George A. Birmingham

“ Don’t shake your head at me that way, James Hope. You don’t know what you’re refusing. I can give you work to do out there, and money to earn, and a fine house to live in. It’s a good land, so it is; it’s a land of liberty. We’ve done with the tyrannies of this worn-out old world. A man may speak his mind out there, and think his own thoughts and go his own way. We doff our hats and make our bows to no man living, only to him who shows himself by fine deeds to be our better. It’s the land for you and the land for me, and the land for every man that loves freedom. ”

“ The English Fleet might have laid Hamburg in ruins and anchored in the Kiel Canal. Men might have died in millions. Civilization itself might have been swept away. But the face of the sun, rising on Salissa day by day, was in no way darkened by horror, or crimsoned with shame. The sea whispered round the island shores, but brought no news of the rushings to and fro of hostile fleets. The winds blew over battle-fields, but they reached Salissa fresh and salt-laden, untainted by the odour of carnage or the choking fumes of cannon firing. ”

“ Tim Gorman’s fine eyes were the only things about him which struck me as noticeable. No artist can model eyes in clay. But Mrs. Ascher had got all that I saw in his eyes into the head before me—all and a great deal more. She had somehow succeeded in making the lips, the nostrils, the forehead, the cheek-bones, express the fact that Tim Gorman is an idealist, a dreamer of fine dreams and at the same time innocent as a child which looks out at the world with wonder. ”

“ The grass which lay around the maze of paths was sacred as a rule, even from the list slippers of the nuns, but to-day booths stood on it like stalls at a charity bazaar, hung with tweeds, blankets, and stockings. A tall Calvary lowered incongruously over one. An inferior Madonna, deposed from her old station in the entrance-hall, presided in a weather-beaten blue robe over another.
Beyond the garden, blocked off from it by a white wall, lay the factory itself, the magnet which was drawing the great of the earth to the nunnery. ”

“ Ascher and men like him have spun fine threads, covering every civilised land with a web of credit, infinitely complex, so delicate that a child’s hand could tear it.
A storm, even a strong breeze comes, and the threads are dragged from their holdings and waved in wild confusion through the air. A man, brutal as war, goes striding through the land, and, without knowing what he does, bursts the filaments and destroys the shimmering beauty which was before he came. ”

“ Lancashire, with all its crowd of sooty towns, jostling each other against railway lines, with its human habitations cowering under the shadow of cotton mills, will hereafter recall to me a vision of broad, flat lands, dotted over with huts like penthouses, of miles and miles of black earth bare of all verdure but covered with low, scrubby bushes with the white cotton hanging from them; of crowds of negroes gay in all the primary colors, dragging sacks after them as they pick the precious stuff which is to clothe hall mankind. ”

“ There is nothing beyond the reach of a city which unfalteringly believes in itself. No other city believes in itself quite so whole-heartedly as Chicago does, and I expect Chicago will be the world center of literature, music and art. There is nothing to stop it, unless indeed Chicago itself gives up the idea and chooses to be something else instead. It may, I hope it will, decide to be the New Jerusalem, with gates of pearl and streets of gold and a tree of life growing in the midst of it. Then Chicago will be the New Jerusalem and I shall humbly sue to be admitted as a citizen. ”

“ It is turned backwards by some stray spit of land and set beating against some other current of the same tide which has taken a different way and reached the same point in strong opposite flow. The little glistening wavelets leap to meet each other, like lovers reunited whose mouths are hungry for the pressure of glad greetings. There are places where the water eddies round and round, where smooth eager lips, rising from the whirlpools, seem as if they reached up for something to kiss, and are sucked down again into the depths with voiceless passion. ”

“ She came close to him and spoke.
“There is no above or below, Neal, when we love each other. How can I be far above the man who loves me?”
“But there is no hope for us, none at all anywhere. Even to-morrow I may have to go—Una, I may have to fight——”
“Whatever comes, Neal, I know that you will be brave and good. Be brave and good, dear Neal, and then God will give us our hearts’ desire. I am not afraid of the future. Why should you be afraid? If you do what is right and honourable what is there to fear? God is good.” ”

“ For the moment I felt nothing but a sense of exultation, strangely out of harmony with the grave melancholy with which Ascher spoke. I suppose the soldier instinct survives in me, an inheritance from generations of my forefathers, all of whom have worn swords, many of whom have fought. We have done our part in building up the British Empire, we Irish gentlemen, fighting, as Virgil’s bees worked, ourselves in our own persons, but not for our own gain. There is surely not one battlefield of all where the flag of England has flown on which we have not led men, willing to fall at the head of them. ”

“ Major Kent sat at the tiller smoking. He was in that mood of vacant obliviousness of the ordinary affairs of life which long drifting on calm seas induces. The helplessness of man in a sailing-ship, when the wind fails him, begets a kind of fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable, which is the nearest thing to peace that any of us ever attain. Indeed to drift along the tide is peace, and no conviction of the inevitableness of the worries which lurk in ambush for us on the land has any power to break the spell.
Meldon lay stretched on the deck outside the combing of the cockpit. ”

“ I had not talked about money. I had more sense than to mention money to a woman in Mrs. Ascher’s frame of mind.
“I have money enough of my own,” she said. “He and I want very little. What do we care for except just to love each other and to see beautiful things and to escape from all this nightmare of blood and hate and horror and hideousness?”
I felt helpless. Mrs. Ascher had undoubtedly hit on a new solution of the problem. She proposed that Ascher should impale himself not on one or other, but on both horns of the dilemma, be false to every kind of honour and loyalty. ”

“ On the roofs of many of them long grass grew. From a chimney here and there a thin column of smoke was blown eastwards and vanished in the clear air a few yards from the hole from which it emerged. Gaunt cattle, dejected creatures, stood here and there idle, as if the task of seeking for grass long enough to lick up had grown too hard for them. In the muddy bohireens long, lean sows, creatures more like hounds of some grotesque, antique breed than modern domestic swine, roamed and rooted. ”

“ I was quite prepared to believe that Anthony was inspired by a passion far out of the common. I know nothing more terrifying than the chill embrace of the sea at night-time. To strike out through the slimy weeds which lie close along the surface at the ebb point of a spring tide, to clamber on low rocks, half awash for an hour or two at midnight, these are things which I would not willingly do.
“The first time he went for to try it,” said Peter, “he felt a bit queer in himself and he thought it would do him no harm if he was to bless himself. ”

“ What sort will the next generation of our people be, with their own language gone from them, and their Irish ways forgotten, and all the old tales and songs and tunes perished away like the froth of the waves that the storm blew up across the fields the night your father died? ”

“ If New York were a city of hustlers, New York would drill no holes in steel girders.
The fact is that America has, in this matter of hustle, been grossly slandered in Europe. I am not sure that the Americans, with a curious perversity, have not slandered themselves, and done as much as any one to keep the hustle myth alive. The American understands the value of not hurrying as well as any one in the world. He has, justly, a high opinion of himself and declines to be a slave to a wretched machine like a clock. ”

“ The white terns hover and plunge, re-emerge amid the joyful callings of their fellows, each with some tiny silver fish to feed to the yellow chicks which gape to them from the short, coarse grass among the rocks. Curlews call to each other from island to island, and high answering calls come from the sea-saturated fields of the mainland. Small broad billed guillemots and puffins float at ease upon the water, swelling with obvious pride as they display the flocks of little ones which swim with infantile solemnity around them. Gulls cluster and splash noisily over shoals of fry. ”

“ There is, no doubt, another way of looking at the system. The ships, the kings, the mighty minds, the common men, are all of them in bondage to Ascher and his kind. He and his brother financiers are the unseen rulers, the mysteriously shrouded tyrants of the world. This system of credit, which need not be at all or might be quite other than it is, has given them supreme, untempered power, which they use to the injury of men. This is Gorman’s view. But is it any less romantic than the other? An epic can be written round a devil as greatly as round a hero. ”

“ The day closes early in these great camps. At half-past eight the recreation huts close their doors. Concerts and entertainments are over. The men stream back to their tents along muddy roads, laughing, chatting, singing. Lights appear in the tents, and a glow, red or white, shines through the canvas. One after another these are extinguished. The “Last Post” sounds from a dozen bugles. The multitudinous noises of camp life die away. The rifle-fire which has crackled all day on the ranges has long ceased. The spluttering of machine guns in the training camps vexes the ear no more. ”