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
It is dim in the passage. A condition on which generous Uncle Pyke years
before installed this wonderful electric light that you flick on and
flick off as you require it was that it should always be flicked off
when you did not require it. Now as Rosalie came from the study the
passage was lit only by the shaft of light that gleamed from the
dining-room door; its only sound Aunt Belle’s noisy chatter from the
waiting table.
He was fumbling at the coats, standing there sharply outlined against
the stream of light, his face cut on it in a perfect silhouette. She
had to pass him. That hateful he. She was seized with a fit of that same
trembling that had shaken her after the passage between them at the gate
on Shoot Up Hill. It shook her now, dreadfully. Her knees trembled. She
felt faint. Awful to hate so! She was quite close, almost touching him.
It was necessary he should move, forward or back, to give her room. But
he did not move. His hands, outstretched before him on the coats, and
sharp against the light, appeared to her to be shaking; but that was the
hallucination of this frightful trembling that possessed her. She tried
to say, “If you please--,” but, dreadfully, had no voice; but made some
sound; and he, most slowly, drew back. It was before him that she had to
pass.
She advanced; and felt, as if she saw it, the intensity of the gaze of
his eyes upon her; and saw, as if the place were light and her look not
averted, his “marching” face and those lines radiating to his temples
(horizon tracks) where the faint touch of greyness was; and suddenly had
upon her senses, with an extraordinary pungency, causing them to swim,
that odd, nice smell there was about him of mingled peat and soap and
fresh tobacco, of tweed and heather and the sea.
She caught her breath...
The thing’s too poignant for the words a man has.
She was caught in his arms, terribly enfolding her. He was crying in
her ears, passionately, triumphantly, “Rosalie! Rosalie!” She was in his
arms. Those long, strong arms of his were round her; and she was caught
against his heart, her face upturned to his, his face against her own;
and she was swooning, falling through incredible spaces, drowning in
incredible seas, sinking through incredible blackness; and in her ears
his voice, coming to her in her extremity like the beat of a wing in the
night, like the first pulsing roll of music enormously remote, “Rosalie!
Rosalie!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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