Stephen McKenna

“ Agnes replied. "Have you been working too hard?"
Over his port—which would not stand comparison with any from the artful little cellar in Ryder Street—Eric tried to settle in his mind how much she had seen and how much she had imagined. There was assuredly this much change in him, that to-night Agnes was not even waking him to dispassionate interest; he had no attention to spare her. And yet it was not that Barbara had captured his mind; she was nothing but an elf of mischief, dancing in the sunshine backwards and forwards across his path, pelting him with flowers, vanishing and reappearing. ”

“ Pall Mall is overlaid, as in a palimpsest, with imaginary clubs; and the narrow, silent streets behind the Abbey are roused to life by the hoot or jingle of phantom cabs on their way to a political dinner.
It is a world complete in all its generations, all its social grades. They are born and educated, these dream-children; they love and quarrel, marry and separate, make money and lose it, live and die. Another generation presses upward to take their place ”

“ Charm, which is so hard to analyse in the living, is yet harder to recapture from the dead; but, if the record of a single friendship can suggest loyalty, courage, generosity and tenderness, if a whimsical turn of phrase can indicate humour, patience and an infinite capacity for providing and receiving enjoyment, Teixeira’s letters will preserve, for those who did not know him, the fragrance of spirit recognized and remembered by all who did. ”

“ The babble of voices rose and swelled until the chairman wound his way back to Eric’s side and led him into the dining-room. Detachment changed for a moment to antagonism as he walked between the long whispering rows: warm waves of scent beat upon his cheeks; before, behind and on either side he felt the magnetism of a thousand eyes drawing him out of his self-sufficiency and assailing his frozen reserve. As quickly as his companion would allow, he walked on, looking stiffly ahead, to the seat of honour. ”

“ Since the day when I helped George Oakleigh to divide the world and secure a lasting peace, our nerves had worn thin; we devoted too much time to seeing that other people went promptly about their duties; and a deadly personal bitterness—embodied for me in Grayle, though I do not single him out for attack—poisoned our confidence in our own leaders. I was glad to feel the icy wind of the Atlantic lashing my face, blowing the cobwebs from my brain and the sour taste from my mouth, as we rounded the last Irish headland. ”

“ On the other hand, parliament and the whole machine of government never, in their most exalted moments, attain such a nobility of soul as the mob outside achieves in its disinterested moods. From the first day of war to the last and for all their lapses into panic and madness, the uninstructed silent masses were prompt in every crisis with more patience and fortitude, more philosophy and more capacity for sacrifice than parliament knew how to use. It is not through the House of Commons that England will be made a home for heroes. ”

“ Nowadays dinner is little more than a bribe offered to so many women and men to induce them to play bridge with you rather than with some one else. The tables were already set, when we left the dining-room; Lady Erskine’s last words were: “You won’t be long, will you?”
I do not play. Even in old days I never mastered whist. And I hope you will not cry “Sour grapes”, if I say that I do not wish to learn. I ask nothing better than a little music after dinner. If not too modern, it does not interfere with conversation, whereas the sight of a card-table freezes the most eloquent lips. ”

“ Dear Barbara, to please me, will you see your doctor before you go back to hospital?"
Barbara had so long looked on George as a kindly and comfortable bit of universal family furniture that she was startled by the unexpected softening of his voice. Perhaps he, too, felt that it was time to cultivate a heart and to fall in love. She smiled with an approach to happiness. Any hint of tenderness in a man's voice made her like a flower opening its petals to the sun. ”

“ I was often reminded of a chorus girl I once saw in undergraduate days at a Covent Garden Ball, whirling through the night—like Sonia—from one till three, and at four o'clock lying asleep in a box with her cheek on her arm, oblivious and—I hope—happy; in any case too weary to dream what the future might hold. Looking back on the four years of carnival that ended with the war, I seem to find in Sonia the embodiment of the age's spirit.
"You know how that sort of thing ends, I suppose?" I took occasion to ask.
"Oh, don't be heavy, George!" she exclaimed impatiently. "We can only die once." ”

“ Hundreds were assembled at the Plaza, when he arrived: how many hundreds he was too indifferent to enquire, but they were lined up in rows; the rumble of countless conversations shrank to a whisper and died away in a moment’s silence; then every one who knew him hastened to shake hands, while the rest begged to be introduced. For all his indifference, Eric was warmed by his reception. Throughout his wanderings in South America and Japan, imagination and will had swung alternate hammers to fashion a new life which he could find worth living. ”

“ Tall and broad-shouldered, with thick black hair and a white face, tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, and a cigarette in a holder, taciturn, impassive and unsmiling, Teixeira never failed to conceal that he was more shy than his visitor. With articulation as beautifully clear as his writing and in words not less exquisitely chosen than the language of his books, he would introduce the newcomer to those with whom he was to work. ”

“ I hurried along by his side, feeling more and more that the whole evening had passed in a dream and that I should wake up to find myself back in my internment camp. The noise and excitement had tired me into somnolence; the darkened streets added to my feeling of unreality. The dog with a cane and hat in his jaws, one young man with another young man sprawling on his shoulders, Grayle panting on one side and myself guiding the unconvincing procession on the other made up a picture whose reality I myself doubted more than once. ”

“ I had tided Arthur through his great crisis; and there was nothing, I felt, to fear in the future. But we could not let it rest at that. There had been an intolerable amount of malicious gossip—how wide-spread I could not believe until the proof was thrust before me—; men jesting in their clubs, women gloating. . . And you may be sure that the Brackenbury and Spenworth broods were only too delighted to think that yet another had been dragged down to their level; if one was not to be a by-word and an object of scorn. ”

“ It was his practice to drag a table, chairs and piano into the Quad and dispense coffee and iced champagne cup to all who passed. O'Rane would be found at the piano,—or on top of it with a guitar across his knees,—and the rest of us would lie back in long wicker chairs, gazing dreamily up at the scarlet and white flowers in the window-boxes, the flaky, grey-black walls, and far above them the early stars shining down from the darkening sky. ”

“ The dead so came to life, as I wrote about them, that sometimes I would lay down my pen and forget the war for the days before David O’Rane was blinded and Tom Dainton killed, the days when every one was quoting Barbara’s latest epigram and discussing Val Arden’s last novel, the days when Sonia Dainton broke a heart a week and an engagement a season. Musing of days and nights softened by time, I felt that never had there been such years in the life of any country, never had there been women and men like those of our generation. ”

“ Barbara stole a glance at him and then looked away, with eyes narrowed in pain, over the head of the man opposite her, over the shoulders of the footman, blankly and dizzily into the shadows at the end of the room.
“Until humanity has no value at all...” she whispered. “Ah, Eric... If I could wipe it all out and draw a sponge over your memory so that we met as we met that first evening at Margaret Poynter’s, if I could make you loving, tender—not to me, God knows!—, if I could cure your bitterness of spirit and teach you not to condemn all women because one woman once wrecked your life... ”

“ There are things I can say to you that I would never breathe to a man. I, personally, never make a mystery of my age; you will find it in all the books, every one knows I am six years older than Arthur, four years older than Spenworth—why conceal it? I wished Kathleen could have been equally frank, could have seen herself as I saw her. She is within a few months of thirty-nine, with four strapping girls; one does expect a certain dignity and restraint at that age. I know what you are going to say! We of the older generation usually expect more than we receive. ”

“ Year after year, wide-eyed new generations say to themselves, "This indeed is life." The Café Royal is more than a literary institution, it is a social safety-valve: romance, after its little seething, disappears in steam; an hour's cynical conversation, a glass or two of vermouth, a display of the distinctive aspect enable many a young man to return home healed in spirit to tidy himself and to reappear next morning as a sober, laborious and punctual British subject. ”

“ Gaisford would sit with his arms crossed over the back of a chair and his feet twisted round its legs, puffing thoughtfully at his pipe and frowning at his boots. In a long experience of practice among rich and self-conscious patients who would always rather be "interesting" than normal, it was not the first time that he had watched the bloom being rubbed off love; nine broken engagements and balked romances were born of doltish delay; but a mass of sensibility like Eric Lane had not the stamina to wait nor the placidity to go away and forget. ”

“ She wondered how Jack would begin.... Men never troubled about a setting—or a time; they procrastinated and procrastinated until the car was at the door or the train was starting. If she were in his place, there would be splendour of setting and superb eloquence of rolling, romantic phrases. There was colour in the world when Cyrano de Bergerac swung down the street, quarrelling and making love, or when he stood dying and already preparing his bow to the Court of Heaven. But nowadays all emotion was starved; men were ashamed even of emotion's gestures, the bloom and the beauty of language. ”

“ O'Rane cried with an outburst of emotion which he was no longer able to contain. "Grayle, you say you love her! If you care a snap of the fingers for her, if you've any humanity, any decent feeling in the whole of your composition, if you hope for mercy in this world or the next, you've got your opportunity now! The one thing you can do for her abiding happiness is to take my hand and swear you'll never see her again. You know it is! You can walk out of this house and leave her so that no one will dare to say a word against her for fear of being thrashed within an inch of his life. ”

“ His phrase, 'the life we all love and revile,' and the sudden sobering of Arden, had set me thinking of my own life, and as a thing for which a man might die, it seemed a mean and paltry ideal. At Melton and Oxford there had been at least generous illusions, but my dreams had left me in London. The pettiness and personal ambitions of the House, the artificiality and extravagance of society, the lifelessness, the want of purpose, the absence of enthusiasm, seemed to argue a dying civilization. ”

“ There are financial groups and political caves; my cousin Laurence, who has cultivated a knowing and shrewd manner, runs feverishly from one to another, nodding, whispering, waving a vast cigar and, I fancy, rather modelling himself on Saltash. Sam Dainton, who is beginning to look dissipated, engages in feverish pursuit of one woman after another. This fever has infected the women; the divorce-court does a flourishing trade; no one can remember who at any moment is allied with whom; and Sam makes overtures to all in the sure belief that some—and, perhaps, most—will prove to be complaisant. ”