 CHAPTER 17 THREE DAYS Gramn awaited Gramn in an apartment beneath the flying stages. He seemed curious to learn all that had happened, pleased to hear of the extraordinary delight and interest which Gramn took in flying. Gramn was in a mood of enthusiasm. I must learn to fly, he cried. I must master that. I pity all poor souls who have died without this opportunity. The sweet, swift air. It is the most wonderful experience in the world. You will find our new times full of wonderful experiences," said Lincoln. I do not know what you will care to do now. We have music that may seem novel. For the present," said Gramn, flying holds me. Let me learn more of that. Your aeronaut was saying there is some trade's union objection to one's learning. There is, I believe," said Lincoln, but for you, if you would like to occupy yourself with that, we can make you a sworn aeronaut tomorrow." Gramn expressed his wishes vividly and talked of his sensations for a while. And as for affairs, he asked abruptly, how are things going on? Lincoln waved affairs aside. Ostrog will tell you that tomorrow, he said. Everything is settling down. The revolution accomplishes itself all over the world. Friction is inevitable here and there, of course, but your rule is assured. You may rest secure with things in Ostrog's hands. Would it be possible for me to be made a sworn aeronaut, as you call it, forthwith, before I sleep?" said Gramn, pacing. Then I could be added the very first thing tomorrow again. It would be possible, said Lincoln thoughtfully, quite possible. Indeed, it shall be done. He laughed. I came prepared to suggest amusements, but you have found one for yourself. I will telephone to the aeronautical offices from here, and we will return to your apartments in the wind-vane control. By the time you have dined, the aeronauts will be able to come. You don't think that after you have dined you might prefer..." he paused. He asked, said Gramn. We had prepared a show of dancers. They had been brought from the Capri Theatre. I hate ballets, said Gramn shortly. Always did. That other. That's not what I want to see. We had dancers in the old days. For the matter of that they had them in ancient Egypt. But flying. True, said Lincoln, though our dancers. They can afford to wait, said Gramn. They can afford to wait. I know I'm not a Latin. There's questions I want to ask some expert about your machinery. I'm keen. I want no distractions. You have the world to choose from, said Lincoln. Whatever you want is yours. Asano appeared and under the escort of a strong guard they returned through the city streets to Gramn's apartments. Far larger crowds had assembled to witness his return than his departure had gathered, and the shouts and cheering of these masses of people sometimes drowned Lincoln's answers to the endless questions Gramn's aerial journey had suggested. At first Gramn had acknowledged the cheering and cries of the crowd by bows and gestures, but Lincoln warned him that such a recognition would be considered incorrect behavior. Gramn, already a little wearied by rhythmic civilities, ignored his subjects for the remainder of his public progress. Directly they arrived at his apartments. Asano departed in search of kinematographic renderings of machinery in motion, and Lincoln dispatched Gramn's commands for models of machines and small machines to illustrate the various mechanical advances of the last two centuries. The little group of appliances for telegraphic communication attracted the master so strongly that his delightfully prepared dinner, served by a number of charmingly dexterous girls, waited for a space. The habit of smoking had almost ceased from the face of the earth, but when he expressed a wish for that indulgence enquiries were made and some excellent cigars were discovered in Florida, and sent to him by pneumatic dispatch while the dinner was still in progress. Afterwards came the aeronauts, and a feast of ingenious wonders in the hands of a latter-day engineer. For the time, at any rate, the neat dexterity of counting and numbering machines, building machines, spinning engines, patent doorways, explosive motors, grain and water elevators, slaughterhouse machines, and harvesting appliances, was more fascinating to Gramn than any Baedir. We were savages, was his refrain. We were savages. We were in the Stone Age, compared with this. And what else have you? There came also practical psychologists, with some very interesting developments in the art of hypnotism. The names of Milne Bramwell, Fetchner, Leboe, William James, Myers and Gurney, he found, bore a value now that would have astonished their contemporaries. Several practical applications of psychology were now in general use. It had largely superseded drugs, antiseptics, and anesthetics in medicine, was employed by almost all who had any need of mental concentration. A real enlargement of human faculty seemed to have been affected in this direction. The feats of calculating boys, the wonders, as Gramn had been want to regard them, of mesmerizers, were now within the range of anyone who could afford the services of a skilled hypnotist. Long ago, the old examination methods in education had been destroyed by these expedients. Instead of years of study, candidates had substituted a few weeks of trances, and during the trances, expert coaches had simply to repeat all the points necessary for adequate answering, adding a suggestion of the post-hypnotic recollection of these points. In process mathematics particularly, this aid had been of singular service, and it was now invariably invoked by such players of chess and games of manual dexterity as were still to be found. In fact, all operations conducted under finite rules of a quasi-mechanical sort that is, were now systematically relieved from the wanderings of imagination and emotion, and brought to an unexampled pitch of accuracy. Little children of the laboring classes, so soon as they were of sufficient age to be hypnotized, were thus converted into beautifully punctual and trustworthy machine-minders, and released forthwith from the long, long thoughts of youth. Aeronautical pupils, who gave way to giddiness, could be relieved from their imaginary terrors. In every street were hypnotists ready to print permanent memories upon the mind. If anyone desired to remember a name, a series of numbers, a song, or a speech, it could be done by this method, and, conversely, memories could be effaced, habits removed, and desires eradicated. A sort of psychic surgery was, in fact, in general use. In dignities, humbling experiences were thus forgotten. Widows would obliterate their previous husbands. Angry lovers released themselves from their slavery. Two graft desires, however, was still impossible, and the facts of thought-transference were yet unsystematized. The psychologists illustrated their expositions with some astounding experiments in mnemonics made through the agency of a troupe of pale-faced children in blue. Graham, like most of the people of his former time, distrusted the hypnotist, or he might then and there have eased his mind of many painful preoccupations. But in spite of Lincoln's assurances, he held to the old theory that to be hypnotized was in some way the surrender of his personality, the abdication of his will. At the banquet of wonderful experiences that was beginning, he wanted very keenly to remain absolutely himself. The next day, and another day, and yet another day passed in such interests as these. Each day Graham spent many hours in the glorious entertainment of flying. On the third he soared across middle France, and within sight of the snow-clad Alps. These vigorous exercises gave him restful sleep. He recovered almost wholly from the spiritless anemia of his first awakening. And whenever he was not in the air and awake, Lincoln was assiduous in the cause of his amusement. All that was novel and curious in contemporary invention was brought to him, until at last his appetite for novelty was well nigh-glutted. One might fill a dozen in consecutive volumes with the strange things they exhibited. Each afternoon he held his court for an hour or so. He found his interest in his contemporaries becoming personal and intimate. At first he had been alert chiefly for unfamiliarity and peculiarity. Any foppishness in their dress, any discordance with his preconceptions of nobility in their status and manners had jarred upon him. And it was remarkable to him how soon that strangeness and the faint hostility that arose from it disappeared. How soon he came to appreciate the true perspective of his position, and see the old Victorian days remote and quaint. He found himself particularly amused by the red-haired daughter of the manager of the European Piggeries. On the second day after dinner he made the acquaintance of a latter-day dancing-girl and found her an astonishing artist. And after that more hypnotic wonders. On the third day Lincoln was moved to suggest that the master should repair to a pleasure city, but this Graham declined. Nor would he accept the services of hypnotists in his aeronautical experiments. The link of locality held him to London. He found a delight in topographical identifications that he would have missed abroad. Here, or a hundred feet below here, he could say, I used to eat my mid-day cutlets during my London University days. Under here was Waterloo, and a tiresome hunt for confusing trains. Often have I stood waiting down there, bag in hand, and stared up into the sky above the forest of signals, little thinking I should walk some day a hundred yards in the air. And now, in that very sky that was once a grey smoke canopy, I circle in a monoplane. During those three days Graham was so occupied with these distractions that the vast political movements in progress outside his quarters had but a small share of his attention. Those about him told him little. Daily came Ostrog, the boss, his grand vizier, his mayor of the palace, to report in vague terms the steady establishment of his rule. A little trouble soon to be settled in this city, a slight disturbance in that. The song of the social revolt came to him no more. He never learned that it had been forbidden in the municipal limits, and all the great emotions of the crow's nest slumbered in his mind. But on the second and third of the three days he found himself, in spite of his interest in the daughter of the pig manager, or it may be by reason of the thoughts her conversation suggested, remembering the girl Helen Watton, who had spoken to him so oddly at the wind-vane-keepers' gathering. The impression she had made was a deep one, albeit the incessant surprise of novel circumstances had kept him from brooding upon it for a space. But now her memory was coming to its own. He wondered what she had meant by those broken, half-forgotten sentences. The picture of her eyes and the earnest passion of her face became more vivid as his mechanical interests faded. Her slender beauty came compellingly between him and certain immediate temptations of ignoble passion. But he did not see her again until three full days were passed. She came upon him at last in a little gallery that ran from the wind-vane offices toward his state apartments. The gallery was long and narrow, with a series of recesses, each with an arched fenestration that looked upon a court of palms. He came upon her suddenly in one of these recesses. She was seated. She turned her head at the sound of his footsteps and started at the side of him. Every touch of color vanished from her face. She rose instantly, made a step toward him as if to address him, and hesitated. He stopped and stood still, expectant. Then he perceived that a nervous tumult silenced her, perceived too that she must have sought speech with him to be waiting for him in this place. He felt a regal impulse to assist her. "'I have wanted to see you,' he said. "'A few days ago you wanted to tell me something. You wanted to tell me of the people. What was it you had to tell me?' She looked at him with troubled eyes. "'You said the people were unhappy?' For a moment she was silent still. "'It must have seemed strange to you,' she said abruptly. "'It did, and yet it was an impulse.' "'Well, that is all.' She looked at him with a face of hesitation. She spoke with an effort. "'You forget,' she said, drawing a deep breath. "'What? The people!' "'Do you mean you forget the people?' He looked interrogative. "'Yes, I know you are surprised, for you do not understand what you are. You do not know the things that are happening.' "'Well, you do not understand.' "'Not clearly perhaps, but tell me.' She turned to him with sudden resolution. "'It is so hard to explain. I have meant to, I have wanted to, and now I can't "'I am not ready with words. "'But about you there is something. It is wonder. Your sleep, your awakening. These things are miracles, to me at least, and to all the common people. You who have lived and suffered and died, you who are a common citizen, wake again, live again, to find yourself master almost of the world.' "'Master of the earth,' he said. "'So they tell me. But try and imagine how little I know of it.' "'Cities, trusts, the labor department. "'Principalities, powers, dominions, the power and the glory. Yes, I have heard them shout. I know I am master, king, if you wish, with Ostrog, the boss, he paused. She turned upon him and surveyed his face with a curious scrutiny. "'Well,' he smiled, "'to take the responsibility. "'That is what we have begun to fear.' For a moment she said no more. "'No,' she said slowly. "'You will take the responsibility. You will take the responsibility. The people look to you.' She spoke softly. "'Listen, for at least half the years of your sleep, in every generation, multitudes of people, in every generation, greater multitudes of people, have prayed that you might awake. "'Prayed!' Graham moved to speak and did not. She hesitated, and a faint color crept back to her cheek. "'Do you know that you have been to Myriads, King Arthur, Barbarossa, the king who had come in his own good time and put the world right for them? I suppose the imagination of the people. Have you not heard our proverb, when the sleeper wakes? While you lay insensible and motionless there, thousands came—thousands! Every first of the month you lay in state, with a white robe upon you, and the people filed by you. When I was a little girl, I saw you like that, with your face white and calm.' She turned her face from him and looked steadfastly at the painted wall before her. Her voice fell. When I was a little girl, I used to look at your face. It seemed to me fixed and waiting, like the patience of God. "'That is what we thought of you,' she said. "'That is how you seem to us.' She turned her shining eyes to him. Her voice was clear and strong. In the city, in the earth, a myriad, myriad men and women are waiting to see what you will do. You are full of strange, incredible expectations. Yes?' Ostrog, no one, can take that responsibility. Graham looked at her in surprise, at her face lit with emotion. She seemed at first to have spoken with an effort, and to have fired herself by speaking. "'Do you think,' she said, that you who have lived that little life so far away in the past, you who have fallen into and risen out of this miracle of sleep, do you think that the wonder and reverence and hope of half the world has gathered about you, only that you may live another little life, that you may shift the responsibility to any other man?' "'I know how great this kingship of mine is,' he said, haltingly. "'I know how great it seems, but is it real? It is incredible, dreamlike. Is it real, or is it only a great delusion?' "'It is real,' she said, if you dare.' After all, like all kingship, my kingship is belief. It is an illusion in the minds of men. "'If you dare,' she said. "'But, countless men,' she said, and while it is in their minds, they will obey. "'But I know nothing. That is what I had in mind. I know nothing. And these others, the counsellors, Ostrog, they are wiser, cooler. They know so much, every detail.' "'And, indeed, what are these miseries of which you speak? What am I to know? Do you mean?' He stopped, blankly. "'I am still hardly more than a girl,' she said. "'But to me, the world seems full of wretchedness. The world has altered since your day, altered very strangely. I have prayed that I might see you and tell you these things. The world has changed, as if a canker had seized it and robbed life of everything worth having.' She turned a flushed face upon him, moving suddenly. "'Your days were the days of freedom. Yes, I have thought. I have been made to think, for my life has not been happy. Men are no longer free. No greater, no better than the men of your time. That is not all. This city is a prison. Every city is now a prison. Mammon grips the key in his hand. Myriads, countless myriads, toil from the cradle to the grave. Is that right? Is that to be, forever?' "'Yes, far worse than in your time. All about us, beneath us, sorrow and pain. All the shallow delight of such life as you find about you is separated by just a little from a life of wretchedness beyond any telling. Yes, the poor know it. They know they suffer. These countless multitudes who face death for you two nights since, you owe your life to them.' "'Yes,' said Graham slowly. "'Yes, I owe my life to them.' "'You come,' she said, from the days when this new tyranny of the cities was scarcely beginning. It is a tyranny, a tyranny. In your days the feudal warlords had gone, and the new lordship of wealth had still to come. Half the men in the world still lived out upon the free countryside. The cities had still to devour them. I've heard the stories out of the old books. There was nobility. Common men led lives of love and faithfulness, then. They did a thousand things. And you, you come from that time. It was not. But never mind. How is it now?' "'Gain and the pleasure cities. Or slavery, unthanked, unhonored slavery.' "'Slavery,' he said. "'Slavery. You don't mean to say that human beings are chattels?' "'Worse. That is what I want you to know, what I want you to see. I know you do not know. They will keep things from you. They will take you presently to a pleasure city. But you have noticed men and women and children in pale blue canvas, with thin yellow faces and dull eyes? Everywhere. Speaking a horrible dialect, coarse and weak? I have heard it. They are the slaves. Your slaves. They are the slaves of the Labor Department you own. The Labor Department? In some way, that is familiar. Ah, now I remember. I saw it when I was wandering about the city, after the lights returned. Great fronts of buildings, colored pale blue. Do you really mean? Yes. How can I explain it to you? Of course the blue uniform struck you. Nearly a third of our people wear it. More assume it now every day. This Labor Department has grown imperceptibly.' What is this Labor Department?' asked Graham. In the old days, how did you manage with starving people? There was the work-house, which the parishes maintained. Work-house? Yes, there was something in our history lessons. I remember now. The Labor Department ousted the work-house. It grew, partly, out of something you perhaps may remember it, an emotional religious organization called the Salvation Army, that became a business company. In the first place it was almost a charity, to save people from work-house rigors. There had been a great agitation against the work-house. Now I come to think of it, it was one of the earliest properties your trustees acquired. They bought the Salvation Army and reconstructed it as this. The idea, in the first place, was to organize the labor of starving homeless people. Yes. Nowadays there are no work-houses, no refuges and charities, nothing but that department. Its offices are everywhere. That blue is its color. And any man, woman, or child, who comes to be hungry and weary and with neither home nor friend nor resort, must go to the department in the end, or seek some way of death. The euthanasia is beyond their means, for the poor there is no easy death. And at any hour in the day or night there is food, shelter, and a blue uniform for all comers. That is the first condition of the department's incorporation. And in return for a day's shelter, the department extracts a day's work and then returns the visitor's proper clothing and sends him or her out again. Yes. Perhaps that does not seem so terrible to you. In your time men starved in your streets. That was bad. But they died men. These people in blue. The proverb runs, blue canvas once and ever. The department trades in their labor and it has taken care to assure itself of the supply. People come to it starving and helpless. They eat and sleep for a night and day, then work for a day. And at the end of the day they go out again. If they have worked well they have a penny or so. Enough for a theater or a cheap dancing place or a kinematograph story or a dinner or a bet. They wander about after that is spent. Begging is prevented by the police of the ways. Besides no one gives. They come back again the next day or the day after, brought back by the same incapacity that brought them first. At last their proper clothing wears out or their rags get so shabby that they are ashamed. Then they must work for months to get fresh. If they want fresh. A great number of children are born under the department's care. The mother owes them a month thereafter. The children they cherish and educate until they are 14. And they pay two year service. You may be sure these children are educated for the blue canvas. And so it is the department works. And none are destitute in the city? None. They are either in blue canvas or in prison. We have abolished destitution. It is engraved on the department's checks. If they will not work? Most people will work at that pitch and the department has powers. There are stages of unpleasantness in the work, stoppage of food, and a man or woman who has refused to work once is known by a thumb-marking system in the department's offices all over the world. Besides, who can leave the city poor? To go to Paris cost two lions. And for insubordination there are the prisons, dark and miserable, out of sight below. There are prisons now for many things. And a third of the people wear this blue canvas? More than a third. Toilers, living without pride or delight or hope, with the stories of the pleasure cities ringing in their ears, mocking their shameful lives, their privations and hardships. Too poor even for the euthanasie, the rich man's refuge from life. Dumb, crippled millions, countless millions, all the world about, ignorant of anything but limitations and unsatisfied desires. They are born, they are thwarted, and they die. That is the state to which we have come. For a space, Graham sat downcast. But there has been a revolution, he said. All these things will be changed. Ostrog, that is our hope. That is the hope of the world. But Ostrog will not do it. He is a politician. To him it seems things must be like this. He does not mind. He takes it for granted. All the rich, all the influential, all who are happy, come at last to take these miseries for granted. They use the people in their politics. They live in ease by their degradation. But you, you who come from a happier age, it is to you the people look, to you. He looked at her face. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. He felt a rush of emotion. For a moment he forgot this city. He forgot the race and all those vague remote voices in the immediate humanity of her beauty. But what am I to do? He said with his eyes upon her. Rule, she answered, bending towards him and speaking in a low tone. Rule the world as it has never been ruled for the good and happiness of men. For you might rule it. You could rule it. The people are stirring. All over the world the people are stirring. It wants but a word, but a word from you to bring them all together. Even the middle sort of people are restless, unhappy. They are not telling you the things that are happening. The people will not go back to their drudgery. They refuse to be disarmed. Ostrog has awakened something greater than he dreamt of. He has awakened hopes. His heart was beating fast. He tried to seem judicial to weigh considerations. They only want their leader, she said. And then you could do what you would. The world is yours. He sat no longer regarding her. Presently he spoke. The old dreams and the thing I have dreamt, liberty, happiness, are they dreams? Could one man, one man, his voice sank and ceased. Not one man, but all men. Give them only a leader to speak the desire of their hearts. He shook his head and for a time there was silence. He looked up suddenly and their eyes met. I have not your faith, he said. I have not your youth. I am here with power that mocks me. No, let me speak. I want to do not right. I have not the strength for that, but something rather right than wrong. It will bring no millennium, but I am resolved now that I will rule. What you have said has awakened me. You are right. Ostrog must know his place. And I will learn. One thing I promise you, this labor-slavery shall end. And will you rule? Yes, provided, there is one thing. Yes, that you will help me. I, a girl? Yes. Does it not occur to you I am absolutely alone? She started and for an instant her eyes had pity. Need you ask whether I will help you? She said. There came a tense silence and then the beating of a clock striking the hour. Graham rose. Even now, he said, Ostrog will be waiting. He hesitated, facing her. When I have asked him certain questions, there is much I do not know. It may be that I will go to see with my own eyes the things of which you have spoken. And when I return, I shall know if you're going and coming. I will wait for you here again. They regarded one another steadfastly, questioningly, and then he turned from her towards the wind-vane office. End of Chapter 18. Chapter 19 of The Sleeper Awakes, reading by Mark Nelson. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells. Chapter 19, Ostrog's Point of View. Graham found Ostrog waiting to give a formal account of his day's stewardship. On previous occasions, he had passed over this ceremony as speedily as possible in order to resume his aerial experiences. But now he began to ask quick, short questions. He was very anxious to take up his empire forthwith. Ostrog brought flattering reports of the development of affairs abroad. In Paris and Berlin, Graham perceived that he was saying there had been trouble, not organized resistance indeed, but insubordinate proceedings. After all these years, said Ostrog, when Graham pressed enquiries, the Commune has lifted its head again. That is the real nature of the struggle to be explicit. But order had been restored in these cities. Graham, the more deliberately judicial for the stirring emotions he felt, asked if there had been any fighting. A little, said Ostrog, in one quarter only. But the Senegalese division of our African Agricultural Police, the consolidated African companies that have a very well-drilled police, was ready, and so were the aeroplanes. We expected a little trouble in the continental cities and in America, but things are very quiet in America. They are satisfied with the overthrow of the Council for the time. Why should you expect trouble? asked Graham abruptly. There is a lot of discontent, social discontent. The Labour Department? You are learning, said Ostrog with a touch of surprise. Yes, it is chiefly that discontent with the Labour Department. It was that discontent supplied the motive force of this overthrow. That and your awakening. Yes, Ostrog smiled. He became explicit. We had to stir up their discontent. We had to revive the old ideals of universal happiness. All men equal, all men happy. No luxury that everyone might not share. Ideas that have slumbered for two hundred years. You know that? We had to revive these ideals. Impossible as they are, in order to overthrow the Council. And now... Well, our revolution is accomplished and the Council is overthrown. And people whom we have stirred up remain surging. There was scarcely enough fighting. We made promises, of course. It is extraordinary how violently and rapidly this vague out-of-date humanitarianism has revived and spread. We who sowed the seed even have been astonished. In Paris, as I say, we have had to call in a little external help. And here... There is trouble. Multitudes will not go back to work. There is a general strike. Half the factories are empty and the people are swarming in the ways. They are talking of a commune. Men in silk and satin have been insulted in the streets. The blue canvas is expecting all sorts of things from you. Of course, there is no need for you to trouble. We are setting the babble machines to work with counter-suggestions in the cause of law and order. We must keep the grip tight. That is all." Graham thought. He perceived a way of asserting himself, but he spoke with restraint. Even to the pitch of bringing a negro police, he said. They are useful, said Ostrog. They are fine, loyal brutes with no rush of ideas in their heads, such as our rabble has. The council should have had them as police of the ways, and things might have been different. Of course, there is nothing to fear, except rioting and wreckage. You can manage your own wings now, and you can soar away to Capri if there is any smoke or fuss. We have the pull of all the great things. The aeronauts are privileged and rich, the closest trades union in the world, and so are the engineers of the wind veins. We have the air, and mastery of the air is mastery of the earth. No one of any ability is organizing against us. They have no leaders. Only the sectional leaders of the secret society we organized before your very opportune awakening. Mere, busybodies, and sentimentalists they are, and bitterly jealous of each other. None of them is man enough for a central figure. The only trouble will be a disorganized upheaval. To be frank, that may happen, but it won't interrupt your aeronautics. The days when the people could make revolutions are past. I suppose they are, said Graham. I suppose they are, and surprises to me. In the old days we dreamt of a wonderful democratic life, of a time when all men would be equal and happy. Ostrog looked at him steadfastly. The day of democracy is past, he said. Past forever. That day began with the Bowman of Creasy. It ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of the world, when costly cannon, great iron clads, and strategic railways became the means of power. Today is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before. It commands earth and sea and sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth. On your behalf you must accept facts and these are facts. The world for the crowd, as ruler. Even in your days that creed had been tried and condemned. Today it has only one believer, a multiplex silly one, the man in the crowd. Graham did not answer immediately. He stood lost in somber preoccupations. No, said Ostrog. The day of the common man is past. On the open countryside one man is as good as another or nearly as good. The earlier aristocracy had a precarious tenure of strength and audacity. They were tempered. There were insurrections, duels, riots. The first real aristocracy, the first permanent aristocracy came in with castles and armor and vanished before the musket and bow. The second aristocracy, the real one. Those days of gunpowder and democracy were only an eddy in the stream. The common man now is a helpless unit. In these days we have this great machine of the city and an organization complex beyond his understanding. Yet, said Graham, there is something resists, something you are holding down, something that stirs and oppresses. You will see, said Ostrog with a forced smile that would brush these difficult questions aside. I have not roused the force to destroy myself, trust me. I wonder, said Graham. Ostrog stared. Must the world go this way? said Graham with his emotions at the speaking point. Must it indeed go in this way? Have all our hopes been vain? What do you mean? said Ostrog, hopes. I come from a democratic age and I find an aristocratic tyranny. Well, but you are the chief tyrant. Graham shook his head. Well, said Ostrog, take the general question. It is the way that change has always traveled. Aristocracy, the prevalence of the best, suffering an extinction of the unfit and so to better things. But, aristocracy, those people I met, oh, not those, said Ostrog. But for the most part, they go to their death, vice and pleasure. They have no children, that sort of stuff will die out. If the world keeps to one road, that is, if there is no turning back, if we rode to excess, convenient euthanasia for the pleasure seekers singed in the flame, that is the way to improve the race. Pleasant extinction, said Graham. Yet, he thought for an instant. There is that other thing, the crowd, the great mass of poor men. Will that die out? That will not die out. And it suffers. Ostrog moved impatiently, and when he spoke, he spoke rather less evenly than before. Don't trouble about these things, he said. Everything will be settled in a few days now. The crowd is a huge, foolish beast. What if it does not die out? Even if it does not die, it can still be tamed and driven. I have no sympathy with servile men. You heard those people shouting and singing two nights ago. They were taught that song. If you had taken any man there in cold blood, and asked why he shouted, he could not have told you. They think they are shouting for you, that they are loyal and devoted to you. Just then, they were ready to slaughter the council. Today, they are already murmuring against those who have overthrown the council. No, no, said Graham. They shouted because their lives were dreary, without joy or pride, and because in me, in me, they hoped. And what is their hope? What is their hope? What right have they to hope? They work ill, and they want the reward of those who work well. The hope of mankind, what is it, that some day the overman may come some day the inferior the weak and the bestial may be subdued or eliminated subdued if not eliminated the world is no place for the bad the stupid, the innervated their duty it's a fine duty too is to die the death of the failure that is the path by which the beast rose to manhood by which man goes on to hire things. Ostrog took a pace, seemed to think, and turned on Graham. I can imagine how this great world state of ours seems to a Victorian Englishman. You regret all the old forms of representative government, their specter still haunt the world, the voting councils and parliaments and all that 18th century tomfoolery. You feel moved against our pleasure cities. I might have thought of that had I not been busy but you will learn better. The people are mad with envy. They would be in sympathy with you. Even in the streets now they clamor to destroy the pleasure cities. But the pleasure cities are the excretory organs of the state, attractive places that year after year draw together all that is weak and vicious, all that is lascivious and lazy, all the easy roguery of the world to a graceful destruction. They go there, they have their time, they die childless, all the pretty, silly, lascivious women die childless, and mankind is the better. If the people were sane they would not envy the rich their way of death and you would emancipate the silly brainless workers enslaved and try to make their lives easy and pleasant again just as they have sunk to what they are fit for. He smiled a smile that irritated Graham oddly. You will learn better. I know those ideas. In my boyhood I read your shelly and dreamt of liberty. There is no liberty. Save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within, not without. It is each man's own affair. Suppose, which is impossible, that these swarming, yelping fools in blue get the upper hand of us. What then? They will only fall to other masters. So long as there are sheep nature will insist on beasts of prey. It would mean but a few hundred years delay, the coming of the aristocrat and assured. The end will be the overman for all the mad protests of humanity. Let them revolt. Let them win and kill me and my like. Others will arise. Other masters. The end will be the same. I wonder, said Graham doggily. For a moment he stood downcast. But I must see these things for myself. He said, suddenly assuming a tone of confident mastery. Only by seeing can I understand. I must learn. That is what I want to tell you, Ostrog. I do not want to be king in a pleasure city. That is not my pleasure. I have spent enough time with aeronautics and those other things. I must learn how people live now, how the common life has developed. Then I shall understand these things better. I must learn how the common people live, the labor people more especially, how they work, marry, bear children, die. You get that from our realistic novelists, suggested Ostrog, suddenly preoccupied. I want reality, said Graham. There are difficulties, said Ostrog and thought on the whole. I did not expect I had thought and yet perhaps you say you want to go through the ways of the city and see the common people. Suddenly he came to some conclusion. You would need to go disguised, he said. The city is intensely excited and the discovery of your presence among them might create a fearful tumult. Still this wish of yours to go into this city, this idea of yours. Yes, now I think the thing over. It seems to me not altogether. It can be contrived. If you would really find an interest in that. You are, of course, master. You can go soon, if you like. A disguise a sonno will be able to manage. He would go with you. After all, it is not a bad idea of yours. You will not want to consult me for a matter, asked Graham suddenly, struck by an odd suspicion. Oh, dear, no. No. I think you may trust affairs to me for a time at any rate, said Ostrog, smiling, even if we differ. Graham glanced at him sharply. There is no fighting likely to happen soon, he asked abruptly. Certainly not. I have been thinking about these negroes. I don't believe the people intend any hostility to me, and, after all, I am the master. I do not want any negroes brought to London. It is an archaic prejudice, perhaps, but I have peculiar feelings about Europeans and the subject races, even about Paris. Ostrog stood watching him from under his drooping brows. I am not bringing negroes to London, he said slowly, but if you are not to bring armed negroes to London, whatever happens, said Graham, in that matter I am quite decided. Ostrog resolved not to speak and bowed deferentially. End of Chapter 19 Chapter 20 of The Sleeper Awakes This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells Chapter 20 In the City Ways And that night, unknown and unsuspected, Graham, dressed in the costume of an inferior wind-vein official keeping holiday, and accompanied by Asano in Labour Department canvas, surveyed the city through which he had he saw it lit and waking, a whirlpool of life. In spite of the surging and swaying of the forces of revolution, in spite of the unusual discontent, the mutterings of the greater struggle of which the first revolt was but the prelude, the myriad streams of commerce still flowed wide and strong. He knew now something of the dimensions and quality of the New Age, but he was not prepared for the infinite surprise of the detailed view for the torrent of colour and visited the first real contact with the people of these latter days. He realized that all that had gone before, saving his glimpses of the public theatres and markets, had had its element of seclusion, had been a movement within the comparatively narrow political quarter, that all his previous experiences had revolved immediately about the question of his own position. But here was the city at the busiest hours of night, the people to a large extent returned to their own immediate interest, the resumption of the real informal life, the emerged at first into a street whose opposite ways were crowded with the blue canvas liveries. This swarm Gram saw was a portion of a procession, who was odd to see a procession for raiding the city seated. They carried banners of coarse black stuff with red letters. No disarmament said the banners for the most part and crudely doved letters with variant spelling and why should we disarm? No disarming, no disarming. Banner after banner went by a stream of banners flowing past and at last at the end, the song of the revolt in a noisy band of strange instruments. They all ought to be at work, said Asano. They have no food these two days, or they have stolen it. Presently, Asano made a detour to avoid the congested crowd that gaped upon the occasional passage of dead bodies from hospital to a mortuary, the gleaning after death's harvest of the first revolt. That night, few people were sleeping, everyone was abroad. A fast excitement, perpetual crowds perpetually changing, surrounded Graham. His mind was confused and darkened by an incessant tumult, by the cries and enigmatic fragments of the social struggle that was as yet only beginning. Everywhere, festoons and banners of black and strange decorations intensified the quality of his popularity. Everywhere, he cut snatches of that crude thick dialect that served the illiterate class, the class that is beyond the reach of phonograph culture in their commonplace intercourse. Everywhere, this trouble of disarmament was in the air, with the quality of immediate stress of which he had no inkling during his seclusion in the wind vane quarter. He perceived that as soon as he returned, he must discuss this with Ostrog, this and the greater issues of which it was the expression, in a far more conclusive way than he had so far done. Perpetually, that night, even in the earlier hours of their wanderings about the city, the spirit of unrest and revolt swamped his attention to the exclusion of countless strange things he might otherwise have observed. This preoccupation made his impressions fragmentary, yet amidst so much that was strange and vivid, no subject, however personal and insistent, could exert undivided sway. There were spaces when the revolutionary movement passed clean out of his mind, was drawn aside like a curtain from before some startling new aspect of the time. Helen had swayed his mind to this intense earnestness of enquiry, but there came time when she even receded beyond his conscious thoughts. At one moment, for example, he found they were traversing the religious quarter, for the early transit about the city afforded by the moving ways rendered sporadic churches and chapels no longer necessary, and his attention was vividly arrested by the façade of one of the Christian sects. They were travelling seated on one of the swift upper ways, the place leapt upon them at a bend and advanced rapidly toward them. It was covered with inscriptions of blue, save where a vast and glaring kinematic graph transparency presented a realistic new testament scene, and where a vast festoon of black to show that the popular religion followed the popular politics hung across the lettering. Graham had already become familiar with the phonotype writing, and these inscriptions arrested him, being to his sense for the most part almost incredible blasphemy. Among the less offensive were salvation on the first floor and turn to the right, put your money in the bank, and look at the version in London, expert operators, look slippy, what Christ would say to the sleeper, join the up-to-date saints, be a Christian, without hindrance to your present occupation, all the brightest bishops on the bench tonight and prices as usual, brisk blessings for busy businessmen. But this is appalling, said Graham, as that deafening scream of mercantile piety towered above them. What is appalling? asked his little officer, apparently seeking vainly for anything this, surely the essence of religion is reverence. Oh that, Asana looked at Graham. Does it shock you? he said in the tone of one who makes a discovery. I suppose it would, of course. I had forgotten. Nowadays the competition for attention is so keen, and people simply haven't the leisure to attend to their souls, you know, as they used to do. He smiled. In the old days he had quiet sabbaths in the countryside. Though somewhere I've read of Sunday afternoon said, but that, said Graham, glancing back at the receding blue and white, that is surely not the only. There are hundreds of different ways. But, of course, if a sect doesn't tell it doesn't pay. Worship has moved with the times. There are high class sects with quieter ways, costly incense and personal attentions and all that. These people are extremely popular and prosperous. They pay several dozen lions for those apartments to the council. To you, I should say. Graham still felt a little difficulty with the coinage, and this mention of a dozen lions brought him abruptly to that matter. In the moment the screaming temples and their swarming touts were forgotten in this new interest, a turn of a phrase suggested, and an answer confirmed the idea that gold and silver were both demonetized, that stamped gold, which had begun its reign amidst the merchants of Phoenicia, was at last dethroned. The change had been graduated, but the swift, brought about by an extension of the system of checks that had even in his previous life already practically superseded gold in all the larger business transactions. The common traffic of the city, the common currency indeed of all the world, was conducted by means of a little brown, green and pink counts and checks for small amounts printed with a blank payee. Asano had several with him, and at the first opportunity he supplied the gaps in his set. They were printed not on terrible paper, but on a semi-transparent fabric of silk and flexibility, interwoven with silk. Across them all sprawled a facsimile of Graham's signature, his first encounter with the curves and turns of that familiar autograph for 203 years. Some intermediary experiences made no impression sufficiently vivid to prevent the matter of the disarmament claiming his thoughts again. A blurred picture of a theosophist temple that promised miracles and enormous letters of unsteady fire was at least submerged perhaps, but then came the view of the dining hall in Northumberland Avenue. That interested him very greatly. By the energy and thought of Asano, he was able to view this place from a little screened gallery reserved for the attendants of the tables. The building was pervaded by a distant muffle to hooting, piping, and balling, of which he did not at first understand the import, but which recalled a certain mysterious leathery voice he had heard after the resumption of lights on the night of his solitary wandering. He had grown accustomed to vastness and great numbers of people, nevertheless this spectacle held him for a long time. It was as he watched the table service more immediately beneath, and interspersed with many questions and answers concerning details that the realization of the full significance of the feast of several thousand people came to him. It was his constant surprise to find that points that one might have expected to strike vividly at the very outset never occurred to him until some trivial detail suddenly shaped as a riddle and pointed to the obvious thing he had overlooked. He discovered only now that this continuity of the city, this exclusion of weather, these vast hills and ways, involved the disappearance of the household, that the typical Victorian home, the little brick cell containing kitchen and scullery, living rooms and bedrooms, had, save for the ruins that diversified the countryside, vanished as surely as the wattle hut. But now he saw what had indeed been manifest from the first, that London, regarded as a living place, was no longer an aggregation of houses, but a prodigious hotel. A hotel with a thousand classes of accommodation, thousands of dining halls, chapels, theaters, markets and places of assembly, a synthesis of enterprises, at which he chiefly was the owner. People had their sleeping rooms with, it might be, antechambers, rooms that were always sanitary, at least whatever the degree of comfort and privacy, and for the rest they lived much as many people had lived in the new-made giant hotels of the Victorian days, eating, reading, thinking, playing, conversing, all in the places of public resort, going to their work in the industrial quarter of the city, or doing business in their offices in the trading section. He perceived at once how necessarily this state of affairs had developed from the Victorian city. The fundamental reason for the modern city had ever been the economy of cooperation. The chief thing to prevent the merging of the separate households in his own generation was simply the still imperfect civilization of the people. The strong barbaric pride, passions, and prejudices, the jealousies, rivalries, and violence of the middle and lower classes, which had necessitated the entire separation of contagious households. But the change, the taming of the people, put in rapid progress even then. In his brief thirty years of previous life he had seen an enormous extension of the habit of consuming meals from home. The casually patronized horse box coffee house had given place to the open and crowded aerated bread shop, for instance. Women's clubs had had their beginning, and an immense development of reading rooms, lounges, and libraries had witnessed to the growth of social confidence. These promises had by this time attained to their complete fulfillment. The locked and barred household had passed away. These people below him belonged, he learned, to the lower middle class, the class just above the blue laborers. A class so accustomed in the Victorian period to feed with every precaution of privacy that its members, when occasionally confronted them with a public meal, would usually hide their embarrassment under horseplay or a markedly militant demeanor. But these gaily, if lightly dressed people below, albeit vivacious, hurried, and uncommunicative, were dexterously mannered and certainly quite at their ease with regard to one another. He noticed a slight significant thing. The table, as far as he could see, was and remained delightfully neat. There was nothing to parallel the confusion, the broadcast crumbs, the splashes of viant and condiment, the overturned drink and displaced ornaments which would have marked the stormy progress of the Victorian meal. The table furniture was very different. There were no ornaments, no flowers, and the table was without a cloth, being made, he learned, of a solid substance including the texture and appearance of a damask. He discerned that this damask substance was patterned with gracefully designed trade advertisements. In a sort of recess before each dinner was a complex apparatus of porcelain and metal. There was one plate of white porcelain, and by means of taps for hot and cold volatile fluids, the diner washed this himself between the courses. He also washed his elegant white metal knife and fork and spoon, as occasionally required. Soup and the chemical wine that was the common drink were delivered by similar taps, and the remaining covers traveled automatically in tastefully arranged dishes down the table along silver rails. The diner stopped these and helped himself at his discretion. They appeared at a little door at one end of the table and vanished at the other. That turn of democratic sentiment indicated that ugly pride of menial souls which renders equals loft to weight on one another, was very strong, he found, among these people. He was so preoccupied with these details that it was only as he was leaving the place that he remarked the huge advertisement dioramas that marched majestically along the upper wells and proclaimed the most remarkable commodities. Beyond this place they came into a crowded hall, and he discovered the cause of the noise that had perplexed him. They paused a deterrent style at which a payment was made. Graham's attention was immediately arrested by a violent loud hoot followed by a vast leathery noise. The master is sleeping peacefully, with excellent health. He is going to devote the rest of his life to aeronautics. He says women are more beautiful than ever. Gallup, wow! Our wonderful civilization astonishes him beyond measure, beyond all measure. Gallup. He puts great trust in Bas Ostrog, absolute confidence in Bas Ostrog. Ostrog is to be his chief minister. He is authorized to remove or reinstate public officers. All patronage will be in his hands. All patronage in the hands of Bas Ostrog. The counselors have been sent back to their own prison above the council house. Graham stopped at the first sentence and, looking up, beheld a foolish trumpet face from which this was braided. This was the general intelligence machine. For his face it seemed to be gathering breath, and a regular throbbing from its cylindrical body was audible. Then it trumpeted Gallup, Gallup, and broke out again. Paris is now pacified. All resistance is over. Gallup. The black police hold every position of importance in the city. They fight with great bravery, singing songs written in praise of their ancestors by the poet Kipling. Once or twice they got out of hand and tortured and mutilated, wounded and captured in surgeons, men and women. Moral. Don't go rebelling. Ha-ha. Gallup, Gallup. They are lively fellows, lively brave fellows. Let this be the lesson to the disorderly banderlog of the city. Yeah, banderlog, filth of the earth. Gallup, Gallup. There was a confused murmur of disapproval among the crowd. Damned niggers. A man began to hurrah near them. Is this the master's doing, brothers? Is this the master's doing? Black police, said Graham. What is that? You don't mean Asano touched his arm and gave him a warning look. In forthwith, another of these mechanisms screamed deafeningly and gave tongue an assured voice. Yeah, here a live paper yelp. In Paris, yeah-ha-ha. The Parisians exasperated by the black police to the pitch of assassination. Dreadful reprisals, savage times come again. Blood, blood, yeah-ha. The nearer babble machine, hooded stupendously. Gallup, Gallup. Drowned the end of the sentence and proceeded in a rather flatter note than before with novel comments and the horrors of disorder. Law and order must be maintained, said the nearer babble machine. But began Graham. Don't ask questions here, said Asano, in the argument. Then let us go on, said Graham, for I want to know more of this. As he and his companion pushed their way through the excited crowd that swarmed beneath these voices toward the exit, Graham conceived more clearly the proportion and features of this room. Altogether, great and small, there must have been nearly a thousand of these erections, piping, hooting, bawling, and gaveling in that great space, each with its crowd of excited listeners, the majority of the men dressed in blue canvas. And little gossiping mechanisms that chuckled out mechanical sarcasm in odd corners threw a number of grades to such 50-foot giants as that which had first hooded over Graham. This place was unusually crowded because of the intense public interest in the course of affairs in Paris. Evidently, the struggle had been much more savage than Ostrog had represented it. All the mechanisms were discoursing on that topic, and the repetition of the people made the huge hive buzz with such phrases as lynched policemen, women burnt alive, fuzzy-wuzzy, but does the master allow such things, after man near him? Is this the beginning of the master's rule? Is this the beginning of the master's rule? For a long time after he had left the place, the hooting, whistling, and braing of the machines pursued him. Gallup, gallup, yah-ha, yah-ha, yep. Yah-ha, is this the beginning of the master's rule? Directly they were out upon the ways. He began to question Asano closely on the nature of the Parisian struggle. This disarmament, what was their trouble? What does that all mean? Asano seemed chiefly anxious to reassure him that it was all right. But these outrageous. You cannot have an omelet, said Asano, without breaking eggs. It is only the rough people, only in one part of the city. All the rest, it is all right. The Parisian laborers are the wildest in the world, except Aris. What, the Londoners? No, the Japanese. They have to be kept in order. But burning women alive, a commune, said Asano. You are master. The world is yours. But there will be no commune here. There is no need for black police here. And every consideration has been shown. It is their own negroes, French-speaking negroes. Senegal regiments in Niger and Timbuktu. Regiments, said Graham. I thought there was only one. No, said Asano. I glanced at him. There is more than one. Graham felt unpleasantly helpless. I did not think. He began and stopped abruptly. He went off at a tangent to ask for information about these babble machines. For the most part, the crowd present had been shabbily or even raggedly dressed, and Graham learned that so far the more prosperous classes were concerned in all the more comfortable private apartments of the city were fixed babble machines that would speak directly a lever was pulled. The tenant of the apartment could connect this with the cables of any of the great news syndicates that he preferred. When he learned this presently, he demanded the reason of their absence from his own suite of apartments. Asano was embarrassed. I never thought, he said, Ostrog must have had them removed. Graham stared. How was I to know? he exclaimed. Perhaps he thought they would annoy you, said Asano. They must be replaced directly I return, said Graham after an interval. He found a difficulty in understanding that this newsroom and the dining hall were not great central places, that such establishments were repeated almost beyond counting all over the city. But ever and again during the night expedition his ears would pick out from the tumult of the ways the peculiar hooting of the organ of Bas Ostrog, Galupe Galupe, or the thrill Yeha Yeha Yap hear a live paper yelp of its chief rival. Repeated to everywhere were such creaches as the one he now entered. He was reached by a lift and by a glass bridge that flung across the dining hall and traversed the ways at a slight upward angle. To enter the first section of the place necessitated the use of his solvent signature under Asano's discretion. They were immediately attended to by a man in a violet robe and gold cloth the insignia of practicing medical men. He perceived from this man's manner that his identity was known and proceeded to ask questions on the strange arrangements of the place without reserve. On either side of the pathage which was silent and padded as if to dead in the footfall were narrow little doors, their size and arrangement suggestive of the cells of a Victorian prison. But the upper portion of each door was of the same greenish transparent stuff that it enclosed him in his awakening. And within, deemly seen, lay in every case a very young baby in a little nest of wadding. Elaborate apparatus watched the atmosphere and rang a bell far away in their central office at the slightest departure from the optimum of temperature and moisture. A system of such creaches had almost entirely replaced the hazardous adventures of the old world nursing. The attendant presently called grand's attention to the wet nurses, a vista of mechanical figures with armed shoulders and breasts of astonishingly realistic modeling, articulation and texture but mere brass tripods below and having in place of features a flat disc bearing advertisements likely to be of interest to mothers. Of all the strange things that Graham came upon that night none jarred him more upon his habits of thought in this place. The spectacle of the little pink creatures their feeble limbs swaying uncertainly in vague first movements left alone without a brace or endearment was wholly repugnant to him. The attendant doctor was of a different opinion. His statistical evidence sowed beyond dispute that in the Victorian time the most dangerous passage of life with the arms of the mother that there human mortality had ever been most terrible. On the other hand this creche company the international creche syndicate lost not one half percent of the million babies or so that formed its peculiar care but Graham's prejudice was too strong even for those figures. Along one of the many passages of the place they presently came upon a young couple in the usual blue canvas peering through the transparency and laughing hysterically at the bald head of their firstborn. Graham's face must have showed his estimate of them for their merriment ceased and they looked abashed. With this little incident accentuated his sudden realization of the gulf between his habits of thought and the ways of the new age. He passed on to the crawling rooms in the kindergarten for plexed and distressed. He found the endless long play rooms were empty. The latter days children at least still spent their nights in sleep. As they went through these the little officer pointed out the nature of the toys developments of those devised by that inspired sentimentalist Frobel. There were nurses here but much was done by machines that sang and danced and dandled. Graham was still not clear upon many points but so many orphans he said perplexed reverting to a first misconception and learned again that they were not orphans. So soon as they had left the creche he began to speak of the horror that babies in their incubating cases had caused him. His mother had gone, he said. Was it a Kent? Surely it was an instinct. This seemed so unnatural, abominable almost. Along here we shall come to the dancing place, said Asano by way of reply. It is sure to be crowded. In spite of all the political unrest it will be crowded. The women take no great interest in politics except a few here and there. You will see the mothers, most young women in London are mothers. In that class it is considered a credible thing to have one child, a proof of animation. Few middle class people have more than one. With the Labour Department it is different. As for motherhood they still take an immense pride in the children. They come here to look at them quite often. Then do you mean that the population of the world is falling? Yes. Except among the people under the Labour Department. In spite of scientific discipline they are reckless. The air was suddenly dancing with music and down the way the air approached obliquely set with gorgeous pillars as it seemed of clear amethyst, flowed a concourse of gay people in a tumult of merry cries and laughter. He saw curled heads, wreathed brows, and a happy intricate flutter of gamboge past triumphant across the picture. You will see, said Asano with a faint smile, the world has changed. In a moment you will see the mothers of the new age. Come this way. We shall see those yonder again very soon. They ascended to a certain height in a swift lift, and changed to a slower one. As they went on the music grew upon them until it was near and full and splendid and moving with its glorious intricacies they could distinguish the beat of innumerable dancing feet. They made a payment to the turnstile and emerged upon the wide gallery that overlooked the dancing place and upon the full enchantment of sound and light. Here, said Asano, are the fathers and mothers of the little ones you saw. The hall was not so ritually decorated out of the atlas, but saving that, it was for its size the most splendid Graham had seen. The beautiful white-limbed figures that supported the galleries reminded him once more of the restored magnificence of sculpture. They seemed to writhe in engaging attitudes. Their faces laughed. The source of the music that filled the place was hidden, and the whole vast shining floor was thick with dancing couples. Look at them, said the little officer. See how much they show of motherhood. The gallery they stood upon ran along with a huge screen, but cut the dancing hall on one side from a sort of outer hall that showed through broad arches the incessant onward rush of the cityways. In this outer hall was a great crowd of less brilliantly dressed people as numerous almost as those who danced within. The great majority wearing the blue uniform of the labor department that was now so familiar to Grant. Too poor to pass the turnstiles of the festival, they were yet unable to keep away from the sound of its seductions. Some of them even had cleared spaces and were dancing also, fluttering their rags in the air. Some shouted as they danced, jests and odd illusions Grant did not understand. Once someone began whistling the refrain of the revolutionary song, but it seemed as though that beginning was promptly suppressed. The corner was dark and Grant could not see. He turned to the hall again. Above the karyatids were marble busts of men whom that age esteemed great memorial emancipators and pioneers. For the most part their names were strange to Grant, though he recognized great Alan, Lagazian, Nietzsche, Shelley, and Goodwin. Great black festoons and eloquent sentiments reinforced the huge inscription that partially defaced the upper end of the dancing place and asserted that the festival of the awakening was in progress. Myriads are taking holiday or staying from work because of that, quite apart from the laborers who refused to go back, to Desano. These people are always ready for holidays. Grant walked to the parapet and stood leaning over, looking down at the dancers. Save for two or three remote whispering couples who had stolen apart, he and his guide had the gallery to themselves. A warm breath of scent and vitality came up to him. Both men and women below were lightly clad, bare-armed, open-necked, as the universal warmth of the city permitted. The hair of the men was often a mass of effeminate curls. Their chins were always shaven, and many of them had flushed or colored cheeks. Many of the women were very pretty and all were dressed with elaborate cockatry. As they swept by beneath, he saw ecstatic faces with eyes half closed in pleasure. What sort of people are these, he asked abruptly. Workers, prosperous workers, what you would have called the middle class. Independent tradesmen with little separate businesses had vanished long ago, but there are a store service, managers, engineers of a hundred sorts. Tonight is a holiday, of course, and every dancing place in the city will be crowded and every place of worship. But the women, the same. There are a thousand forms of work for women now, but you have the beginning of the independent working women in your days. Most women are independent now. Most of these are married, more or less. There are a number of methods of contracts, and that gives them more money, and enables them to enjoy themselves. I see, said Grant, looking at the flushed faces, the flash and swirl of movement, and still thinking of that nightmare of pink helpless limbs. And these are mothers, most of them. The more I see of these things, the more complex I find your problems. This, for instance, is a surprise. That news from Paris was a surprise. And a little while he spoke again. These are mothers. Presently, I suppose, I shall get into the modern way of seeing things. I have old habits of mine clinging about me, habits based, I suppose, on needs that are over and done with. Of course, in our time, a woman was supposed not only to bear children, but to cherish them, to devote herself to them, to educate them. All the essentials of moral and mental education a child owed its mother, or went without. Quite a number, I admit, went without. Nowadays, clearly, there is no more need for such care than if they were butterflies. I see that. Only there was an ideal, that figure of a grave patient woman, silently and serenely mistress of a home, mother and maker of men. To love her was a sort of worship. He stopped and repeated. A sort of worship. Ideals change, to the little man, as needs change. Graham awoke from an instant referee 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 act, and your necessities of the barbarous state, the life of dangers. Dourness is a man's tribute to unconquered nature. But man has conquered nature now for all practical purposes. His political affairs are managed by bosses of the 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 a 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. We have an institution called euthanasie. Ah, that euthanasie, said Graham, the easy death, the easy death. It is the last pleasure. The euthanasie 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 were the consequence of danger and insecurity. The stoic, the puritan, even in my time, were vanishing types. In the old days the man was armed against pain. Now he is eager for pleasure. There lies the difference. Civilization 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 lent on the ballast rating 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 Isano, one might think differently. I am uncivilized, said Graham, not heeding him. That is the trouble. I am primitive, paleolithic. 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 19th 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. Isano 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 in 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 workplaces 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. Isano led the way along the gallery across the dancing hall. Presently they came to a transverse passage that brought a breath of fresh or colder air. Isano glanced at this passage and passed, 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. 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 through 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 clipped overhead in their stately circle about the pole. He saw these shapes 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 was hidden. To the southwest hung Orion, showing like a pallid ghost through a tracery of ironwork and interlacing shapes above a daftling carcacation 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 a 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 St. Paul's and look once more upon these familiar silent stars. Thence Graham was taken by a son along devious ways to the great gambling and business quarters where the bulk of the fortune in the city were lost and made. It impressed him as a well-nigh interminable series of very high walls 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 color. 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. Gahoot, bonanza. Gullipers, come and hark. The place seemed to him to be dense with people either profoundly agitated or swelling with obscure cunning. Yet he learned 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 babble of white-faced women and redneck leathery-lunged men bought and sold the shares of an absolutely fictitious business undertaking, which, every five minutes, paid a dividend of ten percent and canceled 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, founded at center 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 proprietor. We assure the proprietor. Who's the proprietor? he asked. You. But what did they assure me? he asked. What did they assure me? Didn't you have assurance? Graham thought. Insurance? Yes, insurance. I remember that with the older word. They are insuring your life. Dozens of people are taking out policies, variants of lions are being put on you. And further on, other people are buying annuities. They do that on everybody prominent. Look there. A crowd of people surged in Royd, and Graham saw a vast black screen suddenly illuminated in still larger letters of burning purple. Annuities on the proprietor. X5 per G. The people began to boo and shout at this. A number of hard breathing wild-eyed men came running past, clawing with hooked fingers at the air. There was a furious crush about a little doorway. Osano did a brief inaccurate calculation. 17% per annum is their annuity on you. They would not pay so much percent 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 nor backward. Graham noticed what appeared to him to be a high proportion of women among the spectators, and was reminded again of the economic 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 learned 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 Caldea that he had found favor in her eyes. And then a lank, gree-bearded man, perspiring copiously in a noble passion of self-help, blind to all earthly things, saved that glaring bait thrust between them in a cataclysmal rust toward that alluring X5 per G. I want to get out of this, said Graham Tuassano. 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 into a struggling mass of people. End of Chapter 20 Chapter 21 of The Sleeper Awakes This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Ryan Sutter The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells Chapter 21 The Undercide From the business quarter they presently passed by the running ways into a remote quarter of the city, where the bulk of the manufactures was done. On their way the platform crossed the Thames twice and passed in the broad viaduct across one of the great roads that entered the city from the north. In both cases his impression was swift and in both very vivid. The river was a broad wrinkled glitter of black sea water overarched by buildings and vanishing either way into a blackness starred with receding lights. A string of black barges passed seaward, manned by blue-clad men. The road was a long and very broad and high tunnel along which big-wheeled machines drove noiselessly and swiftly. Here too the distinctive blue of the labor department was in abundance. The smoothness of the double tracks, the largeness and the lightness of the big pneumatic wheels in proportion to the vehicular body struck Graham most vividly. One lank and very high carriage with longitudinal metallic rods hung with the dripping carcasses of many hundred sheep arrested his attention abruptly the edge of the archway cut and blotted out the picture. Presently they left the way and descended by a lift and traversed a passage that sloped downward and so came to a descending lift again. The appearance of things changed. Even the pretense of architectural ornament disappeared. The lights diminished in number and size. The architecture became more and more massive in proportion to the spaces as the factory quarters were reached and the fancy biscuit making place of the potters among the fell spar mills in the furnace rooms of the metal workers among the incandescent lakes of crude edomite the blue canvas clothing was on man woman and child. Many of these great and dusty galleries were silent avenues of machinery. Endless raked out ashen furnaces testified to the revolutionary dislocation but wherever there was work it was being done by working workers in blue canvas. The only people not in blue canvas were the overlookers of the workplaces and the orange clad labour police. And fresh from the flushed faces of the dancing halls the voluntary vigours of the business quarter Graham could note the pinched faces, the feeble muscles and weary eyes of many of the latter day workers. Such as he saw at work were noticeably inferior in physique to the few gaily dressed managers and who were directing their labourers. The burly labourers of the old Victorian times had followed that drae horse and all such living force producers to extinction. The place of his costly muscles was taken by some dexterous machine. The latter day labourer, male as well as female was essentially a machine minder and feeder, a servant and attendant or an artist under direction. The women in comparison with those Graham remembered were as a class distinctly plain and flat-chested. Two hundred years of emancipation from the moral restraints of puritanical religion two hundred years of city life had done their work in eliminating the strain of feminine beauty and vigor from the blue canvas myriads. To be brilliant physically or mentally to be in any way attractive or exceptional had been and was still a certain way of emancipation to the drudge. A line of escape to the pleasure city with its splendors and delights and at last to the euthanasie and peace. To be steadfast against such inducements was scarcely to be expected of meanly nourished souls. In the young cities of Graham's former life the newly aggregated labouring mass had been a diverse multitude still stirred by the tradition of personal honour and a high morality. Now it was differentiating into an distinct class with a moral and physical difference of its own even with a dialect of its own. They penetrated downward ever downward towards the working places. Presently they passed underneath one of the streets of the moving ways and saw its platforms running on their rails far overhead and chinks of white lights between the transverse slits. The factories that were not working were sparsely lighted. To Graham they and their shrouded aisles and machines seemed plunged in gloom and even where work was going on the illumination was far less brilliant than upon the public ways. Beyond the blazing lakes of Edomite he came to the warn of the jewelers and with some difficulty and by using his signature obtained admission to these galleries. They were high and dark and rather cold. In the first a few men were making ornaments of gold filigree each man at a little bench by himself with a little shaded light. The long vista of light patches with the nimble fingers brightly lit and moving among the gleaming yellow coils and the intent face like the face of a ghost in each shadow had the oddest effect. The work was beautifully executed but without any strength of modeling or drawing for the most part intricate grotesques or the ringing of the changes on a geometrical motif these workers were a peculiar white uniform without pockets or sleeves. They assumed this on coming to work but at night they were stripped and examined before they left the premises of the department. In spite of every precaution the labor policemen told them in a depressed tone the department was not infrequently robbed. Beyond was a gallery of women busyed in cutting and setting slabs of artificial ruby and next these were men and women working together upon the slabs of copper net that formed the basis of cloison atiles. Many of these workers had lips and nostrils a livid white due to a disease caused by a peculiar purple enamel that chanced to be much in fashion. Asano apologized to Graham for this offensive sight but excused himself on the score of the convenience of this route. This is what I wanted to see, said Graham. This is what I wanted to see. Trying to avoid a start at a particularly striking disfigurement. She might have done better with herself than that, said Asano. Graham made some indignant comments. But Sire, we simply could not stand that stuff without the purple, said Asano. In your days people could stand such crudities. They were nearer the barbaric by two hundred years. They continued along one of the lower galleries of this cloisonnay factory and came to a little bridge that spanned a vault. Looking over the parapet, Graham saw that beneath was a wharf under yet more tremendous archings than any he had seen. Three barges, smothered in flowery dust, were being unloaded of their cargos of powdered felspar by a multitude of coughing men, each guiding a little truck. The dust filled the place with a choking mist and turned the electric glare yellow. The vague shadows of these workers gesticulated about their feet and rushed to and fro against a long stretch of whitewashed wall. Every now and then one would stop to cough. A shadowy huge mass of masonry rising out of the inky water brought to Graham's mind the thought of the multitude of ways and galleries and lifts that rose floor above floor overhead between him and the sky. The men worked in a silence under the supervision of two of the labor police. Their feet made a hollow thunder on the planks along which they went to and fro. And as he looked at the scene, some hidden voice in the darkness began to sing. That shouted one of the policemen, but the order was disobeyed, and first one and then all the white-stained men who were working there had taken up the beating refrain singing it defiantly, the Song of the Revolt. The feet upon the planks thundered now to the rhythm of the song. Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! The policemen who had shouted glanced at his fellow and Graham saw him shrug his shoulders. He made no further effort to stop the singing. Though they went through these factories and places of toil, seeing many painful and grim things, that walk left on Graham's mind a maze of memories, fluctuating pictures of swathed halls and crowded vaults seen through clouds of dust, of intricate machines, the racing threads of looms, the heavy beat of stamping machinery, the roar and rattle of belt and armature, of ill-lit subterranean aisles and sleeping places, illimitable vistas of pinpoint lights. Here was the smell of tanning, and here the reek of a brewery, and here unprecedented reeks, everywhere were pillars and cross-archings of such a massiveness as Graham had never before seen. Thick titans of greasy shining brickwork crushed beneath the vast weight of that complex city world, even as these anemic millions complexity, and everywhere were pale features, lean limbs, disfigurement and degradation. Once and again, and again a third time, Graham heard the song of the revolt during his long, unpleasant research in these places, and once he saw a confused struggle down a passage and learnt that a number of these serfs had seized their bread before their work was done. Graham was ascending towards the ways again and he saw a number of blue clad children running down a transverse passage and presently perceived the reason of their panic in a company of the labor police armed with clubs trotting towards some unknown disturbance. And then came a remote disorder, but for the most part this remnant that worked worked hopelessly. All the spirit that was left in fallen humanity was above in the streets that night, calling for the master, and valiantly noisily keeping its arms. They emerged from these wanderings and stood blinking in the bright light of the middle passage of the platforms again. They became aware of the remote hooting and yelping of the machines of one of the general intelligence offices and suddenly came men running and along the platforms and about the ways everywhere was a shouting and crying. Then a woman with a face of mute white terror and another who gasped and shrieked as she ran. What has happened now? said Graham, puzzled, for he could not understand their thick speech. Then he heard it in English and perceived that the thing that everyone was shouting that men yelled to one another that women took up screaming that was passing like the first breeze of a thunderstorm chill and sudden through the city was this. Ostrog has ordered the black police to London. The black police are coming from South Africa. The black police, the black police. Osano's face was white and astonished. He hesitated, looked at Graham's face and told him the thing he already knew. But how can they know? asked Osano. Graham heard someone shouting. Stop all work! Stop all work! And a swarthy hunchback ridiculously gay and green and gold came leaping down the platforms towards him. Balling again and again in good English. This is Ostrog's doing. Ostrog the nave. The master is betrayed. His voice was hoarse and a thin foam dropped from his ugly shouting mouth. He yelled an unspeakable horror that the black police had done in Paris and so passed shrieking Ostrog the nave. For a moment Graham stood still. For it had come upon him again that these things were a dream. He looked up at the great cliff of buildings on either side vanishing into blue haze at last above the lights and down to the roaring tears of platforms and the shouting running people who were gesticulating past. The master is betrayed. They cried. The master is betrayed. Suddenly the situation shaped itself in his mind real and urgent. His heart began to beat fast and strong. It has come, he said. I might have known. The hour has come. He thought swiftly. What am I to do? Go back to the council house, said Asano. Why should I not appeal? The people are here. You will lose time. They will doubt if it is you, but they will mass about the council house. There you will find their leaders. Your strength is there with them. Suppose this is only a rumor. It sounds true, said Asano. Let us have the facts, said Graham. Asano shrugged his shoulders. We'd better get towards the council house, he cried. That's where they will swarm. Even now the ruins may be impassable. Graham regarded him doubtfully and followed him. They went up the stepped platforms to the swiftest one. And there, Asano accosted a labourer. The answers to his questions were in the thick vulgar speech. What did he say, asked Graham? He knows little, but he told me that the black police would have arrived here before the people knew had not someone in the wind-vane offices learnt. He said, a girl. Not. He said a girl. He did not know who she was. Who came out from the council house crying aloud and told the men at work among the ruins. And then another thing was shouted. Something that turned in aimless tumult into determinate movements. It came like a wind along the street. To your wards! To your wards! Every man get arms! Every man to his ward! Chapter 21 Recording by Ryan Sutter RyanSutter.net