The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “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.

  IV

  One day the Hotel Mustapha realized that Wilmer had disappeared.

  Gossip put it about that he had gone to the desert. Someone had seen him driven off very early in a closed car; and Mrs. Gallaby, who lived on the same floor, questioned the femme de chambre.

  “Yes, madame, Monsieur Wilmer has gone to Bou Saada. He will return in a few days.”

  Wilmer saw the sunset from the balcony of the little hotel at Bou Saada. Below him lay a garden with cherries and apricots in blossom and a yellow foliaged lemon tree full of pale fruit. Bou Saada spread itself in brown cubes among the palms and against a streak of yellow sand, with here and there a solitary tower or the dome of a mosque rising above the flat-roofed houses. The mountains were camel coloured. Amid the palms and prickly pear a stream flickered. Somewhere, a blackbird scolded between bursts of deep piping.

  Wilmer leaned his arms on the rail. He had come over the Atlas mountains and across the leagues of stony desert that lie beyond Aumale, and he had felt tired, but as he looked at the fruit blossom, the grey-green palms, the flickering water, and the outlined strangeness of the little eastern village, his tiredness seemed to pass. He heard the powerful voice of a muezzin calling the people to prayer. The desert flashed a momentary gold. He could catch the sound of running water, and a sense of peace descended on him.

  “This—is what she wished to see. Can she see it? She—does—see it.”

  There were violets in the garden below, crimson stocks, and roses. It had been raining earlier in the day, and the air felt fresh. And Wilmer lingered there, watching the light die, and the palms growing black under the stars.

  Someone knocked at his door.

  “Monsieur, le diner est servi.”

  He went down and dined, though he hardly noticed what he ate, or the people at the other tables, and afterwards he returned to the galleried balcony and watched the dim town, and the still dimmer mountains. A great silence held. A murmur of voices came from some of the other rooms, but he was not disturbed by them. A man and a girl came and stood under one of the other arches; he heard their laughter and their soft, happy chatter, and the human part of him was glad.

  “Lovers,” he thought, “like we were—and are.”

  And his right arm hollowed itself as though to enclose the invisible figure of his mate.

  A spiritual calm descended upon him. He went to bed and slept without dreams, to be wakened just before the dawn by the muezzin’s voice. It sent a tremor of awe through him, a quiver of expectation, and he slipped out of bed, and putting on his overcoat, stood on the balcony and watched the dawn.

  Birds sang. The hills bathed their faces in the light, and the palms grew gently green under a cloudless sky. The strange town began to add its murmurs to the sound of running water; and Wilmer’s brain seemed to grow as clear and as cloudless as the sky, and a tremor of exultation and of wonder stirred in him. The dawn—the inevitable dawn—symbol of the eternal mystery!

  From the very beginning of it that day seemed to him to be unlike all other days. He dressed, and with a strange sense of lightness at the heart he went out and, ignoring the casual crowd of guides and beggars at the hotel door, made his way down to the bed of the stream. He was alone here under the palms, but as he sat among the stones and listened to the running water he felt that he was not alone.

  There he remained, with the shadows of the palms and the sunlight falling about him. The hours passed. Time had ceased to count, nor did he feel hunger or thirst, for his body was no more than the shadow of a tree, or the water upon which the sunlight played. He waited, his eyes expectant, his mouth tremulous with a kind of smiling tenderness.

  “One whole day thou shalt fast, and towards evening the spirit shall descend upon thee.”

  Where he had read these words Wilmer could not remember, but they seemed to come to him out of the clear desert sky.

  About sunset he arose and stood leaning against a palm tree, his face to the west. His eyes were lit up.

  “Kitty—I cannot go back, unless you go back with me.”

  And then, something came to him, a directing impulse, an inward urge, somet
hing that he found it impossible to describe.

  He felt impelled towards the hotel. He returned to it, walking like a somnambulist, past the chattering Arabs and a staring waiter who said something to him that Wilmer did not hear. He went up to his room, closed the door and locked it, and stood still by the end of the bed.

  “What do you want me to do, Kitty?”

  He seemed to listen. Then he moved to the table by the window where he had left a note-book and pencil. He sat down, opened the note-book, picked up the pencil, and for a few seconds he remained motionless, rigid. Then the pencil began to move; it jerked, traced a few meaningless scrawls, and then, with a queer aim of deliberate swiftness, it began to write.

  Ten minutes later, just as the sun set, Wilmer was holding up the note-book and reading what he had written.

  “I am here—Peter—with you—always. Write, write for Kitty. Go back, help, mend life.”

  And the handwriting was not his own handwriting—but the handwriting of his wife.

  V

  Wilmer’s chauffeur, a grizzled Italian whose smile uncovered two rows of strong white teeth, had brought Wilmer over the Atlas mountains with irresponsible and brilliant recklessness, but before starting on the homeward journey from Bou Saada his English passenger cautioned him:

  “Drive slowly, and be careful on the mountains.”

  The Italian beamed.

  “Monsieur is a little afraid of the mountains?”

  Wilmer’s French was not of the best, but the Italian understood him to say that there was a second passenger in the car. The chauffeur comforted him with a beneficent flash of his white teeth, and on the mountain road he drove most sympathetically, to be rewarded in the courtyard of the Mustapha Hotel with a tip of a hundred francs.

  The Italian took off his hat and bowed low. Later, he was heard to say that the Englishman was moonstruck but generous.

  Yet, the Wilmer who had returned to the Mustapha Hotel was a different Wilmer. He walked into the dining-room that night, with a happy erectness; an inward light seemed to burn in him. He bowed to Mrs. Gallaby, and joked with the head-waiter.