H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ On the right and left of the sandy strip of beach, bushes of the maramee apple grew down to the water, overshadowing it. To protect the boat from the sun, he moored her amidst the bushes. He would row sometimes to the reef, but he could never land on it, for there was nothing to tie the boat up to. Floating in her, he would lie with his arm upon the thwart and his chin resting on his arm, watching the coral floor of the lagoon, the moving shells, the crabs flittering along sideways, the flights of coloured fish—a whole world in crystal, silent, coloured, vivid with life and always new. ”

“ Twice as broad it always looked seen by moonlight or starlight than when seen by day. Occasionally the splash of a great fish would cross the silence, and the ripple of it would pass a moment later across the placid water.
Big things happened in the lagoon at night, unseen by eyes from the shore. You would have found the wood behind them, had you walked through it, full of light. A tropic forest under a tropic moon is green as a sea cave. You can see the vine tendrils and the flowers, the orchids and tree boles all lit as by the light of an emerald-tinted day. ”

“ Through the open windows came the pulse-like sound of the omnibuses in the King's Road, the sleigh bells of the hansoms, the rattle of the coster's barrow, and voices.
As he painted, the sounds outside brought before him the vision of the King's Road, Chelsea, where flaming June was also at work with her golden brush and palette of violet colours.
He saw in imagination the scarlet pyramids of strawberries in the shops. The blazing barrow of flowers all a-growing and a-blowing, the late-June morning crowd, and through the crowd wending its way the figure of a girl. ”

“ Lying as she was she could see nothing but the ribbed sides of the boat, the grey sky above, and a gull with domed wings and down-curved head, poised, as though suspended on the end of a string. It screamed at her, shifted its position, and then passed, as though blown away on the wind. She sat up. Bompard had drawn away from her and was lying curled up on his side. La Touche on his back, forward, shewed nothing but his knees; across the gunnel lay the sea, desolate in the dawn, turbulent, yet hard and mournful as a view of slated roofs after rain. ”

“ When the great lagoon was emptying or filling to the tide, the water at the pierheads went like a mill race; at slack water it lay gently flowing to the swell of the outside sea as now.
Floyd came from under the tent, glanced round him, stretched himself, and then crossed the reef to the outer beach, where the breakers were coming in—the eternal breakers of the Pacific, leisurely, monotonous, rhythmical, filling the air with their sound and spindrift, their ozone and life.
Nothing could be more extraordinary than the contrast between the inner beach and the outer beach of the island. ”

“ The moonlight lit the castle wall and the dangling rope and showed the black shadow of the moat, a terrific sight that made Rochefort’s stomach crawl and his throat close. This was no castle wall which he had to descend. It was like looking over the cliff at the world’s end or one of those terrific bastions of cloud which one sees sometimes banking the sky before a storm. The moonlight it was that lent this touch of vastness to the prospect below, a prospect that made the sweat stand out on the palms of Rochefort’s hands and his soul to contract on itself. ”

“ Another flash lit the world, and Adams saw the rain.
He saw what it is given to very few men to see. From horizon to horizon, as if built by plumb, line and square, stretched a glittering wall, reaching from the forest to the sky. The base of this wall was lost in snow-white billows of spray and mist.
Never was there so tremendous a sight as this infinite wall and the Niagara clouds of spray, roaring, living, and lit by the great flash one second, drowned out by the darkness and the thunder the next. ”

“ That was how Gerald Wilder looked when he was in a rage. I could see now Gerald Wilder, the assassin and the suicide. I was Gerald Wilder.
Geraldine and I were inextricably entangled—she in the body of a boy, I in the body of a woman. Was this my punishment for that murder and that suicide committed long, long ago, this blind maze of the flesh into which I had been led? I could do one of two things. Leave Geraldine to-morrow morning, never to see her again, or—stay. If I left her she would break her heart, and die. I would break my heart, and die. ”

“ The hollow tapping of the woodpecker comes from the beech glades, whilst the rabbits shake the dew from their fur, and the rustle of the stoat comes from the ferns; a nut falls, and, looking up, you see against the sky, where the treetops are waving in the palest sapphire air, the squirrel, the sweetest of all wood things.
You observe one another and he is gone, and the wind draws up from leagues away like the rustling of a silken skirt, till, suddenly, the whole forest draws breath. You can hear it waking from its slumber just as at dusk you can hear it falling to sleep ”

“ One already had been partly shaped and hollowed, and resting on it for a moment, Le Moan followed its curves with her eyes, felt the ax marks with her hand, took in every detail of the work, saw it as, with outrigger affixed and sail spread to the wind, it would take the sea, sometime—sometime—sometime.
The ceaseless breakers casting their spindrift beneath the moon lulled her mind for a moment till trees, canoe, reef and sea all faded and dissolved in a world of sound, a voice-world through which came the chanting of stricken coral and, at last, pictures of the wind-blown southern beach. ”

“ Pelisson was half asleep, and Toto as white as a ghost. Gaillard, his cuff scribbled over with lunatic poetry, cast his mournful eyes at the dawn peeping in white over the silent Boulevard des Capucines.
“I was once a youth,” said Gaillard. “That is what the world says to us in the dawn. The dawn ever fills me with despair—a delicious despair. I do not know why, but it seems forever linked to that divine forlorn hope, love. This is the light from which we rebuild old castles and recall vanished faces. In the faint wind that moves we hear the whisper of voices. ”

“ They were entering now the real desert. The great yellow desert that lies burning in the sun for ever. Now voiceless, now sighing and shifting its sand to the wind that blows from nowhere. Here there are no roads, only caravan tracks marked by the skeletons of men and animals, an horizon hard like burnished brass, a thirst that drains even the water in the oasis wells.
Jacques, old campaigner that he was, had never grown used to the desert, no white man ever does. There is a spirit here that daunts the soul and haunts the heart for ever. ”

“ Just in that moment when the sun has all but freed himself from the horizon, the pampas, in weather like this, is a golden and a wonderful and a living thing; comfortable as the light of a fire, the light of the sun destroys desolation and the bleakness of distance and almost the sense of loneliness.
Luggard had a month before him, perhaps more, to be lived out in this place. Here on the pampas he had to face Nature and Time without a companion and without a roof to cover him, and—at first sight, without an occupation to engage his mind. ”

“ To starboard lay Palm Island, with the sea quietly creaming on the coral beach and the palms stirring to the morning wind, to port the white Dryad riding to her anchor on the near-shore blue, and beyond the Dryad the violet of the great depths spreading to the far horizon, beyond which lay Andros, and the islands, reefs, and banks from Great Abeco to Rum Cay. Not a sail on all that sea, nor a stain on all that splendor: nothing but the gulls wheeling and crying over the reefs to southward. ”

“ Away out there in a right line from where Gaspard was sitting beneath the palm trees, under the blinding dazzle of sea, the Rhone was lying with her bottom ripped out, her boilers burst, her boats hanging smashed at her davits; a horrible travesty of a ship, knocked under the sea as if with the blow of a giant’s fist, a raffle of ropes, machinery, and corpses.
The gods had been very good to Gaspard and Yves, and Gaspard had, by the direction of the gods, been the salvation of Yves. The whole catastrophe had come like a clap of thunder on a moonlit sea. ”

“ Lestrange had retired with a book, and a half a page had drowned him in oblivion; Kearney, under a tree, was lost to the world, and Dick, curled like a leaf, was gripping in oblivion the toy the sailor had cut for him, a tiny boat no bigger than a forefinger, rough-hewn in a few minutes, but still a boat.
Just before sunset that evening the wind fell to a dead calm. Living in the open the faintest breathing of wind makes itself felt; there is no anemometer like the sense of man, and a dead calm affects not only the sense of man, but his soul. ”