May Sinclair

“ Gisborne, R.A., was a solemn egoist, and his picture represented, not Jane Holland, but Gisborne's limited idea of her. It was a sombre face, broadened and foreshortened by the heavy, leaning brows. A face with a straight-drawn mouth and eyes prophetic of tragedy, a face in which her genius brooded, downcast, flameless, and dumb. He had got all her features, her long black eyebrows, her large, deep-set eyes, flattened queerly by the level eyebrows, her nose, a trifle too long in the bridge, too wide in the nostril, and her mouth which could look straight enough when her will was dominant. ”

“ In sheer defiance she essays to render the whole real world, the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world; where the tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates. It is the world of the beginnings; the world of the early nineteenth century that she paints. A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness of the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling the waters; for Charlotte Brontë has before her the stupendous vision of the world as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be. ”

“ He saw the earth flung off, an incandescent ball, from the wheeling sun. He saw it hang like a dead white moon in a sky strewn with the corpses of spent worlds. But to his surprise he saw no darkness. He learned that light is older than the suns; that they are born of it, not it of them. The whole universe stood up on end round him, doubling all its future back upon all its past.
He saw the vast planes of time intersecting each other, like the planes of a sphere, wheeling, turning in and out of each other. He saw other space and time systems rising up, toppling, enclosing and enclosed. ”

“ To Anne he was "poor Col-Col" again, the little boy who was afraid of ghosts, only more abandoned to terror, more unresisting.
He would start and tremble at any quick, unexpected movement. He would burst into tears at any sudden sound. Small noises, whisperings, murmurings, creakings, soft shufflings, irritated him. Loud noises, the slamming of doors, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, made him writhe in agony. For Colin the deep silence of the Manor was the ambush for some stupendous, crashing, annihilating sound; sound that was always coming and never came. ”

“ She remembered how with some resurgent, ultimate instinct of surrender she had sunk on the floor of her room, flung out her arms across the bed in the supreme gesture of supplication, and thus gone, eyes shut and with no motion of thought or sense in her, clean into the blackness where, as if it had been waiting for her, the thing had found her.
It had found her. Agatha was precise on that point. She had not found it. She had not even stumbled on it, blundered up against it in the blackness. ”

“ Winny's face pressed closer and closer to the lattice. One of her little feet went tap-tapping on the gravel, beating the measure of the waltz. For at the sound of the music, at the sight of the locked and whirling couples, her memory revived; she heard again the beating of the measure old as time; she felt in her limbs the start and strain of the wild energy; and instinct, savage and shy, moved in the rhythm of her blood, and desire for the joy of the swift running, of the lacing arms and flying feet. ”

“ When it stopped the men shouted; there were voices that barked hoarsely and broke; voices that roared; young voices that screamed, strung up by the skirling of the bagpipes. The pipers played to them again.
And suddenly Michael was overcome. Pity shook him and grief and an intolerable yearning, and shame. For one instant his soul rose up above the music, and was made splendid and holy, the next he cowered under it, stripped and beaten. He clenched his fists, hating this emotion that stung him to tears and tore at his heart and at the hardness of his mind. ”

“ There she was, so near now that he could almost have tipped a rope-end down her skylight from the skylight of the Torch, every line of her exquisite body new-washed in gold and shivering under the touches of the dawn. She was awake, alive; the life that had still beaten through her dreams in the night, stirred by the drowsy fingering of the harbor tide, was throbbing and thrilling with many pulses as she shook out her streamers to the wind. And now her mainsail went slowly up, and she leapt and shuddered through all her being, passionate as though the will of the wind was her will. ”

“ How would they appeal to Miss Harden? For this miserable consciousness of himself was pervaded, transcended by his consciousness of her.
Of her beauty he grew every minute more aware. It was not of the conspicuous and conquering kind; it carried no flaming banner of triumphant sex; indeed, it demanded a kindred fineness of perception to discern it, being yet vague with the softness of her youth. Her hair was mere darkness without colour or flame, her face mere whiteness without a flush; all her colour and her light were, where her soul was, in her mouth and eyes. ”

“ Majendie's sister lay on her couch by the window, as they had left her, as they would always find her, not like a woman with a hopelessly injured spine, but like a lady of the happy world, resting in luxury, a little while, from the assault of her own brilliant and fatiguing vitality. The flat, dark masses of her hair, laid on the dull red of her cushions, gave to her face an abrupt and lustrous whiteness, whiteness that threw into vivid relief the features of expression, the fine, full mouth, with its temperate sweetness, and the tender eyes, dark as the brows that arched them. ”

“ You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.
I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight, efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that his blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and this superhuman power. ”

“ And all these things of stone, the village, the Vicarage, the church, the churchyard and the gravestones of the dead are alike naked and black, blackened as if fire had passed over them. And in their grayness and their desolation they are one with each other and with the network of low walls that links them to the last solitary farm on the High Moor. And on the breast of the earth they show, one moment, solid as if hewn out of her heart, and another, slender and wind-blown as a tangle of gray thread on her green gown. ”

“ No fowler spreads his snares in sight of those innocent birds that perch on the tree of life in paradise. As Arthur’s soul (it was a vain soul) preened its wings before her, Aggie never inquired whether the brilliance of its plumage was its own, or merely common to all feathered things in the pairing season. Young Arthur’s soul was like a lark, singing in heaven its delirious nuptial hymn. Aggie sat snug in her nest and marvelled at her mate, at the mounting of his wings, the splendid and untiring ardors of his song. ”

“ She would have said now that the earth at her feet had become insubstantial, but that she knew, in a flash, that what she saw was the very substance of the visible world; live and subtle as flame; solid as crystal and as clean. It was the same world, flat field for flat field and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were, infinitely transparent.
Agatha in her moment saw that the whole world brimmed and shone and was alive with the joy that was its life, joy that flowed flood-high and yet was still. ”

“ It was part of her queerness that she had the square brows, the wide mouth, the large, innocent muzzle of a deer, and a neck that carried her head high. With a queerness amounting to perversity some gentle, fawn-like, ruminant woman had borne her. And, queerer still, her genius had rushed in and seized upon that body, that it might draw wild nature into it through her woodland, pastoral blood. And for the blood it took it had given her back fire.
Latterly, owing to Tanqueray's behaviour, whenever Jane looked in the glass, it had been the element of queerness and ugliness that she had seen. ”

“ The long silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows which never show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the active duties of existence—this was the essence and soul of the existence she knew best. ”

“ Yet that night, all over the Heath, in hollows under the birch-trees, and on beds of trampled grass, young lovers lay in each other's arms and said the same thing in the same words: "Do you love me?" "You know I love you!" over and over, in voices drowsy and thick with love.
"There's one thing I haven't thought of," said Nicky. "And that's that damned strike. If it hits Daddy badly we may have to wait goodness knows how long. Ages we may have to." ”

“ They say that passion in a pure woman is first lit at the light of the ideal, and burns downward from spirit to earth. But Frida's had shot up full-flamed from the dark, kindled at the hot heart of nature, thence it had taken to itself wings and flown to the ideal; and for its insatiable longing there was no ideal but the whole. Other women before Frida had loved the world too well; but for them the world meant nothing but their own part and place in it. For Frida it meant nothing short of the divine cosmos. ”