Stella Benson

“ To-day, and yet I must
Be faithful still, and trust
In what dead men did prove.
Magic may kill
Their wisdom and their will,
Yet I must follow still
Their path ... my groove....
TO THE UNBORN
Oh, bend your eyes, nor send your glance about.
Oh, watch your feet, nor stray beyond the kerb.
Oh, bind your heart lest it find secrets out.
For thus no punishment
Of magic shall disturb
Your very great content.
Oh, shut your lips to words that are forbidden.
Oh, throw away your sword, nor think to fight.
Seek not the best, the best is better hidden. ”

“ There is no power that can mock at space, there is no enchantment that is not lost between us and the moon, and all magic people know—and tremble to know—that in a breath, between one second and another, that Hand may close, and the shell of time first crack and then be crushed, and magic be one with nothingness and death and all other delusions. This is why magic, which treats the other elements as its servants, bows before space, and has to call such a purely independent contrivance as a broomstick to its help in the matter of air-travel. ”

“ No more would the drum of the sea beat in her heart, there was nothing left but the throbbing of distant trams.
"So it's all lies ..." she said quietly. "There really is a thing called death after all. People die...."
"Jay, darling, don't," sobbed Mr. Morgan. "For God's sake marry me, and
I'll comfort you. I won't die—I swear I won't. And after all, it's
Spring. There's no real death in the Spring. Kew can't have died."
"Oh, what's the use of these eternal seasons?" said Jay. "There is a thing called death. And death has no romance and no reason. ”

“ Black, shining women, with the faces of bull-dogs—only not so sincere—swung in a slow whirlwind of many petticoats up and down the street, with vivid burdens of fruit piled in ochre-coloured baskets on their heads. Little boys and girls, with their clothes precariously slung on thin brown shoulders, and well aired by an impromptu system of ventilation, ran by the gardener’s side, and reminded him of the necessity of quatties and half-pinnies, even in this paradise of the poor, where sustenance literally falls on your head from every tree in the forest. ”

“ So I have built To-day, the day that I desired,
Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more,
Lest comfort come no more.
So I have built To-day, a proud and perfect day,
And I have built the towers of cliffs upon the sands;
The foxgloves and the gorse I planted on my way;
The thyme, the velvet thyme, grew up beneath my hands,
Grew pink beneath my hands.
So I have built To-day, more precious than a dream;
And I have painted peace upon the sky above;
And I have made immense and misty seas, that seem
More kind to me than life, more fair to me than love—
More beautiful than love. ”

“ She never could keep her hands still. She threw out her right hand as if in surrender and hammered the side of the car. Edward could feel that she was absolutely tense. The muscles of her neck were unyielding.
He thought, “I must be very cautious.” He understood that he was not in Emily’s world at all. “I must be very cautious even in thinking of her now....” It was like falling into very cold water and becoming at once numb. “I mustn’t be feeble in this too. I must be a hero in another way. If I love her without hope, in the end I must die because the pain will grow and grow.” ”

“ Indeed, even on battle-fields—ah, what are we about, what are we about? We are neither of us killing Evil, we are killing youth...."
"I know, I know," wept the German witch. "My wizard fell at Vimy Ridge...."
"You are talking magic at last," said our witch. "Dear witch, why don't you go home and ask how it can be a good plan for one Crusader against Evil to blow up another? How can two people be righteously scourging each other at the same time? It is like the old problem of two serpents eating each other, starting at the tail. ”

“ The gardener looked, but could see nothing that aroused in him a horror proportionate to his companion’s tone.
“Listen,” said the suffragette half an octave higher.
The gardener listened. But all he heard was, “Oh, my dear, it was too killing....”
Then, because the chauffeur on the bank paused in mid-sandwich, as if about to rebuke their curiosity, they walked on.
“One is born a woman,” said the suffragette. “A woman in her sphere—which is the home. One starts by thinking of one’s dolls, later one thinks about one’s looks, and later still about one’s clothes. But nobody marries one. ”

“ She found to her surprise that one may love life and yet also think lovingly of death. To live is most interesting in an uneasy way, but to die is to forget at once all these trivial turbulences, to forget equally the people you have loved and the people you have hated, to forget everything you ever knew, to be alone, and to be no longer disturbed by unceasing voices.
At this time I think Jay felt more hatred of everybody than love of any one person. But then, of course, she had vowed to Chloris after the affair with young William Morgan that she would never fall in love again. ”

“ He could hear well, he felt, but this was because Banner Hope was singing in such a sharp voice. Edward said, “It is more dramatic to be sad than to be happy, anyway, Emily. Everything that is meant to be dramatic is sad. The song that Hope is singing is—like all jazz songs—about being far away from where you want to be.”
“Sadness is too easy,” said Emily. “It is like mother-love and the weakness of little children and the old home and the maiden’s prayer—a too easy short cut to drama. All my life I have been dramatic but I have never arrived at drama by sadness.” ”

“ Sarah Brown was not altogether unfamiliar with the Parish of Faery, but she never failed to be surprised by the enchantment of the Enchanted Forest. The Green Ride runs straight through it, so incredibly straight that as you walk along it the end of it is at the end of your sight, and is like a star in a green sky. There is a dream that binds your mind as you cross the forest; it is like an imitation of eternity, so that, as you pass into the forest's shade, time passes from before you, and, as you pass out of it, you seem to have lived a thousand quiet and utterly forgotten lives. ”

“ When you see the Lock you feel like an ant seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The suffragette, as she stood on the iron way that goes along the top edge of one of the gates, had to think of all the biggest things she had ever imagined to keep herself from dwindling out of existence. Even Women’s Rights grew small in the light of this man-made immensity. She was standing on the highest gate, and she could look across a perspective of three empty cube-worlds, at the white Canal and the white sea beyond it. ”

“ The thundering headlands sprang from Jay's left hand, and she could see the cliffs written over with strange lines, and the shadow that they cast upon deep water. It was the colour of a great passion, and against that colour pink foxgloves bowed dramatically upon the fringe of space. The white gulls were in the valleys of the sea. I wish colour could be built by words. I wish I could speak colour to myself in the dark. I can never fill my eyes full enough of the colour of the sea, nor my ears of the crying of the seagulls. ”

“ I do not know how many hills lift up the dramatic city of San Francisco from the level of her sea and her bay. To the precipitous shoulder of one of these hills clung the house in which Edward sat. It was night-time and the great California stars hung out of a thick dark sky. Perhaps the stars gave the waters of the bay and of the Golden Gate their [10] luminous look, as if there were light set in the floor of the world, a great light overlaid by fathoms of dark vivid water. ”

“ Sarah Brown smelt the unmistakable sour smell of magic, and saw soundless words moving Richard's little khaki moustache. Then she found that she had disappeared.
She had never done this before, she had always been present to disturb and interrupt herself. She had never seen the world before, except through the little glazed peepholes, called eyes, through which her everyday self rather wistfully believed that it could see. Now, of course, she knew what seeing was, and for the first time she was aware of the real sizes of things. Poor man measures all things by the size of his own foot. ”

“ Only the great creepers throw cables of hope from tree to tree, and the orchids nestle blood-red against the colourless hearts of the cotton trees.
The huts for the homeless had been built in a wide clearing in the woods, only divided from the sea by the road, a belt of palms, and a frill of sand so white that the word white sounded dirty as you looked at it. The rocks leant out of opal water into pearl air. A pensive pelican, resting its double chin upon its breast, stood waiting on a low rock.
The gardener dismounted with great care. ”

“ Russell, sighing for so many words wasted. "In that House by the Sea, who was your Secret Friend?"
"My Friend," said Jay, "is young and very full of youth. He is like a baby who knows life and yet finds it very amusing, and very new. He is without the gift of rest, but then he does not need it, the world in which he lives is not so tired and not so muddling as our world. In him my only belief and my only colour and my last dregs of romance, and certainly my youth survive. We never bother about reserve, and we never mind being sentimental in my Secret World. ”

“ Only the voice of the invisible Mayor could be heard, singing, "If those lips could only speak," in a loud tremulous voice, to the accompaniment of his own unseen stamping feet.
"You've been putting magic into that flame," said Sarah Brown distractedly. "I told you it was dangerous. Nothing will put magic out, except more magic. What will the witch say?"
"It doesn't matter what anybody says," said Miss Ford. "We are all going to America. No place and no person matters when I am not there. There are no places and no people existing where I am not. ”

“ The Ford seemed to Edward to be a sun round which the golden planets of the hills revolved. Except for a lapse into greenness after the rains, California hills are always golden; sometimes rose-gold, sometimes lemon-gold. Now the rains were [67] almost forgotten as the travellers drove inland, but there was a faint dream of green on some of the slopes, a glaze or transparency of green laid lightly on the glowing golden hills. And, besides this dream of color, always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. ”

“ The Red Place lost its flame-like life at night. Night, that blind angel, has no dealings with colour, and turns even the auburn of the pine-trunks to cold silver. But before the gardener awoke again, the sun had roused the gods of the place to discover the theft of their red gold, and to replace it.
The gardener, as he trilled like a lark in one of the red-tiled bathrooms, was suddenly reminded that he was a merry vagabond. ”

“ In London it is impossible to ignore the fact that you are late. The self-righteous hands of clocks point out your guilt whichever way you look. Your eye and your ear are accused on every side. You long for the courteous clocklessness of the country; there, mercifully, the sun neither ticks nor strikes, nor cavils at the minutes.
There was a crowd of home-goers at Brown Borough Church, and each 'bus as it arrived was like the angel troubling the waters of Bethesda. There was no hope for the old or timid. Kew was an expert in the small sciences of London. ”