The complete works, p.84
The Complete Works, page 84
Council with suggestions of a vague universality of
power. And they had spoken of the Sleeper; it had
not really struck him vividly at the time that he was the Sleeper. He had to recall precisely what they had said.
He walked into the bedroom and peered up through
the quick intervals of the revolving fan. As the fan swept round, a dim turmoil like the noise of machinery came in rhythmic eddies. All else was silence.
Though the perpetual day still irradiated his apartments, he perceived the little intermittent strip of sky
was now deep blue--black almost, with a dust of
little stars.
He resumed his examination of the rooms. He
could find no way of opening the padded door, no bell nor other means of calling for attendance. His feeling of wonder was in abeyance; but he was curious,
anxious for information. He wanted to know exactly
how he stood to these new things. He tried to compose himself to wait until someone came to him.
Presently he became restless and eager for information, for distraction, for fresh sensations.
He went back to the apparatus in the other room,
and had soon puzzled out the method of replacing the cylinders by others. As he did so, it came into his
mind that it must be these little appliances had fixed the language so that it was still clear and understandable after two hundred years. The haphazard cylinders he substituted displayed a musical fantasia. At
first it was beautiful, and then it was sensuous. He presently recognized what appeared to him to be an
altered version of the story of Tannhauser. The music was unfamiliar. But the rendering was realistic, and with a contemporary unfamiliarity. Tannhauser did
not go to a Venusberg, but to a Pleasure City. What
was a Pleasure City? A dream, surely, the fancy of
a fantastic, voluptuous writer.
He became interested, curious. The story developed
with a flavour of strangely twisted sentimentality.
Suddenly he did not like it. He liked it less as it
proceeded.
He had a revulsion of feeling. These were no pictures, no idealisations, but photographed realities. He
wanted no more of the twenty-second century Venusberg.
He forgot the part played by the model in
nineteenth century art, and gave way to an archaic
indignation. He rose, angry and half ashamed at himself for witnessing this thing even in solitude. He
pulled forward the apparatus, and with some violence sought for a means of stopping its action. Something snapped. A violet spark stung and convulsed his
arm and the thing was still. When he attempted next
day to replace these Tannhauser cylinders by another pair, he found the apparatus broken....
He struck out a path oblique to the room and paced
to and fro, struggling with intolerable vast impressions.
The things he had derived from the cylinders
and the things he had seen, conflicted, confused him.
It seemed to him the most amazing thing of all that
in his thirty years of life he had never tried to shape a picture of these coming times. "We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!"
"What have they got to, what has been done? How do I come into the midst of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the systematised sensuality of a class of rich men!
He thought of Bellamy, the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so oddly anticipated this actual experience.
But here was no Utopia, no Socialistic state.
He had already seen enough to realise that the ancient antithesis of luxury, waste and sensuality on the one hand and abject poverty on the other, still prevailed.
He knew enough of the essential factors of life to
understand that correlation. And not only were the
buildings of the city gigantic and the crowds in the street gigantic, but the voices he had heard in the
ways, the uneasiness of Howard, the very atmosphere
spoke of gigantic discontent. What country was he
in? Still England it seemed, and yet strangely
"un-English." His mind glanced at the rest of the world, and saw only an enigmatical veil.
He prowled about his apartment, examining everything as a caged animal might do. He felt very tired,
felt that feverish exhaustion that does not admit of rest.
He listened for long spaces under the ventilator to
catch some distant echo of the tumults he felt must be proceeding in the city.
He began to talk to himself. "Two hundred and
three years! " he said to himself over and over again, laughing stupidly. "Then I am two hundred and
thirty-three years old! The oldest inhabitant. Surely they haven't reversed the tendency of our time and
gone back to the rule of the oldest. My claims are
indisputable. Mumble, mumble. I remember the Bulgarian atrocities as though it was yesterday. 'Tis a
great age! Ha ha!" He was surprised at first to hear himself laughing, and then laughed again deliberately and louder. Then he realised that he was
behaving foolishly. "Steady," he said. "Steady!"
His pacing became more regular. "This new
world," he said. "I don't understand it. __Why?__ . . .
But it is all __why!__"
"I suppose they can fly and do all sorts of things Let me try and remember just how it began."
He was surprised at first to find how vague the
memories of his first thirty years had become. He
remembered fragments, for the most part trivial
moments, things of no great importance that he had
observed. His boyhood seemed the most accessible
at first, he recalled school books and certain lessons in mensuration. Then he revived the more salient
features of his life, memories of the wife long since dead, her magic influence now gone beyond corruption, of his rivals and friends and betrayers, of the
swift decision of this issue and that, and then of his , last years of misery, of fluctuating resolves, and at last of his strenuous studies. In a little while he perceived he had it all again; dim perhaps, like metal long laid aside, but in no way defective or injured, capable of re-polishing. And the hue of it was a deepening misery.
Was it worth re-polishing? By a miracle he had
been lifted out of a life that had become intolerable.
He reverted to his present condition. He wrestled
with the facts in vain. It became an inextricable tangle.
He saw the sky through the ventilator pink with
dawn. An old persuasion came out of the dark recesses of his memory. "I must sleep," he said. It appeared as a delightful relief from this mental distress and from the growing pain and heaviness of his
limbs. He went to the strange little bed, lay down and was presently asleep.
He was destined to become very familiar indeed
with these apartments before he left them, for he
remained imprisoned for three days. During that time no one, except Howard, entered his prison. The marvel of his fate mingled with and in some way minimised
the marvel of his survival. He had awakened
to mankind it seemed only to be snatched away into
this unaccountable solitude. Howard came regularly
with subtly sustaining and nutritive fluids, and light and pleasant foods, quite strange to Graham. He
always closed the door carefully as he entered. On
matters of detail he was increasingly obliging, but the bearing of Graham on the great issues that were evidently being contested so closely beyond the soundproof
walls that enclosed him, he would not elucidate.
He evaded, as politely as possible, every question on the position of affairs in the outer world.
And in those three days Graham's incessant
thoughts went far and wide. All that he had seen,
all this elaborate contrivance to prevent him seeing, worked together in his mind. Almost every possible
interpretation of his position he debated--even as it chanced, the right interpretation. Things that presently happened to him, came to him at last credible,
by virtue of this seclusion. When at length the
moment of his release arrived, it found him prepared.
Howard's bearing went far to deepen Graham's
impression of his own strange importance; the door
between its opening and closing seemed to admit with him a breath of momentous happening. His enquiries
became more definite and searching. Howard
retreated through protests and difficulties. The awakening was unforeseen, he repeated; it happened to
have fallen in with the trend of a social convulsion.
"To explain it I must tell you the history of a gross and a half of years," protested Howard.
"The thing is this," said Graham. "You are afraid of something I shall do. In some way I am
arbitrator--I might be arbitrator."
" It is not that. But you have--I may tell you
this much--the automatic increase of your property
puts great possibilities of interference in your hands.
And in certain other ways you have influence, with
your eighteenth century notions."
"Nineteenth century," corrected Graham.
"With your old world notions, anyhow, ignorant
as you are of every feature of our State."
"Am I a fool? "
"Certainly not."
"Do I seem to be the sort of man who would act
rashly?"
"You were never expected to act at all. No one
counted on your awakening. No one dreamt you
would ever awake. The Council had surrounded you
with antiseptic conditions. As a matter of fact, we
thought that you were dead--a mere arrest of decay.
And--but it is too complex. We dare not suddenly
--while you are still half awake."
"It won't do," said Graham. "Suppose it is as you say--why am I not being crammed night and
day with facts and warnings and all the wisdom of the time to fit me for my responsibilities? Am I any
wiser now than two days ago, if it is two days, when I awoke?"
Howard pulled his lip.
"I am beginning to feel--every hour I feel more clearly--a sense of complex concealment of which
you are the salient point. Is this Council, or committee, or whatever they are, cooking the accounts of
my estate? Is that it? "
"That note of suspicion--" said Howard.
" Ugh!" said Graham. "Now, mark my words, it will be ill for those who have put me here. It will be ill. I am alive. Make no doubt of it, I am alive.
Every day my pulse is stronger and my mind clearer
and more vigorous. No more quiescence. I am a
man come back to life. And I want to __live---__"
"__Live!__"
Howard's face lit with an idea. He came towards
Graham and spoke in an easy confidential tone.
"The Council secludes you here for your good.
You are restless. Naturally--an energetic man!
You find it dull here. But we are anxious that everything you may desire--every desire--every sort of
desire . . . There may be something. Is there
any sort of company? "
He paused meaningly.
" Yes," said Graham thoughtfully. " There is."
"Ah! __Now!__ We have treated you neglectfully."
"The crowds in yonder streets of yours."
"That," said Howard, "I am afraid--. But--"
Graham began pacing the room. Howard stood
near the door watching him. The implication of Howard's suggestion was only half evident to Graham
Company? Suppose he were to accept the proposal,
demand some sort of __company__? Would there be any
possibilities of gathering from the conversation o£ 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 I" 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:
