When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells (latest books to read TXT) 📗

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 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.”