Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

“ It has been my fate to put to sea in some of the worst-found craft that ever scrambled into port again, but of the lot, that ugly little cutter of Haigh's stands pre-eminent.
She possessed no single good point in her favour. She had swung in harbour so long that everywhere above the water-line she was as staunch as a herring-net. Her standing rigging, being of wire, was merely rusted, but her running gear was something too appalling to think about. ”

“ Cromwell gave an order, the boat backed in to the shingle, and we found ourselves shaking hands with one another, as if we were dear friends who had always worked for one another's welfare.
"Mentone and Paris will be our neighbourhoods for winter and summer," said Pether, "and you two men must contrive to beat us up somehow and compare notes over this mutual score."
"Ladies are seldom averse to jewellery," said Haigh. "Will Mrs. Cromwell deign to accept from Mr. Cospatric and myself this small packet of diamonds, to be mounted as she sees fit?" ”

“ We flew past the brown vine-stumps, and the mule-gins above the wells, and the many ducts and gutters which drain the marshes, our animals steaming as they strained at the traces, and the driver jerking about like some frenzied jumping-jack as he forced them on. The pace was almost racing pace, and to be in a race always warms one's blood. I began to share Taltavull's excitement. He was looking at his watch ever and anon, at each time crying that we should have scarcely time to meet the train. And yet it was evident that the mules could go no faster. ”

“ Hand up another bottle of that vermouth and the dipper."
We lifted her through it all that morning at a splendid pace, the wake boiling up astern like a mill-tail. The two booms did certainly make occasional plunges which might have jarred timid nerves, but such a trifle did not disturb us.
"It's the best bit of racing I've ever done," said Haigh. "There's a pig of a following sea, and the wind's squally. Just her weather. If we'd only got another craft trying to beat us, the thing would be perfect. We should have some inducement to carry on then." ”

“ The long snug harbour of Mahon, which was in the days of canvas wings almost always filled with craft refuging, is now in this era of steam usually tenantless. So it was a bit of a surprise to us to find the English Channel Fleet lying there at anchor. The big war steamers were getting their matutinal scrub, and were alive with blue-and-white-clothed men. They looked very strong, very trim, very seaworthy, and the bitter contrast between them and our tattered selves made me curse them with sailor's point and fluency. Not so Haigh. ”

“ I told him frankly. "Your principles are far too explosive for my taste."
Taltavull waved a bony hand deprecatingly. "The universal complaint, monsieur. It is the one great drawback to our Cause that we have as yet discovered no means of propagating it save only by the theory of devastation. It is only strong men and, I regret to say it, desperate men who can accept the gospel of dynamite. There are teeming millions of others ready enough to blow up society as it is at present constituted, but who shrink from the only means we have to propose." ”

“ My dear Don Miguel, a statesman in your own islands once evolved the policy of Thorough. We have adopted the selfsame principle. Nobody and nothing must stand in the way of our ends. We stand up for humanity in the mass. Bourgeois society is bound to go under. And to hasten its downfall any one of our members is proud to offer himself as a sufferer, or as even a martyr to death, for the Cause. We aim at producing a state of society in which men may live together in harmony without laws. You must see that we are merely extreme philanthropists, and that our motives are pure in the extreme. ”

“ Then Haigh delivered himself of further wisdom.
"It's a queer gamble this, take it through and back, and it's remarkably like roulette in being a game where a system doesn't pay. As long as we worked haphazard we did wonders. As soon as we tried to do a rational thing, and make that harbour at Ciudadella, we got euchred. Well, I dare say we both know how to take a whipping without howling over it. So for the present let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we may drown. Knock me a biscuit out of the weevils, old chappie, and give me likewise vermouth and corned horse." ”

“ But the anarchist was not a Spaniard, nor an Italian, nor anything else so narrow. He was a man of no nationality, and cosmopolitan, and sublimely proud of that expansiveness. Consequently, he had taken his ideas of furniture from a more northern island, and had his room well crammed with massive mahogany and dark oak, with the upholstery in dull crimson velvet. To be sure, no style could be more unsuited to the climate, but then, on the other hand, it was a standing witness of his emancipation from all restraint. ”

“ His fears still were strong, but curiosity trampled them under foot, and the man in the rope sandals dropped noiselessly on to the floor of the tunnel. Again the intense white glare shone out, and the watcher saw words of writing on the farther wall of the Talayot, and him of the spectacles holding his wooden box so as to face them. Afterwards, by the light of a candle, he who had made the flashes scraped this lettering from the plaster with his knife, and his companion, laughing, scribbled something else on the blank place. ”

“ Indeed, we made two several attempts at knocking the island out of the water, each sufficiently distinct to have made any ordinary sailorman in his sane senses get snugly to sea without further humbugging. And the afternoon wore on without our seeing either the lighthouse, the castle, or the town we were looking for; and just upon dusk the coast turned sharply off to the eastward.
"That looks like a bay," said Haigh, squinting at the land that was rising and falling over our weather quarter. "If we hold on as we are going, we ought to pick up the other horn of it." ”

“ There is something in your blood, some hereditary taint of conservatism, which forbids it. But for all that, you shall find that we anarchists can keep faith with our opponents. You shall have your rigid eighteen months' monopoly of the diamonds before we begin to stir the market and set about revolutionizing the world."
"Always supposing you can manage to finger the Recipe, which, as we stand at present, seems a by no means certain thing." ”

“ We were then off the south-western corner of Minorca, with the high ground on the northern parts of the sister island standing up clearly against the horizon. Even from that distance we could make out with the glasses a watch-tower on the peninsula which divides Pollensa Bay from Alcudia. Up there the sentinels of those naked slingers who loved wine and women when the world was young had peered over the blue sea for a first sight of Roman or Carthaginian pirate galley.
"Happy times when those men lived," said the anarchist; "there were few laws to trouble them." ”

“ A bit of a reverse seemed to daze him.
"It's money that makes the world go round," remarked Haigh after we had got beyond the cheerful howls of the crowd, and our two fine mules had settled down to a steady hand-gallop. "If you look, you'll just see the tail end of the train swinging out of sight round that curve. If we have any luck, and the engine yonder doesn't forget its dignity and exceed the orthodox Spanish crawl, we should overhaul 'em before they make the next station. Our present pace is distinctly good. ”

“ What sportsman in Norway would not tingle with delight at the chance of getting a bear? Ulus had slipped a thong round Se's throat, and that wily hound was mute. He was as keen on bjorn as either of us, and being gray, and vastly experienced, he knew better than to bay or otherwise create a disturbance.
"Patron?" whispered Ulus.
I loaded cautiously, not sending the lever quite home, so as to avoid a click, and nodded. Then we slipped our knife-sheaths round to the hip—for a shot in the dark is apt to wound only and cause a red-mouthed charge—and then the door was opened. ”

“ All that day I hunted about, trying to get a passage across to the islands; needless to remark, without success. The mail steamers run there from Valencia and Barcelona only, and though there are occasional orange boats passing between Soller in North Mallorca and Marseille, they aren't to be depended on. By a singular irony of fate, I did come across an old white—painted barque which had just come out of Palma in ballast; but her skipper only told what I knew full well in my own heart, that I might very likely wait three years before I found a craft going the other way. ”

“ And yet he owned to never concealing his views from any man. "The sublime importance of our end, Monsieur Cospatric," said he, "justifies any means taken to attain it. We are associated with dynamite? Justly. Dynamite is a deplorable necessity."
If Taltavull had merely kept on in this strain, I should have put him down as one of those human paradoxes a man is bound to meet if he vagabondizes much, and should have forgotten him and his gruesome schemes and ideals by the next day. ”

“ There were orchards of almond-trees that seemed from a distance to be bearing a crop of snowflakes, till one came nearer and could distinguish the delicate pinks and mauves of their blossom; there were bushy algobras with rich green foliage; oranges, bearing the last of that juicy crop which, when fresh gathered, melts in the mouth like ice; olive-trees, with dry gray leaves and trunks so grotesquely gnarled as to suggest arboreal pain. The hot sun above, dappling the young corn and filling the stone water-conduits with soft tree-shadows; the tinkling twitter of unseen birds ”