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THE SLEEPER AWAKES
A Revised Edition of “When the Sleeper Wakes”
H.G. WELLS
1899
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
_When the Sleeper Wakes_, whose title I have now altered to _The Sleeper Awakes_, was first published as a book in 1899 after a serial appearance in the _Graphic_ and one or two American and colonial periodicals. It is one of the most ambitious and least satisfactory of my books, and I have taken the opportunity afforded by this reprinting to make a number of excisions and alterations. Like most of my earlier work, it was written under considerable pressure; there are marks of haste not only in the writing of the latter part, but in the very construction of the story. Except for certain streaks of a slovenliness which seems to be an almost unavoidable defect in me, there is little to be ashamed of in the writing of the opening portion; but it will be fairly manifest to the critic that instead of being put aside and thought over through a leisurely interlude, the ill-conceived latter part was pushed to its end. I was at that time overworked, and badly in need of a holiday. In addition to various necessary journalistic tasks, I had in hand another book, _Love and Mr. Lewisham_, which had taken a very much stronger hold upon my affections than this present story. My circumstances demanded that one or other should be finished before I took any rest, and so I wound up the Sleeper sufficiently to make it a marketable work, hoping to be able to revise it before the book printers at any rate got hold of it. But fortune was against me. I came back to England from Italy only to fall dangerously ill, and I still remember the impotent rage and strain of my attempt to put some sort of finish to my story of Mr. Lewisham, with my temperature at a hundred and two. I couldn’t endure the thought of leaving that book a fragment. I did afterwards contrive to save it from the consequences of that febrile spurt–_Love and Mr. Lewisham_ is indeed one of my most carefully balanced books–but the Sleeper escaped me.
It is twelve years now since the Sleeper was written, and that young man of thirty-one is already too remote for me to attempt any very drastic reconstruction of his work. I have played now merely the part of an editorial elder brother: cut out relentlessly a number of long tiresome passages that showed all too plainly the fagged, toiling brain, the heavy sluggish _driven_ pen, and straightened out certain indecisions at the end. Except for that, I have done no more than hack here and there at clumsy phrases and repetitions. The worst thing in the earlier version, and the thing that rankled most in my mind, was the treatment of the relations of Helen Wotton and Graham. Haste in art is almost always vulgarisation, and I slipped into the obvious vulgarity of making what the newspaper syndicates call a “love interest” out of Helen. There was even a clumsy intimation that instead of going up in the flying-machine to fight, Graham might have given in to Ostrog, and married Helen. I have now removed the suggestion of these uncanny connubialities. Not the slightest intimation of any sexual interest could in truth have arisen between these two. They loved and kissed one another, but as a girl and her heroic grandfather might love, and in a crisis kiss. I have found it possible, without any very serious disarrangement, to clear all that objectionable stuff out of the story, and so a little ease my conscience on the score of this ungainly lapse. I have also, with a few strokes of the pen, eliminated certain dishonest and regrettable suggestions that the People beat Ostrog. My Graham dies, as all his kind must die, with no certainty of either victory or defeat.
Who will win–Ostrog or the People? A thousand years hence that will still be just the open question we leave to-day.
H.G. WELLS.
CONTENTS
I. INSOMNIA
II. THE TRANCE
III. THE AWAKENING
IV. THE SOUND OF A TUMULT
V. THE MOVING WAYS
VI. THE HALL OF THE ATLAS
VII. IN THE SILENT ROOMS
VIII. THE ROOF SPACES
IX. THE PEOPLE MARCH
X. THE BATTLE OF THE DARKNESS
XI. THE OLD MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING
XII. OSTROG
XIII. THE END OF THE OLD ORDER
XIV. FROM THE CROW’S NEST
XV. PROMINENT PEOPLE
XVI. THE MONOPLANE
XVII. THREE DAYS
XVIII. GRAHAM REMEMBERS
XIX. OSTROG’S POINT OF VIEW
XX. IN THE CITY WAYS
XXI. THE UNDER-SIDE
XXII. THE STRUGGLE IN THE COUNCIL HOUSE
XXIII. GRAHAM SPEAKS HIS WORD
XXIV. WHILE THE AEROPLANES WERE COMING
XXV. THE COMING OF THE AEROPLANES
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
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, 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. “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. The first need of this exhausted being was companionship. He flung himself down on the steeply sloping turf beside the motionless seated figure, and threw out a skirmishing line of gossip.
His hearer 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 objection to this benevolent intrusion upon his despair.
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 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 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 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 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 ideas of a 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 looked 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 one must give him a chance.” He struck a match in the virile way, and proceeded to light his pipe.
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, 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 afraid. He took the man by the shoulder and shook him. “Are you asleep?” he said, with his voice jumping, and again, “Are you asleep?”
A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was dead. He 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.”
He returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the shoulder, shook it, shouted. The room was flooded with yellow glare as his landlady entered with the light. His face was white as he turned blinking towards her. “I must fetch a doctor,” 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 mediocrity, 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.”
“Do you mean–he was stiff and hard?”
“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 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–“
“Coils.”
“Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about. There were 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 a waking or a death; sometimes first one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had made in injecting nourishment, for that 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 boy. 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–I 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.”
“There has been a lot of change certainly,” said Warming. “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 connexions of ours. It is a grotesque and unprecedented position.”
“Rather,” said Isbister.
“It seems to me it’s a case of 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-in 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 awake,” he said at last. He sighed. “He will never awake 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 subconscious 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 that 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 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 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 one, 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 glass like 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 where? 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 these 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 the 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 them 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 south-west 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, Church and State. High and low, rich and poor, one with another … Is there England still?”
“That’s a comfort! Is there London?”
“This _is_ London, eh? And you are my assistant-custodian; assistant-custodian. And these–? Eh? Assistant-custodians too!”
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. 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 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 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. 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 newcomer 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 they can be procured. 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 anemic 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 crop-headed 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 ringer, 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 garment of bluish white, and 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 wild-eyed 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, 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 great 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 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 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 motionless. 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. Someone 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. 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, 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 bridges.
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 foreshortened, 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 openwork 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 below, and then his eyes went back to the tumultuous struggle.
Along one of the faster 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 vanes 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 seen thus far, this second hall appeared to be decorated with extreme richness. On a pedestal at the remoter 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 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 slantingways 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, it 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 pleasing 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 councillors 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 vanes 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 vanes 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.
“Thi 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