Strode

“ Strode, with dancing eyes. "What have we to do with time?" She took Felisi's hand in hers.
"Perhaps you didn't know you had married a mermaid. Behold, O Caliban—we are about to show off!"
The two figures slid beneath the water as silently as seals. The ripples expanded in ever-widening circles, and were still.
At the end of perhaps half a minute, which to Strode seemed more like half an hour, he went to the edge of the pool and looked down. There was nothing—nothing but a pale green abyss fringed with swaying weed. Stella had always been fearless where water was concerned, he remembered. ”

“ A shadow appeared in the pool, deep down, then shot to the surface like a meteor, resolving itself into a sleek head that turned on Strode its staring, terrified eyes. It was the native girl—alone. The fact smote Strode with the force of a physical blow. For a moment he crouched there, stunned into impotence; then without word or look, plunged into the pool.
As a dive it was a poor performance, Felisi decided, and it soon became evident that Bunny could not swim, either. ”

“ Strode had escaped from an interminable ship's concert, and was enjoying a quiet half -hour with a novel on his bunk, when a distraught figure appeared in the doorway, sprang forward at sight of him, and seized him by the arm. It was Challoner's son-in-law.
"Where's father—where's Mr. Challoner?" he demanded fiercely.
"How should I know?" said Strode.
"But—but you were always with him. We made sure you'd know. He's gone—vanished, I tell you. What's to be done?"
"Look for him," said Strode, scrambling from the bunk and into his shoes. "A man can't vanish off the Boreas." ”

“ Challoner ended on a note of defiant futility, and glared upward at the scudding cloud- wrack.
"Aren't you rather hard on yourself?" Strode suggested.
"Not a bit. I've only taken a look at myself rather late in life, and don't like the view." ”

“ Strode demanded.
"I didn't imagine anything. I just waited to see."
"So did I," said Strode.
"It seems I've been lucky," mused the girl, staring seaward with a gravity that seldom left her. "You just do what you're told without wanting to know any more. Do you think you can keep it up?"
"Why not?" said Strode. "Most of us did that for five straight years not so very long ago."
The girl nodded understandingly. "Anyway, I've found out all that I wanted to," she went on. "If you can obey orders on Wakiki beach, you can obey them anywhere."
"I'm inclined to agree with you," said Strode. ”

“ I tell you the prairie's hard on a woman—hard."
"'For better or worse,' you know," Strode reminded him.
"Oh, it's all right for us to talk that way," objected the other. "We've got our work. It's queer the grip it gets on us, too. We begin to think we're really doing something. It's all I know—how to work, and what's it done but lose me all I was working for?"
"Me?" The man leant back in the chair with his legs asprawl and a bitter smile on his lips. "I've got a few bottles up at the shack. ”

“ Lamb had allowed a choreboy to do something else than saw wood, but with such disastrous results to life and property that he was resolved never to repeat the experiment. Consequently it was Strode's lot to stand on one leg for the greater part of each day, wielding a bucksaw, and slowly but surely raising a veritable monument of sawn timber. In this fashion he passed through the inevitable stages of backache, blisters, and bone-weariness to a surprising physical fitness and a fuller appreciation of such achievements as the Egyptian Pyramids. ”

“ Felisi sighed.
And curiously enough Mrs. Strode chanced to sigh at much the same moment as she leant over the yacht's rail watching an outrigger canoe and its diminutive bronze occupant rising and falling on the gentle swell. What it must be to have nothing, and therefore happiness! To live in an earthly paradise and a sulu. To know nothing of the fetish of civilization. To be something more than an automaton to the man you love, even though he be your husband.... ”

“ They will know from experience that when all thought is circumscribed by mechanical and monotonous toil, one of two things is bound to happen: the toiler either rebels and seeks fresh fields of activity, or succumbs and is converted into a human machine.
Strode escaped this latter fate as by a miracle. Towards the end of his eighth week of bucksawing he had mechanically constructed an edifice of firewood no less imposing than Mr. Lamb's house itself, and was standing on one leg chatting brightly to himself, when he became aware that he was not alone. ”

“ STRODE, RALPH (fl. 1350–1400) , schoolman, was perhaps born, like most of the name, in the west of England. The Scottish origin with which he is often credited is an invention of Dempster. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow before 1360, and where John Wycliffe was his colleague. Strode acquired a high reputation as a teacher of formal logic and scholastic philosophy, and wrote educational treatises which had a wide vogue. ”

“ And the one who's never done anything, and never will do anything if he can help it. Oh, I tell you, we get all sorts in here."
"I expect you do," said Strode, "but I don't seem to recognise myself yet."
"No," agreed the agent, "that's why I'm taking the trouble to talk to you."
Strode was encouraged into turning back from the door.
"Mind, I'm not raising any false hopes," warned the other, with a dolorous eye fastened on his victim like a poultice, "but if you're willing to do anything until you can do something, there's a mixed farmer out Lakeville, Ontario way, wanting a choreboy." ”

“ He did not know, except that he was still in the dark, and darkness is uninviting, Then it occurred to him that he was weakening, even as his employer had imagined that he might, and the next morning found him setting out on an exhaustive search of every harbour in the group.
Like their owners, no craft is everything that can be desired. There is bound to be a compromise somewhere. But on the whole, and when the shipyard had done with her, Strode was passably satisfied with the auxiliary cutter that he found. ”

“ An hour later Strode was pacing the deck with ill-concealed impatience. He was not used to being baulked of anything, and in the present instance he was aware of an inordinate and unaccountable desire to set eyes on his wife.
Afternoon tea, served by the implacable Parks, proved a dreary affair, and by five o'clock impatience had given way to a senseless but none the less acute anxiety. He might go and meet her. It would be a pleasant surprise. He called for the sailing dinghy, and set out for the reef. After all, it was only about half a mile long, and Stella must be somewhere on it. ”

“ It was a terrible mistake. I should never have come." She gave a hard little laugh. "Four years is too long. A woman changes, and men's memories are short. I began to think of these things some time ago, and on the boat——"
"On the boat," Strode continued glibly, "the idea took such a hold that you decided to prove it one way or the other by letting Tatham recognise you first. If he did, well and good. If not——"
"You seem to know a great deal," murmured the girl.
"You see, I've been with Tatham nearly a month," said Strode, "and that was his idea, too." ”

“ And we humour 'em. Why?"
"I wonder," ventured Strode.
Grouch glared at him unseeingly for a space. "Because we're fools," he jerked out. "Because we're hidebound, hamstrung, everlastingly damned by something—something I can't put a name to."
"Why not call it tradition?" suggested Strode.
"All right, anything you like." Grouch rocked with scorn on the edge of the bridge. "But it's got to be shaken off before a feller will do any good for himself. I'm going to shake it off," he announced firmly.
"You'll find it goes deeper than you think," warned Strode. ”

“ Strode looked up with a slightly puzzled expression. "Oh, it's not that," he said. "The Islands suit me all right, but I don't seem to suit them."
"Drink?" queried Bowman, his smile broadening to, cover the blatancy of the question.
Strode shook his head. "No," he said, "that doesn't worry me."
"Mat fever?" (Indolence.)
"No, I don't think I've ever been accused of that."
"Then what the mischief's the matter with the Islands?"
"They don't let a man work," said Strode.
Bowman was surprised into letting his tea get cold. ”

“ Purvis said and did while Strode was in her amazing employ. His duties appeared to consist of rising at any hour that seemed good to him, mealing with his employer and her daughter Joyce—a taciturn but otherwise attractive girl of about twenty-five—and occasionally rolling the drive, supervising the vegetable garden, or posting letters. Of an evening he was expected, and usually contrived, to make himself pleasant to the family and any chance visitors, and on the last day of each month Mrs. Purvis handed him, almost apologetically, a very clean envelope containing thirty dollars. ”

“ As when John Milton based "Il Penseroso" upon the verses "In Praise of Melancholy," commencing—
Hence, all ye vain delights!
and ending
Here stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley,
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lonely melancholy.
These have been claimed for Fletcher, since he inserted them in his play of "The Nice Valour," but possibly were composed by Dr. William Strode, who flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century. Dr. Strode is also thought to have written a lyric often quoted as Dryden's, "The Commendation of Music," which contains some delicate lines ”

“ A few days later I received a letter from Strodtmann, in which he narrated the results of the séance, as follows: The clairvoyante took one of my envelopes in her hand and said this contained the hair of a young man who looked thus and so. She then described my appearance in the most accurate way, and added that this young man had won notoriety by his connection with a bold enterprise, and that at the present time he was on the other side of a deep water, in a large city and in the circle of a happy family. ”

“ Broad strokes, a line here, one there, with much left to the imagining--such will serve best for the painting of a picture like this--a picture wherein every ordinary bond of human life, the nexus of man's society, is shattered. Where everything must strive to reconstruct itself from the dust. Where the future, if any such there may be, must rise from the ashes of a crumbling past.
Broad strokes, for detailed ones would fill too vast a canvas. Impossible to describe a tenth of the activities of Beatrice and Stern the next four days. ”

“ Strodtmann was not able to preserve order among his things, and as I, too, had my weaknesses in that direction, our room, which served at the same time as a living and sleeping apartment, often presented the picture of most wonderful confusion. It is an old experience, that a person who is not himself very orderly finds the disorderliness of another sometimes quite unendurable. ”

“ Then he showed the ring, and asked whether the maidens recognized it. Indeed they did recognize him and the ring. “But you poor unfortunate, this is the end of us and of you!” said they. “The troll with three heads will be along before long, and you had better hide behind the door!” “O, I’m so frightened, I’m so frightened!” wailed the maiden whom the young fellow had chosen. “Just you stop crying,” said the young fellow. “I think fortune will favor us!”
The troll came that very moment and thrust his three heads into the door. “Uff, it smells like Christian blood here!” ”

“ Strogue is a man of honour, according to his lights. But, alas, an inveterate gambler; and that saps the foundations of honesty. God made honesty, and man makes honour, and shapes it according to the fashion of the day. Strogue has been here, he has sat in that chair, with his head in his hands, and shivering ”

“ When they had eaten in the morning, he put his seven-mile waistcoat on them. “When you reach your goal, you need only say: ‘Where you were put on this morning, there you are to hang again to-night!’ and then the seven-mile waistcoat will travel home by itself,” said the troll. Then they were carried for miles, over hill and dale, on and on. In the evening, at dusk, they again came to a great, ugly rock.
“I will knock here!” said the maid, and knocked and thumped on the rock. “O no,” said the princess, “please do not knock here, you can see how sinister everything looks here!” ”

“ So the engineer desisted. And he, too, set his eye to the twisting aperture.
At sight of the narrow segment of forest visible through it, and of the several members of the Horde, a strong revulsion came upon him.
Up welled a deep-seated love for the memory of the race of men and women as they once had been--the people of the other days. Stern almost seemed to behold them again, those tall, athletic, straight-limbed men; those lithe, deep-breasted women, fair-skinned and with luxuriant hair; all alike now plunged for a thousand years in the abyss of death and of eternal oblivion. ”

“ When Strogue translated this to me, I felt some gratifying surprise; for our language is not so wonderfully [Pg 400] mellifluous, or melodious; though our voices are not such a cackle as theirs. But the old gentleman soon revoked his claim upon my gratitude by explaining, as interpreted by Strogue, that the words indeed were strange and hideous, like the sound of a saw on a flinty rock ”