When the Sleeper Wakes, H. G. Wells [interesting novels in english .TXT] 📗
- Author: H. G. Wells
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“Stop the ways,” they cried. Agile figures ran up swiftly 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 without a movement. 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. Some one 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. And 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 and 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 ridges.
And thence they passed across the street and at a vast height above it.
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