E. F. Benson

“ One terrific second of calm preceded the explosion, and, as if Nature was following the lines of this human drama, for that second the downpour of the blinding rain outside was stayed. Inside and out there was a moment’s silence.
“I know all that,” he said quietly, “but I can’t help myself. It is not for the picture—that doesn’t matter. It is for me. Because I love you.”
Madge threw her arms wide, then brought them together in front of her as if keeping him off, and a sort of cry of triumph that had begun to burst from her lips ended in a long moan. ”

“ Colin had wandered in the moonlight past the end of the terrace, and now stood on the plateau, where, according to the plan, the sanctuary was to have been built. Round him rose the tranced forest-trees, the grass, drenched with dew, glimmered like a spread sheet of moonstone. Then, suddenly springing up again, the wind warm and caressing made the branches of the oaks whisper and sway, and through him ran a great exaltation. He raised his hands, spreading his arms out wide.
“O Lord and Benefactor,” he said. “How will I rejoice to build a shrine in honour of thee....” ”

“ But, just as she got into the motor, Archie, rosy and suffused with sleep, like a child that has lain still and grown all night, came flying downstairs in dressing-gown and pyjamas.
"Had to come down and say good-bye, Jessie," he said. "Do come back; come down for next Sunday, and we'll go up together for Helena's wedding. Promise!"
Jessie looked at that "morning face" which glowed with the exuberance of boyish health and happiness. She herself had slept very badly, dozing for a little and then being awakened by the sound of talking next door, and of peremptory resounding tappings. ”

“ Is all lost to me?"
"Yea, and it is lost to me," said Wotan, "for from the life and light of the gods thou passest. Here shalt thou abide, even here, and deep sleep shall wrap thee round, and thou shalt be alone and without protector, until the day come that some man, a wayfarer, passing here shall see a maid lying alone, and shall come to her and wake her, and she shall be his. Maiden only thou art, not maiden of my will, and to maid, as is fit, comes man."
But even now when the horror of her full doom was told to Brunnhilde, still she swooned not nor bewailed herself. ”

“ Dodo thought, at any rate, that she loved him, and that knowledge made her feel less abased before him. All love—the love for children, for parents, for husband, for wife, for lover, for mistress—has something divine about it, or else it is not love. The love Jack felt for her was divine enough not to seek its own, to sacrifice itself on the altar of duty and loyalty and the pure cold gods, and in its tumultuous happiness it could think of others. And Dodo's love was touched, though ever so faintly, with the same divine spark, a something so human that it touched heaven. ”

“ It was everywhere: the sky and the sun were full of it, it burst in those myriad blossoms from the dark, wholesome soil; it was spring that set this good wind blowing, it bubbled and chuckled in the chalk-stream, with its waving weeds and bright glimmering beds of pebbles. Above all, it was in her own heart on this glorious morning, till she thought it must almost burst, too, so overflowing was it with sheer, unreasoning happiness.
Indeed, Martin had been quite right when he had told Karl how happy she was, and though she did not reason to herself about it, the cause was abundantly clear. ”

“ I want to have a full nursery. I want to see Helen old and grey-headed, with grandchildren round her, and herself the youngest of them all. I want to live through the whole of this beautiful life till old age; and though that is called the winter of life, there is no need that it should be so. The last day of a man of eighty should be the most luxuriant of autumn, before the touch of winter has blackened the flowers; for it is only the thought of death that makes us think of old age and winter together, and the thought that does that conceives falsely of death. ”

“ Can't you come out, too, to look after your Italian property? Fancy having a week at Alatri again! There won't be bathing, of course; but how I long to hear the swish and bang of the shutters that Pasqualino has forgotten to hitch to, in the Tramontana! And the sweeping of the wind in the stone-pine! And the glow and crackle of the wood-fire on the hearth! And the draughty rooms! And the springing up of the freesias! And Seraphina, fat Seraphina, and the smell of frying! Fancy being heedless again for a week! I feel sure the war has never touched the enchanted island. The world as it was! ”

“ But I think this Riseholme life with its finish and its exquisiteness spoils one for other places. London is like a railway-junction: it has no true life of its own. There is no delicacy, no appreciation of fine shades. Individualism has no existence there; everyone gabbles together, gabbles and gobbles: am not I naughty? If there is a concert in a private house—you know my views about music and the impossibility of hearing music at all if you are stuck in the middle of a row of people—even then, the moment it is over you are whisked away to supper, or somebody wants to have a few words. ”

“ She had asked for a sign that he could turn the gray into gold, and for reply she got the assurance that she might put her mind at rest with the thought of what Mr. and Mrs. Osborne were to each other! She knew that for that moment she only saw the ludicrous side of it, and that a very real and solid truth was firm below it, but somehow it was not what she wanted. She wanted ... she hardly knew what, but something of the spirit of romance that triumphantly refuses to acquiesce in the literal facts of life, and see all things through the many-coloured blaze of its own light. ”

“ Yes, surely, this was the essence of portrait-painting: not to present a man as he was at a particular moment, in one particular part, with the emblem of one particular pursuit by him—an artist with his canvas, a sculptor with his clay—but the whole man, his Jekyll and his Hyde together in one picture.
Then in a moment his mind, as it were, found the handle of the door for which it had been groping in darkness, and flung it open, letting in the full blaze of a complete idea. There is only one human being on earth whom any artist who ever lived could paint completely. ”

“ Every moment Edith’s content broadened and deepened; here in the gentler activities of the country, in long garden-hours, in the absence of crowds, in days spent quietly, and nights that did not begin with dawn, she felt that there would be no need of making those continuous efforts, which Hugh must never know to be efforts, and which had so tired her. They had tired her body and mind alike; the effort had been physically exhausting, but the mental force, the willpower to make them appear spontaneous, the natural expression of an abundant vitality had been even more tiring. ”

“ They figure to themselves the depressing spectacle of snow as it usually appears in England, smooth and soft and wet, and too close a cousin to slush not to be tainted with a family resemblance; the image called up by ice is a grey surface in which are imbedded dead leaves, twigs and stones thrown on to it by boys for purposes not clearly understandable, while all they know of hoar-frost is an evanescent decoration that occurs at the edges of ditches and on lawns when tea is being made in the morning and disappears as soon as the poached eggs, leaving the grass soaked and dripping. ”

“ Against the sight of him, the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand, Eva knew she would be powerless. The impossibilities on which she dwelt would sink, she well knew, into nothing by the side of that one great impossibility—that of resisting his claims when he came to seek and have her. Surely nothing on earth, not duty, nor unselfishness, nor wisdom, was so strong as Love, the soft, delicate-winged Love, which neither strove nor wept, but only smiled and smiled, until its claims, its claims in full, were willingly poured into its outstretched hand. ”

“ Elizabeth laid her hand on his knee.
"Daddy dear, I believe in all things living and beautiful, and true. Don't take it to heart—pray don't. Does—does the blossom know what fruit is coming? But surely the fruit comes."
Swiftly, suddenly at this supreme instant of sunset, all the world was changed; it was as if it passed into the heart of an opal. The dust of the main road into which the two had just turned was transfigured into mist of gold and rose; the wayfarers who passed along, plodding home with camels and mild-eyed buffaloes, were changed into citizens of some rainbow-kingdom. ”

“ It cannot be; again and again I tell myself it cannot be. But so I told myself when the telegram of Dick’s death came, and in spite of all my telling it was true, and the tears of the whole world could not wash out a word of it. But if once more I am to go unrequited, I do not see how I can bear it. It would be wiser to see no more of this incarnation of Margery. At present I love seeing her, because—because that pressed and withered flower I always carry with me has, so to speak, blushed again with the hues of life, and a living fragrance breathes from it. ”

“ Nicholas paused for a moment, and his face lit up with a blaze of hatred.
"For it is already evening with them," he cried, "and when the day dawns night shall have swallowed them, and they will awake no more. Do you know what is the strongest feeling that ever grips a man's heart? No, not love, nor yet fear, but revenge. And if you had suffered as I have suffered you would know what it is to be filled with one thought only—to see blood in the sunrise and blood in the setting of the sun; to feel that you have ceased to be a man and have become a sword. ”

“ And that evening, when the child was gone to bed and Father Andréa had charged himself to see that nothing caught fire, and that no changeling fairy—a vague phantom terror dreaded and abhorred of Suleima's soul—malignantly visited the cradle of the littlest, the two went off for old sake's sake in the boat, Mitsos with the fishing spear and resin, to visit the dark, dear places of the bay. The land-breeze was steady, and the moon already swung high among the stars, and from afar they could see the white wall that both knew. As they passed it, Suleima clung the closer to Mitsos. ”

“ Thurso awoke next morning, feeling, so he told himself, the stimulus and exhilaration of this new climate and the bracing effect of this dry, sunny morning of frost. After the narrow berth of his cabin it was a luxury to sleep in a proper bed again, and a luxury when awake to lie at ease in it. What an excellent night he had had, too! He had slept from about half-past eleven the night before till he was called at half-past eight—slept uninterruptedly and dreamlessly, without those incessant wakings from agonised dreams of desire which had so obsessed him during the last week. ”

“ For solitude is a habit of extraordinary fascination, and very quick to grow on anyone who has sufficient interest in things not to be bored by the absence of people. And with Tom Merivale, Nature, the unfolding of flowers, the lighting of the stars in the sky, the white splendour of the moon, the hiss of the rain on to cowering shrubs and thirsty grass was much more than an interest; it was a passion which absorbed and devoured him. For Nature, to the true devotee, is a mistress far more exacting and far more infinite in her variety and rewards than was ever human mistress to her adorer. ”

“ Even as she spoke a little red flower blossomed at Wotan's feet, opening suddenly at the dawn of this sweet spring morning, and above his head two birds mated in mid-air, and his heart was warm within him with the instinct of the spring-time. "It is the spell of the spring," he thought to himself. "Love and spring drove mad both man and woman, and if there is blame, the blame is there." Aloud he said—
"O Fricka, it is spring-time!" and almost a tear of tenderness for the frail race of men he so loved started to his eye. ”

“ There will be nothing of us either, unless you mean that at some future time I am alive because part of me has become perhaps a murderer, and another part a politician, and another a housemaid, for all I know.
The February sun was warm; you might almost call it hot. A little wind pregnant with spring moved through the bushes; the snowdrops, those pale heralds of the triumphant march of the new year, were thick in the grass where we had planted them, Helen and I, last autumn, so that they should give us the earliest news of the returning tide of life. ”

“ Colin stood very still. Was it really Violet who could laugh like that, with that pure abandonment to amusement? Was it she who shone with that serene and radiant love?...
She sat up again after that burst of laughter, and saw him. In an instant her face changed to the face he knew. It changed from the face of a mother, girlish still, though that big boy sprawled there, to the frozen beauty which she presented to the world. No faintest glint of laughter lingered on her mouth or in her eyes. And yet, amazingly, they were still alight with love. ”

“ They were strolling together by the edge of the lake in the hour of sunset, and Jessie, though sick at heart and tortured by the weight of her forebodings, and the tempest of fire and blood which had burst on Europe, yet tried to open her heart to the sweet spell of the tranquil evening. Somewhere behind the cloud of evil which had so suddenly taken shape in that host of barbarians who already had overrun Belgium, and which, no less, was invading the spirit of the boy she loved with the uttermost fibre of her being, there shone the eternal serenity of Omnipotent Mercy. ”

“ She had yet to learn the true and the wider outlook, to feel that fire of love that fuses all things together, and loves though it can tenderly laugh, and is gentle always, and rejoices in the weaknesses and imperfections and faults of the beloved, simply because they are his. For though there are many ways of love, the spirit that animates them all is just that; they are all swayed by one magical tune. But that Dora did not yet know, she had not heard a note of it, she did not even know the region of the soul where it made melody all day long. ”

“ Such happiness, the highest and the best of all earthly bliss, is no niggardly distillation of human life; to produce it a hundred or a myriad souls have not to be boiled down in torment of fire or refined through starvation of joy so that, basil-like, it may put forth its flowers from roots that have been enriched with the life-blood and tears of the many, nor is it rare or recondite and only to be perceived by the Æolian harps of the world. Instead it is a common, common bliss; none seek it or strain after it, but there are but few who do not find it. Her sweet simple soul loved Hugh ”

“ If Suleima should die; better even if she should not die, but live bitterly, for, no doubt, she too loved him. He would come to her, how well she could picture in what manner, great and awkward and burning and beyond compare, saying little but letting all be seen. Not content with that picture, she went on to put specious, despicable words into his mouth. Suleima, he should say, would soon get over it; for him he was simply one of the sea, and Suleima hated the sea; she would live with Mitsos's friends—a man's friends were always kind to women who had wearied him. ”