Gilbert Cannan

“ INTERIOR FREDERIC had omitted to make any mention of the fact that he had lost his brother’s drawings, and had brushed the thought of them aside. He had a comfortable memory and a convenient conscience which never worried about his lapses and misdemeanours until they were known or in danger of being known to other people. Then he lived in dread of the application of official morality and indulged in a perfect orgy of self-torment, grinding himself between the upper and nether millstones of his own laxity and the rigid codes with which his upbringing had imbued him. ”

“ The upheaval that had taken place in him had set him growing mentally and spiritually; in his office, in his house, he was hurt at every turn, bumping into corners where none had been before. He saw in marriage perfect freedom. It was an illusion, but he was wholly deceived by it. He saw it as a summit of achievement from which he could defy all that he had suffered all his life. He said to Annette:
“Annette, I love you. I want you to marry me. We shall be very poor, but we shall have each other, and nothing else matters.” ”

“ I look forward to the day when they will be as little interested in events after death. A man’s father and his son (mother and daughter included) are all the past and future vouchsafed to him, and if he will take the trouble to understand them he will find satisfaction and to spare for what is at present called his thirst for immortality.
I find immortality an admirable word upon which to end my preface, but, in face of the grey tints of this composition, I must protest my optimism, believing human life to be like a river, that, if it be fouled, will run itself clear in time. ”

“ And when Annette replied that she was very happy—she looked it too—Gertrude realised painfully that she was brutally indifferent.
The starving cannot rejoice with the well-fed.
Gertrude felt her life trickling away through her fingers: worst of all, though she was not conscious of it, her desire for life was ebbing away from her. All the bitterness, all the hunger, all the hard envy in her heart she translated into one word: “Old.” She said to herself: “I am getting old.” ”

“ James Lawrie could be likened to a garden roller, Mrs. Folyat could most nearly be said to resemble a mill-stone. She was of the great and ignoble army of people who are neither good nor bad, renounce their potentialities in either direction, and drag all those to whom they cling—for cling they must if they are to remain above ground—down to the lowest depths of impotence, than which there is no worse state. She made herself comfortable with fiction and preferred everything to truth. ”

“ Serge fell back on action. Whenever his mother, in the metallic tones of her querulous mood, asked Mary to fetch her book from the other end of the house, or to unravel her knitting when she had dropped a stitch, or to read to her because her eyes ached, Serge bustlingly and rather ostentatiously forestalled his sister. There was never any sign that he had produced any effect on mother or daughter.
This went on for months. Existence in the house in Burdley Park passed smoothly and placidly, and Francis seemed to be happy, as he had never been, busy with his parish and greenhouse. ”

“ Annette’s traditional modesty twinged, and she shifted a little uneasily on the bed. Serge marked that and went on:
“Sorry. I won’t talk about it if it makes you uneasy. You believe in souls and bodies separate, the soul prisoned in the vile clay, and all that. I don’t. I believe that the two things are one and indivisible. If you don’t believe that, you are apt to take all the surface happenings of life much too seriously, and you lose all sense of proportion and humour and make the most ridiculous messes for yourself and everybody connected with you. ”

“ In the reflection of life in which men strive to live (for in that reflection their vanity can have free play, exactly as it can and always does when a man scans his features in a glass) love and death are not seen. All human codes of conduct and of morals, all dealings between man and man, are cut to fit the reflection and not life itself. . . . What, then, is human life?—what are the depths that sustain the yeasty turbulence of man’s knavery and folly and dirtiness and hysteria? . . . A man is kin and comrade with all things living, from the great sun to the motes dancing in the sun’s rays. ”

“ He had no ambition, and often ludicrously had learned the scorn a man can come by who prefers anything to his own advancement; often he had seen how profitable it was for a man to sacrifice his talent to his vanity, and how incredible to such a man that it could be possible to sacrifice vanity to talent. From all he had heard of London, the greatest city in the world, its subservience to ambitious men was as immense as its renown. In our town, Benskin and his school of little fishes had dubbed Serge “amateur” by way of killing him. ”

“ Very rarely, however, is the issue so simple. The bone-and-shadow business comes into play here also, and most people marry with very little passionate love and a great deal of careful imitation of it, so that most marriages are strangled in their birth with a very tangled web of lies.
It was so with Frederic and Jessie Folyat in their marriage, and they were never so nearly united as when jealousy came between them. Their marriage feast did coldly furnish forth the funeral of love, and over love’s dead body they quarrelled. ”

“ The world did not exist for business. It existed for Annette. He had a trembling desire to tell them so . . . One man told him that though immense fortunes had been made in the cotton trade, they were a mere trifle compared with the misery that had been created in the making of them. “But that,” said the man gloomily, “is the way of the world. It’s happened so often that nobody worries when it happens again. All business is dirty business. A man must live, though I can never understand why.” . . . Such pessimism seemed utterly absurd to Bennett. ”

“ ST. WITHANS IF Potsham was somnolent, St. Withans, our parson’s Cornish living, might well have been the home of the Sleeping Beauty. For a time it was a place of enchantment while the charm and novelty of wedded love were upon Francis and his Martha. They were blissfully happy: the county welcomed them, they had a charming house and garden, a carriage, money in plenty, children, and when they were bored with the country they could escape to the gaiety of Plymouth. ”

“ There’s no escape. There’s no good life but in the honest meeting of the one and the other. . . .”
“And women?” asked Serge.
“Their minds reflect only the minds of men. I think now that all the trouble, all the distress, and all the muddle come from the arrogance of men, who have always preferred the reflection of life in the flattering mirror of their minds to life itself. They have dropped the bone for the shadow, when they might have had both. They could have admired the shadow and eaten the bone; but, in the folly of their arrogance, they have thrown both away. ”

“ Bennett had no corrective. No grown person ever held out a hand to save him from his dark thoughts and uneasy desires when they came to him, nor troubled to enquire into what pitfalls he might be tumbling. Instructed by Kraus he went the way of all flesh and lost his peace of mind and the bloom of his boyhood. All around him he saw darkness and ugliness, but never any beauty. The one place in his daily walks that his imagination fastened on was the gaol, and he dreamed of prisoners and policemen and arrestments. ”