began striding rapidly up and down the room. “Everything you say, everything you do, convinces me — of some great issue in which I am concerned. I do not want to pass the time, as you call it. Yes, I know. Desire and indulgence are life in a sense — and Death! Extinction! In my life before I slept I had worked out that pitiful question. I will not begin again. There is a city, a multitude — . And meanwhile I am here like a rabbit in a bag.”
His rage surged high. He choked for a moment and began to wave his clenched fists. He gave way to an anger fit, he swore archaic curses. His gestures had the quality of physical threats.
“I do not know who your party may be. I am in the dark, and you keep me in the dark. But I know this, that I am secluded here for no good purpose. For no good purpose. I warn you, I warn you of the consequences. Once I come at my power — “
He realised that to threaten thus might be a danger to himself. He stopped. Howard stood regarding him with a curious expression.
“I take it this is a message to the Council,” said Howard.
Graham had a momentary impulse to leap upon the man, fell or stun him. It must have shown upon his face; at any rate Howard’s movement was quick. In a second the noiseless door had closed again, and the man from the nineteenth century was alone.
For a moment he stood rigid, with clenched hands half raised. Then he flung them down. “What a fool I have been!” he said, and gave way to his anger again, stamping about the room and shouting curses…. For a long time he kept himself in a sort of frenzy, raging at his position, at his own folly, at the knaves who had imprisoned him. He did this because he did not want to look calmly at his position. He clung to his anger — because he was afraid of fear.
Presently he found himself reasoning with himself. This imprisonment was unaccountable, but no doubt the legal forms — new legal forms — of the time permitted it. It must, of course, be legal. These people were two hundred years further on in the march of civilisation than the Victorian generation. It was not likely they would be less — humane. Yet they had cleared their minds of formulae! Was humanity a formula as well as chastity?
His imagination set to work to suggest things that might be done to him. The attempts of his reason to dispose of these suggestions, though for the most part logically valid, were quite unavailing. “Why should anything be done to me?”
“If the worst comes to the worst,” he found himself saying at last, “I can give up what they want. But what do they want? And why don’t they ask me for it instead of cooping me up?”
He returned to his former preoccupation with the Council’s possible intentions. He began to reconsider the details of Howard’s behaviour, sinister glances, inexplicable hesitations. Then, for a time, his mind circled about the idea of escaping from these rooms; but whither could he escape into this vast, crowded world? He would be worse off than a Saxon yeoman suddenly dropped into nineteenth century London. And besides, how could anyone escape from these rooms?
“How can it benefit anyone if harm should happen to me?”
He thought of the tumult, the great social trouble of which he was so unaccountably the axis. A text, irrelevant enough, and yet curiously insistent, came floating up out of the darkness of his memory. This also a Council had said:
“It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people.”
Chapter VIII.
The Roof Spaces
As the fans in the circular aperture of the inner room rotated and permitted glimpses of the night, dim sounds drifted in thereby. And Graham, standing underneath, was startled by the sound of a voice.
He peered up and saw in the intervals of the rotation, dark and dim, the face and shoulders of a man regarding him. Then a dark hand was extended, the swift vane struck it, swung round and beat on with a little brownish patch on the edge of its thin blade, and something began to fall therefrom upon the floor, dripping silently.
Graham looked down, and there were spots of blood at his feet. He looked up again in a strange excitement. The figure had gone.
He remained motionless — his every sense intent upon the flickering patch of darkness. He became aware of some faint, remote, dark specks floating lightly through the outer air. They came down towards him, fitfully, eddyingly, and passed aside out of the uprush from the fan. A gleam of light flickered, the specks flashed white, and then the darkness came again. Warmed and lit as he was, he perceived that it was snowing within a few feet of him.
Graham walked across the room and came back to the ventilator again. He saw the head of a man pass near. There was a sound of whispering. Then a smart blow on some metallic substance, effort, voices, and the vanes stopped. A gust of snowflakes whirled into the room, and vanished before they touched the floor. “Don’t be afraid,” said a voice.
Graham stood under the vane. “Who are you?” he whispered.
For a moment there was nothing but a swaying of the fan, and then the head of a man was thrust cautiously into the opening. His face appeared nearly inverted to Graham; his dark hair was wet with dissolving flakes of snow upon it. His arm went up into the darkness holding something unseen. He had a youthful face and bright eyes, and the veins of his forehead were swollen. He seemed to be exerting himself to maintain his position.
For several seconds neither he nor Graham spoke.
“You were the Sleeper?” said the stranger at last.
“Yes,” said Graham. “What do you want with me?”
“I come from Ostrog, Sire.”
“Ostrog?”
The man in the ventilator twisted his head round so that his profile was towards Graham. He appeared to be listening. Suddenly there was a hasty exclamation, and the intruder sprang back just in time to escape the sweep of the released fan. And when Graham peered up there was nothing visible but the slowly falling snow.
It was perhaps a quarter of an hour before anything returned to the ventilator. But at last came the same metallic interference again; the fans stopped and the face reappeared. Graham had remained all this time in the same place, alert and tremulously excited.
“Who are you? What do you want?” he said.
“We want to speak to you, Sire,” said the intruder. “We want — I can’t hold the thing. We have been trying to find a way to you — these three days.”
“Is it rescue?” whispered Graham. “Escape?”
“Yes, Sire. If you will.”
“You are my party — the party of the Sleeper?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“What am I to do?” said Graham.
There was a struggle. The stranger’s arm appeared, and his hand was bleeding. His knees came into view over the edge of the funnel. “Stand away from me,” he said, and he dropped rather heavily on his hands and one
