The Happy WarriorHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
The Happy Warrior
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Fiction
She stopped and stared at him in a dazed way. He pulled up and went on
quite contentedly: "Keb?--Keb, miss--keb,--keb?" His voice and his keb
came presently into her realisation. There returned to her knowledge
of what she purposed. Her thoughts seemed to her to be drifting
shapes, and this one had floated away and she had been trying to reach
it--hanging there just above her--while she stared at him. She gave
him the address of the Knightsbridge flat and presently was driving
there and presently going up the stairs, very slowly, taking her key
from her purse, and then entering.
The flat was in extraordinary confusion. She did not notice. The
woman who came daily to attend her wants had come twice to find her not
returned, and a third time with a gentleman friend (on tiptoe), taking
a stealthy and permanent departure an hour later with everything that
could be conveniently carried. The back of a drawer in a bureau had
not received this lady's attention. It contained all that Audrey had
come to seek: a box of carved wood, picked up on the Continent. Those
two letters Roly had given her for Mr. Pemberton and Gran were here.
Her mind had turned to them when she had realised the thing that had
never occurred to her: that she would not be believed. Here also was
her marriage certificate and all the letters Roly had written
her--before marriage and from India.
She took up the box and began to retrace her steps. She had scarcely
got down the stairs when dizziness seized her again. The dreadful
sickness and the trembling that the shock of her first encounter with
Lady Burdon had caused her had been stamped out by the final blow that
made her wring her hands and cry "Oh ... oh!" and had sent her numbed
from the house and carried her numbed to this point. Her physical
senses had been drugged, just as they had been hypnotised by the
instruction to which she had answered "Yes, Roly." Now they were
suddenly released from the kindness of the drug. Dizziness--and while
all things spun about her--pain. It caught her with a violence so
immense that she believed her body could not contain it and would go
asunder. It drove her, as it seemed to her, through unconsciousness
and into a state in which she met it again with a quality in its
sharpness that she knew for death, as if she recognised death. It
dropped her back from where she had seen death, through the degree of
its first immensity, and down to a gnawing that told her it was
gathering force to rush up again and this time leave her there--gone.
In that respite she got to the cab. She would die at the next
onslaught--Maggie! If Maggie could hold her when it came! She did not
know the address in the Holloway Road; but knew it was there, and a
butcher's with a strange name--Utter--had caught her attention opposite
when she left the house. She tried to tell the driver, but her
condition overcame her speech. He saw her state and jumped down to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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