Decline and Fall quotes

illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the beano.

“The fines!” said Mr. Sniggs, gently rubbing his pipe along the side of his nose. “Oh, my! the fines there’ll be after this evening!”

There is some very particular port in the senior common-room cellars that is only brought up when the College fines have reached £50.

“There must be fifty of them at least,” said Mr. Postlethwaite. “If only they were all members of the College! Fifty of them at ten pounds each. Oh my!”

“It’ll be more if they attack the Chapel,” said Mr. Sniggs. “Oh, please God, make them attack the Chapel.”

“I wonder who the unpopular undergraduates are this term. They always attack their rooms. I hope they have been wise enough to go out for the evening.”

“But it’s quite all right. It isn’t Rending. It’s Pennyfeather—someone of no importance.”

“Well, that saves a great deal of trouble. I am glad, Sniggs; I am, really. What a lot of clothes the young man appears to have lost!”

Next morning there was a lovely College meeting.

“I think you ought to find some work,” said his guardian thoughtfully.

“Nothing like it for taking the mind off nasty subjects.”

“But what kind of work?”

“Indeed, indeed? Well, I shall not ask for details.

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.

But, again to be practical, Mr. Pennyfeather, I can hardly pay one hundred and twenty pounds to anyone who has been sent down for indecent behaviour. Suppose that we fix your salary at ninety pounds a year to begin with?

“There’s no discipline in the place,” said Grimes, and then he went out too.

“I wonder whether I’m going to enjoy being a schoolmaster,” thought Paul.

Quite soon another and older man came into the room.

Well, you must do the best you can. There goes the bell for dinner. I won’t detain you. Oh, one other thing. Not a word to the boys, please, about the reasons for your leaving Oxford!

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

There, I fancy I have said something for you to think about. Good night.”

I want you to start again.’ So he sat down there and then and wrote me a letter of recommendation to any future employer, a corking good letter, too. I’ve got it still. It’s been very useful at one time or another.

That’s the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

“I subscribed a guinea to the War Memorial Fund. I felt I owed it to them. I was really sorry,” said Grimes, “that that cheque never got through.

“Oh, all right,” said Philbrick, making off.

“Women are an enigma,” said Grimes, “as far as Grimes is concerned.”

You see, it wasn’t the ordinary sort of Doubt about Cain’s wife or the Old Testament miracles or the consecration of Archbishop Parker. I’d been taught how to explain all those while I was at college. No, it was something deeper than all that.

I couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all.

There was my mother and the Bundles and Mrs. Crump talking away quite unconcernedly while I sat there wrestling with this sudden assault of doubt. You see how fundamental that is.

“Good morning, sir,” said the next.

“Oh, shut up,” said Paul.

At this the boy took out a handkerchief and began to cry quietly.

“You can’t keep me in,” said Clutterbuck; “I’m going for a walk with Captain Grimes.”

“Then I shall very nearly kill you with this stick. Meanwhile you will all write an essay on ‘Self-indulgence.’ There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.”

From then onwards all was silence until break. Paul, still holding the stick, gazed despondently out of the window. Now and then there rose from below the shrill voices of the servants scolding each other in Welsh.

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Prendergast.

“Frankly, I deplore the whole business.”

Philbrick appeared in an overcoat and a bowler hat.

“Well,” asked Paul, “how are the sports going?”

“Not very well,” said Mr. Prendergast; “in fact, they’ve gone.”

“Yes. You see, none of the boys came back from the first race. They just disappeared behind the trees at the top of the drive. I expect they’ve gone to change. I don’t blame them, I’m sure. It’s terribly cold.

“Just back from the gay metropolis of Llandudno,” he said. “

Shopping with Dingy is not a seemly occupation for a public-school man.

How did the heats go?”

“Crikey!” said Philbrick. “Loonies! This is where I shoot.”

“I refuse to believe the evidence of my eyes,” said the Doctor. “These creatures simply do not exist.”

After brief preliminary shuffling and nudging, an elderly man emerged from the back of the group. He had a rough black beard and wore on his uneven shoulders a druidical wreath of brass mistletoe-berries.

“Do you understand, madam, that you are bringing a serious accusation against my son’s honour?”

“Serious accusation, fiddlesticks! What he wants is a jolly good hidin’.”

“No doubt you judge other people’s sons by your own. Let me tell you, Lady Circumference …”

This was one of Lady Circumference’s favourite topics, but somehow she did not feel disposed to enlarge on it to Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde with the same gusto as when she was talking to Mrs. Sidebotham and the Vicar’s wife.

She never felt quite at ease with people richer than herself.

“Well, we all feel the wind a bit since the war,” she said briefly. “How’s Bobby Pastmaster?”

More food was brought them. Mr. Prendergast ate with a hearty appetite.

“Oh, why did nobody warn me?” cried Grimes in his agony.

“I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I’ve risked them, and I don’t mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage.

There’s a home and family waiting for every one of us. We can’t escape, try how we may.

It’s the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences.

There’s no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home-builders, beavers and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?”

We can’t escape, try how we may. It’s the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There’s no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist.

We are just potential home-builders, beavers and ants.

How do we come into being? What is birth?”

They were identified without difficulty as having belonged to the Captain. In the breast pocket of the jacket was an envelope addressed to the Doctor, and in it a slip of paper inscribed with the words:

“Those that live by the flesh shall perish by the flesh.”

As far as was possible this intelligence was kept from the boys.

Flossie, though severely shocked at this untimely curtailment of her married life, was firm in her resolution not to wear mourning.

“I don’t think my husband would have expected it of me,” she said.

In these distressing circumstances the boys began packing their boxes to go away for the Easter holidays.

This was the Paul Pennyfeather who had been developing in the placid years which preceded this story.

In fact, the whole of this book is really an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather

, so that readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast.

“Don’t you like it?” asked Peter Beste-Chetwynde over the cocktail-shaker. “I think it’s so good. It was rather Chokey’s taste before.”

“I hate and detest every bit of it,” said Professor Silenus gravely. “Nothing I have ever done has caused me so much disgust.”

With a deep sigh he rose from the table and walked from the room, the fork with which he had been eating still held in his hand.

“When I was your age,” said Sir Humphrey to Miles, “we used to sit up all night sometimes playing poker. Heavy money, too.”

“Oh, you wicked old thing!” said Miles.

Early on Monday morning the Minister of Transportation’s Daimler disappeared down the drive. “I rather think he expected to see mamma,” said Peter. “I told him what was the matter with her.”

“What sort of job, Margot?” Paul’s eyes followed the swan gliding serenely across the lake; he did not dare to look at her.

“Well, Paul, you might stay and protect me from swans, mightn’t you?”

Margot paused and then, releasing her hand, took a cigarette-case from her pocket. Paul struck a match. “My dear, what an unsteady hand! I’m afraid you’re drinking too many of Peter’s cocktails. That child has a lot to learn yet about the use of vodka.

“

Yes, mum, but it was in the war, and he was very drunk.

”

“I hear your nephew Alastair Trumpington is the best man,” said Lady Vanbrugh.

“You seem to be as well informed as my chiropodist,” said Lady Circumference with unusual felicity, and all Lowndes Square shook at her departure.

In the unconverted mewses of Mayfair and the upper rooms of Shepherd’s Market and North Audley Street, where fashionable bachelors lurk disconsolately on their evenings at home, there was open lamentation at the prey that had been allowed to slip through their elegantly gloved fingers, …

Paul turned the liqueur round in his glass, inhaled its rich bouquet for a second, and then held it before him.

“To Fortune,” he said, “a much-maligned lady!”

“Which of you gentlemen is Mr. Paul Pennyfeather?”

Paul sat for the regulation ten minutes in the regulation nine inches of warm water—which smelt reassuringly of disinfectant—and then put on his prison clothes.

The loss of his personal possessions gave him a curiously agreeable sense of irresponsibility.

“You look a treat,” said Philbrick.

“Shut up, you ⸻ ⸻,” remarked the warder, and locked the door.

“I suppose I shall learn to respect these people in time,” thought Paul. “They all seem so much less awe-inspiring than anyone I ever met.”

His next visit was from the Schoolmaster. The door was unlocked, and a seedy-looking young man in a tweed suit came into the cell.

Not so Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery. Never, he felt, was his mind more alert or resourceful or his vast accumulation of knowledge more available than at his little court of summary justice. “No one knows what to expect,” complained warders and prisoners alike.

“Justice,” said Sir Wilfred, “is the capacity for regarding each case as an entirely new problem.”

After a few months of his administration, Sir Wilfred was able to point with some pride to a marked diminution in the number of cases brought before him.

The Chief Warder considered. “I think whore of Babylon, on the whole, sir.”

Sir Wilfred smiled as a conjurer may who has forced the right card.

“Now I,” he said, “am of a different opinion. It may surprise you, but I should say that the significant thing about this case was the fact that the prisoner held a piece of the stool.”

Paul returned to his cell. His supper had already been served out to him, a small pie from which protruded the feet of two pigeons; there was even a table-napkin wrapped round it. But

Paul had very little appetite, for he was greatly pained at how little he was pained by the events of the afternoon.

Lord Tangent was dead; Mr. Prendergast was dead; the time would even come for Paul Pennyfeather; but

Grimes, Paul at last realized, was of the immortals.

He was a life force. Sentenced to death in Flanders, he popped up in Wales; drowned in Wales, he emerged in South America;

“This is the ordinary certificate of death,” said Dr. Fagan. “Will you be so good as to sign it there?”

“Oh, death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?” said the surgeon, and with these words and a laboured effort of the pen he terminated the legal life of Paul Pennyfeather.

“Splendid!” said Sir Alastair. “Now here’s your money. If I were you I should run off and have a drink while the pubs are still open.”

Paul got into the boat and was rowed away.

Sir Alastair, like Sir Bedivere, watched him out of sight.

There were two hours before dinner. Paul rose and descended the arcaded street into the square, drawing his scarf tight about his throat; the evenings began to get cold about this time.

It was odd being dead.

That morning Margot had sent him a bunch of Press cuttings about himself, most of them headed “Wedding Sensation Echo” or “Death of Society Bridegroom Convict.” With them were his tiepin and the rest of his possessions which had been sent to her from Egdon.