Who Goes There!Chambers, Robert W. (Robert William)
General
Who Goes There!
Chambers, Robert W. (Robert William)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Through the open port a grey sky glimmered. She rose to her knees and
gazed out upon a grey waste of water heaving to the horizon.
Then she turned and looked across at the bed where Guild lay, his blond
head cradled on one arm, asleep.
Her eyes rested on him a long while. Then she caught sight of her shoes
and spats on the floor--looked down at the blankets and covers that had
kept her warm. The next moment her eyes fell on her satchel where it
stood open, the key still in the lock, and her silver toilet articles
glimmering dully inside.
The vague tenderness in her blue eyes vanished; _he_ had done _this_,
too!--shamefully, by force, treading mercilessly on the frail bud of
friendship--ignoring everything, sacrificing everything to a dull,
obstinate determination which he had characterized as duty.
She turned and looked at the man who had done all this, her eyes darkly
beautiful, her lips stern.
Duty? He had not considered the duty she owed. He had not respected her
promise to bring back what had been intrusted to her. And when the
discussion had tired him--when her warnings, pleadings--even her appeals
in the name of the first friendship she had ever given--had been
ignored, he had coolly used violence.
Yes, violence, although, perhaps, the violence had not been very
violent. But it was force--and hateful to her who never before had been
obliged to endure the arrogance which her caste only knew how to
dispense.
"So brauch' Ich Gewalt!" kept ringing in her ears like a very obsession
as she knelt there, sitting back on her own supple limbs, and watching
the sleeping man out of beautiful hostile eyes.
_That_ man! That _American_--or Belgian--whatever he was--with his clear
grey eyes and his short yellow hair and that mouth of his which could be
faintly humorous at times and, at times be so ugly and set--what was
there about him that she liked--or rather _had_ liked?
Not his features; they were only passable from an ornamental point of
view--not his lean but powerful figure, which resembled many other
figures she had seen in England--not his manner particularly--at least
she had seen more deferential attitudes, more polish of the courtly and
continental sort, more empressement.
_What_ was it she liked,--had _once_ liked in this man? Nothing!
_Nothing!_--the tears suddenly glimmered in her eyes and she winked them
dry, angrily.
And to think--to remember in years to come that she--_she_ had pleaded
with that man in the name of friendship--and of something _more_ than
friendship!--The hot colour mantled face and throat and she covered her
eyes in a sudden agony of mortification.
For a few moments she remained so, then her hands fell, helplessly
again.
And, as she knelt there looking at him through the increasing daylight,
suddenly her eyes narrowed, and her set face grew still and intent.
Crowding out of the shallow breast pocket of his Norfolk where he lay
were papers. _Her_ papers!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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