James White

“ The white men are many and they know as much as they are many. Let them send more people to teach us and our children and we will gladly welcome them. Some of our people have been bad. Bad white men have made them worse. We want the bad men to be kept away, but we will welcome good white men, and our children shall learn [180] from them and be wise."
Then Sus-quat-i-mi arose, and in heavy and somewhat pompous speech said: "Many years ago our white brother made my sun-picture at Peach Springs. He has eaten tunas, mescal, pinion nuts, and corn at my hawa. ”

“ It was James's habit to disconcert his opponent by a rush of talk while he himself made certain of his next move. Nothing flusters a man more, James considered, than to brush aside his attempts to explain himself. But now the arguments, the things he could say to Mary, were springing up, were marshalling themselves in his mind, demanding expression. ”

“ That James as a husband might remain unblemished in goodness and wisdom she had resolved to know nothing of James the public employer.
James for his part had not so much accepted her sacrifice as not noticed it, and now it was wasted. She knew now what her husband's goodness and wisdom were. He was neither honest, nor loyal, nor pure—he was a loose man, stained, unscrupulous; a man—she told herself this because it made her suffer—a man no better than the men who preyed on Florrie Wilson. ”

“ There was nothing monstrous about it, she told herself, nothing more strange, nothing more unbelievable, than that she had been a fool. James cared for the thing he had created, for his achievement, his title to respect in the eyes of the world. Any man can marry a wife, any man can beget children, but James had built up this business with the strength of his manhood, and now the business made James a powerful man. ”

“ Most men would have harangued them, lectured them, put their backs up. James preferred to preserve the amenities of life while out-manœuvring his opponents. Scolding was a woman's game, a fool's game, it never paid. If a man couldn't be the head of his own house without making a fuss about it he deserved what ignominy came his way. James went upstairs in excellent spirits to kiss Mary good-bye. ”

“ But when men or nations are cheated in the object of their hopes, it does not take long to turn disappointment into hatred. The Restoration of 1660 was to bring back the golden age of the first years of James,—the prosperity without the tyranny, the old hereditary rule without its high pretensions, the manliness of the English yeoman without his tendency to fanatical innovation. And instead of this Arcadia there was nothing to be seen but a kingdom without dignity, a king without honesty, and a people without independence. ”

“ TIME drew on towards the wedding, and James's contentment increased. He felt very well that autumn—his summer holiday had agreed with him—and he was vain of his vigour at an age when many men are already a little wearied by life. Fate, too, was treating him kindly. Mary had settled down, Laura's child was a boy, and a very fine boy, and here was Rosemary marrying an exceedingly decent young fellow who was bound to get on. Moreover business was booming. James went down to his office every morning in an excellent temper. He had made up his mind now that he would carry his cinema project through. ”

“ She was not one of the women who were fitted, either by training or by an adventurous disposition to work with men, at men's affairs, on a neutral footing. Men, for her, had been creatures to be pleased and to be cared for, and men had loved her and been good to her precisely because of this attitude of hers. To do what James asked would be to approach them on a different basis, and she felt it was hard she should be asked to risk what she had been so proud of—her successful relations with her husband and her son. ”

“ Women seem to have managed the whole political machine in those days, as the lengthy and mysterious letters of 'Mrs. White,' 'Jean Murray,' and others in the Carte MSS. testify.
We are not much concerned with the brothers of the Oglethorpe girls, but the oldest, Theophilus, turned Jacobite. That he had transferred his allegiance and active service to King James is proved by his letters from Paris to James, and to Gualterio in 1720 and 1721. [38] According to the second report on the Stuart Papers at Windsor, he was created a baron by James III in 1717. ”

“ But instead of inhaling the joys of the new day, James, whose Courtly name was "Jimmie," looked for yellow granules on the dasher, and promised God if He would let him grow up that his little boy should never have to churn.
Throwing sticks in the water to scare the fish.
Any boy knows that it is a degrading thing to churn, and he further knows that to wear a green-checked gingham apron is odious beyond description ”

“ Almost as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine as if they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies relieved by a faded green scarf, the delicate tone of which had been consecrated by the years, she was the picture of a serene, exquisite, but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or indeed all whose person, might have been powdered with silver. ”

“ A man like James was impatient of weakness and stupidity,—impatient, therefore, of poverty and helplessness. His workers were his material—his instruments—his troops; all men's games have, after all, she supposed, an analogy to their great game of war. Men enjoy a fight, they had rather get things by fighting, and when one fights someone is sure to be hurt. No, these poor girls in the restaurants were not James's charge, but hers, and she had neglected her charge as idle women neglect it everywhere. ”

“ For one thing Black was a woman, and though one does one's best to be generous to women it is not possible always to be square with them. But what was really the main point was that James was hardly, in this, a private man. He represented the business, the prosperity of the business. And the business had the right to demand honesty from all its employees, and constant, unswerving efforts from him to secure their honesty. Mary and Trent didn't seem to see that there was a principle involved. ”

“ James, whose disinclination to hear Mary arguing was hardening to impatience, found it impossible not to interrupt her, for by this time his own stock of arguments had replenished itself.
"My dear," he said, "I know how good your intentions are, and believe me I feel for the girls, though perhaps not as deeply as a sympathetic woman does. It isn't really there that we differ, that is why I said nothing about it. Everyone admits, nowadays, that the condition of society is far from perfect, I'm with you there ”

“ The sturdy Englishman who doffed his hat to the squire, and [456] joined his young lord in sports upon the green, in the beginning of James’s reign, was the same stout-hearted, strong-willed individual who stiffened into Puritanism and contempt of all earthly authorities in the unlovely, unloving days of the Rump and Cromwell. ”

“ One ought to see the poor as a whole and not only in the glimpses she obtained from the visits she paid with Miss Percival. But after all the chief thing was a change of attitude. James would think of the plans—that she could safely leave to him. Her task was to lead him to realise for himself that the people really needed his help. ”

“ James was detached and good-humoured, perfectly ready to talk things over with her. He seemed to think that it was really very creditable that she should have stuck to the thing like this, and taken such an interest in it. One gets rather too much into the habit of assuming that women do not care about serious things. Well then, to what revolutionary courses did she—dear little person that she was—wish to commit her wretched husband and his old-fashioned business? ”

“ Such was the popularity of Whitefield, that when he left the city, about one hundred and fifty gentlemen accompanied him as far as Chester, fifteen miles from Philadelphia, where he preached to about seven thousand people. At White Clay creek, he preached to eight thousand people, three thousand of whom, it is said, were on horseback. Many complimentary effusions to him appeared in the newspapers, and James Pemberton, a very distinguished Friend, said of him, "In his conversation he is very agreeable, and has not much of the priest; he frequents no set company." ”

“ Yes, they are alive, every fear-blanched billow and eddy of them—alive and frenzied with the sense of their doom. They see below them that nameless pause of the arrested current, and the high-tossed drift of sound and spray which rises up lamenting, like the ghosts of their brothers who have been dashed to pieces. They shriek, they sob, they clasp their white hands and toss their long hair; they cling and clutch and wrestle, and, above all, they appear to bite. ”

“ They sat down at a little table which was a very different affair from the great clattering see-saw in the saloon of the steamer. The wide doors and windows of the restaurant stood open, beneath large awnings, to a wide expanse studded with other plants in tubs and rows of spreading trees—beyond which appeared a large shady square without palings and with marble-paved walks. And above the vivid verdure rose other façades of white marble and of pale chocolate-coloured stone, squaring themselves against the deep blue sky. ”

“ So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute—his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there had been “treatment,” of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience. ”

“ The boy was sure that no man would dare to follow him, even if the fence would hold a man's weight. He had scurried up the bank before his pursuer had reached the side Jimmy had leaped from so lightly. He scooted through the underbrush. Again and again did the "champeen fence-walker" smile to himself as he slackened his pace to dodge a volley of rocks, and again and again did James Sears—an exemplary youth for the most part, who knew his Ten Commandments by heart—look exultingly at his pullet. ”

“ And how color and sound stood out in the transparent air! How audibly the little ripples on the beach whispered to the open sky! How our irreverent voices seemed to jar upon the privacy of the little cove! The mossy rocks doubled themselves without a flaw in the clear, dark water. The gleaming white beach lay fringed with its deep deposits of odorous sea-weed, gleaming black. The steep, straggling sides of the cliffs raised aloft their rugged angles against the burning blue of the sky. ”

“ My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made me, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe—the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. ”

“ She almost wished that she could take cover, just for the first impending interview, behind the dislike that had protected her when she ran away. But she could not do that—even on general grounds it is not right to dislike people if in any way one can manage to make oneself like them. And she owed it to James, moreover, to approach him in the kindest mood compatible with firmness. She had caused him, by her behaviour, quite enough discomfort and chagrin already. For the same reason she must not keep him waiting. ”

“ There was much excitement which would probably have died as other excitement had died before, had not the times produced a voice of compelling power. This voice spoke through an individual known as James King of William.
King was a man of keen mind and dauntless courage, who had tried his luck briefly at the mines, realized that the physical work was too much for him, and had therefore returned to mercantile and banking pursuits in San Francisco. ”

“ The dark walls of the hedgerows had turned into blooming screens, the sodden verdure of lawn and meadow been washed over with a lighter brush. We went forth without loss of time for a long walk on the great grassy hills, smooth arrested central billows of some primitive upheaval, from the summits of which you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties, within the scope of your vision, commingle their green exhalations. Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered slopes, white with the blossom of apples. ”

“ There are no white villages gleaming in the distance, no spires of churches, no salient details. It is all green, lonely, and vacant. If you wish to enjoy a detail, you must stop beneath a cluster of pines and listen to the murmur of the softly-troubled air, or follow upward the scaly straightness of their trunks to where the afternoon light gives it a colour. Here and there on a slope by the roadside stands a rough unpainted farmhouse, looking as if its dreary blackness were the result of its standing dark and lonely amid so many months—and such a wide expanse—of winter snow. ”

“ Among all the jewelled shrines and overwrought tabernacles of Italy, I have seen no such magnificent waste of labor, no such glorious synthesis of cunning secrets. As you wander, sweating and blinking, over the changing levels of the edifice, your eye catches at a hundred points the little profile of a little saint, looking out into the dizzy air, a pair of folded hands praying to the bright immediate heavens, a sandalled monkish foot planted on the edge of the white abyss. ”