Farthing

“ It's not in me.
My sinking heart I pray Thee raise
So shall I give it Thee.
My life as spider's webb's cut off,
Thus fainting have I said,
And living man no more shall see
But be in silence laid. ”

“ The lights were dim and ineffective; but the darkness was the same that is eternally suspended over half the world, and to which the human race has become more or less accustomed. Old man Farding was no better or no worse than I expected. ”

“ And yet each whispering wind has blown
Abroad the story of my shame.
I dread to see men shrink away
With startled looks of scorn or fear,
When in life’s crowded marts some day,
That name falls on their ear. ”

“ As it is, I have suffered and borne my sufferings, not like a beast, but like a man. You hint at some mystery in connection with that monster which I cannot fathom. Time is too precious for me to waste it by groping in the dark. ”

“ In this astounding story of unparalleled interest, we see the sinister figure of FATE stalk deviously but relentlessly through the mystifying mazes of love, devotion, intrigue, cunning, cruelty and crime, until a conscienceless fiend, in human shape, lies prostrate in death, overwhelmed by the ruthless forces of his own creating. ”

“ It was all a dream, and people cannot dream forever. The flesh is weak, and the spirit less enduring than the flesh. You wearied of each other! Forever became a year, six months, six weeks! Love, indifference, infidelity, estrangement, oblivion! ”

“ One wild, volumod malignance of yells! To have light might be death. In the dark
On the floor the poor mother groped madly about the dead child for a spark
Of the hope of pulsation of life, till the blood that was mine and her own. ”

“ As if counting and hesitating what course to pursue for their relief, he paces up and down the grotesque mass, touching one, and gazing upon the haggard features of another, who looks up to see what it is that disturbs her. ”

“ I could not have distinguished the features of any human face, I had seen that one only in my imagination; but how distinct, how ghastly, how horrible it was. It was myself twenty years older, with features wasted by debauchery or disease, wild eyes, a brutalized mouth, and, despite the total wiping out of my vitality, there was enough energy remaining in that phantom to insult and defy the creature that I am now. ”

“ Who shall describe the sensation of the poor mortal, as he felt himself falling—falling down—down, a blind mass, through the darkened air? Those who have fallen, or have leaped even from a moderate height, can have no conception of the frenzied terror that took possession of him for a moment. ”

“ It means agony to him and all that love him: what maimer of agony God wot, and in His hand is the ell-wand to measure, and the balances to weigh. Lord! Thou wilt not blunder to give an inch too much, nor wilt Thou for all our greeting weigh one grain too little. Thou wilt not let us miss the right way, for the rough stones and the steep mountain-side. ”

“ As much to fly from the dreadful spectacle as any instinct of self-preservation, he took advantage of the next mad paroxysms of pain and blindness, that always impelled the suffering beast towards the left, to slip past him on the right, reach the incline, and scramble wildly up to the plain again. ”

“ Dim tales of horrors long since forgotten recurred to him with a devilish persistency, so that, lying there wide-eyed, he could almost fancy that evil face leaning out of the picture above to smile down at him with all its old malignity. ”

“ IT cannot be. Where is that mightie joy,
Which just now took up all my heart?
Lord, if thou must needs use thy dart,
Save that, and me; or sin for both destroy.
The grosser world stands to thy word and art ”

“ There is a vacant look in your usually radiant eyes; a want of intelligence in the curve of your rosy lips—”
“Eugen! Stop that string of fantastic rubbish! Where have you been, and what have you been doing?”
“I have not deserved that from you. Haven’t I been telling you all this time where I have been and what I have been doing? There is a brutality in your behavior which is to a refined mind most lamentable.” ”

“ In fancy, the wretched man would see what he’d never seen in reality—her slender body falling down the steep declivity, dashing against the pointed crags and projections of chalk every instant, and then arriving with a dull thump at the bottom, and lying on the rough shingles, without life or sense or motion. ”

“ Without the storm a sail would be a rag. But his was the excessive feebleness of the rag, which the wind inflates till it tears it. He felt himself sinking. Was he about to fall unconscious on the pavement? To faint is the resource of a woman, and the humiliation of a man. ”

“ The other threw himself upon pleasure's tide, and, blind to earnest duty, drank the sunshine of life's springtime in draughts so intemperate that he became intoxicated with poisonous fire, and, falling into the arms of the knaves who thrive on human weakness and depravity, his moral sense, like theirs, grew warped, and he ripened into a knave himself. ”

“ We would fain imagine the shrunken-cheeked factory-girl singing to herself a happy burthen, as she shifts the loom,—the burthen of her life, and fain believe that the voice was innocent as the sky-lark's. ”

“ And yet, it sometimes happens, not often, and not even to all, that a shadow falls over the scene and blots out all its comeliness, and then ensues a flare, a lightning flash, and we see all—no longer beautiful, but infinitely ghastly. ”

“ Your lips have no restraint while your tongue flatters and you make your sacred beauty a thing of hell. You fool men with sham tears, sham smiles, sham sentiments, sham emotions—playing the game of life with marked cards, cogged dice—a shark at getting, only a miser at giving. ”

“ For some moments the poor man lay motionless, vainly endeavoring to collect his scattered senses. A hand irreverently laid upon his collar, and a rough shake, assisted to recall his consciousness. As the Padre staggered to his feet he found himself confronted by a stranger.
Seen dimly through the fog, and under circumstances that to say the least were not prepossessing, the new-comer had an inexpressibly mysterious and brigand-like aspect. ”

“ The faces were inhuman, distorted, elongated, squashed, some nauseating, others merely enough to make one squeamish. And the glow which backgrounded the whole scene took away a lot of the mystery. They had hands and feet—plainly seen—and they didn't float. ”

“ I half expected to see presently great half-formed shapes come rolling up to me to crush me; some thing fiery, not strange, too utterly horrible to be strange, but utterly vile and ugly, the sight of which would have killed me when I was upon the earth, come rolling up to torment me. ”

“ How prone we are to forget the devotion of a dumb brute that thoughtlessly eats our lace lambrequins, and ere we have stopped to consider our mad course, we have driven the loving heart and the warm wet tongue and the cold little black nose out of our home-life, perhaps into the cold, cold grave or the bleak and relentless pound. ”

“ The grosser material part of my nature would be rendered more gross, more material; capable only of those delights that the grossest minds revel in, to the utter exclusion of those sublime visions and inspirations which visit the soul when least clogged with matter. ”

“ She was thinner than he had ever seen her, and her face had grown pale. But the fixed gravity and mournfulness of her expression struck him even more than the sharpened contour of her features or the dark lines beneath her eyes. She looked as if she suffered: as if she was suffering still.
"You are ill!" ”

“ Then some panting, a few seconds of silence—during which I asked myself what Guillaume had done—and he added with ineffable satisfaction:
Ah! futtering is after all the only thing worth living for in this world. ”

“ At a distance, these melt into harmonious proportions, but they lose their charm when we are close at hand. Here are hideous mixtures of human and brute life. Many of the leering faces are simply idiotic and the contortions of the bodies clustered together are horrible. ”

“ And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and, when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope first. ”

“ Comedy consists, though of low persons, yet of natural actions and characters; I mean such humours, adventures, and designs, as are to be found and met with in the world. Farce, on the other side, consists of forced humours, and unnatural events. Comedy presents us with the imperfections of human nature: Farce entertains us with what is monstrous and chimerical. ”

“ As one who long has lain in wait
With purpose to retaliate,
And thus he dealt the avenging stroke.
"In such a company as this,
A tale so tragic seems amiss,
That by its terrible control
O'ermasters and drags down the soul
Into a fathomless abyss. ”

“ His torch glowed, and she had a momentary glimpse of his face, thin, neurotic, with restless eyes, and a mouth that had the voracious look that one sees in men who are always hungry for some new sensation. ”

“ Rolled sightless orbs to learn the cause,
But, hark!—the steps renew.
"Where art thou, darling—why so long
Hast thou delayed to-night?
We die of thirst,—we are not strong,
This fasting kills outright. ”

“ Here I was ready if necessary to go through fire and water--a certain amount of each, at any rate--to get a better knowledge of the frank-hearted girl whose enthusiasm had so touched me in the afternoon, and all that Fate asked was a cabman's fare and a few stern words delivered with an air! Fate is no bargainer worthy the name. ”

“ A great tenderness overcame her—the sadness of an unskilful demiurge, who makes a world and beholds that it is bad. She desired to ask pardon of her creatures, even though they were too poorly formed to grant it. ”

“ He tensed against whatever was about to happen. Then, in a rush, a small whirring sound descended swiftly behind his ear and his head split with pain. The floor opened into a black abyss in front of him and he plunged toward it headfirst. ”

“ If life had hitherto worn a dark aspect in my eyes, it now changed into a spectre, whose ghastly, distorted features and looks at first struck me with horrour, and afterward, when use made me cold and indifferent, taught me to despise everything, above all myself. ”

“ He runs backwards and forwards, up and down the room, while she follows him with her large, suffering eyes, which have an unnatural look in them, follows him backwards and forwards in unutterable surprise,—a surprise which seems to have fallen from heaven, and which changes little by little into an unutterable, inconceivable disappointment, and that again into an indescribably bitter, sickening contempt. ”

“ In it we behold the type of the horrible, without anything to relieve the unpleasant impression. The positive, though distant, resemblance to the human form itself, instead of making the creature more seemly, only intensities the feeling of dread with which we behold it. ”

“ Let the very worst come to pass that can come to pass, even so an attitude of mere unmitigated despair hardly befits fast disappearing mortals, whose breath is in their nostrils. Looking backwards may seem all gloom and pain, and looking forward no better, possibly rather worse, and yet assuredly it is not all gloom, or all pain. ”

“ But when to the sight is added the appalling effect of the various unnatural and fearful noises, the muttering and sighing, the groaning and blowing, the every agonized struggling of the mighty action within—as a whole it is too horrible! ”

“ And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts,
But only how did you take it?
You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that?
Come up with a smiling face.
It's nothing against you to fall down flat,
But to lie there—that's disgrace.
The harder you're thrown, why the higher you bounce ”

“ There are many whose loads are too heavy--for instance, asses. There are a few whose loads are too light--scoffers, like myself. You have had occasion to rebuke me, this night, Father Capel, and were I not a hardened sinner I should be groaning in tribulation. ”

“ Weak as I was, exhausted, prostrate, my muscles contracted with such desperate violence that I was thrown up up through the air, to fall two, three, four yards from my chair, which was thrown over backwards by the push I gave it.
I fell ... I fell ... my head and arms [Pg 203] thrown forward ... and I lost consciousness again.
I lost consciousness again; but not before I had had time to see the Man likewise hurled headforemost into the abyss, where He fell, and fell, and fell, to be dashed to death on the white boulders under the black rushing water.... ”

“ In the resonant darkness you hear the dismal uproar circling above the houses sometimes for a long while; and as you can see nothing, you feel, in spite of yourself, a sort of dread and a sympathetic uneasiness until the sobbing flock has passed out of hearing in space. ”

“ Yet there lay, underneath his own gloomy agony, a remote consciousness of collateral affliction, such as is frequently experienced by those who may be drawn, by some temporary and present pleasure, from the contemplation of their misery. ”