Hubert Bland

“ What happened psychologically to me was this: that I felt just a trifle less regard and respect for your sex, Alexa, than I was conscious of when I left home. I daresay it was unreasonable of me, but there it was. Women of our class are not really nice, I found myself saying to myself, not really and truly nice in the innermost soul of them. No wonder they don’t get on with their servants, I thought to myself, for if they are rude to their social equals, what must they be to those whom they think their inferiors? I rather hated your sex for about twenty-five minutes. ”

“ The out-buildings and the mill formed a square, and, once kindled, all would burn rapidly; and, from the slight eminence where he stood, the onlooker, cool and free from the madness that surged in the brain of the actors, could see plainly that the incendiaries ran a very fair chance of being caught in their own trap, and of perishing like rats in a barn. The big iron gates were closed immovably, and the only exit was by a narrow door. If once a panic began, and the men lost their heads in trying to pass this door, there might be a tragedy more terrible than Litvinoff cared to contemplate. ”

“ That “subtle something” of which you can’t say more even to me—there is no need of greater definiteness, I, as always, understand—is the true, almost the only, irremovable hindrance to happiness in marriage, the marriage of sensible people. Anything does to make fools unhappy. It is unpardonable and unforgettable. Unpardonable, because it is not a deed or even a thought or a look; unforgettable because it is always there. And the worst of it is, it can by its very nature discover itself only in intimacy. One has to jump into the water before one finds out with certainty that one can’t swim. ”

“ It was a bitter thought to Richard Ferrier that the old man's last moments should have been made unquiet through any conduct of his, and he reproached himself for not having concealed his own feelings better, and for not having watched more keenly over those of his father. The most crushing part of bereavement is always the consciousness that so little more thought, so little more tact and tenderness, would have sufficed to spare that ended life many an hour of sorrow, that quiet heart many a pang of pain. ”

“ The one fatal thing in dress is to wear anything because you happened to have admired it on someone else, and for that reason only. The one triumphant thing in the matter of dress is to remember that you are yourself and not that other person. In all other matters women seem to remember it easily enough. In the matter of dress only do they lose their sense of identity.
Now, Alexa, turn on me, do, and riposte by telling me that men are every bit as bad; that they too are the slaves of fashion. ”

“ It was to be noticed, by the way, that in the walks of both these young men all roads led, not to Rome, but past Aspinshaw. Richard had borne all this, sustaining himself with a hope that Miss Stanley did not really feel interested so much in Roland as in the tastes he affected. He had still hoped that she might come to care for him,—for the man who loved her with such a passionate intensity. It is so hard, so very hard, to believe that the love that is everything to us is absolutely nothing to the beloved. Men have even dreamed that their passion could warm marble to life. ”

“ This morning I picked a rose for sheer pity of it, and in half an hour its charm was gone; its very colour had changed, its pink shell-like petals (it was the last of the Maman Cochets) had turned livid as the lips of a corpse; it exhaled, not perfume, but an odour of death. The birds flutter about aimlessly, they seem to feel there is nothing left for them to do in a world so full of sadness, no nests to be builded, no broods to be reared; and they haven’t the heart to sing. To add the last touch of sable to the whole mumpish outlook, you are away. ”

“ Is it not better, seeing the little time that is ours, to know that we at least have listened to the wail of agony that ever goes up to the deaf heavens?—that we have done what we could in our little day to help forward a better time for those who shall come after us, than to know that we have had the good opinion of "respectable people"?'
'If one could only hope that one could help it forward!' sighed Clare.
'Hope? We know it. These things will be. It is a question of the little sooner or the little later. There is no standing still. He that is not with us is against us. ”

“ It is the passion for something that marriage does not satisfy—the passion for Romance. The unfortunates yearn, yearn with an irresistible yearning, for something to happen, something unusual, something with a spice of danger in it, something which pulls at the heart’s strings, something to make one wake up in the morning with a feeling that the eggs and bacon for breakfast are not the most exciting prospect of the day. ”

“ Some kind fate certainly kept watch over my wife while I was playing the fool and dangling after another woman. And Fate has been a thousand times better to me than I deserve. With my dear wife, and the prospect of meeting you soon in Russia, I feel all the old enthusiasm re-awakening. Vive la Révolution!—Your old secretary and friend,
Armand Percival.
'In signing that name I feel as though I were writing with my left hand, it is so awkward to me after all these years.'
Petrovitch sighed as he replaced the letters in their envelope. ”

“ Romance, in-loveness, cannot survive six weeks of the appalling intimacy of marriage. That is past praying for. What shall follow its departure then? Mere emptiness, a tramp across a sandy desert or a treacherous bog? That depends. The thing that should follow is friendship, friendship of a peculiar, a unique, sort; friendship touched by tenderness, mixed with memories, coloured by emotion.
But again remember this—it takes as much brains to build up and to maintain a friendship of that kind as it does to ... well ... more than it does to do anything else in the world so well worth doing. ”

“ O run at full speed across a Derbyshire moor by the uncertain light of a wintry moon is a feat not unattended with difficulty and danger, especially when the runner is not quite accustomed to the course; but it would have taken greater pitfalls than even those moors present to have made Count Litvinoff choose a longer and easier way. For when that shout had been borne to him on the wind he scented excitement and danger, and excitement and danger were to him as the breath of life. He was almost certain that the men meant mischief, and he intended to do his best to prevent it. ”

“ The philosopher neither warns against the inevitable nor regrets it. He likes just to look it straight in the face sometimes, that’s all. It amuses him.
But now, apart from this in-loveness—which I will not call love, hang me if I will—do men, men as a whole, men as a sex, love women, women in the lump, women as a sex? As I live, I don’t believe they do! It would be interesting if some leisured and industrious person—you might take on the job, Alexa, when you return—would compile a volume of proverbs, aphorisms, epigrams, from all languages, which have women as their subject. ”

“ Alice Hatfield hadn't read Huxley, but if she had she would have agreed with him in this; and now it seemed as though the furies were driving her along the streets towards that miserable home of hers, where, so far, no dove of peace had folded its wings.
It is given to all of us, at one time or another, to repent—more or less—of the evil; but many of us also know what it is to look back, with something like remorse, on what we believe to have been the good. ”

“ I confess that fact does not vastly impress me, because mothers look always with a friendly eye upon their daughters’ suitors, supposing, of course, that they are anywhere near the mark.
Has it ever struck you as queer and rather significant that while women are always anxious for their daughters to marry, men, for the most part, boggle at the thought of it? It looks almost as though your sex got more out of the arrangement than ours, doesn’t it? That if they stand to lose more, as they indubitably do, they stand to win more too? ”

“ The mill was not one of those square, many-windowed blocks which remind one of children's toy-houses, but a group of irregular buildings of all sorts and sizes, built of grey stone and roofed with slate. There was a paved yard surrounded by outhouses, some mere sheds of wood and thatch, and it was round the outhouse nearest to the mill itself that the men were crowding. There was plenty of light now for Litvinoff to discern every detail of the scene before him, for two sheds were on fire and burning merrily in the frosty air. ”

“ To suppress an instinct, then, or to allow it to atrophy by disuse, is to shut oneself off from an opportunity of pleasure, to narrow the range of one’s emotions and one’s intellect, to diminish the number of one’s sensations; it is to be incomplete, and if you are incomplete, you cannot be delightful, Alexa. Your favourite Heine says somewhere that a charming woman without religion is like a beautiful flower without perfume. ”

“ Richard rested his hand on his father's gravestone with a caressing touch. A great wave of regret and longing swept over him, and then a sort of relief at the thought that his father could not know how his dying wish would be unfulfilled. The old man's words rang in his ears,—'It has been a long life; I should like to lie quiet at last.'
'Thank God,' said Richard. People who don't believe in God have a way of speaking as though they did in moments of emotion. 'Thank God, he can't be troubled about anything now. Dear old dad—he has that wish, at any rate. ”

“ You may be a pigeon, Alexa, but, thanks to many things, you are not a defenceless pigeon. You are defended, for instance, by your own brains, by the knowledge which I have taken good care should be yours, by the customs of the social circle in which you were born, by the institution of marriage, and most of all by the jealousy and suspicion the wolves and hawks have of one another. ”

“ Litvinoff shuddered as he lighted a large cigar and pulled his gloves on.
'This is a detestable climate,' he said, as he drew the first whiffs; 'but London is about the only place I know where good cigars can be had at a price to fit the pocket of an exile. I suppose I shall soon have to leave this palatial residence, and become one of the out-at-elbows gentlemen who make life hideous in Leicester Square and Soho.'
Like many men who have lived lonely lives, Michael Litvinoff had an inveterate habit of soliloquy. ”

“ These are hard words, Alexa, but I am cross to-day.
Fashion in its smaller sense, “the fashion” as it is forced upon women by the dressmakers and designers, as a card is forced by a sharper on a flat, is for nine people out of ten an accursed thing, a monstrous thing. It assumes that all women will look well dressed in the same way. Now, if anything is certain, it is that of any hundred women selected haphazard, not more than ten can dress in the same way and look anything but ridiculous. ”

“ Much as the Ferriers had already wondered at Litvinoff's mastery of English, they wondered still more after the first ten minutes on his speech. It is one thing to carry on a social conversation in a tongue not one's own; it is another and a widely different thing to be able to hold a foreign audience, and to sway and move it, to rouse its enthusiasm and to thrill it with horror, at one's will and pleasure. Yet such was the power of this young Russian rebel. ”

“ Marriages, Alexa, are not made in Heaven as some are still found to say, nor in Hell, as too many just now are apt to declare. They are made for the most part in the Home. The strongest condemnation of the grown-up Home is the enormous number of young women who marry to get away from it. In the name of my own sex I do resent and protest against that. It is hard upon us that we should be so often regarded by the Beloved as a sort of melancholy alternative to the Home. ”

“ Do not let my brother win what his fault forbids me to try for.'
She rose.
'I have given you no right to talk in that way, nor to ask me any such promise, and I will promise nothing since I know nothing,' she said, indignantly.
'Then at least it shall not be my fault,' said Richard with equal fire, 'if you do not know what every woman he comes near ought to know. He is not free to offer love to any woman. He owes all the love he is capable of to a woman he has ruined and deserted.'
Miss Stanley looked at him coldly and contemptuously. ”

“ Ah, but you, or some other girl who, unlike you, is a little agnostic Philistine, might say, those emotional experiences are æsthetic, not religious. It is the music itself that thrills, not the devotion that the music seeks to express; it is the particles of the incense that titillate the nostrils, not the odour of prayer that penetrates to the soul. Not a bit of it, Alexa, that is a callow observation worthy only a Hall of Science lecturer. ”

“ You are so strong, I can't expect you to understand the imbecilities of such a weak fool as I am. From the moment when I ceased to spend all my time and all your money on your work, I seemed utterly degraded in my own eyes, and it did not seem to matter what I did, so I have gone on from bad to worse, and the principles you would die for, have only been will-o'-the-wisp lights to lead me into direr troubles than I should ever have known without them. ”

“ Truly, I don’t believe that the right sort of men ever look forward to their daughter’s marriages with anything but fierce distaste. When it comes to the point, I mean. They wouldn’t like them not to be married, and they hate it when they are. From which you will gather what a mistake it is to be the right sort of man, and what supreme folly it is to beget daughters, anyway.
It is rum though, rum and inexplicable, that feeling of savage resentment one has against every other man who aspires to any sort of intimacy with any woman for whom one cares even a little. ”

“ The story of the sleeping beauty is an allegory with a very real meaning. Every woman's mind has its time of slumber, when the creed of the day is truth and the convention of the day is morality. The fairy prince's awakening kiss may come in the pages of a book, in the words of a speaker, through love, through suffering, through sorrow, through a thousand things glad or sad, and to some it never comes, and that is the saddest thing of all. Clare had slept, and now was well awake, and it was no word of Count Litvinoff's that had broken the slumbrous spell. ”

“ I don’t ask you, Alexa, whence comes this new-born desire of yours to know all about men; but I warn you that I am pretty good at guessing. However, let that pass. Not only will you never know all about men, but at present, my kiddie, [112] you don’t know anything at all. Knowledge of live things is not to be got from books or plays. All you can get from books or plays is—what shall I call it? there is no one word that will do—a sort of vague and deceptive hint of the reality. ”