The woman was another story. She was quiet and reserved, dressed in
black, with a neat little black hat with a green feather in it. She had
yellow fluffy hair and bright childish blue eyes and a simple, innocent
expression. She spoke very softly and almost in a whisper. So far as I
could discover she could see nothing odd in Wilbraham nor in anything
that he had said. She was the one person in all the world who had
understood him completely and found nothing out of the way in his talk.
She had liked him at once, she said. "I could see that he was kind,"
she added earnestly, as though to her that was the most important thing
in all the world. No, his talk had not seemed odd to her. She had
believed every word that he had said. Why not? You could not look at
him and not believe what he said.
Of course it was true. And why not? What was there against it? It had
been a great help for her what the gentleman had told her... Yes, and
he had gone to sleep with his head in her lap... and she had stayed
awake all night thinking... and he had waked up just in time to see the
sun rise. Some sunrise that was, too.
That was a curious little fact that all three of them, even the
battered pugilist, should have been so deeply struck by that sunrise.
Wilbraham on the last day of his life, when he hovered between
consciousness and unconsciousness, kept recalling it as though it had
been a vision.
"The sun--and the trees suddenly green and bright like glittering
swords. All shapes--swords, plowshares, elephants, and camels--and the
sky pale like ivory. See, now the sun is rushing up, faster than ever,
to take us with him, up, up, leaving the trees like green clouds
beneath us--far, far beneath us--"
The woman said that it was the finest sunrise she had ever seen. He
talked to her all the time about his plans. He was looking disheveled
now and unshaven and dirty. She suggested that he should go back to his
flat. No, he wished to waste no time. Who knew how long he had got? It
might be only a day or two ... He would go to Covent Garden and talk to
the men there.
She was confused as to what happened after that. When they got to the
market the carts were coming in and men were very busy.
She saw the gentleman speak to one of them very earnestly, but he was
busy and pushed him aside. He spoke to another, who told him to clear
out.
Then he jumped on to a box, and almost the last sight she had of him
was his standing there in his soiled clothes, a streak of mud on his
face, his arms outstretched and crying: "It's true! Stop just a
moment--you _must_ hear me!"
Some one pushed him off the box. The pugilist rushed in then, cursing
them and saying that the man was a gentleman and had given him half a
crown, and then some hulking great fellow fought the pugilist and there
was a regular melee. Wilbraham was in the middle of them, was knocked
down and trampled upon. No one meant to hurt him, I think. They all
seemed very sorry afterwards....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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