Defenders of Democracy Part 14

Sherston's Wedding Eve

In the gathering twilight a man stood at the eastern window of a room which formed the top story of one of the houses in Peter the Great Terrace--that survival from the early nineteenth century which forms a kind of recess in the broad thoroughfare linking Waterloo Bridge with the Strand. The man's name was Shirley Sherston, and among the happy, prosperous few who are concerned with such things, he was known for his fine, distinguished work in domestic architecture.

It was the evening of October 13, 1915, and Sherston was to be married to-morrow.

Now, for what most people would have thought a puerile reason, that with him 13 had always proved a luck number, he had much wished that to-day should be his wedding day. And Helen Pomeroy, his future wife, who never thought anything he did or desired to do puerile or unreasonable, had been quite willing to fall in with his fancy.

The lucky day had actually been chosen. Then a tiresome woman, a sister of Miss Pomeroy's mother, had said she could not be present at the marriage if it took place on the thirteenth, as on that day her son, who had been home on leave, was going back to the Front.

She had also pointed out quite unnecessarily, that 13 is an unlucky number.

Staring out into the darkness, Sherston's stormy, eager heart began to quiver with longing, with regret, and with the half-painful rapture of antic.i.p.ation. He had suddenly visioned--and Sherston was a man given to vivid visions--where he would have been now, at this moment, had his marriage indeed taken place this morning. He saw himself, on this beautiful starlit, moonless night, standing, along with his dear love, on the platform of a medieval tower, which, together with the picturesque farmhouse which had been tacked on to the tower about a hundred years ago, rose, close to the seash.o.r.e, on a lonely stretch of the Suss.e.x coast.

But what was not true tonight would be true to-morrow night, twenty-four hours from now.

He had bought tower and house three years ago, and he had spent there many happy holidays, boating and fishing, alone, or in company of some man chum. Sherston had never thought to bring a woman there, for the morrow's bridegroom, for some six to seven years past, had had an impatient contempt for, as well as fear of, women.

Sherston was a widower, though he never used the word, even in his innermost heart, for to him the term connoted something slightly absurd, and he was sensitive to ridicule.

Very few of the people at preset acquainted with the brilliant, pleasantly eccentric architect, knew that he had been married before. But of course the handful of old Bohemian comrades whom he had faithfully kept from out of the past, were well aware of the fact. They were not likely to forget it either, for whenever it was mentioned, each of them at once remembered that which at the time it had happened, Sherston had every reason to tell rather than to conceal, namely, that the woman who had been his wife had gone down with the t.i.tanic.

But how long ago that now seemed!

The outbreak of war, which caused so much unmerited misfortune to English artists and their like, and which at one moment had threatened to wreck his own successful opening career, had brought to Shirley Sherston a piece of marvelous good fortune..

Early in the memorable August, 1914, at a time when the fabric of his life and work seemed shattered, and when the lameness which he had so triumphantly coped with during his grown up life as to cause those about him scarcely to know it was there, made it out of the question for him to respond to his country's first call for men, the architect happened to run across James Pomeroy, a cultivated millionaire with whom he had once had a slight business relation.

Acting on a kindly impulse which even now Mr. Pomeroy hardly knew whether to remember with pleasure or regret, the older man had pressed the younger to spend a week in a country house which he had taken for the summer near London.

That was now fourteen months ago, but Sherston, standing there, remembered as if it had happened yesterday, his first sight of the girl who was to become his wife to-morrow. Helen Pomeroy had been standing on a brick path bordered with holly hocks, and she had smiled, a little shyly and gravely, at her father's rather eccentric-looking guest. But on that war-summer morning she had appeared to the stranger as does a mirage of spring water to a man who is dying of thirst in the desert.

Up to that time Sherston had always supposed himself to be attracted to small women. He was a big, fair man, with loosely hung limbs, and his wife--poor little baggage--had been a tiny creature, vixenish at her worst, kittenish at her best. But Helen Pomeroy was tall, with the n.o.ble proportions and tapering limbs of a G.o.ddess, and gradually--not for some time, for all social life was dislocated in England during that strange summer--Sherston became aware, with a kind of angry revolt of soul, that he was but one of many worshipers at the shrine.

Following an irresistible impulse, he early in their acquaintance told Helen Pomeroy more of himself than he had ever told any other human being; and his confidences at last included a bowdlerized account of his wretched marriage. But though they soon became friends, and though he went on seeing a great deal of her, all through that autumn and winter, Sherston feared to put his fate to the touch, and he was jealous--G.o.d alone knew how hideously, intolerably jealous--of the khaki-clad soldiers who came and went in her father's house in town.

and then, one day, during the second summer of their acquaintance, a word let drop by Mr. Pomeroy, who had become fond of the odd, restless fellow, opened a pit before Sherston's feet. It was a word implying that now, at last, Helen's father and mother hoped she would "make up her mind." A very distinguished soldier, whom she had refused as a girl of twenty, had come back unchanged, after six years, from India, and Helen, or so her parents hoped and thought, was seriously thinking of him.

Sherston had kept away. He had even left two of her letters--the rather formal letters which had come to mean so very much in his life--unanswered. A fortnight had gone by, and then there had reached him a prim little note from Mrs. Pomeroy, asking him why he had not been to see them lately. There was a postscript: "If you do not come soon, you will not see my daughter. She has not been well, and we are thinking of sending her up to Scotland, to friends who are in Skye, for a good long holiday."

He had gone to Cadogan Square (it was August 13th) as quickly as a taxi could take him, and by a blessed stroke of luck he had found Miss Pomeroy alone. In a flash all had come right between them.

That had only been nine weeks ago, and now they were to be married to-morrow...

Sherston had been standing a long time at that cas.e.m.e.nt of his which commanded the huge gray ma.s.s of Somerset House, when at last he turned round, and went quickly across the room to the other, western, window.

Even in the gathering darkness what a faery view was there! Glad as he was to know that after to-night he would never again see this living room in its present familiar guise--for he had arranged with a furniture dealer to come and take everything left in it away, within an hour of his departure--he told himself that never again could he hope to live with such a view as that on which he was gazing out now.

The yellowing branches of the trees which have their roots deep in the graveyard of the old Savoy Chapel formed, even in mid-October, a delicious screen of living, moving leaves. Far below, to his left, ran the river Thames, its rushing waters full of a mysterious, darksome beauty, and illumined, here and there, with the quivering reflection of shadowed white, green and red lights. Sherston in his heart often blessed the Sepelin scare which had banished the monstrous, flaring signs which, till a few months ago, had so offended his eyes each time that he looked out into the night, towards the water.

The lease of a fine old house in Cheyenne Walk had been chosen by Mr. Pomeroy as his daughter's wedding gift, and already certain of Sherston's personal possessions had been moved there. But he was taking with him as little as possible, and practically nothing from this memory-haunted room.

It was the big, light, airy, loft-like apartment which had attracted him in these chambers fifteen years ago, when he had first come to London from the Midlands, at the age of three-and-twenty. It was here, five years later, that he had come straight back from the Soho Registry Office with the young woman whom he had quixotically drawn up out of a world--the nether world--where she had been happier than she could ever hope to become with him. For Kitty Brawle--her very surname was symbolic--was one of those doomed creatures who love the mud, who never really wish to leave the mud--who feel sc.r.a.ped and sad when clean.

Unhappy Sherston! The n.o.blest thing he had ever done, or was ever likely to do, in his life, proved, for a time at least, his undoing.

Kitty had made him from generous mean, from unsuspecting suspicious, and during the wretched year they had spent together she had had a disastrous effect on his work. At last, acting on the shrewd advice of one of those instinctive men of the world of which Bohemia is full, he had bought her a billet in a theatrical touring company.

There, by an extraordinary chance, Kitty made a tiny hit--sufficiently of a hit to bring her from an American impresario a creditable offer, contingent on her fare being paid to the States.

Gladly, how gladly only he himself had known--Sherston had taken her pa.s.sage in the t.i.tanic, Kitty's own characteristic choice of a boat. And he had done more. though short of money, he had given Kitty a hundred pounds.

Four days after their parting had come the astounding news of the sinking of the liner, followed, by Sherston, by a period of strange, painful suspense, filled with the eager scanning of lists, cables to and from America, finally terminated by an official intimation that poor Kitty had gone down in, and with, the ship.

Sherston's imagination was inconveniently vivid, and for a few poignant weeks his wife's horrible end haunted him. But after a while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from there he came back with his nerves in better order than they had ever been.

Fate, which so seldom interferes with kindly intention in the lives of men, had cut what had become a strangling knot, and Kitty, from a dreadful, never-forgotten burden, had become a rather touching, piteous memory, growing ever dimmer as first the months, and then the years, slipped by.

Even so, her ghost sufficiently often haunted this large room, and the other apartments which composed Sherston's set of chambers, to make him determine that Miss Pomeroy should never come there. And she, being in this as unlike other, commonplace, young woman as she was in everything else, had never put him to the pain of finding an insincere excuse for his unwillingness to show her the place in which he lived and worked....

The coming night stretched long and bleak before to-morrow's bridegroom. There were fourteen hours to live through before he could even see Helen, for the time of the marriage had been fixed for eleven o'clock.

Sherston was not looking forward to the actual ceremony--no man ever does; and though it was to be a war wedding, a great many people, as he was ruefully aware, had been bidden to the ceremony. But it was comfortable to know that none of the guests had been asked to go back to the house from which he and his bride were to start for Suss.e.x at one o'clock, in the motor which was Mrs. Pomeroy's marriage gift to her daughter.

Suddenly Sherston discovered the he was very hungry! He had lunched at Cadogan Square at a quarter to two, but he had felt too inwardly excited in that queer atmosphere of tears and laughter, of trousseau and wedding presents, to eat.

Even the least earthly of Romantics cannot forget for long the claims of the flesh, and so, smiling a little wryly in the darkness, he now told himself that the best thing he could do was to go out and get some supper. Acquainted with all the eating houses in the region, he was glad indeed that after to-night he would never have to enter one again.

Pulling down the green blind in front of him, Sherston walked across the room and pulled down the blind of the other window, for the London lighting orders had become much stricter of late. Then he turned on the electric light switch, took up his hat and stick, and went out into the little lobby.

Before him was a narrow aperture which opened straight on to the steep, short flight of steps connecting his chambers with the stone staircase of the big old house. This latter-like set of steps had a door top and bottom, but the lower door, which gave on to the landing, was generally left open. Turning out the light in the lobby, Sherston put his left hand on the banister and slid down in the darkness, taking the dozen steps as it were in one stride.

As he reached the bottom he suddenly became aware that the door before him, that giving on the landing, was shut, and that some one, almost certainly a child--for there was not room on the mat for a full-grown person--was crouching down just within the door.

Sherston felt sharply, perhaps unreasonably, irritated. Known in the neighborhood as open-handed and kindly, it had sometimes happened, but generally only in wintry weather, that he had come home to find some poor waif lying in wait for him. Man, woman or child who had wandered in, maybe, before the big door downstairs was closed, or who, if still blessed with some outer semblance of gentility, had managed cunningly to get past the Cerberus who lived in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and whose duty it was to open the front door, after eight at night, to non-residents.

He felt in his pocket for a half-a-crown, and then, pretending still to be unaware that there was any one there, he fumbled for the spring lock.

The door burst open--he saw before him the shaft of glimmering whiteness shed by the skylight, for since the Zeppelin raid of the month before, the staircase was always left in darkness--and the figure of his unknown guest rolled over, picked itself up, and stood revealed, a woman, not a child, as he had at first thought.

And then a feeling of sick, shrinking fear came over Sherston, for there fell on his ears the once horribly familiar accents--plaintive, wheedling, falsely timorous--of his dead wife's voice....

"Is that you, Shirley? I didn't know that you was at home. The windows were all dark, and--" In an injured tone this: "I've been waiting here ever so long for you to come in!"

The wraith-like figure before him was only too clearly flesh and blood, and, as he stepped forward, it moved quickly across, and stood, barring his way, on the top stone step of the big staircase.

Sherston remained silent. He could think of nothing to say. But his mind began to work with extraordinary rapidity and lucidity.

There was only one thing to do, here and now. That was to give the woman standing there a little money--not much--and tell her to come back again the next day. Having thus got rid of her--he knew that on no account must she be allowed to stay here the night--he must go at once to Mr. Pomeroy and tell him of this terrible, hitherto unimaginable, calamity. He told himself that it would be, if not exactly easy, then certainly possible to arrange a divorce.

Determinedly, in these tense, terrible moments, he refused to let himself face the coming anguish and dismay of the morrow. It was just a blow, straight between the eyes from fate--that fate who he had foolishly thought had been kind.