City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
He looked at them closely in a puzzled way. He read a label aloud in a
dragging voice.
“Ann Hutchinson, Liverpool. What's--what's Liverpool?
“Oh, come,” encouraged Little Ann, “you know that. It's a place in
England. We're going back to England.”
He stood and gazed fixedly before him. Then he began to rub his fingers
across his forehead. Ann knew the straining look in his eyes. He was
making that horrible struggle to get back somewhere through the darkness
which shut him in. It was so painful a thing to see that even Hutchinson
turned slightly away.
“Don't!” said Little Ann, softly, and tried to draw him away.
He caught his breath convulsively once or twice, and his voice dragged
out words again, as though he were dragging them from bottomless depths.
“Going--back--to--England--back to England--to England.”
He dropped into a chair near by, his arms thrown over its back, and
broke, as his face fell upon them, into heavy, deadly sobbing--the
kind of sobbing Tembarom had found it impossible to stand up against.
Hutchinson whirled about testily.
“Dang it!” he broke out, “I wish Tembarom'd turn up. What are we to do?”
He didn't like it himself. It struck him as unseemly.
But Ann went to the chair, and put her hands on the shuddering shoulder,
bending over the soul-wrung creature, the wisdom of centuries in the
soft, expostulatory voice which seemed to reach the very darkness he
was lost in. It was a wisdom of which she was wholly unaware, but it had
been born with her, and was the building of her being.
“'Sh! 'S-h-h!” she said. “You mustn't do that. Mr. Tembarom wouldn't
like you to do it. He'll be in directly. 'Sh! 'Sh, now!” And simple as
the words were, their soothing reached him. The wildness of his sobs
grew less.
“See here,” Hutchinson protested, “this won't do, my man. I won't have
it, Ann. I'm upset myself, what with this going back and everything. I
can't have a chap coming and crying like that there. It upsets me worse
than ever. And you hangin' over him! It won't do.”
Strangeways lifted his head from his arms and looked at him.
“Aye, I mean what I say,” Hutchinson added fretfully.
Strangeways got up from the chair. When he was not bowed or slouching it
was to be seen that he was a tall man with square shoulders. Despite his
unshaven, haggard face, he had a sort of presence.
“I'll go back to my room,” he said. “I forgot. I ought not to be here.”
Neither Hutchinson nor Little Ann had ever seen any one do the thing
he did next. When Ann went with him to the door of the hall bedroom, he
took her hand, and bowing low before her, lifted it gently to his lips.
Hutchinson stared at him as he turned into the room and closed the door
behind him.
“Well, I've read of lords and ladies doin' that in books,” he said, “but
I never thought I should see a chap do it myself.”
Little Ann went back to her mending, looking very thoughtful.
“Father,” she said, after a few moments, “England made him come near to
remembering something.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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