Death -- Fiction; Friendship -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Women novelists -- Fiction
“Yes. I felt that too.”
He glanced sideways at me.
“Ah, then you knew her?” His voice (or I imagined it) had chilled. It
began to say, that faint chill, that if I too were of ‘the set,’ he
could not be at ease. But I would not give him time to think awry.
“No, no! Only tonight. But I do know her.”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight,” I said and looked at him.
“Then——” his hand tightened on the chair, “you saw? I was right? You
_did_ see?”
“I saw—something,” I admitted.
“Some one?”
I nodded.
His face lighted up. He pulled in his chair to me.
“Her hands—did you notice her hands? I have a drawing of them somewhere.
I’ll show it to you——” He stopped short: Then—“What is your name?” he
asked me.
“Jenny. Jenny Summer.”
He considered that fact for a moment and put it aside again.
“I’d like you to see it. Anita will want it for that damned scrap-book
of hers. She’ll be worrying at me—they all will.”
“You won’t let it go?” I said quickly.
He shook his head.
“No. But they can’t understand why. They can’t understand anything. They
thought I was mad just now. So I was, for that matter. To see her again,
you know—to see her again——”
“I know,” I said.
He laughed nervously.
“Hallucination, of course. Thought transference. What you please. They’d
say so. Do you think so? And I’d been thinking of my picture of her. Oh,
I admit it. So we must look at the matter in the light of common-sense.”
“But I saw her too.”
His eyes softened, and his voice.
“Yes. You were there. That’s comfort. You saw her too—standing there
with her dear hands full of cowslips——”
“A torch,” I said.
“Cowslips——” he checked on the word. “_What?_”
“She was carrying a candle,” I insisted. “It had just been lighted. She
was holding it so carefully.”
We stared at each other.
“You’re sure?”
“Sure.”
He fell back wearily in his chair.
“What’s the good of talking? She’s dead. That’s the end of it. I was
dreaming. Of course. But when you said that you saw, for a moment I
believed——What does it matter? What does it matter anyway? But her hands
were full of cowslips.”
I turned to him eagerly. I knew what to say. It was as if the words were
being whispered to me.
“That was your Madala Grey. But mine—how could she be the same? Oh,
can’t you see? We’ve never seen the real Madala Grey. She gave—she
became—to each of us—what we wanted most. She wrote down our dreams. She
_was_ our dreams. Can’t you see what she meant to my cousin? Anita toils
and slaves for her little bit of greatness. But _she_ was born royal.
That’s why Anita hates her so—hates her and worships her. Why, she’s
been a sort of star to you all—a symbol—a legend—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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