Читать книгу The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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Wilmer was sitting in front of the fire, his elbows on his knees, his fists under his chin. His slippers lay on the hearth-rug just as he had kicked them off. His pipe had gone out, but he held it gripped between his teeth.

“What a mockery!” he thought, and glanced at the empty chair beside him.

It was a very ordinary arm-chair, upholstered in blue tapestry, with rolled arms and a comfortable sloping back. A green cushion lay on the seat, and as Wilmer glanced at it a flicker of pain seemed to pass across his face. It had been his wife’s chair, and that green cushion had formed the familiar halo behind her bronze-brown head.

He stared at the cushion.

His wife had been dead for a year. She lay in that North London cemetery, deep in the dreary clay of it, and she had died just before he had become so fatuously famous.

For his fame was fatuous, since it had come to Wilmer when it had ceased to matter, when it was useless, and he had ceased to care.

Had it come a year earlier how different things might have been.

The house-bell rang. He heard the maid go to the door, and a moment later she was looking kindly at the bent back of him and holding out his letters.

“Letters, sir.”

“Put them on the table, Mary.”

“Shall I turn on the light, sir?”

“No; don’t bother.”

She went out, closing the door gently, with pity in her pleasant, unsubtle eyes. “Poor gentleman, he had taken it to heart;” and Wilmer sat there, staring at the fire, that most lonely and lost of creatures, a man whose soul-mate had vanished and left him in the darkness.

Presently he turned and picked up the letters. There were quite a number of them, a proof of the public’s delight in one of its latest pets. Wilmer glanced perfunctorily at the envelopes, bending down before the firelight, with his thin and sensitive face lit up by the glow. What a budget! Letters from enthusiastic young ladies beseeching him for an autograph. Another letter from a titled person asking him to present her with some of his books to be sold at a charity bazaar. Yet another letter from a cinematograph company, desiring to be informed whether the film rights of his next novel had been disposed of.

And a letter from his literary agents. He recognized the impressive notepaper used by Messrs. Wagstaffe and Plater.

“Dear Mr. Wilmer,

“Messrs. Macalpine are anxious to receive the MS. of your autumn novel.

“We have pleasure in informing you that ‘Tempest’ has reached a tenth large edition.

“The news from the U.S.A. is magnificent. ‘Tempest’ is still the bestseller. Etc. etc.——”

Wilmer threw the letter into the fire and watched it burn. The curling, reddening sheets seemed to writhe mockingly.

Yes, what a damned mockery it was!

A year ago he had been a poor man—so poor that he had been unable to give his wife that last great chance which might have saved her life. For fifteen years she had given him love, courage and understanding; she had been the human triumph behind the bitterness of his failure; she had worked and smiled in this shabby little Canonbury house, filling it with a spiritual tenderness. When he had gone down into the deeps, her love had picked him up, and with a comrade’s courage had set him on his feet again.

“Go on, Peter. Some day it will come to you.”

And it had come, but after her death, after he had ceased to care, and that was where the damned irony of it wounded him. “Tempest,” a fragment of blood and of tears that had brought him so much material plunder, had been written while death had come nearer and nearer. He had read it to her, chapter by chapter. He had finished it a month before she had died. And it had gone out to the world with her name upon the page of dedication.

“To Kitty.”

And Kitty did not know.

Yet, how he had striven to convince himself that Catharine Wilmer did know, and that all that had happened to him since was as real to her as it was to him. Death and survival had not vexed him until he had found himself alone, and then he had struggled in the darkness outside the gate of the great mystery, trying to penetrate it, to feel Kitty’s presence somewhere in the beyond.

He had failed, though there had been moments when he could have sworn that she was near him, sitting in that chair.

He could remember waking at night after she had died, and imagining her near him, quietly breathing.

“Kitty!”

And then, emptiness, and the realization of it, and the anguish of an inexorable silence.