Stephen Graham

“ We know ourselves far from home, and we cannot say how far from the goal, but still very far, and there is no turning back. "Would there were," says the foolish heart. "Would I had never come away from the warm home, the mother's love, the friends who care for me, the woman who loves me, the girl who has such a lot of empty time on her hands now that I have gone away, her lover." How lonely it is on the steerage deck in the crowd of a thousand strangers, hearing a score of unknown tongues about your ears, hearing your own language so pronounced you scarce recognise it! ”

“ In nothing more shall he ever be surprised. Life is revealed, the woman who fled is won. Now is the horizon removed to its utmost possibility—further than that grey-blue line he cannot pass. He may descend the mountain, but the horizon will narrow on—narrow in, and even though it widen out again, and although he run his life’s journey along the way, he will win no further than these, for that is the shore of life itself, on which rolls the grey sea of Death.
As he descends into the plains, happiness remains his, and the mountain vision remains in his heart. Life has been revealed ”

“ AT THE CONVENT OF MARTHA AND MARY One Sunday I went to the convent of St. Martha and St. Mary in the Bolshaya Ordinka on the other side of the Moscow river. It is a wonderful institution, belonging to the new Russia and yet being part of the old, a young dainty stem with leaves sprung from the rugged many-wintered tree of the Russian Church. Like St. Vladimir’s Cathedral at Kief, its beauty lies not in any antiquity or ruin. It is a new institution; it is served by young people; and has new life, new interest, and ideals. ”

“ Politically understood, there should be no property in the dead bodies of this great war. There is only one totality of death and suffering. The dead of the war are a blend. One high stone might stand at the head of each cemetery, and on it all the names be inscribed. The little crosses with name and numbers on each are but desperate human reminders of individuality. But for a dreadful peace, worse than the war, America would have been convinced, as was her war-commander Pershing, that it was nobler to leave her sacrifices on the altar with the others. ”

“ An hour before dawn a new awakening. Oh dear, night not gone! The tramp is vexed. The moon has finished her hunting, and is going out of the night with her dark huntsmen; she passes through the gate. Peerless hunter!
The sky is full of light, a sort of dull, paper-lantern light. In an hour it will be morning. The side on which I have been lying is sore. I turn over and reflect joyfully that when next I wake it will be day. Moths are flitting in the dawn twilight: yes, in an hour it will be day. ”

“ Probably the Koran is translated in a wrong spirit or to suit a British taste. But obviously it is meant to be chanted, and it is full of rhythms with which we are unfamiliar, as unfamiliar as we are with the sobbing, plaintive, screaming music that is melody in the Moslem’s ears. The soul of the Koran is not like the soul of the Bible, just as the soul of a mediæval Christian city such as Florence or Rome is unlike Khiva or Bokhara or Samarkand, just as the souls of our eager mystical populations are different from the souls of those simple, satisfied and fatalistic people. ”

“ It is a fallacy to think that during the siesta you do not tramp; you are tramping, wandering in unknown parts, exploring the primitive, opening doors, making new connections with the great unity of which you have been a nonconscious part.
You wake with no headache, but with, instead, a freshness and eagerness. You do not start at the unfamiliar scene; you know yourself to be at home. You look upon your companion still sleeping—did you ever look upon your friend asleep—not in a bed in a hotel, or on a red sofa after dinner, or in the dim corner of a jolting train—but in Nature’s house? ”

“ That makes us all nomads, all gypsies, all pilgrims. That draws the steps of the willing, and even the unwilling find themselves borne along by a human tide and a sliding sand of time—away to the west and the night and the other country. No one can stay, even if he will. In time all must go, all must follow the sun and cross the Divide and go down the slopes of the unimaginable other side and be with the stars in the long, hungry night, the myriads of stars that never do anything else but look down on human souls and ask of us and stare at us and dream of us. ”

“ How strange that all the luxury and glamour of Vienna, as you see it at this moment, is the concomitant of complete decline and mortal peril. In arriving in the city one felt at last that one was in Europe, but it proves to be not the Europe of the future. Vienna in 1921 is part of the sunset of that old radiant, peaceful Europe we knew before the war. Night has to swallow it up, and the future lies on other horizons, in Prague and Belgrade and Budapest, in the capitals of that new Europe which arises from the defeat and ruin of the war. ”

“ As I walked along the red road betwixt the fluffy cotton fields from village to village and from mansion to mansion, those stately farmhouses of the South, I was always on the lookout for the oldest folk along the way. The young ones knew only of the war that was just past, the middle-aged thought of the old Civil War as somewhat of a joke, but the only thing the old folks will never laugh over is the great strife which with its before and after made the very passion of their lives. ”

“ The shadow which for a moment dwells over the valley, changing the little mountain rivulet which is tumbling down to the Terek from a warm, flashing, inviting stream to what appears a river of salt or ice, is the aspect of the present time made up for me by the gnarled and frowning cliffs, the mountain road, the heavy ox-cart upon it and the clumsy, patient oxen beating up the dust, the ruined castle on the mountain, with the cottages of Fortoug clinging to it like lichen, and the clustered gravestones on the knoll where the tribesmen lie buried, and the solitary tombs of the chiefs. ”

“ It is life everywhere. And yet mingled with life there is death. There is plague in Cairo, and every now and then the eyes rest on a native funeral procession, one procession, two processions, five processions, ten processions all following one another. They are in every street, and they go past with their strange pomp of death, with the body and the mourners and the keeners and professional howlers. The brightly living crowd on the footways each side of the road pause a moment and think, “Some one has died,” and pass on, oblivious, intent on life. ”

“ Alas, Albert had its day of fate and of complete sacrifice ere the war should end—when all should go, yea, Virgin and all, and only Golgotha remain, Golgotha and the Roman soldiers who smote the Master with their spears as He hung from the Cross.
Twilight settles down upon the dead, the twilight of time and misery. The dreadful reality of destruction becomes more intense and real. After all, sunlight and the noonday do not always show us truth. They are in themselves so full of life and happiness that they divert attention from ruins and death unto themselves. ”

“ We have become star-gazers, we irreconcilables; expecters of signs and wonders. We live upon every ridge of the world, and have made of every mountain a watch-tower; and from the towers we strain our eyes to see past the stars.
For the stars are perchance but the flowers in a garden, or the lights upon the walls of a garden, and beyond them is the palace of our fathers.
"And since the early days till now," said my companion, "I have wandered about the world, sometimes sojourning a while in a town, but seldom for long. For the town is not a good place." ”

“ Leaving Europe for America, you sit up in the prow and look ahead, over the ocean; at least, you do not sit and watch the Irish coast disappear. But leaving Europe for Asia, you sit aft and watch her to the last. And the retreating lights of Baku are the lights of Europe.
The night is very dark and starless, and so the eight-mile semicircle of lights is wonderful to behold; the handsome lanterns of the pier, the lights of the esplanade, of the three variety theatres, of the cinemas and shops, the thousands of sparks of homes on the mountain-side. ”

“ Then we lay flat on our backs on our blankets and watched our sparks fly up and die in scores, in thirties, in fives, in thirty-fives, in hundred and fives. What a giddy and wild life some of them had! How they whirled! How impetuous were some, how serpentine others! We saw how all of them trailed their light as the first escaped from the fire, and were like serpents of flame.
“They do not die,” said the poet. “They only seem to die; they go on, like ideas, into the invisible world. I’d like to write a volume of adventures, the story of the adventures of, say, twelve different sparks.” ”

“ In the long halt, therefore, one has not stopped living, because one has ceased going onward. You get poised on your center. You feel the origins of joy and pain—deep down at the heart’s core, the place from which something in you is welling up all the while, welling up and overflowing, flowing away in waves and tides, to break on a mystical shore.
Belike you have a child’s happiness into which you are unwilling to probe. You ask not whether it is more in one thing than in another. You tramp and you are happy, and halt and you are happy. ”

“ In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it. To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst, it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave, he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. ”

“ Even below the ruins the clefts hold snow, and one sees a rivulet of snow and ice descending to become a cascade of bright water. From the river to the sky the whole is harmonised by moss and lichen and ancient greyness. It is a place where the stupendous majesty of Nature troubles the soul, where one feels oppressed by the immanence of powers greater than oneself, where one knows in one’s heart how small and feeble is the little earth-born creature Man beside those powers which have fashioned the Universe and which move in the fir-hearts of worlds. ”

“ Near Bernafay too the crosses of the dead lie spread out like rows of pins, memorial crosses where there is no body, crosses for the unknown, more surely for the unknown British soldier than for the known. So also it will be with them. The babies are rising, the younger men are growing, growing to hide all and everything. The nakedness of reality which we see to-day will be hidden in the shade by and by. These brand-new cemeteries, looking often so fresh and rich in their masses of brown-stained wood, will pass. ”

“ Even the beauty of woman is not always a lure. There is a beauty in woman which makes one glad, but there is the beauty that haunts one like a great sadness, besides the beauty that draws one nearer to her. There is the seductive beauty of Cleopatra, but there is also the almost repulsive beauty of Medea, and besides both there is the mysterious beauty of Helen or of Eve.
Beauty is also a great possession, and that is another conception, another mystery. We lie like a mirror in the presence of Beauty, and it builds the very temple of our souls. Beauty is the gold of earthly experience. ”