The Sleeper Awakes | Page 6

man very often when he's
not looking."
Warming seemed to doubt the quality of the luck. "I just missed seeing
you, if I recollect aright."
"You came back by the trap that took me to Camelford railway station.
It was close on the Jubilee, Victoria's Jubilee, because I remember the
seats and flags in Westminster, and the row with the cabman at
Chelsea."
"The Diamond Jubilee, it was," said Warming; "the second one."
"Ah, yes! At the proper Jubilee--the Fifty Year affair--I was down at
Wookey--a boy. I missed all that.... What a fuss we had with him! My
landlady wouldn't take him in, wouldn't let him stay--he looked so
queer when he was rigid. We had to carry him in a chair up to the hotel.
And the Boscastle doctor--it wasn't the present chap, but the G.P.
before him--was at him until nearly two, with me and the landlord
holding lights and so forth."
"Do you mean--he was stiff and hard?"
"Stiff!--wherever you bent him he stuck. You might have stood him on
his head and he'd have stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course
this"--he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his head--"is
quite different. And the little doctor--what was his name?"
"Smithers?"
"Smithers it was--was quite wrong in trying to fetch him round too

soon, according to all accounts. The things he did! Even now it makes
me feel all--ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those beastly
little things, not dynamos--"
"Coils."
"Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about.
There were just two flaring yellow candles, and all the shadows were
shivering, and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and
him--stark and squirming in the most unnatural ways. Well, it made me
dream."
Pause.
"It's a strange state," said Warming.
"It's a sort of complete absence," said Isbister. "Here's the body, empty.
Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It's like a seat vacant and marked
'engaged.' No feeling, no digestion, no beating of the heart--not a flutter.
That doesn't make me feel as if there was a man present. In a sense it's
more dead than death, for these doctors tell me that even the hair has
stopped growing. Now with the proper dead, the hair will go on
growing--"
"I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.
They peered through the glass again. Graham was indeed in a strange
state, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in
medical history. Trances had lasted for as much as a year before--but at
the end of that time it had ever been a waking or a death; sometimes
first one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had
made in injecting nourishment, for that had been resorted to to
postpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been
trying not to see them.
"And while he has been lying here," said Isbister, with the zest of a life
freely spent, "I have changed my plans in life; married, raised a family,
my eldest lad--I hadn't begun to think of sons then--is an American

citizen, and looking forward to leaving Harvard. There's a touch of grey
in my hair. And this man, not a day older nor wiser (practically) than I
was in my downy days. It's curious to think of."
Warming turned. "And I have grown old too. I played cricket with him
when I was still only a boy. And he looks a young man still. Yellow
perhaps. But that is a young man nevertheless."
"And there's been the War," said Isbister.
"From beginning to end."
"And these Martians."
"I've understood," said Isbister after a pause, "that he had some
moderate property of his own?"
"That is so," said Warming. He coughed primly. "As it happens--I have
charge of it."
"Ah!" Isbister thought, hesitated and spoke: "No doubt--his keep here is
not expensive--no doubt it will have improved--accumulated?"
"It has. He will wake up very much better off--if he wakes--than when
he slept."
"As a business man," said Isbister, "that thought has naturally been in
my mind. I have, indeed, sometimes thought that, speaking
commercially, of course, this sleep may be a very good thing for him.
That he knows what he is about, so to speak, in being insensible so long.
If he had lived straight on--"
"I doubt if he would have premeditated as much," said Warming. "He
was not a far-sighted man. In fact--"
"Yes?"
"We differed on that point. I stood to him somewhat in the relation of a
guardian. You have probably seen enough of affairs to recognise that

occasionally a certain friction--. But even if that was the case, there is a
doubt whether he will ever