This FreedomHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
This Freedom
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
They were come to the lighted shops and the crowded pavements. The bus
drew up at the thronged corner adjacent to the divigation of the Harrow
Road and she leaned over and watched the scene, smilingly (for sheer
happiness) looking down upon it, as smilingly (for her triumphant
altitude) she felt that she looked down upon the world. She would not
have changed place with any life living or that could be lived; she was
so much abandoned to her happiness that she made the intention she would
sit up in her significant apartment all that night, not to lose a moment
of it. She grudged that even sleep upon her happiness should intrude.
There came one in the traffic beneath her that caught her attention: a
woman whom people stood aside to let pass and turned to look upon with
grins; two or three urchins danced about the woman, pointing at her and
calling at her. Her dress was disordered, muddy all up one side as if
she had fallen; her face flushed; her hat awry; her hair escaped and
wisped about her eyes and on her shoulders. She was drunk. An obscene
and horrible spectacle, the mock of her beholders. A horrible woman.
It was Keggo.
Rosalie caught her breath. She made to rise but did not rise. Keggo
stopped and lifted all around a vacant gaze. Her eyes met Rosalie’s
straight above her. She lurched a step and stopped and swayed and looked
again, battling perhaps with hints within her fumy brain of recognition.
Rosalie made again to rise to go to her and again did not rise. The bus
moved forward. That wretched woman, making as if to pursue her aroused
be-fuddlement, turned about to follow and came a few steps, lurching
like a ship that foundered. The light blazed down upon her upturned
face. She lurched into some shadow and, as wreckage swallowed up in the
trough of the sea, her face was gone.
Lurching... as a ship... that foundered. There was in Rosalie’s mind
some dim memory struggling. Lurching... as a ship... in the darkness...
in the night. And her face... seen and gone... as a ship... labouring...
as a ship...
Ah!
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing; Only a
signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness.
It came to Rosalie complete and word for word; and with perfect
clearness, as though she saw and sensed them, all its attendant
circumstances: the attic room at the Sultana’s, the strange smell
mingled with the smell of the oil lamp, Keggo in the wicker chair, she
beside her, her head against Keggo’s knee; and Keggo’s voice reciting
the lines and her young, protesting, loving cry, “O Keggo!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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