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 odd, sad, significant, that there is scarcely a picture that shows
together those three children, or even two of them. It’s 1921 now and
drawing very close to Finis; but always the old detachment, the seeming
want of mutual love, appears to hold the three apart. Doda is sometimes
glimpsed, no more, with Benji, always putting off or chilling off her
brother for her friends; sometimes she’s seen with Huggo, meeting him
and he her, more like an acquaintance of their sets than like fruit
of the same parents; familiar, apparently, with one another’s lives:
referring to places of amusement by both frequented, as had been done,
in instance, on that night of Huggo’s announcement of his marriage when
with a note that rung sinister he had bantered Doda and she had turned
and run upstairs. But no more than that. The children seem to have no
mutual love. They’re different.
It’s 1921. Huggo was scarcely ever seen now. He had married in haste and
had in haste repented. He also had played a trick, involving a sum of
money, on his father. His wife, as it appeared, had been met at some
dancing club and the brief courtship had continued anywhere but at her
home. Of her home Huggo knew only what she told him; and what she
told him was only what she could invent. She was then, at their first
meeting, in the uniform of a war service corps to which she belonged.
She said her father was a clergyman.
“A clergyman’s daughter!” cried Huggo bitterly, acquainting Rosalie
only three months after his marriage of his marriage’s failure. “A
clergyman’s daughter! That’s what they all say--those! Wasn’t I a fool
to be caught out by that! Oh, wasn’t I a fool! If you want to know what
she really was, she was a teashop waitress, in the city somewhere. If
you want to know what her reverend father in the country was, is, he
doesn’t live in the country; he lives in Holloway, and he doesn’t live
in a rectory in Holloway, he lives in a baker’s shop. That’s what he is,
a baker! That’s what I’ve done for myself, married a waitress! Yes, and
then you, you and father, when she comes whining here and complains I
ill-treat her and keep her without money, you two take her part and send
her back to me with your championship and get me here to pijaw me about
my duty to my pretty young wife! Well, now you know, now you know, and
you can tell father what my pretty young wife is--how she deceived me.
Deceived me! Now you know.”
Rosalie said, “Huggo, you deceived her.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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