Various

“ Oxford drew nearer and nearer. Tom Tower loomed before him. Its great bell rang out. And suddenly, as if he could repress it no longer, there ran through Sorell’s mind—his half melancholy mind, unaccustomed to the claims of personal happiness—the vision that Connie had so sharply evoked; of a girl’s brown eyes and honest look—the look of a child to be cherished, of a woman to be loved.
Was it that morning that he had helped Nora to translate a few lines of the Antigone? ”

“ But Falloden was blind to it. His pulses were full of riot. She had been so near to him, and yet so far away; so sweet, yet so defensive. His whole nature cried out fiercely for her. ‘I want her!—I want her! And I believe she wants me. She’s not afraid of me now—she turns to me. What keeps us apart? Nothing that ought to weigh for a moment against our double happiness!’
He turned and walked stormily homewards. Then, as he saw the roof and white walls of the cottage through the trees, his mood wavered—and fell. There was a life there which he had injured—a life that now depended on him. ”

“ A week passed, and one evening she dined alone, her mother and Bobby having gone to a theatre. Her dinner was but a pretence. She remembered that the ladies’ reading-room was open till nine o’clock. It tempted her like a forbidden fruit. She could get in an hour’s work there while they were at the theatre. Her heart began to beat hard as the thought came to her of the walk through the wet streets, the lit windows of the great house beyond the courtyard, the hall through which she would pass so quickly, the stairs, the narrow corridor between the books. ”

“ I always think of Lowell as the most accomplished master of graceful English to whom I ever listened. I should never have heard or seen him, I should never have come across Llewelyn Davies or Tom Hughes, or many other men of mark in the world, had I not gone to the College. I went there, a young Oxford man, anxious to ‘do my bit,’ and thinking that I could confer benefits on others by teaching them. My experience is—and numbers of young University men have had the same experience—that I received infinitely more than I ever gave. ”

“ He led the way to the house and to the upper rooms, and pointed out the best windows, and watched them pile bedding at the windows and break out loopholes in the wall. All the time shell after shell was smashing and crashing down somewhere outside, and now the Germans began to fire star-shells that floated down in a blaze of dazzling light, blinding the defenders and exposing them as visible targets to the hail of bullets that came drumming and rattling in from their unseen foes. ”

“ The Working Men’s College was largely, perhaps mainly, the product of Oxford and Cambridge, in the sense that most of its founders and first teachers had belonged to one or other of the two Universities, and their object was to impart to others the College spirit as they had felt and known it and realised its value; to give to poor men, to manual workers, something, if it were ever so little, of the atmosphere which had brightened and broadened and sweetened their own lives. The College, accordingly, has always taken Oxford and Cambridge for its models. ”

“ He will hear in them the cry of the White Eagle—the White Eagle of Poland—as she soars wounded and bleeding over the southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and forests of Lithuania. It is in these songs, chère Miladi, that we Poles listen to the very heart-beats of our outraged country. Our songs—our music—our poets—our memories:—as a nation that is all we have—except the faith in us that never dies. Hinc surrectura! Yes, she shall rise again, our Poland! Our hope is in God, and in the human heart, the human conscience, that He has made. ”

“ Meanwhile—what was not so evident to this large-hearted observer—Otto was more than willing—he burned—to play his part. All that is mystical and passionate in the soul of a Polish Catholic had been stirred in him by his accident, his growing premonition of short life, the bitterness of his calamity, the suddenness of his change of heart towards Falloden.
‘My future is wrecked. I shall never live to be old. I shall never be a great musician. But I mean to live long enough to make Constance happy! ”

“ Sorell was talking with the ex-scout in the dining-room, impressing on him certain [503] medical directions. Radowitz suddenly felt himself singularly forlorn and deserted. Of course, Falloden and Constance would marry. He always knew it. He would have served to keep them together, and give them opportunities of meeting, when they might have easily drifted entirely apart. He laughed to himself as he thought of Connie’s impassioned cry—‘I shall never, never, marry him!’ Such are the vows of women. She would marry him; and then what would he, Otto, matter to her or to Falloden any longer? ”

“ I have an impression of helping Lavender to raise Fédore from the ground, and of his muttering—‘A foul blow, before God a foul blow,’ as we laid her, quivering but apparently unconscious, upon the couch. An impression of sultry, copper-coloured sunshine suddenly and harshly lighting up the disordered room, the grim assembly of men, and the woman’s pale recumbent figure, as with a glare of widespread conflagration. ”

“ We owe you a great deal, Lady Constance—or—perhaps now—I may call you Constance?’
Constance winced, and pointedly avoided giving him leave. But for Alice’s sake she held her tongue. The wedding was to be hurried on, and Mrs. Hooper, able for once to buy new frocks with a clear conscience, and possessed of the money to pay for them, was made so happy by the bustle of the trousseau that she fell in love with her prospective son-in-law as the cause of it. Ewen Hooper meanwhile watched him with mildly shrewd eyes, deciding once more in his inner mind that mathematicians were an inferior race. ”

“ We have not to consider whether Shakespeare thought Henry V. was in truth such a man as he put on the stage; or whether he did or did not stop to think that the real Henry V. must have known French quite well, if not as well as English, from his infancy; or other little puzzles that any observant reader may put, and get no certain answer, in this and most of the plays: for these things are not to our present purpose.
Shakespeare’s Henry V. is most human when he talks with his own soldiers as a plain gentleman, and they reason of the king’s responsibility in a thoroughly medieval fashion. ”

“ Mulholland at least—out of a rich moral history—guessed that what they saw in the Boar’s Hill cottage was simply the working out of the old spiritual paradox—that there is a yielding which is victory, and a surrender which is power. It seemed to her often that Radowitz was living in a constant state of half-subdued excitement, produced by this strange realisation that he and his life had become so important to Falloden that the differences of training and temperament between them, and all the little daily rubs, no longer counted ”

“ They never taught the working man to try everything by the test question, What am I going to get by it in pounds, shillings, and pence? nor did they for one moment appeal to the manual workers as a class with interests distinct from those of the community. The spirit of class was to them anathema, the negation of brotherhood and of true citizenship, the enemy of the State. They taught that men should have their full living wage, if they earned it; that true citizen life implied conditions under which honest labour would always ensure to the labourer sufficiency of good food and a decent home ”

“ What really matters is that war must needs come in the dramatist’s way if he presents histories ancient or modern, and offers not only stirring incidents but precious occasions for developing every kind of character. Without the field of Shrewsbury we should not know Falstaff as we do know him; it gives us the exact measure of his braggadocio and the full wealth of the measureless ironical humour which he turns freely on himself, being resolved, since he may be no better than he is, to make himself out rather worse. ”

“ The street through the town was by then choked from end to end with a seething mass of men and cattle and vehicles, military transport and ammunition wagons, soldiers, old peasant men and boys, women with children clutching their skirts or wailing in their arms, country carts piled with bedding and furniture, squealing pigs and squawking leg-tethered poultry, with huddled clinging old crones and round-eyed infants. ”

“ Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face, and the deep brown eyes, and the look that made pretence and cowardice ashamed, was dead, leaving a thought and a teaching behind him that his Oxford will not let die. Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and could occasionally be seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ Church and Balliol still represented the rival centres of that great feud between Liberal and Orthodox which had convulsed the University a generation before. ”

“ The 18-pounder field-gun makes a most ear-splitting crack for those who stand in front of the battery, and, moreover, the sound seems to come from only a few yards away. The sniper’s bullet will strike the parapet with a resounding crack, followed by the whirr of its passage through the air, and a new-comer might easily imagine that one of our own men had fired from the next traverse. ”

“ Falloden was aware through every pulse of her fast developing beauty. And although no great heiress, as heiresses now go, she would ultimately inherit a large amount of scattered money, in addition to what she already possessed. The Langmoors would certainly have her out of Oxford at the earliest possible moment—and small blame to them.
In all this he reasoned as a man of his class and antecedents was likely to reason—only with a bias against himself. To capture Connie, through Otto, before she had had any other chances of marriage, seemed to him a mean and dishonourable thing. ”

“ The Dons of my time were a distinguished body enough, brilliant scholars, kindly and sympathetic advisers, and inspiring and ardent teachers. No one could lightly underrate such men as ‘Jimmy’ Riddell, Edwin Palmer, Henry Smith, Green, Newman, and the great Jowett. With the last I was never brought personally much into contact, as, conscious of my deficiencies in the requirements for success as a classical scholar, I took the earliest opportunity of transferring my energies to the Law and History School, in which I saw more prospect of success. ”

“ When a shell passes very near to one its whistle increases to the roar of an express train, and when there is anything like a heavy bombardment on it is only those shells which pass dangerously close that one can hear above the general din.
More disconcerting than the actual burst of the shell is the ‘whirr’ of the splinters or, in the case of shrapnel, the loud ‘miaow’ of the flying bullets. ”

“ It may have been this that deceived the defenders into allowing the enemy to come almost to hand-grips before the fighting began, and anyhow it is certain that the first sounds of conflict that Papa heard were not, as he had expected, a long-drawn rapid rifle fire, but one single and then a few scattered shots, shoutings, and the clash of steel on steel. For the moment it looked as if the first rush was to swamp the defence and break through it, since a seething mass of men fighting fiercely with butt and bayonet eddied slowly back and actually into the street of the town. ”

“ Let us take leave of Henry V. with the remark that Shakespeare by his mouth anticipates Wellington’s policy and rebukes the Prussian devil’s gospel of frightfulness. ‘We give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French [411] upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner.’ And this is the Shakespeare whom the Germans pretend to understand better than his own countrymen. ”

“ We are certain to disagree about heaps of things.’
‘Of course we are. Quite certain!’
‘I tell you again,’ said Falloden, speaking with a strong simplicity and sincerity that were all the time undoing the impression he honestly desired to make—‘It’s a big risk for you—a temperament like mine—and you ought to think it over seriously. And then’—he paused abruptly in front of her, his hands in his pockets—‘Why should you—you’re so young!—start life with any burden on you? Why should you? It’s preposterous! I must look after Otto all his life.’
‘So must I!’ said Connie quickly. ”

“ A pleasant ‘drawing-room’ voice is that of our beautiful little field-howitzer. It goes off with more of a puff than a bang, and the shell sails away with a soft whirring note which is lost in the distance long before the formidable crash of the burst is wafted back from the German lines.
An alarming sound that one used to hear earlier in the war, when ammunition was of a lower quality than it is now, was that [465] of a shell with a ‘stripped’ driving band. Such a shell will whirl through the air at any angle and will land, possibly base first, a mile or two short of its mark. ”

“ Now ‘Percy’ is another fellow altogether. ‘Percy’ is the long 13-centimetre high-velocity German gun. At most ranges ‘Percy’ comes quicker than sound, and there is no warning of his approach. He goes off with a mighty bang, and his shell, when you do hear it, comes along with a terrific shriek. The only encouraging thought about ‘Percy’ is that he is not very common down the line, whereas we have many guns that must give the enemy similar thrills. ”

“ The advantage of numbers was largely with the Germans, but the narrowness of doorway and passage made it difficult for this weight of numbers to come at the defenders and beat them down; and the British were not only holding their own but were even driving the invaders slowly backward, when the sound of rapid blows, the riving and crashing of woodwork, the clash and tinkle of breaking glass told that one of the shuttered windows had been forced. ”

“ Diplomacy, as we now understand it, was an invention of the Renaissance, and especially the Italian Renaissance, flourishing in an exuberant youth and wearing the ornaments of humanist learning not always free from pedantry, and humanist accomplishment often straying into over-ingenious conceits. The letters of Elizabethan statesmen and scholars, even on ordinary business, often conceal their real point from a modern’s first reading by their refined excess of caution. ”

“ And here and there were persons who had a clear vision of the future to which was trending this new eagerness of women to explore regions hitherto forbidden them in the House of Life.
Connie had no such vision, but she had a boundless curiosity and a thrilling sense of great things stirring in the world. Under Nora’s lead she had begun to make friends among the women-students, and to find her way into their little bed-sitting-rooms at tea-time. ”