Short Fiction quotes

“You see that parchment Oswald Crollius? He was one of the first to show me the way, though I don’t think he ever found it himself. That is a strange saying of his: ‘

In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.

’ ”

Its pigeonholes and drawers teemed with documents on the most morbid subjects, and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which he had painfully entered the gems of his collection.

Clarke had a fine contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story ceased to interest him if it happened to be printed;

his sole pleasure was in the reading, compiling, and rearranging what he called his Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil, and engaged in this pursuit the evening seemed to fly and the night appeared too short.

sordid misery, that is all. You may think, Villiers, that I have exaggerated and talked for effect; but I have not told you half. I could tell you certain things which would convince you, but you would never know a happy day again.

You would pass the rest of your life, as I pass mine, a haunted man, a man who has seen hell.

”

“The name she passed under when I met her was Helen Vaughan, but what her real name was I can’t say. I don’t think she had a name. No, no, not in that sense.

Only human beings have names, Villiers; I can’t say any more.

Goodbye; yes, I will not fail to call if I see any way in which you can help me. Good night.”

he himself was the embodied proof of it. Villiers mused curiously over the story he had heard, and wondered whether he had heard both the first and the last of it. “No,” he thought, “certainly not the last, probably only the beginning.

A case like this is like a nest of Chinese boxes; you open one after another and find a quainter workmanship in every box.

Most likely poor Herbert is merely one of the outside boxes; there are stranger ones to follow.”

“

I have always been rather fond of going over empty houses; there’s a sort of fascination about the desolate empty rooms, with the nails sticking in the walls, and the dust thick upon the windowsills.

But I didn’t enjoy going over Number 20, Paul Street. I had hardly put my foot inside the passage before I noticed a queer, heavy feeling about the air of the house.

Each of these men who had resolved to die a tortured shameful death was rich, prosperous, and to all appearances in love with the world, and not the acutest research could ferret out any shadow of a lurking motive in either case.

There was a horror in the air, and men looked at one another’s faces when they met, each wondering whether the other was to be the victim of the fifth nameless tragedy.

Journalists sought in vain in their scrapbooks for materials whereof to concoct reminiscent articles; and the morning paper was unfolded in many a house with a feeling of awe; no man knew when or where the blow would next light.

but nothing of the sort has taken place. As for the theory of mania, that is very well, of course, for the coroner’s jury, but everybody knows that it’s all nonsense.

Suicidal mania is not smallpox.

”

“Why? Because it made my blood run cold to see that man’s face. I could never have supposed that such an infernal medley of passions could have glared out of any human eyes; I almost fainted as I looked.

I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man’s outward form remained, but all hell was within it.

Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair. I am sure he did not see me;

No; assuming, as I had to assume, that her record was not of the cleanest, it would be pretty certain that at some previous time she must have moved in circles not quite so refined as her present ones.

If you see mud on the top of a stream, you may be sure that it was once at the bottom.

I went to the bottom. I have always been fond of diving into Queer Street for my amusement, and I found my knowledge of that locality and its inhabitants very useful.

“Very good. I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens.

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing.

It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things;

“Exactly. I was even then forming myself, though all unconsciously. You know my poor father could not afford to send me to the University. I used to grumble in my ignorance at not having completed my education.

That was the folly of youth, Salisbury; my University was Piccadilly.

There I began to study the great science which still occupies me.”

“

The science of the great city; the physiology of London; literally and metaphysically the greatest subject that the mind of man can conceive.

What an admirable salmi this is; undoubtedly the final end of the pheasant. Yet I feel sometimes positively overwhelmed with the thought of the vastness and complexity of London. Paris a man may get to understand thoroughly with a reasonable amount of study;

literally and metaphysically the greatest subject that the mind of man can conceive. What an admirable salmi this is; undoubtedly the final end of the pheasant. Yet I feel sometimes positively overwhelmed with the thought of the vastness and complexity of London.

Paris a man may get to understand thoroughly with a reasonable amount of study; but London is always a mystery.

In Paris you may say: ‘Here live the actresses, here the Bohemians, and the Ratés’; but it is different in London. You may point out a street, correctly enough, as the abode of washerwomen;

“Give me some more wine. Thanks. You are mistaken, my dear fellow, you are really mistaken. London has nothing to be ashamed of in the way of crime.

Where we fail is for want of Homers, not Agamemnons.

Carent quia vate sacro, you know.”

“Well, in plain language, we have no good writers in London who make a speciality of that kind of thing.

Our common reporter is a dull dog; every story that he has to tell is spoilt in the telling.

His idea of horror and of what excites horror is so lamentably deficient. Nothing will content the fellow but blood, vulgar red blood, and when he can get it he lays it on thick, and considers that he has produced a telling article.

To be exact, I had a glass of beer in the General Gordon, the most flourishing house in the neighbourhood, and as I was wandering rather aimlessly about, I saw an uncommonly tempting gap in a hedgerow, and resolved to explore the meadow beyond.

Soft grass is very grateful to the feet after the infernal grit strewn on suburban sidewalks

, and after walking about for some time I thought I should like to sit down on a bank and have a smoke.

I believe the people who live there mostly go into the City. I have seen once or twice a laden bus bound thitherwards. But however that may be, I can’t conceive a greater loneliness in a desert at midnight than there is there at midday.

It is like a city of the dead; the streets are glaring and desolate, and as you pass it suddenly strikes you that this too is part of London.

Well, a year or two ago there was a doctor living there;

“Sorcery and sanctity,” said Ambrose, “these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.”

Cotgrave listened, interested. He had been brought by a friend to this mouldering house in a northern suburb, through an old garden to the room where Ambrose the recluse dozed and dreamed over his books.

but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint.

Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner sense of things, and, consequently, our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate, unimportant.

”

“

Great people of all kinds forsake the imperfect copies and go to the perfect originals.

I have no doubt but that many of the very highest among the saints have never done a ‘good action’ (using the words in their ordinary sense).

“You’re quite wrong,” said Ambrose. “

I never make paradoxes; I wish I could.

I merely said that a man may have an exquisite taste in Romanée Conti, and yet never have even smelt four ale. That’s all, and it’s more like a truism than a paradox, isn’t it?

We think that a man who does evil to us and to his neighbours must be very evil. So he is, from a social standpoint; but can’t you realize that

Evil in its essence is a lonely thing, a passion of the solitary, individual soul?

Really, the average murderer, quâ murderer, is not by any means a sinner in the true sense of the word. He is simply a wild beast that we have to get rid of to save our own necks from his knife.

Gilles de Raiz is an instance. So you see that while the good and the evil are unnatural to man as he now is—to man the social, civilized being—evil is unnatural in a much deeper sense than good.

The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his.

In brief, he repeats the Fall.”

“

Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church.

”

“Yes.

It is the infernal miracle as holiness is the supernal.

Now and then it is raised to such a pitch that we entirely fail to suspect its existence; it is like the note of the great pedal pipes of the organ, which is so deep that we cannot hear it.

So, on the ‘other side,’ we venerate the saints, but we don’t ‘like’ them as we like our friends. Can you persuade yourself that you would have ‘enjoyed’ St. Paul’s company?

Do you think that you and I would have ‘got on’ with Sir Galahad?

“So with the sinners, as with the saints. If you met a very evil man, and recognized his evil; he would, no doubt, fill you with horror and awe; but there is no reason why you should ‘dislike’ him.

“I told you it was very rare,” said Ambrose, who appeared willing to avoid the giving of a direct answer. “The materialism of the age, which has done a good deal to suppress sanctity, has done perhaps more to suppress evil.

We find the earth so very comfortable that we have no inclination either for ascents or descents.

It would seem as if the scholar who decided to ‘specialize’ in Tophet, would be reduced to purely antiquarian researches. No palæontologist could show you a live pterodactyl.”

We find the earth so very comfortable that we have no inclination either for ascents or descents. It would seem as if the scholar who decided to ‘specialize’ in Tophet, would be reduced to purely antiquarian researches.

No palæontologist could show you a live pterodactyl.

”

Nearly all the drawers were full of old dresses, but one of the small ones looked empty, and I found this book hidden right at the back.

I wanted a book like this, so I took it to write in. It is full of secrets.

I have a great many other books of secrets I have written, hidden in a safe place, and I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones; but there are some I shall not put down at all.

Then she brought out a great gold cup, covered with jewels, from her fairy palace, and she offered him wine in the cup to drink.

And he drank, and the more he drank the more he longed to drink, because the wine was enchanted.

So he kissed the lovely lady, and she became his wife, and he stayed all that day and all that night in the hill where she lived, and when he woke he found he was lying on the ground, close to where he had seen …

… she lived, and when he woke he found he was lying on the ground, close to where he had seen the stag first, and his horse was there and his hounds were there waiting, and he looked up, and the sun sank behind the mountain.

And he went home and lived a long time, but he would never kiss any other lady because he had kissed the queen of the fairies, and he would never drink common wine any more, because he had drunk enchanted wine.

And sometimes nurse told me tales that she had heard from her great-grandmother, who was very old, and lived in a cottage on the mountain all alone, and most of these tales were about a hill where people used to meet at night long ago, …

… and a day, when she was to have been married, they carried her through the town in her smock, and they tied her to a great stake in the marketplace, and burned her alive before the bishop with her wax image hung round her neck.

And people said the wax man screamed in the burning of the flames.

And I thought of this story again and again as I was lying awake in my bed, and I seemed to see the Lady Avelin in the marketplace, with the yellow flames eating up her beautiful white body.

In the cases I am thinking of there could have been no possibility of ‘suggestion’ or subconscious action of any kind.

One might as well suppose a schoolboy ‘suggesting’ the existence of Aeschylus to himself, while he plods mechanically through the declensions.

“But you have noticed the obscurity,” Ambrose went on, “and in this particular case it must have been dictated by instinct, since the writer never thought that her manuscripts would fall into other hands. But the practice is universal, and for most excellent reasons.

“Yes, it was hidden by the thorns and the thick undergrowth that had surrounded it. It was a wild, lonely country; but you know what it was like by her description, though of course you will understand that the colours have been heightened.

A child’s imagination always makes the heights higher and the depths deeper than they really are; and she had, unfortunately for herself, something more than imagination.

One might say, perhaps, that the picture in her mind which she succeeded in a measure in putting into words, was the scene as it would have appeared to an imaginative artist. But it is a strange, desolate land.”

“And is it there still?”

“I sent for tools, and we hammered it into dust and fragments.”

“The persistence of tradition never surprises me,” Ambrose went on after a pause. “I could name many an English parish where such traditions as that girl had listened to in her childhood are still existent in occult but unabated vigour.

Darnell cast an anxious glance at the clock.

“Goodbye,” and they kissed each other seriously and dutifully, and Mary’s eyes made Darnell think of those lonely water-pools, hidden in the shadow of the ancient woods.

So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life.

“Goodbye,” and they kissed each other seriously and dutifully, and Mary’s eyes made Darnell think of those lonely water-pools, hidden in the shadow of the ancient woods.

So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life.

To Darnell the true life would have seemed madness, and when, now and again, the shadows and vague images reflected from its splendour fell across his path, he was afraid, and took refuge in what he would have called the sane “reality” of common and …

She could scarcely take in the news that her aunt was a hopeless maniac, for Mrs. Nixon, having been extremely stupid all her days, had naturally succeeded in passing with her relations as typically sensible.

With the Reynolds family, as with the great majority of us, want of imagination is always equated with sanity, and though many of us have never heard of Lombroso we are his ready-made converts.

We have always believed that poets are mad, and if statistics unfortunately show that few poets have really been inhabitants of lunatic asylums, it is soothing to learn that nearly all poets have had whooping-cough, which is doubtless, like intoxication, a minor madness.

Mary looked at him steadily and touched his arm, and he drew a long breath before he spoke again.

“It is the old blood calling to the old land,” he said. “I was forgetting that I am a clerk in the City.”

It was, doubtless, the old blood that had suddenly stirred in him;

There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.

There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, “It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,” and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it.

So it was in these British trenches.

In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers.

But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.

His voice was hushed. For as he looked at the minister the fashion of his vesture was changed. The black robe seemed to melt away from him.

He was all in armour, if armour be made of starlight, of the rose of dawn, and of sunset fires; and he lifted up a great sword of flame.

Full in the midst, his Cross of Red Triumphant Michael brandishèd, And trampled the Apostate’s pride.

There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper.

I often think that the most extraordinary item of intelligence that I have read in print appeared a few years ago in the London Press. It came from a well known and most respected news agency; I imagine it was in all the papers.

to this land I came, and to hollows that were purple and odorous with wild thyme, wonderful with many tiny, exquisite flowers.

There was benediction in centaury, pardon in eye-bright, joy in lady’s slipper

;

bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly inexplicable; devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the key to the nature of the enigma.

You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till you know what the puzzle is about.

“Yards divided by minutes,” said the mathematical master to me long ago, “will give neither pigs, sheep, nor oxen.” He was right; though his manner on this and on all other occasions was highly offensive.

devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till you know what the puzzle is about.

“Yards divided by minutes,” said the mathematical master to me long ago, “will give neither pigs, sheep, nor oxen.”

He was right; though his manner on this and on all other occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process, as I may call it;

then a rushing lamp; and then, as if in an incredible point of time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and all the sky and hid the stars and possessed the land.

“I thought the end of the world had come,” one of the sailors said.

And then, an instant more, and it was gone from them, and four of them say that there was a red spark on Chapel Head, where the old grey chapel of St. Teilo stands, high above the water, in a cleft of the limestone rocks.

but that was all over between them that had seen the rosy light; old enemies shook hands heartily, and roared with laughter as they confessed one to another what fools they had been.

“I can’t exactly say how it has happened or what has happened at all,” said one, “but if you have all the world and the glory of it, how can you fight for fivepence?”

The church of Llantrisant is a typical example of a Welsh parish church, before the evil and horrible period of “restoration.”

some of the old Italian masters of painting had known it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but broken hints.

It is not poetic to go to Apothecaries’ Hall for similes.

But for many years I kept by me an article from the Lancet or the British Medical Journal—I forget which—in which a doctor gave an account of certain experiments he had conducted with a drug called the Mescal Button, or Anhelonium lewinii.

The landlord is a very jovial, merry fellow, and I observed with some astonishment that his ordinary, easy manner was completely altered as he said, gravely, “That will be over there, up by the mountain,” pointing vaguely to the north.

And he changed the subject, as a Freemason changes the subject.

There the matter lies, and its appositeness to the story of Llantrisant is this: that the dream of Olwen Phillips was, in fact, the Vision of the Holy Graal.

… a thrilling all over him and he felt as strong as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before, so that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him, as if it were sport and play.

And much more wonderful than this or any other wonders was forgiveness, with love to follow it.

There were meetings of old enemies in the marketplace and in the street that made the people lift up their hands and declare that it was as if one walked the miraculous streets of Syon.

but there is, of course, this difficulty, that one may be hallucinated and communicate his impression to the others, telepathically.

But at the last, what do we know?

there is all the difference in the world between the impression you receive from such a chance communication and that given by half a dozen lines of print with name, and street and date and all the facts of the case.

People in trains repeat all sorts of tales, many of them false; newspapers do not print accounts of murders that have not been committed.

Then another consideration that has made for secrecy. I may have seemed to say that the old office of rumor no longer exists; I shall be reminded of the strange legend of “the Russians” and the mythology of the “Angels of Mons.”

But we have grown of late to such a reverence for the printed word and such a reliance on it, that the old faculty of disseminating news by word of mouth has become atrophied.

Forbid the Press to mention the fact that Jones has been murdered, and it is marvelous how few people will hear of it, and of those who hear how few will credit the story that they have heard.

You meet a man in the train who remarks that he has been told something about a murder in Southwark;

I have compared him to Mr. Tulkinghorn of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; but Mr. Llewelyn would most certainly never have dreamed of employing his leisure in peering into the cupboards where the family skeletons were hidden.

Supposing such cupboards to have existed, Mr. Payne Llewelyn would have risked large out-of-pocket expenses to furnish them with double, triple, impregnable locks.

He was a new man, an advena, certainly; for he was partly of the Conquest, being descended on one side from Sir Payne Turberville; but he meant to stand by the old stock.

state, as Remnant puts it. But I think it’s extremely improbable. Probability is the guide of life, you know, Remnant,” said Dr. Lewis, smiling at that gentleman, as if to say that he also had done a little reading in his day. “

And it follows therefore, that improbability is also the guide of life.

When you get a very high degree of probability, that is, you are justified in taking it as a certainty; and on the other hand, if a supposition is highly improbable, you are justified in treating it as an impossible one.

“It is a question of idiosyncrasy,” said the doctor.

“Is idiosyncrasy Greek for ‘I don’t know’?” asked Remnant.

“Not at all,” said Lewis, smiling blandly. “I mean that in some diatheses whisky—as you have mentioned whisky—appears not to be pathogenic, or at all events not immediately pathogenic.

In other cases, as you very justly observed, there seems to be a very marked cachexia associated with the exhibition of the spirit in question, even in comparatively small doses.”

Under this cloud of professional verbiage Lewis escaped from the Club and from Remnant.

He did not want to hear any more about that Dreadful Ray, because he felt sure that the Ray was all nonsense. But asking himself why he felt this certitude in the matter he had to confess that he didn’t know.

“People say that the Germans have landed, and that they are hiding in underground places all over the country.”

Lewis gasped for a moment, silent in contemplation of the magnificence of rumor.

The Germans already landed, hiding underground, striking by night, secretly, terribly, at the power of England! Here was a conception which made the myth of “The Russians” a paltry fable; before which the Legend of Mons was an ineffectual thing.

“It’s more than extraordinary; it’s an awful state of things. It’s terror in the dark, and there’s nothing worse than that. As that young fellow I was telling you about said,

‘At the front you do know what you’re up against.’

”

Merritt knelt on his knees, and hollowed his hand and drank the well water. He said (over his port) that night that if all water were like the water of the filbert well the world would turn to teetotalism.

It takes a townsman to relish the manifold and exquisite joys of the country.

It was not till he began to venture abroad that Merritt found that something was lacking of the old rich peace that used to dwell in Meirion. He had a favorite walk which he never neglected, year after year.

I have heard many gentlemen staying in Porth say that there is nothing to beat the view from the hill over there, not in the whole of Wales.”

Everyone is polite in Meirion, but somehow Merritt understood that, in English, this speech meant “move on.”

Merritt moved back to Porth—he was not in the humor for any idle, pleasurable strolling after so dreadful a meeting with death. He made some inquiries in the town about the dead man, but nothing seemed known of him.

And since the real nature of all this mystery of death was unknown, it followed easily that the signs and warnings and omens of it were all the more unknown.

Here was horror, there was horror; but there was no links to join one horror with another;

no common basis of knowledge from which the connection between this horror and that horror might be inferred.

Then the dog became like a possessed creature. He barked furiously.

He ran up to one of the men and looked up at him, “as if he were begging for his life,” as the man said, and then rushed to the gate and stood by it, wagging his tail and barking at intervals.

The men stared and laughed.

Harvest was going on, everybody was busy in his own fields, and after the long day’s hard work neither the farmer nor his men felt inclined to stroll about in search of news or gossip.

A harvester at the day’s end is ready for supper and sleep and for nothing else.

And so it was late in that week when it was discovered that Thomas Griffith and all his house had vanished from this world.

The rest followed him.

The corporal snapped out an order over his shoulder, and there was a rattling metallic noise as the men fixed their bayonets and became in an instant dreadful dealers out of death, in place of harmless fellows with a feeling for beer.

“Thomas Griffith!” again bellowed the farmer.

And the horses; four great, heavy, patient-looking beasts they were there too, and in the lower field the sheep were standing, as if they waited to be fed.

“You would think they all knew there was something wrong,”

one of the soldiers muttered to another. A pale sun showed for a moment and glittered on their bayonets. They were standing about the body of poor, dead Griffith, with a certain grimness growing on their faces and hardening there.