Hall Caine

“ When I hear people say that Great Britain is not yet awake to the fact that she is at war I wonder where they keep their eyes. If I had been a Rip Van Winkle, suddenly awakened after twenty years of sleep, or yet an inhabitant of Mars dropped down on our part of this planet, I think I should have known in any five minutes of any day since August 5, 1914, that Great Britain was at war. Such a spirit has never breathed through our Empire during my time, or yet through any other empire of which I have any knowledge. ”

“ I see the life of the world already beginning again. I see a man ploughing a field that is not yet cleared of broken guns, shattered gun-carriages, and tangled masses of barbed wire; a woman milking her cow in a half-roofed cow-house, and children playing among the piled-up stones of a village street where less than a week ago a child lay face down after the bursting of a shell.
I see our armies arriving in Paris, now our second capital, and full for all time to come of vivid memories. ”

“ Then down into the wide waste of still water slid the body of Kisseck.
Danny saw it done. The image that had possession of him stood up so vividly before him at that instant that he shrieked. He peered into the water as if his eyes would bring back what the immemorial sea had swallowed up forever.
Forever? No! Listen!
Listen to that rumble as the waves circle over the spot where the body has disappeared! It is the noise of the iron weights shifting from their places. They are tearing open the canvas in which the body is wrapped. They have rolled out of it and sunk into the sea. ”

“ For Charlie they did not weep. His spirit is not dead for them—it cannot die. When brave deeds have to be done, they will see its light, like a beacon that does not fail, over the mountains of the fiercest storm; they will hear its voice above the thunder of the loudest waves.
A full moon is shining to-night on the place of Charlie’s rest, and if the old Norse story is true, that while the body lies in sight of the sea the spirit lives in the winds above it, Charlie is not done with his old enemy yet. ”

“ It tracks the growth of a feeling more real than fact. The movement of incident cannot anywhere be more eager, sustained and absorbing than the change of emotion from the warm picture of the sweet child, radiant with joy, leaping with the love of life, lying in the meadows, looking far through the blown grass and wondering where the city is of which they tell her for a tale, to the cold, dark study of the weak, erring girl who knows the city now, its pride and woe, yet while "nothing tells of winter" steels her heart against its sorrow and shuts her eyes to its shame. ”

“ The young man has gone. The one gleam of light which has lit the blind and weary years has left him. He is alone once more. Oh! this lonely life, this desolate sea, this yearning for news, this hunger for home!
"I cannot bear it," he thinks: "I will go back. A little longer! Only a little longer! Till the last link has gone, the last trace is lost, and then—"
A long way off the voices of the sailors are dying away over the sea:
Be it ever so humble
There's no place like home. ”

“ THE SOUL OF POLAND
It is a fearful thing to murder, or attempt to murder, the soul of a nation. The call that comes to a people's heart from the soil that gave them birth is a spiritual force which no conquering empire should dare to kill. How powerful it is, how mysterious, how unaccountable, and how infinitely pathetic! The land of one's country may be so bleak, so bare, so barren, that the stranger may think God can never have intended that it should be trodden by the foot of man, yet it seems to us, who were born to it, to be the fairest spot the sun shines upon. ”

“ It had got into my head that Lucy was the victim of a conspiracy, and that the two men, the doctor and the clergyman, were at the bottom of everything. With heart and brain aflame I went tramping down the curving path. In my mind's eye I was seeing my dear girl as if by flashes of lightning, first with her beautiful bright eyes full of youth and health and happiness and love, and next in the toils of some hideous and mysterious trouble. ”

“ I see the great news of the new peace flying over Britain, not as the news of the peace of 1815 did, to the galloping o horses and the sounding of trumpets, by stage-coaches from Lombard Street, like spokes from the hub of a wheel, down the dark high roads to Bath, to Portsmouth, to Manchester, to York, to Edinburgh, but in one instant through the air to every corner of the kingdom, so that if it goes by day the very earth seems to know of it, and if by night the darkness seems to hear and the morning light to tell of it. ”

“ No protest from Mona, no argument, no entreaty, prevailed to disturb that instant inference.
"He is dead, he is dead!" he cried; "now is my heart smitten and withered like grass." Then, rising to his feet, and gazing through his poor blurred eyes into Mona's face with a look of reproach, "Young woman," he said, "why would you torture an old man with words of hope? Christian is dead. My son is dead. Dead? Can it be true? Yes, dead. Lord, Lord, now let me eat ashes for bread, and mingle my drink with weeping."
And so he poured out his soul in a torrent of wild laments. ”

“ There bit by bit the strange and solemn idea of unrequited love was borne in upon him. It was very hard to understand. For one short day the image of a happy love had stood up before his mind, but already that day was dead. That he should never again clasp her hand whom he loved, that all was over between them—it was painful, it was crushing.
And oh! it was very cruel. His life seemed as much ended as if he had taken his death-warrant, for life without hope was nothing worth. ”

“ Charlie was dead. He had just breathed his last, and his rugged comrades, who know nothing of poetry, but are poets nevertheless to the deepest grain of them, had ran up the flag mast-high (not half-mast) as signal to the Great Cox of all that here was a soul in the troubled waters of death waiting for the everlasting lifeboat to bear him to the eternal shore.
The sea takes some of our bravest and best. Charlie it did not take. Not so sure is it that he who lives by the sword will perish by the sword, as that he who baulks the sea the sea will surely have for its prey. ”

“ Through the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is beautiful. But it is the beauty of fair cheeks from which the canker frets the soft tenderness of colour; the loveliness of golden hair that has lost its radiance; the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the dew of the spirit, now dry, and cold, and lustreless. In her face we may see the mark of a great wrong, and, as visible, the relentless vengeance that pursues the faithless. ”

“ Nobody who ever met the late King Leopold could have had any doubt that he was a great man, if greatness can be separated from goodness and measured solely by energy of intellect and character. I see him now as I saw him in the garden of a house on the Riviera, the huge, unwieldy creature, with the eyes of an eagle, the voice of a bull and the flat tread of an elephant, and I recall the thought with which I came away:
"Thank God that man is only the King of a little country! If he had been the sovereign of a great State he would have become the scourge of the world." ”

“ The body, free of the weights, has come up to the surface. It is floating like a boat. The torn canvas is opening out. It is spreading like a sail in the breeze. Away it goes over the sea! It is flying across the waters, straight for the land.
The men stood and stared into each other's faces in speechless dismay. It was as though an avenging angel had torn the murdered man from their grasp and cried aloud in their ears, "Blood will have blood."
They strained their eyes to watch it until it became a speck in the twilight of the dawn, and could be seen no more. ”

“ There is scarcely a sound. Presently there comes slowly down as from the key-stone of the monster machine, a shining column of steel. It reaches the black ring, presses down on it, descends without a pause to the white-hot block, rests on top of it for a moment, there is a thud as of something falling into a pit beneath, and then the column rises, the arch is reopened, and the ring has disappeared, having passed through the metal and dropped to the ground below. The sense of silent, irresistible, oceanic, almost motionless power has left you breathless. ”

“ I sailed south through the Straits of Messina a few weeks before the earthquake, and, returning north a few months later, I looked eagerly for the change which I imagined must have been made by the frightful upheaval of the earth that had killed hundreds of thousands, and shaken the soul of the entire human family, but I could see no change at all, even through the strongest field-glasses, until I came within sight of the waste and wreckage of the little works of men. Yes, Nature goes her own way, winter and summer, seedtime and harvest, healing her own wounds, but taking no thought of ours. ”

“ Their foreheads touched, their breathing must have mingled. Lucy inade a low, indistinguishable cry, and half turned to me with a movement either of appeal or of reproach.
The operation went on. Slowly, very slowly, with a calm that began to grow hateful, the magnetizer continued the downward pressure. Lucy's hysteria seemed to subside at every stroke of his hand. After a time her face, which had grown pale with fear, was inflamed as with pleasure, her eyes brightened and became humid, their pupils dilated, and their gaze grew fixed. ”