Читать книгу The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

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Wilmer made all his arrangements through Messrs. Cook’s office in Pall Mall.

When he entered the office about ten o’clock next morning he held the heavy swing-door open for a moment as though allowing a companion to pass through. He was smiling. At the long counter a clerk glanced at him inquiringly.

“Yes, sir?”

“I want to go to Algiers. Can you arrange everything?”

“You will want a sleeper, sir, and a cabin? There is rather a rush just now. And the hotel?”

“The best there is. It must have a garden, and not be in the middle of the town.”

“The ‘Mustapha’ would suit you, sir; fairly quiet and beautifully situated.”

“Can you wire for a room?”

“Certainly. Accommodation on the train and on the boat from Marseilles for one?”

“For two.”

“A two-berthed cabin, and a sleeper for two. And the hotel? The ‘Mustapha’ has suites.”

“I should want a suite facing south.”

“Very good, sir. You have a passport?”

“No.”

“We shall have to arrange that. I take it, sir, that you wish to leave——?”

“As soon as you can obtain the necessary tickets and accommodation.”

“We will wire at once, sir. I will make a note of all the details.”

Wilmer left by the boat train on a raw February morning. No one saw him off; in fact, no one but the old servant knew that he was going, and in his pocket he carried a letter from his literary agents—an anxious and worried letter. Wilmer had written to tell Messrs. Wagstaffe and Plater that his next novel would not be ready for autumn publication, and had hinted that its completion was a matter of indifference to him. His agents had diagnosed “swelled head.”

He had the expectant look of a man setting out upon a memorable adventure. At Calais his calmness in the ridiculous scuffle at the “customs,” might have suggested the experienced traveller. He had a detached air; he seemed to dream above the heads of the excited crowd.

“Premier classe, monsieur?”

“Wagons-lits.”

His porter delivered him into the hands of a little swarthy man in a chocolate-coloured uniform who conducted Wilmer to his sleeper.

“For two, monsieur.”

“Yes.”

Wilmer closed the door and arranged his baggage, and he behaved as though someone were sitting on the seat by the window.

“Not a bad crossing, Kitty. You would like the lower berth, dear. I shall be able to tuck you up before climbing upstairs.”

Later, the attendant—a man of commerce—realized that Wilmer had no travelling companion.

“But monsieur is alone?”

“No.”

The man stared.

“There is a gentleman who has no berth. If monsieur is agreeable——”

Wilmer was not agreeable. He showed a touch of fierceness. He had paid for his compartment and he did not wish to be disturbed, and the attendant, pocketing a fifty-franc note, left him alone. The Englishman was either a rich egoist or a lunatic. The tip was the thing that mattered.

At Marseilles the sun shone, and Wilmer, the sole occupant of a two-berthed cabin, stood on the deck of the Timgad and watched the golden figure of Notre Dame de Mont Gard grow dim against the blue of the northern sky. The sea was calm, and the deck-steward was portioning out deck-chairs. Wilmer asked him to reserve two.

“What name, monsieur?”

“Wilmer.”

“Monsieur et madame?”

“If you please.”

So the red chair next to Wilmer bore on its little white card “Madame Wilmer,” as he sat and watched the sea.

A florid, sanguine, talkative old lady occupied the chair beyond the vacant one. She and Wilmer went in to meals and returned to their two chairs; and, in due course the sociable person attacked the dreamy man. She had a book in her lap—Wilmer’s novel “Tempest.”

“Beautiful crossing.”

“Perfect.”

“I am afraid your wife must be rather a bad sailor.”

Wilmer started.

“Yes.”

“What a pity. The cabins are so stuffy. I always believe in staying on deck.”

Before Algiers flashed its whiteness across the blue, the sociable lady had discovered that she had made the acquaintance of the great novelist, and she showed that she was impressed, but she was a good deal puzzled by seeing Wilmer disembarking with no travel-weary wife leaning upon his arm. And she was still more puzzled when she found herself sitting opposite to him in the omnibus of the Mustapha Hotel.

The bus swept them out of Algiers up to Mustapha Superieur, while Wilmer sat and dreamed, and the sociable lady exercised a tactful reticence. It was obvious to her that Wilmer was an unusual man, and he behaved in an unusual manner, for when the omnibus deposited them in the hotel courtyard, Wilmer got out and wandered aside into the garden. He strolled along the terrace, with the late sunlight splashing upon the palms, olives and cypresses, and the flowers aglow in the green alley-ways, and the red earthy spaces. He carried his hat in his hand. He was looking for a mimosa tree, and when he found one he stood and smiled at some imagined person who stood close beside him.

“Mimosa—Kitty. This is the sort of place we always dreamed of.”

At the reception bureau a polite under-manager greeted him smilingly.

“Ah—Mr. Wilmer—we thought that you might have missed the boat. Yes—your suite is ready. Perhaps you would like to see it.”

The under-manager led the way to the lift, and paused as though he expected a third person. His eyes met Wilmer’s.

“Are you alone, sir?”

Wilmer replied with a slight movement of the head, and the under-manager bowed him into the lift.

“Pardon—but I understood—— The suite we reserved is for two.”

“If I approve of it—you can charge me for two.”

“It is a little unusual, sir.”

“Does it matter? I like—space.”

Wilmer approved of the suite. It consisted of a spacious bedroom, a bathroom, and a small sitting-room, and its windows looked out over the garden and into the fragrant yellow heart of a mimosa tree. Cap Matifou was visible, purple horn thrusting into the deep blue sea. Wilmer stood at one of the windows and his face dreamed. A porter came in with his light luggage, to be followed by a waiter who wished to know if monsieur desired tea.

Wilmer ordered tea, and he drank it at one of the open windows, watching the changing lights upon the garden below him. In the distance, the sea, softened to a blue-grey silkiness, reflected the glowing whiteness of a mass of cumulus cloud. Cap Matifou grew opalescent. He was aware of a sudden dewy freshness in the air, and of the perfumes rising from the garden where great patches of soft gloom began to spread under the trees.

“Good, isn’t it, dear? Just what we dreamed of.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gallaby, the lady of the Timgad, was chattering over her tea to a party of friends whom she had come to join.

“Who do you think came over in the boat with me? Yes; and he is staying here—Mr. Wilmer who wrote ‘Tempest.’ And, oh, my dear, there was something most odd.”

“These literary people——!”

“No; he looks quite ordinary. But he had two chairs on deck labelled ‘Monsieur et Madame Wilmer.’ His wife’s chair was empty, and so—of course I thought—we had been chatting—you know—I thought she was a bad sailor or an invalid——”

Mrs. Gallaby had a sense of the dramatic, she paused to refill her tea-cup.

“And wasn’t she?”

“My dear, there wasn’t a Mrs. Wilmer.”

“Oh!”

“He got off the boat alone, and he came up in the bus with me—alone. Now—why——?”

“Did you mention his wife?”

“I asked him if she was a bad sailor.”

“Well?”

“And he said ‘yes.’ Wasn’t it odd?”

When Wilmer walked into the dining-room he was quite unaware of the fact that a dozen people were watching him with interest. He stood in the middle of the big room, with that air of dreamy detachment, looking like a visionary. The head-waiter bustled up to him.

“A table for one, monsieur?”

“For two, please.”

“Two? monsieur.”

“Yes.”

The man was polite but puzzled. He led the way to a corner.

“Madame is dining in her room, monsieur?”

Wilmer produced something from the side pocket of his dinner-jacket, and that something was transferred to the head-waiter’s hand.

“I wish to have a table for two. Someone will be joining me here—very soon.”

“Very good, monsieur. Shall we lay two covers?”

“Please.”

The head-waiter pocketed two hundred-franc notes, and Mrs. Gallaby, who had been sufficiently near to hear the conversation touched her neighbour’s sleeve.

“Did you hear? He asked for a table for two. Isn’t it odd?”

As the days went by the Mustapha Hotel found itself becoming more and more interested in Wilmer’s oddness. He spoke to no one, though his reserve was not studied and wilful; he ignored his fellow humans because he had ceased to be aware of them. He idled about, or sat in the sun, and on his face was a look of gentle expectancy. Unsubtle people thought him “sidy,” and reduced his aloofness to a question of “pose.” He spent much of his time in wandering about the hills, steeping himself and his growing obsession in the African spring, breathing the colour and the smell of it. Kitty had been a great lover of flowers, and all the flowers that he saw were hers.

He became a source of interest to the “staff.” They liked him, for he was generous and courteous. The femme de chambre and the valet who looked after him thought him pleasantly and romantically mad. “Some great trouble!” For on his dressing-table he kept a silver mirror and hair-brush, a tortoiseshell comb, a box of hairpins, scent bottles, women’s things. A lace bed-cap hung on the mirror frame, and a pair of grey suede shoes and of pink satin slippers waited under a chair.

“And he has a lady’s night-dress in a silk case on the pillow beside him. Poor fellow!”

“How ridiculous!”

“Why should it be ridiculous. I always dust the shoes and the slippers, and clean the silver, and put it just as he placed it.”

“And he tips well.”

“You say he is an author?”

“He keeps a portfolio on the table. It is full of clean paper. I have seen him sitting there, but he never writes anything. Sometimes I open the portfolio and look.”

“Touched in the head.”

“I have no quarrel with such queerness. I wish some of the old ladies had a little of it.”

There was one person in the hotel who had begun to observe Wilmer with the eyes of a clinician, and that person was the English doctor, a man with a quiet blue eye and an air of laconic kindness. Wilmer interested him. The doctor watched him for some days with a keen and sympathetic curiosity. He noticed that when Wilmer went to sit in a quiet corner of the terrace he always kept a vacant chair next to him, and that sometimes he spread a coat over the chair. The doctor followed him on one or two occasions up the hill to the Bois, and observed that Wilmer walked on the outside of the path, and that he kept turning his head to the right.

“Just as though—a woman—were walking beside him!”

On another occasion, Rome—the doctor—witnessed a curious incident. One of the hotel bores, a little, pursy, ape-headed profiteer with a face of brass, who was for ever talking about “my suite”—went up and laid a hand on Wilmer’s other chair. Curmudgeon needed the chair, and chairs were free, and Wilmer had no right to it.

The doctor saw Wilmer betray a sudden, unexpected fierceness.

“This chair’s reserved.”

Curmudgeon appeared inclined to challenge the assertion.

“No one’s sitting in it, my dear sir.”

Wilmer jerked the chair from the other man’s grip, and placed it carefully on the far side of him.

“It is reserved. If you want a chair, find another.”

The chair-stealer came away fuming and appealed in a thick voice to Dr. Rome.

“Did you see that? The fellow’s cracked.”

“Why?”

“Stuck to that chair. I thought he was going to get up and hit me. Just as though his best girl was coming to sit in it.”

“Perhaps she is,” said the doctor.

“He ought not to be allowed here. Everybody’s talking about him.”

“Well—they must talk about something. Besides, there is nothing offensive about the man.”

“Nothing offensive? Why, my dear sir, if he isn’t cracked, he is the most swollen-headed idiot that ever——”

“Talked about a ‘suite’,” said the doctor who had moments of wanton puckishness.

But in Wilmer’s dream-world the illusion was not all that it seemed. He had moments of bitter loneliness when the dream seemed nothing but an illusion, for what proof had he of that dear, invisible presence? There were times when he was most strangely sure that his wife was near him, and though his senses were too unsubtle to detect her immaterial presence, the soul of him felt some other being near him. The look of expectancy remained in his eyes, but it was more anxious and less radiant.

“O—words—words!” he would say to himself; “they are as useless and as limited as our senses. Something in me feels that which can neither be defined or explained. The blind worm is on the edge of vision.”

Often, in the evening, he would walk up to the Bois and, standing there among the silent pines, look up at the star dust, and at the lights of Algiers below him. Like a visionary, alone in some very solitary place, he would try to penetrate the eternal mystery, to thrust himself through into a world of other dimensions. His dream was a beautiful conception, but the love in him cried out for some convincing sign.

Standing there he would speak to his dear, unseen comrade.

“Kitty—I am waiting. I want you. I feel you—there. Give me some proof, dear, for sometimes my spirit is weak.”

He would try and justify the silence.

“We are so much in the dark, dear. I can understand that it may be very difficult for you to get back to me in this world—as we know it. My senses limit me. These bondages of the flesh! Is it possible for you to unroll them—and to make me see or feel—or divine the imperishable ‘you’? If you could touch me—but once——”

His feeling of anxiety increased. Dream as he might, Wilmer knew that he could not prove to his eager, critical self that the obsession was anything but a dream. He might surround himself with his memories of her, with tender imaginings, pathetic make-believe, yet the illusion cast no shadow.

People noticed that he went about with a slight droop of the shoulders. His eyes looked anxious, and his face had lost its expression of happy expectancy. He avoided his fellow humans more and more; he ceased to appear in the dining-room and took his meals in his own suite.

Dr. Rome’s interest grew more personal and grave. He began seriously to think of laying a gentle hand on this quiet madman’s illusion. Something tragic might happen, for Wilmer’s face suggested a possible tragedy.