Dystopian Novels of H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells
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Graham stood regarding him.
“You must understand,” began Howard abruptly, avoiding Graham’s eyes, “that our social order is very complex. A half explanation, a bare unqualified statement would give you false impressions. As a matter of fact — it is a case of compound interest partly — your small fortune, and the fortune of your cousin Warming which was left to you — and certain other beginnings — have become very considerable. And in other ways that will be hard for you to understand, you have become a person of significance — of very considerable significance — involved in the world’s affairs.”
He stopped.
“Yes?” said Graham.
“We have grave social troubles.”
“Yes?”
“Things have come to such a pass that, in fact, it is advisable to seclude you here.”
“Keep me prisoner!” exclaimed Graham.
“Well — to ask you to keep in seclusion.”
Graham turned on him. “This is strange!” he said.
“No harm will be done you.”
“No harm!”
“But you must be kept here — “
“While I learn my position, I presume.”
“Precisely.”
“Very well then. Begin. Why harm?”
“Not now.”
“Why not?”
“It is too long a story, Sire.”
“All the more reason I should begin at once. You say I am a person of importance. What was that shouting I heard? Why is a great multitude shouting and excited because my trance is over, and who are the men in white in that huge council chamber?”
“All in good time, Sire,” said Howard. “But not crudely, not crudely. This is one of those flimsy times when no man has a settled mind. Your awakening — no one expected your awakening. The Council is consulting.”
“What council?”
“The Council you saw.”
Graham made a petulant movement. “This is not right,” he said. “I should be told what is happening.”
“You must wait. Really you must wait.”
Graham sat down abruptly. “I suppose since I have waited so long to resume life,” he said, “that I must wait a little longer.”
“That is better,” said Howard. “Yes, that is much better. And I must leave you alone. For a space. While I attend the discussion in the Council…. I am sorry.”
He went towards the noiseless door, hesitated and vanished.
Graham walked to the door, tried it, found it securely fastened in some way he never came to understand, turned about, paced the room restlessly, made the circuit of the room, and sat down. He remained sitting for some time with folded arms and knitted brow, biting his finger nails and trying to piece together the kaleidoscopic impressions of this first hour of awakened life; the vast mechanical spaces, the endless series of chambers and passages, the great struggle that roared and splashed through these strange ways, the little group of remote unsympathetic men beneath the colossal Atlas, Howard’s mysterious behaviour. There was an inkling of some vast inheritance already in his mind — a vast inheritance perhaps misapplied — of some unprecedented importance and opportunity. What had he to do? And this room’s secluded silence was eloquent of imprisonment!
It came into Graham’s mind with irresistible conviction that this series of magnificent impressions was a dream. He tried to shut his eyes and succeeded, but that time-honoured device led to no awakening.
Presently he began to touch and examine all the unfamiliar appointments of the two small rooms in which he found himself.
In a long oval panel of mirror he saw himself and stopped astonished. He was clad in a graceful costume of purple and bluish white, with a little greyshot beard trimmed to a point, and his hair, its blackness streaked now with bands of grey, arranged over his forehead in an unfamiliar but pleasing manner. He seemed a man of five-and-forty perhaps. For a moment he did not perceive this was himself.
A flash of laughter came with the recognition. “To call on old Warming like this!” he exclaimed, “and make him take me out to lunch!”
Then he thought of meeting first one and then another of the few familiar acquaintances of his early manhood, and in the midst of his amusement realised that every soul with whom he might jest had died many score of years ago. The thought smote him abruptly and keenly; he stopped short, the expression of his face changed to a white consternation.
The tumultuous memory of the moving platforms and the huge façade of that wonderful street reasserted itself. The shouting multitudes came back clear and vivid, and those remote, inaudible, unfriendly councillors in white. He felt himself a little figure, very small and ineffectual, pitifully conspicuous. And all about him, the world was — strange.
Chapter VII.
In the Silent Rooms
Presently Graham resumed his examination of his apartments. Curiosity kept him moving in spite of his fatigue. The inner room, he perceived, was high, and its ceiling dome shaped, with an oblong aperture in the centre, opening into a funnel in which a wheel of broad vanes seemed to be rotating, apparently driving the air up the shaft. The faint humming note of its easy motion was the only clear sound in that quiet place. As these vanes sprang up one after the other, Graham could get transient glimpses of the sky. He was surprised to see a star.
This drew his attention to the fact that the bright lighting of these rooms was due to a multitude of very faint glow lamps set about the cornices. There were no windows. And he began to recall that along all the vast chambers and passages he had traversed with Howard he had observed no windows at all. Had there been windows? There were windows on the street indeed, but were they for light? Or was the whole city lit day and night for evermore, so that there was no night there?
And another thing dawned upon him. There was no fireplace in either room. Was the season summer, and were these merely summer apartments, or was the whole city uniformly heated or cooled? He became interested in these questions, began examining the smooth texture of the walls, the simply constructed bed, the ingenious arrangements by which the labour of bedroom service was practically abolished. And over everything was a curious absence of deliberate ornament, a bare grace of form and colour, that he found very pleasing to the eye. There were several very comfortable chairs, a light table on silent runners carrying several bottles of fluids and glasses, and two plates bearing a clear substance like jelly. Then he noticed there were no books, no newspapers, no writing materials. “The world has changed indeed,” he said.
He observed one entire side of the outer room was set with rows of peculiar double cylinders inscribed with green lettering on white that harmonized with the decorative scheme of the room, and in the centre of this side projected a little apparatus about a yard square and having a white smooth face to the room. A chair faced this. He had a transitory idea that these cylinders might be books, or a modern substitute for books, but at first it did not seem so.
The lettering on the cylinders puzzled him. At first sight it seemed like Russian. Then he noticed a suggestion of mutilated English about certain of the words.
“Thi Man huwdbi Kin” forced itself on him as “The Man who would be King.”
“Phonetic spelling,” he said. He remembered reading a story with that title, then he recalled the story vividly, one of the best stories in the world. But this thing before him was not a book as he understood