To the Dark Tower (33 page)

I am not afraid to die. In a sense, I feel that I am dying
for you
. In some way, I feel that this too is necessary.

Now and at all moments—now and at the hour of death—I am yours, yours only.

SHIRLEY
.

She pushed the sheets into an envelope and licked the flap with a greyish tongue. The pen seemed to scratch intolerably as she wrote the address in careful flourishes. Then for a while she sat motionless, looking outwards at the plane trees, the little square, the blotchy façade opposite. Suddenly it seemed to her bitter and terrible that she should never see these things again. If it had been raining or there had been a fog perhaps she would have been able to leave them without regret. But the spring sunshine was sad and autumnal as it flowed over the window-sill; it was lax with memories. She wanted to sit in it, doing nothing, while far below people made random furrows of shadows on the gleaming pavements, and a dog sniffed a lamp-post, and a barrel-organ tinkled in the distance.

Oh, no. She must be resolute. She put on her coat with its fur collar that stuck out in drab tufts, and then her hat, and last of all some green woollen gloves embroidered with eidelweiss. But before she left the room she went on an impulse to the head of her bed. Taking from the wall the framed photograph of her father she smashed it downwards on the brass bedpost. Then, from the splintered glass, she extricated his image and put it in her pocket.

As she walked downstairs she fingered it all the time.

From a letter:

M
Y DEAR
G
ENERAL
,—I am sending you this typescript of the novel. I have called it
To the Dark Tower
. This is the third draft. But it still is not you...F
RANK
C
AULDWELL
.

First published in 1946 by Home & Van Thal

This edition published 2013 by Bello
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Copyright © Francis King, 1946

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