"Herbert George Wells. When the Sleeper Wakes" - читать интересную книгу автора

him."

"If he wakes."

"If he wakes," echoed Isbister. "Do you notice the pinched-ill look of his
nose, and the way in which his eyelids sink?"

Warming looked and thought for a space. "I doubt if he will wake," he said
at last.

"I never properly understood," said Isbister, "what it was brought this on.
He told me something about overstudy. I've often been curious."

"He was a man of considerable gifts, but spasmodic, emotional. He had grave
domestic troubles, divorced his wife, in fact, and it was as a relief from
that, I think, that he took up politics of the rabid sort. He was a
fanatical Radical-a Socialist-or typical Liberal, as they used to call
themselves,-of the advanced school. Energetic-flighty-undisciplined.
Overwork upon a controversy did this for him. I remember the pamphlet he
wrote-a curious production. Wild, whirling stuff. There were one or two
prophecies. Some of them are already exploded, some of them are established
facts. But for the most part to read such a thesis is to realise how full
the world is of unanticipated things. He will have much to learn, much to
unlearn, when he wakes. If ever a waking comes."

"I'd give anything to be there," said Isbister, "just to hear what he would
say to it all."

"So would I," said Warming. "Aye! so would I," with an old man's sudden
turn to self pity. "But I shall never see him wake."

He stood looking thoughtfully at the waxen figure. "He will never wake," he
said at last. He sighed "He will never wake again."

CHAPTER III

THE AWAKENING

But Warming was wrong in that. An awakening came.

What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity-the self! Who
can trace its reintegration as morning after morning we awaken, the flux
and confluence of its countless factors intenveaving, rebuilding, the dim
first stirrings of the soul, the growth and synthesis of the unconscious to
the subconscious, the sub-conscious to dawning consciousness, until at last
we recognise ourselves again. And as it happens to most of us after the
night's sleep, so it was with Graham at the end of his vast slumber. A dim
cloud of sensation taking shape, a cloudy dreariness, and he found himself
vaguely somewhere, recumbent, faint, but alive.