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

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 Iying 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." I

"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 didn't expect that some day my pigments would
glorify the whole blessed coast of England, from Land's End round again to
the Lizard. Luck comes to a 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