Harkness

“ Through Pain we reach Power.
"I test you with pain, and as you overcome the pain so do you climb up beside me, who have also overcome it, and we are in time as gods knowing good and evil.... A concrete case, Mr. Harkness. I slash your face with a knife. You are so powerful that you take the pain, twist it in your hand and throw it away. You rise up to me, and suddenly I, who have inflicted the pain on you, love you because you have taken my power over you and used it for your soul's advantage."
"And do I love you because you have slashed my face?" asked Harkness.
Crispin's eyes narrowed. ”

“ He seemed to be compelled to push against blankets of cold damp obstruction. The Fog assumed a personality, and it was a personality strangely connected in Harkness's confused brain with that little red-headed man who seemed now always to be pursuing him. He was somewhere there in the fog; it was part of his game that he was playing with Harkness, and he could hear that sweet melodious voice whispering: "Pain, you know. Pain. That's the thing to teach you what life really means. ”

“ But what an old scamp her father must be, Harkness thought, to give her up like this to a man for whom she has no love, who doesn't love her. Why did she do it? And what kind of a man is the father-in-law of whom she is so afraid and who dominates his son so absolutely? ”

“ Harkness, I have devoted my later years to the solution of this problem.
"I feel, if I may say so, without too much arrogance, that I am intending to help poor human nature along the road to a better understanding of life. Poor, muddled human nature. Defeated always by Fear. Yes, Fear. And if they have surmounted Pain and stand with their foot on its body, what remains? It is gone, vanished. I myself am increasing my power every day. First one, then another. First through Pain. ”

“ The path appeared. "Tell me, did you have a queer time with Crispin—the elder one, I mean?"
"I've never had so strange a conversation with any one," said Harkness. "Madness is a queer thing when you are in actual contact with it, because we have, every one of us, enough madness in ourselves to wonder whether some one else is so mad after all. He talked the most awful nonsense, and dangerous nonsense too, but there was a kind of theory behind it, something that almost held it all together. A sort of pathos too, so that you felt, in spite of yourself, sorry for the man." ”

“ Harkness. He is everything to me in the world. He has no one to look after him but myself. He is, as you must have seen, very nervous and susceptible to different personalities. I could see at once to-night that your personality is one that would have a very disturbing effect on him. ”

“ The philosophy of pain as related to power one might perhaps term it. God—of whose existence no thinking man can truly permit himself to doubt—have you ever thought, Mr. Harkness, that the whole of His power is derived from the pain that He inflicts upon those less powerful than Himself? We conceive of Him as a beneficent Being, and from that it follows that He must have determined that pain is, from Him, our greatest beneficence. It is plainly for our good that He torments us. ”

“ Every one has their own secret importance for themselves—at least, every one in our village had. People you would have supposed had nothing in them, yet if you talked to them you soon saw that they fancied that the world would end if they weren't in it to make it go round."
"Well, honestly, that isn't my opinion of myself," Harkness answered. "I don't think that I help the world to go round at all. Of course, I think that there have to be all the ordinary people in it like myself to appreciate all the doings and sayings of the others, the geniuses—to make the audience. ”

“ You can never take off; the trees are close; a straight ascent is needed. And the wind—!"
He struggled in the other's grasp as Harkness swung open the cabin door, his fear of what seemed a certain death overmastering his fear of the weapon. He was shouting for help as Harkness threw him roughly aside and leaped into the ship.
Outside Harkness saw running figures as he threw on the motors. A pistol's flash came sharply through the storm and dark. A window in the chateau flashed into brilliance to frame the figure of a girl. Tall and slender, she leaned forward with outstretched arms. ”

“ He glanced quickly round. Only Harkness of all the men present had seen it.
‘Turn the ’eap over, sir,’ said the foreman, evidently as surprised as the younger man, ‘see if there are any more.’
Broughton sifted the sawdust through his fingers, and his astonishment was not lessened when he discovered two others hidden in the little pile.
He gazed at the three gold coins lying in his palm. As he did so Harkness gave a smothered exclamation and, stooping rapidly, picked something out from between two of the boards of the hold’s bottom. ”

“ I've never broken my word to any one. I won't break it now. It's only for a few days."
"How can you be so selfish, Hesther, as to want to upset every one's plans just for a whim of your own? For myself I don't care. You could go home for ever for all I care. I didn't want to marry any one. But what my father wished had to be."
She clung to him then, crying again and again between her sobs:
"Oh, let me go home! Let me go home! Let me go home!"
Harkness fancied that the man put his hands on her shoulders. ”

“ Along the market-place went the beadle, the drum, the trumpet and the flute.
For a moment a marvellous silence fell.
To Harkness this silence was exquisite. The myriad stars, the high buildings, their façades ruby-coloured with the leaping light, the dark piled background, the crowd humming now with quiet, like water on the boil, the glow of rich suffused colour sheltering everything with its beautiful cloak, the rich voices tossing into the air the jolly song, the sense of well-being and the tradition of the lasting old time and the spirit of England eternally fresh and sturdy and strong ”

“ I do not mean to be severe when I assert that, nine times out of ten, it is the victim's own fault that she is pushed out of the way, or, as our slangy youth of to-day put it, "is not in it." It is your business and mine to be in it, heart, soul, and body, and to keep our places there by every effort in our power. A fear of that which is high, or mental or physical inertia, or, to be less euphemistic and more exact, laziness—should not deter us. ”

“ But I always failed: he always seemed to avoid frankness, evidently suspecting me of insincerity, and dreading the folly of any emotional display. I could read in his face and the tone of his voice, "What is the good of talking? I know all the facts already, and I know what is on the tip of your tongue, and I know that you will say one thing and do another." At first I was mortified by his dread of frankness, but I came later to think that it was rather the absence, on his part, of any need of frankness. ”

“ Harkins, the village physician, stood at the foot of the bed, his honest face set in strong lines in anticipation of the worst. Many scenes of suffering had rendered him only more sympathetic with human sorrow, sympathetic with the real, increasingly intolerant of the false. At the bed-side stood the expert, who had come so far, at so great an expense-long, rough miles by auto that a few hours might be saved-who had come, they all believed, to decide the fate of the beloved girl who lay so death-like before them. ”

“ Afraid of a little trouble, a little pain, a little hardship? Do you pull away every time your conscience says, ‘Tommy, come this way: do that’? Do you jump about and shy, and try and run away, like the white horse, when your mother has told you to do something or other? And are you always nervous—afraid of being ‘found out’? And if you are alone in the dark do you get ‘creeps,’ and think there are bogeys coming after you?”
134
Some of the Cubs looked down on the ground, and answered nothing. ”

“ We have on such occasions found, if I am not much mistaken, the temper of our minds in a tenor very remote from that which attends the presence of positive pleasure; we have found them in a state of much sobriety, impressed with a sense of awe, in a sort of tranquillity shadowed with horror. The fashion of the countenance and the gesture of the body on such occasions is so correspondent to this state of mind, that any person, a stranger to the cause of the appearance, would rather judge us under some consternation, than in the enjoyment of anything like positive pleasure. ”

“ Harky pondered a question that has bemused all great philosophers: how can humans be so foolish?
Working at that rhythmic speed which Mun considered ideal for hoeing corn, missing not a single stroke, Harky went on. Discontent became anguish, and anguish mounted to torture, but Harky knew that the wrong move now might very well be ruinous. Like all people with great plans and strong opposition, he must suffer before he gained his ends. ”

“ AS common labour, which is a mode of pain, is the exercise of the grosser, a mode of terror is the exercise of the finer parts of the system; and if a certain mode of pain be of such a nature as to act upon the eye or the ear, as they are the most delicate organs, the affection approaches more nearly to that which has a mental cause. ”

“ Harcourt was in the right condition of mind to be benefited by your line of thought."
"Do you think that any one could be benefited by it?"
She was a little puzzled. Was he, like some young clergy-men she had known, eager for a few crumbs of praise for his first crude efforts? She was not one to give any faint and hollow commendation, and yet she did not wish to hurt his feelings. But her reply had a tinge of satire in it, for she had no patience with the weakness of vanity. ”

“ Their behaviour is so peculiar that I almost dread something has happened, with which I am unacquainted.
But perhaps it is the present temper of my mind: the effect of sensations too irritable, doubts too tremulous, and fears too easily excited. I cannot forget the conversation: it haunts me; and, did not Frank set me the example of fortitude, I have sometimes doubted of my own perseverance.
Oh, how mean is this in me! Is not the task I have proposed to myself a worthy and a high one? Am I not convinced it is an inevitable duty? ”

“ Sometimes the desire to share the interest of this ever-varying daily work with another, gripped him in the throes of its human necessity. When his deep, penetrating eyes had been long bent upon the shifting, shuffling mind of a patient, at last piercing with tender mercilessness to the very core of that mind's malady ”

“ This man Harker, by his own confession, had been employed for weeks to keep close watch upon us, and report all our doings to Bulwrag. That demon discovered that this low fellow bore a grudge against us, because of his expulsion from the cottage; and what better spy could he wish for than one who had lived in the place, and knew every twig and stone? It is awful for a simple man (who lives without much thought, and says and does everything without looking round) to find that all his little doings have been watched, by an eye that was anything except the eye of God. ”

“ I thought of her as she was, and could have hated myself for the devotion with which my heart regarded her!
I never closed my eyes the entire night. I lay down and walked about alternately, my mind in a perfect fever of conflict. Pride, a false pride, but not the less strong for that, alone sustained me. The general had announced to me that I was free. Be it so; I will no longer be a burden on his hospitality. La marquise hears the tidings with pleasure. ”

“ I think you are right,” said Harcourt, pleased with an illustration that suited his own modes of thinking.
“Yes, sir,” said Billy, gaining confidence by the approval; “a man is a ma-chine, and all the parts ought to be balanced, and, as the ancients say, in equilibrio. If preponderance here or there, whether it be brain or spinal marrow, cardiac functions or digestive ones, you disthroy him, and make that dangerous kind of constitution that, like a horse with a hard mouth, or a boat with a weather helm, always runs to one side.” ”

“ Now the vagabond position is clean outside all these tinsel trappings. The very circumstance that you renounce all the earlier conveniences of life without regret, and can exist without them, gives you a pleasant sense of elevation in your own eyes. You take up an unreservedly indulgent attitude towards yourself—though for the matter of that I for one have never been severe towards myself. T have never taken myself to task, the teeth of my conscience have never gnawed me, nor have I ever been scratched by the claws of my reason. ”

“ There's much more, but for most men that would be enough. To let it go unanswered is a confession of its truth."
"My invariable answer to such words," said Stuart Farquaharson slowly, "is made with a clenched fist. The triple immunity of your cloth, your age and your infirmity denies me even that reply." ”

“ And hence, as I conceive, it is, that all pleasures are greater in the expectation, or in the reflection, than in fruition; as all pains, which press heavy upon both parts of that unequal union by which frail mortality holds its precarious tenure, are ever most acute in the time of suffering: for how easy sit upon the reflection the heaviest misfortunes, when surmounted!—But most easy, I confess, those in which body has more concern than soul. ”