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

me. For two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work
at all, except the most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is
full of inappeasable regrets. At nights--when it is less likely I
shall be recognised--I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder what
people would think of that if they knew. A Cabinet Minister, the
responsible head of that most vital of all departments, wandering
alone--grieving--sometimes near audibly lamenting--for a door, for
a garden!"


IV


I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar
sombre fire that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly
to-night. I sit recalling his words, his tones, and last evening's
Westminster Gazette still lies on my sofa, containing the
notice of his death. At lunch to-day the club was busy with him
and the strange riddle of his fate.

They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep
excavation near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts
that have been made in connection with an extension of the railway
southward. It is protected from the intrusion of the public by a
hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been cut
for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that
direction. The doorway was left unfastened through a
misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his
way . . . . .

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

It would seem he walked all the way from the House that
night--he has frequently walked home during the past Session--and
so it is I figure his dark form coming along the late and empty
streets, wrapped up, intent. And then did the pale electric lights
near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of
white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?

Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?

I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me.
There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the
victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type
of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my
profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious if you will,
and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had
in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something--I know not
what--that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a
secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether