
position.

For several seconds neither he nor Graham spoke.

“You were the Sleeper?” said the stranger at last.

“Yes,” said Graham. “What do you want with me?”

“I come from Ostrog, Sire.”

“Ostrog?”

The man in the ventilator twisted his head round so that his profile was
towards Graham. He appeared to be listening. Suddenly there was a hasty
exclamation, and the intruder sprang back just in time to escape the
sweep of the released fan. And when Graham peered up there was nothing
visible but the slowly falling snow.

It was perhaps a quarter of an hour before anything returned to the
ventilator. But at last came the same metallic interference again; the
fans stopped and the face reappeared. Graham had remained all this time
in the same place, alert and tremulously excited.

“Who are you? What do you want?” he said.

“We want to speak to you, Sire,” said the intruder.

“We want--I can’t hold the thing. We have been trying to find a way to
you these three days.”

“Is it rescue?” whispered Graham. “Escape?”

“Yes, Sire. If you will.”

“You are my party--the party of the Sleeper?”

“Yes, Sire.”

“What am I to do?” said Graham.

There was a struggle. The stranger’s arm appeared, and his hand was
bleeding. His knees came into view over the edge of the funnel. “Stand
away from me,” he said, and he dropped rather heavily on his hands and
one shoulder at Graham’s feet. The released ventilator whirled noisily.
The stranger rolled over, sprang up nimbly and stood panting, hand to a
bruised shoulder, and with his bright eyes on Graham.

“You are indeed the Sleeper,” he said. “I saw you asleep. When it was
the law that anyone might see you.”

“I am the man who was in the trance,” said Graham. “They have imprisoned
me here. I have been here since I awoke--at least three days.”

The intruder seemed about to speak, heard something, glanced swiftly at
the door, and suddenly left Graham and ran towards it, shouting quick
incoherent words. A bright wedge of steel flashed in his hand, and he
began tap, tap, a quick succession of blows upon the hinges. “Mind!”
 cried a voice. “Oh!” The voice came from above.

Graham glanced up, saw the soles of two feet, ducked, was struck on the
shoulder by one of them, and a heavy weight bore him to the earth. He
fell on his knees and forward, and the weight went over his head. He
knelt up and saw a second man from above seated before him.

“I did not see you, Sire,” panted the man. He rose and assisted Graham
to arise. “Are you hurt, Sire?” he panted. A succession of heavy blows
on the ventilator began, something fell close to Graham’s face, and a
shivering edge of white metal danced, fell over, and lay flat upon the
floor.

“What is this?” cried Graham, confused and looking at the ventilator.
“Who are you? What are you going to do? Remember, I understand nothing.”

“Stand back,” said the stranger, and drew him from under the ventilator
as another fragment of metal fell heavily.

“We want you to come, Sire,” panted the newcomer, and Graham glancing
at his face again, saw a new cut had changed from white to red on his
forehead, and a couple of little trickles of blood starting therefrom.
“Your people call for you.”

“Come where? My people?”

“To the hall about the markets. Your life is in danger here. We have
spies. We learned but just in time. The Council has decided--this very
day--either to drug or kill you. And everything is ready. The people are
drilled, the wind-vane police, the engineers, and half the way-gearers
are with us. We have the halls crowded--shouting. The whole city shouts
against the Council. We have arms.” He wiped the blood with his hand.
“Your life here is not worth--” “But why arms?”

“The people have risen to protect you, Sire. What?”

He turned quickly as the man who had first come down made a hissing
with his teeth. Graham saw the latter start back, gesticulate to them to
conceal themselves, and move as if to hide behind the opening door.

As he did so Howard appeared, a little tray in one hand and his heavy
face downcast. He started, looked up, the door slammed behind him, the
tray tilted sideways, and the steel wedge struck him behind the ear. He
went down like a felled tree, and lay as he fell athwart the floor of
the outer room. The man who had struck him bent hastily, studied his
face for a moment, rose, and returned to his work at the door.

“Your poison!” said a voice in Graham’s ear.

Then abruptly they were in darkness. The innumerable cornice lights
had been extinguished. Graham saw the aperture of the ventilator with
ghostly snow whirling above it and dark figures moving hastily. Three
knelt on the fan. Some dim thing--a ladder was being lowered through the
opening, and a hand appeared holding a fitful yellow light.

He had a moment of hesitation. But the manner of these men, their swift
alacrity, their words, marched so completely with his own fears of
the Council, with his idea and hope of a rescue, that it lasted not a
moment. And his people awaited him!

“I do not understand,” he said, “I trust. Tell me what to do.”

The man with the cut brow gripped Graham’s arm.

“Clamber up the ladder,” he whispered. “Quick. They will have heard--”

Graham felt for the ladder with extended hands, put his foot on the
lower rung, and, turning his head, saw over the shoulder of the nearest
man, in the yellow flicker of the light, the first-comer astride over
Howard and still working at the door. Graham turned to the ladder again,
and was thrust by his conductor and helped up by those above, and then
he was standing on something hard and cold and slippery outside the
ventilating funnel.

He shivered. He was aware of a great difference in the temperature. Half
a dozen men stood about him, and light flakes of snow touched hands and
face and melted. For a moment it was dark, then for a flash a ghastly
violet white, and then everything was dark again.

He saw he had come out upon the roof of the vast city structure which
had replaced the miscellaneous houses, streets and open spaces of
Victorian London. The place upon which he stood was level, with huge
serpentine cables lying athwart it in every direction. The circular
wheels of a number of windmills loomed indistinct and gigantic through
the darkness and snowfall, and roared with a varying loudness as the
fitful white light smote up from below, touched the snow eddies with a
transient glitter, and made an evanescent spectre in the night; and
here and there, low down! some vaguely outlined wind-driven mechanism
flickered with livid sparks.

All this he appreciated in a fragmentary manner as his rescuers stood
about him. Someone threw a thick soft cloak of fur-like texture about
him, and fastened it by buckled straps at waist and shoulders. Things
were said briefly, decisively. Someone thrust him forward.

Before his mind was yet clear a dark shape gripped his arm. “This way,”
 said this shape, urging him along, and pointed Graham across the flat
roof in the direction of a dim semicircular haze of light. Graham
obeyed.

“Mind!” said a voice, as Graham stumbled against a cable. “Between them
and not across them,” said the voice. And, “We must hurry.”

“Where are the people?” said Graham. “The people you said awaited me?”

The stranger did not answer. He left Graham’s arm as the path grew
narrower, and led the way with rapid strides. Graham followed blindly.
In a minute he found himself running. “Are the others coming?” he
panted, but received no reply. His companion glanced back and ran on.
They came to a sort of pathway of open metal-work, transverse to the
direction they had come, and they turned aside to follow this. Graham
looked back, but the snowstorm had hidden the others.

“Come on!” said his guide. Running now, they drew near a little windmill
spinning high in the air. “Stoop,” said Graham’s guide, and they avoided
an endless band running roaring up to the shaft of the vane. “This
way!” and they were ankle deep in a gutter full of drifted thawing snow,
between two low walls of metal that presently rose waist high. “I will
go first,” said the guide. Graham drew his cloak about him and followed.
Then suddenly came a narrow abyss across which the gutter leapt to the
snowy darkness of the further side. Graham peeped over the side once and
the gulf was black. For a moment he regretted his flight. He dared not
look again, and his brain spun as he waded through the half liquid snow.

Then out of the gutter they clambered and hurried across a wide flat
space damp with thawing snow, and for half its extent dimly translucent
to lights that went to and fro underneath. He hesitated at this unstable
looking substance, but his guide ran on unheeding, and so they came to
and clambered up slippery steps to the rim of a great dome of glass.
Round this they went. Far below a number of people seemed to be dancing,
and music filtered through the dome.... Graham fancied he heard a
shouting through the snowstorm, and his guide hurried him on with a new
spurt of haste. They clambered panting to a space of huge windmills, one
so vast that only the lower edge of its vans came rushing into sight and
rushed up again and was lost in the night and the snow. They hurried for
a time through the colossal metallic tracery of its supports, and came
at last above a place of moving platforms like the place into which
Graham had looked from the balcony. They crawled across the sloping
transparency that covered this street of platforms, crawling on hands
and knees because of the slipperiness of the snowfall.

For the most part the glass was bedewed, and Graham saw only hazy
suggestions of the forms below, but near the pitch of the transparent
roof the glass was clear, and he found himself looking sheerly down upon
it all. For awhile, in spite of the urgency of his guide, he gave way
to vertigo and lay spread-eagled on the glass, sick and paralysed. Far
below, mere stirring specks and dots, went the people of the unsleeping
city in their perpetual daylight, and the moving platforms ran on their
incessant journey. Messengers and men on unknown businesses shot along
the drooping cables and the frail bridges were crowded with men. It was
like peering into a gigantic glass hive, and it lay vertically below him
with only a tough glass of unknown thickness to save him from a fall.
The street showed warm and lit, and Graham was wet now to the skin with
thawing snow, and his feet were numbed with cold. For a space he could
not move.

“Come on!” cried his guide, with terror in his voice. “Come on!”

Graham reached the pitch of the roof by an effort.

Over the ridge, following his guide’s example, he turned about and slid
backward down the opposite slope very swiftly, amid a little avalanche
of snow. While he was sliding he thought of what would happen if some
broken gap should come in his way. At the edge he stumbled to his feet
ankle deep in slush thanking heaven for an opaque footing again. His
guide was already clambering up a metal screen to a level expanse.

Through the spare snowflakes above this loomed another line of vast
windmills, and then suddenly the amorphous tumult of the rotating wheels
was pierced with a deafening sound. It was a mechanical shrilling of
extraordinary intensity that seemed to come simultaneously from every
point of the compass.

“They have missed us already!” cried Graham’s guide in an accent of
terror, and suddenly, with a blinding flash, the night became day.

Above the driving snow, from the summits of the wind-wheels, appeared
vast masts carrying globes of livid light. They receded in illimitable
vistas in every direction. As far as his eye could penetrate the
snowfall they glared.

“Get on this,” cried Graham’s conductor, and thrust him forward to a
long grating of snowless metal that ran like a band between two slightly
sloping expanses of snow. It felt warm to Graham’s benurrled feet, and a
faint eddy of steam rose from it.

“Come on!” shouted his guide ten yards off, and, without waiting, ran
swiftly through the incandescent glare towards the iron supports of the
next range of wind-wheels. Graham, recovering from his astonishment,
followed as fast, convinced of his imminent capture.

In a score of seconds they were within a tracery of glare and black
shadows shot with moving bars beneath the monstrous wheels. Graham’s
conductor ran on for some time, and suddenly darted sideways and
vanished into a black shadow in the corner of the foot of a huge
support. In another moment Graham was beside him.

They cowered panting and stared out.

The scene upon which Graham looked was very wild and strange. The snow
had now almost ceased; only a belated flake passed now and again across
the picture. But the broad stretch of level before them was a ghastly
white, broken only by gigantic masses and moving shapes and lengthy
strips of impenetrable darkness, vast ungainly Titans of shadow. All
about them, huge metallic structures, iron girders, inhumanly vast as it
seemed to him, interlaced, and the edges of wind-wheels, scarcely moving
in the lull, passed in great shining curves steeper and steeper up
into a luminous haze. Wherever the snow-spangled light struck down,
beams and girders, and incessant bands running with a halting,
indomitable resolution passed upward and downward into the black. And
with all that mighty activity, with an omnipresent sense of motive and
design, this snow-clad desolation of mechanism seemed void of all
human presence save themselves, seemed as trackless and deserted and
unfrequented by men as some inaccessible Alpine snowfield.

“They will be chasing us,” cried the leader. “We are scarcely halfway
there yet. Cold as it is we must hide here for a space--at least until
it snows more thickly again.”

His teeth chattered in his head.

“Where are the markets?” asked Graham staring out. “Where are all the
people?”

The other made no answer.


“Look!” whispered Graham, crouched close, and became very still.

The snow had suddenly become thick again, and sliding with the whirling
eddies out of the black pit of the sky came something, vague and large
and very swift. It came down in a steep curve and swept round, wide
wings extended and a trail of white condensing steam behind it, rose
with an easy swiftness and went gliding up the air, swept horizontally
forward in a wide curve, and vanished again in the steaming specks of
snow. And, through the ribs of its body, Graham saw two little men, very
minute and active, searching the snowy areas about him, as it seemed to
him, with field glasses. For a second they were clear, then hazy through
a thick whirl of snow, then small and distant, and in a minute they were
gone.

“Now!” cried his companion. “Come!”

He pulled Graham’s sleeve, and incontinently the two were running
headlong down the arcade of ironwork beneath the wind-wheels. Graham,
running blindly, collided with his leader, who had turned back on him
suddenly. He found himself within a dozen yards of a black chasm. It
extended as far as he could see right and left. It seemed to cut off
their progress in either direction.

“Do as I do,” whispered his guide. He lay down and crawled to the edge,
thrust his head over and twisted until one leg hung. He seemed to feel
for something with his foot, found it, and went sliding over the edge
into the gulf. His head reappeared. “It is a ledge,” he whispered. “In
the dark all the way along. Do as I did.”

Graham hesitated, went down upon all fours, crawled to the edge, and
peered into a velvety blackness. For a sickly moment he had courage
neither to go on nor retreat, then he sat and hung his leg down, felt
his guide’s hands pulling at him, had a horrible sensation of sliding
over the edge into the unfathomable, splashed, and felt himself in a
slushy gutter, impenetrably dark.

“This way,” whispered the voice, and he began crawling along the gutter
through the trickling thaw, pressing himself against the wall. They
continued along it for some minutes. He seemed to pass through a hundred
stages of misery, to pass minute after minute through a hundred degrees
of cold, damp, and exhaustion. In a little while he ceased to feel his
hands and feet.

The gutter sloped downwards. He observed that they were now many feet
below the edge of the buildings. Rows of spectral white shapes like the
ghosts of blind-drawn windows rose above them. They came to the end of
a cable fastened above one of these white windows, dimly visible and
dropping into impenetrable shadows. Suddenly his hand came against his
guide’s.

“Still!” whispered the latter very softly.

He looked up with a start and saw the huge wings of the flying machine
gliding slowly and noiselessly overhead athwart the broad band of
snow-flecked grey-blue sky. In a moment it was hidden again.

“Keep still; they were just turning.”

For awhile both were motionless, then Graham’s companion stood up,
and reaching towards the fastenings of the cable fumbled with some
indistinct tackle.

“What is that?” asked Graham.

The only answer was a faint cry. The man crouched motionless. Graham
peered and saw his face dimly. He was staring down the long ribbon of
sky, and Graham, following his eyes, saw the flying machine small and
faint and remote. Then he saw that the wings spread on either side,
that it headed towards them, that every moment it grew larger. It was
following the edge of the chasm towards them.

The man’s movements became convulsive. He thrust two cross bars into
Graham’s hand. Graham could not see them, he ascertained their form by
feeling. They were slung by thin cords to the cable. On the cord were
hand grips of some soft elastic substance. “Put the cross between your
legs,” whispered the guide hysterically, “and grip the holdfasts. Grip
tightly, grip!”

Graham did as he was told.

“Jump,” said the voice. “In heaven’s name, jump!”

For one momentous second Graham could not speak. He was glad afterwards
that darkness hid his face. He said nothing. He began to tremble
violently. He looked sideways at the swift shadow that swallowed up the
sky as it rushed upon him.

“Jump! Jump--in God’s name! Or they will have us,” cried Graham’s guide,
and in the violence of his passion thrust him forward.

Graham tottered convulsively, gave a sobbing cry, a cry in spite of
himself, and then, as the flying machine swept over them, fell forward
into the pit of that darkness, seated on the cross wood and holding
the ropes with the clutch of death. Something cracked, something rapped
smartly against a wall. He heard the pulley of the cradle hum on its
rope. He heard the aeronauts shout. He felt a pair of knees digging into
his back.... He was sweeping headlong through the air, falling through
the air. All his strength was in his hands. He would have screamed but
he had no breath.

He shot into a blinding light that made him grip the tighter. He
recognised the great passage with the running ways, the hanging lights
and interlacing girders. They rushed upward and by him. He had a
momentary impression of a great circular aperture yawning to swallow him
up.

He was in the dark again, falling, falling, gripping with aching hands,
and behold! a clap of sound, a burst of light, and he was in a brightly
lit hall with a roaring multitude of people beneath his feet. The
people! His people! A proscenium, a stage rushed up towards him, and his
cable swept down to a circular aperture to the right of this. He felt he
was travelling slower, and suddenly very much slower. He distinguished
shouts of “Saved! The Master. He is safe!” The stage rushed up towards
him with rapidly diminishing swiftness. Then--

He heard the man clinging behind him shout as if suddenly terrified,
and this shout was echoed by a shout from below. He felt that he was no
longer gliding along the cable but falling with it. There was a tumult
of yells, screams and cries. He felt something soft against his extended
hand, and the impact of a broken fall quivering through his arm...

He wanted to be still and the people were lifting him. He believed
afterwards he was carried to the platform and given some drink, but he
was never sure. He did not notice what became of his guide. When his
mind was clear again he was on his feet; eager hands were assisting him
to stand. He was in a big alcove, occupying the position that in his
previous experience had been devoted to the lower boxes. If this was
indeed a theatre.

A mighty tumult was in his ears, a thunderous roar, the shouting of a
countless multitude. “It is the Sleeper! The Sleeper is with us!”

“The Sleeper is with us! The Master--the Owner! The Master is with us.
He is safe.”

Graham had a surging vision of a great hall crowded with people. He saw
no individuals, he was conscious of a froth of pink faces, of waving
arms and garments, he felt the occult influence of a vast crowd pouring
over him, buoying him up. There were balconies, galleries, great
archways giving remoter perspectives, and everywhere people, a vast
arena of people, densely packed and cheering. Across the nearer space
lay the collapsed cable like a huge snake. It had been cut by the men
of the flying machine at its upper end, and had crumpled down into the
hall. Men seemed to be hauling this out of the way. But the whole effect
was vague, the very buildings throbbed and leapt with the roar of the
voices.

He stood unsteadily and looked at those about him. Someone supported him
by one arm. “Let me go into a little room,” he said, weeping; “a little
room,” and could say no more. A man in black stepped forward, took his
disengaged arm. He was aware of officious men opening a door before
him. Someone guided him to a seat. He staggered. He sat down heavily and
covered his face with his hands; he was trembling violently, his nervous
control was at an end. He was relieved of his cloak, he could not
remember how; his purple hose he saw were black with wet. People were
running about him, things were happening, but for some time he gave no
heed to them.

He had escaped. A myriad of cries told him that. He was safe. These were
the people who were on his side. For a space he sobbed for breath,
and then he sat still with his face covered. The air was full of the
shouting of innumerable men.



CHAPTER IX. THE PEOPLE MARCH

He became aware of someone urging a glass of clear fluid upon his
attention, looked up and discovered this was a dark young man in a
yellow garment. He took the dose forthwith, and in a moment he was
glowing. A tall man in a black robe stood by his shoulder, and pointed
to the half open door into the hall. This man was shouting close to
his ear and yet what was said was indistinct because of the tremendous
uproar from the great theatre. Behind the man was a girl in a silvery
grey robe, whom Graham, even in this confusion, perceived to be
beautiful. Her dark eyes, full of wonder and curiosity, were fixed on
him, her lips trembled apart. A partially opened door gave a glimpse
of the crowded hall, and admitted a vast uneven tumult, a hammering,
clapping and shouting that died away and began again, and rose to a
thunderous pitch, and so continued intermittently all the time that
Graham remained in the little room. He watched the lips of the man in
black and gathered that he was making some clumsy explanation.

He stared stupidly for some moments at these things and then stood up
abruptly; he grasped the arm of this shouting person.

“Tell me!” he cried. “Who am I? Who am I?”

The others came nearer to hear his words. “Who am I?” His eyes searched
their faces.

“They have told him nothing!” cried the girl.

“Tell me, tell me!” cried Graham.

“You are the Master of the Earth. You are owner of half the world.”

He did not believe he heard aright. He resisted the persuasion. He
pretended not to understand, not to hear. He lifted his voice again. “I
have been awake three days--a prisoner three days. I judge there is some
struggle between a number of people in this city--it is London?”

“Yes,” said the younger man.

“And those who meet in the great hall with the white Atlas? How does it
concern me? In some way it has to do with me. Why, I don’t know. Drugs?
It seems to me that while I have slept the world has gone mad. I have
gone mad.”

“Who are those Councillors under the Atlas? Why should they try to drug
me?”

“To keep you insensible,” said the man in yellow.

“To prevent your interference.”

“But _why?_”

“Because _you_ are the Atlas, Sire,” said the man in yellow. “The world
is on your shoulders. They rule it in your name.”

The sounds from the hall had died into a silence threaded by one
monotonous voice. Now suddenly, trampling on these last words, came
a deafening tumult, a roaring and thundering, cheer crowded on cheer,
voices hoarse and shrill, beating, overlapping, and while it lasted the
people in the little room could not hear each other shout.

Graham stood, his intelligence clinging helplessly to the thing he had
just heard. “The Council,” he repeated blankly, and then snatched at a
name that had struck him. “But who is Ostrog?” he said.

“He is the organiser--the organiser of the revolt. Our Leader--in your
name.”

“In my name?--And you? Why is he not here?”

“He--has deputed us. I am his brother--his half-brother, Lincoln. He
wants you to show yourself to these people and then come on to him. That
is why he has sent. He is at the wind-vane offices directing. The people
are marching.”

“In your name,” shouted the younger man. “They have ruled, crushed,
tyrannised. At last even--”

“In my name! My name! Master?”

The younger man suddenly became audible in a pause of the outer thunder,
indignant and vociferous, a high penetrating voice under his red
aquiline nose and bushy moustache. “No one expected you to wake. No one
expected you to wake. They were cunning. Damned tyrants! But they were
taken by surprise. They did not know whether to drug you, hypnotise you,
kill you.”

Again the hall dominated everything.

“Ostrog is at the wind-vane offices ready--. Even now there is a rumour
of fighting beginning.”


The man who had called himself Lincoln came close to him. “Ostrog has it
planned. Trust him. We have our organisations ready. We shall seize the
flying stages--. Even now he may be doing that. Then--”

“This public theatre,” bawled the man in yellow, “is only a contingent.
We have five myriads of drilled men--”

“We have arms,” cried Lincoln. “We have plans. A leader. Their police
have gone from the streets and are massed in the--” (inaudible). “It
is now or never. The Council is rocking--They cannot trust even their
drilled men--”

“Hear the people calling to you!”

Graham’s mind was like a night of moon and swift clouds, now dark and
hopeless, now clear and ghastly. He was Master of the Earth, he was a
man sodden with thawing snow. Of all his fluctuating impressions the
dominant ones presented an antagonism; on the one hand was the White
Council, powerful, disciplined, few, the White Council from which he
had just escaped; and on the other, monstrous crowds, packed masses of
indistinguishable people clamouring his name, hailing him Master.
The other side had imprisoned him, debated his death. These shouting
thousands beyond the little doorway had rescued him. But why these
things should be so he could not understand.

The door opened, Lincoln’s voice was swept away and drowned, and a rush
of people followed on the heels of the tumult. These intruders came
towards him and Lincoln gesticulating. The voices without explained
their soundless lips. “Show us the Sleeper, show us the Sleeper!” was
the burden of the uproar Men were bawling for “Order! Silence!”

Graham glanced towards the open doorway, and saw a tall, oblong picture
of the hall beyond, a waving, incessant confusion of crowded, shouting
faces, men and women together, waving pale blue garments, extended
hands. Many were standing, one man in rags of dark brown, a gaunt
figure, stood on the seat and waved a black cloth. He met the wonder and
expectation of the girl’s eyes. What did these people expect from him.
He was dimly aware that the tumult outside had changed its character,
was in some way beating, marching. His own mind, too, changed for a
space he did not recognise the influence that was transforming him.
But a moment that was near to panic passed. He tried to make audible
inquiries of what was required of him.

Lincoln was shouting in his ear, but Graham was deafened to that. All
the others save the woman gesticulated towards the hall. He perceived
what had happened to the uproar. The whole mass of people was chanting
together. It was not simply a song, the voices were gathered together
and upborne by a torrent of instrumental music, music like the music of
an organ, a woven texture of sounds, full of trumpets, full of flaunting
banners, full of the march and pageantry of opening war. And the feet of
the people were beating time--tramp, tramp.

He was urged towards the door. He obeyed mechanically. The strength
of that chant took hold of him, stirred him, emboldened him. The hall
opened to him, a vast welter of fluttering colour swaying to the music.

“Wave your arm to them,” said Lincoln. “Wave your arm to them.”

“This,” said a voice on the other side, “he must have this.” Arms were
about his neck detaining him in the doorway, and a black subtly-folding
mantle hung from his shoulders. He threw his arm free of this and
followed Lincoln. He perceived the girl in grey close to him, her face
lit, her gesture onward. For the instant she became to him, flushed and
eager as she was, an embodiment of the song. He emerged in the alcove
again. Incontinently the mounting waves of the song broke upon his
appearing, and flashed up into a foam of shouting. Guided by Lincoln’s
hand he marched obliquely across the centre of the stage facing the
people.

The hall was a vast and intricate space--galleries, balconies, broad
spaces of amphitheatral steps, and great archways. Far away, high up,
seemed the mouth of a huge passage full of struggling humanity. The
whole multitude was swaying in congested masses. Individual figures
sprang out of the tumult, impressed him momentarily, and lost definition
again. Close to the platform swayed a beautiful fair woman, carried by
three men, her hair across her face and brandishing a green staff. Next
this group an old careworn man in blue canvas maintained his place in
the crush with difficulty, and behind shouted a hairless face, a
great cavity of toothless mouth. A voice called that enigmatical word
“Ostrog.” All his impressions were vague save the massive emotion
of that trampling song. The multitude were beating time with their
feet--marking time, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. The green weapons waved,
flashed and slanted. Then he saw those nearest to him on a level space
before the stage were marching in front of him, passing towards a great
archway, shouting “To the Council!” Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. He
raised his arm, and the roaring was redoubled. He remembered he had to
shout “March!” His mouth shaped inaudible heroic words. He waved his arm
again and pointed to the archway, shouting “Onward!” They were no longer
marking time, they were marching; tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. In that
host were bearded men, old men, youths, fluttering robed bare-armed
women, girls. Men and women of the new age! Rich robes, grey rags
fluttered together in the whirl of their movement amidst the dominant
blue. A monstrous black banner jerked its way to the right. He perceived
a blue-clad negro, a shrivelled woman in yellow, then a group of tall
fair-haired, white-faced, blue-clad men pushed theatrically past him.
He noted two Chinamen. A tall, sallow, dark-haired, shining-eyed youth,
white clad from top to toe, clambered up towards the platform shouting
loyally, and sprang down again and receded, looking backward. Heads,
shoulders, hands clutching weapons, all were swinging with those
marching cadences.

Faces came out of the confusion to him as he stood there, eyes met his
and passed and vanished. Men gesticulated to him, shouted inaudible
personal things. Most of the faces were flushed, but many were ghastly
white. And disease was there, and many a hand that waved to him was
gaunt and lean. Men and women of the new age! Strange and incredible
meeting! As the broad stream passed before him to the right, tributary
gangways from the remote uplands of the hall thrust downward in an
incessant replacement of people; tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. The unison
of the song was enriched and complicated by the massive echoes of arches
and passages. Men and women mingled in the ranks; tramp, tramp, tramp,
tramp. The whole world seemed marching. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp; his
brain was tramping. The garments waved onward, the faces poured by more
abundantly.


Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp; at Lincoln’s pressure he turned towards the
archway, walking unconsciously in that rhythm, scarcely noticing his
movement for the melody and stir of it. The multitude, the gesture and
song, all moved in that direction, the flow of people smote downward
until the upturned faces were below the level of his feet. He was aware
of a path before him, of a suite about him, of guards and dignities, and
Lincoln on his right hand. Attendants intervened, and ever and again
blotted out the sight of the multitude to the left. Before him went the
backs of the guards in black--three and three and three. He was marched
along a little railed way, and crossed above the archway, with the
torrent dipping to flow beneath, and shouting up to him. He did not
know whither he went; he did not want to know. He glanced back across a
flaming spaciousness of hall. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.



CHAPTER X. THE BATTLE OF THE DARKNESS

He was no longer in the hall. He was marching along a gallery
overhanging one of the great streets of the moving platforms that
traversed the city. Before him and behind him tramped his guards. The
whole concave of the moving ways below was a congested mass of people
marching, tramping to the left, shouting, waving hands and arms, pouring
along a huge vista, shouting as they came into view, shouting as they
passed, shouting as they receded, until the globes of electric light
receding in perspective dropped down it seemed and hid the swarming bare
heads. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.

The song roared up to Graham now, no longer upborne by music, but coarse
and noisy, and the beating of the marching feet, tramp, tramp, tramp,
tramp, interwove with a thunderous irregularity of footsteps from the
undisciplined rabble that poured along the higher ways.

Abruptly he noted a contrast. The buildings on the opposite side of the
way seemed deserted, the cables and bridges that laced across the aisle
were empty and shadowy. It came into Graham’s mind that these also
should have swarmed with people.

He felt a curious emotion--throbbing--very fast! He stopped again. The
guards before him marched on; those about him stopped as he did. He saw
the direction of their faces. The throbbing had something to do with the
lights. He too looked up.

At first it seemed to him a thing that affected the lights simply, an
isolated phenomenon, having no bearing on the things below. Each huge
globe of blinding whiteness was as it were clutched, compressed in a
systole that was followed by a transitory diastole, and again a systole
like a tightening grip, darkness, light, darkness, in rapid alternation.

Graham became aware that this strange behaviour of the lights had to
do with the people below. The appearance of the houses and ways, the
appearance of the packed masses changed, became a confusion of vivid
lights and leaping shadows. He saw a multitude of shadows had sprung
into aggressive existence, seemed rushing up, broadening, widening,
growing with steady swiftness--to leap suddenly back and return
reinforced. The song and the tramping had ceased. The unanimous march,
he discovered, was arrested, there were eddies, a flow sideways, shouts
of “The lights!” Voices were crying together one thing. “The lights!”
 cried these voices. “The lights!” He looked down. In this dancing death
of the lights the area of the street had suddenly become a monstrous
struggle. The huge white globes became purple-white, purple with a
reddish glow, flickered, flickered faster and faster, fluttered between
light and extinction, ceased to flicker and became mere fading specks
of glowing red in a vast obscurity. In ten seconds the extinction
was accomplished, and there was only this roaring darkness, a black
monstrosity that had suddenly swallowed up those glittering myriads of
men.

He felt invisible forms about him; his arms were gripped. Something
rapped sharply against his shin. A voice bawled in his ear, “It is all
right--all right.”

Graham shook off the paralysis of his first astonishment. He struck his
forehead against Lincoln’s and bawled, “What is this darkness?”

“The Council has cut the currents that light the city. We must
wait--stop. The people will go on. They will--”

His voice was drowned. Voices were shouting, “Save the Sleeper. Take
care of the Sleeper.” A guard stumbled against Graham and hurt his hand
by an inadvertent blow of his weapon. A wild tumult tossed and whirled
about him, growing, as it seemed, louder, denser, more furious each
moment. Fragments of recognisable sounds drove towards him, were whirled
away from him as his mind reached out to grasp them. Voices seemed to be
shouting conflicting orders, other voices answered. There were suddenly
a succession of piercing screams close beneath them.

A voice bawled in his ear, “The red police,” and receded forthwith
beyond his questions.

A crackling sound grew to distinctness, and there with a leaping of
faint flashes along the edge of the further ways. By their light Graham
saw the heads and bodies of a number of men, armed with weapons like
those of his guards, leap into an instant’s dim visibility. The whole
area began to crackle, to flash with little instantaneous streaks of
light, and abruptly the darkness rolled back like a curtain.

A glare of light dazzled his eyes, a vast seething expanse of struggling
men confused his mind. A shout, a burst of cheering, came across the
ways. He looked up to see the source of the light. A man hung far
overhead from the upper part of a cable, holding by a rope the blinding
star that had driven the darkness back. He wore a red uniform.

Graham’s eyes fell to the ways again. A wedge of red a little way along
the vista caught his eye. He saw it was a dense mass of red-clad men
jammed the higher further way, their backs against the pitiless cliff
of building, and surrounded by a dense crowd of antagonists. They were
fighting. Weapons flashed and rose and fell, heads vanished at the edge
of the contest, and other heads replaced them, the little flashes from
the green weapons became little jets of smoky grey while the light
lasted.

Abruptly the flare was extinguished and the ways were an inky darkness
once more, a tumultuous mystery.

He felt something thrusting against him. He was being pushed along the
gallery. Someone was shouting--it might be at him. He was too confused
to hear. He was thrust against the wall, and a number of people
blundered past him. It seemed to him that his guards were struggling
with one another.

Suddenly the cable-hung star-holder appeared again, and the whole scene
was white and dazzling. The band of red-coats seemed broader and nearer;
its apex was half-way down the ways towards the central aisle. And
raising his eyes Graham saw that a number of these men had also appeared
now in the darkened lower galleries of the opposite building, and were
firing over the heads of their fellows below at the boiling confusion of
people on the lower ways. The meaning of these things dawned upon him.
The march of the people had come upon an ambush at the very outset.
Thrown into confusion by the extinction of the lights they were now
being attacked by the red police. Then he became aware that he was
standing alone, that his guards and Lincoln were along the gallery in
the direction along which he had come before the darkness fell. He saw
they were gesticulating to him wildly, running back towards him. A great
shouting came from across the ways. Then it seemed as though the whole
face of the darkened building opposite was lined and speckled with
red-clad men. And they were pointing over to him and shouting. “The
Sleeper! Save the Sleeper!” shouted a multitude of throats.

Something struck the wall above his head. He looked up at the impact and
saw a star-shaped splash of silvery metal. He saw Lincoln near him. Felt
his arm gripped. Then, pat, pat; he had been missed twice.

For a moment he did not understand this. The street was hidden,
everything was hidden, as he looked. The second flare had burned out.

Lincoln had gripped Graham by the arm, was lugging him along the
gallery. “Before the next light!” he cried. His haste was contagious.
Graham’s instinct of self-preservation overcame the paralysis of his
incredulous astonishment. He became for a time the blind creature of
the fear of death. He ran, stumbling because of the uncertainty of the
darkness, blundered into his guards as they turned to run with him.
Haste was his one desire, to escape this perilous gallery upon which he
was exposed. A third glare came close on its predecessors. With it came
a great shouting across the ways, an answering tumult from the ways.
The red-coats below, he saw, had now almost gained the central passage.
Their countless faces turned towards him, and they shouted. The white
facade opposite was densely stippled with red. All these wonderful
things concerned him, turned upon him as a pivot. These were the guards
of the Council attempting to recapture him.

Lucky it was for him that these shots were the first fired in anger for
a hundred and fifty years. He heard bullets whacking over his head, felt
a splash of molten metal sting his ear, and perceived without looking
that the whole opposite facade, an unmasked ambuscade of red police, was
crowded and bawling and firing at him.

Down went one of his guards before him, and Graham, unable to stop,
leapt the writhing body.

In another second he had plunged, unhurt, into a black passage, and
incontinently someone, coming, it may be, in a transverse direction,
blundered violently into him. He was hurling down a staircase in
absolute darkness. He reeled, and was struck again, and came against a
wall with his hands. He was crushed by a weight of struggling bodies,
whirled round, and thrust to the right. A vast pressure pinned him.
He could not breathe, his ribs seemed cracking. He felt a momentary
relaxation, and then the whole mass of people moving together, bore him
back towards the great theatre from which he had so recently come.

There were moments when his feet did not touch the ground. Then he was
staggering and shoving. He heard shouts of “They are coming!” and a
muffled cry close to him. His foot blundered against something soft, he
heard a hoarse scream under foot. He heard shouts of “The Sleeper!” but
he was too confused to speak. He heard the green weapons crackling. For
a space he lost his individual will, became an atom in a panic, blind,
unthinking, mechanical. He thrust and pressed back and writhed in the
pressure, kicked presently against a step, and found himself ascending
a slope. And abruptly the faces all about him leapt out of the black,
visible, ghastly-white and astonished, terrified, perspiring, in a livid
glare. One face, a young man’s, was very near to him, not twenty inches
away. At the time it was but a passing incident of no emotional value,
but afterwards it came back to him in his dreams. For this young man,
wedged upright in the crowd for a time, had been shot and was already
dead.

A fourth white star must have been lit by the man on the cable. Its
light came glaring in through vast windows and arches and showed Graham
that he was now one of a dense mass of flying black figures pressed back
across the lower area of the great theatre. This time the picture was
livid and fragmentary slashed and barred with black shadows. He saw that
quite near to him the red guards were fighting their way through the
people. He could not tell whether they saw him. He looked for Lincoln
and his guards. He saw Lincoln near the stage of the theatre surrounded
in a crowd of black-badged revolutionaries, lifted up and staring to
and fro as if seeking him. Graham perceived that he himself was near
the opposite edge of the crowd, that behind him, separated by a barrier,
sloped the now vacant seats of the theatre. A sudden idea came to him,
and he began fighting his way towards the barrier. As he reached it the
glare came to an end.

In a moment he had thrown off the great cloak that not only impeded
his movements but made him conspicuous, and had slipped it from his
shoulders. He heard someone trip in its folds. In another he was scaling
the barrier and had dropped into the blackness on the further side. Then
feeling his way he came to the lower end of an ascending gangway. In
the darkness the sound of firing ceased and the roar of feet and voices
lulled. Then suddenly he came to an unexpected step and tripped and
fell. As he did so pools and islands amidst the darkness about him leapt
to vivid light again, the uproar surged louder and the glare of the
fifth white star shone through the vast fenestrations of the theatre
walls.

He rolled over among some seats, heard a shouting and the whirring
rattle of weapons, struggled up and was knocked back again, perceived
that a number of black-badged men were all about him firing at the
rebels below, leaping from seat to seat, crouching among the seats
to reload. Instinctively he crouched amidst the seats, as stray shots
ripped the pneumatic cushions and cut bright slashes on their soft metal
frames. Instinctively he marked the direction of the gangways, the most
plausible way of escape for him so soon as the veil of darkness fell
again.

A young man in faded blue garments came vaulting over the seats.
“Hullo!” he said, with his flying feet within six inches of the
crouching Sleeper’s face.

He stared without any sign of recognition, turned to fire, fired, and,
shouting, “To hell with the Council!” was about to fire again. Then it
seemed to Graham that the half of this man’s neck had vanished. A
drop of moisture fell on Graham’s cheek. The green weapon stopped
half raised. For a moment the man stood still with his face suddenly
expressionless, then he began to slant forward. His knees bent. Man and
darkness fell together. At the sound of his fall Graham rose up and ran
for his life until a step down to the gangway tripped him. He scrambled
to his feet, turned up the gangway and ran on.

When the sixth star glared he was already close to the yawning throat of
a passage. He ran on the swifter for the light, entered the passage
and turned a corner into absolute night again. He was knocked sideways,
rolled over, and recovered his feet. He found himself one of a crowd of
invisible fugitives pressing in one direction. His one thought now
was their thought also; to escape out of this fighting. He thrust and
struck, staggered, ran, was wedged tightly, lost ground and then was
clear again.

For some minutes he was running through the darkness along a winding
passage, and then he crossed some wide and open space, passed down a
long incline, and came at last down a flight of steps to a level place.
Many people were shouting, “They are coming! The guards are coming. They
are firing. Get out of the fighting. The guards are firing. It will be
safe in Seventh Way. Along here to Seventh Way!” There were women and
children in the crowd as well as men. Men called names to him. The crowd
converged on an archway, passed through a short throat and emerged on a
wider space again, lit dimly. The black figures about him spread out and
ran up what seemed in the twilight to be a gigantic series of steps. He
followed. The people dispersed to the right and left.... He perceived
that he was no longer in a crowd. He stopped near the highest step.
Before him, on that level, were groups of seats and a little kiosk. He
went up to this and, stopping in the shadow of its eaves, looked about
him panting.

Everything was vague and gray, but he recognised that these great steps
were a series of platforms of the “ways,” now motionless again. The
platform slanted up on either side, and the tall buildings rose beyond,
vast dim ghosts, their inscriptions and advertisements indistinctly
seen, and up through the girders and cables was a faint interrupted
ribbon of pallid sky. A number of people hurried by. From their shouts
and voices, it seemed they were hurrying to join the fighting. Other
less noisy figures flitted timidly among the shadows.

From very far away down the street he could hear the sound of a
struggle. But it was evident to him that this was not the street into
which the theatre opened. That former fight, it seemed, had suddenly
dropped out of sound and hearing. And--grotesque thought!--they were
fighting for him!

For a space he was like a man who pauses in the reading of a vivid book,
and suddenly doubts what he has been taking unquestioningly. At that
time he had little mind for details; the whole effect was a huge
astonishment. Oddly enough, while the flight from the Council prison,
the great crowd in the hall, and the attack of the red police upon the
swarming people were clearly present in his mind, it cost him an effort
to piece in his awakening and to revive the meditative interval of the
Silent Rooms. At first his memory leapt these things and took him back
to the cascade at Pentargen quivering in the wind, and all the sombre
splendours of the sunlit Cornish coast. The contrast touched everything
with unreality. And then the gap filled, and he began to comprehend his
position.

It was no longer absolutely a riddle, as it had been in the Silent
Rooms. At least he had the strange, bare outline now. He was in some way
the owner of half the world, and great political parties were fighting
to possess him. On the one hand was the White Council, with its red
police, set resolutely, it seemed, on the usurpation of his property and
perhaps his murder; on the other, the revolution that had liberated him,
with this unseen “Ostrog” as its leader. And the whole of this gigantic
city was convulsed by their struggle. Frantic development of his
world! “I do not understand,” he cried. “I do not understand!”

He had slipped out between the contending parties into this liberty of
the twilight. What would happen next? What was happening? He figured
the redclad men as busily hunting him, driving the blackbadged
revolutionists before them.

At any rate chance had given him a breathing space. He could lurk
unchallenged by the passers-by, and watch the course of things. His eye
followed up the intricate dim immensity of the twilight buildings, and
it came to him as a thing infinitely wonderful, that above there the
sun was rising, and the world was lit and glowing with the old familiar
light of day. In a little while he had recovered his breath. His
clothing had already dried upon him from the snow.

He wandered for miles along these twilight ways, speaking to no one,
accosted by no one--a dark figure among dark figures--the coveted man
out of the past, the inestimable unintentional owner of half the world.
Wherever there were lights or dense crowds, or exceptional excitement
he was afraid of recognition, and watched and turned back or went up and
down by the middle stairways, into some transverse system of ways at a
lower or higher level. And though he came on no more fighting, the
whole city stirred with battle. Once he had to run to avoid a marching
multitude of men that swept the street. Everyone abroad seemed involved.
For the most part they were men, and they carried what he judged were
weapons. It seemed as though the struggle was concentrated mainly in
the quarter of the city from which he came. Ever and again a distant
roaring, the remote suggestion of that conflict, reached his ears.
Then his caution and his curiosity struggled together. But his caution
prevailed, and he continued wandering away from the fighting--so far as
he could judge. He went unmolested, unsuspected through the dark. After
a time he ceased to hear even a remote echo of the battle, fewer and
fewer people passed him, until at last the Titanic streets became
deserted. The frontages of the buildings grew plain and harsh; he seemed
to have come to a district of vacant warehouses. Solitude crept upon
him--his pace slackened.

He became aware of a growing fatigue. At times he would turn aside
and seat himself on one of the numerous seats of the upper ways. But
a feverish restlessness, the knowledge of his vital implication in his
struggle, would not let him rest in any place for long. Was the struggle
on his behalf alone?

And then in a desolate place came the shock of an earthquake--a roaring
and thundering--a mighty wind of cold air pouring through the city,
the smash of glass, the slip and thud of falling masonry--a series of
gigantic concussions. A mass of glass and ironwork fell from the remote
roofs into the middle gallery, not a hundred yards away from him, and
in the distance were shouts and running. He, too, was startled to an
aimless activity, and ran first one way and then as aimlessly back.

A man came running towards him. His self-control returned. “What have
they blown up?” asked the man breathlessly. “That was an explosion,” and
before Graham could speak he had hurried on.

The great buildings rose dimly, veiled by a perplexing twilight, albeit
the rivulet of sky above was now bright with day. He noted many strange
features, understanding none at the time; he even spelt out many of the
inscriptions in Phonetic lettering. But what profits it to decipher a
confusion of odd-looking letters resolving itself, after painful strain
of eye and mind, into “Here is Eadhamite,” or, “Labour Bureau--Little
Side?” Grotesque thought, that in all probability some or all of these
cliff-like houses were his!

The perversity of his experience came to him vividly. In actual fact he
had made such a leap in time as romancers have imagined again and again.
And that fact realised, he had been prepared, his mind had, as it were,
seated itself for a spectacle. And no spectacle, but a great vague
danger, unsympathetic shadows and veils of darkness. Somewhere through
the labyrinthine obscurity his death sought him. Would he, after all, be
killed before he saw? It might be that even at the next shadowy corner
his destruction ambushed. A great desire to see, a great longing to
know, arose in him.

He became fearful of corners. It seemed to him that there was safety
in concealment. Where could he hide to be inconspicuous when the lights
returned? At last he sat down upon a seat in a recess on one of the
higher ways, conceiving he was alone there.

He squeezed his knuckles into his weary eyes. Suppose when he looked
again he found the dark through of parallel ways and that intolerable
altitude of edifice, gone? Suppose he were to discover the whole story
of these last few days, the awakening, the shouting multitudes, the
darkness and the fighting, a phantasmagoria, a new and more vivid sort
of dream. It must be a dream; it was so inconsecutive, so reasonless.
Why were the people fighting for him? Why should this saner world regard
him as Owner and Master?

So he thought, sitting blinded, and then he looked again, half hoping
in spite of his ears to see some familiar aspect of the life of the
nineteenth century, to see, perhaps, the little harbour of Boscastle
about him, the cliffs of Pentargen, or the bedroom of his home. But fact
takes no heed of human hopes. A squad of men with a black banner tramped
athwart the nearer shadows, intent on conflict, and beyond rose that
giddy wall of frontage, vast and dark, with the dim incomprehensible
lettering showing faintly on its face.

“It is no dream,” he said, “no dream.” And he bowed his face upon his
hands.



CHAPTER XI. THE OLD MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING

He was startled by a cough close at hand.

He turned sharply, and peering, saw a small, hunched-up figure sitting a
couple of yards off in the shadow of the enclosure.

“Have ye any news?” asked the high-pitched wheezy voice of a very old
man.

Graham hesitated. “None,” he said.

“I stay here till the lights come again,” said the old man. “These blue
scoundrels are everywhere--everywhere.”

Graham’s answer was inarticulate assent. He tried to see the old man but
the darkness hid his face. He wanted very much to respond, to talk, but
he did not know how to begin.

“Dark and damnable,” said the old man suddenly. “Dark and damnable.
Turned out of my room among all these dangers.”

“That’s hard,” ventured Graham. “That’s hard on you.”

“Darkness. An old man lost in the darkness. And all the world gone mad.
War and fighting. The police beaten and rogues abroad. Why don’t they
bring some negroes to protect us?... No more dark passages for me. I
fell over a dead man.”

“You’re safer with company,” said the old man, “if it’s company of
the right sort,” and peered frankly. He rose suddenly and came towards
Graham.

Apparently the scrutiny was satisfactory. The old man sat down as if
relieved to be no longer alone. “Eh!” he said, “but this is a terrible
time! War and fighting, and the dead lying there--men, strong men, dying
in the dark. Sons! I have three sons. God knows where they are tonight.”

The voice ceased. Then repeated quavering: “God knows where they are
tonight.”

Graham stood revolving a question that should not betray his ignorance.
Again the old man’s voice ended the pause.

“This Ostrog will win,” he said. “He will win. And what the world will
be like under him no one can tell. My sons are under the wind-vanes,
all three. One of my daughters-in-law was his mistress for a while.
His mistress! We’re not common people. Though they’ve sent me to wander
tonight and take my chance.... I knew what was going on. Before most
people. But this darkness! And to fall over a dead body suddenly in the
dark!”

His wheezy breathing could be heard.

“Ostrog!” said Graham.

“The greatest Boss the world has ever seen,” said the voice.

Graham ransacked his mind. “The Council has few friends among the
people,” he hazarded.

“Few friends. And poor ones at that. They’ve had their time. Eh! They
should have kept to the clever ones. But twice they held election. And
Ostrog. And now it has burst out and nothing can stay it, nothing can
stay it. Twice they rejected Ostrog--Ostrog the Boss. I heard of his
rages at the time--he was terrible. Heaven save them! For nothing on
earth can now, he has raised the Labour Companies upon them. No one else
would have dared. All the blue canvas armed and marching! He will go
through with it. He will go through.”

He was silent for a little while. “This Sleeper,” he said, and stopped.

“Yes,” said Graham. “Well?”

The senile voice sank to a confidential whisper, the dim, pale face came
close. “The real Sleeper--”

“Yes,” said Graham.

“Died years ago.”

“What?” said Graham, sharply.

“Years ago. Died. Years ago.”

“You don’t say so!” said Graham.

“I do. I do say so. He died. This Sleeper who’s woke up--they changed in
the night. A poor, drugged insensible creature. But I mustn’t tell all I
know. I mustn’t tell all I know.”

For a little while he muttered inaudibly. His secret was too much for
him. “I don’t know the ones that put him to sleep--that was before my
time--but I know the man who injected the stimulants and woke him again.
It was ten to one--wake or kill. Wake or kill. Ostrog’s way.”

Graham was so astonished at these things that he had to interrupt, to
make the old man repeat his words, to re-question vaguely, before he was
sure of the meaning and folly of what he heard. And his awakening had
not been natural! Was that an old man’s senile superstition, too, or
had it any truth in it? Feeling in the dark corners of his memory, he
presently came on something that might conceivably be an impression of
some such stimulating effect. It dawned upon him that he had happened
upon a lucky encounter, that at last he might learn something of the
new age. The old man wheezed a while and spat, and then the piping,
reminiscent voice resumed:

“The first time they rejected him. I’ve followed it all.”

“Rejected whom?” said Graham. “The Sleeper?”

“Sleeper? No. Ostrog. He was terrible--terrible! And he was promised
then, promised certainly the next time. Fools they were--not to be more
afraid of him. Now all the city’s his millstone, and such as we dust
ground upon it. Dust ground upon it. Until he set to work--the workers
cut each other’s throats, and murdered a Chinaman or a Labour policeman
at times, and left the rest of us in peace. Dead bodies! Robbing!
Darkness! Such a thing hasn’t been this gross of years. Eh!--but ‘tis
ill on small folks when the great fall out! It’s ill.”

“Did you say--there had not been what?--for a gross of years?”

“Eh?” said the old man.

The old man said something about clipping his words, and made him repeat
this a third time. “Fighting and slaying, and weapons in hand, and fools
bawling freedom and the like,” said the old man. “Not in all my life has
there been that. These are like the old days--for sure--when the Paris
people broke out--three gross of years ago. That’s what I mean hasn’t
been. But it’s the world’s way. It had to come back. I know. I know.
This five years Ostrog has been working, and there has been trouble and
trouble, and hunger and threats and high talk and arms. Blue canvas and
murmurs. No one safe. Everything sliding and slipping. And now here we
are! Revolt and fighting, and the Council come to its end.”

“You are rather well-informed on these things,” said Graham.

“I know what I hear. It isn’t all Babble Machine with me.”

“No,” said Graham, wondering what Babble Machine might be. “And you are
certain this Ostrog--you are certain Ostrog organised this rebellion and
arranged for the waking of the Sleeper? Just to assert himself--because
he was not elected to the Council?

“Everyone knows that, I should think,” said the old man. “Except--just
fools. He meant to be master somehow. In the Council or not. Everyone
who knows anything knows that. And here we are with dead bodies lying
in the dark! Why, where have you been if you haven’t heard all about
the trouble between Ostrog and the Verneys? And what do you think the
troubles are about? The Sleeper? Eh? You think the Sleeper’s real and
woke of his own accord--eh?”

“I’m a dull man, older than I look, and forgetful,” said Graham. “Lots
of things that have happened--especially of late years--. If I was the
Sleeper, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t know less about them.”

“Eh!” said the voice. “Old, are you? You don’t sound so very old! But
its not everyone keeps his memory to my time of life--truly. But these
notorious things! But you’re not so old as me--not nearly so old as me.
Well! I ought not to judge other men by myself, perhaps. I’m young--for
so old a man. Maybe you’re old for so young.”

“That’s it,” said Graham. “And I’ve a queer history. I know very little.
And history! Practically I know no history. The Sleeper and Julius
Caesar are all the same to me. It’s interesting to hear you talk of
these things.”

“I know a few things,” said the old man. “I know a thing or two. But--.
Hark!”

The two men became silent, listening. There was heavy thud, a concussion
that made their seat shiver. The passers-by stopped, shouted to one
another. The old man was full of questions; he shouted to a man who
passed near. Graham, emboldened by his example, got up and accosted
others. None knew what had happened.

He returned to the seat and found the old man muttering vague
interrogations in an undertone. For a while they said nothing to one
another.

The sense of this gigantic struggle, so near and yet so remote oppressed
Graham’s imagination. Was this old man right, was the report of the
people right, and were the revolutionaries winning? Or were they all in
error, and were the red guards driving all before them? At any time the
flood of warfare might pour into this silent quarter of the city and
seize upon him again. It behooved him to learn all he could while there
was time. He turned suddenly to the old man with a question and left it
unsaid. But his motion moved the old man to speech again.

“Eh! but how things work together!” said the old man. “This Sleeper that
all the fools put their trust in! I’ve the whole history of it--I was
always a good one for histories. When I was a boy--I’m that old--I
used to read printed books. You’d hardly think it. Likely you’ve seen
none--they rot and dust so--and the Sanitary Company burns them to make
ashlarite. But they were convenient in their dirty way. Oh I learnt a
lot. These new-fangled Babble Machines--they don’t seem new-fangled to
you, eh?--they’re easy to hear, easy to forget. But I’ve traced all the
Sleeper business from the first.”


“You will scarcely believe it,” said Graham slowly, “I’m so
ignorant--I’ve been so preoccupied in my own little affairs, my
circumstances have been so odd--I know nothing of this Sleeper’s
history. Who was he?”

“Eh!” said the old man. “I know. I know. He was a poor nobody, and set
on a playful woman, poor soul! And he fell into a trance. There’s the
old things they had, those brown things--silver photographs--still
showing him as he lay, a gross and a half years ago--a gross and a half
of years.”

“Set on a playful woman, poor soul,” said Graham softly to himself, and
then aloud, “Yes--well! go on.”

“You must know he had a cousin named Warming a solitary man without
children, who made a big fortune speculating in roads--the first
Eadhamite roads. But surely you’ve heard? No? Why? He bought all the
patent rights and made a big company. In those days there were grosses
of grosses of separate businesses and business companies. Grosses of
grosses! His roads killed the railroads--the old things--in two dozen
years; he bought up and Eadhamited the tracks. And because he didn’t
want to break up his great property or let in shareholders, he left it
all to the Sleeper, and put it under a Board of Trustees that he had
picked and trained. He knew then the Sleeper wouldn’t wake, that he
would go on sleeping, sleeping till he died. He knew that quite well!
And plump! a man in the United States, who had lost two sons in a boat
accident, followed that up with another great bequest. His trustees
found themselves with a dozen myriads of lions’-worth or more of
property at the very beginning.”

“What was his name?”

“Graham.”

“No, I mean--that American’s.”

“Isbister.”

“Isbister!” cried Graham. “Why, I don’t even know the name.”

“Of course not,” said the old man. “Of course not. People don’t learn
much in the schools nowadays. But I know all about him. He was a rich
American who went from England, and he left the Sleeper even more than
Warming. How he made it? That I don’t know. Something about pictures by
machinery. But he made it and left it, and so the Council had its start.
It was just a council of trustees at first.”

“And how did it grow?”

“Eh!--but you’re not up to things. Money attracts money--and twelve
brains are better than one. They played it cleverly. They worked
politics with money, and kept on adding to the money by working currency
and tariffs. They grew--they grew. And for years the twelve trustees
hid the growing of the Sleeper’s estate, under double names and company
titles and all that. The Council spread by title deed, mortgage, share,
every political party, every newspaper, they bought. If you listen to
the old stories you will see the Council growing and growing. Billions
and billions of lions at last--the Sleeper’s estate. And all growing
out of a whim--out of this Warming’s will, and an accident to Isbister’s
sons.

“Men are strange,” said the old man. “The strange, thing to me is how
the Council worked together so long. As many as twelve. But they worked
in cliques from the first. And they’ve slipped back. In my young days
speaking of the Council was like an ignorant man speaking of God. We
didn’t think they could do wrong. We didn’t know of their women and all
that! Or else I’ve got wiser.

“Men are strange,” said the old man. “Here are you, young and
ignorant, and me--sevendy years old, and I might reasonably be
forgetting--explaining it all to you short and clear.

“Sevendy,” he said, “sevendy, and I hear and see--hear better than I
see. And reason clearly, and keep myself up to all the happenings of
things. Sevendy!

“Life is strange. I was twaindy before Ostrog was a baby. I remember him
long before he’d pushed his way to the head of the Wind Vanes Control.
I’ve seen many changes. Eh! I’ve worn the blue. And at last I’ve come to
see this crush and darkness and tumult and dead men carried by in heaps
on the ways. And all his doing! All his doing!”

His voice died away in scarcely articulate praises of Ostrog.

Graham thought. “Let me see,” he said, “if I have it right.”

He extended a hand and ticked off points upon his fingers. “The Sleeper
has been asleep--”

“Changed,” said the old man.

“Perhaps. And meanwhile the Sleeper’s property grew in the hands of
Twelve Trustees, until it swallowed up nearly all the great ownership of
the world. The Twelve Trustees--by virtue of this property have become
virtually masters of the world. Because they are the paying power--just
as the old English Parliament used to be--”

“Eh!” said the old man. “That’s so--that’s a good comparison. You’re not
so--”

“And now this Ostrog--has suddenly revolutionised the world by waking
the Sleeper--whom no one but the superstitious, common people had ever
dreamt would wake again--raising the Sleeper to claim his property from
the Council, after all these years.”

The old man endorsed this statement with a cough. “It’s strange,”
 he said, “to meet a man who learns these things for the first time
tonight.”

“Aye,” said Graham, “it’s strange.”

“Have you been in a Pleasure City?” said the old man. “All my life I’ve
longed--” He laughed. “Even now,” he said, “I could enjoy a little
fun. Enjoy seeing things, anyhow.” He mumbled a sentence Graham did not
understand.

“The Sleeper--when did he awake?” said Graham suddenly.

“Three days ago.”

“Where is he?”

“Ostrog has him. He escaped from the Council not four hours ago. My
dear sir, where were you at the time? He was in the hall of the
markets--where the fighting has been. All the city was screaming about
it. All the Babble Machines! Everywhere it was shouted. Even the fools
who speak for the Council were admitting it. Everyone was rushing off to
see him--everyone was getting arms. Were you drunk or asleep? And even
then! But you’re joking! Surely you’re pretending. It was to stop the
shouting of the Babble Machines and prevent the people gathering that
they turned off the electricity--and put this damned darkness upon us.
Do you mean to say--?”

“I had heard the Sleeper was rescued,” said Graham. “But--to come back a
minute. Are you sure Ostrog has him?”

“He won’t let him go,” said the old man.

“And the Sleeper. Are you sure he is not genuine? I have never heard--”

“So all the fools think. So they think. As if there wasn’t a thousand
things that were never heard. I know Ostrog too well for that. Did
I tell you? In a way I’m a sort of relation of Ostrog’s. A sort of
relation. Through my daughter-in-law.”


“I suppose--”

“Well?”

“I suppose there’s no chance of this Sleeper asserting himself. I
suppose he’s certain to be a puppet--in Ostrog’s hands or the Council’s,
as soon as the struggle is over.”

“In Ostrog’s hands--certainly. Why shouldn’t he be a puppet? Look at his
position. Everything done for him, every pleasure possible. Why should
he want to assert himself?”

“What are these Pleasure Cities?” said Graham, abruptly.

The old man made him repeat the question. When at last he was assured
of Graham’s words, he nudged him violently. “That’s too much,” said he.
“You’re poking fun at an old man. I’ve been suspecting you know more
than you pretend.”

“Perhaps I do,” said Graham. “But no! why should I go on acting? No, I
do not know what a Pleasure City is.”

The old man laughed in an intimate way.

“What is more, I do not know how to read your letters, I do not know
what money you use, I do not know what foreign countries there are. I
do not know where I am. I cannot count. I do not know where to get food,
nor drink, nor shelter.”

“Come, come,” said the old man, “if you had a glass of drink, now, would
you put it in your ear or your eye?”

“I want you to tell me all these things.”

“He, he! Well, gentlemen who dress in silk must have their fun.” A
withered hand caressed Graham’s arm for a moment. “Silk. Well, well!
But, all the same, I wish I was the man who was put up as the Sleeper.
He’ll have a fine time of it. All the pomp and pleasure. He’s a queer
looking face. When they used to let anyone go to see him, I’ve got
tickets and been. The image of the real one, as the photographs show
him, this substitute used to be. Yellow. But he’ll get fed up. It’s a
queer world. Think of the luck of it. The luck of it. I expect he’ll be
sent to Capri. It’s the best fun for a greener.”

His cough overtook him again. Then he began mumbling enviously of
pleasures and strange delights. “The luck of it, the luck of it! All my
life I’ve been in London, hoping to get my chance.”

“But you don’t know that the Sleeper died,” said Graham, suddenly.

The old man made him repeat his words.

“Men don’t live beyond ten dozen. It’s not in the order of things,” said
the old man. “I’m not a fool. Fools may believe it, but not me.”

Graham became angry with the old man’s assurance. “Whether you are a
fool or not,” he said, “it happens you are wrong about the Sleeper.”

“Eh?”

“You are wrong about the Sleeper. I haven’t told you before, but I will
tell you now. You are wrong about the Sleeper.”

“How do you know? I thought you didn’t know anything--not even about
Pleasure Cities.”

Graham paused.

“You don’t know,” said the old man. “How are you to know? It’s very few
men--”

“I _am_ the Sleeper.”

He had to repeat it.

There was a brief pause. “There’s a silly thing to say, sir, if you’ll
excuse me. It might get you into trouble in a time like this,” said the
old man. Graham, slightly dashed, repeated his assertion.

“I was saying I was the Sleeper. That years and years ago I did, indeed,
fall asleep, in a little stonebuilt village, in the days when there were
hedgerows, and villages, and inns, and all the countryside cut up into
little pieces, little fields. Have you never heard of those days? And it
is I--I who speak to you--who awakened again these four days since.”

“Four days since!--the Sleeper! But they’ve got the Sleeper. They have
him and they won’t let him go. Nonsense! You’ve been talking sensibly
enough up to now. I can see it as though I was there. There will be
Lincoln like a keeper just behind him; they won’t let him go about
alone. Trust them. You’re a queer fellow. One of these fun pokers. I see
now why you have been clipping your words so oddly, but--”

He stopped abruptly, and Graham could see his gesture.

“As if Ostrog would let the Sleeper run about alone! No, you’re telling
that to the wrong man altogether. Eh! as if I should believe. What’s
your game? And besides, we’ve been talking of the Sleeper.”

Graham stood up. “Listen,” he said. “I am the Sleeper.”

“You’re an odd man,” said the old man, “to sit here in the dark, talking
clipped, and telling a lie of that sort. But--”

Graham’s exasperation fell to laughter. “It is preposterous,” he cried.
“Preposterous. The dream must end. It gets wilder and wilder. Here am
I--in this damned twilight--I never knew a dream in twilight before--an
anachronism by two hundred years and trying to persuade an old fool that
I am myself, and meanwhile--Ugh!”

He moved in gusty irritation and went striding. In a moment the old man
was pursuing him. “Eh! but don’t go!” cried the old man. “I’m an old
fool, I know. Don’t go. Don’t leave me in all this darkness.”

Graham hesitated, stopped. Suddenly the folly of telling his secret
flashed into his mind.

“I didn’t mean to offend you--disbelieving you,” said the old man coming
near. “It’s no manner of harm. Call yourself the Sleeper if it pleases
you. ‘Tis a foolish trick.”

Graham hesitated, turned abruptly and went on his way.

For a time he heard the old man’s hobbling pursuit and his wheezy cries
receding. But at last the darkness swallowed him, and Graham saw him no
more.



CHAPTER XII. OSTROG

Graham could now take a clearer view of his position. For a long time
yet he wandered, but after the talk of the old man his discovery of this
Ostrog was clear in his mind as the final inevitable decision. One
thing was evident, those who were at the headquarters of the revolt had
succeeded very admirably in suppressing the fact of his disappearance.
But every moment he expected to hear the report of his death or of his
recapture by the Council.

Presently a man stopped before him. “Have you heard?” he said.

“No!” said Graham starting.

“Near a dozand,” said the man, “a dozand men!” and hurried on.

A number of men and a girl passed in the darkness, gesticulating and
shouting: “Capitulated! Given up!” “A dozand of men.” “Two dozand of
men.” “Ostrog, Hurrah! Ostrog, Hurrah!” These cries receded, became
indistinct.

Other shouting men followed. For a time his attention was absorbed
in the fragments of speech he heard. He had a doubt whether all were
speaking English. Scraps floated to him, scraps like Pigeon English,
like ‘nigger’ dialect, blurred and mangled distortions. He dared
accost no one with questions. The impression the people gave him jarred
altogether with his preconceptions of the struggle and confirmed the
old man’s faith in Ostrog. It was only slowly he could bring himself
to believe that all these people were rejoicing at the defeat of the
Council, that the Council which had pursued him with such power and
vigour was after all the weaker of the two sides in conflict. And if
that was so, how did it affect him? Several times he hesitated on the
verge of fundamental questions. Once he turned and walked for a long
way after a little man of rotund inviting outline, but he was unable to
master confidence to address him.

It was only slowly that it came to him that he might ask for the
“wind-vane offices,” whatever the “wind-vane offices” might be.
His first enquiry simply resulted in a direction to go on towards
Westminster. His second led to the discovery of a short cut in which
he was speedily lost. He was told to leave the ways to which he had
hitherto confined himself knowing no other means of transit--and
to plunge down one of the middle staircases into the blackness of a
crossway. Thereupon came some trivial adventures; chief of these an
ambiguous encounter with a gruff-voiced invisible creature speaking in
a strange dialect that seemed at first a strange tongue, a thick flow of
speech with the drifting corpses of English words therein, the dialect
of the latter-day vile. Then another voice drew near, a girl’s voice
singing, “tralala tralala.” She spoke to Graham, her English touched
with something of the same quality. She professed to have lost her
sister, she blundered needlessly into him he thought, caught hold of him
and laughed. But a word of vague remonstrance sent her into the unseen
again.

The sounds about him increased. Stumbling people passed him, speaking
excitedly. “They have surrendered!” “The Council! Surely not the
Council!” “They are saying so in the Ways.” The passage seemed wider.
Suddenly the wall fell away. He was in a great space and people were
stirring remotely. He inquired his way of an indistinct figure. “Strike
straight across,” said a woman’s voice. He left his guiding wall, and in
a moment had stumbled against a little table on which were utensils of
glass. Graham’s eyes, now attuned to darkness, made out a long vista
with pallid tables on either side. He went down this. At one or two of
the tables he heard a clang of glass and a sound of eating. There were
people then cool enough to dine, or daring enough to steal a meal
in spite of social convulsion and darkness. Far off and high up he
presently saw a pallid light of a semi-circular shape. As he approached
this, a black edge came up and hid it. He stumbled at steps and found
himself in a gallery. He heard a sobbing, and found two scared little
girls crouched by a railing. These children became silent at the near
sound of feet. He tried to console them, but they were very still until
he left them. Then as he receded he could hear them sobbing again.

Presently he found himself at the foot of a staircase and near a wide
opening. He saw a dim twilight above this and ascended out of the
blackness into a street of moving Ways again. Along this a disorderly
swarm of people marched shouting. They were singing snatches of the song
of the revolt, most of them out of tune. Here and there torches flared
creating brief hysterical shadows. He asked his way and was twice
puzzled by that same thick dialect. His third attempt won an answer
he could understand. He was two miles from the wind-vane offices in
Westminster, but the way was easy to follow.

When at last he did approach the district of the wind-vane offices it
seemed to him, from the cheering processions that came marching along
the Ways, from the tumult of rejoicing, and finally from the restoration
of the lighting of the city, that the overthrow of the Council must
already be accomplished. And still no news of his absence came to his
ears.

The re-illumination of the city came with startling abruptness. Suddenly
he stood blinking, all about him men halted dazzled, and the world was
incandescent. The light found him already upon the outskirts of the
excited crowds that choked the Ways near the wind-vane offices, and the
sense of visibility and exposure that came with it turned his colourless
intention of joining Ostrog to a keen anxiety.

For a time he was jostled, obstructed, and endangered by men hoarse and
weary with cheering his name, some of them bandaged and bloody in his
cause. The frontage of the wind-vane offices was illuminated by some
moving picture, but what it was he could not see, because in spite
of his strenuous attempts the density of the crowd prevented his
approaching it. From the fragments of speech he caught, he judged it
conveyed news of the fighting about the Council House. Ignorance and
indecision made him slow and ineffective in his movements. For a time he
could not conceive how he was to get within the unbroken facade of this
place. He made his way slowly into the midst of this mass of people,
until he realised that the descending staircase of the central Way led
to the interior of the buildings. This gave him a goal, but the crowding
in the central path was so dense that it was long before he could reach
it. And even then he encountered intricate obstruction, and had an hour
of vivid argument first in this guard room and then in that before he
could get a note taken to the one man of all men who was most eager
to see him. His story was laughed to scorn at one place, and wiser for
that, when at last he reached a second stairway he professed simply to
have news of extraordinary importance for Ostrog. What it was he would
not say. They sent his note reluctantly. For a long time he waited in
a little room at the foot of the lift shaft, and thither at last came
Lincoln, eager, apologetic, astonished. He stopped in the doorway
scrutinising Graham, then rushed forward effusively.

“Yes,” he cried. “It is you. And you are not dead!”

Graham made a brief explanation.

“My brother is waiting,” explained Lincoln. “He is alone in the
wind-vane offices. We feared you had been killed in the theatre. He
doubted--and things are very urgent still in spite of what we are
telling them _there_--or he would have come to you.”

They ascended a lift, passed along a narrow passage, crossed a
great hall, empty save for two hurrying messengers, and entered a
comparatively little room, whose only furniture was a long settee and a
large oval disc of cloudy, shifting grey, hung by cables from the wall.
There Lincoln left Graham for a space, and he remained alone without
understanding the shifting smoky shapes that drove slowly across this
disc.

His attention was arrested by a sound that began abruptly. It was
cheering, the frantic cheering of a vast but very remote crowd, a
roaring exultation. This ended as sharply as it had begun, like a sound
heard between the opening and shutting of a door. In the outer room was
a noise of hurrying steps and a melodious clinking as if a loose chain
was running over the teeth of a wheel.

Then he heard the voice of a woman, the rustle of unseen garments. “It
is Ostrog!” he heard her say. A little bell rang fitfully, and then
everything was still again.

Presently came voices, footsteps and movement without. The footsteps
of some one person detached itself from the other sounds and drew
near, firm, evenly measured steps. The curtain lifted slowly. A tall,
white-haired man, clad in garments of cream coloured silk, appeared,
regarding Graham from under his raised arm.

For a moment the white form remained holding the curtain, then dropped
it and stood before it. Graham’s first impression was of a very broad
forehead, very pale blue eyes deep sunken under white brows, an aquiline
nose, and a heavily-lined resolute mouth. The folds of flesh over the
eyes, the drooping of the corners of the mouth contradicted the
upright bearing, and said the man was old. Graham rose to his feet
instinctively, and for a moment the two men stood in silence, regarding
each other.

“You are Ostrog?” said Graham.

“I am Ostrog.”

“The Boss?”

“So I am called.”

Graham felt the inconvenience of the silence. “I have to thank you
chiefly, I understand, for my safety,” he said presently.

“We were afraid you were killed,” said Ostrog.

“Or sent to sleep again--for ever. We have been doing everything to keep
our secret--the secret of your disappearance. Where have you been? How
did you get here?”

Graham told him briefly.

Ostrog listened in silence.

He smiled faintly. “Do you know what I was doing when they came to tell
me you had come?”

“How can I guess?”

“Preparing your double.”

“My double?”

“A man as like you as we could find. We were going to hypnotise him, to
save him the difficulty of acting. It was imperative. The whole of this
revolt depends on the idea that you are awake, alive, and with us. Even
now a great multitude of people has gathered in the theatre clamouring
to see you. They do not trust... You know, of course--something of your
position?”

“Very little,” said Graham.

“It is like this.” Ostrog walked a pace or two into the room and turned.
“You are absolute owner,” he said, “of more than half the world. As a
result of that you are practically King. Your powers are limited in
many intricate ways, but you are the figure head, the popular symbol of
government. This White Council, the Council of Trustees as it is called.”

“I have heard the vague outline of these things.”

“I wondered.”

“I came upon a garrulous old man.”

“I see... Our masses--the word comes from your days--you know of course,
that we still have masses--regard you as our actual ruler. Just as a
great number of people in your days regarded the Crown as the ruler.
They are discontented--the masses all over the earth--with the rule
of your Trustees. For the most part it is the old discontent, the old
quarrel of the common man with his commonness--the misery of work and
discipline and unfitness. But your Trustees have ruled ill. In certain
matters, in the administration of the Labour Companies, for example,
they have been unwise. They have given endless opportunities. Already we
of the popular party were agitating for reforms--when your waking came.
Came! If it had been contrived it could not have come more opportunity.”
 He smiled. “The public mind, making no allowance for your years of
quiescence, had already hit on the thought of waking you and appealing
to you, and--Flash!”

He indicated the outbreak by a gesture, and Graham moved his head to
show that he understood.

“The Council muddled--quarreled. They always do. They could not decide
what to do with you. You know how they imprisoned you?”

“I see. I see. And now--we win?”

“We win. Indeed we win. Tonight, in five swift hours. Suddenly we struck
everywhere. The windvane people, the Labour Company and its millions,
burst the bonds. We got the pull of the aeropiles.”

He paused. “Yes,” said Graham, guessing that aeropile meant flying
machine.

“That was, of course, essential. Or they could have got away. All the
city rose, every third man almost was in it! All the blue, all the
public services, save only just a few aeronauts and about half the red
police. You were rescued, and their own police of the Ways--not half of
them could be massed at the Council House--have been broken up, disarmed
or killed. All London is ours--now. Only the Council House remains.

“Half of those who remain to them of the red police were lost in that
foolish attempt to recapture you. They lost their heads when they lost
you. They flung all they had at the theatre. We cut them off from
the Council House there. Truly tonight has been a night of victory.
Everywhere your star has blazed. A day ago--the White Council ruled as
it has ruled for a gross of years, for a century and a half of years,
and then, with only a little whispering, a covert arming here and there,
suddenly--So!”

“I am very ignorant,” said Graham. “I suppose--. I do not clearly
understand the conditions of this fighting. If you could explain. Where
is the Council? Where is the fight?”

Ostrog stepped across the room, something clicked, and suddenly,
save for an oval glow, they were in darkness. For a moment Graham was
puzzled.

Then he saw that the cloudy grey disc had taken depth and colour, had
assumed the appearance of an oval window looking out upon a strange
unfamiliar scene.

At the first glance he was unable to guess what this scene might be.
It was a daylight scene, the daylight of a wintry day, grey and clear.
Across the picture and halfway as it seemed between him and the remoter
view, a stout cable of twisted white wire stretched vertically. Then he
perceived that the rows of great windwheels he saw, the wide intervals,
the occasional gulfs of darkness, were akin to those through which he
had fled from the Council House. He distinguished an orderly file of red
figures marching across an open space between files of men in black,
and realised before Ostrog spoke that he was looking down on the upper
surface of latter-day London. The overnight snows had gone. He judged
that this mirror was some modern replacement of the camera obscura, but
that matter was not explained to him. He saw that though the file of red
figures was trotting from left to right, yet they were passing out of
the picture to the left. He wondered momentarily, and then saw that the
picture was passing slowly, panorama fashion, across the oval.

“In a moment you will see the fighting,” said Ostrog at his elbow.
“Those fellows in red you notice are prisoners. This is the roof space
of London--all the ho

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/775