NB. The quotes are arranged in chronological
order by collections. Within these sections, the titles of the stories and
other relevant details are given in square brackets. The titles from Ashenden refer not to the shortish
“chapters” of this book, but to the much better known pieces from The Complete Short Stories (1951). Up at the Villa, inhabiting the no man’s
land between novel and short story, is included by way of bonus.
The Trembling
of a Leaf
(1921)
[The Pacific]
The Pacific
is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the
English Channel off Beachy Head , with a heavy
swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped with white crests, and boisterous. It
is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue is arrogant.
The sun shines fiercely from an unclouded sky. The trade wind gets into your
blood and you are filled with an impatience for the unknown. The billows,
magnificently rolling, stretch widely on all sides of you, and you forget your
vanished youth, with its memories, cruel and sweet, in a restless, intolerable
desire for life. On such a sea as this Ulysses sailed when he sought the Happy
Isles. But there are days also when the Pacific is like a lake. The sea is flat
and shining. The flying fish, a gleam of shadow on the brightness of a mirror,
make little fountains of sparkling drops when they dip. There are fleecy clouds
on the horizon, and at sunset they take strange shapes so that it is impossible
not to believe that you see a range of lofty mountains. They are the mountains
of the country of your dreams. You sail through an unimaginable silence upon a
magic sea. Now and then a few gulls suggest that land is not far off, a
forgotten island hidden in a wilderness of waters; but the gulls, the melancholy
gulls, are the only sign you have of it. You see never a tramp, with its
friendly smoke, no stately bark or trim schooner, not a fishing boat even: it
is an empty desert; and presently the emptiness fills you with a vague
foreboding.[1]
[The Fall of
Edward Barnard]
''Do you know
that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants
leisure.''
Self-sacrifice
appealed so keenly to his imagination that the inability to exercise it gave
him a sense of disillusion. He was like the philanthropist who with altruistic
motives builds model dwellings for the poor and finds that he has made a
lucrative investment. He cannot prevent the satisfaction he feels in the ten
per cent which rewards the bread that he had cast upon the waters, but he has an
awkward feeling that it detracts somewhat from the savour of his virtue.
[Red]
''The tragedy
of love is not death or separation. [...] The tragedy of love is indifference.''[2]
''We are
foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if we weren't
perhaps we should be less wise at fifty.''
''Do we not
know that the essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity?''
''...passion
has in it always a shade of sadness, a touch of bitterness or anguish...''
''...when
sentimentality is joined with scepticism there is often the devil to pay.''
''There is
always a pain in the contemplation of perfect beauty.''
''A soul is a
troublesome possession and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.''
The Casuarina Tree (1926)
[The Letter]
Outside on the quay the sun beat fiercely. A stream of motors, lorries and
buses, private cars and hirelings, sped up and down the crowded thoroughfare,
and every chauffeur blew his horn; rickshaws threaded their nimble path amid
the throng, and the panting coolies found breath to yell at one another;
coolies, carrying heavy bales, sidled along with their quick jog-trot and
shouted to the passer-by to make way; itinerant vendors proclaimed their wares.
Singapore is the meeting-place of a hundred peoples; and men of all colours,
black Tamils, yellow Chinks, brown Malays, Armenians, Jews and Bengalis, called
to one another in raucous tones. But inside the office of Messrs. Ripley, Joyce
& Naylor it was pleasantly cool; it was dark after the dusty glitter of the
street and agreeably quiet after its unceasing din.
[The Force of Circumstance]
Under the breathless sun of midday it [the river] had the white pallor of
death. A native was paddling along in a dug-out so small that it hardly showed
above the surface of the water. The colours of the day were ashy and wan. They
were but the various tones of the heat. (It was like an Eastern melody, in the
minor key, which exacerbates the nerves by its ambiguous monotony; and the ear
awaits impatiently a resolution, but waits in vain.)
[The Outstation]
The air was scented with the sweet-smelling flowers of a tree that grew at
the entrance to the arbour, and the fireflies, sparkling dimly, flew with their
slow and silvery flight. The moon made a pathway on the broad river for the
light feet of Siva's bride, and on the further bank a row of palm trees was
delicately silhouetted against the sky.
[P. & O.]
And presently, no one quite knew how, the notion spread through the ship that Gallagher was bewitched. While the ladies sat about on their deck–chairs, stitching away at the costumes they were making for the fancy–dress party on Christmas Day, they gossiped about it in undertones, and the men in the smoking–room talked of it over their cocktails. A good many of the passengers had lived long in the East and from the recesses of their memory they produced strange and inexplicable stories. Of course it was absurd to think seriously that Gallagher was suffering from a malignant spell, such things were impossible, and yet this and that was a fact and no one had been able to explain it. The doctor had to confess that he could suggest no cause for Gallagher’s condition, he was able to give a physiological explanation, but why these terrible spasms should have suddenly assailed him he did not say.
There was something impressive in the thought of this ship speeding through a deserted sea, while to her from all parts came unseen messages. She seemed at that moment strangely alone and yet the centre of the world. In the lazaret the sick man, shaken by the cruel spasms, gasped for life. Then the passengers became conscious that the ship’s course was altered, and they heard that the captain had made up his mind to put in at Aden. Gallagher was to be landed there and taken to the hospital, where he could have attention which on board was impossible. The chief engineer received orders to force his engines. The ship was an old one and she throbbed with the greater effort. The passengers had grown used to the sound and feel of her engines, and now the greater vibration shook their nerves with a new sensation. It would not pass into each one’s unconsciousness, but beat on their sensibilities so that each felt a personal concern. And still the wide sea was empty of traffic, so they seemed to traverse an empty world. And now the uneasiness which had descended upon the ship, but which no one had been willing to acknowledge, became a definite malaise. The passengers grew irritable, and people quarrelled over trifles which at another time would have seemed insignificant. Mr Jephson made his hackneyed jokes, but no one any longer repaid him with a smile. The Linsells had an altercation, and Mrs Linsell was heard late at night walking round the deck with her husband and uttering in a low, tense voice a stream of vehement reproaches. There was a violent scene in the smoking–room one night over a game of bridge, and the reconciliation which followed it was attended with general intoxication. People talked little of Gallagher, but he was seldom absent from their thoughts. They examined the route map. The doctor said now that Gallagher could not live more than three or four days, and they discussed acrimoniously what was the shortest time in which Aden could be reached. What happened to him after he was landed was no affair of theirs; they did not want him to die on board.
Already all those people had put out of their minds with a kind of ferocity
the thought of that poor lonely man who had so strangely died in their midst.
They felt no compassion for him but resentment rather, because on his account
they had been ill–at–ease. They seized upon life avidly. They made their jokes,
they flirted, they gossiped. Mrs Hamlyn remembered what the consul had said,
that among Mr Gallagher’s papers no letters could be found, not the name of a single
friend to whom the news of his death might be sent, and she knew not why this
seemed to her unbearably tragic. There was something mysterious in a man who
could pass through the world in such solitariness. When she remembered how he
had come on deck in Singapore, so short a while since, in such rude health,
full of vitality, and his arrogant plans for the future, she was seized with
dismay. Those words of the burial service filled her with a solemn awe: Man
that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.
He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower . . . Year in, year out, he had made
his plans for the future, he wanted to live so much and he had so much to live
for, and then just when he stretched out his hand–oh, it was pitiful; it made
all the other distresses of the world of small account. Death with its mystery
was the only thing that really mattered. Mrs Hamlyn leaned over the rail and
looked at the starry sky. Why did people make themselves unhappy? Let them weep
for the death of those they loved, death was terrible always, but for the rest,
was it worth while to be wretched, to harbour malice, to be vain and
uncharitable? She thought again of herself and her husband and the woman he so
strangely loved. He too had said that we live to be happy so short a time and
we are so long dead. She pondered long and intently, and suddenly, as summer
lightning flashes across the darkness of the night, she made a discovery which
filled her with tremulous surprise; for she found that in her heart was no
longer anger with her husband nor jealousy of her rival. A notion dawned on
some remote horizon of her consciousness and like the morning sun suffused her
soul with a tender, blissful glow. Out of the tragedy of that unknown
Irishman’s death she gathered elatedly the courage for a desperate resolution.
Her heart beat quickly, she was impatient to carry it into effect. A passion
for self–sacrifice seized her.
Ashenden (1928)
[The Traitor]
Ashenden
admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness. People sometimes thought
him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to
them, and even the few to whom he was attached his eyes saw with equal
clearness the merits and the defects. When he liked people it was not because
he was blind to their faults, he did not mind their faults but accepted them
with a tolerant shrug of shoulders, or because he ascribed to them excellencies
that they did not possess; and since he judged his friends with candour they
never disappointed him and he seldom lost one. He asked from none more than he
could give.
How much easier life would be if people were all black or all white and how
much simpler it would be to act in regard to them! Was Caypor a good man who
loved evil or a bad man who loved good? And how could such unreconcilable
elements exist side by side and in harmony within the same heart? For one thing
was clear, Caypor was disturbed by no gnawing of conscience; he did his mean
and despicable work with gusto. He was a traitor who enjoyed his treachery.
Though Ashenden had been studying human nature more or less consciously all his
life, it seemed to him that he knew as little about it now in middle age as he
had done when he was a child. Of course R. would have said to him: Why the
devil do you waste your time with such nonsense? The man's a dangerous spy and
your business is to lay him by the heels.
She
was no fool. She had read much, in several languages, and she could talk of the
books she had read with good sense. She had a knowledge of modern painting and
modern music that not a little impressed Ashenden. It was amusing once to hear
her before luncheon play one of those silvery little pieces of Debussy; she
played it disdainfully because it was French and so light, but with an angry
appreciation of its grace and gaiety.
When
Ashenden congratulated her she shrugged her shoulders.
‘The
decadent music of a decadent nation,’ she said. Then with powerful hands she
struck the first resounding chords of a sonata by Beethoven; but she stopped.
‘I cannot play, I am out of practice, and you English, what do you know of
music? You have not produced a composer since Purcell!’
Ashenden spent two or three days visiting Basle. It did not much amuse him. He passed a good deal of time in the book-shops turning over the pages of books that would have been worth reading if life were a thousand years long.
Ashenden spent two or three days visiting Basle. It did not much amuse him. He passed a good deal of time in the book-shops turning over the pages of books that would have been worth reading if life were a thousand years long.
Having taken a room at the hotel at which he had been instructed to stay,
Ashenden went out; it was a lovely day, early in August, and the sun shone in
an unclouded sky. He had not been to Lucerne since he was a boy and but vaguely
remembered a covered bridge, a great stone lion and a church in which he had sat,
bored yet impressed, while they played an organ; and now, wandering along a
shady quay (and the lake looked just as tawdry and unreal as it looked on the
picture-postcards) he tried not so much to find his way about a half-forgotten
scene as to re-form in his mind some recollection of the shy and eager lad, so impatient
for life (which he saw not in the present of his adolescence but only in the
future of his manhood) who so long ago had wandered there. But it seemed to him
that the most vivid of his memories was not of himself, but of the crowd; he
seemed to remember sun and heat and people; the train was crowded and so was
the hotel, the lake steamers were packed and on the quays and in the streets
you threaded your way among the throng of holiday-makers. They were fat and old
and ugly and odd, and they stank. Now, in war-time, Lucerne was as deserted as
it must have been before the world at large discovered that Switzerland was the
playground of Europe. Most of the hotels were closed, the streets were empty,
the rowing boats for hire rocked idly at the water's edge and there was none to
take them, and in the avenues by the lake the only persons to be seen were
serious Swiss taking their neutrality, like a dachshund, for a walk with them.
Ashenden felt exhilarated by the solitude and, sitting down on a bench that
faced the water, surrendered himself deliberately to the sensation. It was true
that the lake was absurd, the water was too blue, the mountains too snowy, and
its beauty, hitting you in the face, exasperated rather than thrilled; but all
the same there was something pleasing in the prospect, an artless candour, like
one of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words,
that made Ashenden smile with complacency. Lucerne reminded him of wax flowers
under glass cases and cuckoo clocks and fancy-work in Berlin wool. So long at
all events as the fine weather lasted he was prepared to enjoy himself.
[Mr
Harrington's Washing]
Though he
[Ashenden] had both esteem and admiration for the sensibility of the human
race, he had little respect for their intelligence: man has always found it
easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.
For Mr Harrington was a talker. He talked as though it were a natural
function of the human being, automatically, as men breathe or digest their food;
he talked not because he had something to say, but because he could not help
himself, in a high-pitched, nasal voice, without inflexion, at one dead level
of tone. He talked with precision, using a copious vocabulary and forming his
sentences with deliberation; he never used a short word when a longer one would
do; he never paused. He went on and on. It was not a torrent, for there was
nothing impetuous about it, it was like a stream of lava pouring irresistibly
down the side of a volcano. It flowed with a quiet and steady force that
overwhelmed everything that was in its path.
[Giulia
Lazzari]
[First
lines:]
Ashenden was
in the habit of asserting that he was never bored. It was one of his notions
that only such persons were as had no resources in themselves and it was but
the stupid that depended on the outside world for their amusement. Ashenden had
no illusions about himself and such success in current letters as had come to
him had left his head unturned. He distinguished acutely between fame and the
notoriety that rewards the author of a successful novel or a popular play; and
he was indifferent to this except in so far as it was attended with tangible
benefits. He was perfectly ready to take advantage of his familiar name to get
a better state-room in a ship than he had paid for, and if a Customs-house
officer passed his luggage unopened because he had read his short stories
Ashenden was pleased to admit that the pursuit of literature had its
compensations. He sighed when eager young students of the drama sought to
discuss its technique with him, and when gushing ladies tremulously whispered
in his ear their admiration of his books he often wished he was dead. But he
thought himself intelligent and so it was absurd that he should be bored. It
was a fact that he could talk with interest to persons commonly thought so
excruciatingly dull that their fellows fled from them as though they owed them
money. It may be that here he was but indulging the professional instinct that
was seldom dormant in him; they, his raw material, did not bore him any more
than fossils bore the geologist. And now he had everything that a reasonable
man could want for his entertainment. He had pleasant rooms in a good hotel and
Geneva is one of the most agreeable cities in Europe to live in. He hired a boat and rowed on the lake
or hired a horse and trotted sedately, for in that neat and orderly canton it
is difficult to find a stretch of turf where you can have a good gallop, along
the macadamized roads in the environs of the town. He wandered on foot about
its old streets, trying among those grey stone houses, so quiet and dignified,
to recapture the spirit of a past age. He read again with delight Rousseau's Confessions, and for the second or third
time tried in vain to get on with La
Nouvelle Héloïse. He wrote. He knew few people, for it was his business to
keep in the background, but he had picked up a chatting acquaintance with
several persons living in his hotel and he was not lonely. His life was
sufficiently filled, it was varied, and when he had nothing else to do he could
enjoy his own reflections; it was absurd to think that under these
circumstances he could possibly be bored, and yet, like a little lonely cloud
in the sky, he did see in the offing the possibility of boredom. There is a
story that Louis XIV, having summoned a courtier to attend him on a ceremonial
occasion, found himself ready to go as the courtier appeared; he turned to him
and with icy majesty said, J'ai failli
attendre, of which the only translation I can give, but a poor one, is, I
have but just escaped waiting: so Ashenden might have admitted that he now but
just escaped being bored.
Ashenden reflected
that this was the mistake the amateur humorist, as opposed to the professional,
so often made; when he made a joke he harped on it. The relations of the joker
to his joke should be as quick and desultory as those of a bee to its flower.
He should make his joke and pass on. There is of course no harm if, like the
bee approaching the flower, he buzzes a little; for it is just as well to
announce to a thick-headed world that a joke is intended. But Ashenden, unlike
most professional humorists, had a kindly tolerance for other people's humour
and now he answered R. on his own lines.
Luxury is
dangerous to people who have never known it and to whom its temptations are
held out too suddenly. R., that shrewd, cynical man, was captured by the vulgar
glamour and the shoddy brilliance of the scene before him. Just as the
advantage of culture is that it enables you to talk nonsense with distinction,
so the habit of luxury allows you to regard its frills and furbelows with a
proper contumely.
[His
Excellency]
[His
Excellency:]
''I am not
sure if a man isn't wiser to do what he wants very much to do and let the
consequences take care of themselves.''
[His
Excellency:]
''There is
always something a little absurd in success.''
[Ashenden:]
''All
sensible people know that vanity is the most devastating, the most universal,
and the most ineradicable of the passions that afflict the soul of man, and it
is only vanity that makes him deny its power. It is more consuming than love.
With advancing years, mercifully, you can snap your fingers at the terror and
the servitude of love, but age cannot free you from the thraldom of vanity.
Time can assuage the pangs of love, but only death can still the anguish of
wounded vanity. Love is simple and seeks no subterfuge, but vanity cozens you
with a hundred disguises. It is part and parcel of every virtue: it is
mainspring of courage and the strength of ambition; it gives constancy to the
lover and endurance to the stoic; it adds fuel to the fire of the artist's
desire for fame and is at once the support and the compensation of the honest
man's integrity; it leers even cynically in the humility of the saint. You
cannot escape it, and should you take pains to guard against it, it will make
use of those very pains to trip you up. You are defenceless against its
onslaught because you know not on what unprotected side it will attack you.
Sincerity cannot protect you from its snare nor humour from its mockery.''
[Last lines:]
'What was the
concert like?' asked Sir Herbert.
'Oh, not bad
at all. They gave a Brahms Concerto and the Fire-music from the Walküre, and some Hungarian dances of
Dvorak.[3]
I thought them rather showy.' She turned to Ashenden. 'I hope you haven't been
bored all alone with my husband. What have you been
talking about? Art and Literature?'
'No, its raw
material,' said Ashenden.
He took his
leave.
[The Hairless Mexican]
What a nuisance it was, he reflected irritably, to have an imagination that
conjured up pictures of things that you didn't in the least want to see!
For three days Ashenden led the idle life that fitted so well the fantastical, untidy, and genial city. He did nothing from morning till night but wander at random, looking, not with the eye of the tourist who seeks for what ought to be seen, nor with the eye of the writer who looks for his own (seeing in a sunset a melodious phrase or in a face the inkling of a character), but with that of the tramp to whom whatever happens is absolute. He went to the museum to look at the statue of Agrippina the Younger, which he had particular reasons for remembering with affection, and took the opportunity to see once more the Titian and the Brueghel in the picture gallery. But he always came back to the church of Santa Chiara. Its grace, its gaiety, the airy persiflage with which it seemed to treat religion and at the back of this its sensual emotion ; its extravagance, its elegance of line; to Ashenden it seemed to express, as it were in one absurd and grandiloquent metaphor, the sunny, dusty, lovely city and its bustling inhabitants. It said that life was charming and sad; it's a pity one hadn't any money but money wasn't everything, and anyway why bother when we are here today and gone tomorrow, and it was all very exciting and amusing, and after all we must make the best of things: facciamo una piccola combinazione.
For three days Ashenden led the idle life that fitted so well the fantastical, untidy, and genial city. He did nothing from morning till night but wander at random, looking, not with the eye of the tourist who seeks for what ought to be seen, nor with the eye of the writer who looks for his own (seeing in a sunset a melodious phrase or in a face the inkling of a character), but with that of the tramp to whom whatever happens is absolute. He went to the museum to look at the statue of Agrippina the Younger, which he had particular reasons for remembering with affection, and took the opportunity to see once more the Titian and the Brueghel in the picture gallery. But he always came back to the church of Santa Chiara. Its grace, its gaiety, the airy persiflage with which it seemed to treat religion and at the back of this its sensual emotion ; its extravagance, its elegance of line; to Ashenden it seemed to express, as it were in one absurd and grandiloquent metaphor, the sunny, dusty, lovely city and its bustling inhabitants. It said that life was charming and sad; it's a pity one hadn't any money but money wasn't everything, and anyway why bother when we are here today and gone tomorrow, and it was all very exciting and amusing, and after all we must make the best of things: facciamo una piccola combinazione.
[Miss King]
'You ought to get material that would be very useful to you in
your work.'
'I shouldn't mind that,' said Ashenden.
'I'll tell you an incident that occurred only the other day
and I can vouch for its truth. I thought at the time it would make a damned
good story. One of the French ministers went down to Nice to recover from a
cold and he had some very important documents with him that he kept in a
dispatch-case. They were very important indeed. Well, a day or two after he
arrived he picked up a yellow-haired lady at some restaurant or other where
there was dancing, and he got very friendly with her. To cut a long story short,
he took her back to his hotel – of course it was a very imprudent thing to do –
and when he came to himself in the morning the lady and the dispatch-case had
disappeared. They had one or two drinks up in his room and his theory is that
when his back was turned the woman slipped a drug into his glass.'
R. finished and looked at Ashenden with a gleam in his close-set
eyes.
'Dramatic, isn't it?' he asked.
'Do you mean to say that happened the other day?'
'The week before last.'
'Impossible,' cried Ashenden. 'Why, we've been putting that incident
on the stage for sixty years, we've written it in a thousand novels. Do you
mean to say that life has only just caught up with us?'
R. was a trifle disconcerted.
'Well, if necessary, I could give you names and dates, and believe
me, the Allies have been put to no end of trouble by the loss of the documents
that the dispatch-case contained.'
'Well, sir, if you can't do better than that in the secret
service,' sighed Ashenden, 'I'm afraid that as a source of inspiration to the writer
of fiction it's a wash-out. We really can't
write that story much longer.'
It did not take them long to settle things and when Ashenden rose
to go he had already made careful note of his instructions.He was to start for
Geneva next day. The last words that R. said to him, with a casualness that
made them impressive, were:
'There's just one thing I think you ought to know before you take
on this job. And don't forget it. If you do well you'll get no thanks and if
you get into trouble you'll get no help. Does that suit you?'
'Perfectly.'
'Then I'll wish you good afternoon.'
Ashenden was on his way back to Geneva. The night was stormy and the wind
blew cold from the mountains, but the stodgy little steamer plodded sturdily
through the choppy waters of the lake. A scudding rain, just turning into
sleet, swept the deck in angry gusts, like a nagging woman who cannot leave a
subject alone.
Lake Leman, on fine days so trim and pretty, artificial like a piece of
water in a French garden, in this tempestuous weather was as secret and as
menacing as the sea. He made up his mind that, on getting back to his hotel, he
would have a fire lit in his sitting-room, a hot bath, and dinner comfortably by
the fireside in pyjamas and a dressing-gown. The prospect of spending an
evening by himself with his pipe and a book was so agreeable that it made the
misery of that journey across the lake positively worth while.
He wished to give himself a moment to think, but as he ascended the three
flights slowly his feet were like lead. There could be small doubt why two
police officers were so bent upon seeing him. He felt on a sudden dreadfully
tired. He did not feel he could cope with a multitude of questions. And if he
were arrested as a secret agent he must spend at least the night in a cell. He
longed more than ever for a hot bath and a pleasant dinner by his fireside. He had
half a mind to turn tail and walk out of the hotel, leaving everything behind
him; he had his passport in his pocket and he knew by heart the hours at which
trains started for the frontier: before the Swiss authorities had made up their
minds what to do he would be in safety. But he continued to trudge upstairs. He
did not like the notion of abandoning his job so easily; he had been sent to
Geneva, knowing the risks, to do work of a certain kind, and it seemed to him
that he had better go through with it. Of course it would not be very nice to
spend two years in a Swiss prison, but the chance of this was, like
assassination to kings, one of the inconveniences of his profession. He reached
the landing of the third floor and walked to his room. Ashenden had in him, it
seems, a strain of flippancy (on account of which, indeed, the critics had
often reproached him) and as he stood for a moment outside the door his
predicament appeared to him on a sudden rather droll. His spirits went up and
he determined to brazen the thing out. It was with a genuine smile on his lips
that he turned the handle and entering the room faced his visitors.
Ashenden knew that when you have nothing apposite to say it is better to
hold your tongue; and when a man has made a remark that calls to his mind for
an answer, he is apt to find silence a trifle disconcerting. Ashenden waited
for the detective to proceed.
It looked very like a trap. But nothing is so foolish as to ascribe profundity
to what on the surface is merely inept; it is a pitfall into which many an
ingenuous reviewer has fallen headlong. Ashenden had a confident belief in the
stupidity of the human animal, which in the course of his life had stood him in
good stead. It flashed across him that if the detective asked him such a
question it was because he had no shadow of proof that he was engaged in any
illegal practice.
First Person
Singular (1931)
[Virtue]
[First
lines:]
There are few
things better than a good Havana
And sometimes
even the fate of human beings is curious to consider. It is strange to look
upon this man or that, the quiet ordinary persons of every day, the bank clerk,
the dustman, the middle-aged girl in the second row of the chorus, and think of
the interminable history behind them and of the long, long series of hazards by
which from the primeval slime the course of events has brought them at this
moment to such and such a place. When such tremendous vicissitudes have been
needed to get them here at all one would have thought some huge significance
must be attached to them; one would have thought that what befell them must
matter a little to the Life Spirit or whatever else it is that has produced
them. An accident befalls them. The thread is broken. The story that began with
the world is finished abruptly and it looks as though it meant nothing at all.
A tale told by an idiot. And is it not odd that this event, of an importance so
dramatic, may be brought about by a cause so trivial?
An incident
of no moment, that might easily not have happened, has consequences that are
incalculable. It looks as though blind chance ruled all things. Our smallest
actions may affect profoundly the whole lives of people who have nothing to do
with us. The story I have to tell would never have happened if one day I had
not walked across the street. Life is really very fantastic and one has to have
a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it.
[The first-person
narrator:]
''I prefer a
loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.''
[The first-person
narrator:]
...but if the
folly of men made one angry one would pass one's life in a state of chronic
ire.
''Good
gracious, she could have remained faithful to him in spirit while she was being
unfaithful to him in the flesh. That is a feat of legerdemain that women find
it easy to accomplish.''
''What an
odious cynic you are.''
''If it's
cynical to look truth in the face and exercise common sense in the affairs of
life, then certainly I'm a cynic and odious if you like.''
[The Human
Element]
People are
always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important
to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to
others.
The worst of
having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were
acting naturally or being tactful too.
So it has
been said that it was not jealousy that caused Othello to kill Desdemona, but
an agony that the creature that he believed angelic should be proved impure and
worthless. What broke his noble heart was that virtue should so fall.
I have always
found the Bright Young People extremely tedious. The gay life seems dull and
stupid to the onlooker, but the moralist is unwise to judge it harshly. It is
as absurd to be angry with the young things who lead it as with a litter of
puppies scampering aimlessly around, rolling one another over and chasing their
tails. It is well to bear with fortitude if they cause havoc in the flower beds
or break a piece of china. Some of them will be drowned because their points
are not up to the mark, and the rest will grow up into well-behaved dogs. Their
unruliness is due only to the vitality of youth.
[Jane]
She managed
(as so few people do) to look exactly what she was.
When anyone is very positive in an opinion it is only human nature to wish him proved wrong.
When anyone is very positive in an opinion it is only human nature to wish him proved wrong.
[Last lines:]
''You know,
when I married Gilbert and settled in London and people began to laugh at what
I said no one was more surprised than I was. I'd said the same things for
thirty years and no one ever saw anything to laugh at. I thought it must be my
clothes or my bobbed hair or my eyeglass. Then I discovered it was because I
spoke the truth. It was so unusual that people thought it humorous.[4]
One of these days someone else will discover the secret, and when people
habitually tell the truth of course there'll be nothing funny in it.''
''And why am
I the only person not to think it funny?'' asked Mrs. Tower.
Jane
hesitated a little as though she were honestly searching for a satisfactory
explanation.
''Perhaps you
don't know the truth when you see it, Marion
It certainly
gave her the last word. I felt that Jane would always have the last word. She was priceless.
[The Alien
Corn]
I know very
little of music and that is one of the reasons for which I have found this
story difficult to write. When I go to a concert at the Queen's Hall and in the
intervals read the programme it is all Greek to me. I know nothing of harmony
and counterpoint. I shall never forget how humiliated I felt once when, having
come to Munich
I permit
myself a trite remark. It is strange that men, inhabitants for so short a while
of an alien and inhuman world, should go out of their way to cause themselves
so much unhappiness.
Then he
played Beethoven's Appassionata. I
used to play it myself when I played the piano (very badly) in my far distant
youth and I still knew every note of it. Of course it is a classic and a great
work, it would be foolish to deny it, but I confess that at this time of day it
leaves me cold. It is like Paradise Lost,
splendid, but a trifle stolid.
He played
Chopin. He played two waltzes that were familiar to me, a polonaise and an
etude. He played with a great deal of brio. I wish I knew music well enough to
give an exact description of his playing. It had strength, and a youthful exuberance,
but I felt that he missed what to me is the peculiar charm of Chopin, the
tenderness, the nervous melancholy, the wistful gaiety and the slightly faded
romance that reminds me always of an Early Victorian keepsake.
She got up
and went to the piano. She took off the rings with which her fingers were
laden. She played Bach. I do not know the names of the pieces, but I recognized
the stiff ceremonial of the frenchified little German courts and the sober,
thrifty comfort of the burghers, and the dancing on the village green, the
green trees that looked like Christmas trees, and the sunlight on the wide
German country, and a tender cosiness; and in my nostrils there was a warm
scent of the soil and I was conscious of a sturdy strength that seemed to have
its roots deep in mother earth, and of an elemental power that was timeless and
had no home in space. She played beautifully, with a soft brilliance that made
you think of the full moon shining at dusk in the summer sky. With another part
of me I watched the others and I saw how intensely they were conscious of the
experience. They were rapt. I wished with all my heart that I could get from
music the wonderful exaltation that possessed them.
'Do you feel at home in England
'No,' I said,
'but then I don't feel at home anywhere else.'
But he was
quite naturally not interested in me.
Ah King (1933)
[Footprints
in the Jungle]
[Last lines:]
''I'll tell
you what, there's one job I shouldn't
like,'' he said.
''What is
that?''
''God's, at
the Judgment day,'' said Gaze. ''No, sir''
[The
Book-Bag]
[First
lines:]
Some people
read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is
innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent
nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time
bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the
unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to
my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of
the Army and Navy stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I
have spent many delightful hours over both these works.
But the human
beings are incalculable and he is a fool who tells himself that he knows what a
man is capable of.
'Oh,
the Life of Byron?' I said breezily.
'Have you read it already?'
'A
good deal of it. I read till three.'
'I've
heard it's very well done. I'm not sure that Byron interests me so much as all
that. There was so much in him that was so frightfully second-rate. It makes
one rather uncomfortable.'
'What
do you think is the real truth of that story about him and his sister?'
'Augusta
Leigh? I don't know very much about it. I've never read Astarte.'
'Do
you think they were really in love with one another?'
'I
suppose so. Isn't it generally believed that she was the only woman he ever
genuinely loved?'
'Can
you understand it?'
'I
can't really. It doesn't particularly shock me. It just seems to me very unnatural.
Perhaps "unnatural" isn't the right word. It's incomprehensible to
me. I can't throw myself into the state of feeling in which such a thing seems
possible. You know, that's how a writer gets to know the people he writes
about, by standing himself in their shoes and feeling with their hearts.'
I
know I did not make myself very clear, but I was trying to describe a
sensation, an action of the subconscious, which from experience was perfectly
familiar to me, but which no words I knew could precisely indicate. I went on:
'Of
course she was only his half-sister, but just as habit kills love I should have
thought habit would prevent its arising. When two persons have known one
another all their lives and lived together in close contact I can't imagine how
or why that sudden spark should flash that results in love. The probabilities
are that they would be joined by mutual affection and I don't know anything that
is more contrary to love than affection.'
I
could just see in the dimness the outline of a smile flicker for a moment on my
host's heavy, and it seemed to me then, somewhat saturnine face.
'You
only believe in love at first sight?'
'Well,
I suppose I do, but with the proviso that people may have met twenty times
before seeing one another. "Seeing" has an active side and a passive
one. Most people we run across mean so little to us that we never bestir
ourselves to look at them. We just suffer the impression they make on us.'
'Oh,
but one's often heard of couples who've known one another for years and it's never
occurred to one they cared two straws for each other and suddenly they go and
get married. How do you explain that?'
'Well,
if you're going to bully me into being logical and consistent, I should suggest
that their love is of a different kind. After all, passion isn't the only
reason for marriage. It may not even be the best one. Two people may marry
because they're lonely or because they're good friends or for convenience sake.
Though I said that affection was the greatest enemy of love, I would never deny
that it's a very good substitute. I'm not sure that a marriage founded on it
isn't the happiest.'[5]
[The Back of
Beyond]
[George
Moon:]
''Is one's
honour really concerned because one's wife hops into bed with another man?''
[George
Moon:]
''Oh, my dear
boy, one mustn't expect gratitude. It's a thing that no one has a right to.
After all, you do good because it gives you pleasure. It's the purest form of
happiness there is. To expect thanks for it is really asking too much. If you
get it, well, it's like a bonus on shares on which you've already received a
dividend; it's grand, but you mustn't look upon it as your due.''
[George
Moon:]
''You're
behaving generously, old boy, and, you know, one needs a devil of a lot of tact
to get people to forgive one one's generosity. Fortunately women are frivolous
and they very quickly forget the benefits conferred upon them. Otherwise, of
course, there'd be no living with them.''
[George
Moon:]
''I haven't
deeply considered the matter [...] but if to look truth in the face and not
resent it when it's unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling
when it's absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it's pitiful, is to be
cynical, then I suppose I'm a cynic. Mostly human nature is both absurd and pitiful,
but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it more to smile at than to
weep.''
''Have you
been happy too?''
''I think I
can say I've been a success.''
''Oh, well,
that's probably all the happiness you were capable of.''
[The Door of Opportunity ]
‘I thought the risk was unjustifiable.’
A thin smile was outlined on the Governor’s grey face.
‘If the officers of this Government had hesitated to take unjustifiable risks it would never have become a province of the British Empire.’
Alban was silent. It was difficult to talk to a man who spoke obvious nonsense.
[...]
The Governor drummed on the table with his fingers. He looked out of the window and then looked again at Alban. When he spoke it was not unkindly. ‘I think you are unfitted by temperament for this rather rough–and–tumble life, Torel. If you’ll take my advice you’ll go home. With your abilities I feel sure that you’ll soon find an occupation much better suited to you.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean, sir.’
‘Oh, come, Torel, you’re not stupid. I’m trying to make things easy for you. For your wife’s sake as well as for your own I do not wish you to leave the colony with the stigma of being dismissed from the Service for cowardice. I’m giving you the opportunity of resigning.’
‘Thank you very much, sir. I’m not prepared to avail myself of the opportunity. If I resign I admit that I committed an error and that the charge you make against me is justified. I don’t admit it.’
‘You can please yourself. I have considered the matter very carefully and I have no doubt about it in my mind. I am forced to discharge you from the Service. The necessary papers will reach you in due course. Meanwhile you will return to your post and hand over to the officer appointed to succeed you on his arrival.’
‘Very good, sir,’ replied Alban, a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. ‘When do you desire me to return to my post?’
‘At once.’
‘Have you any objection to my going to the club and having tiffin before I go?’
The Governor looked at him with surprise. His exasperation was mingled with an unwilling admiration.
‘Not at all. I’m sorry, Torel, that this unhappy incident should have deprived the Government of a servant whose zeal has always been so apparent and whose tact, intelligence, and industry seemed to point him out in the future for very high office.’
‘Your Excellency does not read Schiller, I suppose. You are probably not acquainted with his celebrated line: mit der Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘Roughly: Against stupidity the gods themselves battle in vain.’
‘Good morning.’
With his head in the air, a smile on his lips, Alban left the Governor’s office. The Governor was human, and he had the curiosity to ask his secretary later in the day if Alban Torel had really gone to the club.
‘Yes, sir. He had tiffin there.’
‘It must have wanted some nerve.’
Alban entered the club jauntily and joined the group of men standing at the bar. He talked to them in the breezy, cordial tone he always used with them. It was designed to put them at their ease. They had been discussing him ever since Stratton had come back to Port Wallace with his story, sneering at him and laughing at him, and all who had resented his superciliousness, and they were the majority, were triumphant because his pride had had a fall. But they were so taken aback at seeing him now, so confused to find him as confident as ever, that it was they who were embarrassed. One man, though he knew perfectly, asked him what he was doing in Port Wallace.
‘Oh, I came about the riot on the Alud Estate. H.E. wanted to see me. He does not see eye to eye with me about it. The silly old ass has fired me. I’m going home as soon as he appoints a D.O. to take over.’
There was a moment of awkwardness. One, more kindly disposed than the others, said:
‘I’m awfully sorry.’
Alban shrugged his shoulders.
‘My dear fellow, what can you do with a perfect damned fool? The only thing is to let him stew in his own juice.’
When the Governor’s secretary had told his chief as much of this as he thought discreet, the Governor smiled.
‘Courage is a queer thing. I would rather have shot myself than go to the club just then and face all those fellows.’
‘I should have been a fool to risk my life to no purpose. Why should I? Nothing that concerned me was at stake. Courage is the obvious virtue of the stupid. I don’t attach any particular importance to it.’
‘How do you mean that nothing that concerned you was at stake? If that’s true then your whole life is a sham. You’ve given away everything you stood for, everything we both stand for. You’ve let all of us down. We did set ourselves up on a pinnacle, we did think ourselves better than the rest of them because we loved literature and art and music, we weren’t content to live a life of ignoble jealousies and vulgar tittle–tattle, we did cherish the things of the spirit, and we loved beauty. It was our food and drink. They laughed at us and sneered at us. That was inevitable. The ignorant and the common naturally hate and fear those who are interested in things they don’t understand. We didn’t care. We called them Philistines. We despised them and we had a right to despise them. Our justification was that we were better and nobler and wiser and braver than they were. And you weren’t better, you weren’t nobler, you weren’t braver. When the crisis came you slunk away like a whipped cur with his tail between his legs. You of all people hadn’t the right to be a coward. They despise us now and they have the right to despise us. Us and all we stood for. Now they can say that art and beauty are all rot; when it comes to a pinch people like us always let you down. They never stopped looking for a chance to turn and rend us and you gave it to them. They can say that they always expected it. It’s a triumph for them.
[...]
‘God knows I loved you. For eight years I worshipped the ground you trod on. You were everything to me. I believed in you as some people believe in God. When I saw the fear in your eyes that day, when you told me that you weren’t going to risk your life for a kept woman and her half–caste brats, I was shattered. It was as though someone had wrenched my heart out of my body and trampled on it. You killed my love there and then, Alban. You killed it stone–dead. Since then when you’ve kissed me I’ve had to clench my hands so as not to turn my face away. The mere thought of anything else makes me feel physically sick. I loathe your complacence and your frightful insensitiveness. Perhaps I could have forgiven it if it had been just a moment’s weakness and if afterwards you’d been ashamed. I should have been miserable, but I think my love was so great that I should only have felt pity for you. But you’re incapable of shame. And now I believe in nothing. You’re only a silly, pretentious, vulgar poseur. I would rather be the wife of a second–rate planter so long as he had the common human virtues of a man than the wife of a fake like you.’
Cosmopolitans (1936)
[A Friend in Need]
[First
lines:]
For thirty
years now I have been studying my fellow-men. I do not know very much about
them. I should certainly hesitate to engage a servant on his face, and yet I
suppose it is on the face that for the most part we judge the persons we meet.
We draw our conclusions from the shape of the jaw, the look in the eyes, the
contour of the mouth. I wonder if we are more often right than wrong. Why novels
and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of
necessity, make their characters all of a piece. They cannot afford to make
them self-contradictory, for then they become incomprehensible, and yet
self-contradictory is what most of us are. We are a haphazard bundle of
inconsistent qualities. In books on logic they will tell you that it is absurd
to say that yellow is tubular or gratitude heavier than air; but in that
mixture of incongruities that makes up the self yellow may very well be a horse
and cart and gratitude the middle of the week. I shrug my shoulders when people
tell me that their first impressions of a person are always right. I think they
must have small insight or great vanity. For my own part I find that the longer
I know people the more they puzzled me: my oldest friends are just these of
whom I can say that I don't know the first thing about them.
One afternoon
I was sitting in the lounge of the Grand Hotel [in Yokohama Vancouver and San
Francisco or to Europe by way of Shanghai ,
Hong-Kong, and Singapore
[Last lines:]
I didn’t say
anything for a moment or two. I was a trifle shocked. Then I asked Burton
''When you
made him that offer of a job, did you know he’d be drowned?''
He gave a
little mild chuckle and he looked at me with those kind and candid blue eyes of
his. He rubbed his chin with his hand.
''Well, I
hadn’t got a vacancy in my office at the moment.''
[The Happy
Man]
[First
lines:]
It is a
dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have often wondered at the
self-confidence of politicians, reformers and such like who are prepared to
force upon their fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits and
points of view. I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise
another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows oneself?
Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself: I know nothing of others. We can
only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbours. Each one of us is a
prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who
form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for
them as for himself.[7] And life, unfortunately,
is something that you can lead but once; mistakes are often irreparable, and
who am I that should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a
difficult business and I have found it hard enough to make my own a complete
and rounded thing; I have not been tempted to teach my neighbour what he should
do with his.
''Life is
full of compensations…''
[Salvatore]
[First
lines:]
I wonder if I
can do it.
[Last lines:]
I started by
saying that I wondered if I could do it and now I must tell you what it is that
I have tried to do. I wanted to see whether I could hold your attention for a
few pages while I drew for you the portrait of a man, just an ordinary
fisherman who possessed nothing in the world except a quality which is the
rarest, the most precious and the loveliest that anyone can have. Heaven only
knows why he should so strangely and unexpectedly have possessed it. All I know
is that it shone in him with a radiance that, if it had not been so unconscious
and so humble, would have been to the common run of men hardly bearable. And in
case you have not guessed what the quality was, I will tell you. Goodness, just
goodness.
[The
Judgement Seat]
[First lines:]
They awaited their turn patiently,
but patience was no new thing to them; they had practised it, all three of
them, with grim determination, for thirty years. Their lives had been a long preparation
for this moment and they looked forward to the issue now, if not with
self-confidence, for that on so awful an occasion would have been misplaced, at
all events with hope and courage. They had taken the strait and narrow path when
the flowery meads of sin stretched all too invitingly before them; with heads
held high, though with breaking hearts, they had resisted temptation; and now,
their arduous journey done, they expected their reward. There was no need for
them to speak, since each knew the others' thoughts, and they felt that in all three
of them the same emotion of relief filled their bodiless souls with
thanksgiving. With what anguish now would they have been wrung if they had
yielded to the passion which then had seemed so nearly irresistible and what a
madness it would have been if for a few short years of bliss they had
sacrificed that Life Everlasting which with so bright a light at long last
shone before them!
At last their angels took them by the hand and led them to the Presence. For a little while the Eternal took not the slightest notice of them. If the truth must be told he was in a bad humour. A moment before there had come up for judgement a philosopher, deceased full of years and honours, who had told the Eternal to his face that he did not believe in him. It was not this that would have disturbed the serenity of the Kings of Kings, this could only have made him smile; but the philosopher, taking perhaps an unfair advantage of the regrettable happenings just then upon Earth, had asked him how, considering them dispassionately, it was possible to reconcile his All-Power with his All-Goodness.
At last their angels took them by the hand and led them to the Presence. For a little while the Eternal took not the slightest notice of them. If the truth must be told he was in a bad humour. A moment before there had come up for judgement a philosopher, deceased full of years and honours, who had told the Eternal to his face that he did not believe in him. It was not this that would have disturbed the serenity of the Kings of Kings, this could only have made him smile; but the philosopher, taking perhaps an unfair advantage of the regrettable happenings just then upon Earth, had asked him how, considering them dispassionately, it was possible to reconcile his All-Power with his All-Goodness.
''No
one can deny the fact of Evil,'' said the philosopher, sententiously. ''Now, if
God cannot prevent Evil he is not all-powerful, and if he can prevent it and
will not, he is not all-good.''
This
argument was of course not new to the Omniscient, but he had always refused to
consider the matter; for the fact is, though he knew everything, he did not
know the answer to this. Even God cannot make two and two five. But the
philosopher, pressing his advantage, and, as philosophers often will, drawing from
a reasonable premise an unjustifiable inference – the philosopher had finished
with a statement that in the circumstances was surely preposterous.
'I will not believe,' he said, 'in a God who is not All-Powerful and All-Good.'
'I will not believe,' he said, 'in a God who is not All-Powerful and All-Good.'
They
finished and there was silence. There was silence in all the courts of heaven.
Go to hell were the words that came to the Eternal's lips, but he did not utter
them, for they had a colloquial association that he rightly thought unfitting
to the solemnity of the occasion. Nor indeed would such a decree' have met the merits
of the case. But his brows darkened. He asked himself if it was for this that
he had made the rising sun shine on the boundless sea and the snow glitter on
the mountain tops; was it for this that the brooks sang blithely as they
hastened down the hillsides and the golden corn waved in the evening breeze?
'I
sometimes think,' said the Eternal, 'that the stars never shine more brightly
than when reflected in the muddy waters of a wayside ditch.'[8]
But
the three shades stood before him and now that they had unfolded their unhappy
story they could not but feel a certain satisfaction. It had been a bitter
struggle, but they had done their duty. The Eternal blew lightly, he blew as a
man might blow out a lighted match, and, behold! where the three poor souls had
stood – was nothing. The Eternal annihilated them.
'I
have often wondered why men think I attach so much importance to sexual
irregularity,' he said. 'If they read my works more attentively they would see
that I have always been sympathetic to that particular form of human frailty.'
Then
he turned to the philosopher, who was still waiting for a reply to his remarks.
'You
cannot but allow,' said the Eternal, ' that on this occasion I have very
happily combined my All-Power with my All-Goodness.'
[The Promise]
I do not like
these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull
their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge and lipstick.
But Elizabeth Vernon painted not to imitate nature, but to improve it; you did
not question the means but applauded the result.
[Last lines:]
She smiled and nodded and turned away. I watched her walk up Davies Street
[Mayhew]
[First
lines:]
The lives of
most men are determined by their environment. They accept the circumstances
amid which fate has thrown them not only with resignation but even with good
will. They are like streetcars running contentedly on their rails and they
despise the sprightly flivver that dashes in and out of the traffic and speeds
so jauntily across the open country. I respect them; they are good citizens,
good husbands, and good fathers, and of course somebody has to pay the taxes;
but I do not find them exciting. I am fascinated by the men, few enough in all
conscience, who take life in their own hands and seem to mould it to their own
liking. It may be that we have no such thing as free will, but at all events we
have the illusion of it. At a cross-road it does seem to us that we might go
either to the right or the left and, the choice once made, it is difficult to
see that the whole course of the world's history obliged us to take the turning
we did.[9]
[Last lines:]
That vast
accumulation of knowledge is lost for ever. Vain was that ambition, surely not
an ignoble one, to set his name beside those of Gibbon and Mommsen. His memory
is treasured in the hearts of a few friends, fewer, alas! as the years pass on,
and to the world he is unknown in death as he was in life.
And yet to me
his life was a success. The pattern is good and complete. He did what he
wanted, and he died when his goal was in sight and never knew the bitterness of
an end achieved.
[In a Strange
Land]
[First
lines:]
I am of a
roving disposition; but I travel not to see imposing monuments, which indeed
somewhat bore me, nor beautiful scenery, of which I soon tire; I travel to see
men. I avoid the great. I would not cross the road to meet a president or a
king; I am content to know the writer in the pages of his book and the painter
in his picture; but I have journeyed a hundred leagues to see a missionary of
whom I had heard a strange story and I have spent a fortnight in a vile hotel
in order to improve my acquaintance with a billiard-marker.
[Louise]
[First
lines:]
I could never
understand why Louise bothered with me. She disliked me and I knew that behind
my back, in that gentle way of hers, she seldom lost the opportunity of saying
a disagreeable thing about me. She had too much delicacy ever to make a direct
statement, but with a hint and a sigh and a little flutter of her beautiful
hands she was able to make her meaning plain. She was a mistress of cold
praise. It was true that we had known one another almost intimately for
five-and-twenty years, but it was impossible for me to believe that she could
be affected by the claims of old association. She thought me a coarse, brutal,
cynical, and vulgar fellow. I was puzzled at her not taking the obvious course
and dropping me. She did nothing of the kind; indeed, she would not leave me
alone; she was constantly asking me to lunch and dine with her and once or
twice a year invited me to spend a week-end at her house in the country. At
last I thought that I had discovered her motive. She had an uneasy suspicion
that I did not believe in her; and if that was why she did not like me, it was
also why she sought my acquaintance: it galled her that I alone should look
upon her as a comic figure and she could not rest till I acknowledged myself
mistaken and defeated. Perhaps she had an inkling that I saw the face behind
the mask and because I alone held out was determined that sooner or later I too
should take the mask for the face. I was never quite certain that she was a
complete humbug. I wondered whether she fooled herself as thoroughly as she
fooled the world or whether there was some spark of humour at the bottom of her
heart. If there was it might be that she was attracted to me, as a pair of
crooks might be attracted to one another, by the knowledge that we shared a
secret that was hidden from everybody else.
[Home]
[First
lines:]
The farm lay
in a hollow among the Somersetshire hills, an old-fashioned stone house
surrounded by barns and pens and outhouses. Over the doorway the date when it
was built had been carved in the elegant figures of the period, 1673, and the
house, grey and weather-beaten, looked as much a part of the landscape as the
trees that sheltered it. An avenue of splendid elms that would have been the
pride of many a squire's mansion led from the road to the trim garden. The
people who lived here were as stolid, sturdy, and unpretentious as the house;
their only boast was that ever since it was built from father to son in one
unbroken line they had been born and died in it. For three hundred years they
had farmed the surrounding land. George Meadows was now a man of fifty, and his
wife was a year or two younger. They were both fine, upstanding people in the
prime of life; and their children, two sons and three girls, were handsome and strong.
They had no new-fangled notions about being gentlemen and ladies; they knew
their place and were proud of it. I have never seen a more united household.
They were merry, industrious, and kindly. Their life was patriarchal. It had a
completeness that gave it a beauty as definite as that of a symphony by Beethoven
or a picture by Titian. They were happy and they deserved their happiness.
The Mixture
as Before
(1940)
[The
Treasure]
Now it is a
funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very
often get it.
[The Lotus
Eater]
[First
lines:]
Most people,
the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon
them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square
holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much
better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all
events with resignation. They are like tram-cars travelling for ever on the
selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards,
inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron. It is
not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into
his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him.
Very few
people know where to look for happiness; fewer still find it.
There is a
terrace that overlooks the Bay of Naples , and when the sun sinks slowly into the sea
the island of Ischia
[...]
The instant
of overwhelming beauty had passed and the sun, like the top of an orange, was
dipping into a wine-red sea. We turned round and leaning our backs against the
parapet looked at the people who were sauntering to and fro. They were all
talking their heads off and the cheerful noise was exhilarating. Then the church
bell, rather cracked, but with a fine resonant note, began to ring. The Piazza
at Capri , with its clock tower over the
footpath that leads up from the harbour, with the church up a flight of steps,
is a perfect setting for an opera by Donizetti, and you felt that the voluble
crowd might at any moment break out into a rattling chorus. It was charming and
unreal.
[Lord
Mountdrago]
And what had
he not seen of human nature during the fifteen years that patients had been
coming to his dingy back room in Wimpole
Street
...after all
the years during which Dr. Audlin had been treating the diseased souls of men
he knew how thin a line divides those whom we call sane from those whom we call
insane. He knew how often in men who to all appearance were healthy and normal,
who were seemingly devoid of imagination, and who fulfilled the duties of
common life with credit to themselves and with benefit to their fellows, when
you gained their confidence, when you tore away the mask they wore to the
world, you found not only hideous abnormality, but kinks so strange, mental
extravagances so fantastic, that in that respect you could only call them
lunatic. If you put them in an asylum not all the asylums in the world would be
large enough.
[Gigolo and
Gigolette]
It was his
duty to be civil to the rich and great. Mrs. Chaloner Barrett was an American
widow of vast wealth; she not only entertained expensively, but also gambled.
[...]
''Got a good
table for me, Paco?'' said Eva Barrett.
''The best.''
His eyes, fine, dark Argentine eyes, expressed his admiration of Mrs. Barrett's
opulent, ageing charms. This also was business.
Mrs. Barrett
paused at the top of the steps that led down to the terrace long enough for the
press representative, a little haggard woman with an untidy head, to come up
with her notebook. Sandy Riviera
[The Voice of the Turtle]
Her passion
for music was complete bunkum. Once at a concert to which I went with her she
slept all through the Fifth Symphony, and I was charmed to hear her during the
interval telling people that Beethoven stirred her so much that she hesitated
to come and hear him, for with those glorious themes singing through her head,
it meant that she wouldn't sleep a wink all night. I could well believe she
would lie awake, for she had had so sound a nap during the Symphony that it
could not but interfere with her night's rest.
The prima donna was
standing in the window, with her back to the lighted room, and she looked out
at the darkly shining sea. The cedar made a lovely pattern against the sky. The
night was soft and balmy. Miss Glaser played a couple of bars. A cold shiver
ran down my spine. La Falterona gave a little start as she recognized the
music, and I felt her gather herself together.
Mild und leise wie er lächelt
Wie das Auge hold er öffnet.
It
was Isolde's death song... It did not matter now that instead of an orchestral
accompaniment she had only the thin tinkle of a piano. The notes of the
heavenly melody fell upon the still air and travelled over the water. In that
too-romantic scene, in that lovely night, the effect was shattering. La
Falterona's voice, even now, was exquisite in its quality, mellow and
crystalline; and she sang with wonderful emotion, so tenderly, with such
tragic, beautiful anguish that my heart melted within me. I had a most awkward
lump in my throat when she finished, and looking at her I saw that tears were
streaming down her face. I did not want to speak. She stood quite still,
looking out at the ageless sea.
What a strange woman! I
thought then that I would sooner have her as she was, with her monstrous
faults, than as Peter Melrose saw her, a pattern of all the virtues. But then
people blame me because I rather like people who are a little worse than is
reasonable. She was hateful, of course, but she was irresistible.
Up at the
Villa (1941)
[Last lines:]
''So now
what?''
''Well, if
you insist on marrying me... But it's an awful risk we're taking!''
''Darling,
that's what life's for – to take risks.''
Creatures of
Circumstance
(1947)
[Sanatorium]
People often said he [Ashenden] had a low opinion of human
nature. It was because he did not always judge his fellows by the usual
standards. He accepted, with a smile, a tear or a shrug of the shoulders, much
that filled others with dismay. It was true that you would never have expected that
good-natured, commonplace little chap to harbour such bitter and unworthy thoughts;
but who has ever been able to tell to what depths man may fall or to what
heights rise? The fault lay in the poverty of his ideals. Henry Chester was
born and bred to lead an average life, exposed to the normal vicissitudes of
existence, and when an unforeseeable accident befell him he had no means of
coping with it. He was like a brick made to take its place with a million
others in a huge factory, but by chance with a flaw in it so that it is
inadequate to its purpose. And the brick too, if it had a mind, might cry: What
have I done that I cannot fulfil my modest end, but must be taken away from all
these other bricks that support me and thrown on the dust heap? It was no fault
of Henry Chester’s that he was incapable of the conceptions that might have
enabled him to bear his calamity with resignation. It is not everyone who can
find solace in art or thought. It is the tragedy of our day that these humble souls
have lost their faith in God, in whom lay hope, and their belief in a
resurrection that might bring them the happiness that has been denied them on
earth; and have found nothing to put in their place.
There are people who say that suffering ennobles. It is not true.
As a general rule it makes man petty, querulous and selfish; but here in this
sanatorium there was not much suffering. In certain stages of tuberculosis the
slight fever that accompanies it excites rather than depresses, so that the
patient feels alert and, upborne by hope, faces the future blithely; but for
all that the idea of death haunts the subconscious. It is a sardonic theme song
that runs through a sprightly operetta. Now and again the gay, melodious arias,
the dance measures, deviate strangely into tragic strains that throb sinisterly
down the nerves; the petty interests of every day, the small jealousies and
trivial concerns are as nothing; pity and terror make the heart on a sudden
stand still and the awfulness of death broods as the silence that precedes a
tropical storm broods over the tropical jungle.[10] After Ashenden had been for some time at the sanatorium there came a boy of
twenty. He was in the navy, a sub-lieutenant in a submarine, and he had what
they used to call in novels galloping consumption. He was a tall, good-looking
youth, with curly brown hair, blue eyes and a very sweet smile. Ashenden saw
him two or three times lying on the terrace in the sun and passed the time of
day with him. He was a cheerful lad. He talked of musical shows and film stars;
and he read the paper for the football results and the boxing news. Then he was
put to bed and Ashenden saw him no more. His relations were sent for and in two
months he was dead. He died uncomplaining. He understood what was happening to
him as little as an animal. For a day or two there was the same malaise in the
sanatorium as there is in a prison when a man has been hanged; and then, as though
by universal consent, in obedience to an instinct of self-preservation, the boy
was put out of mind: life, with its three meals a day, its golf on the
miniature course, its regulated exercise, its prescribed rests, its quarrels
and jealousies, its scandal-mongering and petty vexations, went on as before.
[...]
Templeton was perhaps a little more than forty years of age.
He had been in the Grenadier Guards, but had resigned his commission after the
war. A man of ample means, he had since then devoted himself entirely to
pleasure. He raced in the racing season, shot in the shooting season and hunted
in the hunting season. When this was over he went to Monte Carlo. He told
Ashenden of the large sums he had made and lost at baccarat. He was very fond
of women and if his stories could be believed they were very fond of him. He
loved good food and good drink. He knew by their first names the headwaiters of
every restaurant in London where you ate well. He belonged to half a dozen
clubs. He had led for years a useless, selfish, worthless life, the sort of
life which maybe it will be impossible for anyone to live in the future, but he
had lived it without misgiving and had enjoyed it. Ashenden asked him once what
he would do if he had his time over again and he answered that he would do
exactly what he had done. He was an amusing talker, gay and pleasantly ironic, and
he dealt with the surface of things, which was all he knew, with a light, easy
and assured touch. He always had a pleasant word for the dowdy spinsters in the
sanatorium and a joking one for the peppery old gentlemen, for he combined good
manners with a natural kindliness. He knew his way about the superficial world
of the people who have more money than they know what to do with as well as he
knew his way about Mayfair. He was the kind of man who would always have been willing
to take a bet, to help a friend and to give a tenner to a rogue. If he had
never done much good in the world he had never done much harm. He amounted to
nothing. But he was a more agreeable companion than many of more sterling
character and of more admirable qualities. He was very ill now. He was dying
and he knew it. He took it with the same easy, laughing nonchalance as he had
taken all the rest. He’d had a thundering good time, he regretted nothing, it
was rotten tough luck getting T.B., but to hell with it, no one can live
forever, and when you came to think of it, he might have been killed in the war
or broken his bloody neck in a point to point. His principle all through life
had been, when you’ve made a bad bet, pay up and forget about it. He’d had a
good run for his money and he was ready to call it a day. It had been a damned
good party while it lasted, but every party’s got to come to an end, and next
day it doesn’t matter much if you went home with the milk or if you left while
the fun was in full swing.
Of all those people in the sanatorium he was probably from the
moral standpoint the least worthy, but he was the only one who genuinely
accepted the inevitable with unconcern. He snapped his fingers in the face of
death, and you could choose whether you thought his levity unbecoming or his
insouciance gallant.
[...]
“Rum thing at my time of life, falling in love with a decent girl.
Last thing I’d ever expected of myself. And it’s no good denying it, I’m in it
up to the neck; if I were a well man I’d ask her to marry me tomorrow. I never
knew a girl could be as nice as that. I've always thought girls, decent girls,
I mean, damned bores. But she isn’t a bore, she's as clever as she can stick.
And pretty too. My God, what a skin! And that hair: but it isn’t any of that
that’s bowled me over like a row of ninepins. D’you know what’s got me? Damned
ridiculous when you come to think of it. An old rip like me. Virtue. Makes me
laugh like a hyena. Last thing I’ve ever wanted in a woman, but there it is, no
getting away from it, she’s good, and it makes me feel like a worm. Surprises
you, I suppose?”
“Not a bit,” said Ashenden. “You’re not the first rake who’s fallen
to innocence. It’s merely the sentimentality of middle age.”
“Dirty dog,” laughed Templeton.
[The Romantic Young Lady]
[First lines:]
One of the many inconveniences of real life is that it seldom gives you a
complete story. Some incident has excited your interest, the people who were
concerned in it are in the devil's own muddle, and you wonder what on earth will
happen next. Well, generally nothing happens. The inevitable catastrophe you
foresaw wasn't inevitable after all and high tragedy, without any regard to
artistic decency, dwindles into drawing-room comedy. Now, growing old has many
disadvantages, but it has this compensation (among, let us admit, not a few
others) that sometimes it gives you the opportunity of seeing what was the
outcome of certain events you had witnessed long ago. You had given up the hope
of ever knowing what was the end of the story and then, when you least expected
it, it is handed to you on a platter.
[...]
“There is a common impression that Southern people are romantic and
Northern people matter of fact. The reverse is true. It is the Northerners who
are incurably romantic. I have lived long enough among you Spaniards to know
that you are nothing if not practical.”
[Appearance and Reality]
[First lines:]
I do not vouch for the truth of this story, but it was told me by a
professor of French literature at a celebrated university and he was a man of
too high a character, I think, to have told it to me unless it were true. His practice
was to draw the attention of his pupils to three French writers who in his
opinion combined the qualities that are the mainsprings of the French character.
By reading them, he said, you could learn so much about the French people that,
if he had the power, he would not trust such of our rulers as have to deal with
the French nation to enter upon their offices till they had passed a pretty
stiff examination on their works. They are Rabelais, with his gauloiserie, which may be described as
the ribaldry that likes to call a spade something more than a bloody shovel; La
Fontaine, with his bon sens, which is
just horse sense; and finally Corneille with his panache. This is translated in the dictionaries as the plume, the
plume the knight at arms wore on his helmet, but metaphorically it seems to
signify dignity and bravado, display and heroism, vainglory and pride. It was le panache that made the French gentlemen
at Fontenoy say to the officers of King George II, fire first, gentlemen; it
was Ie panache that wrung from
Cambronne’s bawdy lips at Waterloo the phrase: the guard dies but never
surrenders; and it is Ie panache that
urges an indigent French poet, awarded the Nobel prize, with a splendid gesture
to give it all away. My professor was not a frivolous man and to his mind the
story I am about to tell brought out so distinctly the three master qualities
of the French that it had a high educational value.
I have called it Appearance and
Reality. This is the title of what I suppose may be looked upon as the most
important philosophical work that my country (right or wrong) produced in the
nineteenth century. It is stiff but stimulating reading. It is written in
excellent English, with considerable humour, and even though the lay reader is
unlikely to follow with understanding some of its very subtle arguments he has
nevertheless the thrilling sensation of walking a spiritual tightrope over a metaphysical
abyss, and he ends the book with a comfortable feeling that nothing matters a
hang anyway. There is no excuse for my making use of the title of so celebrated
a book except that it so admirably suits my story. Though Lisette was a
philosopher only in the sense in which we are all philosophers that she exercised
thought in dealing with the problems of existence her feeling for reality was
so strong and her sympathy for appearance so genuine that she might almost
claim to have established that reconciliation of irreconcilables at which the
philosophers have for so many centuries been aiming. Lisette was French and she
passed several hours of every working day dressing and undressing herself at
one of the most expensive and fashionable establishments in Paris. A pleasant
occupation for a young woman who was well aware that she had a lovely figure. She
was in short a mannequin. She was tall enough to be able to wear a train with
elegance and her hips were so slim that in sports clothes she could bring the
scent of heather to your nostrils. Her long legs enabled her to wear pyjamas
with distinction and her slim waist, her little breasts, made the simplest bathing
dress a ravishment. She could wear anything. She had a way of huddling herself
in a chinchilla coat that made the most sensible persons admit that chinchilla
was worth all the money it cost. Fat women, gross women, stumpy women, bony women,
shapeless women, old women, plain women, sat in the comfortable armchairs and because
Lisette looked so sweet bought the clothes that so admirably suited her. She
had large brown eyes, a large red mouth and a very clear but slightly freckled
skin. It was difficult for her to preserve that haughty, sullen and coldly
indifferent demeanour that appears to be essential to the mannequin as she
sails in with deliberate steps, turns round slowly and, with an air of contempt
for the universe equalled only by the camel's, sails out. There was the
suspicion of a twinkle in Lisette's large brown eyes and her red lips seemed to
tremble as though on the smallest provocation they would break into a smile. It
was the twinkle that attracted the attention of Monsieur Raymond Le Sueur.
[The Colonel’s Lady]
Written in the first person, it began with the tremulous surprise
of the woman, past her youth, when it dawned upon her that the young man was in
love with her. She hesitated to believe it. She thought she must be deceiving
herself. And she was terrified when on a sudden she discovered that she was passionately
in love with him. She told herself it was absurd; with the disparity of age
between them nothing but unhappiness could come to her if she yielded to her
emotion. She tried to prevent him from speaking, but the day came when he told her
that he loved her and forced her to tell him that she loved him too. He begged
her to run away with him. She couldn’t leave her husband, her home; and what
life could they look forward to, she an ageing woman, he so young? How could
she expect his love to last? She begged him to have mercy on her. But his love
was impetuous. He wanted her, he wanted her with all his heart, and at last
trembling, afraid, desirous, she yielded to him. Then there was a period of
ecstatic happiness. The world, the dull, humdrum world of every day, blazed
with glory. Love songs flowed from her pen. The woman worshipped the young,
virile body of her lover. George flushed darkly when she praised his broad
chest and slim flanks, the beauty of his legs and the flatness of his belly.
Hot stuff, Daphne's friend had said. It was that all right.
Disgusting.
There were sad little pieces in which she lamented the
emptiness of her life when as must happen he left her, but they ended with a
cry that all she had to suffer would be worth it for the bliss that for a while
had been hers. She wrote of the long, tremulous nights they passed together and
the languor that lulled them to sleep in one another's arms. She wrote of the
rapture of brief stolen moments when, braving all danger, their passion
overwhelmed them and they surrendered to its call.
She thought it would be an affair of a few weeks, but
miraculously it lasted. One of the poems referred to three years having gone by
without lessening the love that filled their hearts. It looked as though he
continued to press her to go away with him, far away, to a hill town in Italy,
a Greek island, a walled city in Tunisia, so that they could be together
always, for in another of the poems she besought him to let things be as they
were. Their happiness was precarious. Perhaps it was owing to the difficulties they
had to encounter and the rarity of their meetings that their love had retained
for so long its first enchanting ardour.
[Flotsam and Jetsam]
It did not take her long to discover that Jack Carr wanted her. She was
excited. She’d never been promiscuous, but in all those years she’d been on the
stage naturally there’d been episodes. You couldn’t hardly have put up with
being on tour month after month if you didn’t have a bit of fun sometimes. Of
course now she wasn't going to give in too easily, she didn't want to make
herself cheap, but what with the life she led, she’d be a fool if she missed
the chance; and as far as Norman was concerned, well, what the eye didn't see
the heart didn’t grieve over. They understood one another all right. Jack and
her; they knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, it was only a matter of
waiting for the opportunity; and the opportunity came. But then something
happened that they hadn’t bargained for: they fell madly in love with one
another. If Mrs. Grange really had been telling the story to Skelton it might
have seemed as unlikely to him as it did to them. They were two very ordinary
people, he a jolly, good-natured, commonplace planter, and she a small-part
actress far from clever, not even very young, with nothing to recommend her but
a neat figure and a prettyish face. What started as a casual affair turned
without warning into a devastating passion and neither of them was of a texture
to sustain its exorbitant compulsion. They longed to be with one another; they
were restless and miserable apart. [...] It was difficult for them to meet.
They had to run awful risks. Perhaps the chances they had to take, the
obstacles they had to surmount, were fuel to their love; a year passed and it
was as overwhelming as at the beginning; it was a year of agony and bliss, of
fear and thrill.
[A Casual Affair]
I didn’t suppose that Lady Kastellan, devoured by passion, could ever have
considered what would happen if she were found out. When the blow fell it is
not strange that she was scared out of her wits. She may not have had more to
do with her children than most women who live the sort of life she lived, but
she may for all that not have wanted to lose them. I did not even know whether
she had ever cared for her husband, but from what I knew of her I guessed that
she was not indifferent to his name and wealth. The future must have looked
pretty grim. She was losing everything, the grand house in Carlton House
Terrace, the position, the security; her father could give her no money and her
lover had still to find a job. It may not have been heroic when she yielded to
the entreaties of her family, but it was comprehensible.
[...]
I remembered very well what he looked like. He was tall and well-made, a
trifle dressy, but he was young enough to carry off his faultless clothes with
a dash, with dark brown hair, very neat and sleek, blue eyes with very long
lashes, and a fresh brilliant colour. He looked the picture of health. He was
amusing, gay and quick-witted. I never knew anyone who had more charm. It is a
dangerous quality and those who have it trade on it. Often they think it is
enough to get them through life without any further effort. It is well to be on
one’s guard against it. But with Jack Almond it was the expression of a
charming, generous nature. He delighted because he was delightful. He was entirely
without conceit. He had a gift for languages, he spoke French and German
without a trace of accent, and his manners were admirable. You felt that when
the time came he would play the part of an ambassador to a foreign power in the
grand style. No one could fail to like him. It was not strange that Lady Kastellan
should have fallen madly in love with him. My fancy ran away with me. What is
there more moving than young love? The walks together of that handsome pair in
one of the parks in the warm evenings of early summer, the dances they went to
where he held her in his arms, the enchantment of the secret they shared when
they exchanged glances across a dinner-table, and the passionate encounters,
hurried and dangerous, but worth a thousand risks, when at some clandestine
meeting-place they could give themselves to the fulfilment of their desire.
They drank the milk of Paradise.
[...]
“Well, I think that during those first five years he was buoyed up by the
sacrifice he'd made. He had a chivalrous soul. He had given up everything that
made life worth living to him to save the woman he loved better than anything
in the world. I think he had an exaltation of spirit that never left him. He
loved her still, with all his heart; most of us fall in and out of love; some men
can only love once, and I think he was one of them. And in a strange way he was
happy because he’d been able to sacrifice his happiness for the sake of someone
who was worthy of the sacrifice. I think she was always in his thoughts. Then
he went home. I think he loved her as much as ever and I don’t suppose he ever
doubted that her love was as strong and enduring as his. I don’t know what he
expected. He may have thought she'd see it was no good fighting her inclination
any more and would run away with him. It may have been that he'd have been satisfied
to realize that she loved him still. It was inevitable that they should meet;
they lived in the same world. He saw that she didn’t care a row of pins for him
any longer. He saw that the passionate girl had become a prudent, experienced
woman of the world, he saw that she'd never loved him as he thought she loved him
and he may have suspected that she'd lured him coldly into making the sacrifice
that was to save her. He saw her at parties, self-possessed and triumphant. He
knew that the lovely qualities he’d ascribed to her were due to his own
imagination and she was just an ordinary woman who had been carried away by a momentary
infatuation and having got over it had returned to her true life. A great name,
wealth, social distinction, worldly success: those were the things that
mattered to her. He’d sacrificed everything, his friends, his familiar
surroundings, his profession, his usefulness in the world, success, all that
gives value to existence – for nothing. He’d been cheated and it broke him. Your
friend Walton said the true thing, you noticed it yourself, he said it looked
as if life had gone out of him. It had. After that he didn’t care any more and
perhaps the worst thing was that even with it all, though he knew Lady
Kastellan for what she was, he loved her still. I know nothing more shattering than
to love with all your heart, than not to be able however hard you try to break
yourself of it, someone whom you know is worthless. Perhaps that is why he took
to opium. To forget and to remember.”
It was a long speech I had made and now I stopped.
“All that’s only fancy,” said Low.
“I know it is,” I answered, “but it seems to fit the circumstances.”
“There must have been a weak strain in him. Otherwise he could have fought
and conquered.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps there is always a certain weakness attached to such great
charm as he possessed. Perhaps few people love as wholeheartedly and as
devotedly as he loved. Perhaps he didn’t want to fight and conquer. I can't
bring myself to blame him.”
[Episode]
Ned Preston was a Scot, a good-humoured, merry soul, with a gift for
telling a story, sometimes too lengthily, for he was uncommonly loquacious, but
with dramatic intensity. He was a bachelor with a small income which sufficed
for his modest needs, and in this he was lucky since he suffered from that form
of chronic tuberculosis which may last for years without killing you, but which
prevents you from working for your living. Now and then he would be ill enough
to stay in bed for two or three weeks, but then he would get better and be as
gay, cheerful and talkative as ever. I doubt whether he had enough money to
live in an expensive sanatorium and he certainly hadn't the temperament to suit
himself to its life. He was worldly. When he was well he liked to go out, out
to lunch, out to dinner, and he liked to sit up late into the night smoking his
pipe and drinking a good deal of whiskey. If he had been content to live the
life of an invalid he might have been alive now, but he wasn't; and who can
blame him? He died at the age of fifty-five of a haemorrhage which he had one
night after coming home from some house where, he may well have flattered himself,
he was the success of the party.
“Imagination’s an odd thing, it dries
up...”
Often on summer evenings in the country when they’d been lying
in a field in one another’s arms, mouth to mouth, her desire had been as
intense as his. She knew how much he wanted her and she was ready to give him
what he asked. But when things got too desperate he'd suddenly jump up and say:
“Come on, let’s walk.”
He’d drag her to her feet. She knew what was in his mind. He wanted
to wait till they were married. His love had given him a delicacy of sentiment
that he'd never known before. He couldn’t make it out himself, but he had a
funny sort of feeling about her, he felt that if he had her before marriage it
would spoil things. Because she guessed what was in his heart she loved him all
the more.
[The Unconquered]
"Why do you want to come here? Why can't you leave us alone?"
asked Annette.
He really didn't know. He didn't like to say that he wanted a
little human friendship. The silent hostility that surrounded them all at
Soissons got on his nerves so that sometimes he wanted to go up to a Frenchman
who looked at him as if he wasn't there and knock him down, and sometimes it
affected him so that he was almost inclined to cry. It would be nice if he had
some place to go where he was welcome. He spoke the truth when he said he had
no desire for Annette. She wasn't the sort of woman he fancied. He liked women
to be tall and full-breasted, blue-eyed and fair-haired like himself; he liked them
to be strong and hefty and well-covered. That refinement which he couldn't
account for, that thin fine nose and those dark eyes, the long pale face – there
was something intimidating about the girl so that if he hadn't been excited by
the great victories of the German armies, if he hadn't been so tired and yet so
elated, if he hadn't drunk all that wine on an empty stomach it would never
have crossed his mind that he could have anything to do with her.
[Annette:]
“I don't know whether I more loathe the brutality of you Germans or despise
your sentimentality.”
[Annette’s father:]
“I went through the last war and we all did things we wouldn’t have done in
peacetime. Human nature is human nature.”
[The Kite]
[First lines:]
I know this is an odd story. I don't understand it myself and if I set it
down in black and white it is only with a faint hope that when I have written
it I may get a clearer view of it, but rather with the hope that some reader,
better acquainted with the complication of human nature than I am, may offer me
an explanation that will make it comprehensible to me. Of course the first
tiling that occurs to me is that there is something Freudian about it. Now, I
have read a good deal of Freud, and some books by his followers, and intending
to write this story I have recently flipped through again the volume published
by the Modem Library which contains his basic writings. It was something of a
task, for he is a dull and verbose writer and the acrimony with which he claims
to have originated such and such a theory shows a vanity and a jealousy of
others working in the same field which somewhat ill become the man of science.
I believe, however, that he was a kindly and benign old party. As we know,
there is often a great difference between the man and the writer. The writer
may be bitter, harsh and brutal, while the man may be so meek and mild that he
wouldn't say boo to a goose. But that is neither here nor there. I found
nothing in my rereading of Freud's works that cast any light on the subject I
had in mind. I can only relate the facts and leave it at that.
[...]
"What d'you make of it?" asked Ned as he finished.
"You know, Betty isn't a bad girl. I've seen her several times, there's nothing
wrong with her except her insane jealousy of Herbert's kite; and he isn't a
fool by any means. In fact he's smarter than the average. What d'you suppose
there is in kite-flying that makes the damned fool so mad about it?"
"I don't know," I answered. I took my time" You
see, I don't know a thing about flying a kite. Perhaps it gives him a sense of
power as he watches it soaring towards the clouds and of mastery over the
elements as he seems to bend the winds of heaven to his will. It may be that in
some queer way he identifies himself with the kite flying so free and so high
above him, and it's as it were an escape from the monotony of life. It may be
that in some dim, confused way it represents an ideal of freedom and adventure.
And you know, when a man once gets bitten with the virus of the ideal not all
the King's doctors and not all the King's surgeons can rid him of it. But all
this is very fanciful and I daresay it's just stuff and nonsense. I think you'd
better put your problem before someone who knows a lot more about the
psychology of the human animal than I do."
The Complete Short Stories (1951)
[Masterson = Chapter X, The Gentleman
in the Parlour, 1930]
[First lines:]
When I left Colombo I had no notion of going to Keng Tung, but on the ship I met
a man who told me he had spent five years there. He said it had an important
market, held every five days, whither came natives of half a dozen countries
and members of half a hundred tribes. It had pagodas darkly splendid and a remoteness
that liberated the questing spirit from its anxiety. He said he would sooner
live there than anywhere in the world. I asked him what it had offered him and
he said, contentment. He was a tall, dark fellow with the aloofness of manner
you often find in those who have lived much alone in unfrequented places. Men
like this are a little restless in the company of others and though in the
smoking-room of a ship or at the club bar they may be talkative and convivial,
telling their story with the rest, joking and glad sometimes to narrate their
unusual experiences, they seem always to hold something back. They have a life
in themselves that they keep apart, and there is a look in their eyes, as it
were turned inwards, that informs you that this hidden life is the only one
that signifies to them. And now and then their eyes betray their weariness with
the social round into which hazard or the fear of seeming odd has for a moment
forced them. They seem then to long for the monotonous solitude of some place
of their predilection where they can be once more alone with the reality they
have found.
I did not want to be inquisitive or to force a
confidence my host had no wish to give, but neither did I desire to seem so
unconcerned as to prevent him from telling me something he had in his heart.
Often in some lonely post in the jungle or in a stiff grand house, solitary in
the midst of a teeming Chinese city, a man has told me stories about himself
that I was sure he had never told to a living soul. I was a stray acquaintance
whom he had never seen before and would never see again, a wanderer for a
moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse led him to lay
bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night (sitting
over a syphon or two and a bottle of whisky, the hostile, inexplicable world
outside the radius of an acetylene lamp) than I could have if I had known them
for ten years. If you are interested in human nature it is one of the great
pleasures of travel. And when you separate (for you have to be up betimes)
sometimes they will say to you:
‘I’m afraid I’ve bored you to
death with all this nonsense. I haven’t talked so much for six months. But it’s
done me good to get it off my chest.’
‘A thing I've never been able to
understand is why a woman thinks it worth while to make you do something you
don’t want to. She’d rather you did a thing against the grain than not do it at
all. I don’t see what satisfaction it can be to them.’
‘The satisfaction of triumph. A
man convinced against his will may be of the same opinion still, but a woman
doesn’t mind that. She has conquered. She has proved her power.’
‘Are you fond of children?’
‘Yes. I have a strange and almost
unnatural passion for newborn babies.’
‘I don’t think I am, you know. I
couldn’t even feel very much about my own. I've often wondered if it showed
that I was rather a ratter.’
‘I don’t think so. I think the
passion many people affect for children is merely a fashionable pose. I have a
notion that children are all the better for not being burdened with too much
parental love.’
[1]
Cf. A Writer’s Notebook (1949),
“1916”, “The Pacific”, pp. 89-90 in the Mandarin edition (1991):
The
Pacific. On some days it offers all your fancy pictured. The sea is calm and
under the blue sky brilliantly blue. On the horizon are fleecy clouds, and at
sunset they take strange shapes so that it is almost impossible not to believe
you see a range of mountains. The nights then are lovely, the stars very
bright, and later, when the moon rises, it is dazzling in its brilliancy. But more
often than you would have expected the sea is rough, capped with white crests,
and sometimes it is as grey as the Atlantic .
There is a heavy swell. The most wonderful thing about the Pacific is its
solitariness. You pass day after day without seeing a ship. Now and then a few
seagulls suggest that land is not far distant, one of those islands lost in a
wilderness of waters; but not a tramp, not a sailing vessel, not a
fishing-boat. It is an empty desert, and presently the emptiness fills you with
a vague foreboding. There is something frightening about the vast, silent
emptiness.
[2] Cf. The Circle, written in 1919, first produced and published in 1921;
Act 3:
Lady Kitty: Are you
shocked? One sacrifices one’s life for love and then one finds that love doesn’t
last. The tragedy of love isn’t death or separation. One gets over them. The
tragedy of love is indifference.
[3] There are, of course, no “Hungarian
dances of Dvorak”. There are Slavonic dances by him and Hungarian ones by
Brahms. I wonder if this was a mistake on Maugham’s part or yet another fine
touch of characterisation. His Excellency’s wife is not only a musical snob,
but apparently careless of memory too.
[4]
Cf. The Circle, Act 3:
C.-C.:
I'm neither, my dear boy; I'm merely a very truthful man. But people are so
unused to the truth that they're apt to mistake it for a joke or a sneer.
[5] Cf. The
Summing Up (1938), chapter 77: “People are very hypocritical in this matter
and will not face the truth. They so deceive themselves that they can accept it
with complacency when their love dwindles into what they describe as a solid
and enduring affection. As if affection had anything to do with love!”
[6] Evidently the 1923
Great Kantō earthquake.
Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of
brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have
no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully
to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to
accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know
our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose
language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound
things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual.
Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the
umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house.
Cf. also “Person – To – Person”
(1955) by Tennessee
It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition so
terrifying to think of that we usually don't. And so we talk to each other,
write and wire each other, call each other short and long distances across land
and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each
other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted
effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once
said, "We all of us are sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own
skins."
The
character alluded to is Val from Tennessee
Cf. also “A
Fragment: Could I remount the river of my years” (1816) by Lord Byron:
The ashes of a thousand ages spread
Wherever Man has trodden or shall tread?
Or do they in their silent cities dwell
Each in his incommunicative cell?
[8] Cf. The
Summing Up (1938), chapter 15: “The spirit is often most free when the body
is satiated with pleasure; indeed, sometimes the stars shine more brightly seen
from the gutter than from the hilltop.”
Cf. also Dumby in Oscar
Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893):
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars?”
[9] Cf. the opening paragraph of “The Lotus
Eater” from The Mixture as Before
(1940). Cf. also the Preface to vol. 3 of The
Complete Short Stories, Heinemann, 1951:
There is one more
point I want to make. Most of these stories are on the tragic side. But the
reader must not suppose that the incidents I have narrated were of common
occurrence. The vast majority of these people, government servants, planters,
and traders, who spent their working lives in Malaya
were ordinary people ordinarily satisfied with their station of life. They did
the jobs they were paid to do more or less competently. They were as happy with
their wives as are most married couples. They led humdrum lives and did very
much the same things every day. Sometimes by way of a change they got a little
shooting; but as a rule, after they had done their day's work, they played
tennis if there were people to play with, went to the club at sundown if there
was a club in the vicinity, drank in moderation, and played bridge. They had
their little tiffs, their little jealousies, their little flirtations, their
little celebrations. They were good, decent, normal people.
I respect, and
even admire, such people, but they are not the sort of people I can write
stories about. I write stories about people who have some singularity of
character which suggests to me that they may be capable of behaving in such a
way to give me an idea that I can make use of, or about people who by some
accident or another, accident of temperament, accident of environment, have
been involved in unusual contingencies. But, I repeat, they are the exception.
[10] This is from the first British edition (Heinemann, 1947). The first American one (Doubleday, 1947), published around the same time, has the rather clumsier “…the awfulness of death broods as broods over the tropical jungle the silence that precedes a tropical storm.”
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