When the Sleeper wakes

by Herbert George Wells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Nineteenth century,” corrected Graham.

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

  “Am I a fool?”

  “Certainly not.”

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

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

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

  Howard pulled his lip.

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

  “That note of suspicion — “ said Howard.

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

  “Live!”

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

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

  He paused meaningly.

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

  “Ah! Now! We have treated you neglectfully.”

  “The crowds in yonder streets of yours.”

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

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

  “What do you mean by company?”

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

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

  Graham stopped dead.

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

  He indicated the exterior world.

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

  “No!” he shouted.

  He began striding rapidly up and down the room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER VIII. THE ROOF SPACES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  For several seconds neither he nor Graham spoke.

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

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

  “I come from Ostrog, Sire.”

  “Ostrog?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes, Sire. If you will.”

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

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “What am I to do?” said Graham.

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

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

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