by A. J. Cronin
Then all at once she slipped back again. More faces peering from behind those parted curtains. Frank’s face: calm and with that curious mocking smile; Anna’s, taunting, sneering, reviling her; Netta’s, ruddy and open; Dave Bowie’s face, mild and laughing; faces of her childhood, too, all those early faces, distant, floating, forming now a ring which spun around her dizzily. Then came another interval of painful consciousness. Where was she? So weak, so filled with this burning and this anguish! Was she – was she dying?’ No! That couldn’t be. She wasn’t finished with things yet. Only forty-five. She wasn’t beaten. Her head was still up. On and on. The wheels were racing madly forward – on and on!
Back again to that delirious dreaming. No faces now, but, instead, a light – a dazzling light which bathed her – so bright for her weak eyes. It glowed and glowed like the halo of a Christ. No, it was not that – Christ’s halo was never so bright. It was sunlight – the burnished sunlight falling across the shining sea, and through it bright motes went flickering up like butterflies. She was back, back at the beginning; she was at her window looking out, waiting, raising her hand to shade her eyes against that light.
It flooded her whole being, that light, with final, blinding intensity.
Then all at once went out.
Suddenly, upon her, rushing, came the last eternal darkness.
It was upon the evening following her admission that she died. No resistance – no reaction – it was quite inevitable.
They took her to the mortuary. There, upon that thick stone slab, which once had been a vision of her nightmare fancy, they laid her.
The night was gentle, quiet with the late autumnal stillness she had loved. And into the silent crypt a grey mist rolled from the moving river, weaving mysteriously about her figure lying wasted, naked, stripped of everything, upon that slab.
Fixed in the rigid mask of death, the face was meaningless. The eyes were closed, the lips pale and faintly parted, the hands, translucent upon the breast, crossed with final impotence. And the vapours, rising more thickly from the water and the earth, enshrouded her.
Copyright
First published in 1933 by Gollancz
This edition published 2013 by Bello
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Copyright © A. J. Cronin, 1933
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