THE SLEEPER AWAKES
A Revised Edition of "When the Sleeper Wakes"
H.G. WELLS
1899
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
_When the Sleeper Wakes_, whose title I have now altered to _The Sleeper
Awakes_, was first published as a book in 1899 after a serial appearance
in the _Graphic_ and one or two American and colonial periodicals. It is
one of the most ambitious and least satisfactory of my books, and I have
taken the opportunity afforded by this reprinting to make a number of
excisions and alterations. Like most of my earlier work, it was written
under considerable pressure; there are marks of haste not only in the
writing of the latter part, but in the very construction of the story.
Except for certain streaks of a slovenliness which seems to be an almost
unavoidable defect in me, there is little to be ashamed of in the writing
of the opening portion; but it will be fairly manifest to the critic that
instead of being put aside and thought over through a leisurely
interlude, the ill-conceived latter part was pushed to its end. I was at
that time overworked, and badly in need of a holiday. In addition to
various necessary journalistic tasks, I had in hand another book, _Love
and Mr. Lewisham_, which had taken a very much stronger hold upon my
affections than this present story. My circumstances demanded that one or
other should be finished before I took any rest, and so I wound up the
Sleeper sufficiently to make it a marketable work, hoping to be able to
revise it before the book printers at any rate got hold of it. But
fortune was against me. I came back to England from Italy only to fall
dangerously ill, and I still remember the impotent rage and strain of my
attempt to put some sort of finish to my story of Mr. Lewisham, with my
temperature at a hundred and two. I couldn't endure the thought of
leaving that book a fragment. I did afterwards contrive to save it from
the consequences of that febrile spurt--_Love and Mr. Lewisham_ is indeed
one of my most carefully balanced books--but the Sleeper escaped me.
It is twelve years now since the Sleeper was written, and that young man
of thirty-one is already too remote for me to attempt any very drastic
reconstruction of his work. I have played now merely the part of an
editorial elder brother: cut out relentlessly a number of long tiresome
passages that showed all too plainly the fagged, toiling brain, the heavy
sluggish _driven_ pen, and straightened out certain indecisions at the
end. Except for that, I have done no more than hack here and there at
clumsy phrases and repetitions. The worst thing in the earlier version,
and the thing that rankled most in my mind, was the treatment of the
relations of Helen Wotton and Graham. Haste in art is almost always
vulgarisation, and I slipped into the obvious vulgarity of making what
the newspaper syndicates call a "love interest" out of Helen. There was
even a clumsy intimation that instead of going up in the flying-machine
to fight, Graham might have given in to Ostrog, and married Helen. I have
now removed the suggestion of these uncanny connubialities. Not the
slightest intimation of any sexual interest could in truth have arisen
between these two. They loved and kissed one another, but as a girl and
her heroic grandfather might love, and in a crisis kiss. I have found it
possible, without any very serious disarrangement, to clear all that
objectionable stuff out of the story, and so a little ease my conscience
on the score of this ungainly lapse. I have also, with a few strokes of
the pen, eliminated certain dishonest and regrettable suggestions that
the People beat Ostrog. My Graham dies, as all his kind must die, with no
certainty of either victory or defeat.
Who will win--Ostrog or the People? A thousand years hence that will
still be just the open question we leave to-day.
H.G. WELLS.
CONTENTS
I. INSOMNIA
II. THE TRANCE
III. THE AWAKENING
IV. THE SOUND OF A TUMULT
V. THE MOVING WAYS
VI. THE HALL OF THE ATLAS
VII. IN THE SILENT ROOMS
VIII. THE ROOF SPACES
IX. THE PEOPLE MARCH
X. THE BATTLE OF THE DARKNESS
XI. THE OLD MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING
XII. OSTROG
XIII. THE END OF THE OLD ORDER
XIV. FROM THE CROW'S NEST
XV. PROMINENT PEOPLE
XVI. THE MONOPLANE
XVII. THREE DAYS
XVIII. GRAHAM REMEMBERS
XIX. OSTROG'S POINT OF VIEW
XX. IN THE CITY WAYS
XXI. THE UNDER-SIDE
XXII. THE STRUGGLE IN THE COUNCIL HOUSE
XXIII. GRAHAM SPEAKS HIS WORD
XXIV. WHILE THE AEROPLANES WERE COMING
XXV. THE COMING OF THE AEROPLANES
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
CHAPTER I
INSOMNIA
One afternoon, at low water, Mr. Isbister, a young artist lodging at
Boscastle, walked from that place to the picturesque cove of Pentargen,
desiring to examine the caves there. Halfway down the precipitous path to
the Pentargen beach he came suddenly upon a man sitting in an attitude of
profound distress beneath a projecting mass of rock. The hands of this
man hung limply over his knees, his eyes were red and staring before him,
and his face was wet with tears.
He glanced round at Isbister's footfall. Both men were disconcerted,
Isbister the more so, and, to override the awkwardness of his involuntary
pause, he remarked, with an air of mature conviction, that the weather
was hot for the time of year.
"Very," answered the stranger shortly, hesitated a second, and added in a
colourless tone, "I can't sleep."
Isbister stopped abruptly. "No?" was all he said, but his bearing
conveyed his helpful impulse.
"It may sound incredible," said the stranger, turning weary eyes to
Isbister's face and emphasizing his words with a languid hand, "but I
have had no sleep--no sleep at all for six nights."
"Had advice?"
"Yes. Bad advice for the most part. Drugs. My nervous system.... They are
all very well for the run of people. It's hard to explain. I dare not
take ... sufficiently powerful drugs."
"That makes it difficult," said Isbister.
He stood helplessly in the narrow path, perplexed what to do. Clearly the
man wanted to talk. An idea natural enough under the circumstances,
prompted him to keep the conversation going. "I've never suffered from
sleeplessness myself," he said in a tone of commonplace gossip, "but in
those cases I have known, people have usually found something--"
"I dare make no experiments."
He spoke wearily. He gave a gesture of rejection, and for a space both
men were silent.
"Exercise?" suggested Isbister diffidently, with a glance from his
interlocutor's face of wretchedness to the touring costume he wore.
"That is what I have tried. Unwisely perhaps. I have followed the coast,
day after day--from New Quay. It has only added muscular fatigue to the
mental. The cause of this unrest was overwork--trouble. There was
something--"
He stopped as if from sheer fatigue. He rubbed his forehead with a lean
hand. He resumed speech like one who talks to himself.
"I am a lone wolf, a solitary man, wandering through a world in which I
have no part. I am wifeless--childless--who is it speaks of the childless
as the dead twigs on the tree of life? I am wifeless, childless--I could
find no duty to do. No desire even in my heart. One thing at last I set
myself to do.
"I said, I _will_ do this, and to do it, to overcome the inertia of this
dull body, I resorted to drugs. Great God, I've had enough of drugs! I
don't know if _you_ feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its
exasperating demand of time from the mind--time--life! Live! We only live
in patches. We have to eat, and then comes the dull digestive
complacencies--or irritations. We have to take the air or else our
thoughts grow sluggish, stupid, run into gulfs and blind alleys. A
thousand distractions arise from within and without, and then comes
drowsiness and sleep. Men seem to live for sleep. How little of a man's
day is his own--even at the best! And then come those false friends,
those Thug helpers, the alkaloids that stifle natural fatigue and kill
rest--black coffee, cocaine--"
"I see," said Isbister.
"I did my work," said the sleepless man with a querulous intonation.
"And this is the price?"
"Yes."
For a little while the two remained without speaking.
"You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel--a hunger and
thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a
whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts
leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady--" He paused. "Towards
the gulf."
"You must sleep," said Isbister decisively, and with an air of a remedy
discovered. "Certainly you must sleep."
"My mind is perfectly lucid. It was never clearer. But I know I am
drawing towards the vortex. Presently--"
"Yes?"
"You have seen things go down an eddy? Out of the light of the day, out
of this sweet world of sanity--down--"
"But," expostulated Isbister.
The man threw out a hand towards him, and his eyes were wild, and his
voice suddenly high. "I shall kill myself. If in no other way--at the
foot of yonder dark precipice there, where the waves are green, and the
white surge lifts and falls, and that little thread of water trembles
down. There at any rate is ... sleep."
"That's unreasonable," said Isbister, startled at the man's hysterical
gust of emotion. "Drugs are better than that."
"There at any rate is sleep," repeated the stranger, not heeding him.
Isbister looked at him. "It's not a cert, you know," he remarked.
"There's a cliff like that at Lulworth Cove--as high, anyhow--and a
little girl fell from top to bottom. And lives to-day--sound and well."
"But those rocks there?"
"One might lie on them rather dismally through a cold night, broken bones
grating as one shivered, chill water splashing over you. Eh?"
Their eyes met. "Sorry to upset your ideals," said Isbister with a sense
of devil-may-careish brilliance. "But a suicide over that cliff (or any
cliff for the matter of that), really, as an artist--" He laughed. "It's
so damned amateurish."
"But the other thing," said the sleepless man irritably, "the other
thing. No man can keep sane if night after night--"
"Have you been walking along this coast alone?"
"Yes."
"Silly sort of thing to do. If you'll excuse my saying so. Alone! As you
say; body fag is no cure for brain fag. Who told you to? No wonder;
walking! And the sun on your head, heat, fag, solitude, all the day long,
and then, I suppose, you go to bed and try very hard--eh?"
Isbister stopped short and looked at the sufferer doubtfully.
"Look at these rocks!" cried the seated man with a sudden force of
gesture. "Look at that sea that has shone and quivered there for ever!
See the white spume rush into darkness under that great cliff. And this
blue vault, with the blinding sun pouring from the dome of it. It is your
world. You accept it, you rejoice in it. It warms and supports and
delights you. And for me--"
He turned his head and showed a ghastly face, bloodshot pallid eyes and
bloodless lips. He spoke almost in a whisper. "It is the garment of my
misery. The whole world ... is the garment of my misery."
Isbister looked at all the wild beauty of the sunlit cliffs about them
and back to that face of despair. For a moment he was silent.
He started, and made a gesture of impatient rejection. "You get a
night's sleep," he said, "and you won't see much misery out here. Take
my word for it."
He was quite sure now that this was a providential encounter. Only half
an hour ago he had been feeling horribly bored. Here was employment the
bare thought of which, was righteous self-applause. He took possession
forthwith. The first need of this exhausted being was companionship. He
flung himself down on the steeply sloping turf beside the motionless
seated figure, and threw out a skirmishing line of gossip.
His hearer lapsed into apathy; he stared dismally seaward, and spoke only
in answer to Isbister's direct questions--and not to all of those. But he
made no objection to this benevolent intrusion upon his despair.
He seemed even grateful, and when presently Isbister, feeling that his
unsupported talk was losing vigour, suggested that they should reascend
the steep and return towards Boscastle, alleging the view into Blackapit,
he submitted quietly. Halfway up he began talking to himself, and
abruptly turned a ghastly face on his helper. "What can be happening?" he
asked with a gaunt illustrative hand. "What can be happening? Spin, spin,
spin, spin. It goes round and round, round and round for evermore."
He stood with his hand circling.
"It's all right, old chap," said Isbister with the air of an old friend.
"Don't worry yourself. Trust to me,"
The man dropped his hand and turned again. They went over the brow and to
the headland beyond Penally, with the sleepless man gesticulating ever
and again, and speaking fragmentary things concerning his whirling brain.
At the headland they stood by the seat that looks into the dark mysteries
of Blackapit, and then he sat down. Isbister had resumed his talk
whenever the path had widened sufficiently for them to walk abreast. He
was enlarging upon the complex difficulty of making Boscastle Harbour in
bad weather, when suddenly and quite irrelevantly his companion
interrupted him again.
"My head is not like what it was," he said, gesticulating for want of
expressive phrases. "It's not like what it was. There is a sort of
oppression, a weight. No--not drowsiness, would God it were! It is like
a shadow, a deep shadow falling suddenly and swiftly across something
busy. Spin, spin into the darkness. The tumult of thought, the confusion,
the eddy and eddy. I can't express it. I can hardly keep my mind on
it--steadily enough to tell you."
He stopped feebly.
"Don't trouble, old chap," said Isbister. "I think I can understand. At
any rate, it don't matter very much just at present about telling me,
you know."
The sleepless man thrust his knuckles into his eyes and rubbed them.
Isbister talked for awhile while this rubbing continued, and then he had
a fresh idea. "Come down to my room," he said, "and try a pipe. I can
show you some sketches of this Blackapit. If you'd care?"
The other rose obediently and followed him down the steep.
Several times Isbister heard him stumble as they came down, and his
movements were slow and hesitating. "Come in with me," said
Isbister, "and try some cigarettes and the blessed gift of alcohol.
If you take alcohol?"
The stranger hesitated at the garden gate. He seemed no longer aware of
his actions. "I don't drink," he said slowly, coming up the garden path,
and after a moment's interval repeated absently, "No--I don't drink. It
goes round. Spin, it goes--spin--"
He stumbled at the doorstep and entered the room with the bearing of one
who sees nothing.
Then he sat down heavily in the easy chair, seemed almost to fall into
it. He leant forward with his brows on his hands and became motionless.
Presently he made a faint sound in his throat.
Isbister moved about the room with the nervousness of an inexperienced
host, making little remarks that scarcely required answering. He
crossed the room to his portfolio, placed it on the table and noticed
the mantel clock.
"I don't know if you'd care to have supper with me," he said with an
unlighted cigarette in his hand--his mind troubled with ideas of a
furtive administration of chloral. "Only cold mutton, you know, but
passing sweet. Welsh. And a tart, I believe." He repeated this after
momentary silence.
The seated man made no answer. Isbister stopped, match in hand,
regarding him.
The stillness lengthened. The match went out, the cigarette was put down
unlit. The man was certainly very still. Isbister took up the portfolio,
opened it, put it down, hesitated, seemed about to speak. "Perhaps," he
whispered doubtfully. Presently he glanced at the door and back to the
figure. Then he stole on tiptoe out of the room, glancing at his
companion after each elaborate pace.
He closed the door noiselessly. The house door was standing open, and
he went out beyond the porch, and stood where the monkshood rose at the
corner of the garden bed. From this point he could see the stranger
through the open window, still and dim, sitting head on hand. He had
not moved.
A number of children going along the road stopped and regarded the artist
curiously. A boatman exchanged civilities with him. He felt that possibly
his circumspect attitude and position looked peculiar and unaccountable.
Smoking, perhaps, might seem more natural. He drew pipe and pouch from
his pocket, filled the pipe slowly.
"I wonder," ... he said, with a scarcely perceptible loss of
complacency. "At any rate one must give him a chance." He struck a match
in the virile way, and proceeded to light his pipe.
He heard his landlady behind him, coming with his lamp lit from the
kitchen. He turned, gesticulating with his pipe, and stopped her at the
door of his sitting-room. He had some difficulty in explaining the
situation in whispers, for she did not know he had a visitor. She
retreated again with the lamp, still a little mystified to judge from her
manner, and he resumed his hovering at the corner of the porch, flushed
and less at his ease.
Long after he had smoked out his pipe, and when the bats were abroad,
curiosity dominated his complex hesitations, and he stole back into his
darkling sitting-room. He paused in the doorway. The stranger was still
in the same attitude, dark against the window. Save for the singing of
some sailors aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships in the harbour
the evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of monkshood and
delphinium stood erect and motionless against the shadow of the hillside.
Something flashed into Isbister's mind; he started, and leaning over the
table, listened. An unpleasant suspicion grew stronger; became
conviction. Astonishment seized him and became--dread!
No sound of breathing came from the seated figure!
He crept slowly and noiselessly round the table, pausing twice to listen.
At last he could lay his hand on the back of the armchair. He bent down
until the two heads were ear to ear.
Then he bent still lower to look up at his visitor's face. He started
violently and uttered an exclamation. The eyes were void spaces of white.
He looked again and saw that they were open and with the pupils rolled
under the lids. He was afraid. He took the man by the shoulder and shook
him. "Are you asleep?" he said, with his voice jumping, and again, "Are
you asleep?"
A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was dead. He
became active and noisy, strode across the room, blundering against the
table as he did so, and rang the bell.
"Please bring a light at once," he said in the passage. "There is
something wrong with my friend."
He returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the shoulder, shook
it, shouted. The room was flooded with yellow glare as his landlady
entered with the light. His face was white as he turned blinking towards
her. "I must fetch a doctor," he said. "It is either death or a fit. Is
there a doctor in the village? Where is a doctor to be found?"