Antic Hay quotes

She had just been diligently good, that was all. Good; good? It was a word people only used nowadays with a kind of deprecating humorousness. Good. Beyond good and evil? We are all that nowadays. Or merely below them, like earwigs?

I glory in the name of earwig.

Gumbril made a mental gesture and inwardly declaimed. But good in any case, there was no getting out of that, good she had been.

They were two ugly, stupid-looking louts, who ought to have been apprenticed years ago to some useful trade. Instead of which they were wasting their own and their teacher’s and their more intelligent comrades’ time in trying, quite vainly, to acquire an elegant literary education.

The minds of dogs, Gumbril reflected, do not benefit by being treated as though they were the minds of men.

“O Lord, have mercy upon us: have mercy upon us.”

“Give a brief account of the character and career of Pope Pius IX, with dates wherever possible.”

Gumbril leaned back in his chair and thought of his own character, with dates.

1896: the first serious and conscious and deliberate lie. Did you break that vase, Theodore? No, mother. It lay on his conscience for nearly a month, eating deeper and deeper. Then he had confessed the truth. Or rather he had not confessed;

“He couldn’t have come through without it, I believe. It was a symbol, a proud flag.

Poverty’s squalid, not fine at all.

The monocle made a kind of difference, you understand. I’m always so enormously thankful I had a little money. I couldn’t have stuck it without. It needs strength, more strength than I’ve got.”

How can there ever be liberty under any system? No amount of profit-sharing or self-government by the workers, no amount of hyjeenic conditions or cocoa villages or recreation grounds can get rid of the fundamental slavery—the necessity of working.

Liberty? why, it doesn’t exist! There’s no liberty in this world; only gilded cages.

And then, Mr. Gumbril, even suppose you could somehow get rid of the necessity of working, suppose a man’s time were all leisure. Would he be free then? I say nothing of the natural slavery of eating and sleeping and all that, Mr. Gumbril;

Gumbril listened, not very attentively. He was wondering how anyone could talk so loud, could boast so extravagantly.

It was as though the man had to shout in order to convince himself of his own existence.

Poor Lypiatt; after all these years, Gumbril supposed, he must have some doubts about it. Ah, but this time, this time he was going to bowl them all over.

Mr. Mercaptan made a delicate gesture. “Ça se sent, mon cher ami,” he said, “ça ne s’explique pas.”

Satan, it is said, carries hell in his heart; so it was with Mr. Mercaptan⁠—wherever he was, it was Paris.

“Dreams in nineteen twenty-two. …” He shrugged his shoulders.

“I glory in the name of earwig,” said Gumbril. He was pleased with that little invention. It was felicitous; it was well chosen. “

One’s an earwig in sheer self-protection,

” he explained.

These revolting Dostoevskys.” Mr. Mercaptan spoke with a profound feeling. “Nor all Utopians. Homo au naturel—” Mr. Mercaptan applied his thumb and forefinger to his, alas! too snout-like nose, “ça pue. And as for Homo à la H. G. Wells—ça ne pue pas assez.

What I glory in is the civilized, middle way between stink and asepsis.

Give me a little musk, a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine and strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and potpourri in the corners of the drawing-room.

My life.” His voice trembled a little. “People mock me, hate me, stone me, deride me. But I go on, I go on. For I know I’m right. And in the end they too will recognize that I’ve been right.” It was a loud soliloquy.

One could fancy that Lypiatt had been engaged in recognizing himself.

“All the same,” said Gumbril with a cheerful stubbornness, “I persist that the word ‘dreams’ is inadmissible.”

Gallantly Mercaptan kissed the back of the hand which held the egg. “I might be happier,” he murmured, rolling up at her from the snouty face a pair of small brown eyes. “Puis-je espérer?”

Mrs. Viveash laughed expiringly from her inward deathbed and turned on him, without speaking, her pale unwavering glance.

Her eyes had a formidable capacity for looking and expressing nothing; they were like the pale blue eyes which peer out of the Siamese cat’s black velvet mask.

Mrs. Viveash smiled her agonizing smile, nodded slowly and said, “

Perhaps. And one doesn’t die, you know. One doesn’t die.

”

Then the people will be looking to a real fixed symbol of leadership, not to the peculiarities of the mere individuals. Beards and ’air and funny collars change; but a good uniform is always the same. Give them feathers, that’s what I say, Mr. Gumbril.

Feathers will increase the dignity of the State and lessen the importance of the individual.

And that,” concluded Mr. Bojanus with emphasis, “that, Mr. Gumbril, will be all to the good.”

Viveash’s herd, the architectural herd of his father, the educational herd (but that, thank God! was now bleating on distant pastures), the herd of Mr. Bojanus—he belonged to them all a little, to none of them completely. Nobody belonged to his herd. How could they?

No chameleon can live with comfort on a tartan.

He put on his coat.

“If you want to say Beaver,” he said, “you may.”

The Complete Man had made his first speech.

“I want to say nothing,” said the stranger. She spoke with a charming precision and distinctness, lingering with a pretty emphasis on the n of nothing. “N—n—nothing”—it sounded rather final. She turned away, she moved on.

There was a long silence. Gumbril finished his chocolate cake, gloomily drank his tea and did not speak. He found, all at once, that he had nothing to say. His jovial confidence seemed, for the moment, to have deserted him.

He was only the Mild and Melancholy one foolishly disguised as a Complete Man; a sheep in beaver’s clothing.

He entrenched himself behind his formidable silence and waited; waited, at first, sitting in his chair, then, when this total inactivity became unbearable, striding about the room.

His beard tickled her neck; shivering a little, she brought down the magnolia petals across her eyes. The Complete Man lifted her up, walked across the room carrying the fastidious lady in his arms and deposited her on the rosy catafalque of the bed.

Lying there with her eyes shut, she did her best to pretend she was dead.

Gumbril had looked at his wrist watch and found that it was six o’clock. Already? He prepared himself to take his departure. Wrapped in a pink kimono, she came out into the hall to wish him farewell.

Gumbril hurried off along the street. “If we really have found out a technique for influencing the germ-plasm directly …” he heard the doggy young man saying; but he was already too far away to catch the rest of the sentence.

There are many ways, he reflected, of spending an afternoon.

The doggy young man refused to come in, he had to get in his game of tennis before dinner. Shearwater climbed the stairs alone.

“There’s money in it,” he said.

Mr. Boldero was a small dark man of about forty-five, active as a bird and with a bird’s brown, beady eyes, a bird’s sharp nose.

He was always busy, always had twenty different irons in the fire at once, was always fresh, clearheaded, never tired. He was also always unpunctual, always untidy. He had no sense of time or of order.

He was like a bird in appearance.

But in mind, Gumbril found, after having seen him once or twice, he was like a caterpillar: he ate all that was put before him, he consumed a hundred times his own mental weight every day.

Other people’s ideas, other people’s knowledge—they were his food. He devoured them and they were at once his own. All that belonged to other people he annexed without a scruple or a second thought, quite naturally, as though it were already his own.

one ever passed in a governess cart at the heels of a barrel-bellied pony. How simple to spit on the floors of churches! Si prega di non sputare.

Simple to kick one’s legs and enjoy oneself⁠—dutifully⁠—in pink underclothing.

Perfectly simple.

There is an instant of expectation, and then, with a series of mounting trochees and a downward hurrying, step after tiny step, in triple time, the dance begins. Irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has gone before.

But man’s greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance.

In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and unsuitable thoughts of a free man. The spirit is slave to fever and beating blood, at the mercy of an obscure and tyrannous misfortune.

Irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has gone before. But man’s greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance.

In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and unsuitable thoughts of a free man.

The spirit is slave to fever and beating blood, at the mercy of an obscure and tyrannous misfortune. But irrelevantly, it elects to dance in triple measure—a mounting skip, a patter of descending feet.

“Did I … ?” Emily laughed expressively. “No, I didn’t enjoy,” she said.

“Enjoy isn’t the word. You enjoy eating ices. It made me happy. It’s unhappy music, but it made me happy.”

Gumbril hailed a cab and gave the address of his rooms in Great Russell Street. “Happy,” he repeated, as they sat there side by side in the darkness. He, too, was happy.

Never again, never again: there had been a time when she could make herself cry, simply by saying those two words once or twice, under her breath. Never again, never again. She repeated them softly now. But she felt no tears behind her eyes.

Grief doesn’t kill, love doesn’t kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while it still lives, rots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.

Never again, never again. Instead of crying, she laughed, laughed aloud. The pigeon-breasted old gentleman who had just passed her, twirling between his finger and thumb the ends of a white military moustache, turned round startled. Could she be laughing at him?

“I wish they’d hurry up with the second scene,” said Mrs. Viveash. “If there’s anything that bores me, it’s entr’actes.”

“Most of one’s life is an entr’acte,” said Gumbril, whose present mood of hilarious depression seemed favourable to the enunciation of apophthegms.

“None of your cracker mottoes, please,” protested Mrs. Viveash.

for he seemed to be carrying a good deal of money. He was incapable of looking after himself. Coleman had pounced on him at once, claimed an old friendship which the youth was too tipsy to be able to deny, and carried him off.

There was something, he always thought, peculiarly interesting about the spectacle of children tobogganing down into the cesspools.

“I like this place,” said the young man.

You could make the wittiest Guy de Maupassant short story out of the life of Christ, by contrasting the mad rabbi’s pretensions with his abject fate. It’s a question of the point of view.

Everyone’s a walking farce and a walking tragedy at the same time.

The man who slips on a banana-skin and fractures his skull describes against the sky, as he falls, the most richly comical arabesque. And you, Myra—what do you suppose the unsympathetic gossips say of you?

Mrs. Viveash shut her eyes.

“We’re all in the vacuum,” she said. “You’ll still have plenty of company, you know.”

She was silent for a moment. “Still, I’m sorry,” she added. “Why didn’t you tell me? And why didn’t you just pay no attention to me and go all the same?”

“No. I said: This is all—everything, the universe.

In love, it’s either all or nothing at all.

” She shut her eyes and almost immediately went to sleep again.

“You won’t force me to change my opinion.” Gumbril smiled at her. “Eppur’ si muove—I stick to my guns like Galileo. They move and they’re horrible.”

“They’re me,” said Mrs. Viveash emphatically. “Those things are me.”

They drove first to Lypiatt’s mews. Under the Piranesian arch. The clotheslines looped from window to window across the street might have been those ropes which form so essential and so mysterious a part of the furniture of the Prisons.

Lypiatt stood with folded arms by the window, listening.

How lightly they threw his life, his heart, from hand to hand, as though it were a ball and they were playing a game!

He thought suddenly of all the times he had spoken lightly and maliciously of other people. His own person had always seemed, on those occasions, sacred. One knew in theory very well that others spoke of one contemptuously—as one spoke of them.

Mrs. Viveash drew the corners of her mouth down into a painful smile and did not answer. “Aren’t we going to pass through Piccadilly Circus again?” she asked. “I should like to see the lights again.

They give one temporarily the illusion of being cheerful.

”

“It means you’re going to bed.” “How do you know?” he asked. “Do you think I don’t know you after all this time? I know that pat by heart.” And suddenly all her warm, quiet happiness evaporated; it was all gone.

“I’m only a machine for going to bed with,” she said. “That’s all I am for you.”

She felt she would like to cry. But James only laughed and said, “Nonsense!” and pulled his arm clumsily from underneath her. “You go to sleep,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead.

The little cab buzzed along down the empty Mall. They were silent. Through the thick air one could see the brightest of the stars.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

It was one of those evenings when love is once more invented for the first time. That, too, seems a little ridiculous, sometimes, in the morning.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

It was one of those evenings when love is once more invented for the first time. That, too, seems a little ridiculous, sometimes, in the morning.

“Here are the lights again,” said Mrs. Viveash. “Hop, twitch, flick—yes, genuinely an illusion of jollity, Theodore. Genuinely.”

Polished by the wheels and shining like an old and precious bronze, the road stretched before them, reflecting the lamps.

It had the inviting air of a road which goes on forever.

“They used to have such good peepshows in this street,” Gumbril tenderly remembered:

“Penetrating into Maida Vale. We shall soon be there. Poor old Shearwater!” He laughed.

Other people in love were always absurd.

“Shall we find him in, I wonder?” It would be fun to see Shearwater again. She liked to hear him talking, learnedly, and like a child.

… “But what did you want with me?” he had asked. “Just to look at you,” she answered.

Just to look; that was all. Music hall, not boudoir.

“Here we are.” Gumbril got out and rang the second floor bell.