Together and Apart, page 31
He scrambled over the gate again and hurried off down the lane. As he reached the garden gate the bicycle began to thump away on the hill. This time it made a really effective departure. He could hear it for a long time, throbbing through the quiet night, till it was no louder than the ticking of a watch.
Everyone had gone back into the house except Johnnie Graham, with whom he lingered on the lawn, waiting for Eliza. Presently he saw her coming, quickly and silently, in and out of the chequered patches of shadow. She went past them towards the house, moving steadily forward, like a sleep-walker, invested by some power not her own. Her face, in the moonlight, looked strange to him, yet familiar; he felt that he might have seen it long ago when he too was young, and knew nothing, and took the light of heaven for granted. And now, after many years, he saw again that face, that fabled face of happiness, uplifted to the quiet sky, before she passed by him and was gone.
Johnnie turned with him to look after her.
‘She reminds me,’ he said suddenly, ‘of someone. But I can’t remember her name, after all this time.’
‘I don’t suppose you ever knew it,’ said Alec.
‘Oh, yes. I knew it all right,’ said Johnnie morosely. ‘Wilcox, or Wilkinson … or it might have been Blenkinsop. It’s funny … a funny thing! I can never remember their names.’
‘Their names,’ said Alec, ‘we know not nor shall know.’
He paused, unable to recall the end of the quotation. Johnnie, surprisingly, finished it for him in the disgusted manner which he reserved for poetry and for all expressions of sentiment.
‘Like the lost. Pleiad … ugh! … seen no more below.’
A frog, in the reeds by the river, set up a dry little croaking like an echo.
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Copyright © Margaret Kennedy 1936
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First published in Great Britain by Cassell & Co in 1936
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Margaret Kennedy, Together and Apart
