Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
It was
turning over, had turned over, a new leaf. Soon it would be a churlish
thing to reproach it for a past that it had lived down; it was becoming
sadder and wiser, and better able to distinguish between the things that
would "do" and the things that would not. The less talk ... (here John
Willie began to realise that he was not a fly, and to collect his nerves
for the turn-over to the under side of that H that a few yards away
dropped over, with a little gleam, into nothing) ... the less talk the
soonest mended. He did not intend to say--anything--to June. Indeed he
intended ... (there: that was rather a jerk to his shoulder socket, but
he was safely underneath) ... indeed he intended that his attitude to
June about such matters should be rather severe. This was not because
June's own thoughts were in the least degree lax (she erred, if
anywhere, on the prudish side), but because women were very tender
things. A whisper was fatal to them. That was why John Willie was
clinging now to that enormous piece of knitting of iron and upholstered
carriages and electric light. He had climbed out in order that nobody
should be able to say, after that, that....
Then it was that he knew, once and for ever, that this was a lie. Then
it was that he knew that he was not where he was, suspended between the
stars of heaven and the lamps of earth, on June's account. He was there
because a gipsy girl had called him. This was his service, not of the
pretty and pleasant June he was presently going to marry, but of one
whom he had not married, of one he had not feared to compromise, of one
who had known nothing, cared nothing, save that she had been lost in a
wild and tender and beautiful love. She, none other, had called him----
Then, too, it was that there rose to him from below a faint yet high and
shuddering "A-a-a-ah!" that was followed by a sudden cessation of all
sound whatever save only a distant throb and pulsing in the
Dancing-Hall. It surprised him for a moment; then he remembered. Of
course. He had been seen----
She, none other, had called him, and he knew now that so she would
continue to call him, wherever he might be--from his labour by day and
from his rest by night, from his laughter with his children and his
clasping of his wife. She would continue to call him until softness and
ease should have done their slow and fatal work, would continue to call
him until that nerve, with her harping on it, should have become
dull....
He seemed to hear the echoes of that voiceless calling, diminishing
through the years to come. They would end in a silence that his wife's
innocent garrulity would never, never be able to break----
The faint throb in the Dancing-Hall also ceased. The Kursaal Gardens
were a bead mat of faces. There was not a whisper. Delyn was not
stiller.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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