Douglas Pulleyne

“ And Cyprian incomprehensibly knew that he would never seek out Muriel Vane with that question on his lips; that her image would slowly drift out of his dreams and that before it receded for ever he could make no effort to call it back. Could not? Then it was true that no man worshipped only at one shrine in a lifetime? It was the Ideal and not the Individual to which he burnt his incense! The most startling part of this discovery was that nothing mattered at the moment save that Ferlie would be glad of it.
"As the years go by, one must change," he said diffidently. ”

“ Meanwhile, Cyprian, incapable of perceiving his desire for any woman, save one who was the figment of his own imagination, clothed in a blurred semblance to Muriel Vane, mounted the stairs to an airy room with a sloping roof which lent queer profundities to the dancing shadows born of Ferlie's night-light. Found Ferlie sitting up among the pillows with the sheet over her head and the fear of the devil in her soul. Ferlie, at seven, was afraid of darkness, being accidentally buried alive, and wolves. Not lions and tigers: only wolves. ”

“ Cyprian's laughter shattered the imperceptible barrier of restraint.
"How old do you think I am, Ferlie?"
She surveyed him critically. "Well, you are never any particular age to me because, underneath, I feel you are about mine; but the other girls don't think you look more than forty."
"They are a little premature. I am only thirty-five."
"It's a good age, you know," said Ferlie gravely. "How terribly short Life is; over before you have got anywhere." ”

“ This much I will yield, Cyprian. Let me try and find some quiet place where we can be alone and think. I am glad we have been forced to sever all artificial connection with our fellow-men. Bless Aunt B.! We have enough money to go where we please, and when I have chosen a refuge where we can be, figuratively, apart in the desert, when we have had time to forget the harsh inharmonies of the past weeks; when there is no need any longer for us to live under the shadow of a lie, then I will promise you to approach the whole question with an open mind ”

“ Scarcely concealing the effort it cost, Cyprian raised his head and looked at him. Yes. That hair, also, would have flaunted a rebellious crop of sunny waves had they been allowed to grow. He was too white and frail-looking for prettiness but it was with his mother's wide steady gaze that he returned Cyprian's survey which shifted first.
"Nonsense!" said Aunt B. on a low quaver of amusement, "you can't afford to be jealous of Ferlie's son."
Cyprian replied with a vexed laugh,
"Don't read me so clearly out loud. There are some things a man wishes to hide from himself." ”

“ Just the flash of an eyelid, and Jardine was pursuing his majestic course over the grass, his back-view impervious to criticism and comment. Not until the last glimpse of his black coat-tails had disappeared behind the yew-bushes did Ferlie rise to her feet and face Cyprian beside the laughing faun. Again that illusory sightlessness filmed her dilated pupils. She looked through him and beyond into a blank pall of darkness.
"Cyprian," the voice was dead like her face, "Take me away."
He fancied the half-human leering thing of stone stirred in evil exultation. ”

“ Did I lie to you after the return of Hla Byu into our joint lives? Did I leave you and withdraw to fight my battle alone when she drowned herself? I wonder whether the earthly years make a difference, Ferlie, after all? I wonder whether you are capable of understanding what love means to a man who has lived nearly half a century without it, and who suddenly finds himself face to face with its illimitable mysteries? ”

“ I yielded up some none-too-solid convictions to your mysticism; cannot you, in return, yield a little of your mysticism to my common sense? We are in the twentieth century: it is a day of elastic ideas for all who have imbibed the plain truth that to live in peace we must let our neighbours live in peace. The minimum observance of Herd Law, and Civilization is satisfied. As a woman who has divorced her husband—in the last divorce bill we can find cause for that without touching upon more personal reasons—you'd be remarried to a man who had had a son by a dead Burmese girl. ”

“ Ferlie's own disappointment receded into the background as she measured the full force of this second blow which Fate had dealt Peter.
"It will mean——" she faltered after a long pause, and stopped.
"Anything a fellow can get," said Peter, his air-castles a blur of undefined hues at his feet like the ruined rainbows of melted snow.
Ferlie wondered if it were true about the darkest hour coming before dawn. Wished that she could hear Cyprian's views on the subject. ”

“ He, in Thu Daw, she, in John, had yielded to the Earth that heritage it demanded of all living creatures which crawled upon its face. They had added their quota to Creation, lest Life perish here before its incomprehensible purpose should have been fulfilled.
Was another life required of them to perfect the love they bore one another? All life is by no means conceived in love. ”

“ She must see him before Monday's matinée.
Her way instantaneously seemed to grow clear and hard, like a path on ice. Perhaps Cyprian had escaped the rules of captivity away there among his lonely scattered mines.
Cyprian, who had come to her rescue in nursery-days when Hell loomed before her in the glowing grate, near the yawning tomb of the toy-cupboard and when the night-light, which should have illumined the tired pilgrim's path to a Heaven of sunny dreams, had blown out.... "And ... you will always like me best, Cyprian?" ... "Of course ... Of course." ”

“ You have been thirty-five years in a world where there is unlimited happiness and unlimited misery. And you haven't yet decided which you want to choose: Spring days, and stars, and the smell of the sea, and flowers, and experiments in queer forces electrifying every creature that lives and breathes, or somnambulisticism ... listen, I made that word up, I think—in a stuffy old cage, the bars of which are conventions which ought to be broken into smither——"
"Ferlie, you are making that lion angry by beating the umbrella on his bars." ”

“ Ferlie, in those days, had not even attained the dignity of flapperdom. Too small for khaki-worship. And it was during those years, he had heard, that Muriel began to lose her silver-fair head. He remembered his one last futile attempt to win her before returning to Burma. His hand, the forefinger stained with ink, stretched irresolutely towards the telephone. As if in direct answer to the impulse a bell rang. The electric bell of his flat. Curious. The valet of his rooms used a latch-key, discreetly, when the flat's occupant was out, and had already taken his dinner order. ”

“ However, though there happened to be a brilliant moon which silvered the palms and blackened their shadows to thick treacley pools, Slippery Sam, with Ferlie behind the driver and Cyprian perched on the back seat of the rocking tonga, appeared that evening to be in spiritual rather than spirited mood.
"He's really a very nice horse," Jellybrand's mild accents assured them, "and w-would you believe it?—he loves ripe coco-nuts." ”

“ Even if Ferlie were unhappy with the tall futile individual he had seen her marry, what could Cyprian do? For him the road stretched thus solitary to the end of the horizon, lengthened by the fruitless wooing of the sleep that had deserted his tired plodding brain. If he stopped working, inaction would only increase the pressure of thoughts which work held at bay. ”

“ There is a form of Art, which only artists of a higher evolution than you are fit to practise. My objection would not have been founded on any idea that the human body must be concealed to all for the sake of those who misread its allegorical beauty."
He unscrewed a fresh tube with savagely nervous fingers, and descended to cheap reviling.
"Sterne, I gather, is one of the fortunately evolved specimens who do not misread the allegory and are, hence, privileged without the artist's excuse."
"Your thoughts just bore me," said Ferlie flatly. ”

“ Margery was the most interested in Ferlie's future radiance as a "Fairy." The dean's wife, impressed by such single-minded strength of character, had invited her to tea and presented her with a blue card depicting a rising sun shooting an inquisitive searchlight on the face of a worried-looking young woman wending her way up a crowded thoroughfare either in quest of true friendship or a factory. ”

“ He might trust Ferlie to the stake with their numerous unique secrets.
"But, Cyprian, why..."
"Dear, my dear," said the man, speaking more to the beauty of her upturned face than to the child, "when you want to marry it is only the one person who counts. The one person with all her faults and weaknesses—because those, too, are part of her. Chocolate fudge (and there are more kinds of that than you know) doesn't come into it with the averagely decent man. You just love the person or you don't. You will understand all about it some day, when you are older." ”

“ But sometimes—at night—Heaven is very far away and earth is most powerfully real, and doubts creep over me, who have laid the great burden of this faith on you, whether I am fit to bear the burden of my own human loving. You see, Cyprian, there is one instinct given to women at Creation; the roots of which are in Creation itself.
"John is mine by duty and Thu Daw is yours by desire, but I want—and, at the moment, I'd sell my soul to eternal death to make it come true—your son in my arms ... ”

“ Two days later, a Ferlie with brooding lips, who had twice circumvented Clifford's indications that he came of the Bull-dog Breed, sought Peter where he was engaged in discarding superfluous treasures for which there would be neither nor lot in the life to come.
"Are you sorry, too, about this marriage, Peter?"
He avoided her direct gaze.
"Girls do marry," he said, rather banally.
"I know they do. But there's such a thing as—being in love." ”

“ Who could tell that, on opposite sides of the Equator, Ferlie and Cyprian were both battling against that apathy which descends, like a canopy of darkness, upon ultra-sensitive spirits who have reached their limit of controlled mental suffering, blinding a vision ordinarily (since the high gods are just) unusually clear to distinguish between immortal and merely mortal beauty, and affecting them with that terror, however diffidently one may approach the Example, which wrung a cry of agony from the Leader of all Christs, whose lips were silent in the utmost extremities of bodily pain? ”

“ Whether you go with us or not, John and I leave here to-night—in time. You could not trust me five years ago; can you trust me now?"
"It was not you five years ago; it was my own creed that I could not trust."
"But now it is different, Cyprian. You have out-lived one stage of self-mistrust now."
Did man ever arrive beyond the reach of that urging Power in a world peopled with mortal flesh, he wondered.
Strange that, in forcing a decision upon himself concerning Ferlie's future, Cyprian forgot the very existence of Hla Byu and his son. ”

“ Cyprian, it is a terrible thing to come, unawares, upon a soul in Gethsemane. What has lain between you two in the past I do not know; what may lie between you in the future I dare not think. But I at my eavesdropping post grew colder and colder. If Ferlie continued much longer to carry this secret burden I was certain she would go out of her mind. And I am convinced that whatever the stereotyped and doubtless to your mind worthy, principles to which you have succumbed in this matter, no man can count himself wholly irresponsible whose name is thus centred in a woman's prayers. ”

“ The place bored Clifford, Ferlie informed her, and just now he was obliged to be in town.
Clifford let her do what she liked at Black Towers, so long as she did not offend old Jardine, the retainer who acted as head seneschal and cherished insurmountable objections to innovation of any kind.
"It's a grim-looking pile," said Aunt Brillianna, sniffing the odour of musty armour in the subdued hall. "You look as if you had been living among ghosts, child." ”

“ They ask other people (about it) and wonder, for they do not know (about) Giri. Giri will not return alone (that is why) she sings and calls out, 'Come (back) , Shoan! Come back, Shoan....'"
Ferlie used to love to think she could hear the voice of Giri, crying loudest when the nights were happiest, since the Grey Lady of Sorrow loves best to walk in quiet places which have once known laughter and love.
She and Cyprian lingered after the tale was finished and the children in bed, dreamily feeding the red heap of dying logs with grass and leaves and rousing little spurts of angry blue flame. ”

“ Ferlie would not be true to type if, at her age, a cardinal did not seem too picturesque to be a liar. And, believe me, the Pope was the only safe substitute for you."
"You, surely, are not advocating collusion?" asked Cyprian, tickled, in spite of himself, at this feminine Juggernaut, the wheels of whose common-sense responded to no brake till she had guided them triumphantly past her goal.
"I don't believe there is 'no cause,'" she snapped: "If he is a gentleman he will make one, since he has obviously admitted her right to leave him. It can't affect the child's inheritance. ”

“ There must be some other fulfilment for the love which has kept watch o'er its immortality. Some other road than this, along which the faithless "Little Ones" had stumbled with bleeding feet down the revealing arches of the years.... One was risking all for a shadow.... But as one saw the shadow it was that of a very mighty reality.... Behind every shadow there must be a substance. Ferlie had decided that herself ... already. In this, it was, fairly, hers to lead.
"Lead on," echoed Cyprian aloud of his heart, remembering when she had used the selfsame words to him. ”