Mortal Coils quotes

Had there ever been such an ass as poor, dear Janet Spence? Never, unless it was himself. Decidedly he was the more malignant fool, since he, at least, was aware of his folly and still persisted in it. Why did he persist?

Ah, the problem that was himself, the problem that was other people.

He had reached the gate. A large, prosperous-looking motor was standing at the side of the road.

"She was, alas! Fuit.

We shall all be 'was' one of these days.

Meanwhile...."

Mr. Hutton adored her for the virgin imbecility of the words.

How late in one's existence one makes the discovery of one's body!

"The electricity isn't in me, it's in you." He kissed her again, whispering her name several times: Doris, Doris, Doris.

She had to take a deep breath, to draw herself up deliberately, before she was strong enough to start her homeward walk.

She had half a mile in which to invent the necessary lies.

Alone, Mr. Hutton suddenly found himself the prey of an appalling boredom.

The creature lay in an inert ecstasy. Mrs. Hutton continued to play Patience. Arrived at an impasse, she altered the position of one card, took back another, and went on playing.

Her Patiences always came out.

"Dr. Libbard thinks I ought to go to Llandrindod Wells this summer."

Whatever she said was always said with intensity. She leaned forward, aimed, so to speak, like a gun, and fired her words. Bang! the charge in her soul was ignited, the words whizzed forth at the narrow barrel of her mouth.

She was a machine-gun riddling her hostess with sympathy.

Mr. Hutton had undergone similar bombardments, mostly of a literary or philosophic character—bombardments of Maeterlinck, of Mrs. Besant, of Bergson, of William James. To-day the missiles were medical. She talked about insomnia, she expatiated on the virtues of harmless drugs and beneficent specialists.

Mr. Hutton looked on in silence. The spectacle of Janet Spence evoked in him an unfailing curiosity.

He was not romantic enough to imagine that every face masked an interior physiognomy of beauty or strangeness, that every woman's small talk was like a vapour hanging over mysterious gulfs.

His wife, for example, and Doris; they were nothing more than what they seemed to be. But with Janet Spence it was somehow different.

Doris was waiting at the cross-roads. They dined together twenty miles from home, at a roadside hotel. It was one of those bad, expensive meals which are only cooked in country hotels frequented by motorists. It revolted Mr. Hutton, but Doris enjoyed it.

She always enjoyed things.

Mr. Hutton ordered a not very good brand of champagne. He was wishing he had spent the evening in his library.

Pringle, and the waitress in London, and others—there seemed to be dozens of them. It had all been so stale and boring. He knew it would be; he always knew. And yet, and yet....

Experience doesn't teach.

Poor little Doris! He would write to her kindly, comfortingly, but he wouldn't see her again. A servant came to tell him that his horse was saddled and waiting. He mounted and rode off. That morning the old bailiff was more irritating than usual.

"Most certainly." But what was she leading up to?

Nobody makes generalisations about life unless they mean to talk about themselves.

Happiness: he looked back on his own life, and saw a cheerful, placid existence disturbed by no great griefs or discomforts or alarms. He had always had money and freedom; he had been able to do very much as he wanted.

Mr. Hutton continued his contemplation of Florence. He had need to be alone. It was good sometimes to escape from Doris and the restless solicitude of her passion.

He had never known the pains of loving hopelessly, but he was experiencing now the pains of being loved.

These last weeks had been a period of growing discomfort. Doris was always with him, like an obsession, like a guilty conscience. Yes, it was good to be alone.

DOLPHIN. Fortunate being.

Why, before I left England I attended a luncheon of the Poetry Union at which no less than a hundred and eighty-nine poets were present. The sight of them made me decide to go to Italy.

AMY. Will you show me your books?

DOLPHIN. Make me talk about myself. If you want to get people to like you, you must always lead the conversation on to the subject of their characters. Nothing pleases them so much.

They'll talk with enthusiasm for hours and go away saying that you're the most charming, cleverest person they've ever met.

But of course you knew that already. You re Machiavellian.

DOLPHIN. Make me talk about myself.

If you want to get people to like you, you must always lead the conversation on to the subject of their characters.

Nothing pleases them so much. They'll talk with enthusiasm for hours and go away saying that you're the most charming, cleverest person they've ever met. But of course you knew that already. You re Machiavellian.

The disgustingness of it, you mean. (She pushes him from her. His head wobbles once, as though it were inanimate, before he straightens into life.) The maternal instinct. Ugh. It's been the undoing of too many women.

You men come with your sentimental babyishness and exploit it for your own lusts.

Be a man, Bertino. Be a woman, I mean, if you can.

(She pushes him from her. His head wobbles once, as though it were inanimate, before he straightens into life.) The maternal instinct. Ugh. It's been the undoing of too many women. You men come with your sentimental babyishness and exploit it for your own lusts.

Be a man, Bertino. Be a woman, I mean, if you can.

ALBERTO (looking up at her with eyes full of doglike, dumb reproach). Lucrezia! You, too? Is there nobody who cares for me? This is the unkindest cut of all. I may as well die. (He relapses into tears.)

DOLPHIN.

My philosophic detachment? But it's only a mask to hide the ineffectual longings I have to achieve contact with the world.

PAUL. But surely nothing is easier. One just makes a movement and impinges on one's fellow-beings.

Ah, then I feel myself to be superb. I carry all before me. In those brief moments the whole secret of the world is revealed to me.

I perceive that the supreme quality in the human soul is effrontery.

Genius in the man of action is simply the apotheosis of charlatanism. Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Mr. Gladstone, Lloyd George—what are they? Just ordinary human beings projected through the magic lantern of a prodigious effrontery and so magnified to a thousand times larger than life.

Ah, then I feel myself to be superb. I carry all before me. In those brief moments the whole secret of the world is revealed to me. I perceive that the supreme quality in the human soul is effrontery.

Genius in the man of action is simply the apotheosis of charlatanism.

Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Mr. Gladstone, Lloyd George—what are they? Just ordinary human beings projected through the magic lantern of a prodigious effrontery and so magnified to a thousand times larger than life. Look at me.

Look at me. I am far more intelligent than any of these fabulous figures; my sensibility is more refined than theirs, I am morally superior to any of them. And yet, by my lack of charlatanism, I am made less than nothing.

My qualities are projected through the wrong end of a telescope and the world perceives me far smaller than I really am.

But the world—who cares about the world? The only people who matter are the women.

She touches lost chords in one's heart. I love the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach, I am transported by Beethoven's hundred-and-eleventh Sonata; but the fact doesn't prevent my being moved to tears by the last luscious waltz played by the hotel orchestra.

In the best constructed brains there are always spongy surfaces that are sensitive to picture postcards and Little Nelly and the End of a Perfect Day.

Miss Toomis has found out my Achilles's heel. She is boring, ridiculous, absurd to a degree, but oh! how moving, how adorable.

DOLPHIN. I suppose it can. For, when all is said, there are damned few of us who really take things much to heart. Julie de Lespinasses are happily not common. I am even subnormal.

At twenty I believed myself passionate: one does at that age.

But now, when I come to consider myself candidly, I find that I am really one of those who never deeply felt nor strongly willed. Everything is profoundly indifferent to me.

He looks up at her admiringly, passes his tongue over his lips. Then, with a sigh, turns to dust the tables.)

Young Spode was not a snob; he was too intelligent for that, too fundamentally decent.

Not a snob; but all the same he could not help feeling very well pleased at the thought that he was dining, alone and intimately, with Lord Badgery.

Badgery held up a white hand. "No more, no more.

I find literature quite depressing enough. I insist that life at least shall be a little gayer.

Did you tell him I wanted him to paint my room?"

"Well, I'm not so old as I was," Spode replied. "

You know how middle-aged one is as a schoolboy and undergraduate. Now I'm old enough to know I'm young.

"

"It's a very, very long time. And yet, when I look back on it, it all seems but a day or two ago.

Strange that each day should seem so long and that many days added together should be less than an hour.

How clearly I can see old Haydon pacing up and down! Much more clearly, indeed, than I see you, Mr. Spode. The eyes of memory don t grow dim. But my sight is improving, I assure you; it's improving daily.

This unexpected deviation into sense increased the general feeling of discomfort.

It became necessary to take the old man seriously, to regard him as a human being.

Up till then he had been no more than an object of curiosity, a mummy in an absurd suit of evening-clothes with a green ribbon across the shirt front. People could not help wishing that they had subscribed a little more.

Green tunnels—the word had floated down to her, through profound depths of reverie, across great spaces of abstraction, startling her like the sound of a strange-voiced bell. Green tunnels—what a wonderful idea. She would not listen to her father explaining the phrase into dullness.

He made everything dull; an inverted alchemist, turning gold into lead.

She pictured caverns in a great aquarium, long vistas between rocks and scarcely swaying weeds and pale, discoloured corals; endless dim green corridors with huge lazy fishes loitering aimlessly along them. Green-faced monsters with goggling eyes and mouths that slowly opened and shut. Green tunnels....

All night long the same old irritating cicada scraped and scraped among the pine trees, monotonous and regular as clockwork. Zip zip, zip zip zip. Boring, boring. Was the animal never bored by its own noise? It seemed odd that it shouldn't be.

But, when she came to think of it, nobody ever did get bored with their own noise.

Mrs. Topes, for example; she never seemed to get bored. Zip zip, zip zip zip. The cicada went on without pause.

And he had genius—the real Italian genius for engineering, for dominating and exploiting nature. A true son of the Roman aqueduct builders he was, and a brother of the electrical engineers. Only Kuno—that was his name—didn't work in water; he worked in women.

He knew how to harness the natural energy of passion; he made devotion drive his mills.

The commercial exploitation of love-power, that was his specialty. I sometimes wonder," Miss Penny added in a different tone, "whether I shall ever be exploited, when I get a little more middle-aged and celibate, by one of these young engineers of the passions.

"

You can write pages about Destiny and its ironic quacking. It's tremendously impressive, and there's money in every line.

"

"Very curious," I agreed. "

But, then, so is everything else if you look at it like that.

"