John Galsworthy

“ You felt that Vaness was a philosopher, yet he never bored you with his views, and was content to let you grasp his moving principle gradually through watching what he ate, drank, smoked, wore, and how he encircled himself with the beautiful things and people of this life. Presumably he was rich, for one was never conscious of money in his presence. Life moved round him with a certain noiseless ease or stood still at a perfect temperature like the air in a conservatory round a choice blossom which a draught might shrivel. ”

“ And Bowden turned up into the lane. There was a dull buzzing in his ears, but his nostrils moved, savouring the evening scents of grass, of cow-dung, dried earth, and hedgerow weeds. His nose was alive, the rest within him all knotted into a sort of bitter tangle round his heart. The blood beat in his temples, and he dwelled heavily on foot and foot. Along this road Steer must come in his cart—God for ever darn him! Beyond his own top pasture he reached the inn abutting on the road. From the bench in there under the window he could see anyone who passed. ”

“ Staring at the river he seemed to see cruelty hovering over himself, his wife, society, the flower-girl, even over that scoundrel—naked cruelty, waiting to pounce on one or all. Which ever way one turned the thing was dirty, cruel. No wonder blackmail was accounted such a heinous crime. No other human act was so cold-blooded, spider-like, and slimy; none plunged so deadly a dagger into the bowels of compassion, so eviscerated humanity, so murdered faith! ”

“ If only one could love him! His self-control is forbidding—it’s not human! He ought to want our sympathy. He ought to sympathise with us. He doesn’t seem to feel—for himself, for us, for anything. And to-morrow—what will happen? Is life possible here, now? Can we stand him in the house, about the place? He’s frightening!’
The sleeper, in his first bed of one thousand and one nights, lay, his eyes pinched up between brows and bony cheeks of a face as if carved from ivory, and his lips still smiling at the softness under him. ”

“ He was fighting with his timber now, as if the thing were alive and each tree an enemy. In the interminable stumbling exertion of that groping progress his angry mood gave place to half-comatose philosophy. Trees! His great-great-grandfather had planted them! His own was the fifth man’s life, but the trees were almost as young as ever; they made nothing of a man’s life! He sniggered: and a man made nothing of theirs! Did they know they were going to be cut down? All the better if they did, and were sweating in their shoes. He pinched himself—his thoughts were becoming so queer! ”

“ In the brisk wind those tops swayed a little and gave forth soft complaint. ‘Three times my age,’ he thought; ‘prime timber.’ The ride wound sharply and entered a belt of larch, whose steep rise entirely barred off the rather sinister sunset—a dark and wistful wood, delicate dun and grey, whose green shoots and crimson tips would have perfumed the evening coolness, but for the cigar smoke in his nostrils. ‘They’ll have this spinney for pit props,’ he thought; and, taking a cross ride through it, he emerged in a heathery glen of birch-trees. ”

“ He struck again, but the sticks clashed, and dropping his own, Bowden lurched at his enemy’s throat. He had twice Steer’s strength and bulk; half his lean quickness and sobriety. They swayed between the beech trunks, now in shadow, now in moonlight which made their faces livid, and showed the expression in their eyes, of men out to kill. They struggled chest against chest, striving to throw each other; with short hard gruntings. They reeled against a trunk, staggered and unclinched, and stood, breathing hard, glaring at each other. ”

“ There was all the magic of transition from season to season, even in the song of the cuckoo, which flighted arrow-like to a thorn-tree up the rocky dingle, and started a shrill calling. Bowden counted his beasts, and marked the fine sheen on their red coats. He was drowsy from his hot day, from the cider he had drunk, and the hum of the flies in the fern. ”

“ I had the middle tent, Weymouths to my right, Radolins to my left. Everything was well done by our merry dragoman, and dinner, thanks to him, Jessie Weymouth, and Radolin, a lively feast. Still, these first three days, skirting cultivation, were disappointing. But on the fourth we were well out on the lonely sands, and the desert air had begun to go to our heads. That night we camped among bare hills under a wonderful starry sky, cold and clear as crystal. Our scoundrel surpassed himself at dinner; Jessie Weymouth and Radolin were madcaps; Weymouth his old sunny self. ”

“ How nearly he had bolted—back to the idyllic, to Varvara’s searching candour and Katrina’s laughing innocence, before she was there beside him, lace veiling her hair, face, eyes, like an Eastern woman, and her fingers had slipped under his sleeve.... What a walk! What sense of stepping into the unknown; strange intimacy and perfect ignorance! Perhaps every man had some such moment in his life—of pure romance, of adventuring at all and any cost. ”

“ Ned Bowden’s room, his father’s, his old grandmother’s were up the other stairs. She would have liked him to see her coming down—like what the young men did in the magazines, looking up at the young ladies beautiful and cool, descending slowly. But would he look at her when he had his best on, going to Molly Winch? She went down the wriggling staircase. Gnats were still dancing outside the porch, ducks bathing and preening their feathers in sunlight which had lost all sting. ”

“ With a sort of relish he thought of how his past life had circled round those ‘toffs,’ slippery, shadowlike, kicked about; and now he could get up on the Downs away from ‘toffs,’ George Pulcher, all that crowd, and smell the grass, and hear the bally larks, and watch his own mare gallop!
They were putting the numbers up for the first race. Queer not to be betting, not to be touting round; queer to be giving it a rest! ”

“ I was sitting there one sunny afternoon with my back to a clump of azaleas watching an old coloured gardener—so old that he had started life as an ‘owned’ negro they said, and certainly still retained the familiar suavity of the oldtime darkie—I was watching him prune the shrubs when I heard the voice of Rupert K. Vaness say, quite close: “There’s nothing for me but beauty, Miss Monroy.”
The two were evidently just behind my azalea clump, perhaps four yards away, yet as invisible as if in China.
“Beauty is a wide, wide word. Define it, Mr. Vaness.” ”

“ The man shifted on his broken boots. “Don’t you hit me, guv’nor, I got a knife here.”
“I’m not going to hit you. I’m going to hand you over to the police.”
The man’s eyes roved, looking for a way of escape; then rested, as if fascinated, on the glowing hearth.
“What’s ten pounds?” he said suddenly; “you’d never ha’ missed it.”
Granter smiled.
“You don’t seem to realise, my friend, that blackmail is the most devilish crime a man can commit.” And he crossed over to the telephone.
The man’s eyes, dark, restless, violent, and yet hungry, began to shift up and down the building of a man before him. ”

“ Success, power, wealth—those aims of profiteers and premiers, pedagogues and pandemoniacs, of all, in fact, who could not see God in a dewdrop, hear Him in distant goat-bells, and scent Him in a pepper-tree—had always appeared to me akin to dry-rot. And yet every day one saw more distinctly that the holders of the ‘power’ philosophy were the hub of a universe which, with the approbation of the majority they represented, they were fast making uninhabitable. ”

“ A painter of flowers and trees myself, I specialise in gardens, and freely assert that none in the world is so beautiful as this. Even before the magnolias come out it consigns the Boboli at Florence, the Cinnamon Gardens of Colombo, Concepcion at Malaga, Versailles, Hampton Court, the Generaliffe at Granada, and La Mortola to the category of ‘also ran.’ Nothing so free, gracious, so lovely and wistful, nothing so richly coloured, yet so ghostlike, exists planted by the sons of men. It is a kind of paradise which has wandered down, a miraculously enchanted wilderness. ”

“ Walls have a singular value for civilised beings. In my thin tent between the thin tents of those two couples, prevented by lack of walls from any outlet to their feelings, I seemed to hear the smothered reproaches, the smothered longings. It was the silence of those two suddenly stricken lovers that was so impressive. I, literally, did not dare to speak to Weymouth while we were all mixed up like that. ”

“ The equality of the sexes—they say—the tendency of women towards brains and trousers, have diminished Venus; and yet, I fancy what happened to my friend Weymouth may still happen to young gentlemen who talk as if love had no fevers and no proprietary instincts; as if, when you burn for a woman, you are willing to leave her to another, or share her with him without fuss. Of course there are men who have no blood in their veins; but my friend Weymouth unfortunately had—not for nothing was the sunny, spilt-wine look about his hair and cheeks and dark-blue eyes. ”

“ Passing through the gate he entered the ride of the home covert. Variety lay like colour on his woods. They stretched for miles, and his ancestors had planted almost every kind of tree—beech, oak, birch, sycamore, ash, elm, hazel, holly, pine; a lime-tree and a hornbeam here and there, and further in among the winding coverts, spinneys and belts of larch. The evening air was sharp, and sleet showers came whirling from those bright clouds; he walked briskly, drawing at his richly fragrant cigar, the whisky still warm within him. ”

“ The cart was mounting through the hedgeless fields which fringed the Downs; larks were singing, the wheat was very green, the patches of charlock brightened everything; it was lonely, few trees, [Pg 273] few houses, no people, extreme peace, just a few rooks crossing under a blue sky.
“Wonder if he’ll offer us a drink?” said ‘Jimmy.’
“Not he; but help yourself, my son.” ”

“ The face which Granter turned toward that surprising utterance was a good illustration of the saying ‘things are not what they seem.’ Above that big building of a body it quivered, ridiculously alive and complex, as of a man full of nerves, humours, sarcasms; and a deep continuous chinking sound arose—of Charles Granter jingling coins in his trousers’ pocket. The quiver settled into raised eyebrows, into crow’s-feet running out on to the broad cheekbones, into a sarcastic smile drooping the corners of the lips between moustache and beard. ”

“ So I was searching right and left for something to believe in, willing to accept even Rupert K. Vaness and his basking philosophy. But, then, could a man bask his life right out? Could just looking at fine pictures, tasting rare fruits and wines, the mere listening to good music, the scent of azaleas and the best tobacco, above all the society of pretty women, keep salt in my bread, an ideal in my brain? Could they? That’s what I wanted to know.
Everyone who goes to Charleston in the spring, soon or late, visits Magnolia Gardens. ”

“ A wild young devil! The madness of those nights beneath these trees by the old fountain! How he used to sit waiting on this bench in the darkness with heart fluttering, trembling, aching with expectancy!... Gad, how he had ached and fluttered on that seat! What fools young men could be! And yet in all his life had there been weeks so wildly sweet as those? Weeks the madness of which could stir in him still this strange youthful warmth. Rubbing his veined, thin hands together, he held them out into a streak of sunlight and closed his eyes.... ”

“ We get some fresh fruit to-morrow at the Fayoum.”
He went on to his men, two hundred yards away among the camels.
It was wonderfully silent. The light from stars and a half-moon powdered the sands; no wind at all, yet deliciously cold—the desert in good mood; no influence quite so thrilling to pulses, yet so cooling to fevers; no sound, no movement in all the night.
“Isn’t it heavenly? Good-night.”
Hélène Radolin was passing me in her fur. She went into her tent. I sat on, smoking. And presently, outside the dining-tent, I saw Weymouth, his head thrown back, drawing in deep breaths. ”

“ Deerstalker!” “Calliope wins! She wins!”
Gawd! His horse! They flashed past—fifty yards to go, and not a head between ’em!
“Deerstalker! Deerstalker!” “Calliope!”
He saw his mare shoot out—she’d won!
With a little queer sound he squirmed and wriggled on to the stairs. No thoughts while he squeezed, and slid, and hurried—only emotion—out of the Ring, away to the paddock. His horse!
Docker had weighed in when he reached the mare. All right! He passed with a grin. ‘Jimmy’ turned almost into the body of Polman standing like an image.
“Well, Mr. Shrewin,” he said to nobody, “she’s won.” ”

“ Difficult to say whether morality exists in a man like Bowden, whose blood is racy of the soil, and whose farmyard is so adjacent. That his son should run riot with the girl Pansy would have struck him more, perhaps, if Steer had not shot his dog—the affair so providentially put that fellow’s nose out of joint. ”

“ Though not quite the centre of the Turf, the Green Dragon had nursed a coup in its day, nor was it without a sense of veneration. The ownership of Calliope invested ‘Jimmy’ Shrewin with the importance of those out of whom something can be had. It took time for one so long accustomed to beck and call, to mole-like procedure, and the demeanour of young bloods, to realise that he had it. ”