第 7 页

"This way," he said concisely, and they went on in silence to a little

door that opened at their approach. The two men in red stopped on either

side of this door. Howard and Graham passed in, and Graham, glancing

back, saw the white-robed Council still standing in a close group and

looking at him. Then the door closed behind him with a heavy thud, and

for the first time since his awakening he was in silence. The floor,

even, was noiseless to his feet.

Howard opened another door, and they were in the first of two contiguous

chambers furnished in white and green. "What Council was that?" began

Graham. "What were they discussing? What have they to do with me?"

Howard closed the door carefully, heaved a huge sigh, and said something

in an undertone. He walked slanting ways across the room and turned,

blowing out his cheeks again. "Ugh!" he grunted, a man relieved.

Graham stood regarding him.

"You must understand," began Howard abruptly, avoiding Graham's eyes,

"that our social order is very complex. A half explanation, a bare

unqualified statement would give you false impressions. As a matter of

fact--it is a case of compound interest partly--your small fortune, and

the fortune of your cousin Warming which was left to you--and certain

other beginnings--have become very considerable. And in other ways

that will be hard for you to understand, you have become a person of

significance--of very considerable significance--involved in the world's

affairs."

He stopped.

"Yes?" said Graham.

"We have grave social troubles."

"Yes?"

"Things have come to such a pass that, in fact, is advisable to seclude

you here."

"Keep me prisoner!" exclaimed Graham.

"Well--to ask you to keep in seclusion."

Graham turned on him. "This is strange!" he said.

"No harm will be done you."

"No harm!"

"But you must be kept here--"

"While I learn my position, I presume."

"Precisely."

"Very well then. Begin. Why _harm?_"

"Not now."

"Why not?"

"It is too long a story, Sire."

"All the more reason I should begin at once. You say I am a person of

importance. What was that shouting I heard? Why is a great multitude

shouting and excited because my trance is over, and who are the men in

white in that huge council chamber?"

"All in good time, Sire," said Howard. "But not crudely, not crudely.

This is one of those flimsy times when no man has a settled mind. Your

awakening. No one expected your awakening. The Council is consulting."

"What council?"

"The Council you saw."

Graham made a petulant movement. "This is not right," he said. "I should

be told what is happening.

"You must wait. Really you must wait."

Graham sat down abruptly. "I suppose since I have waited so long to

resume life," he said, "that I must wait a little longer."

"That is better," said Howard. "Yes, that is much better. And I must

leave you alone. For a space. While I attend the discussion in the

Council. I am sorry."

He went towards the noiseless door, hesitated and vanished.

Graham walked to the door, tried it, found it securely fastened in

some way he never came to understand, turned about, paced the room

restlessly, made the circuit of the room, and sat down. He remained

sitting for some time with folded arms and knitted brow, biting his

finger nails and trying to piece together the kaleidoscopic impressions

of this first hour of awakened life; the vast mechanical spaces, the

endless series of chambers and passages, the great struggle that roared

and splashed through these strange ways, the little group of remote

unsympathetic men beneath the colossal Atlas, Howard's mysterious

behaviour. There was an inkling of some vast inheritance already in

his mind--a vast inheritance perhaps misapplied--of some unprecedented

importance and opportunity. What had he to do? And this room's secluded

silence was eloquent of imprisonment!

It came into Graham's mind with irresistible conviction that this series

of magnificent impressions was a dream. He tried to shut his eyes and

succeeded, but that time-honoured device led to no awakening.

Presently he began to touch and examine all the unfamiliar appointments

of the two small rooms in which he found himself.

In a long oval panel of mirror he saw himself and stopped astonished. He

was clad in a graceful costume of purple and bluish white, with a little

greyshot beard trimmed to a point, and his hair, its blackness streaked

now with bands of grey, arranged over his forehead in an unfamiliar but

graceful manner. He seemed a man of five-and-forty perhaps. For a moment

he did not perceive this was himself.

A flash of laughter came with the recognition. "To call on old Warming

like this!" he exclaimed, "and make him take me out to lunch!"

Then he thought of meeting first one and then another of the few

familiar acquaintances of his early manhood, and in the midst of his

amusement realised that every soul with whom he might jest had died

many score of years ago. The thought smote him abruptly and keenly;

he stopped short, the expression of his face changed to a white

consternation.

The tumultuous memory of the moving platforms and the huge facade of

that wonderful street reasserted itself. The shouting multitudes came

back clear and vivid, and those remote, inaudible, unfriendly councilors

in white. He felt himself a little figure, very small and ineffectual,

pitifully conspicuous. And all about him, the world was--strange.

CHAPTER VII. IN THE SILENT ROOMS

Presently Graham resumed his examination of his apartments. Curiosity

kept him moving in spite of his fatigue. The inner room, he perceived,

was high, and its ceiling dome shaped', with an oblong aperture in the

centre, opening into a funnel in which a wheel of broad vans seemed to

be rotating, apparently driving the air up the shaft. The faint humming

note of its easy motion was the only clear sound in that quiet place. As

these vans sprang up one after the other, Graham could get transient

glimpses of the sky. He was surprised to see a star.

This drew his attention to the fact that the bright lighting of these

rooms was due to a multitude of very faint glow lamps set about the

cornices. There were no windows. And he began to recall that along

all the vast chambers and passages he had traversed with Howard he had

observed no windows at all. Had there been windows? There were windows

on the street indeed, but were they for light? Or was the whole city lit

day and night for evermore, so that there was no night there?

And another thing dawned upon him. There was no fireplace in either

room. Was the season summer, and were these merely summer apartments, or

was the whole City uniformly heated or cooled? He became interested in

these questions, began examining the smooth texture of the walls, the

simply constructed bed, the ingenious arrangements by which the labour

of bedroom service was practically abolished. And over everything was a

curious absence of deliberate ornament, a bare grace of form and

colour, that he found very pleasing to the eye. There were several very

comfortable chairs, a light table on silent runners carrying several

bottles of fluids and glasses, and two plates bearing a clear substance

like jelly. Then he noticed there were no books, no newspapers, no

writing materials. "The world has changed indeed," he said.

He observed one entire side of the outer room was set with rows of

peculiar double cylinders inscribed with green lettering on white that

harmonized With the decorative scheme of the room, and in the centre of

this side projected a little apparatus about a yard square and having a

white smooth face to the room. A chair faced this. He had a transitory

idea that these cylinders might be books, or a modern substitute for

books, but at first it did not seem so.

The lettering on the cylinders puzzled him. At first sight it seemed

like Russian. Then he noticed a suggestion of mutilated English about

certain of the words.

"oi Man huwdbi Kin"

forced itself on him as "The Man who would be King." "Phonetic

spelling," he said. He remembered reading a story with that title, then

he recalled the story vividly, one of the best stories in the world. But

this thing before him was not a book as he understood it. He puzzled out

the titles of two adjacent cylinders. 'The Heart of Darkness,' he had

never heard of before nor 'The Madonna of the Future'--no doubt if they

were indeed stories, they were by post Victorian authors.

He puzzled over this peculiar cylinder for some time and replaced it.

Then he turned to the square apparatus and examined that. He opened a

sort of lid and found one of the double cylinders within, and on the

upper edge a little stud like the stud of an electric bell. He pressed

this and a rapid clicking began and ceased. He became aware of voices

and music, and noticed a play of colour on the smooth front face. He

suddenly realised what this might be, and stepped back to regard it.

On the flat surface was now a little picture, very vividly coloured,

and in this picture were figures that moved. Not only did they move, but

they were conversing in clear small voices. It was exactly like reality

viewed through an inverted opera glass and heard through a long tube.

His interest was seized at once by the situation, which presented a

man pacing up and down and vociferating angry things to a pretty but

petulant woman. Both were in the picturesque costume that seemed so

strange to Graham. "I have worked," said the man, "but what have you

been doing?"

"Ah!" said Graham. He forgot everything else, and sat down in the chair.

Within five minutes he heard himself named, heard "when the Sleeper

wakes," used jestingly as a proverb for remote postponement, and passed

himself by, a thing remote and incredible. But in a little while he knew

those two people like intimate friends.

At last the miniature drama came to an end, and the square face of the

apparatus was blank again.

It was a strange world into which he had been permitted to see,

unscrupulous, pleasure seeking, energetic, subtle, a world too of dire

economic struggle; there were allusions he did not understand, incidents

that conveyed strange suggestions of altered moral ideals, flashes of

dubious enlightenment. The blue canvas that bulked so largely in his

first impression of the city ways appeared again and again as

the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story was

contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end had

been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat staring at the blankness.

He started and rubbed his eyes. He had been so absorbed in the

latter-day substitute for a novel, that he awoke to the little green

and white room with more than a touch of the surprise of his first

awakening.

He stood up, and abruptly he was back in his own wonderland. The

clearness of the kinetoscope drama passed, and the struggle in the vast

place of streets, the ambiguous Council, the swift phases of his waking

hour, came back. These people had spoken of the Council with suggestions

of a vague universality of power. And they had spoken of the Sleeper; it

had not really struck him vividly at the time that he was the Sleeper.

He had to recall precisely what they had said.

He walked into the bedroom and peered up through the quick intervals of

the revolving fan. As the fan swept round, a dim turmoil like the noise

of machinery came in rhythmic eddies. All else was silence.

Though the perpetual day still irradiated his apartments, he perceived

the little intermittent strip of sky was now deep blue--black almost,

with a dust of little stars.

He resumed his examination of the rooms. He could find no way of opening

the padded door, no bell nor other means of calling for attendance.

His feeling of wonder was in abeyance; but he was curious, anxious for

information. He wanted to know exactly how he stood to these new things.

He tried to compose himself to wait until someone came to him. Presently

he became restless and eager for information, for distraction, for fresh

sensations.

He went back to the apparatus in the other room, and had soon puzzled

out the method of replacing the cylinders by others. As he did so, it

came into his mind that it must be these little appliances had fixed the

language so that it was still clear and understandable after two hundred

years. The haphazard cylinders he substituted displayed a musical

fantasia. At first it was beautiful, and then it was sensuous. He

presently recognized what appeared to him to be an altered version of

the story of Tannhauser. The music was unfamiliar. But the rendering was

realistic, and with a contemporary unfamiliarity. Tannhauser did not

go to a Venusberg, but to a Pleasure City. What was a Pleasure City? A

dream, surely, the fancy of a fantastic, voluptuous writer.

He became interested, curious. The story developed with a flavour of

strangely twisted sentimentality. Suddenly he did not like it. He liked

it less as it proceeded.

He had a revulsion of feeling. These were no pictures, no idealisations,

but photographed realities. He wanted no more of the twenty-second

century Venusberg. He forgot the part played by the model in nineteenth

century art, and gave way to an archaic indignation. He rose, angry and

half ashamed at himself for witnessing this thing even in solitude. He

pulled forward the apparatus, and with some violence sought for a means

of stopping its action. Something snapped. A violet spark stung and

convulsed his arm and the thing was still. When he attempted next day

to replace these Tannhauser cylinders by another pair, he found the