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

tailor standing at his elbow smiling, and holding some palpably new
garments over his arm. The crop-headed boy, by means of one finger, was
impelling the complicated machine towards the lift by which he had arrived.
Graham stared at the completed suit. "You don't mean to say-!"

"Just made," said the tailor. He dropped the garments at the feet of
Graham, walked to the bed on which Graham had so recently been Iying, flung
out the translucent mattress, and turned up the looking glass. As he did so
a furious bell summoned the thickset man to the corner. The man with the
flaxen beard rushed across to him and then hurried out by the archway.

The tailor was assisting Graham into a dark purple combination garment,
stockings, vest, and pants in one, as the thickset man came back from the
corner to meet the man with the flaxen beard returning from the balcony.
They began speaking quickly in an undertone, their bearing had an
unmistakable quality of anxiety. Over the purple under-garment came a I
complex but graceful garment of bluish white, and I Graham was clothed in
the fashion once more and saw himself, sallow-faced, unshaven and shaggy
still, but at least naked no longer, and in some indefinable unprecedented
way graceful.

"I must shave," he said regarding himself in the glass.

"In a moment," said Howard.

The persistent stare ceased. The young man closed his eyes, reopened them,
and with a lean hand extended, advanced on Graham. Then he stopped, with
his hand slowly gesticulating, and looked about him.

"A seat," said Howard impatiently, and in a moment the flaxen-bearded man
had a chair behind Graham. "Sit down, please," said Howard.

Graham hesitated, and in the other hand of the wildeyed man he saw the
glint of steel.

"Don't you understand, Sire?" cried the flaxen-bearded man with hurried
politeness. "He is going to cut your hair."

"Oh!" cried Graham enlightened. "But you called him-

"A capillotomist-precisely ! He is one of the finest artists in the world."

Graham sat down abruptly. The flaxen-bearded man disappeared. The
capillotomist came forward with graceful gestures, examined Graham's ears
and surveyed him, felt the back of his head, and would have sat down again
to regard him but for Howard's audible impatience. Forthwith with rapid
movements and a succession of deftly handled implements he shaved Graham's
chin, clipped his moustache, and cut and arranged his hair. All this he did
without a word, with something of the rapt air of a poet inspired. And as
soon as he had finished Graham was handed a pair of shoes.