Anthony Hope

“ His nature was not of that sort, and he could not by a spasm of penitence nullify the events of the last few months. He must accept himself as altered by what he had gone through. Was there, then, any life left for the man he was now?
Undoubtedly, the easiest thing was to bid a quiet good-by to the life he had so mismanaged. He had never in old days been wedded to life. He had learnt always to regard it rather as a necessary evil than as a thing desirable in itself. Its momentary sweetness left it more bitter still. There would be a physical pang, inevitable to a strong man, full of health. ”

“ He released Ora and came towards Irene. "They've actually taken to sending me briefs! How are you, Lady Bowdon?"
"And the briefs keep him from me," said Ora; she was standing now in the middle of the room.
"Yes," he said with a smile at her. "The world's a very selfish thing; it wants a big share." He paused a moment, and went on, "I smell much tobacco; who's been here?"
"Sidney Hazlewood and Babba," Ora answered. "They came about the play. They want me to sign the agreement to-morrow."
"Ah, yes," he said wearily. "They're very persistent gentlemen. Your husband all right, Lady Bowdon?" ”

“ The moment I was by he started a step forward, asking:
"Pray, sir, do you know our king?"
"I never saw him," said I. "I hope to do so on Wednesday."
He said no more, but I felt his eyes following me till the door closed behind me. My saucy conductor, looking over her shoulder at me as she preceded me upstairs, said:
"There's no pleasing Master Johann for one of your color, sir."
"He prefers yours, maybe? " I suggested.
"I meant, sir, in a man," she answered, with a coquettish glance.
"What," asked I, taking hold of the other side of the candlestick, "does color matter in a man?" ”

“ He was different now from Marie Sarradet's placid, contented, half-condescending wooer, different from him who had worshipped Bernadette with virgin eyes—different now even from the forsaken and remorseful lover of that black hour at Hilsey. He had received an initiation—a beginning of wisdom, an opening of the eyes, a glimpse of what a man's life may be and hold and do for him. He had seen lights glimmering on the surface of other lives, and now and then, however dimly and fitfully, revealing their deeper waters. ”

“ He and she were the sort of people to live in that sort of world, and to stand as its representatives. A feeling came over me that it was a fair fine world, where life need not be a struggle, where a man need not live alone, where he would not be striving always after what he could never achieve, waging always a war in which he should never conquer, staking all his joys against most uncertain shadowy prizes, which to win would bring no satisfaction. I cried out suddenly, as I walked by myself through the night, "There's no pleasure in my life." ”

“ He was rather nervous about bringing the matter forward, fearing lest the mere idea of it, entertained by the junior partner, might seem treason in the eyes of his senior in the growing business of Gilbert Foot and Co.
The interview held one or two surprises for him. In this affair Andy was to learn the worth of a band of resolute friends, and to begin to understand how much men will do for a man who has convinced them that he can do things for himself also. For such a man the way is cleared of all but inevitable difficulties. ”

“ We awake to find done what our sleepy brains missed in the doing, and after months or years perceive ourselves in a second older by all that period. We are jogged by the elbow, roused ruthlessly and curtly bidden to look and see how we are changed, and wonder, weep, or smile as may seem best to us in face of the metamorphosis. A moment of such awakening came to me now; I seemed a man different from him who had, no great number of minutes before, hastened to the house, inspired by an insane hope, and aflame with a passion that defied reason and summed up life in longing. ”

“ Yet the knowledge counted; she looked on Grantley with different eyes. The revelation of himself, wrung from him by overpowering necessity, did its work. The resolve he had then announced, presumptuous beyond the right of mortal man, less than human in its cruelty, almost more than human in its audacity of successful revolt against destiny, might leave him hateful still, but showed him not negligible. He could not be put on one side, discarded, eliminated from her life. He was too big for that. Against her will he attracted her attention and constrained her interest. ”

“ I believe he thought I should win it."
"I don't exactly remember what it was, but you'd have had a good go for it, Andy."
"Leaping, running, wrestling, throwing the discus, hurling the spear—I think that's right. He was talking about it the very last day I sat at that desk—eight years ago! Yes, it's eight years since I went out to the war, and nearly five since I went to Canada. And I've never been back! Well, except for not seeing him and Nancy again, I'm glad of it. I've done better out there. ”

“ Reluctantly and gradually her ardent mind, by nature ever either buoyant in the heaven of assured hope or cast down to the depths of despair, bowed to the middle conclusion, and consented to look through the eyes of wisdom and experience. ”

“ Only a miracle could give that back to one who must cling to life, if he could keep his hold on it at all, at the cost of abandoning all the efforts and all the activities which had made it what it was alike for himself and for others. ”

“ When a man looks back on the past, reviewing in his mind the chances Fortune has given and the calls she has made, he always torments himself by thinking that he could have done other and better than in fact he did. Even now I lie awake at night sometimes, making clever plans by which I could have thwarted Rupert's schemes. ”

“ Had I chosen otherwise, I should have lived a more peaceful and died a richer man. Yet I do not repent; not riches nor peace, but the stir of the blood, the work of the hand, and the service of the brain make a life that a man can look back on without shame and with delight. ”

“ Yes, Andy was on the whole the happiest—happier even than Harry, to whom content, triumph, and challenge were all too habitual; happier even than Vivien, who had still some schooling to endure, still some of love's finicking doubts, some of hope's artificially prudent incredulity, to overcome; beyond doubt happier than Wellgood, who had lost two pounds, or Isobel Vintry, who had challenged and had been told that her challenge should be taken up—some day! ”

“ You will ask, and with reason, why I did not bring you up myself, and why I have delayed publicly acknowledging you as my daughter till the hour of my death. I can give no reason good to the world. I can give none good to my own conscience, unless it is a good one to say that a man is what God made him and that there are some things impossible to some men. ”

“ He reminded me now and then of Geoffrey Owen, but his enthusiasm was of a dryer sort; not humanity, but the abstract idea of progress inspired him; not the abolition of individual suffering, but the perfecting of his logical conceptions in the sphere of politics was his stimulating hope. And there was in him a strong alloy of personal ambition and a stronger of personal passion. Rather to my surprise Hammerfeldt showed no uneasiness at my friendship with him; I joked once on the subject and he answered:
"Wetter only appeals to your intellect, sire. ”

“ The time comes when no man can work. The darkness might fall on his task still unperformed. He became afraid, and therefore impatient. He could not wait for Sibylla to come to him. He must meet her—in something more than civility, in something more than a formal concession of her demands, more than an acquiescence which had been not untouched by irony and by the wish to put her in the wrong. He must forget his claims and think of his needs. ”

“ Bob eyed him with a questioning air; it was as though a man who had been on a merry-go-round were consulted by one who thought of venturing on the trip.
"People talk a great deal of rot," Bob reflected. "A girl isn't degraded, or unsexed, or anything of that sort, just because she sings for her living."
"Surely not," smiled Ashley.
The prejudices were crying out in pain as Bob's newborn idea crushed and mangled them.
"But the governor's so against all that sort of thing," Bob complained. Then he looked up at his friend. "That's mostly your fault," he added, with an awkward laugh. ”

“ Such was the work that a glimmer of hope could do.
To subtract instead of adding, to divide instead of multiplying, to lessen after increase, to draw out instead of paying in—these operations, whether with regard to a man's fame, or his power, or his substance, or even the scope of his tastes and the joy of his recreations, are precisely those which philosophy assumes to teach us to perform gracefully and with no exaggerated pangs. The man himself remains, says popular philosophy ”

“ As he believed himself able to conquer all external obstacles in his path, so he vaguely supposed that he could overcome and obliterate anything there might be wrong in himself, or at any rate that he could so outweigh it by a more prodigal display of his gifts as to reduce it to utter insignificance ”

“ It is easy to maintain that any given object of ambition, or even that any chosen excellence, is not indispensable; it needs more resolution to say that it is immaterial and no ground for regret that a man has been less of a man, a narrower creature, than it lay in his power to be ”

“ So far as it lay in his power he would banish Harry Belfield from Meriton and put an end to any career he might have there. He repeated to Andy more calmly, but not less forcibly, what he had shouted in his fury the evening before.
"Of course I want it kept as quiet as possible; but I don't want it kept quiet at the cost of that fellow's going unpunished—getting off scot-free! We've nothing to be ashamed of. Publicity won't hurt us, little as we may like it. But it'll hurt him, and he shall have it in full measure—straight in the face. ”

“ He is no longer weighing perplexing possibilities, but, having chosen his path, feels that he has done all that can be done, and that this conviction will enable him to bear with patience the outcome of his determination, whatever it may be. ”

“ But no training had succeeded in eradicating a strong mind's instinct of self-confidence, and if up till now he had committed no rebellion, it was because his reason had been rather a voluntary and eager helper than a captive or slave to the tribunal he distinguished from it by the name of conscience. ”

“ Wellgood by the thought of a mastery he deemed already established, and waiting only for his word to be declared; Vivien by a dream that glowed and glittered, refusing too close a touch with earth; Andy by a stout conviction that he must not think about chances, but work away at his timber (he still called it lumber in his inner mind) and his books, pausing only to thank heaven for a wonderful Saturday holiday.
But life was taking chances! Supine in her chair, silent since her one exclamation in championship of Harry Belfield, Isobel Vintry echoed the cry. Life was taking chances? ”

“ Yes, any business is a good enough excuse for leaving me! By heaven, I wonder if a king was ever served so badly as I am! Why did you trouble to get me out of Zenda? Nobody wants me, nobody cares whether I live or die."
To reason with such a mood was impossible. I could only assure him that I would hasten my return by all possible means.
"Yes, pray do," said he. "I want somebody to look after me. Who knows what that villain Rupert may attempt against me? And I can't defend myself, can I? I’m not Rudolf Rassendyll, am I?" ”

“ When the people about him were already sure, he was gradually reaching confidence—never the imperious self-confidence of commanding genius, which makes no question but that the future will be as obedient to its sway as the past, but a very sober trust in a proved ability, a trust based on no inner instinct of power, but solely on the plain experience that hitherto he had shown himself equal to the business which came his way—equal to it if he worked very hard at it, took it seriously, and gave all he had to give to it. ”

“ If our soul be our prison, and ourself the jailer, in vain shall we plan escape or offer bribes for freedom; wheresoever we go we carry the walls with us, and if death, then death alone can unlock the gates.
The scene grew quieter. Victoria rose, and threw herself into a chair in a weary, puzzled desolation; my mother sat quite still, with eyes intent on the floor, and lips close shut. A sense of awkwardness grew strong on me; I wanted to get out of the room. They would not fight any more now; they would be very distant to one another ”

“ That things we have desired did not come to pass may be sad; that they never could have is sadder, by so much as the law we understand seems a more cruel force than the chance that hits us once, we know not whence, and may never strike again. The chance seems only a perverse accident falling on us from outside; the law abides, a limitation of ourselves. Towards such a consciousness as this Mervyn struggled. ”

“ I lay there, thinking, as men sick and weary in body will, of the dangers and the desperate nature of the risk, rather than of the hope which its boldness would have inspired in a healthy, active brain. ”

“ If a man were good it seemed to Owen but natural; if he were a rogue my tutor would set it down to anything in the world save his own fault. Everybody could be mended if everybody else would try. Thus he brought with him into our conservative military court and society the latest breath of generous hope and human aspiration that had blown over Oxford. Surely this was a strange choice of Hammerfeldt's! ”