"Wells, H G - The Door In The Wall, And Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

world. I began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that
I should never see that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a
little from overwork--perhaps it was what I've heard spoken of as
the feeling of forty. I don't know. But certainly the keen
brightness that makes effort easy has gone out of things recently,
and that just at a time with all these new political developments
--when I ought to be working. Odd, isn't it? But I do begin to
find life toilsome, its rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I
began a little while ago to want the garden quite badly. Yes--and
I've seen it three times."

"The garden?"

"No--the door! And I haven't gone in!"

He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his
voice as he spoke. "Thrice I have had my chance--THRICE!
If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in
out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out
of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This
time I will stay . . . . . I swore it and when the time came--
I DIDN'T GO.

"Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to
enter. Three times in the last year.

"The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the
Tenants' Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a
majority of three. You remember? No one on our side--perhaps very
few on the opposite side--expected the end that night. Then the
debate collapsed like eggshells. I and Hotchkiss were dining with
his cousin at Brentford, we were both unpaired, and we were called
up by telephone, and set off at once in his cousin's motor. We got
in barely in time, and on the way we passed my wall and door--livid
in the moonlight, blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our
lamps lit it, but unmistakable. 'My God!' cried I. 'What?'said
Hotchkiss. 'Nothing!' I answered, and the moment passed.

"'I've made a great sacrifice,' I told the whip as I got in.
'They all have,' he said, and hurried by.

"I do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the
next occasion was as I rushed to my father's bedside to bid that
stern old man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were
imperative. But the third time was different; it happened a week
ago. It fills me with hot remorse to recall it. I was with Gurker
and Ralphs--it's no secret now you know that I've had my talk with
Gurker. We had been dining at Frobisher's, and the talk had become
intimate between us. The question of my place in the reconstructed
ministry lay always just over the boundary of the discussion. Yes