CHAPTER III - IN THE CELLAR
I have heard patients, emerging from the
chloroform swoon, describe how, before awakening, they had seemed to view
themselves lying unconscious upon their beds, detailing the posture of their
motionless bodies and inert limbs. In this way, now, I seemed to see myself.
I am sure that was no dream of the vague
borderland between death and life. I saw the pallid face, so shrunken that the
skin clung to the edged bones, and the dry hair, the pinched lips and waxen
hands. I saw myself as if from some non-spatial point, and with singular
indifference, except that one fragment of knowledge, detached from my serene
omniscience, troubled me. I had to return within that physical envelope; and
behind me lay dim memories, quite untranslatable, but ineffably rapturous,
which made that projected incarnation an event of dread.
Vague images of earthly things began to float
upward out of the dark, as it were, symbols of physical life whose meaning
remained obscure. I pictured a spring-board, on which a swimmer stood poised,
waiting to dive into the sea and set the plank behind him quivering, and a large
roll of some material, like a carpet, blocking a cellar door.
Gradually, through an alternation of dreams and
blankness, I began to be aware of the parched and withered body that cloaked
me. The point of consciousness had shrunk within its earthly envelope. Soon it
diffused itself throughout my members. Now I could translate my symbols into
ideas. That coiled-up substance that blocked the door was my tongue, fallen
back into the throat. And the spring-board on which the swimmer stood—that was
my heart, waiting to beat. And unless and until the swimmer—I—made that plunge
into life’s ocean, it could not. Slowly the need of physical resurrection urged
me onward.
A thousand darts were stabbing in my flesh, like
purgatorial fire. No motor nerve had yet awakened, but the capillaries,
opening, pricked me like red-hot needles. Faint memories of the past flashed
through my mind, and, though I recalled no intervening period, I was sensible
that those events had happened infinitely long before.
Suddenly I plunged. I felt as if a sword had
pierced my body. I felt the waters of that living ocean close over my face, and
gasped. I breathed. Simultaneously, with a loud click, the cap of the cylinder
flew off, air rushed in, a stabbing light broke through my closed eyelids; I
fainted.
It was, of course, the gradual unscrewing of the
cylinder cap as the mechanism ran down, and the consequent admission of minute
quantities of oxygen, that had begun to restore me. I must have passed several
days in semi-consciousness before the cylinder opened. When the last thread of
the screw was traversed, the inrush of air caused the respiration to begin.
I was breathing when I became conscious once more,
and my heart was straining in my breast. I got my eyes open. There followed hours
of light-tortured delirium, during which I struggled to regain the motor
powers. With infinite endeavor I placed one hand upon the other and passed it
up the wrist and forearm. The muscles were all gone. The ulna and radius were
perfectly distinguishable, and I could encircle either with my fingers, after I
had managed to flex them. I noticed that my joints creaked like rusty hinges.
I tried to bend my elbows, and this next grim
battle lasted an incalculable time. Gradually I became aware of some obstacle
on each side of me. Then, for the first time since my awakening, I knew that I
was inside the cylinder. But I did not know that it had fallen upon its side
until it slid forward, and my puny struggles dislodged me and flung me free
into a pool of water. I drew in a deep breath, feeling my lungs crackle like
old parchment, and plunged my face and shoulders beneath the surface. My skin
sucked up the moisture like a sponge, and I contrived to get a few drops past
my swollen tongue. I had just sense enough and time to turn my face upward
before I became unconscious again.
I must have slept long, for, on my next awakening,
the light was brighter and still more torturing. Memory began to stir. I
recalled my conversation with Sir Spofforth, our journey into the annex,
Lazaroff’s invitation to me to enter the cylinder. He must have shut me in for
a moment by way of a practical joke, and gone away with Esther, persuading
himself and her that I could free myself and would follow. I tried to call him.
But only a croaking gasp came from my lips. I tried again and again, gradually
regaining the power of vocal utterance. But there came no answer, and each time
that I called, the echoing, hoarse susurrus brought me nearer to the
realization of some terror at hand which I did not dare to face.
I looked about me. Beside me lay the cylinder,
almost buried in mud. I was still within the secret vault, but a part of the
brick partition had fallen inward in such a way as to screen the few visible
inches of the steel case that had housed me, so that nobody would have
suspected its presence in the mud of the little chamber. I remembered that
there had been two more; I looked about me, but there was no sign of them.
Now I began to realize that there had been a
considerable change in my surroundings since I became unconscious. The light
which had distressed me came through a hole in the roof of the adjoining
cellar, filtering thence through the aperture in the broken wall, and was of
the dimmest. In place of the concrete floor there was a swamp of mud, with
pools of water here and there, and the dirt was heaped up in the corners and
against the walls. Moss and splotched fungi grew among the tumbled bricks, and
everywhere were spore stains and microscopic plant growth.
I was bewildered by these signs of dilapidation
everywhere. The guinea-pigs and monkeys were gone; the cellar was empty, save
for some low, rough planks of wood fitted on trestles and set about the floor.
On the wall at the far end hung something that gradually took form as I
strained my aching eyes to a focus.
It was a crucifix. The cellar had become a
subterranean chapel. The cross was hewn coarsely of pine, and the figure that
hung upon it grotesquely carven; yet there was the pathos of wistful, ignorant
effort in the workmanship that bespoke the sincerity of the artist.
I made my difficult way toward the stairs
I made my difficult way upon hands and knees
through the gap in the wall, across the mud floor of the cellar, toward the
stairs, resting several times from weariness before I reached my destination.
But when I arrived at the far end, where the stairs should have been, I
received a shock that totally unnerved me. The stairs were gone. In place of
them was a debris of rubble and broken stones, as firmly set as if workmen had
built it into the wall. The mass must have been there for years, because, out
of the thin soil that had drifted in, a little oak tree sprang, twisting its
spindling stem to rear its crown toward the patch of daylight.
At last I understood. I had come to realize the
fact that my sleep had been a prolonged one; it might have lasted weeks—even
months, I had thought, as with cataleptics; but an entire century! that idea
had been too incredibly grotesque for consideration. That Sir Spofforth, with
whom, it seemed, I had dined almost yesterday, had gone, ages ago, to his long
home; Lazaroff; Esther, whom I loved; that generations had come into birth and
died ... it seemed too cruel a jest. I wept. I raved and called for Esther.
Surely a hundred years had never passed, turning her brown hair to gray, lining
her gentle face, bringing at last the gift of death to her, while I lay
underground, encased in steel and air!
I cried aloud in terror. I hammered helplessly upon
the walls. Again I called Esther, Lazaroff, George. There was no answer of any
kind.
Presently a ray of light quivered through the
hole, falling upon the heap of debris that blocked the stairway. The yellow
beam moved onward, and now it bathed the thin branches of the little twisted
tree that, by the aid of those few minutes of sunlight daily, had ventured into
life. It had grown cunningly sidewise, so as to expose the maximum of wood to
the light. I watched the ray till it went out; I wanted to show the plant to
Lazaroff, to ask him whether the mechanics of heliotropism could suffice to answer
the problem of the tree’s brainless consciousness; and my chagrin that this
whim could not be fulfilled assumed an absurd significance. It was, in fact,
the realization of this loss of responsiveness to the reality of the situation
that constantly urged me to find some way of escape when I might have relapsed
otherwise into an acquiescence which would have brought insanity and death.
The stairs being gone, I turned my consideration
to the cellar roof. To reach this it would be necessary to drag one of the
planks beneath the hole and scramble up, clinging to the sides with my fingers
and bracing my feet against the wall. This feat was not a difficult one for a
normal man, but for me clearly impossible. I must wait until I became stronger.
It is a strange thing, but I had not associated
the need of waiting with the idea of food until I found the box of biscuit. I
stumbled upon the box by the accident of scratching my wrist against the edge
as I crawled along the wall. I saw the corner projecting from a mound of earth,
and, scraping some of the dirt away, I lifted the pine-wood lid.
Inside the box I found a quantity of biscuit which
seemed to have been baked recently. It was crisp, and too hard for me to break.
I dipped a piece in the stagnant water, and, as I swallowed the first morsels,
became aware of my ravenous hunger.
I can hardly estimate the duration of the
imprisonment that followed. It was of days and nights which succeeded each the
other in monotonous succession, during which, like a hibernating beast, I
crouched and groped within the cellar, dozing and shivering, and gnawing
incessantly at my food. Only those few minutes of sunshine daily saved my
reason, I am convinced now. My evening clothes, which at first had appeared to
have suffered no injury during my century of sleep, had begun to disintegrate,
and hung upon me in tattered fragments. It was a period of despair, with very
little alternating hope. Sometimes I prayed wildly beneath the crucifix,
sometimes, in an access of madness, I cried for Esther and Lazaroff again. And
for whole hours I convinced myself that this was a dream.
But my strength returned with amazing swiftness.
As in the case of a typhoid convalescent, every particle of food seemed to
build up my body. I must have put on pounds each day. The barrel framework of
my ribs filled out, the muscles showed their old outlines beneath the skin, the
fluid rushed into the joints and restored their suppleness. And daily I
practiced exercises. I managed to drag one of the benches beneath the hole at
last, and, standing on this, tried often to draw myself up; but on each
occasion my struggles only brought down a shower of earth and stones, and I
resigned myself to a period of further waiting, watching for dawn like a
troglodyte, and for the sun like a fire-worshiper.
In the end my escape developed in a manner the
least imaginable. It began with my discovery of a second box in another of the
mounds. I opened it hastily, in the greedy anticipation of finding something
more palatable than biscuit.
Instead of this I found a number of strange batons
of wood. They resembled policemen’s truncheons, but each had a tiny rounded
plate of glass near the head, and there evidently was some sort of mechanism
near the handle, for there was a push-button, fitted with a heavy guard of
brass, so strong that I could not raise it with my fingers. It was indeed
providential that I was unable to do so.
I carried the strange implement beneath the hole in
the roof and laid it on the bench, intending to examine it more carefully as
soon as the sun appeared. Meanwhile, this being the time for my daily exercise,
I mounted the bench and tried to pull myself up. I failed; yet I detected a
considerable improvement in my muscular power, and, becoming exhausted, I prepared
to descend. Inadvertently, but without anticipating any serious result, I
placed my foot against the truncheon in such a way as to elevate the guard.
I heard it click as it rose into position, and, in
setting down my foot again, depressed the push-button.
The truncheon tipped to the ground, pointing
upward. I saw a ray of blinding light, of intense whiteness tipped with mauve,
shoot from the head, and, with a crash, a shower of stones fell on me, bearing
me to the ground and enveloping me in a cloud of dust.
I must have lain half stunned for some minutes. I
was aroused by feeling the sunlight on my eyelids. I started to my feet. The
hole in the roof was nearly twice the former size, and a heap of fallen stones
and pieces of brick afforded me a perfect stepway. I was scratched by the
falling debris, but happily the explosion, as I deemed it, seemed to have been
in an upward direction.
In a moment I was scrambling up the stones. I
slipped and clutched and struggled; I got my head and shoulders in the air and
pulled my body after me; I trod upon leaves; I looked about me.
I was standing in the midst of what appeared to be
an ancient forest of oak and beech trees, whose bare boughs, covered with snow,
shook under a gray sky above a carpet of withered, snow-spread leaves, and
under these were endless heaps of disintegrating bricks. In vain I looked about
me for the Institute. There was no sign of it, nor of Sir Spofforth’s house.
Nowhere was anything to be seen but the same forest growth, the dead leaves scurrying
before the chill wind, and the vast brick piles. I had emerged from the cellar
into a trackless wilderness.
And now at last my final doubt, which had bred
hope, was gone. I ran through the forest, on and on, shouting like a madman and
beating my breast, stumbling over the brick heaps that lay everywhere, plunging
through thorny undergrowth, heedless of any course. I must have been running
for ten minutes when my strength failed me, and I collapsed beside an ancient
road, overgrown with shrubs and saplings, yet discernible in its course between
the tall trees that bordered it. Before me, far away through the vista line, I
saw a white bank against the gray horizon.
I flung myself upon my face and prayed, with all
my will, to die.
CHAPTER IV - THE ROAD TO LONDON
A shadow swept over me, and, looking up, I saw an
airplane gliding noiselessly above; it stopped, hung poised and motionless, and
then dropped slowly and almost vertically into the road, coming to ground
within a dozen yards of where I lay.
There stepped out a man in a uniform of pale blue,
having insewn upon the breast a piece of white linen, cut to the shape of a
swan. He came toward me with hesitancy, and stood over me, staring at me and at
my clothes with an expression indicative of the greatest bewilderment.
“Where’s your brass, friend?” he inquired after a
few moments, speaking in a high-pitched, monotonous, and rather nasal tone. He
rubbed his smooth-shaven face in thought. “Where’s your brass?” he repeated.
I perceived that he wore about his neck a twisted
cord whose ends were tied through the loop of a brass plate, stamped with
letters and figures.
“For God’s sake tell me what year this is!” I
cried.
At the profane expletive, which had been drawn
from me by my anguish, he recoiled in dismay; he seemed less shocked than
frightened; he glanced about him quickly, and then cast a very searching look at
me. But next he began to smile in a half-humorous, kindly way.
“You’re one of the escaped defectives, aren’t
you?” he inquired. “You have nothing to fear from me, friend. We airplane
scouts have no love for the Guard. You can go on your way. But where are you
lying up? Are your friends near?”
“Will you tell me what year this is?” I demanded
frantically.
“Yap, certainly,” he answered. “This is
Thirty-seven, Cold Solstice less five.” He shook his head and began staring at
me again.
I laughed hysterically. “I don’t know what that
jargon means,” I answered, “but I went to sleep in the vault of the Biological
Institute in the year 1915.”
Perplexity had succeeded alarm. The airscout shook
his head again. He was one of those deliberate, slow-moving men whose
resolutions, tardily made, harden to inflexibility; I recognized the type and
found the individual pleasing. He was a good-looking young fellow of about
eight and twenty, with straight, dark hair and a very frank countenance. He
looked like a sailor, and the rolling, open collar, which fell back, sailor
fashion, revealed a muscular throat, tanned, like his face, to the color of the
bricks around us.
“I don’t know what to make of you,” he said
thoughtfully. “I don’t want to trap you, but you were better off in the art
factories. I don’t know what to do with you.”
I sprang to my feet, and for an instant I ceased
to realize my predicament. “Will you take me to my friends in London?” I asked.
In my mind was the memory of a university acquaintance who lived in St. John’s
Wood. But then the swift remembrance came back to me, and I hung my head and
groaned.
“Back to London!” exclaimed the airscout. “But
you’ll be put to the leather vats. Doctor Sanson is furious, and the police are
searching for you everywhere. You’re crazed! What’s the sense of running away
from painting pictures and going back to sweat ten years over the hides?”
“Take me to London!” I implored. “I have nowhere
to go. Perhaps—I don’t know—”
I was hoping wildly that somebody whom I had known
might still survive. But by this time I was beginning to pull myself together.
I resolved to wait for his decision.
“Now, friend,” he said, as if he had made up his
mind, “your top got stuffed making those factory pictures, as was very natural.
Now, I think you had better go back to London, and I’ll take you there, since
your friends have shaken you. But of course it must be the police station. I
can’t risk my own liberty. Once more, are you sure you want to go? If not, I
haven’t seen you.”
“I’ll go,” I answered indifferently.
“Yap? Step in, then!”
I took my seat beside him. It will seem
incredible, but I had never ridden in an airplane before. In my other days only
a few had seen these craft. It was hardly more than six years since the Wrights
had flown when my long sleep began. In spite of my oppression of mind, or
perhaps because the days of horror that I had spent in the cellar produced the
unavoidable reaction, I began to feel the exhilaration of the flight as we
ascended to a height of perhaps a thousand feet and drove northward. The
sensation was that of sitting still and seeing the trees flit by beneath me,
and would have been pleasing but for the intense cold, which pierced through my
rags and numbed me. I perceived that the airplane was under perfect control,
and could be stayed without falling. After a while I realized that there was no
motor.
My companion saw me looking at the machine.
“Improved solar type,” he said, patting her caressingly. “Better than a bird,
isn’t she?” He turned toward me. “You’ve been sleeping in the wood these three
days?” he asked. “And find the factories best? I don’t score you for that.
Where’s the rest of you? Five, weren’t there? Why didn’t you keep together?
Where’s that bishop of yours?”
But, seeing that he could elicit no comprehensible
answer to his repeated questions—in truth, I did not know how to reply—he
relapsed into an equal silence. And now the white bank that I had seen on the
horizon began to assume crenellations, which in turn became buildings of immense
height and symmetrical aspect. And I forgot my situation in admiration and
amazement at the panorama that began to unfold beneath us.
The county of Surrey appeared to be an extensive
forest, ending about a waste of dismantled brick, the suburbs of old London,
which extended on each side as far as I could see. Then the modern town began:
an outer ring of what I took to be enormous factories and storage warehouses;
an inner ring, no doubt, of residences; and then the nucleus, the most splendid
city that the imagination could have devised.
London seemed to be smaller than the metropolis of
a century ago. I could see from the height of Hampstead, in the north, to the
region of Dulwich, and from Woolwich to Acton, all clearly defined, like a
great map unrolled beneath me, though I could recognize none of the old
landmarks, save the unchanging Thames. The interior city was laid out in
squares, huge buildings, sometimes enclosing interior courts, occupying the
blocks formed by the parallel and intersecting streets. As we drove inward from
the outskirts, the buildings became higher, but always uniformly so, the city
thus presenting the aspect of a succession of gigantic steps, until the summit,
the square mile comprising the heart, was reached.
This consisted of an array of enormous edifices,
with fronts perfectly plain, and evidently constructed of brick-faced
steel-work, but all glistening a dazzling white, which, even at that height,
made my eyes water, and rising uniformly some forty-five or fifty stories. The
flat roofs were occupied by gardens or what I took to be gymnasia, sheltered
beneath tarpaulins. I saw innumerable airplanes at rest, suspended high above
the streets, while others flitted here and there above the roofs, and a whole
fleet lay, as if moored, some distance away, apparently over the center of the
city, above a singular building, which awakened associations in my mind, though
I was unable to name it.
It had a round dome, being, in fact, the only
domed building that I could see. This covered only the central portion of the
enormous architectural mass, and appeared to float in the air above an aerial
garden, laid out with walks that radiated from a flat building, which filled
the space between the floating dome and the roof beneath it. I surmised that
this must be the new House of Parliament. The entire mass was surrounded by a
double wall, with a roofed space of perhaps ninety feet from rear to front, castellated.
Mounted on this were what appeared to be a number of large, conical-shaped
implements, of great size. Long, graceful bridges on arches connected this wall
with the domed building; and wall and building glistened from top to base so
brilliantly that the glow seared my eyes like sunlight.
As we were now flying at a low altitude, I turned
my attention to the streets, which appeared like canyons far beneath. Along
these swarmed a multitude of travelers, dressed in two colors only, white and
blue, the latter vastly predominating. I could see no vehicles, and I imagined,
what proved to be correct, that the streets themselves were moving. Most of
those journeying seemed content to lean back against the railings, the lowest
bars of which projected, forming a continuous seat, and rest. Nearly all the
streets were traveling in the same direction, those that reversed this movement
being small and comparatively empty. From the presence of what seemed to be
iron stanchions, set along the edges of these moving ways, I surmised that they
were roofed with crystal.
Along the front of the buildings ran single
tracks, connecting at regular intervals with the streets beneath by means of
elevators, which shot up and down continuously, bearing their freight. These
tracks were placed above each other at ten-story intervals, so that there were
three or four rows of these aerial streets, ranging from the ground to the
upper portions of the buildings, all filled with travelers. The buildings, each
comprising an entire block, the elevated streets, with their graceful bridges
flung forth across the chasms, the absence of any of the old poverty and dirt,
and that huge gathering of human beings, going about their business in so
systematic a fashion, fascinated me, and even aroused my enthusiasm.
Signs evidently indicated to persons approaching
in airships the purpose of each building and landing-stage, but these were in
characters entirely unintelligible to me.
My companion stayed the vessel in the air and
tapped me on the arm. I started, to see him regarding me with the same
expression of humorous perplexity.
“I must put you off here, friend,” he said. “I
think I have done the best I could for you. You would have died in the forest,
while here—well, there’s a chance for you. And it’s better to go to the leather
vats for a few years than to die and go nowhere. I’ll know you if we meet
again. What’s your name?”
“Arnold Pennell,” I answered, clasping the hand
that he held out to me.
He almost jumped. “Don’t tell that to the Council,
unless you want the Rest Cure,” he said.
“Don’t tell them my name?”
“Not both names, friend. You know what I mean. If
you don’t know—” He shrugged his shoulders. “Mine’s Jones,” he said. “My
father’s was Williams. My grandfather’s was Jones again. They say it’s one of
our oldest names—common in the days before civilization. Now down we go.”
The airplane swooped down and came to rest upon
the roof immediately beneath us. On this I saw a number of men, apparently
practicing gymnastic exercises; and hardly were we at a standstill when two of
them came running up to us. They were clad in blue uniforms resembling that of
the airscout, but instead of a swan each wore a shield-shaped piece of linen
upon his back and breast.
“What’s this?” they demanded in a breath, pointing
at me and bursting into bellowing laughter.
“One of your defectives,” answered Jones. “I found
him in the forest while patrolling.”
They rushed at me and dragged me from the
airplane, swiftly patting me about the body, as if in search of weapons.
Satisfied that I was unarmed, they turned to the airscout.
“You’ll share the reward!” they cried, again
simultaneously.
“Keep it!” replied the airscout tartly, and rose
into the air, waving me a cordial good-bye.
They rushed me across the roof through a crowd of
other men, similarly clad, down an elevator, and into the street. They dragged
me upon one of the moving platforms and conveyed me a short distance,
descending at the entrance to one of the innumerable shining buildings, over
which was inscribed something in the same undecipherable letters.
But, quickly as we had gone, the report of my
arrest seemed to have preceded us, for our way was blocked by a vast and
constantly increasing crowd, that came running up with lively and shameless curiosity,
and, attracted by my rags, I suppose, pressed closely about us and uttered
hoots of laughter. I heard the word “defective” bandied from mouth to mouth.
I looked at these people attentively. There were
both men and women present, all wearing clothing of the same pale blue color,
which seemed to be prescribed, although the cut of each garment was to some
extent individual. In effect, the men wore sack suits of a coarsely woven
woolen material, with short, loose trousers fastened with laces about the
ankles, and square-cut coats having wide lapels extending to a broad,
turned-back collar that fell over the shoulders like a sailor’s, revealing a
neckpiece of blue linen. The women’s short skirts reached to the tops of their
high boots, and the fashion seemed to run to large buttons and loose sleeves.
They wore no hats. Upon the breast, near the shoulder, each person wore a small
linen badge, indicative of his occupation.
I glanced from one to another, and met hard,
mirthless eyes, and mouths twisted in sneering mockery
What disconcerted me was the shrewd, mocking smile
upon each face. I glanced from one to another, seeking to find something of the
same friendly interest that animated me, and met hard, mirthless eyes, and
mouths twisted in sneering mockery.
Another thing that startled and almost terrified
me was the absence of a certain conventionality of restraint that had ruled
everybody in that other world of mine. For instance, among those gibing at me
was a gray-bearded man who danced before me like a small urchin. Another made
an expressive pantomime of death. A girl stuck out her tongue at me. I
remembered the plaint, that never since the glorious age of Greece had the code
of public morality coincided with that privately held. This we all knew; the
statesman in parliament was not on bowing terms with the same statesman in the
smoking-room. Some said it was Christianity, others respectability that bound
us in this organic hypocrisy; but now the two codes seemed to have coalesced. A
grandfather grimaced at me; a gray-haired woman put out her foot to trip me; if
there had been stones I think they would have flung them at me. But suddenly a
youngish lad in white appeared, and the crowd, hastening to make a path for
him, shrank back with servile demeanor. Taking advantage of this, my captors,
linking their arms in mine, made a rush forward, scattering the mob right and
left, and bore me through a swinging door into a small rotunda, in which a
number of other policemen were seated with their blue-clad prisoners.
