Thomas Sigismund Stribling

“ Standifer's voice was tinged with horror.
“He was stalking us in a human skin, exactly as a hunter stalks a deer in a deer robe,” returned M. Demetriovich.
“Then wasn't he a human being?” gasped the secretary.
“It certainly was the devil,” gasped Pablo Pasca with a putty face. “The prefect told us not to come here.”
“He knows he is a human being,” accented Pethwick irritably, “but he doubts if we are. Did you notice his manner? Did you observe the supercilious, egotistical, conceited air of everything he did or said? He put us down as Darwin's connecting link. We are animals to him. ”

“ Hogan saluted in the darkness and turned about for his cabin. Madden began a careful journey aft toward the wheel.
He fought his way to the ladder and climbed up into the night, sometimes clinging like a fly to the underside of the reeling wall, sometimes going up a steep slant. Gusts of spume and foam whipped him all the way up. Once on top of the wall, he clung to the inside rail and began pulling himself carefully around toward the rear bridge. At this height the full force of the wind almost tore him from his reeling anchorage. ”

“ He was a graceful, sunburned fellow, and as he bent his head over the guitar, during his intermittent strumming, Strawbridge was surprised to see that his hair was done up like a woman's, in a knot at the back of his head.
Just why the American should have decided to ask this particular man for delicate information, it is impossible to say. It may have been because he was leaning against a shrine, or because he showed splendid white teeth as he smiled at the varying fortunes of the players. There is a North American superstition that a man with good teeth also possesses good morals. ”

“ Peter always remembered his mother's funeral in fragments of intolerable pathos,—the lifting of old Parson Ranson's hands toward heaven, the songs of the black folk, the murmur of the first shovelful of dirt as it was lowered to the coffin, and the final raw mound of earth littered with a few dying flowers. With that his mother—who had been so near to, and so disappointed in, her son—was blotted from his life. The other events of the funeral flowed by in a sort of dream: he moved about; the negroes were speaking to him in the queer overtones one uses to the bereaved ”

“ And the mysterious schooner, with its lights and shadows exaggerated in the tropical glare, seemed to the tired swimmers to be as remote as ever.
As Madden pressed on and on, changing strokes after the fashion of tiring swimmers, the constant beat of the sun made his eyeballs ache; the ocean felt like a Turkish bath; the muscles in his shoulders, back and legs grew numb, with an occasional cramping twinge. And what irritated him as much as anything else was the fact that he was swimming toward the right quarter of the schooner, throwing away his energy. ”

“ So deeply ingrained is it that almost every novel written by white men revolves about some woman's choice of her mate being thwarted by power or pride or wealth, but in every instance the rightness of the woman's choice is finally justified. The burden of every song is love, true love, enduring love, a woman's true and enduring love.
And in his moment of clairvoyance Peter saw that these songs and stories were profoundly true. Against a woman's selectiveness no other social force may count. ”

“ To fight—to hammer and kick in Niggertown's dust—over a girl! It was an indignity.
Peter shifted his position in his chair, and his thoughts took another trail. Tump's attack had been sudden and silent, much like a bulldog's. The possibility of a simple friendship between a woman and a man never entered Tump's head; it never entered any Niggertown head. Here all attraction was reduced to the simplest terms of sex. Niggertown held no delicate intimacies or reserves. Two youths could not go with the same girl. Black women had no very great powers of choice over their suitors. ”

“ One minute the great structure would rise dizzily, high into the black blast, a skyscraper flung up on a mountain Madden could look far below on the lights of the struggling Vulcan. Up there the storm yelled and screamed at every corner and brace of the weltering dock, and wrenched at the midget helmsman. Then came the sickening drop, down, down, down, into the profound, and the Vulcan would swing far above her towering consort. For the instant the storm would be blanketed by the prodigious waves. ”

“ Notwithstanding her enormous size, everything about the vessel impressed Madden that she was built for secrecy. She was squat, considering her length and breadth. It was as if her designer were trying to make a craft invisible at sea. As near as Madden could determine in the strange light, she was painted a pale sky-blue. During the day, no doubt, she melted into the sky like a chameleon.
As the smaller craft approached its huge mate, its circle of light contracted until it finally concentrated into a dazzling white spot centered on the prow of the monster. ”

“ After all, there is no way for a man to rest without a woman. All he can do is to stop work.
For a long time they sat transported amid the dusty honeysuckles and withered blooms, but after a while they began talking a little at a time of the future, their future. They felt so indissolubly joined that they could not imagine the future finding them apart. There was no need for any more trouble with Tump Pack. They would marry quietly, and go away North to live. Peter thought of his friend Farquhar. He wondered if Farquhar's attitude would be just the same toward Cissie as it was toward him. ”

“ As he went, Strawbridge tried quickly to think of some other question to ask the police. He wondered if it would be best not to go up to the officer at all. If he knew the man with the hair was not looking after him... He was vaguely angry at everything and everybody—at Venezuela for making a law that would force an American salesman to go about the important function of business like a thief; at the consul for not giving him complete sailing instructions; at himself for asking ticklish questions of a man with a wad of hair. ”

“ Madden realized he was seeing what every landsman dreams of seeing: a naval battle. For some inscrutable reason, Caradoc had headed the Vulcan clear around and now faced the enemy, like a rat terrier amid a battle of mastiffs.
Madden turned aft as the tug swung around to follow the fortunes of the Panther. He could see German shells exploding now and then on her decks; sometimes they would strike the sea and send up typhoons of water and weed. ”

“ Caradoc's sun-baked face had a yellowish, bloodless hue, his lean jaws clenched under his choppy white mustache. In the midst of his burning pain he held his legs rigid, pushed Leonard with one hand and pawed furiously through the viscid tangle with the other.
The constancy of his companions braced Madden like a dash of ice water. His own weakness had brought about this dangerous plight. The American caught up his buoy, and between great gasps of the blessed air, rapped out that he could go by himself, and began making his own way forward. ”

“ As the motor whirled cityward, the bull-fighter sat with both hands gripping the front seat, staring intently as the wedding music of the peons came to them, with its long-drawn, melancholy burden.
Strawbridge leaned back, listening and looking. He was still thinking about the play in New York and regretting the fact that in real life one never saw any such dramatic openings. In real life it was always just work, work, work— going after an order, or collecting a bill—never any drama or romance, just dull, prosy, commonplace business... ”