When the Sleeper wakes

by Herbert George Wells

  He proceeded to details, and they had a lengthy conversation. The Surveyor-General mentioned the names of Pestalozzi and Froebel with profound respect, although he displayed no intimacy with their epoch-making works. Graham learnt that University Extension still existed in a modified form. “There is a certain type of girl, for example,” said the Surveyor-General, dilating with a sense of his usefulness, “with a perfect passion for severe studies — when they are not too difficult you know. We cater for them by the thousand. At this moment,” he said with a Napoleonic touch, “nearly five hundred phonographs are lecturing in different parts of London on the influence exercised by Plato and Swift on the love affairs of Shelley, Hazlitt, and Burns. And afterwards they write essays on the lectures, and the names in order of merit are put in conspicuous places. You see how your little germ has grown? The illiterate middle-class of your days has quite passed away.”

  “About the public elementary schools,” said Graham. “Do you control them?”

  The Surveyor-General did, “entirely.” Now, Graham, in his later democratic days, had taken a keen interest in these and his questioning quickened. Certain casual phrases that had fallen from the old man with whom he had talked in the darkness recurred to him. The Surveyor-General, in effect, endorsed the old man’s words. “We have abolished Cram,” he said, a phrase Graham was beginning to interpret as the abolition of all sustained work. The Surveyor-General became sentimental. “We try and make the elementary schools very pleasant for the little children. They will have to work so soon. Just a few simple principles — obedience — industry.”

  “You teach them very little?”

  “Why should we? It only leads to trouble and discontent. We amuse them. Even as it is — there are troubles — agitations. Where the labourers get the ideas, one cannot tell. They tell one another. There are socialistic dreams — anarchy even! Agitators will get to work among them. I take it — I have always taken it — that my foremost duty is to fight against popular discontent. Why should people be made unhappy?”

  “I wonder,” said Graham thoughtfully. “But there are a great many things I want to know.”

  Lincoln, who had stood watching Graham’s face throughout the conversation, intervened. “There are others,” he said in an undertone.

  The Surveyor-General of schools gesticulated himself away. “Perhaps,” said Lincoln, intercepting a casual glance, “you would like to know some of these ladies?”

  The daughter of the Manager of the Piggeries of the European Food Trust was a particularly charming little person with red hair and animated blue eyes. Lincoln left him awhile to converse with her, and she displayed herself as quite an enthusiast for the “dear old times,” as she called them, that had seen the beginning of his trance. As she talked she smiled, and her eyes smiled in a manner that demanded reciprocity.

  “I have tried,” she said, “countless times — to imagine those old romantic days. And to you they are memories. How strange and crowded the world must seem to you! I have seen photographs and pictures of the old times, the little isolated houses built of bricks made out of burnt mud and all black with soot from your fires, the railway bridges, the simple advertisements, the solemn savage Puritanical men in strange black coats and those tall hats of theirs, iron railway trains on iron bridges overhead, horses and cattle, and even dogs running half wild about the streets. And suddenly, you have come into this!”

  “Into this,” said Graham.

  “Out of your life — out of all that was familiar.”

  “The old life was not a happy one,” said Graham. “I do not regret that.”

  She looked at him quickly. There was a brief pause. She sighed encouragingly. “No?”

  “No,” said Graham. “It was a little life — and unmeaning. But this —. We thought the world complex and crowded and civilised enough. Yet I see — although in this world I am barely four days old — looking back on my own time, that it was a queer, barbaric time — the mere beginning of this new order. The mere beginning of this new order. You will find it hard to understand how little I know.”

  “You may ask me what you like,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Then tell me who these people are. I’m still very much in the dark about them. It’s puzzling. Are there any Generals?”

  “Men in hats and feathers?”

  “Of course not. No. I suppose they are the men who control the great public businesses. Who is that distinguished looking man?”

  “That? He’s a most important officer. That is Morden. He is managing director of the Antibilious Pill Company. I have heard that his workers sometimes turn out a myriad myriad pills a day in the twenty-four hours. Fancy a myriad myriad!”

  “A myriad myriad. No wonder he looks proud,” said Graham. “Pills! What a wonderful time it is! That man in purple?”

  “He is not quite one of the inner circle, you know. But we like him. He is really clever and very amusing. He is one of the heads of the Medical Faculty of our London University. All medical men, you know, are shareholders in the Medical Faculty Company, and wear that purple. You have to be — to be qualified. But of course, people who are paid by fees for doing something — “ She smiled away the social pretensions of all such people.

  “Are any of your great artists or authors here?”

  “No authors. They are mostly such queer people — and so preoccupied about themselves. And they quarrel so dreadfully! They will fight, some of them, for precedence on staircases! Dreadful isn’t it? But I think Wraysbury, the fashionable capillotomist, is here. From Capri.”

  “Capillotomist,” said Graham. “Ah! I remember. An artist! Why not?”

  “We have to cultivate him,” she said apologetically. “Our heads are in his hands.” She smiled.

  Graham hesitated at the invited compliment, but his glance was expressive. “Have the arts grown with the rest of civilised things?” he said. “Who are your great painters?”

  She looked at him doubtfully. Then laughed. “For a moment,” she said, “I thought you meant — “ She laughed again. “You mean, of course, those good men you used to think so much of because they could cover great spaces of canvas with oil-colours? Great oblongs. And people used to put the things in gilt frames and hang them up in rows in their square rooms. We haven’t any. People grew tired of that sort of thing.”

  “But what did you think I meant?”

  She put a finger significantly on a cheek whose glow was above suspicion, and smiled and looked very arch and pretty and inviting. “And here,” and she indicated her eyelid.

  Graham had an adventurous moment. Then a grotesque memory of a picture he had somewhere seen of Uncle Toby and the Widow flashed across his mind. An archaic shame came upon him. He became acutely aware that he was visible to a great number of interested people. “I see,” he remarked inadequately. He turned awkwardly away from her, fascinating facility. He looked about him to meet a number of eyes that immediately occupied themselves with other things. Possibly he coloured a little. “Who is that talking with the lady in saffron?” he asked, avoiding her eyes.

  The person in question he learnt was one of the great organisers of the American theatres just fresh from a gigantic production at Mexico. His face reminded Graham of a bust of Caligula. Another striking looking man was the Black Labour Master. The phrase at the time made no deep impression, but afterwards it recurred; — the Black Labour Master? The little lady, in no degree embarrassed, pointed out to him a charming little woman as one of the subsidiary wives of the Anglican Bishop of London. She added encomiums on the episcopal courage — hitherto there had been a rule of clerical monogamy — “neither a natural nor an expedient condition of things. Why should the natural development of the affections be dwarfed and restricted because a man is a priest?”

  “And, bye the bye,” she added, “are you an Anglican?” Graham was on the verge of hesitating inquiries about the status of a “subsidiary wife,” apparently an euphemistic phrase, when Linco
ln’s return broke off this very suggestive and interesting conversation. They crossed the aisle to where a tall man in crimson, and two charming persons in Burmese costume (as it seemed to him) awaited him diffidently. From their civilities he passed to other presentations.

  In a little while his multitudinous impressions began to organise themselves into a general effect. At first the glitter of the gathering had raised all the democrat in Graham; he had felt hostile and satirical. But it is not in human nature to resist an atmosphere of courteous regard. Soon the music, the light, the play of colours, the shining arms and shoulders about him, the touch of hands, the transient interest of smiling faces, the frothing sound of skillfully modulated voices, the atmosphere of compliment, interest and respect, had woven together into a fabric of indisputable pleasure. Graham for a time forgot his spacious resolutions. He gave way insensibly to the intoxication of me position that was conceded him, his manner became less conscious, more convincingly regal, his feet walked assuredly, the black robe fell with a bolder fold and pride ennobled his voice. After all this was a brilliant interesting world.

  His glance went approvingly over the shifting colours of the people, it rested here and there in kindly criticism upon a face. Presently it occurred to him that he owed some apology to the charming little person with the red hair and blue eyes. He felt guilty of a clumsy snub. It was not princely to ignore her advances, even if his policy necessitated their rejection. He wondered if he should see her again. And suddenly a little thing touched all the glamour of this brilliant gathering and changed its quality.

  He looked up and saw passing across a bridge of porcelain and looking down upon him, a face that was almost immediately hidden, the face of the girl he had seen overnight in the little room beyond the theatre after his escape from the Council. And she was looking with much the same expression of curious expectation, of uncertain intentness, upon his proceedings. For the moment he did not remember when he had seen her, and then with recognition came a vague memory of the stirring emotions of their first encounter. But the dancing web of melody about him kept the air of that great marching song from his memory.

  The lady to whom he was talking repeated her remark, and Graham recalled himself to the quasiregal flirtation upon which he was engaged.

  But from that moment a vague restlessness, a feeling that grew to dissatisfaction, came into his mind. He was troubled as if by some half forgotten duty, by the sense of things important slipping from him amidst this light and brilliance. The attraction that these bright ladies who crowded about him were beginning to exercise ceased. He no longer made vague and clumsy responses to the subtly amorous advances that he was now assured were being made to him, and his eyes wandered for another sight of that face that had appealed so strongly to his sense of beauty. But he did not see her again until he was awaiting Lincoln’s return to leave this assembly. In answer to his request Lincoln had promised that an attempt should be made to fly that afternoon, if the weather permitted. He had gone to make certain necessary arrangements.

  Graham was in one of the upper galleries in conversation with a bright-eyed lady on the subject of Eadhamite — the subject was his choice and not hers. He had interrupted her warm assurances of personal devotion with a matter-of-fact inquiry. He found her, as he had already found several other latter-day women that night, less well informed than charming. Suddenly, struggling against the eddying drift of nearer melody, the song of the Revolt, the great song he had heard in the Hall, hoarse and massive, came beating down to him.

  He glanced up startled, and perceived above him an oeil de boeuf through which this song had come, and beyond, the upper courses of cable, the blue haze, and the pendant fabric of the lights of the public ways. He heard the song break into a tumult of voices and cease. But now he perceived quite clearly the drone and tumult of the moving platforms and a murmur of many people. He had a vague persuasion that he could not account for, a sort of instinctive feeling that outside in the ways a huge crowd’ must be watching this place in which their Master amused himself. He wondered what they might be thinking.

  Though the song had stopped so abruptly, though the special music of this gathering reasserted itself, the motif of the marching song, once it had begun, lingered in his mind.

  The bright-eyed lady was still struggling with the mysteries of Eadhamite when he perceived the girl he had seen in the theatre again. She was coming now along the gallery towards him; he saw her first before she saw him. She was dressed in a faintly luminous grey, her dark hair about her brows was like a cloud, and as he saw her the cold light from the circular opening into the ways fell upon her downcast face.

  The lady in trouble about the Eadhamite saw the change in his expression, and grasped her opportunity to escape. “Would you care to know that girl, Sire?” she asked boldly. “She is Helen Wotton — a niece of Ostrog’s. She knows a great many serious things. She is one of the most serious persons alive. I am sure you will like her.”

  In another moment Graham was talking to the girl, and the bright-eyed lady had fluttered away.

  “I remember you quite well,” said Graham. “You were in that little room. When all the people were singing and beating time with their feet. Before I walked across the Hall.”

  Her momentary embarrassment passed. She looked up at him, and her face was steady. “It was wonderful,” she said, hesitated, and spoke with a sudden effort. “All those people would have died for you, Sire. Countless people did die for you that night.”

  Her face glowed. She glanced swiftly aside to see that no other heard her words.

  Lincoln appeared some way off along the gallery, making his way through the press towards them. She saw him and turned to Graham strangely eager, with a swift change to confidence and intimacy. “Sire,” she said quickly, “I cannot tell you now and here. But the common people are very unhappy; they are oppressed — they are misgoverned. Do not forget the people, who faced death — death that you might live.”

  “I know nothing — “ began Graham.

  “I cannot tell you now.”

  Lincoln’s face appeared close to them. He bowed an apology to the girl.

  “You find the new world pleasant, Sire?” asked Lincoln, with smiling deference, and indicating the space and splendour of the gathering by one comprehensive gesture. “At any rate, you find it changed.”

  “Yes,” said Graham, “changed. And yet, after all, not so greatly changed.”

  “Wait till you are in the air,” said Lincoln. “The wind has fallen; even now an aeropile awaits you.”

  The girl’s attitude awaited dismissal.

  Graham glanced at her face, was on the verge of a question, found a warning in her expression, bowed to her and turned to accompany Lincoln.

  CHAPTER XVI. THE AEROPHILE

  For a while, as Graham went through the passages of the Wind-Vane offices with Lincoln, he was preoccupied. But, by an effort, he attended to the things which Lincoln was saying. Soon his preoccupation vanished. Lincoln was talking of flying. Graham had a strong desire to know more of this new human attainment. He began to ply Lincoln with questions. He had followed the crude beginnings of aerial navigation very keenly in his previous life; he was delighted to find the familiar names of Maxim and Pilcher, Langley and Chanute, and, above all, of the aerial proto-martyr Lillienthal, still honoured by men.

  Even during his previous life two lines of investigation had pointed clearly to two distinct types of contrivance as possible, and both of these had been realised. On the one hand was the great engine-driven aeroplane, a double row of horizontal floats with a big aerial screw behind, and on the other the nimbler aeropile. The aeroplanes flew safely only in a calm or moderate wind, and sudden storms, occurrences that were now accurately predictable, rendered them for all practical purposes useless. They were built of enormous size — the usual stretch of wing being six hundred feet or more, and the length of the fabric a thousand feet. They were for passenger traffic alone. The lightly
swung car they carried was from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in length. It Was hung in a peculiar manner in order to minimise the complex vibration that even a moderate wind produced, and for the same reason the little seats within the car — each passenger remained seated during the voyage — were slung with great freedom of movement. The starting of the mechanism was only possible from a gigantic car on the rail of a specially constructed stage. Graham had seen these vast stages, the flying stages, from the crow’s nest very well. Six huge blank areas they were, with a giant “carrier“ stage on each.

  The choice of descent was equally circumscribed, an accurately plane surface being needed for safe grounding. Apart from the destruction that would have been caused by the descent of this great expanse of sail and metal, and the impossibility of its rising again, the concussion of an irregular surface, a tree-set hillside, for instance, or an embankment, would be sufficient to pierce or damage the framework, to smash the ribs of the body, and perhaps kill those aboard.

  At first Graham felt disappointed with these cumbersome contrivances, but he speedily grasped the fact that smaller machines would have been unremunerative, for the simple reason that their carrying power would be disproportionately diminished with diminished size. Moreover, the huge size of these things enabled them — and it was a consideration of primary importance — to traverse the air at enormous speeds, and so run no risks of unanticipated weather. The briefest journey performed, that from London to Paris, took about three-quarters of an hour, but the velocity attained was not high; the leap to New York occupied about two hours, and by timing oneself carefully at the intermediate stations it was possible in quiet weather to go around the world in a day.

  The little aeropiles (as for no particular reason they were distinctively called) were of an altogether different type. Several of these were going to and fro in the air. They were designed to carry only one or two persons, and their manufacture and maintenance was so costly as to render them the monopoly of the richer sort of people. Their sails, which were brilliantly coloured, consisted only of two pairs of lateral air floats in the same plane, and of a screw behind. Their small size rendered a descent in any open space neither difficult nor disagreeable, and it was possible to attach pneumatic wheels or even the ordinary motors for terrestrial tragic to them, and so carry them to a convenient starting place. They required a special sort of swift car to throw them into the air, but such a car was efficient in any open place clear of high buildings or trees. Human aeronautics, Graham perceived, were evidently still a long way behind the instinctive gift of the albatross or the fly-catcher. One great influence that might have brought the aeropile to a more rapid perfection had been withheld; these inventions had never been used in warfare. The last great international struggle had occurred before the usurpation of the Council.