When the Sleeper Wakes - H. G. Wells (romance book recommendations TXT) 📗

sense of visibility and exposure that came with it turned his colourless intention of joining Ostrog to a keen anxiety.

For a time he was jostled, obstructed, and endangered by men hoarse and weary with cheering his name, some of them bandaged and bloody in his cause. The frontage of the windvane offices was illuminated by some moving picture, but what it was he could not see, because in spite of his strenuous attempts the density of the crowd prevented his approaching it. From the fragments of speech he caught, he judged it conveyed news of the fighting about the Council House. Ignorance and indecision made him slow and ineffective in his movements. For a time he could not conceive how he was to get within the unbroken facade of this place. He made his way slowly into the midst of this mass of people, until he realised that the descending staircase of the central Way led to the interior of the buildings. This gave him a goal, but the crowding in the central path was so dense that it was long before he could reach it. And even then he encountered intricate obstruction, and had an hour of vivid argument first in this guard room and then in that before he could get a note taken to the one man of all men who was most eager to see him. His story was laughed to scorn at one place, and wiser for that, when at last he reached a second stairway he professed simply to have news of extraordinary importance for Ostrog. What it was he would not say. They sent his note reluctantly. For a long time he waited in a little room at the foot of the lift shaft, and thither at last came Lincoln, eager, apologetic, astonished. He stopped in the doorway scrutinising Graham, then rushed forward effusively.

“Yes,” he cried. “It is you. And you are not dead!”

Graham made a brief explanation.

“My brother is waiting,” explained Lincoln. “He is alone in the windvane offices. We feared you had been killed in the theatre. He doubted — and things are very urgent still in spite of what we are telling them there — or he would have come to you.”

They ascended a lift, passed along a narrow passage, crossed a great hall, empty save for two hurrying messengers, and entered a comparatively little room, whose only furniture was a long settee and a large oval disc of cloudy, shifting grey, hung by cables from the wall. There Lincoln left Graham for a space, and he remained alone without understanding the shifting smoky shapes that drove slowly across this disc.

His attention was arrested by a sound that began abruptly. It was cheering, the frantic cheering of a vast but very remote crowd, a roaring exultation. This ended as sharply as it had begun, like a sound heard between the opening and shutting of a door. In the outer room was a noise of hurrying steps and a melodious clinking as if a loose chain was running over the teeth of a wheel.

Then he heard the voice of a woman, the rustle of unseen garments. “It is Ostrog!” he heard her say. A little bell rang fitfully, and then everything was still again.

Presently came voices, footsteps and movement without. The footsteps of some one person detached itself from the other sounds and drew near, firm, evenly measured steps. The curtain lifted slowly. A tall, white-haired man, clad in garments of cream coloured silk, appeared, regarding Graham from under his raised arm.

For a moment the white form remained holding the curtain, then dropped it and stood before it. Graham’s first impression was of a very broad forehead, very pale blue eyes deep sunken under white brows, an aquiline nose, and a heavily-lined resolute mouth. The folds of flesh over the eyes, the drooping of the corners of the mouth contradicted the upright bearing, and said the man was old. Graham rose to his feet instinctively, and for a moment the two men stood in silence, regarding each other.

“You are Ostrog?” said Graham.

“I am Ostrog.”

“The Boss?”

“So I am called.”

Graham felt the inconvenience of the silence. “I have to thank you chiefly, I understand, for my safety,” he said presently.

“We were afraid you were killed,” said Ostrog.

“Or sent to sleep again — for ever. We have been doing everything to keep our secret — the secret of your disappearance. Where have you been? How did you get here?”

Graham told him briefly.

Ostrog listened in silence.

He smiled faintly. “Do you know what I was doing when they came to tell me you had come?”

“How can I guess?”

“Preparing your double.”

“My double?”

“A man as like you as we could find. We were going to hypnotise him, to save him the difficulty of acting. It was imperative. The whole of this revolt depends on the idea that you are awake, alive, and with us. Even now a great multitude of people has gathered in the theatre clamouring to see you. They do not trust … You know, of course — something of your position?”

“Very little,” said Graham.

“It is like this.” Ostrog walked a pace or two into the room and turned. “You are absolute owner,” he said, “of more than half the world. As a result of that you are practically King. Your powers are limited in many intricate ways, but you are the figure head, the popular symbol of government. This White Council, the Council of Trustees as it is called”

“I have heard the vague outline of these things.”

“I wondered.”

“I came upon a garrulous old man.”

“I see … Our masses — the word comes from your days — you know of course, that we still have masses — regard you as our actual ruler. Just as a great number of people in your days regarded the Crown as the ruler. They are discontented — the masses all over the earth — with the rule of your Trustees. For the most part it is the old discontent, the old quarrel of the common man with his commonness — the misery of work and discipline and unfitness. But your Trustees have ruled ill. In certain matters, in the administration of the Labour Companies, for example, they have been unwise. They have given endless opportunities. Already we of the popular party were agitating for reforms — when your waking came. Came! If it had been contrived it could not have come more opportunity.” He smiled. “The public mind, making no allowance for your years of quiescence, had already hit on the thought of waking you and appealing to you, and — Flash!”

He indicated the outbreak by a gesture, and Graham moved his head to show that he understood.

“The Council muddled — quarreled. They always do. They could not decide what to do with you. You know how they imprisoned you?”

“I see. I see. And now — we win?”

“We win. Indeed we win. Tonight, in five swift hours. Suddenly we struck everywhere. The windvane people, the Labour Company and its millions, burst the bonds. We got the pull of the aeropiles.”

He paused. “Yes,” said Graham, guessing that aeropile meant flying machine.

“That was, of course, essential. Or they could have got away. All the city rose, every third man almost was in it! All the blue, all the public services, save only just a few aeronauts and about half the red police. You were rescued, and their own police of the Ways — not half of them could be massed at the Council House — have been broken up, disarmed or killed. All London is ours — now. Only the Council House remains.

“Half of those who remain to them of the red police were lost in that foolish attempt to recapture you. They lost their heads when they lost you. They flung all they had at the theatre. We cut them off from the Council House there. Truly tonight has been a night of victory. Everywhere your star has blazed. A day ago — the White Council ruled as it has ruled for a gross of years, for a century and a half of years, and then, with only a little whispering, a covert arming here and there, suddenly — So!”

“I am very ignorant,” said Graham. “I suppose — . I do not clearly understand the conditions of this fighting. If you could explain. Where is the Council? Where is the fight?”

Ostrog stepped across the room, something clicked, and suddenly, save for an oval glow, they were in darkness. For a moment Graham was puzzled.

Then he saw that the cloudy grey disc had taken depth and colour, had assumed the appearance of an oval window looking out upon a strange unfamiliar scene.

At the first glance he was unable to guess what this scene might be. It was a daylight scene, the daylight of a wintry day, grey and clear. Across the picture and halfway as it seemed between him and the remoter view, a stout cable of twisted white wire stretched vertically. Then he perceived that the rows of great windwheels he saw, the wide intervals, the occasional gulfs of darkness, were akin to those through which he had fled from the Council House. He distinguished an orderly file of red figures marching across an open space between files of men in black, and realised before Ostrog spoke that he was looking down on the upper surface of latter-day London. The overnight snows had gone. He judged that this mirror was some modern replacement of the camera obscura, but that matter was not explained to him. He saw that though the file of red figures was trotting from left to right, yet they were passing out of the picture to the left. He wondered momentarily, and then saw that the picture was passing slowly, panorama fashion, across the oval.

“In a moment you will see the fighting,” said Ostrog at his elbow. “Those fellows in red you notice are prisoners. This is the roof space of London — all the houses are practically continuous now. The streets and public squares are covered in. The gaps and chasms of your time have disappeared.”

Something out of focus obliterated half the picture. Its form suggested a man. There was a gleam of metal, a flash, something that swept across the oval, as the eyelid of a bird sweeps across its eye, and the picture was clear again. And now Graham beheld men running down among the windwheels, pointing weapons from which jetted out little smoky flashes. They swarmed thicker and thicker to the right, gesticulating — it might be they were shouting, but of that the picture told nothing. They and the windwheels passed slowly and steadily across the field of the mirror.

“Now,” said Ostrog, “comes the Council House,” and slowly a black edge crept into view and gathered Graham’s attention. Soon it was no longer an edge but a cavity, a huge blackened space amidst the clustering edifices, and from it thin spires of smoke rose into the pallid winter sky. Gaunt ruinous masses of the building, mighty truncated piers and girders, rose dismally out of this cavernous darkness. And over these vestiges of some splendid place, countless minute men were clambering, leaping, swarming.

“This is the Council House,” said Ostrog. “Their last stronghold. And the fools wasted enough ammunition to hold out for a month in blowing up the buildings all about them — to stop our attack. You heard the smash? It shattered half the brittle glass in the city.”

And while he spoke, Graham saw that beyond this sea of ruins, overhanging it and rising to a great height, was a ragged mass of white building. This mass had been isolated by the ruthless destruction of its surroundings.