Coulson Kernahan

“ So, too, there are moments of midnight waking, when we lie on our bed as in a grave, and feel the awful thought of death borne in upon us with unutterable, intolerable horror. Then the darkness which shuts out those objects that in the day-time distract the attention of our outward eye, and of our mind, serves only to make our mental vision doubly keen, and to concentrate all our faculties, as to one inward focal point of light, on that hateful thought. Then do we seem to feel the earth rushing swiftly on its way, as if eager to hurry us to our own dissolution ”

“ Better a thousand times for the poor to be in the hands—be under the heels, if you like—of the monarchy and the aristocracy, than be given over, tied hand and foot, to the tender mercies of the mere money-grabber, with no name to uphold, no sense of chivalry to inspire, no conscience to control, no object in life, save to get and keep and grind out money from man, woman, and child. It is not the monarchy or the aristocracy who is the enemy of the people. It is your capitalist, your mill and factory owner, your middleman, your wholesale and retail merchants, your employers of labour. ”

“ Just as we sometimes find, within half-a-dozen paces of a great central city thoroughfare, where the black and pursuing streams of passengers who throng its pavements never cease to flow, and the roar of traffic is never still, some silent and unsuspected alley or court into which no stranger turns aside, and where any sound but that of a slinking footstep is seldom heard,—so, bordering the great world-thoroughfare of the Thames, is to be found a spot where life seems stagnant, and where scarcely one of the thousands who pass within a stone’s throw has ever set foot. ”

“ As some death-stricken and hunted creature presses frantically on as if to escape the arrow that it carries in its breast, so, heedless of all that was passing around her, heedless of shadow or shine, she pressed on and on through the realms of hell, her eyes fixed and wide-distended in agony, and her hands clutching ceaselessly at her bosom, as if the heart of her were being riven in twain. "O God!" I heard her cry, as she passed me, "my heart is broken! my heart is broken! and, alas, one cannot die of a broken heart in hell." ”

“ That there was an obstacle of some sort between Kate and me, I had realised the last time she and I had stood in this same room together, and she had confessed her love. But bogeys—most of all the bogeys of a woman's making and imagining, paralyse and appal her as they may—do not greatly alarm the average man. That which she pronounces to be an insurmountable obstacle, he first surveys on all sides to satisfy himself that it is an obstacle at all, and then calmly goes to work to discover how that obstacle can best be overcome. Kate loved me ”

“ Is there a single thinking man or woman who cannot see that monarchy and imperialism, peers, clergy, and class distinctions are doomed, and that their utter downfall is only a matter of time? Germany, Russia, Austria, Italy, France, and England are undermined to the very cores by Socialism and Anarchy. The mines which are to destroy society, as society now exists, are laid though they are out of sight, and at any moment the opportunity may come to fire the train. ”

“ I am a child of eternity dreaming the dream of time, and even while I dream I am half awake and know that I am but dreaming. Life is to me—not poetically only, but positively—a dream and unsubstantial. The world is a dream, things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thoughts of them. My self-consciousness becomes [Pg 89] awake, and I look in and down upon myself with a wonder as fresh and novel as if the mystery of my own existence had never caused me wonder or surprise before. ”

“ And now again I read your thoughts, and this time you say: 'This man, this Cæsar in conception, this criminal in act, preaches humanity and practises inhumanity; this man speaks of the poor with Christ-like compassion, even while his hands are red with his fellow-creatures' blood.' But whom have I slain? My enemies? Never! My enemies, my deadliest enemy, I would not stoop so much as to strike across the face. But God's enemies, the enemies of God's cause, against them I will use all the cunning and craft of my brain, to wipe them off the face of the earth. ”

“ Those who so decide will not be too hard upon me when I confess that, in allowing myself to lose sight of the person who had been in hiding on the hulk, I made, as events proved, a fatal and, but for other circumstances, an irretrievable mistake. That I am but a bungler at the best is, I fear, already only too evident, though I make bold to say that it is not often that I bungle so badly as I did on this occasion. ”

“ The only mystery which still sometimes troubles me is that most terrible of all mysteries—the mystery of human suffering. But even that I am content to leave, for is not our God Himself a suffering God? and who that witnessed the sufferings of Jesus Christ (and what sufferings were ever like to His?) could have foreseen that the cruel Cross whereon He hung should hereafter be the finger-post to point the way to heaven? or that beneath His cry of agony in the garden, God heard the triumph-song of a ransomed world? ”

“ Knowing, as I did, how uncontrollable was the feeling of the populace in regard to the outrage, I could not disguise from myself that a man who made such a confession as I had to make, would—should he be recognised in the streets—run a very good chance of being mobbed, if not lynched.
An infuriated mob is not given to make nice distinctions, and so long as it has a scapegoat on which to wreak vengeance it does not wait to inquire too particularly into the question of the scapegoat’s innocence or guilt. ”

“ Whether it was the man then standing before me in the opium den who thus laughed, or whether it was the man I had seen kneeling on my chest, a knife in his hand and my life at his mercy, I do not know, and matters nothing, for the face was the same. Then suddenly he turned from me, another being altogether.
"No, don't, old man; think of the risk you run," I heard him say to his friend, laying a hand affectionately on the other's shoulder, those inscrutable eyes of his—all the cunning and cruelty gone—becoming liquid and appealing. ”

“ But in every inspired poem or perfect picture, in the soaring and sobbing of music, in sunrise and sunset, or in the sighing of the wind upon my cheek, there is something which speaks to me of her, and which beckons my spirit forth in search of her, as if by the leading of an unseen hand. And sometimes, but only in my dreaming, musing moments, my thoughts, as they wander forth into the blue expanse around me, take colour and shape, and I see her standing by a tiny cot in a cosy room where the warm firelight flickers on walls gay with pictures. ”

“ The bright prominent eyes, beautiful as a woman’s, the delicately clear complexion, the straw-coloured hair, the aquiline nose with the strange upward arching of the nostrils, the curious knitting of the brows over the eyes, the full lips that spoke of voluptuousness unscrupulous and cruel, the firm, finely-moulded chin—all these there was no mistaking, in spite of his woman’s dress. As I looked at him the scene in the stuffy smoking carriage on the Southend railway came back to me, and when in his quick, incisive way he asked, “Well, sir, and what have you to say for yourself?” ”

“ He was an aristocrat. He was more, even, than an aristocrat; but we will not talk further of that now. She was my mother, but not his wife. She was the mother of his child, and he left her and her child to starve. We did not starve; but I pass over those years. When I was ten, she broke down, worked out, worn out, wearied out. Then I took over her burden. No matter what my work, no matter who my employer. There are thousands of such employers as he; there are millions of such workers as I—workers whom no law protects. You may not be cruel to a cat or dog; you may not over-work a horse. ”

“ Then I turned me round and gazed whence we came, but could nothing discern save remote plains of darkness, athwart the gloom of which I saw flash ever and anon (as one sees flash the eyes of a beast at midnight) the glimmer of a moving world. Then the angel stretched forth his hand, pointing me yet again to the distant east, and far away beyond the beauteous realm I beheld a vast plain of desolation, and beyond that a land whereof I could nothing see, save that a darkness, as of a twilight in which there is no moon, brooded above it like a cloud. ”