Oliver Onions

“ The morning star shone over the sea, and the first cock crowed down in Portsannet. The nightingale ceased to sing. The moon still rode high among the clouds; but a breeze came from the east, and a greyness and lifting altered the air. The cocks made an increasing din. A splendour of rose and gold, in the midst of which the sun burned like a brazier, turned the vault to an ineffable blue, and flushed the tops of the Ladyshaws. And as the earliest of the Pillers to rise trudged down the meadows for water, he saw that a man-o'-war, under half canvas, stood motionless beyond the headland. ”

“ Bligh, of course, would have had his explanation: it was the Hand of God. That sufficed for Bligh, who had gone forward the evening before, and whom Abel Keeling now seemed vaguely and as at a distance to remember as the deep-voiced fanatic who had sung his hymns as, man by man, he had committed the bodies of the ship's company to the deep. Bligh was that sort of man; accepted things without question; was content to take things as they were and be ready with the fenders when the wall of rock rose out of the opalescent mists. ”

“ You cannot turn a two-memoried man out of your house as you can another. You don't get rid of him if you do. He has his own—ubiquity. There is only one of him, and you never know where he isn't. It was not now a question of whether he should marry Julia Oliphant, but whether he was to be suffered to vanish, to be swallowed up in the world of men, a drop in the human ocean that did not merge but still remained a drop, a grain on humanity's shore yet numbered too, an anomaly, a contradiction in nature, a ghost in the flesh, a man among ghosts. ”

“ Billy had turned his back on his work, but still she did not move. More even than my own ceremonial dress the bit of crochet woolwork that lay on the edge of the throne seemed to accentuate the drama that was all sight, with never a word spoken. As if my eyes had moved from hers, which they did not, I seemed to see the whole of that room that had been my own—the imps beyond the sills, Billy's traps, his arrangements of curtains about the four windows, the bed behind the screen where I divined her clothing to lie. ”

“ It was Marsden whom Romarin had come to meet—Marsden, of whom he had thought with such odd persistency lately. Marsden was the only man in the world between whom and himself lay as much as the shadow of an enmity; and even that faint shadow was now passing. One does not guard, for forty years, animosities that take their rise in quick outbreaks of the young blood; and, now that Romarin came to think of it, he hadn't really hated Marsden for more than a few months. ”

“ For the gipsy loves never but the once. In all but love, the waters of the world are not more unstable than she; in love, the rocks are not more irremovable. Therefore she has no past and no regrets. She has no regrets, for there is no scar upon her heart—how can there be a scar, when a scar is a healing, and this wound is never healed, but ever new, ever quivering? And she has no past—how can she have a past when all is a poignant and lovely present, that endures to the end?...
There was so little for John Willie to do. ”

“ The blind at his elbow that allowed the light of a street lamp to struggle vaguely through—the glimpse of greeny blue moonlight seen through the distant kitchen door—the sulky glow of the fire under the black ashes of the burnt manuscript—the glimmering of the tulips and the moon-daisies and narcissi in the bowls and jugs and jars—these did not so trick and bewilder his eyes that he would not know his Own! ”

“ Beams settled with a tired sigh into their old mortices; creatures ticked in the walls; joints cracked, boards complained; with no palpable stirring of the air window-sashes changed their positions with a soft knock in their frames. And whether the place had life in this sense or not, it had at all events a winsome personality. It needed but an hour of musing for Oleron to conceive the idea that, as his own body stood in friendly relation to his soul, so, by an extension and an attenuation, his habitation might fantastically be supposed to stand in some relation to himself. ”

“ The leaves swished and rustled as he diminished the distance between himself and the apparition by a yard or two. Eddy remained as rooted where he stood as the beeches themselves. "John!" he called shakily; "John!" But John was a dozen yards away. Eddy dropped to his hands and knees, for the comfort of the solid earth; he watched, fascinated by the hideous, shining face, devoured by such a fear as grown folk only know now and then in the abject cowardice that visits them in a nightmare. And soon John disappeared from his sight altogether. ”

“ And Miss Belchamber, with a friendly general smile, went off to open her sweat-ducts by means of a hot bath and to close them again afterwards with a cold sponge.
Amory had not gone out this time to press amidst strange people and to look into strange and frightening eyes, various in colour as the pebbles of a beach, and tipped with arrow-heads of white as they turned. ”

“ Oleron had known a good deal about such things in his time, but all that was now past. He had at last found a place which he did not intend to leave until they fetched him out—a place that some might have thought a little on the green-sick side, that others might have considered to be a little too redolent of long-dead and morbid things for a living man to be mewed up in, but ah, so irresistible, with such an authority of its own, with such an associate of its own, and a place of such delights when once a man had ceased to struggle against its inexorable will! ”

“ That evening a noble sunset flooded Wadsworth Scout with golden light. Groups of men stood about the small square, walking from the “Gooise” to the church, and returning again. The parson had locked himself in the church, and Pim o’ Cuddy had retired to his chamber. They watched the declining sun. As it dipped, the ridges and wrinkles of the Scout started out suddenly into strong relief, dramatic as if a scene had been changed at a playhouse; and suddenly a pigeon was seen to rise over James Eastwood’s roof and to wheel and circle as he neared his home. ”

“ So beautifully was the thing running that I had had the idle fancy of some actual urge from Andriaovsky himself; and each night, before sitting down to work, I set his portrait at my desk's end, as if it had been some kind of an observance. The most beautiful result of all was, that I felt what I had not felt for five years—that I too was not "doing" my work, but actually living and being it. At times I took up the sheets I had written as ignorant of their contents as if they had proceeded from another pen—so freshly they came to me. ”

“ I take my chance of being understood in the light of what Woman is to you. Make her what you will: a riddle herself—or the answer to the deepest enigma of the soul; as much earth as a man's hard hands must needs be filled with—or as much spirit as he can bear until he himself is all spirit; a lovely casket—yet not too lovely for the scroll of the Freedom it contains. Have it your own way. I only know that if she spoke thus I heard as if my whole body had been one attuned and exquisite nerve. ”

“ Both had known it in that long exchange of eyes in the Dinard Bazaar that morning.
Therefore I feared that, while Julia had produced in him an aberration grave enough but still only of the second magnitude, Jennie might now unwittingly bring about a cataclysm indeed. For he himself had said that his chances of stability lay in an even and unexciting tenor of life. He must sail, so to speak, on an even keel. Calmly and equably he must pick his way through this beautiful and passionate wonder. He must lash the wheel of his will lest the lightest of her sighs should drive him rail-under. ”

“ I may rant of brotherhood and humanity, but you—you may remember that cart jolting without noise over the sandhills, the blue and primrose petals of those butterflies, the amethyst-tufts of wild thyme, the milkwort, the harebells, and then, of a sudden, that V with the sea beyond. I, choosing to shoulder all the responsibility of a world in the making of which I was not consulted, may moisten that human peat with my tears, but you—you, passionate for beauty's sake, may mourn a loveliness deflowered and a simplicity destroyed. ”

“ THE MCGRATH Amory liked people to be one thing or the other; that was the real reason why she loathed and abhorred Glenerne. She had had ripping times amid the naphtha-lights of the Saturday night street-markets and at Bank Holiday merry-go-rounds and cocoanut-shies; and, of course, when Van Eeden on Dreams came up for discussion, or Galton on Heredity, or Pater on the Renaissance, or the clear-eyed Weiniger on the Relation of the Sexes, she was again entirely at home. On the heights or in the depths she felt the real throb of Humanity’s heart. ”

“ She saw the evening light on the sleek and dappled hides, the gilded ivory and rich brown of their legs and shoulders, the white of inner arms held up on high, their wide red mouths, the quivering of the twin flesh-gouts on the necks of the leaping fauns. And, shutting out the glimpse of sky at the head of the deep ravine, the god himself descended, with his car full of drunken girls who slept with the serpents coiled about them. ”