Harry Leon Wilson

“ They starred the bank that fell away from my porch to the clear-watered river, and they sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively, defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless—has never even wearied. ”

“ Sometimes in a half doze he breathes a long, almost human sigh of perfect and despairing comprehension, as if the whole dead weight of his race's history flashed upon him; as if the woful failure of his species to achieve anything worth while, and the daily futilities of himself as an individual dog were suddenly revealed. In such instants he knows, perhaps, that there is little reward in being a dog, unless you cheat yourself by believing more than the facts warrant. ”

“ The day she came was one of Little Arcady's best; quite all that her anxious servitor could have wished,—a day of summer's first abundance, when our green-bordered streets basked in a tempered sunlight, and our trim white cottages nestled coolly back of their flower gardens. Harried alien as she was, she would be welcomed with smiles, and I was glad for her sake and Clem's when I hurried home to dress for that first dinner with her. ”

“ It was a hot summer below, where the valley widens to let in Amalon; but up in the little-sunned aisle of Box Cañon it was always cool. There the pines are straight and reach their heads far into the sky, each a many-wired harp to the winds that come down from the high divide. Their music is never still; now a low, ominous rush, soft but mighty, swelling as it nears, the rush of a winged host, rising swiftly to one fearsome crescendo until the listener cowers instinctively as if under the tread of many feet; then dying away to mutter threats in the distance, and to come again more fiercely ”

“ Broadway would be weirdly quiet at such times, save for the occasional frenzied clatter of a hurrying milk-wagon. Even the cars seemed to move with less sound than by day, and the early-rising workers inside, holding dinner-pails and lunch-baskets, were subdued and silent, yet strangely observing, as if the hour were one in which the vision was made clear to appraise the values of life justly. To the north, whence the cars bulked silently, would be an awakening sky of such tender beauty that the revellers often paid it the tribute of a moment's notice. ”

“ There is an exciting glimpse of greensward, flowering shrubbery, roses, vines, and a vista of the ends of enormous structures painted yellow. And this avenue is sprightly with the passing of enviable persons who are rightly there, some in alien garb, some in the duller uniform of the humble artisan, some in the pressed and garnished trappings of rich overlords.
It is really best to stand across the street for this clandestine view of heart-shaking delights. If you stand close to the gate to peer past the bulky shape of the warder he is likely to turn and give you a cold look. ”

“ A light wind stirred in the trees, the sky was a void of blue, the scent of the lilacs came to him. That was all reassuring; but something more came: a consciousness that he could translate only as something vast, yet without shape or substance, that opened to him, enfolded him, lifted him. It was a vision of boundless magnitudes and himself among them—among them and with a power he could put upon them. While it lasted he had a child's dim vision of the knowledge that life would be big for him. ”

“ Now the Tree of Truth stands just over this line at which all but the gods' own turn to scamper back before supper. It is the first tree to the left—an apple-tree, twisted, blackened, scathed, eaten with age, yet full of blossoms as fresh and fertile as those first born of any young tree whatsoever. Those able rightly to read this tree of Truth become at once as the gods, keeping the faith of children while absorbing the wisdom of the ages—lacking either of which, be it known, one may not become an imperishable ornament of Time. ”

“ German guns began to feel a way to Paris. The earth rocked in a gentle rhythm under a rain of shells. Shrapnel and gas lent vivacity to the assault. Guns to their utmost reach swept the little valley like a Titan's sickle. Private Cowan nestled his cheek against the earthen side of his little slit trench and tried to remember what she had worn that last night in Newbern. Something glistening, warm in colour, like ripe fruit; and a rusty braid bound her head. ”

“ And one day she knew that all her imaginings about this pair had been vain, caught it in the deepened look of Ewing as he turned from Virginia to herself. It was a thing to bask in—that look—like the fervid sun itself. But it hurt her, too; made it harder to let go of life. Yet always before her was the face of Kitty Teevan with its beseeching eyes: "You have so little time to live, and I must live in his memory always!" ”

“ After a tour of the garden I found myself in the cool twilight of her little parlour, where she begged me to be seated while she prepared me a dish of tea, which she did in the adjoining kitchen, to a cheerful accompaniment of song, quite with an honest, unpretentious good-heartedness. Glad I was for the moment to forget the social rancors of the town, the affronted dignities of the North Side set, and the pernicious activities of the Bohemians, for here all was of a simple humanity such as I would have found in a farmer's cottage at home. ”

“ For, as he had listened to Brigham’s last words, the picture of his vision in the desert had come back,—the cross in the sky, the crucified Saviour upon it, the head in death-agony fallen over upon the shoulder. And then before his eyes had come page after page of that New Testament with a wash of blood across two of them. He felt the new life he had prayed for pouring into his veins, and with it a fierce anger. The one on the cross who had been more than man, who had shirked no sacrifice and loved infinitely, was not thus to be assailed. ”

“ For the sumptuous blending and flaunt of colour, the spontaneous awakening of warm, throbbing new life, and all those inspiring miracles of regeneration which are performed elsewhere in April and May, the city-pent must wait until mid-October.
This is the spring of the city's year. There be those to hint captiously that they find it an affair of false seeming; that the gorgeous colouring is a mere trick of shop-window cunning; that the time is juiceless and devoid of all but the specious delights of surface. ”

“ The small, mighty, night-eyed, well-completed Miss Lansdale, with the voice of a golden jangle, had frozen it about me in lavish abundance.
I went home to play the game, until my eyes tired so that the face of king, queen, and knave leered at me in defeat or simpered sickeningly when I was able to shape their destinies. Thrice I lost interestingly and with profit to my soul, and once I won, though without elation, for we know that little skill may be needed to win when the cards fall right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit. ”

“ Heart speaks to heart naked and unashamed; they fraternize across deeps that are commonly impassable, thrilling as one man to the genius of the double-play, or with one voice hurling merited insults at a remote and contemptuous umpire. It is only there, on earth, that they love their neighbour. There they are fused, and welded into that perfect whole which is perhaps the only colourable imitation ever to be had on earth of the democracy said to prevail in Heaven.
There was no longer a Bean, a Breede, a flapper. ”

“ Can you not picture the mob that would fight for the honour of crucifixion to-morrow, if it were known that the one chosen would sit at the right hand of God and judge all the world? I say there was no sacrifice, even if Christian dogma be literal truth. Why, sir, I could go into the street and find ten men in ten minutes who would be crucified a hundred times to save the souls of us from hell—not if they were to be rewarded with a seat on the throne of God where they could send into hell those who did not believe in them—but for no reward whatever—out of a sheer love for humanity. ”

“ Then a good view of the train could be had; a line of beautiful sleepers terminating in an observation car, its rear platform guarded by a brass-topped railing behind which the privileged lolled at ease; and up ahead a wonderful dining car, where dinner was being served; flitting white-clad waiters, the glitter of silver and crystal and damask, and favoured beings feasting at their lordly ease, perhaps denying even a careless glance at the pitiful hamlet outside, or at most looking out impatient at the halt, or merely staring with incurious eyes while awaiting their choice foods. ”

“ To dull the sudden wanting of his heart for her he walked off alone over the path that bordered the lake, to reduce the amazing actuality of things, if he could, to proportions seemly with normal life. But the lake was a mirror of enchantment, the booming of an owl was a magic portent, the shadowed wall of granite was a turreted castle of mysteries, vague in the starlight, and the very stars themselves huddled down on him excitingly. He was in a world of the unreal, and must do an unreal thing. He stumbled blindly back to camp. ”

“ A world once considered of enduring stability had crashed fearsomely about the ears of Winona Penniman and Wilbur Cowan. After this no support was to be trusted, however seemingly stout. Old foundations had crumbled, old institutions perished, the walls of Time itself lay wrecked. They stared across the appalling desolation with frightened eyes. What next? In a world to be ruined at a touch, like a house of cards, what vaster ruin would ensue? ”

“ For, strangely enough, the two men, so unlike, were drawn closely together—Brigham Young, the broad-headed, square-chinned buttress of physical vitality, the full-blooded, clarion-voiced Lion of the Lord, self-contained, watchful, radiating the power that men feel and obey without knowing why, and Joel Rae, of the long, narrow, delicately featured face, sensitive, nervous, glowing with a spiritual zeal, the Lute of the Holy Ghost, whose veins ran fire instead of blood. One born to command, to domineer; the other to believe, to worship, and to obey. ”

“ Charity—a tear dropped on the world's cold cheek of intolerance to make it burn forever! Or it was the grand motor-power which, like a giant engine, has rolled the car of civilisation out from the maze of antiquity into the light of the present day where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, then to speed on to that hoped-for golden era when truth shall rise as a new and blazing star to light the splendid pageantry of earth, bound together in one law of universal brotherhood, independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence. ”

“ How restful this quiet and reserve after the colour and line tumult of the Higbee apartment. There the flush and bloom of newness were oppressive to the right-minded. All smelt of the shop. Here the dull tones and decorous lines caress and soothe instead of overwhelming the imagination with effects too grossly literal. Here is the veritable spirit of good form.
Throughout the house this contrast might be noted. It is the brown-stone, high-stoop house, guarded by a cast-iron fence, built in vast numbers when the world of fashion moved North to Murray Hill and Fifth Avenue a generation ago. ”

“ Had she felt the need of a death's head at her sun feast, this neutral, denying flatness would have sufficed. The end had come home to her. It was her unseen familiar, voiceless, but ever present, with a look unhurrying but constant.
And there were the mountains themselves, things that had once leaped alive and tortured themselves into frenzied furies of striving only to be stricken and left at last in all the broken tossing of their folly. They had tried the fighting death, and it had availed only to fix their last agonies. ”

“ It was the kind of landscape he had viewed yesterday with a rising distaste; land that had tricked people from their right to wander; to go places on a train when they would.
He brought his eyes back from the treacherous vista and turned them down to the face of the sleeping girl. A pale scarf was wound about her head, and he could see but little beyond it but the tip of her nose, a few scattered, minute freckles on one cheek. She was limp, one bare hand falling inertly over the edge of the seat between them. He looked out again at the checkerboard of farms. ”

“ A few moments later the three were before Brigham, who was standing by his wagon; Joel Rae, glowing with a glad and confident serenity; the tawny chief with his sable braids falling each side of his painted face, gay in his head-dress of dyed eagle plumes, his buckskin shirt jewelled with blue beads and elk’s teeth, warlike with his bow and steel-pointed arrows; and the young man, but little less ornate than his splendid father, stoical, yet scarce able to subdue the flash of hope in his eyes as he looked up to the great white chief. ”

“ The real spring in New York comes when blundering nature has painted the outer wilderness for autumn. What is called "spring" in the city by unreflecting users of the word is a tame, insipid season yawning into not more than half-wakefulness at best. The trees in the gas-poisoned soil are slow in their greening, the grass has but a pallid city vitality, and the rows of gaudy tulips set out primly about the fountains in the squares are palpably forced and alien. ”

“ Ewing awoke in the night at some jolting halt of the train, to feel an exciting thrill of luxury as he stretched in his berth. Here was no stumbling about in the dark to search for a lost trail; nor must he rise in the chill dawn to worry a blaze from overnight embers, cook a discouraging breakfast, catch horses, and lade unwilling beasts with packs. Things would be done for him; and the trail was wide and level as befits the approach to the world. ”

“ When the exciting time of this listening had gone and she stepped from the train into the lazy spring silence of the village, her own heart spelled the thing in quick, loud, hammering beats—a thing which, now that she faced it, was so wildly impossible that her cheeks burned at the first second of actual realisation of its enormity; and her knees weakened in a deathly tremble, quite as if they might bend embarrassingly in either direction.
Then in the outer spaces of her mind there grew, to save her, a sense of her crass fatuity. ”

“ I’ve never been free to have the love of a woman the way you will some day, though I’ve hungered and sickened for it—for a woman who would understand and be close. But this girl has been the soul of it some way. See here, Follett, let her stay this summer, or until I’m dead. That can’t be a long time. I’ve felt the end coming for a year now. Let her stay, believing in me. Let me know to the last that I’m the only man who has been in her heart, who has won her confidence and her love. Oh, I mean fair. You stay with us yourself and watch. Come—but look there, look, man! ”

“ Gordon Dane's was a face before which the eyes of women would fall in half-frightened, half-ecstatic subjection, and men would feel the inexplicable magnetism of his presence. He would be widely remarked for his taste in dress. He would don stripes or checks without a trace of timidity. He would quail before no violence of colour in a cravat.
A certain insignificant Bunker Bean was not like this. With a soul aspiring to stripes and checks that should make him a man to be looked at twice in a city street, he lacked courage for any but the quietest patterns. ”