When the Sleeper Wakes | Page 4

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 suddenly afraid. Overcome by the strangeness of
the man's condition, he took him by the shoulder and shook him. "Are
you asleep?" he said, with his voice jumping into alto, and again, "Are
you asleep?"
A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was dead. He
suddenly 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."
Then he returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the shoulder,
shook it, and shouted. The room was flooded with yellow glare as his
astonished landlady entered with the light. His face was white as he
turned blinking towards her. "I must fetch a doctor at once," he said. "It
is either death or a fit. Is there a doctor in the village? Where is a doctor
to be found?"
CHAPTER II
THE TRANCE
The state of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted for
an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the
flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it
was his eyes could be closed.
He was removed from the hotel to the Boscastle surgery, and from the
surgery, after some weeks, to London. But he still resisted every

attempt at reanimation. After a time, for reasons that will appear later,
these attempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in that
strange condition, inert and still neither dead nor living but, as it were,
suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence. His
was a darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a dreamless
inanition, a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had swelled
and risen to an abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man? Where is
any man when insensibility takes hold of him?
"It seems only yesterday," said Isbister. "I remember it all as though it
happened yesterday -- clearer perhaps, than if it had happened
yesterday."
It was the Isbister of the last chapter, but he was no longer a young man.
The hair that had been brown and a trifle in excess of the fashionable
length, was iron grey and clipped close, and the face that had been pink
and white was buff and ruddy. He had a pointed beard shot with grey.
He talked to an elderly man who wore a summer suit of drill (the
summer of that year was unusually hot). This was Warming, a London
solicitor and next of kin to Graham, the man who had fallen into the
trance. And the two men stood side by side in a room in a house in
London regarding his recumbent figure.
It was a yellow figure lying lax upon a water-bed and clad in a flowing
shirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean limbs and
lank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This glass seemed to
mark off the sleeper from the reality of life about him, he was a thing
apart, a strange, isolated abnormality. The two men stood close to the
glass, peering in.
"The thing gave me a shock," said Isbister "I feel a queer sort of
surprise even now when I think of his white eyes. They were white, you
know, rolled up. Coming here again brings it all back to me.
"Have you never seen him since that time?" asked Warming.
"Often wanted to come," said Isbister; "but business nowadays is too
serious a thing for much holiday keeping. I've been in America most of

the time."
"If I remember rightly," said Warming, "you were an artist?"
"Was. And then I became a married man. I saw it was all up with black
and white, very soon -- at least for a mediocre man, and I jumped on to
process. Those posters on the Cliffs at Dover are by my people."
"Good posters," admitted the solicitor, "though I was sorry to see them
there."
"Last as long as the cliffs, if necessary," exclaimed Isbister with
satisfaction. "The world changes. When he fell asleep, twenty years ago,
I was down at Boscastle with a box of water-colours and a noble,
old-fashioned ambition. I