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

less as it proceeded.

He had a revulsion of feeling. These were no pictures, no idealisations,
but photographed realities. He wanted no more of the twenty-second century
Venusberg. He forgot the part played by the model in nineteenth century
art, and gave way to an archaic indignation. He rose, angry and half
ashamed at himself for witnessing this thing even in solitude. He pulled
forward the apparatus, and with some violence sought for a means of
stopping its action. Something snapped. A violet spark stung and convulsed
his arm and the thing was still. When he attempted next day to replace
these Tannhauser cylinders by another pair, he found the apparatus
broken....

He struck out a path oblique to the room and paced to and fro, struggling
with intolerable vast impressions. The things he had derived from the
cylinders and the things he had seen, conflicted, confused him. It seemed
to him the most amazing thing of all that in his thirty years of life he
had never tried to shape a picture of these coming times. "We were making
the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future
we were making. And here it is!"

"What have they got to, what has been done? How do I come into the midst of
it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the
multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the systematised
sensuality of a class of rich men!

He thought of Bellamy, the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so oddly
anticipated this actual experience. But here was no Utopia, no Socialistic
state. He had already seen enough to realise that the ancient antithesis of
luxury, waste and sensuality on the one hand and abject poverty on the
other, still prevailed. He knew enough of the essential factors of life to
understand that correlation. And not only were the buildings of the city
gigantic and the crowds in the street gigantic, but the voices he had heard
in the ways, the uneasiness of Howard, the very atmosphere spoke of
gigantic discontent. What country was he in? Still England it seemed, and
yet strangely "un-English." His mind glanced at the rest of the world, and
saw only an enigmatical veil.

He prowled about his apartment, examining everything as a caged animal
might do. He felt very tired, felt that feverish exhaustion that does not
admit of rest. He listened for long spaces under the ventilator to catch
some distant echo of the tumults he felt must be proceeding in the city.

He began to talk to himself. "Two hundred and three years! " he said to
himself over and over again, laughing stupidly. "Then I am two hundred and
thirty-three years old! The oldest inhabitant. Surely they haven't reversed
the tendency of our time and gone back to the rule of the oldest. My claims
are indisputable. Mumble, mumble. I remember the Bulgarian atrocities as
though it was yesterday. 'Tis a great age! Ha ha!" He was surprised at
first to hear himself laughing, and then laughed again deliberately and