H. G. Dwight

“ The painter sprang out of his lazy posture.
“What are the things I have seen to those!” he cried. “What do I know of the world, compared to you? You have seen more of life here in Malamocco than I ever did in all the strange cities I have seen! It is nothing to know how men say ‘Good-morning’ in other languages or how they look in foreign coats, if you know what they say on the decks of sinking ships, and how they look when they are washed up dead by the sea!”
For a moment the fisherman was silent, surprised by the other’s vehemence. ”

“ The People of the Chain do not steal secretly through the valleys of Pusht-i-Kuh, telling the Lurs lies and giving them papers in the night. I am not one of the People of the Chain. But the king of the People of the Chain is also my king. And he is a great king, lord of many lands and many seas, who has no need of secret messengers, hostlers and scullions of whom no one has heard, to persuade strangers of his greatness.”
“Your words do not persuade me!” cried the Father of Swords. “A wise man is like a jar in the house of the apothecary, silent but full of virtues. ”

“ This led into a sort of cloister, where a covered ambulatory surrounded a dark pool of stars. Thence another passage brought them out into a great open court. Here an invisible jet of water made an illusion of coolness in another, larger, pool, overlooked by a portico of tall slim pillars. Between them Magin caught the glow of a cigar.
“Good evening, Ganz,” his bass voice called from the court.
“Heaven! Is that you?” replied the smoker of the cigar. “What are you doing here, in God’s name? I imagined you at Mohamera, by this time, or even in the Gulf.” ”

“ The Alps filled the horizon with pale outlines of shadow. Between them and the long spit of the Lido were shining lagoon spaces, out of which the clustered towers seemed to look wistfully over into the unpent sea. With the vividness of mirage he recalled a placid water avenue winding green between its lines of awninged palaces. Then he turned from it all, in sudden hatred of his artificial life, of the restlessness to express. He envied the fisherfolk under their butterfly sails out there where the Adriatic swept bare and blue to the east. There were the true creators! ”

“ This country is a factory of Auroras. Dozens of her pass under that window every day, all turned out to sample as if by machinery, all run by the same interior clockwork, all well made, well dressed, well educated—in the American sense; also well able to milk a cow or to carry one on their backs, but preferring to harangue clubs all day, to dance all night, in any case to circumvent the ingenuity of life in playing us nasty tricks. They won’t do anything they don’t like, and they shut their eyes to the dark o’ the moon.
Just what Aurora wanted of Michael, I can’t say. ”

“ Do we get a penny out of them?”
“Oh, no!” laughed Magin. “You administer them purely on altruistic principles, for their own good and that of the world at large—like the oil-wells of the Karun!”
“Well, since you put it that way,” laughed Matthews in turn, “perhaps we do!”
Magin shrugged his shoulders.
“Extraordinary people! Do you really think the rest of the world so stupid? Or is it that the fog of your island has got into your brains? You always talk about truth as if it were a patented British invention, yet no one is less willing to call a spade a spade. ”

“ They went on, up the steps of the portico, to the door which Ganz opened softly, stepping aside for his visitor to pass in. The room was so dark, after the blinding light of the court, that Matthews saw nothing at first. He stepped forward eagerly, feeling his way among Ganz’s tables and chairs toward the end of the room from which the music came. They gave him, the cluttering tables and chairs, after the empty rooms he had been living in, a sharper renewal of his stab. And even a piano—! It made him think of Kipling and the Song of the Banjo:
“I am memory and torment—I am Town! ”

“ Such a laundry, such storerooms, such coal-bins, never were on sea or land. I shall not draw a peaceful breath until they are mine. Believe me, madam; never, never in this world. You will do me an irreparable injury if you refuse to sell me this house. You don’t care two pins about it. I do. Sell it to me, then. It is small, but I shall give you sixteen thousand dollars for it. Now, this minute.” And drawing a cheque-book from his pocket he uncapped his fountain-pen. “What name shall I put down?”
Mrs. Derwall was too much surprised by the suddenness of his onslaught to answer. ”

“ Why do you come here, courting destruction in a cockleshell that may any minute split on a rock and spill you to the sharks, when you might be punting some pretty girl up the backwaters of the Thames? Why do I float around in this old ark of reeds and bulrushes, like an elderly Moses in search of a promised land, who should be at home wearing the slippers of middle age? What is it? A sunstroke? This is hardly the country where Goethe’s citrons bloom!”
“Damned if I know!” laughed Matthews. “I fancy we like a bit of a lark!” ”

“ It seemed to him that the darkness which fell while his thoughts were turning in this hopeless round was symbolic of an obscurity that for him had crept into the sunlight of the earth. And the things he had lost were as fairylike and unattainable as the magic city glittering there in the distance, above those shadowy arches printed against a river of gold.
He scrambled to the parapet and sat staring down into the underlying chasm. The twinkle of the Speedway and the jewelry of the opposite switches just made visible the water between. How black it was, and how noiseless—like another Lethe! ”

“ Martin did think so. The consciousness of it suddenly overwhelmed him as they came out into the deserted square and crossed to the Via Santa Maria. He would not even have looked back, but for his companion.
“See!” she cried.
The dome of the baptistery, the roof of the cathedral, the top of the tower where they had been, were alight with a delicate rose glow which contrasted extraordinarily with the cold white of the lower shadow. The spectacle was to Martin symbolic and revealing. He saw as if apart from himself the romance of his day. ”

“ The destiny of other men is an accident, a god from the machine or an enemy in ambush. Such was the destiny of Guy Matthews, as it was of how many other unsuspecting young men of his time. It would have been inconceivable to him, as he stood in his dark stone room listening to Magin’s receding stamp, that anything could make him do what Magin demanded. Yet something did—the last drop of the acrid essence Dizful had been brewing for him.
The letter that accomplished this miracle came to him by the hand of a Bakhtiari from Meidan-i-Naft. ”

“ Stories have a strange way of travelling. Sometimes they travel from New York to Constantinople. We have known cases. For that reason we—have prepared that cup of coffee. We must secure ourselves against one chance in a thousand.”
Michael saw it. He was like that. He had that fatal little flaw of the artist, of being able to see the other side. He saw it then as distinctly as he saw the four dark faces, the candle burning quietly in the dark little room, the dark shapes and shadows of the boxes. He wondered what dark strange thing was hidden here—that meant so much to these men. ”

“ What pulled him up short was a new quality in the general unexpectedness of life. Life had always been, like the trip from which he was returning, more or less of a lark. Whereas it suddenly appeared that life might, perhaps, be very little of a lark. So far as he had ever pictured life to himself he had seen it as an extension of his ordered English countryside, beset by no hazard more searching than a hawthorne hedge. ”

“ She hesitated so queerly that my dormant uneasiness stirred anew.
“Of course, if we had only been buying an emerald, we could have found one quite as good, and for far less in New York; though Peter insists we could not. But then, this was not an ordinary stone. After all, what jewel is, if you know its history? Peter had it beautifully mounted for me—in Agra, in sight of the Taj Mahal. As a matter of fact, though, it doesn’t look worth the fortune we paid for it.”
“Nothing does,” I said as much to myself as to her. “Life is like that. It is the pursuit we value, not the acquisition.” ”

“ If we secretly trembled lest our first impression were destined to suffer the common lot of first impressions, we proved that we had been right after all. We began to know it as soon as we clattered under the archway of the podere, passed out of the picturesque white court into an olive yard, skirted an old garden that had gone all to birds and bushes, and looked down from the terrace into the delicious morning freshness of the cypress avenue. But what really clinched us was the loggia. This was nothing less than a great marble room, opening out of the upper hall of the villa. ”

“ The world, he declared, was fallen into disorder, like the hair of an Ethiopian. Within the city wall was a people well disposed as angels; without, a band of tigers. After which he asked if the young Firengi were of the company of those who dug for the poisoned water of Bakhtiari Land, or whether perchance he were of the People of the Chain.
These figures of speech would have been incomprehensible to Matthews, if Abbas had not hinted something about oil rigs. ”

“ I am not like you. I do not betray my country for a little savage with a jewel in her nose! It is because of that small difference between us, Gaston, between your people and my people, that you will see such changes here after the war. But you will not see them unless you accept my offer. After all, what else can you do?” He left Gaston to take it in as he twirled his metal cap. “There is the sun already,” Magin added presently. “We shall have a hot journey.”
Gaston looked over his shoulder at the quivering rim of gold that surged up behind the Bakhtiari mountains. ”

“ Things come, and then other things come. Time is only a chain to hold us to them—or away from them. It is mere chance whether it breaks all at once or by degrees....”
Martin watched her keenly as she spoke, white in the shadow of the cloister, her hair dark against the wan frescoes. There was a curious contrast between the vivid modern figure and those faded images of a life so dim and far away. And recalling the palace gate he wondered what there might be of consistency or inconsistency between what she said so lightly then and what she said so intensely now. ”

“ End my days sneezing and sniffling by some polite lake of Zurich like you, my poor Ganz, when you find in your hand the magic key that might unlock for you any door in the world? That, for example, is not my idea of a lark, as your Son of Papa would say! Men are astounding animals, I admit. But I never could live in Europe, where you can’t turn around without stepping on someone else’s toes. ”

“ I observed after a hilarious evening, as we stood in my window looking at the twilight of the gods that hung in the fiord, “a crown of righteousness shall be laid up for you on high. You have made Zephine’s fortune.”
“O?” he grunted noncommittally.
“That Englishman! I see it all. They were formed by heaven for one another. It’s a case of coup de foudre, as the alienists say. We shall have to go home without Zephine.”
“Herb,” remarked Nick, turning his back on the twilight of the gods and on me, “your inside is as baroque as that bird’s outside. ”

“ The people from every country under the sun, the people of every imaginable social condition, the people with stories to them a mile long—and not all of them printable! Of course that’s chiefly in the mining places, and in the coast places leading to the mining places, where they come and go like ants in a trail, outwardly as much alike as flannel shirts and nondescript kits can make them, inwardly impersonating every race and passion of the world, and all spinning out the great epic of Gold. ”

“ Through the gateway between the houses where the Arno wound out to the plain the splendour of sunset streamed into the city, touching the dusty façades with a fairy glamour, filling the sandy river bed with undreamed secrets of colour, transmuting the parcelled water into purple and gold. The quay where Martin had that morning discovered two persons was crowded with carriages and pedestrians enjoying the cool of the day. The theatrical vivacity of the people, their unaccustomed faces, their foreign speech, gave a new poignancy to his mood of exaltation. ”

“ Moreover we could not help being conscious that our own case was less dire than theirs, and that one of them was a lady. So Nick, like a hero, took off his Persian dressing gown. I, not to be outdone, divested myself of my English travelling rug. As one man we advanced toward the princely apple tree, whose branching trunk intervened between us and the shrinking Serenity of Waldeck-Hohenkugel. And each of us, holding out at arm’s length his offering, invited Her Highness, in a strange mixture of tongues, to accept the same. ”