G. B. Stern

“ I'm glad you feel that you want to give yourself up to the war, Pat. Every man and every woman and every child in the kingdom ought to be feeling the same. No matter if war is right or wrong; no matter if this is the war that ends war, or else another of those beastly life-spilling limb-lopping campaigns that signify nothing in the end—still, any great upheaval is welcome when it means all eyes to the right-about, all eyes fixed steadily upon the same vision—instead of glancing askew ”

“ With the tremulous daring of a man who has caught a glimpse of a woman's face once, swiftly, by night, and has feared to see it the morning after, in case it should prove less lovely—yet longed to gaze upon it and gaze upon it, that each subtle curve, each fleck of colour, might at last grow familiar to him as the sunshine, so Gareth set out, the morning after arrival at Rapparee House, to explore minutely that harbour which Heaven had dumped for his delight beneath his attic window. ”

“ Kathleen withdrew the pins from her hat, and laid the broad-brimmed felt upon the table. Then she sat down; and Gareth sat down opposite; and the black china cat prepared itself for some innocent enjoyment. There were things to be said which had remained unspoken for years. It would be good to clear the air. And they were both out to wound, wound and hack and tear. It is not a pleasant frame of mind which visits a man and a woman from whom the last dreams have been wantonly snatched.
"It was perfect at Alpenruh, wasn't it?" said Kathleen, rending the first veil. ”

“ Directly after sunset, on the last evening of his holiday, Gareth went down to the harbour.
Full tide. The waves had ceased to dash in; and jet-carved against the dull gold sky, cargo-steamer and sailing-boat floated high upon the brimming water, that was tranquil as a mother with babe at her breast. Ever and anon, a larger undulation from beyond the harbour mouth swang and stirred luminous green depths, and shivered the dreaming reflections of white wall and mauve roof and pink roof, till they spread in dark stains of wet over the edge of the quay.... ”

“ The round adventure, this; no mere arc of the circle, but completing each time the full sweep of the compass....
Gareth was walking faster now, ideas surging on a wine-coloured flood down the reopened channels of his mind.... The man he had thought himself; Kathleen, tumultuous red-and-brown as he had once known her; half-forgotten figures of mediæval song, so alive to his boyhood. All trooping past him like some glowing pageant; set to a cadence of words that sank from triumph to a wistful lilt of regret; swelling again to the clarion-song of achievement. ”

“ Here was the old dream which for Gareth had previously been symbolized in the absorbed fraternity of "Campbell's Young Men," repeated now on an immeasurably larger scale. One of Them. The glamour of belonging.
Gareth had always been slightly appalled by the burden of each individual responsible for himself; and his visions had naturally taken the trend of mankind serving in a common cause; one need for the scattered energies; one will pushing these along. The world as a sort of club, excluding a few just to strengthen the privilege of membership. ”

“ She leant back her head against the worn antimacassar, and half closed her eyes. Patricia, watching her, thought in a spasm of generous admiration, how handsome she was, with her aquiline features and sombre colouring and bent weary mouth—"Like an Indian brave...."
And Kathleen, behind the mask of immobility, was absorbed in a concentrated vengeful loathing of the man who had dared shatter her romance, her last hot chance of romance ... and then himself flaunt a love-affair. Let him go? Divorce him? Make the way easy for him with this splendid wilful young creature who thought him divine? ”

“ It was manifestly absurd for Gareth, sixteen years a reader, to hover and hope and dream impossible dreams of publishers; dream as he did in front of that iron swinging sign, on a mellow September evening; dream as might have done the veriest novice in the realm of letters. Gareth should have known better. Besides which, it made him late for dinner.
As it happened, Kathleen was later even than he. But in the parlour of Pacific Villa he found Trixie Worley awaiting him. ”

“ An hysterical fatalism brooded over her passion for Napier Kirby. She knew that if she hesitated once, paused to debate or analyse, looked beyond the actual moment of flight, or looked back to responsibility, habit, sentiment, then the sequence of events which had rushed to ten-thirty, Charing Cross, Friday evening, would pass by that single pin-point moment of action, never to touch it again. And she would be left. Forty-three cannot shatter and re-form her life, lose opportunities and find others, toss love aside and gather up love, as eighteen might do, as twenty-seven had done. ”

“ And there, sitting toothbrush in hand, on the edge of the tin enamelled bath, he strove to recollect the details of Kathleen's outbreak on her horror of certain trivial intimacies of wedlock, that by avoiding them he might yet retain a grip on the slippery substance of their dreams. Bathroom taps; his mind persistently dwelt on that one allusion: "To hear a man's bath-water running in the morning...." But that couldn't be all. The bathroom taps became to him an obsession, wholly responsible for the present state of disillusion between him and Kathleen. ”

“ Gareth retorted bitterly, though the other man's remark had been made without any sub-intention to hurt. "It's the 'thin of it'—the war in words—you never grope through them to the realities going on beyond. Words that muffle suffering till it reaches here beautiful—poignant—noble—crude—restrained—oh, as anything but itself! First the war books, and then criticism of the books, and criticism of the criticism ... how are we—how am I to get past that to the very beat of the war?... The very beat of the war—that's only a phrase too—I don't know what it signifies, when I come to think about it. ”

“ Kathleen should marry him! Gareth was exultant in his new strength, as a man who had drunk red wines. His determination survived sleep, survived the sobriety of morning, sent him with martial tread and squared jaw to the house in North Kensington.
Kathleen was out; would be out to lunch. A temporary check. "Tell Miss Morrison I shall call at six o'clock," in tones of such ringing valour that the maid regarded him in astonishment. How could she know he was out on the quest, his eyes on the hill-tops and his head among the stars, slaying monsters and enchanters as he went? ”

“ But I want to see what stuff you're made of."
"I don't believe I'm made of any stuff," Gareth confessed desperately.
Mr. Temple planted his hands deep in his pockets, and surveyed his offspring with disapproval.
"There's no room in the world for shirkers. The world wants men. You've had things made too easy. The world wants you to stand on your own legs, not on your father's shoulders. It's the law of the world that the weakest go to the wall and the strongest come out on top."
Gareth began to hate the world, as represented by his father's weighty platitudes. ”

“ Neither she nor Gareth cared to wait. Hers was not a nature to brook delay; and he was feverish lest again he should be thwarted of this gift of wedlock which promised to be so fair. He had always desired to be married; as a young man, dreamt of it; later, mused on the state with the wistful envy of one who sees no hope of it for himself. All the failure of his union with Kathleen, he now arbitrarily set down to the fact that she had never been his wife. ”

“ For Patricia O'Neill was proud of her twenty-one years, and the glorious vigour of her limbs, and the resilient stretch of her brain; and of her power to shape her life obedient to those empyreal flashes of inspiration that burst upon her out of the angry clouds. Too proud to yield up one jot of longing to a man who was oblivious of her. ”

“ Patricia sprang upright, and flung up her arms behind her head.... He could not refrain from the thought of how triumphantly nature had equipped her for any strenuous job she might care to undertake; how little likely that she would bungle it; how untiring her limbs; how swift to any adjustment the poised equilibrium of her mind. Nor would any hitch occur in the plans of Ferguson's Ambulance Corps, robbing her of the forthcoming rampant opportunities to—to show off. No hitch—where Pat was concerned. ”

“ Yet Kirby was by no means a personage to be laughed at, despite his enormous vanity, his childishness, his affection for gaudy achievement. He had power; and he had brain; and swift subtle penetrations; probably unexpected tracts of chivalry, forbearance, in his strange composition. And he had come out on top in the great wrestle for place; a strong item in his favour, this—from the point of view of Kathleen, who scorned failure. ”

“ The sensation that at any moment another had the right to walk in, touch her possessions, watch her actions—how had she borne the sixteen years' torment? There burnt within her nature a fierce white-hot virginity, an utter incapacity to share, which all her married life had been powerless to wear away. From the hour when convention and the cramped limits of Pacific Villa had obliged her to watch Gareth struggle with his shirt, love had slipped from her ”