Vincent Starrett

“ Sardis was painfully silent. In the west the low thunder still mocked and muttered, but otherwise the stillness was profound. The great house rose before us at twice its normal height, and at the doorstep, sinister in the saddle, sat Flood—knocking—
The disturbing influence of the earlier hours again had fallen upon me; a weight lay heavily on my consciousness.
With infinite relief, I heard from within the walls the high voice of Robert Hamelin, made higher by its pitch of terror. ”

“ We are to conclude that both the ancient people and the modern writers recognized ecstasy as the supreme gift and state of man, and that they chose the Vine and the juice of the Vine, as the most beautiful and significant symbol of that Power which withdraws a man from the common life and the common consciousness, and taking him from the dust of earth, sets him in high places, in the eternal world of ideas. ”

“ That is not the man!"
Alone of them all I had sensed the situation, but my warning cry came too late. Three rifles flashed simultaneously as the captain's hand dropped, and with a sharp sob the figure in the doorway crumpled and fell. At the same instant, Flood cried out with an awful oath and pitched from his saddle to the earth.
I turned in horror to my companions at this double fall, and in the face of Sardis beheld the answer to my question. Before my flaming glance he leaped away and tried to raise his rifle, but I had dropped mine and now held my revolver in my hand. ”

“ Mr. Harrington Edwards looked at Sherlock Holmes. "Oh, Mr. Holmes," he cried, pathetically, "why did you send for him?"
"Because," said my friend, firmly, "I wish him to hear the truth about the Shakespeare quarto. Sir Nathaniel, I believe you have not been told as yet that Mr. Edwards was robbed, last night, of your precious volume robbed by the trusted servants whom you sent with him to protect it."
"What!" shrieked the titled collector. He staggered and fumbled madly at his heart; then collapsed into a chair. "Good God!" he muttered, and then again: "Good God!" ”

“ And:
"He could imagine a man who was able to live on one sense while he pleased; to whom, for example, every impression of touch, taste, hearing, or seeing should be translated into odor; who at the desired kiss should be ravished with the scent of dark violets, to whom music should be the perfume of a rose garden at dawn."
This is not prose at all, but poetry, and poetry of a high order. And it is from such beautiful manipulation of words, phrases, and rhythms that Machen attains his most clairvoyant and arresting effects in the realms of horror, dread, and terror ”

“ Money [9] is the least important thing in the world. Only the worthless things are to be had for money. Those things which are beyond price—thank God!—are to be had for the asking. Take it, child! Tomorrow is Christmas day. I should be grieved indeed if there were no Alice for you on Christmas day—as grieved as if there were no Santa Claus. ”

“ And in the index before us, from which we had chosen the name of Robert Hamelin, there appeared no other name but which, with equal justice, might have been selected.
"Tonight, then?" I asked.
"Tonight," replied Flood, soberly. "We have always been prompt. Why do you ask, Stormont?"
Sardis laughed offensively. "Hamelin has a beautiful wife," he sneered.
Flood turned on him in a cold fury.
"There are to be no more such remarks," said the captain, "this evening or any other evening. While I am your leader you will address one another openly and with complete respect. ”

“ You remember, Watson, we dined later at Albani's?"
"Oh, Mr. Holmes, do you think you can help me!" cried the abject collector.
"I trust so," declared my friend, cheerfully. "Indeed, I am certain that I can. At any rate, I shall make a gallant attempt, with Watson's aid. Such a book, as you remark, is not easily hidden. What say you, Watson, to a run down to Walton-on-Walton?"
"There is a train in half an hour," said Mr. Harrington Edwards, looking at his watch. "Will you return with me?"
"No, no," laughed Holmes, "that would never do. We must not be seen together just yet, Mr. Edwards. ”

“ The enduring fame of the artist too often is born at sunset, but it is immortal.
More than Hawthorne or Tolstoy, Machen is a novelist of the soul. He writes of a strange borderland, lying somewhere between Dreams and Death, peopled with shades, beings, spirits, ghosts, men, women, souls—what shall we call them?—the very notion of whom stops vaguely just short of thought. ”

“ Edwards," said Holmes, firmly. "You are agitating yourself unduly. And you are unreasonably prolonging our curiosity. You have not yet told us what this book is."
Mr. Harrington Edwards gripped the arm of the chair in which he sat, with tense fingers. Then he spoke, and his voice was low and thrilling:
"The book was a 'Hamlet' quarto, dated 1602, presented by Shakespeare to his friend Drayton, with an inscription four lines in length, written and signed by the Master himself!"
"My dear sir!" I exclaimed. Holmes blew a long, slow whistle of astonishment.
"It is true," cried the collector. ”

“ To come back to Allison: I suppose there is little doubt that his fame is assured by this remarkable poem, so far as it is possible to predict the vagaries of fame's erratic flight; and it is pleasant to know that the controversy over authorship was happily adjusted in his lifetime. Without Champ Hitchcock and the other champions, the dispute might have been continued indefinitely, for Allison himself is far too retiring an individual to push his own claims beyond a modest statement of fact. It is his notion that "these things take care of themselves, and usually work out all right." ”

“ Now I shall have to have a kitten, after all—and I suppose it will eat the bird, and scratch the doll, and tear up the books, and make me angry all day long.”
“No doubt,” said the wooden man, callously.
“But what does he mean by the races?” asked curious Alice.
“The reindeer races,” replied the wooden man. “They race annually on Saturn’s race track, and the winning Santa Claus is the boss Santa Claus of the year, and makes the rounds on Christmas eve. It doesn’t take a minute to get there, and probably by this time the races are over.”
“I hope our Santa Claus won, don’t you?” cried Alice. ”

“ He has had time only to realize its full beauty when disease lays its cold touch upon him, and gathers him into her grasp, until he lies decaying and horrible, seeing his own decay and seeing that his decay makes the white palace foul. The boys did not chant songs as they looped the string round the neck of the uncouth puppy. Mr. Machen fashions prose out of the writhings of Lucian, who is dear to him: and his prose has the rhythmic beat of some dreadful Oriental instrument, insistent, monotonous, haunting ”

“ For Robert Hamelin knew the object and meaning of our errand; I had seen it in his face when he saw my eyes looking in at him through the window.
Flood's voice replied in crisp authority:
"The Riders do not explain. What they command is that Robert Hamelin. shall come forth. If he does not obey, his house will be entered and burned. If he comes forth like a man, his house and family shall be unmolested." ”

“ Sin, according to the same Ambrose I have quoted, is conceivable in the talking of animals. If a chair should walk across a room, that would be sinful, or if a tree sat down with us to afternoon tea. The savage who worships a conjurer is a far finer moralist than the civilisé who suspects him—and I use the name moralist for one who has an appreciation of sin.
This is not the sin of the legal code. Ambrose I conceive to be Arthur Machen. There are only two realities; sorcery and sanctity—sin and sainthood—and each is an ecstasy. Arthur Machen's is the former. ”

“ As for the cigar—By Heaven, he would smoke it!
With the cynical humor of a defeated man, he touched a match to the weed and watched the smoke curl past its fiery tip.
As he smoked, he mused, knocking the ash from his cigar onto a window-ledge of the tall building that braced his back. High up in the building were the offices of Martin Hoganson. . . who by nightfall would have ceased to exist.
In his pocket there was left just enough to buy something he had thought he would never have occasion to use; something his wife was afraid to have around the house, because of the kids . . . ”

“ As I have said, Sir Nathaniel forced me to accept the loan of the book, much against my own wishes. On the evening that I called for it, he told me that two of his trusted servants, heavily armed, would accompany me across the grounds to my home. 'There is no danger,' he said, 'but you will feel better,' and I heartily agreed with him. How shall I tell you what happened? Mr. Holmes, it was those very servants who assailed me and robbed me of my priceless borrowing! ”

“ She would give it back, and if the old man were so kind as to let her, she would creep back into the pages, and be happy there again forever....
“Poor child,” smiled the old bookman, when she had related her adventures, and cried over them. “Indeed he did need his thirteenth year. That is the age at which one best appreciates what reality is. Once learned, it is a lesson never to be forgotten. To the child of thirteen, all things are real if they are beautiful, and all things are unreal which are ugly. Anything is real that we want to be real. ”

“ His pale eyes fixed themselves upon a calendar on the rear wall. The calendar had been the gift of a great banking institution; the legend across its top panel read: "Pay All Bills By Check, You Will Spend Less Money This Way Than If You Have The Cash About You." ”

“ And I forgot, as I have just said, that when the house of life is thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express. ”

“ Rivière, Sangorski, Sutcliffe, and Zaehnsdorf, working alternately, and is a work of such enchantment that any man might gladly die a thousand deaths for the privilege of owning it for five minutes."
"Dear me," quoth Sherlock Holmes, "it must indeed be a handsome volume, and from your description, together with a realization of its importance by reason of its association, I gather that it is something beyond what might be termed a valuable book."
"Priceless!" cried Mr. Harrington Edwards. "The combined wealth of India, Mexico and Wall Street would be all too little for its purchase!" ”

“ Sardis was the last to arrive. On his coming, a low word of command was given, and we moved out of the grove of young trees into the road. A mile beyond lay the denser tangle of the forest, and, beyond that, rose the mountains, dim and vast in the distorting exaggeration of darkness. Over the scene, with little respites of darkness, played the mysterious fire of the skies, and once in the distance I caught the low mutter of thunder in the hills. ”