by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER II
THE TRANCE
The state of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted foran unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the flaccidstate, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it was hiseyes could be closed.
He was removed from the hotel to the Boscastle surgery, and from thesurgery, after some weeks, to London. But he still resisted every attemptat reanimation. After a time, for reasons that will appear later, theseattempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in that strangecondition, inert and still--neither dead nor living but, as it were,suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence. His was adarkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a dreamlessinanition, a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had swelled andrisen to an abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man? Where is any manwhen insensibility takes hold of him?
"It seems only yesterday," said Isbister. "I remember it all as though ithappened yesterday--clearer, perhaps, than if it had happened yesterday."
It was the Isbister of the last chapter, but he was no longer a youngman. The hair that had been brown and a trifle in excess of thefashionable length, was iron grey and clipped close, and the face thathad been pink and white was buff and ruddy. He had a pointed beard shotwith 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 Londonsolicitor and next of kin to Graham, the man who had fallen into thetrance. And the two men stood side by side in a room in a house in Londonregarding his recumbent figure.
It was a yellow figure lying lax upon a water-bed and clad in a flowingshirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean limbs andlank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This glass seemed tomark off the sleeper from the reality of life about him, he was a thingapart, a strange, isolated abnormality. The two men stood close to theglass, peering in.
"The thing gave me a shock," said Isbister. "I feel a queer sort ofsurprise even now when I think of his white eyes. They were white, youknow, 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 tooserious a thing for much holiday keeping. I've been in America most ofthe 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 andwhite, 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 seethem there."
"Last as long as the cliffs, if necessary," exclaimed Isbister withsatisfaction. "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 wouldglorify the whole blessed coast of England, from Land's End round againto 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 seeingyou, if I recollect aright."
"You came back by the trap that took me to Camelford railway station. Itwas close on the Jubilee, Victoria's Jubilee, because I remember theseats 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 atWookey--a boy. I missed all that.... What a fuss we had with him! Mylandlady wouldn't take him in, wouldn't let him stay--he looked so queerwhen he was rigid. We had to carry him in a chair up to the hotel. Andthe Boscastle doctor--it wasn't the present chap, but the G.P. beforehim--was at him until nearly two, with me and the landlord holding lightsand so forth."
"Do you mean--he was stiff and hard?"
"Stiff!--wherever you bent him he stuck. You might have stood him on hishead and he'd have stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of coursethis"--he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his head--"isquite 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 feelall--ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those beastly littlethings, 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 wereshivering, and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and_him_--stark and squirming in the most unnatural ways. Well, it mademe 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 andmarked 'engaged.' No feeling, no digestion, no beating of the heart--nota flutter. _That_ doesn't make me feel as if there was a man present. Ina sense it's more dead than death, for these doctors tell me that eventhe hair has stopped growing. Now with the proper dead, the hair will goon growing--"
"I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.
They peered through the glass again. Graham was indeed in a strangestate, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented inmedical history. Trances had lasted for as much as a year before--but atthe end of that time it had ever been a waking or a death; sometimesfirst one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicianshad made in injecting nourishment, for that had been resorted to topostpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been tryingnot to see them.
"And while he has been lying here," said Isbister, with the zest of alife freely spent, "I have changed my plans in life; married, raised afamily, my eldest lad--I hadn't begun to think of sons then--is anAmerican citizen, and looking forward to leaving Harvard. There's a touchof 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 whenI 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 somemoderate property of his own?"
"That is so," said Warming. He coughed primly. "As it happens--I havecharge of it."
"Ah!" Isbister thought, hesitated and spoke: "No doubt--his keep here isnot expensive--no doubt it will have improved--accumulated?"
"It has. He will wake up very much better off--if he wakes--than whenhe slept."
"As a business man," said Isbister, "that thought has naturally been inmy mind. I have, indeed, sometimes thought that, speaking commercially,of course, this sleep may be a very good thing for him. That he knowswhat he is about, so to speak, in being insensible so long. If he hadlived straight on--"
"I doubt if he would have premeditated as much," said Warming. "He wasnot a far-sighted man. In fact--"
"Yes?"
"We differed on that point. I stood to him somewhat in the relation of aguardian. You have probably seen enough of affairs to recognise thatoccasionally a certain friction--. But even if that was the case, thereis a doubt whether he will ever wake. This sleep exhausts slowly, but itexhausts. 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 changethese twenty years. It's Rip Van Winkle come real."
"There has been a lot of change certainly," said Warming. "And, amongother changes, I have changed. I am an old man."
Isbister hesitated, and then feigned a belated surprise. "I shouldn'thave thought it."
"I was forty-three when
his bankers--you remember you wired to hisbankers--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 unavoidablecuriosity. "He may go on for years yet," he said, and had a moment ofhesitation. "We have to consider that. His affairs, you know, may fallsome day into the hands of--someone else, you know."
"That, if you will believe me, Mr. Isbister, is one of the problems mostconstantly before my mind. We happen to be--as a matter of fact, thereare no very trustworthy connexions of ours. It is a grotesque andunprecedented position."
"Rather," said Isbister.
"It seems to me it's a case of some public body, some practicallyundying guardian. If he really is going on living--as the doctors, someof them, think. As a matter of fact, I have gone to one or two public menabout it. But, so far, nothing has been done."
"It wouldn't be a bad idea to hand him over to some public body--theBritish Museum Trustees, or the Royal College of Physicians. Sounds a bitodd, 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 compoundinterest has a way of mounting up."
"It has," said Warming. "And now the gold supplies are running shortthere is a tendency towards ... appreciation."
"I've felt that," said Isbister with a grimace. "But it makes it betterfor _him_."
"_If_ he wakes."
"If he wakes," echoed Isbister. "Do you notice the pinched-in look of hisnose, and the way in which his eyelids sink?"
Warming looked and thought for a space. "I doubt if he will wake," hesaid at last.
"I never properly understood," said Isbister, "what it was brought thison. He told me something about overstudy. I've often been curious."
"He was a man of considerable gifts, but spasmodic, emotional. Hehad grave domestic troubles, divorced his wife, in fact, and it wasas a relief from that, I think, that he took up politics of therabid sort. He was a fanatical Radical--a Socialist--or typicalLiberal, as they used to call themselves, of the advanced school.Energetic--flighty--undisciplined. Overwork upon a controversy did thisfor him. I remember the pamphlet he wrote--a curious production. Wild,whirling stuff. There were one or two prophecies. Some of them arealready exploded, some of them are established facts. But for the mostpart to read such a thesis is to realise how full the world is ofunanticipated things. He will have much to learn, much to unlearn, whenhe wakes. If ever a waking comes."
"I'd give anything to be there," said Isbister, "just to hear what hewould say to it all."
"So would I," said Warming. "Aye! so would I," with an old man's suddenturn 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."