Short stories, English; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Of course! She must cross the stream--that was quite natural--and there
was a little footbridge, offering passage. She went over, not daring to
look down. On the other side she waited. He was not yet visible. She
wondered what suit he would be wearing, wondered why she wondered. He
came towards her, his clothes curiously more conspicuous than his face.
He was clad in his old tweed suit, and mysteriously it seemed odd to
her. Yet what else should he be wearing? It was the suit he always wore
when out for a walk. She glanced at her own clothes with a subtle sense
of strangeness, yet it was her old summer frock she wore. This little
puzzle about clothes played itself out in cosmic depths of her, receded
or was solved, vanished. Her lover was standing at her side, enfolded
her.
"Mary! I have been so anxious about you!"
She looked up to eyes that seemed like stars in the twilight.
"I, too, Ronald--I have been worrying about you." There was a sense of
something terrible in the background, imminent, and yet she felt it had
been with her for a long time. It ceased. "But everything's all right
now--I have found you."
A little glimmering something in the depths of her asked why she said
that, seemed to repeat doubtfully: "Found you----" in a long, eternally
re-echoing voice. She felt eerie. It was as though her existence was a
duplicate imperfectly combined, like the double vision, half running
into each other, of badly adjusted binoculars.
"I am so glad you are safe, dear," she heard herself say.
"Let us go and hear the nightingales," he said in the voice so
ringingly his own. He drew her along the path in the twilight, his arm
about her waist.
Nightingales? Now? Of course, why not? The season was early June--what
was the silly half-thought submerged beyond the horizon of her mind?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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