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

Graham awoke from an instant reverie and Asano repeated his words. Graham’s mind returned to the thing at hand.

“Of course I see the perfect reasonableness of this Restraint, soberness, the matured thought, the unselfish a act, they are necessities of the barbarous state, the life of dangers. Dourness is man’s tribute to unconquered nature. But man has conquered nature now for all practical purposes — his political affairs are managed by Bosses with a black police — and life is joyous.”

He looked at the dancers again. “Joyous,” he said.

“There are weary moments,” said the little officer, reflectively.

“They all look young. Down there I should be visibly the oldest man. And in my own time I should have passed as middle-aged.”

“They are young. There are few old people in this class in the work cities.”

“How is that?”

“Old people’s lives are not so pleasant as they used to be, unless they are rich to hire lovers and helpers. And we have an institution called Euthanasy.”

“Ah! that Euthanasy!” said Graham. “The easy death?”

“The easy death. It is the last pleasure. The Euthanasy Company does it well. People will pay the sum — it is a costly thing — long beforehand, go off to some pleasure city and return impoverished and weary, very weary.”

“There is a lot left for me to understand,” said Graham after a pause. “Yet I see the logic of it all. Our array of angry virtues and sour restraints was the consequence of danger and insecurity. The Stoic, the Puritan, even in my time, were vanishing types. In the old days man was armed against Pain, now he is eager for Pleasure. There lies the difference. Civilisation has driven pain and danger so far off — for well-to-do people. And only well-to-do people matter now. I have been asleep two hundred years.”

For a minute they leant on the balustrading, following the intricate evolution of the dance. Indeed the scene was very beautiful.

“Before God,” said Graham, suddenly, “I would rather be a wounded sentinel freezing in the snow than one of these painted fools!”

“In the snow,” said Asano, “one might think differently.”

“I am uncivilised,” said Graham, not heeding him. “That is the trouble. I am primitive — Palaeolithic. Their fountain of rage and fear and anger is sealed and closed, the habits of a lifetime make them cheerful and easy and delightful. You must bear with my nineteenth century shocks and disgusts. These people, you say, are skilled workers and so forth. And while these dance, men are fighting — men are dying in Paris to keep the world — that they may dance.”

Asano smiled faintly. “For that matter, men are dying in London,” he said.

There was a moment’s silence.

“Where do these sleep?” asked Graham.

“Above and below — an intricate warren.”

“And where do they work? This is — the domestic life.”

“You will see little work tonight. Half the workers are out or under arms. Half these people are keeping holiday. But we will go to the work places if you wish it.”

For a time Graham watched the dancers, then suddenly turned away. “I want to see the workers. I have seen enough of these,” he said.

Asano led the way along the gallery across the dancing hall. Presently they came to a transverse passage that brought a breath of fresher, colder air.

Asano glanced at this passage as they went past, stopped, went back to it, and turned to Graham with a smile. “Here, Sire,” he said, “is something — will be familiar to you at least — and yet — . But I will not tell you. Come!”

He led the way along a closed passage that presently became cold. The reverberation of their feet told that this passage was a bridge. They came into a circular gallery that was glazed in from the outer weather, and so reached a circular chamber which seemed familiar, though Graham could not recall distinctly when he had entered it before. In this was a ladder — the first ladder he had seen since his awakening — up which they went, and came into a high, dark, cold place in which was another almost vertical ladder. This they ascended, Graham still perplexed.

But at the top he understood, and recognized the metallic bars to which he clung. He was in the cage under the ball of St. Paul’s. The dome rose but a little way above the general contour of the city, into the still twilight, and sloped away, shining greasily under a few distant lights, into a circumambient ditch of darkness.

Out between the bars he looked upon the wind-clear northern sky and saw the starry constellations all unchanged. Capella hung in the west, Vega was rising, and the seven glittering points of the Great Bear swept overhead in their stately circle about the Pole.

He saw these stars in a clear gap of sky. To the east and south the great circular shapes of complaining windwheels blotted out the heavens, so that the glare about the Council House was hidden. To the southwest hung Orion, showing like a pallid ghost through a tracery of ironwork and interlacing shapes above a dazzling coruscation of lights. A bellowing and siren screaming that came from the flying stages warned the world that one of the aeroplanes was ready to start. He remained for a space gazing towards the glaring stage. Then his eyes went back to the northward constellations.

For a long time he was silent. “This,” he said at last, smiling in the shadow, “seems the strangest thing of all. To stand in the dome of Saint Paul’s and look once more upon these familiar, silent stars!”

Thence Graham was taken by Asano along devious ways to the great gambling and business quarters where the bulk of the fortunes in the city were lost and made. It impressed him as a well-nigh interminable series of very high halls, surrounded by tiers upon tiers of galleries into which opened thousands of offices, and traversed by a complicated multitude of bridges, footways, aerial motor rails, and trapeze and cable leaps. And here more than anywhere the note of vehement vitality, of uncontrollable, hasty activity. rose high. Everywhere was violent advertisement, until his brain swam at the tumult of light and colour. And Babble Machines of a peculiarly rancid tone were abundant and filled the air with strenuous squealing and an idiotic slang. “Skin your eyes and slide,” “Gewhoop, Bonanza,” “Gollipers come and hark!”

The place seemed to him to be dense with people either profoundly agitated or swelling with obscure cunning, yet he learnt that the place was comparatively empty, that the great political convulsion of the last few days had reduced transactions to an unprecedented minimum. In one huge place were long avenues of roulette tables, each with an excited, undignified crowd about it; in another a yelping Babel of white-faced women and red-necked leathery-lunged men bought and sold the shares of an absolutely fictitious business undertaking which, every five minutes, paid a dividend of ten per cent and cancelled a certain proportion of its shares by means of a lottery wheel.

These business activities were prosecuted with an energy that readily passed into violence, and Graham approaching a dense crowd found at its centre a couple of prominent merchants in violent controversy with teeth and nails on some delicate point of business etiquette. Something still remained in life to be fought for. Further he had a shock at a vehement announcement in phonetic letters of scarlet flame, each twice the height of a man, that “WE ASSURE THE PROPRAIET’R. WE ASSURE THE PROPRAIET’R.”

“Who’s the proprietor?” he asked.

“You.”

“But what do they assure me?” he asked. “What do they assure me?”

“Didn’t you have assurance?”

Graham thought. “Insurance?”

“Yes — Insurance. I remember that was the older word. They are insuring your life. Dozands of people are taking out policies, myriads of lions are being put on you. And further on other people are buying annuities. They do that on everybody who is at all prominent. Look there!”

A crowd of people surged and roared, and Graham saw a vast black screen suddenly illuminated in still larger letters of burning purple. “Anuetes on the Propraiet’r — x 5 pr. G.” The people began to boo and shout at this, a number of hard breathing, wildeyed men came running past, clawing with hooked fingers at the air. There was a furious crush about a little doorway.

Asano did a brief calculation. “Seventeen per cent per annum is their annuity on you. They would not pay so much per cent if they could see you now, Sire. But they do not know. Your own annuities used to be a very safe investment, but now you are sheer gambling, of course. This is probably a desperate bid. I doubt if people will get their money.”

The crowd of would-be annuitants grew so thick about them that for some time they could move neither forward no backward. Graham noticed what appeared to him to be a high proportion of women among the speculators, and was reminded again of the economical independence of their sex. They seemed remarkably well able to take care of themselves in the crowd, using their elbows with particular skill, as he learnt to his cost. One curly-headed person caught in the pressure for a space, looked steadfastly at him several times, almost as if she recognized him, and then, edging deliberately towards him, touched his hand with her arm in a scarcely accidental manner, and made it plain by a look as ancient as Chaldea that he had found favour in her eyes. And then a lank, grey-bearded man, perspiring copiously in a noble passion of self-help, blind to all earthly things save that glaring, bait, thrust between them in a cataclysmal rush towards that alluring “x 5 pr. G.”

“I want to get out of this,” said Graham to Asano. “This is not what I came to see. Show me the workers. I want to see the people in blue. These parasitic lunatics —”

He found himself wedged in a struggling mass c people, and this hopeful sentence went unfinished.