DUSKY RUTH by A.E. Coppard

“Time had indeed taken them by the forelock, and they looked upon a ruddled world.”

This is a story that is beautifully crammed with its own texture. But tortured by something within it, as if the once woman-scorning protagonist — who eventually reaches an inn in the midst of the Cotswolds and is immediately given roomy slippers to make him comfortable — is perhaps the ghost of the hanged murderous miscreant Timothy Bridger whom he is said to read about in a newspaper while relaxing in his slippers by a log fire. And we experience his impulsive unspoken attraction, in her ‘shrine’ of firelight, to the silently reciprocating woman he calls Dusky Ruth. And his later fully-clothed lustful resistance to her breathtakingly magnetic naked charms, a resistance as a sort of penance? As if nursing a protection for her. It was the tactile descriptions of her hair that got me. I felt impelled to enter the story. And I did. One of the old people in the nearby hearing distance of an inn bedroom.
A ‘rack of passion’. A story so teeming with quotable quotes, I could have quoted it all here. It surely is a classic that I should never have been able to miss. Thanks to the one who alerted me to it today.
A candle’s shoulders and the room number six. And despite what I said above about quoting, the passage below irresistibly needs quoting since it seems to cohere with a story (‘Words the Happy Say’) about unrequited love, with various broken silences, a story that I happened, by chance, to read earlier today HERE…

“He waited for a look from her, a movement to break the trance of silence. No footfall in street or house, no voice in the inn but the clock, beating away as if pronouncing a doom. Suddenly it rasped out nine large notes, a bell in the town repeated them dolefully, and a cuckoo no farther than the kitchen mocked them with three times three.”

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My other reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/03/the-field-of-mustard-by-a-e-coppard/