McBride

“ Albert Edward Murphy looked at Alexander McBride, and after saying that he “would do,” went to dinner. During the prandial meal he explained to his family the properties and attributes of Alexander McBride; and then he and the children went over the long list of neighbour dogs who had oppressed John, the pug, and settled which dog Alexander McBride should chew up first. Alexander McBride should begin on the morrow to rend and destroy the adjacent dogs, and assume toward John, the pug, the rôle of guide, philosopher and friend. Albert Edward Murphy and his children were very happy. ”

“ Shrimplin was strongly inclined to close the door and beat a hasty retreat.
Still peering down the narrow room with its sagging shelves and littered counters, he crossed the threshold. Now he could see the office, a space partitioned off at the rear of the building and having a glass front that gave into the store itself. Here, as he knew, stood Mr. McBride's big iron safe, and here was the high desk, his heavy ledgers—row after row of them; these histories of commerce covered almost the entire period during which men had bought and sold in Mount Hope. ”

“ A man named McBride, who has from keeping a small news-stand gradually come forward until he is now one of the richest of the ticket speculators, “got left,” as he picturesquely observed, on the Bernhardt affair. In other words, rival speculators got all the best seats. So McBride put twelve men on duty in front of the Star Theatre box-office three days before the Irving sales were to open, and there they stayed on duty day and night, until the window was finally thrown open. Each one of these men got ten season-tickets for the Irving engagement, which is to last four weeks. ”

“ It is a difficult thing.”
“Go ahead, son—go right ahead. Take all the time you want.”
McBride started. He started nearly a year before, with the day when he realized that he was in love with Mary Caveny: he told night when, with Dennis Morgan, of the of their engagement; they happened to seek shelter from the storm in the same hotel which had offered sanctuary to Dick Bonham and the girl; of seeing them come out of the same room together; of their laughter over the situation. ...
He told of his knowledge of Morgan's astounding connection with Blair's “Spotlight” ”

“ No one who knows you believes—”
“Perhaps not. But a good many who do not believe do enjoy talking as though they did. And there are thousands of people in town who don't know me and who do believe. I'd rather face this alone. Oh, how could anybody print such a vile thing?”
McBride scrupulously avoided mention of Dennis Morgan's death, save in the presence of others, and then he allowed himself to be drawn into its discussion only when silence might have been regarded as strange. ”

“ The searchers were beginning to tire of beating.
"Roast the devil oot." "Ay, gie McBride a taste o' the fire."
"I'm thanking God for a fool," said Dan, "if the whins will just burn, but whins are dour revengefu' bushes."
"Burn," says Ronny—"burn; they'll hiv a bleeze ye'll see for twenty miles—we're bate, Dan."
"Na, na," says Dan. "Wait you, yonder's a twinkle, anither. Man, they'll mak' a bonny lowe, and waste a heap of good keep."
Men were rushing hither and thither with flaming branches, and already, when the breeze freshened, you could hear the roar and crackle. ”

“ Yes, I saw Mary down there with Bonham; and yes, I gave the facts to Blair. Blair printed nothing but the facts: he left it to the public to draw its own conclusions. I have no doubt Mary was deliciously innocent, hut it didn't look that way. And now”—he poked his head forward as he fired the question—“what in hell are you going to do about it?”
McBride stared amazedly. It was inconceivable that even consuming anger could drive the man to such an admission. His voice was quite steady as he answered Morgan's question. “I'm going to kill you,” he said evenly. ”

“ Unless I'm mistaken, all of you are far too busy to bother with a headstrong female."
The phone was silent for a few seconds, and the sounds of a light scuffle came over the line. Then a cool contralto came.
"I'm Sandra Drake," it said with a world of impertinence. "No man is going to tell me where I can't go!"
"Sister," snapped McBride, "you keep that up and we'll jolly well tell you where you can go!" McBride hung up and redoubled his efforts on the charge-reversal generator. "Women," he snarled, twisting the generator controls as though he had the Drake woman by the throat. ”

“ Morgan was much given to friendships in the underworld; he claimed as intimates a score or more of men and women whose means of livelihood were exceedingly shady, and they fed upon him like leeches. He was a man utterly without morals of any sort, devoid of ethical standards, and for a year or more McBride had known that it was Dennis Morgan who supplied to a shrieking local scandal sheet some of its most unsavory morsels.
This publication—Blair's 'Spotlight'—was a particularly obnoxious thing; a stench in the nostrils of a decent community. ”

“ Dear Judy:
Your letter is here. I have read it twice, and with amazement. Do I understand that Jervis has given you, for a Christmas present, the making over of the John Grier Home into a model institution, and that you have chosen me to disburse the money? Me—I, Sallie McBride, the head of an orphan asylum! My poor people, have you lost your senses, or have you become addicted to the use of opium, and is this the raving of two fevered imaginations? I am exactly as well fitted to take care of one hundred children as to become the curator of a zoo. ”

“ There was in "The Vision of Bunt McBride" a certain sane and healthy animalism that hurt nobody, and that, no doubt, Overbeck, in later books, would modify. He had taken life as he found it to make his book; it was not his fault that the teamsters, biscuit-shooters and "breed" girls of the foothills were coarse in fibre. In his sincerity he could not do otherwise in his novel than paint life as he saw it. ”

“ It was finished, then, and Sandra Drake was more than voluble in her thanks.
"Never mind the thanks," said McBride, "or we'll be into that original wrangle as to who owes who what kind of a favor. Where we sit out here in the lens, favors are not weighted and set down as an asset. Forget it. G'wan out there and get Steve Hammond—and do not forget for one minute I'm coming after you if you're gone more than thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours! Get me?"
"Sure thing," said Drake. "And, John, you're pretty swell." ”

“ All the furniture was carved and upholstered and gorgeous; the people I met were beautifully dressed and low-voiced and well-bred, but it's the truth, Daddy, I never heard one word of real talk from the time we arrived until we left. I don't think an idea ever entered the front door.
Mrs. Pendleton never thinks of anything but jewels and dressmakers and social engagements. She did seem a different kind of mother from Mrs. McBride! If I ever marry and have a family, I'm going to make them as exactly like the McBrides as I can. ”

“ Even the vegetation which the spring-time may have brought seems to vanish from the earth, the precipitated alkali whitens the valleys, and from all the naked hills comes up a glare of dazzling light as from a desert absolute. ”

“ The splintery fragments, broken as macadamizing stone, form over the entire surface a natural riprap, on which the elements spend their force in vain. Such buttes are not transient; the fire has saved them, and in this dry climate they may stand forever. ”

“ Then our Stokes guns joined in, and, if there ever was an infernal machine, that is it. Vomiting out shells as fast as they can be fed into its hungry maw; so fast, indeed, that it is possible for seven of them to be in the air at one time, from one gun, at a range of less than four hundred yards, it is the last word in rapid-fire artillery. ”

“ Far as you can look or listen there comes not the faintest sign or whisper of living thing. No bird visits those forgotten hills, no insect stirs about your feet or beats with humming wings the air; the very wind is silent, and from the glowing buttes, as from a furnace, the heated atmosphere rises in shimmering columns. ”

“ We may discover the coal on one side of a broad-topped hill, and on the other we may look from the hill's summit down through gaping rifts to the same horizon and see everything molten at white heat, while hot air, smoke, and coal-gas, as from a furnace, make the region almost inaccessible. ”

“ But in every engagement there comes a time when every man is "on his own," when it is impossible for the officer, if he be still living, to direct the action. The idea that an officer can exercise "fire control" as taught in our service schools, or can personally direct the fire of a number of machine guns, once the action has started, is ridiculous. The limits of one man's sphere of action, at such a time, are extremely small. ”

“ As the battalion was crossing the long open stretch we came under fire from an enemy machine gun and some men were hit. There's no use talking, no other weapon used in the war is as deadly as a machine gun. Where you can walk through an artillery barrage with a few casualties, the well-directed fire of only one machine gun will pile men up as fast as they come along. ”

“ But we soon found them. The one-eyed gentleman—whose name I never mastered—and several of the children were discovered astride the shiny fat pigs of the merry-go-round whirling in the air above our heads. ”

“ When the final history of this war is written, it is doubtful if any other name will so appeal to the Canadian as Ypres and the Ypres Salient; every foot of which is hallowed ground to French, Belgians, British and Colonials alike; not a yard of which has not been consecrated to the cause of human liberty and baptized in the blood of democracy. ”

“ Eloi
No one realizes better than I the utter futility of attempting to describe a modern battle so that the reader can really understand or visualize it. There are no words in any vocabulary that convey the emotions and thoughts of persons during the long days and nights of horror--of the continual crash of the shells, the melting away or total annihilation of parapets and dug-outs; being buried and spattered with mud and blood; with dead and wounded everywhere and, worst of all, the pitiful ravings of those whose nerves have suddenly given way from shell shock. ”

“ To the left, another group of farm buildings, called Shelley Farm, was in about the same condition, and where St. Eloi had been was nothing but a barren waste. Not a sign of a house or any part of a house was visible; not a brick remained and even the roads, the fine stone-paved roads, had been obliterated. Where had been hedges or trees there was nothing but a desolate expanse of mud which, from a distance, appeared to be a smooth level plain. For a good six hundred yards back of our front line there was not a shrub or bush or tree nor any landmark of any kind. ”

“ In the midst of a battle many men do things which would, at other times, fill them with horror. The excitement of combat seems to breed a lust for killing and the sight of blood is like a red flag to a bull. This, unfortunately, is not confined to Germans. One of our officers who had had a brother killed a few days before deliberately shot and killed several unarmed prisoners. ”

“ A properly directed machine-gun barrage is far more difficult to traverse than anything the artillery can put down and the combination of artillery and machine guns, working together, whether on the offensive or defensive, represents the highest point ever attained in the effective use of fire in battle. ”

“ Our instructors have been technical theorists of the very highest order, basing their theories and working out their problems on the experience furnished by previous wars and of course it is difficult for them to realize that nearly every hypothesis which they have assumed in working out their theories has been proved false. They can not believe that "fire control" of infantry, as taught in the school of fire, has no place in modern trench warfare. ”

“ But the coal is not universally present. Many places are free from it entirely, and here erosion may continue unchecked its peaceful processes until all is beaten down to the common plain. In other places the coal takes fire in but isolated hills, and these become permanent while all else is reduced to prairie. And now we remember that away to the east the plains sometimes show a solitary hill, whose sides, reddening beneath the sparse grass, and whose summit, glowing in the sunshine, betray its origin. ”

“ As soon as we were over the parapet we would split and each go his way, to meet later at an appointed place. One man, alone, can get away (p. 107) with a lot of things that would be impossible for two, but we observed the letter, if not the spirit, of the order.
We had cleared out one of the compartments of the big barn at Captain's Post, carefully plugging up all the shell-holes with sand-bags and other materials so that no light could filter through, and there, at night, would build a great fire in the middle of the stone floor and proceed to enjoy ourselves. ”

“ Even the lignite is no exception. If, now, in connection with this fact, and remembering the arrangement of the strata, we take into account the arid climate which prevails in all these regions, we are in position to understand much of the peculiar conformation of the Bad Lands. In the winter the snows are light, and in summer the rain that falls comes in sudden, violent, but short-lived storms. ”