Read Online When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells - Free Book Online Page B

still but half involved in life. What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult, framed in the setting of the balcony, had a spectacular turn, like a thing witnessed from the box of a theatre. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What was the trouble? My mind is in a whirl. Why were they shouting? What is the danger?”
    “We have our troubles,” said Howard. His eyes avoided Graham’s enquiry. “This is a time of unrest. And, in fact, your appearance, your waking just now, has a sort of connexion—”
    He spoke jerkily, like a man not quite sure of his breathing. He stopped abruptly.
    “I don’t understand,” said Graham.
    “It will be clearer later,” said Howard.
    He glanced uneasily upward, as though he found the progress of the lift slow.
    “I shall understand better, no doubt, when I have seen my way about a little,” said Graham puzzled. “It will be—it is bound to be perplexing. At present it is all so strange. Anything seems possible. Anything. In the details even. Your counting, I understand, is different.”
    The lift stopped, and they stepped out into a narrow but very long passage between high walls, along which ran an extraordinary number of tubes and big cables.
    “What a huge place this is!” said Graham. “Is it all one building? What place is it?”
    “This is one of the city ways for various public services. Light and so forth.”
    “Was it a social trouble—that—in the great roadway place? How are you governed? Have you still a police?”
    “Several,” said Howard.
    “Several?”
    “About fourteen.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Very probably not. Our social order will probably seem very complex to you. To tell you the truth, I don’t understand it myself very clearly. Nobody does. You will, perhaps—bye and bye. We have to go to the Council.”
    Graham’s attention was divided between the urgent necessity of his inquiries and the people in the passages and halls they were traversing. For a moment his mind would be concentrated upon Howard and the halting answers he made, and then he would lose the thread in response to some vivid unexpected impression. Along the passages, in the halls, half the people seemed to be men in the red uniform. The pale blue canvas that had been so abundant in the aisle of moving ways did not appear. Invariably these men looked at him, and saluted him and Howard as they passed.
    He had a clear vision of entering a long corridor, and there were a number of girls sitting on low seats, and as though in a class. He saw no teacher, but only a novel apparatus from which he fancied a voice proceeded. The girls regarded him and his conductor, he thought, with curiosity and astonishment. But he was hurried on before he could form a clear idea of the gathering. He judged they knew Howard and not himself, and that they wondered who he was. This Howard, it seemed, was a person of importance. But then he was also merely Graham’s guardian. That was odd.
    There came a passage in twilight, and into this passage a footway hung so that he could see the feet and ankles of people going to and fro thereon, but no more of them. Then vague impressions of galleries and of casual astonished passers-by turning round to stare after the two of them with their red-clad guard.
    The stimulus of the restoratives he had taken was only temporary. He was speedily fatigued by this excessive haste. He asked Howard to slacken his speed. Presently he was in a lift that had a window upon the great street space, but this was glazed and did not open, and they were too high for him to see the moving platforms below. But he saw people going to and fro along cables and along strange, frail-looking bridges.
    And thence they passed across the street and at a vast height above it. They crossed by means of a narrow bridge closed in with glass, so clear that it made him giddy even to remember it. The floor of it also was of glass. From his memory of the cliffs between New Quay