Robert Grimshaw

“ The portions to the left indicate early periods, those in the centre, present time; those at the right, time to come; each decade being represented by one-half inch of length of the chart. The various strips are devoted to different geographical divisions; that given to [32] our own country being sub-divided into strips corresponding to its various States and Territories. The depth of red tint shows the degree of respect or disrespect for woman; blue tints correspond to enactments rendering marriage more sacred, divorce more difficult, the rights of women more general and acknowledged. ”

“ They found the body where they had hidden it the night before, and in the shelter of a little grove of larches Grimshaw stripped and then reclothed himself in the pedlar's coarse and soiled under-linen, the worn corduroy trousers, the flannel shirt, short coat, and old black velvet hat. Waram was astounded by the beauty and strength of Grimshaw's body. Like the pedlar, he was blonde-skinned, thin-waisted, broad of back.
Grimshaw shuddered as he helped to clothe the dead pedlar in his own fashionable garments. "Death," he said. "Ugh! How ugly. How terrifying. How abominable." ”

“ The lighter red stands for polyandry, or that state in which the woman has several husbands, living peacefully together. This is due to a scarcity of women, owing to the female infants being exposed at birth or sold as slaves. ”

“ Monogamy is rare among the ruder races, but this strip of paler red in Ceylon is to represent the Veddahs, where each male takes but one wife, and is true to her alone until separated by death.
“Almost simultaneously with the fading in the red tint, which fading represents increasing respect for women, we have a deepening of the blue tint lines which stand for ecclesiastical and legal protection of the marriage relation and of the rights of woman. Thus we see the chart changing from deep red to reddish purple, from this through purple to bluish purple ”

“ The enactments concerning marriage and divorce [72] are the same in all civilized nations, and their enforcement most strict.
Only the physically perfect are permitted to marry, and stirpiculture is made a common and honored study. The local government being responsible for the maintenance of cripples and others physically as well as mentally ill, keeps strict watch over health and morals. Surgical and other hospitals are kept up at great expense, and any one meeting with an accident, or becoming ill, is treated at the hospital instead of at home. ”

“ This is a devil of a country, where one may see twenty men encounter death out there at one's eyes and sit and look as calm as this! My Flint, if I am mad, then you are it also, because you have no emotion no more than me.”
“We're neither of us mad, or bad either,” I said. “We'll be sorry enough when we've had time to realize that poor old Tommy Gregg is gone, and Jensen and the rest; but we're shipwrecked ourselves, and in a bit of a fix, Marky, and that's going to take all our thinking for some time.”
“Where are we?” asked the Marquis, looking round. ”

“ Grimshaw’s price for a clean bill of health was preposterous.
“I like the young man, my dear; I am glad to entertain him but not his ideas. It’s so easy to be lavish with other people’s money. Thousands of pounds——!”
She repeated this intermittently, as if repetition might exorcise an unholy suggestion.
“What does Mr. Grimshaw want to do?” asked the girl.
“Heaven knows! A system of drainage, waterworks, the rebuilding of cottages.”
“What Lord Wilverley has done.”
“A very rich man, child. And the best of good fellows—a very sincere friend of yours, by the way.” ”

“ Waram insisted upon this, he told me, because the pedlar's hair was fairly short and they had to establish some sort of a tonsorial alibi. When the floor of the little shop was thick with the sheared "petals," Grimshaw shook his head, brushed off his shoulders, and smiled. "It took twenty years to create that visible personality—and behold, a Swiss barber destroys it in twenty minutes! I am no longer a living poet. I am already an immortal—halfway up the flowery slopes of Olympus, impatient to go the rest of the way. ”

“ Why should you die?"
"I don't understand you, Mrs. Waite," said the stewardess, coolly. She was supporting Mrs. Arthurs now—supporting her toward the brushwood house.
"Well, I'll make you!" screamed the other, beyond all control. "You'll be the next, and I shall to have nurse you—I shall have to die!"
"I guess not," said the American lad. "I'll tend to the lady myself. There isn't any Mrs. Grundy on a plague island. Stewardess, you needn't nurse that lady there, anyhow. I'll do it. I guess we can't spare our ladies, no any more of them, that is."
They all spoke of Mrs. Arthurs as dead ”

“ But Waram disappeared between the larches, without, apparently, having heard. Grimshaw wavered, unable to decide upon the way to the highroad. He could not shake off a sense of loneliness and terror, as if he himself had gone whirling down to his death. Like a man who comes slowly back from the effects of ether, he perceived, one by one, the familiar aspects of the landscape—the delicate flowers powdering the plateau, the tasselled larches on the slope, the lofty snow-peaks still suffused with rosy morning light. ”

“ I pulled the Marquis back into the shade. “This is luck!” I whispered. “The village is quiet; we can very likely get into Mo’s own house, and have a look round. Come on as quick as you can.”
... How still the wide brown street was, under the terrible mid-day sun! Noon is the lonely hour in Papua, when the heat is at its worst; no man stirs about who is not compelled to do so. The women were in the yam fields, taking their mid-day rest from toil beneath the shelter of the bush. The men were loafing about somewhere in the depths of the forest, pretending to hunt. ”

“ Nambu looked at me reproachfully. The man-eater of the ranges does not rudely raise his voice unless he happens to be raiding a village; then—but you men who have been through the war don't need to be told. We are like the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady, all one family under our skins.
"Did you say there was a dim-dim girl here?" I cried. "Who is she. How long has she been here? And how—how—how did she get here?"
You cannot say "how the devil" in any native language; it is a pity.
"What's a dim-dim girl?" asked Rothery, who knew the word for "woman." ”

“ V With the colder weather, Upworthy boasted a cleaner bill of health, although the more elderly villagers suffered abominably from rheumatism. Anxious to “spare” Lady Selina, but even more anxious to mitigate conditions which might be improved, Grimshaw tackled Gridley, the power behind the throne exercising a sly, persistent authority which few could measure, least of all the lady of the manor. Gridley had succeeded his father as bailiff of the Chandos domain. Thousands of just such men are to be found in our southern and western counties. ”

“ And he sang of things he had recently learned—the gaiety of birds, the strength of his arms, the scent of dusk, the fine crystal of a young moon, wind in a field of wheat....
At first the children listened. Then, because he talked so long, the little girl leaned slowly over against his shoulder and fell asleep, while the boy fingered the knives, jangled the key-rings, clipped grass stalks with the scissors, and wound the watches one after the other. The sun was low before Grimshaw left them. "When you are grown up," he said, "remember that Pierre Pilleux sang to you of life." ”

“ This pedlar and I are social outcasts. And there is Dagmar in England, weeping her eyes out because of divorce courts and more public washing of dirty linen. You love her. I don't! Why not carry this fellow to the rochers, to-night after dark? To-morrow, when I have changed clothes with him, we can throw him into the valley. It's a good thousand feet or more. Would there be much left of that face, for purposes of identification? I think not. You can take the mutilated body back to England and I can go on to Chamonix, as he would have gone." Grimshaw touched the pedlar with his foot. "Free." ”

“ At the ends of those two threads, far down among the coral and the sponges and the beds of weed and shell, crept all alone at the bottom of the sea two men, one with the ransom of a king hung round his neck, the other...
What was the other doing?
I did not mean to be very long finding out.
“Run us up as close to the Gertrude as you can, without interfering,” I said.
The captain worked a little nearer. “That's about as far as I can go,” he said. “And now I'm going to send my diver down. You and his lordship can see everything beautiful. ”

“ It grew light; we were on our way. The village where Nambu had said we should find the dim-dim girl was one that I had known long ago; I needed no guide to the lifting precipice, plumed with dangling trees, up which our pathway lay.
Rothery, though he had as plucky a soul as every small, weak body held, seemed somewhat daunted at the sight of this typical Papuan "road," with its faint streak of liana ladder, half rotten, dropped from ledge to ledge and waiting in the wind raised by the waterfall that spumed beside it.
"It looks bad," he said. "Can we take a long time?" ”

“ I heard her murmur as he gave her his arm. “How many trusting little women’s hearts have you charmed away? Do you know the power you have? I think you must be very cruel.”
“No, for I make my spelling gently; ‘fair and softly is always to be blest!’” he answered, through the yelling of the wind. Mrs. Daisie put up her hand anxiously among her curls to see, I think, if nothing was breaking away from its moorings and, being assured of this, fainted a little more in the corner to which the Marquis had conducted her. Her head grazed his shirt-front as she sank back in her chair. ”

“ Would he expand into a splendid somebody? Would he “furnish up”?—to use Brian’s favourite expression about a four-year-old. Dr. Pawley had said of him: “He rings true,” with an allusion to the eighteenth-century wine-glasses which he collected. And, after that happy comparison, she had never heard Grimshaw speak without noting the lingering resonance of his tones. Head and body were admirably proportioned, rich in line and contour, but not aggressively so. ”

“ The fire was low in the marea, but it cast up a deep red glow toward the roof, giving light enough to see the contents of the wonderful bag, as Mo tumbled them out on the floor beside us. The salt had been too much for him; he accepted it eagerly, and was eating it like sugar, smearing his paint all to bits, and nearly choking himself as he sucked it down. These inland natives hardly ever see salt, and they are as keen for it as an alligator for fish, once they get the chance of a little.
Everything that was in the bag the Marquis handled, weighed, even smelt. ”

“ II By the middle of July he was installed in rooms in Upworthy under the fostering care of the Rockrams, two old servants from the Manor. Tom Rockram had been Stimson’s predecessor, before the old Squire died, and his wife had soared from scullery-maid to cook in the same establishment. Their cottage faced the village green, and stood in its own garden. Each spring and summer the Rockrams took in boarders, but, at a hint from Dr. Pawley, they were glad to get a permanent “gentleman.” Grimshaw was given a good bedroom and sitting-room, and he had the use of Pawley’s dispensary. ”

“ You can never accept the look of things in the mountains, and besides we had to keep under shadow of the bush all the way.
It was certain that the women of the place would be coming home from their gardens about 5, and if the dim dim girl caught sight of us I was fairly certain she would make a bolt of it. I should have been none the worse pleased, but I didn't want to disappoint Willis, since he was set upon carrying the matter through.
We came in sight of a break in the deep forest and of a little track leading to it; we concealed ourselves and sat still. ”

“ You probably know about the last phase of Grimshaw's career—who doesn't? There is something fascinating about the escapades of a famous man, but when he happens also to be a great poet, we cannot forget his very human sins—in them he is akin to us.
Not all you have heard and read about Grimshaw's career is true. But the best you can say of him is bad enough. He squandered his own fortune first—on Esther Levenson and the production of "The Sunken City"—and then stole ruthlessly from Dagmar ”

“ There was the sound of a mighty waterfall not far away. I felt once more to make sure—as if one who had seen the battlefields of Europe did not know death at first sight!—and then I left Grace for a moment, warning her to keep hidden, tramped through a few rods of tangled bush, came out on the verge of a great white torrent that seemed to light up the moonless night, and with a single word of farewell gave Willis' body to the deep.
"You are eating tears," whispered Grace to me as we ran along side by side through the dusk, her hand in mine. "Why?" ”

“ Then his thoughts revert to Katherine Grey. Whatever her faults may be, fortunately they are all the very opposite of Miss Grimshaw's: mind and body are altogether formed in a very different mould. After this, the conversation comes to a close, and father and daughter separate—she to lament over the Admiral's infatuation; he to wander for an hour or two more through the dimly lighted empty suite of rooms.
Laura's words have moved him strangely. ”

“ So I sat down on the floor of the marea again, and lit my pipe before I would answer.
“Flint, my very good friend, I fear that you are in a blooming wax,” said the Marquis. “Why should you wax with me? What have I done?”
I took out my pipe. “You don’t seem to remember,” I said, “that we’re in a hostile country. I’d be obliged if you would.” I put back my pipe.
“What did you see?” asked the Marquis, quite grave and sensible now.
“I saw nothing,” I said. “I don’t know that there was anything. But I think I heard—the little creak that some of these big blackwood bows make.” ”