Hope Mirrlees

“ A house with old furniture has no need of guests to be haunted. As we have seen, Master Nathaniel was very sensitive to the silent things—stars, houses, trees; and often in his pipe-room, after the candles had been lit, he would sit staring at the bookshelves, the chairs, his father's portrait—even at his red umbrella standing up in the corner, with as great a sense of awe as if he had been a star-gazer.
But that night, the brooding invisible presences of the carved panels, the storied tapestries, affected even the hard-headed Master Ambrose. ”

“ When she opened her eyes, there was the Magdalene as absorbed as before in the intensity of her own emotion. Le Brun’s dramatic chiaroscuro brings little comfort to suppliants—the eternal impassivity of the Buddha is far less discouraging than an eternal emotion in which we have no part.
Madeleine felt the chill of repulse. Perhaps in Paradise as on earth the Saints were sensible to nothing but the cycle of the sacred Story, and knew no emotions but passionate grief at the Crucifixion, ecstasy at the Resurrection, awe at the Ascension, and child-like joy as the Birth comes round again. ”

“ Trotaconventos (wildly) : Nothing to fear! Oh, my poor black soul ... hell-fire ... the devil hiding like a bug in my shroud ... oh, Blessed Virgin, save me from hell-fire!
The ghost of Don Juan Tenorio appears.
Don Juan Tenorio: There is no hell.
Trotaconventos: Who are you? Speak!
Don Juan Tenorio: I am the broad path that leads to salvation; I am the bread made of wheat; I am the burgeoning of buds and the fall of the leaf; I am the little white wine of Toro and the red wine of Madrigal; I am the bronze on the cheek of the labourer and his dreamless, midday sleep beneath the chestnut tree ”

“ He had suddenly remembered that it was something in the widow Gibberty's trial that was connected in his mind with Master Ambrose's joke about the dead bleeding. And he was re-reading that trial—this time with absorption.
As he read, the colours of his mental landscape were gradually modified, as the colours of a real landscape are modified according to the position of the sun. But if a white road cuts through the landscape it still gleams white—even when the moon has taken the place of the sun. And a straight road still gleamed white across the landscape of Master Nathaniel's mind. ”

“ I would that people were more inclined to such pleasant antics!’
‘In good earnest I did not,’ said Madeleine severely. ‘But I feigned not to be interested when she talked, and averted my eyes from her as if the sight of her worked on my stomach. Oh! what will she think of me?’
‘Well, I don’t know, Chop,’ Jacques said dubiously; ‘it seems you used arts to show yourself in such colours as ’twould be hard to like!’
‘Do people never take likings to bashful, surly people?’ she persisted.
‘I fear me they are apt to prefer smooth-spoken, courtly ones,’ he answered with a smile. ”

“ A horse was dragging a plough against the sky-line, and here and there thin streams of smoke were rising from heaps of smouldering weeds. In the nearer fields, Teresa could discern small, moving objects of a dazzling whiteness—white leghorns gleaning the stubble; and from time to time there reached her the noise of a distant shot, heralding a supper of roast hare or partridge in some secluded farm-house. Then, like a Danish vessel bound for pillage in Mercia, white, swift, compact, a flock of wood pigeons would flash [4] through the air to alight in a far away field and rifle the corn. ”

“ And I think, dear child, ’twill fall out thus with you.’
Madeleine was deeply moved. Mère Agnès’s words, like the tales of a traveller, had stirred in her soul a wanderlust. It felt the lure of the Narrow Way, and was longing to set off on its pilgrimage. For the moment, she did not shrink from “the love of invisible things,” but would actually have welcomed the ghostly, ravishing arms.
‘Oh, tell me, tell me, what I can do to be holy?’ she cried imploringly.
‘You can do nothing, my child, but “watch and pray.” It lies not in us to be holy. ”

“ But, in spite of the light, the focus, and his desire for hard thinking, Master Nathaniel found his thoughts drifting down the most fantastic paths. And, besides, he was so drowsy and his limbs felt so strangely heavy. The colours on the ceiling were getting all blurred, and the old knobs were detaching themselves from their background and shining in space like suns, moons, and stars—or was it like apples—the golden apples of the West? And now the claret-coloured background was turning into a red field—a field of red flowers, from which leered Portunus, and among which wept Ranulph. ”

“ Sister Pilar: Yes, yes, but do you verily believe the nun with her needle, the clerk with his brush, wots anything of these hidden matters? Nay, it is nought but vanity. Oh! these multitudinous seeds of vanity that lie broadcast in every soul, in every mote of sunshine, in every acre of the earth! There is no soul built of a substance so closely knit but that it has crannies wherein these seeds find lodging; and, ere you can say a pater, lo! they are bourgeoning! ’Tis like some church that stands four-square to the winds and sun so long as folk flock there to pray ”

“ If they had been boys, uproariously contemptuous, they would have twitted Madeleine with her lie, but being girls, they merely sneered and ignored her. She felt like a spirit that, suspended in mid-air, watches the body it has left being torn to pieces by a pack of wolves. Days of dull agony followed, but she felt strangely resigned, as if she could go on bearing it for ever and a day.
It was during the Fronde, and Jeanne and her friends had a cult for Condé and Madame de Longueville, the royal rebels. ”

“ It was certainly a pleasant one—fantastic and exquisitely neat. "Neat as a Fairy's parlour"—the old Dorimarite expression came unbidden to his mind.
There was a bowl of autumn roses on the table, faintly scenting the air with the hospitable, poetic perfume that is like a welcome to a little house with green shutters and gay chintzes and lavender-scented sheets. But the host who welcomes you is dead, the house itself no longer stands except in your memory—it is the cry of the cock turned into perfume. Are there bowls of roses in the Fairies' parlours? ”

“ Trotaconventos: Go with you to Granada? What wild tale is this?
Don Salomon: ’Tis no wild tale. You rated me for indifference to my children, but I am not so indifferent as to wish to see them reared in ignorance and superstition by a flock of empty-headed, vicious nuns who have become like Aholah and Aholibah, they who committed whoredoms in Egypt.
Trotaconventos: Once more, an old dog does not bark at a tree-stump. You’ll never go to Granada.
Don Salomon: And why not, star-reader?
Trotaconventos: Because you are of the race of Judas that sold our Lord for a few sueldos. ”

“ Life is like a blind and limitless expanse of sky, for ever dividing into tiny drops of circumstances that rain down, thick and fast, on the just and unjust alike. Art is like the dauntless, plastic force that builds up stubborn, amorphous substance cell by cell, into the frail geometry of a shell. These two things are poles apart—how are they to meet in the same work of fiction?
One way is to fling down, pêle-mêle, a handful of separate acts and words, and then to turn on them the constructive force of a human consciousness that will arrange them into the pattern of logic or of drama. ”

“ Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, the actual head of the family, was a typical Dorimarite in appearance; rotund, rubicund, red-haired, with hazel eyes in which the jokes, before he uttered them, twinkled like a trout in a burn. Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite; though, indeed, it is never safe to classify the souls of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait—a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. ”

“ Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Jasper began to wriggle worse than ever, and, having first cast a furtive glance at his grandmother and aunts, said shrilly, “I dreamt of Mummie last night ... and she had ... she had ... such a funny nose....” and his voice tailed off in a little giggle, half proud, half guilty.
“Jasper!” exclaimed simultaneously the Doña, Teresa, Concha, and Anna, in tones of shocked reproval. ”

“ A VISIT TO THE ABBAYE OF PORT-ROYAL
Madeleine’s bitter self-reproaches for her own weakness were of no avail. She had to acknowledge once and for all that she had not the force to stand out against another personality and tell them in cold blood things they would not like. She could hedge and be lukewarm—as when Jacques wished to be formally affianced—but once she had got into a false position she could not, if the feelings of others were involved, extricate herself in a strong, straightforward way. Would God be angry that she had not set up the Bethel she had promised? ”

“ Endymion Leer eyed him, with a little smile. "And now," he said, "perhaps your Worship will let me talk a little of your own case. The malady you suffer from should, I think, be called 'life-sickness.' You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you brain-sick. There, beneath you, all round you, there surges and swells, and ebbs and flows, that great, ungovernable, ruthless element that we call life. And its motion gets into your blood, turns your head dizzy. Get your sea legs, Master Nathaniel! ”

“ In fact, the whole scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet must be forgotten, and that quickly, for it had been a descent into that ruthless world of reality in which Madeleine could not breathe. That world tyrannised over by the co-sovereigns Cause and Effect, blown upon by sharp, rough winds, and—most horrible of all—fretted with the counter-claims on happiness of myriads of individuals just as ‘square’ and real as she. In such a world how could she—with such frightful odds against her—hope for success, for here she was so impotent, merely a gauche young girl of no position? ”

“ Ranulph had now stopped sobbing, and was lying there quite still. "The whole of me seems to have got inside my head, and to hurt ... just like it all gets inside a tooth when one has toothache," he said wearily.
Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound for restlessness—how well he knew the state of mind these things expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to mould the body's attitude to its own shape. ”