Margaret Pollock Sherwood

“ I watch her as she sits in the sunshine, and I multiply her by hundreds and thousands, innocent people, old folk and babies, old men and women lying down by the roadside to die, and the horror comes like a great tidal wave, sweeping all things before it, drowning all the joy of life and the old sweet ways of living. It breaks on the brick wall of my garden and is driven back; I will not be overwhelmed by any anguish of human fate, my own, or that of any one else. Until some wandering star strikes the earth and shivers it to atoms, there is hope somewhere, and there are things to do! ”

“ Women sobbed for very joy; others wrote madly on their tablets; maidens gasped with red lips slightly opened; never, during the whole lecture season, had come so big a wind from out the bags, and honest Hugh blushed with mingled shame and triumph when he saw the face of his betrothed, for it wore the look of one who had seen the white vision of naked truth.
Following the fashion of the Necromancer, he had taken a maxim, and had dressed it up so that men knew it not, and so that it came forth as revelation. ”

“ Her skin was brown, despite her years of confinement in a shop, so brown that her blue eyes looked paler than they really were. I liked to see her pupils dilate when an idea came to her. They expanded, and her whole face glowed with enthusiasm.
For the Tailoress had the soul of a poet. Through all her starved life she had carefully saved up every semblance of beauty that had fallen to her lot. In her room hung a Carlo Dolce Madonna, in a narrow black-walnut frame, and an unmounted photograph of two Corregio cherubs was pinned to the wall-paper. ”

“ This vivid joy in the encompassing beauty had but one meaning: it was her sense of the glad presence of this new creature, man or god, who seemed continually with her, were he near or far.
"I'm as foolish as a sixteen-year-old girl," she murmured, fingering the grapes in the basket with their setting of green leaves, "and yet, and yet he isn't a man, really; he is only a state of mind!"
She sat, with the cool air of autumn on her cheeks, watching the pickers, who went with even motion up the great slope. ”

“ The hardest thing in the world for me to understand is that the great things of life may hang on mere trifles. If I had not, acting on a moment's impulse, promised to go into lodgings with Gladys in Oxford because she would go there to study Celtic, Icelandic, and Greek, I should never have known you, never have walked with you in glory through an English spring, never have picked crocuses in Iffley meadows and anemones in Bagley wood, never have known that green rippling beauty of Oxford stream and meadow and the piercing joy of life and love that came with you. ”

“ But the Lad thought I was trifling.
“You are mistaken,” he maintained. “Genuine science neither asserts nor denies where it cannot prove. It is silent about the ideas of God and of immortality, because it cannot find any basis for scientific reasoning. It is magnificent,—that reverence that keeps it from making great unprovable statements about things in general. Oh, think of the patience with which scientists study the least things, and the self-control that keeps them from drawing conclusions before they have reached them, and the splendid faith with which they go on working!” ”

“ Life went on quietly in the city by the sea. In the gray mornings count and countess talked amicably together in their great hall, and wool-carder and his wife gossiped cheerily as they rolled and carded the white fleece; in the gray afternoons Sir Knight walked in the castle garden among the flowers with my lady, and the butcher's 'prentice met his maid by the postern door: by embroidery frame and spinning-wheel, by tiring-room and kitchen spit, all was gray peace. ”

“ The ears kept that position in which any one who has ever loved a donkey recognizes scathing criticism. Daphne fingered one of them with her free hand.
"It is only on your back that I feel any strength of mind," she added. "When I am by myself something seems sweeping me away, as the tides sweep driftwood out to sea; but here, resolution crawls up through my body. We must be a new kind of centaur, San Pietro."
Suddenly her face went down between his ears.
"But if you and I united do drive him away, what shall we do,—afterwards?"
"Signorina!" called Bertuccio, running up behind them. ”

“ The little river, the lichen-grown stones, the sense of long continuance, give one a feeling that there are no gaps, no fissures between life and death, that the sight of the eyes slips inevitably into the vision of the soul. The sky seems near in England, with the crumbling grey of old Norman tower and churchyard wall touching its veiled blue, and the low white clouds almost within reach; the old home-like look of the flat stones makes one feel as if the sleepers are still, as it were, sitting on the threshold, or on the old bench by the door. ”

“ Over the shallow tufa basin of the great fountain on the hill Daphne stood gazing into the water. She had sought the deep shadow of the ilex trees, for the afternoon was warm, an almost angry summer heat having followed yesterday's coolness. Her yellow gown gleamed like light against the dull brown of the stone and the dark moss-touched trunks of the trees. Whether she was looking at the tufts of fern and of grass that grew in the wet basin, or whether she was studying her own beauty reflected there, no one could tell, not even Apollo, who had been watching her for some time. ”

“ I look at Madge and Peter, busy in kitchen and garden, at Don, guarding the little iron gate, at the pony grazing beyond the stream, and I feel like a feudal lord. Especially do I feel so when we rout out the utensils in the kitchen,—knives, forks, skillets. Some of them surely antedate the feudal era; they were probably left by the cave men; their prehistoric shape, in its ancient British clumsiness, looks as if it might have archæological, if not practical, value. I shall use them for gardening; the forks will be a great help in wrestling with mother earth. ”

“ High, high up among the sloping hills Daphne sat on a great gray stone. Below her, out beyond olive orchards and lines of cypress, beyond the distant stone pines, stretched the Campagna, rolling in, like the sea that it used to be, wave upon wave of color, green here, but purple in the distance, and changing every moment with the shifting shadows of the floating clouds. Dome and tower there, near the line of shining sea, meant Rome.
Full sense of the enchantment of it all looked out of the girl's face. Wonder sat on her forehead, and on her parted lips. ”

“ No one here now can doubt that England is going through that great anguish wherein the soul of a people is re-born. The unity, the calm, the quickening determination are part of a great spring-time that will lead, God grant, to harvest days of peace. There is slow knitting up of the sinews of war; more and more her sons respond to the call which still leaves them free to choose; old England is getting ready as ever, resolved, incredulous of defeat; the spring knows it; the rooks know it, busy in their elm tree parliament. ”

“ Macaroni? Roast chicken and salad.
Assunta. Niente! Macaroni!
Giacomo. Roast chicken! You are a pretty one to take the place of the cook!
Assunta. Roast chicken then! But what are you standing here for in the hall polishing spoons? If the Contessa could see you!
Assunta dragged her husband by the hem of his white apron through the great marble-paved dining-room out into the smoke-browned kitchen in the rear.
"Now where's Tommaso, and how am I going to get my chicken?" she demanded. "And why, in the name of all the saints, should an American signorina's illustrious name be Daphne?" ”

“ Your Oxford is a new Oxford, awake, struggling, suffering, nursing the wounded, while the noblest of her sons follow you to the war. Thinking of all these things as I walk, I decide not to go to the house, after all; there is a sound of hammering and an air of disquiet. I cross the little stone bridge and follow the stream; this, like the pony, is a new neighbour with which I must become acquainted, and it proves more friendly than that other. There is a touch of September gold everywhere, of autumn perfectness in things, that belies wrong anywhere upon the earth. ”

“ Was it Bertuccio's story of yesterday that filled her with foreboding? Hardly. Rather it seemed a pleasant thought that he and she should feel the bark of one of these great trees closing round them, and should have so beautiful a screen of brown bark and green moss to hide their love from all the world. No, no fear could touch the thought of any destiny with him: she was afraid only of herself.
"You are putting a mere nothing between us," the voice went on. "You are pretending that there is an obstacle when there is none, really."
"Only another man's happiness," murmured the girl. ”

“ From morning until night I am busy with a thousand and one things, commonplace things mostly, in the house, or the village, or beyond. And wherever I go, you seem near, with your long, thin stride, and your preoccupied face, as if your feet had a bit of difficulty in keeping up with your mind. There is a strange sense always, when I walk in the forest, or along the highway, even when I go to Farmer Wilde's to see about butter and vegetables, that you are walking by my side.
Peter is very solicitous about the welfare of my guest, and I have seen him looking at her with vast pity in his eyes. ”

“ She was wandering with a face like that of a sky across which thin clouds scud, in the grass about Hermes' grave. In her hand was the letter of yesterday, and in her eyes the memory of the days before.
"It is all too late," said Daphne, who had learned to talk aloud in this world where no one understood. "The Greeks were right in thinking that our lives are ruled by mocking fate. I wonder what angry goddess cast forgetfulness upon my mind, so that I forgot to tell Apollo what this letter says." ”

“ February, with the vanishing of the icicles, brought snowdrops and crocuses. All kinds of growing things of which I had not dreamed came peeping up in this old garden: crocuses, purple and gold, grow in a little clump where the wind just fails to reach them; royal daffodils nod and sway, or stand erect and golden, those from new planting outshining the rest. In March the violets were out, and primroses followed; the pony's meadow is full of them, deep in the grass; and these are only a part of the lovely procession of flowers,—bluebells, anemones, and unnumbered others. ”

“ Life does not go by plans and charts; no known precautions can foresee its emergencies. Unless some chemical or electric invention of the Teutons can remove the element of uncertainty from existence, surely victory will go to the people who can meet the unforeseen; pull themselves together and know, without forethought, what to do in an instant's danger. All these meditations passed through my head as Puck shook his mane, making light of his adventure, and trotted away down the street to his stable with an unmistakable air of "England expects every pony to do his duty." ”