The complete works, p.79
The Complete Works, page 79
aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships in the harbour, the evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of monkshood and delphinium stood erect and motionless against the shadow of the hillside. Something
flashed into Isbister's mind; he started, and leaning over the table, listened. An unpleasant suspicion
grew stronger; became conviction. Astonishment
seized him and became--dread!
No sound of breathing came from the seated figure!
He crept slowly and noiselessly round the table,
pausing twice to listen. At last he could lay his hand on the back of the armchair. He bent down until the
two heads were ear to ear.
Then he bent still lower to look up at his visitor's face. He started violently and uttered an exclamation.
The eyes were void spaces of white.
He looked again and saw that they were open and
with the pupils rolled under the lids. He was
suddenly afraid. Overcome by the strangeness of the
man's condition, he took him by the shoulder and
shook him. "Are you asleep?" he said, with his voice jumping into alto, and again, "Are you asleep?"
A conviction took possession of his mind that this
man was dead. He suddenly became active and
noisy, strode across the room, blundering against the table as he did so, and rang the bell.
"Please bring a light at once," he said in the passage.
"There is something wrong with my friend."
Then he returned to the motionless seated figure,
grasped the shoulder, shook it, and shouted. The
room was flooded with yellow glare as his astonished landlady entered with the light. His face was white
as he turned blinking towards her. "I must fetch a doctor at once," he said. "It is either death or a fit. Is there a doctor in the village? Where is a
doctor to be found? "
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 Iying lax upon a water-bed
and clad in a flowing shirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean limbs and lank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This glass seemed to mark off the sleeper from the reality of life about him, he was a thing apart, a strange, isolated abnormality.
The two men stood close to the glass,
peering in.
"The thing gave me a shock," said Isbister "I feel a queer sort of surprise even now when I think of his white eyes. They were white, you know, rolled
up. Coming here again brings it all back to me.
"Have you never seen him since that time? " asked Warming.
"Often wanted to come," said Isbister; "but business nowadays is too serious a thing for much holiday
keeping. I've been in America most of the time."
"If I remember rightly," said Warming, "you were an artist?"
"Was. And then I became a married man. I saw
it was all up with black and white, very soon--at
least for a mediocre man, and I jumped on to process.
Those posters on the Cliffs at Dover are by my
people."
"Good posters," admitted the solicitor, "though I |
was sorry to see them there." I
"Last as long as the cliffs, if necessary," exclaimed Isbister with satisfaction. " The world changes.
When he fell asleep, twenty years ago, I was down
at Boscastle with a box of water-colours and a noble, old-fashioned ambition. I didn't expect that some
day my pigments would glorify the whole blessed coast of England, from Land's End round again to the Lizard.
Luck comes to a man very often when he's not
looking."
Warming seemed to doubt the quality of the luck.
" I just missed seeing you, if I recollect aright."
"You came back by the trap that took me to Camelford railway station. It was close on the Jubilee,
Victoria's Jubilee, because I remember the seats and flags in Westminster, and the row with the cabman at
Chelsea."
"The Diamond Jubilee, it was," said Warming;
"the second one."
"Ah, yes ! At the proper Jubilee--the Fifty Year affair--I was down at Wookey--a boy. I missed
all that. . . . What a fuss we had with him! My
landlady wouldn't take him in, wouldn't let him stay-he looked so queer when he was rigid. We had to
carry him in a chair up to the hotel. And the
Boscastle doctor--it wasn't the present chap, but the G.P. before him--was at him until nearly two, with,
me and the landlord holding lights and so forth."
"It was a cataleptic rigour at first, wasn't it?"
"Stiff!--wherever you bent him he stuck. You
might have stood him on his head and he'd have
stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course this"
--he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his head--" is quite different. And, of course, the little doctor--what was his name?"
"Smithers? "
"Smithers it was--was quite wrong in trying to
fetch him round too soon, according to all accounts.
The things he did. Even now it makes me feel all--
ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those
beastly little things, not dynamos--"
"Induction coils."
"Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about. There was just two flaring
yellow candles, and all the shadows were shivering,
and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and him--stark and squirming in the most unnatural
ways. Well, it made me dream."
Pause.
"It's a strange state," said Warming.
" It's a sort of complete absence," said Isbister.
"Here's the body, empty. Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It's like a seat vacant and marked 'engaged.'
No feeling, no digestion, no beating of the
heart--not a flutter. __That__ doesn't make me feel as if there was a man present. In a sense it's more dead than death, for these doctors tell me that even the hair has stopped growing. Now with the proper dead, the
hair will go on growing--"
"I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.
They peered through the glass again. Graham was
indeed in a strange state, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in medical history.
Trances had lasted for as much as a year before
--but at the end of that time it had ever been
waking or a death; sometimes first one and then the
other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had
made in injecting nourishment, for that device had
been resorted to to postpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been trying not to see them.
"And while he has been Iying here," said Isbister, with the zest of a life freely spent, " I have changed my plans in life; married, raised a family, my eldest lad--I hadn't begun to think of sons then--is an American citizen, and looking forward to leaving Harvard.
There's a touch of grey in my hair. And this man,
not a day older nor wiser (practically) than I was in my downy days. It's curious to think of."
Warming turned. "And I have grown old too. I
played cricket with him when I was still only a lad.
And he looks a young man still. Yellow perhaps.
But that is a young man nevertheless."
"And there's been the War," said Isbister.
"From beginning to end."
"And these Martians."
"I've understood," said Isbister after a pause, "that he had some moderate property of his own?"
"That is so," said Warming. He coughed primly.
"As it happens-- have charge of it."
" Ah!" Isbister thought, hesitated and spoke:
"No doubt--his keep here is not expensive--no
doubt it will have improved--accumulated?"
"It has. He will wake up very much better off--
if he wakes--than when he slept."
"As a business man," said Isbister, "that thought has naturally been in my mind. I have, indeed,
sometimes thought that, speaking commercially, of course, this sleep may be a very good thing for him. That
he knows what he is about, so to speak, in being
insensible so long. If he had lived straight on--"
"I doubt if he would have premeditated as much,"
said Warming. "He was not a far-sighted man. In fact--"
"Yes?"
"We differed on that point. I stood to him somewhat in the relation of a guardian. You have probably seen enough of affairs to recognise that
occasionally a certain friction--. But even if that was the case, there is a doubt whether he will ever wake. This sleep exhausts slowly, but it exhausts. Apparently
he is sliding slowly, very slowly and tediously, down a long slope, if you can understand me? "
"It will be a pity to lose his surprise. There's been a lot of change these twenty years. It's Rip Van
Winkle come real."
"It's Bellamy," said Warming. " There has been a lot of change certainly. And, among other changes, I have changed. I am an old man."
Isbister hesitated, and then feigned a belated surprise.
"I shouldn't have thought it."
"I was forty-three when his bankers--you remember you wired to his bankers--sent on to me."
"I got their address from the cheque book in his pocket," said Isbister.
"Well, the addition is not difficult," said Warming.
There was another pause, and then Isbister gave
way to an unavoidable curiosity. "He may go on
for years yet," he said, and had a moment of hesitation.
"We have to consider that. His affairs, you
know, may fall some day into the hands of--someone
else, you know."
"That, if you will believe me, Mr. Isbister, is one of the problems most constantly before my mind. We
happen to be--as a matter of fact, there are no very trustworthy connections of ours. It is a grotesque
and unprecedented position."
"It is," said Isbister. "As a matter of fact, it's a case for a public trustee, if only we had such a
functionary."
"It seems to me it's a case for some public body, some practically undying guardian. If he really is
going on living--as the doctors, some of them, think.
As a matter of fact, I have gone to one or two public men about it. But, so far, nothing has been done."
"It wouldn't be a bad idea to hand him over to
some public body--the British Museum Trustees, or
the Royal College of Physicians. Sounds a bit odd,
of course, but the whole situation is odd."
"The difficulty is to induce them to take him."
"Red tape, I suppose? "
"Partly."
Pause. " It's a curious business, certainly," said Isbister. "And compound interest has a way of
mounting up."
"It has," said Warming. "And now the gold supplies are running short there is a tendency towards
. . . appreciation."
"I've felt that," said Isbister with a grimace. "But it makes it better for him."
"If he wakes."
"If he wakes," echoed Isbister. "Do you notice the pinched-ill look of his nose, and the way in which his eyelids sink?"
Warming looked and thought for a space. "I doubt if he will wake," he said at last.
"I never properly understood," said Isbister, "what it was brought this on. He told me something about
overstudy. I've often been curious."
"He was a man of considerable gifts, but spasmodic, emotional. He had grave domestic troubles,
divorced his wife, in fact, and it was as a relief from that, I think, that he took up politics of the rabid sort.
He was a fanatical Radical--a Socialist--or typical
Liberal, as they used to call themselves,-of the advanced school. Energetic--flighty--undisciplined. Overwork
upon a controversy did this for him. I remember
the pamphlet he wrote--a curious production. Wild,
whirling stuff. There were one or two prophecies.
Some of them are already exploded, some of them are
established facts. But for the most part to read such a thesis is to realise how full the world is of
unanticipated things. He will have much to learn, much to unlearn, when he wakes. If ever a waking comes."
"I'd give anything to be there," said Isbister, "just to hear what he would say to it all."
"So would I," said Warming. "Aye! so would I," with an old man's sudden turn to self pity. "But I shall never see him wake."
He stood looking thoughtfully at the waxen figure.
"He will never wake," he said at last. He sighed
"He will never wake again."
CHAPTER III
THE AWAKENING
But Warming was wrong in that. An awakening
came.
What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple
seeming unity--the self! Who can trace its
reintegration as morning after morning we awaken, the flux and confluence of its countless factors intenveaving, rebuilding, the dim first stirrings of the soul, the growth and synthesis of the unconscious to the
subconscious, the sub-conscious to dawning consciousness, until at last we recognise ourselves again. And
as it happens to most of us after the night's sleep, so it was with Graham at the end of his vast slumber.
A dim cloud of sensation taking shape, a cloudy
dreariness, and he found himself vaguely somewhere,
recumbent, faint, but alive.
The pilgrimage towards a personal being seemed to
traverse vast gulfs, to occupy epochs. Gigantic
dreams that were terrible realities at the time, left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange scenery, as if from another planet. There was a distinct impression, too, of a momentous conversation, of
a name--he could not tell what name--that was
subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten
sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast
hopeless effort, the effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of dazzling unstable
confluent scenes.
Graham became aware his eyes were open and regarding some unfamiliar thing.
It was something white, the edge of something, a
frame of wood. He moved his head slightly, following the contour of this shape. It went up beyond the
top of his eyes. He tried to think where he might be.
Did it matter, seeing he was so wretched? The colour of his thoughts was a dark depression. He felt the
featureless misery of one who wakes towards the hour of dawn. He had an uncertain sense of whispers and
footsteps hastily receding.
The movement of his head involved a perception of
