The Children quotes

… though he had travelled much, and his profession as a civil engineer had taken him to interesting and out-of-the-way parts of the world, and though he was always on the alert for agreeable encounters, it was never at such times that they came to him.

He would have loved adventure, but adventure worthy of the name perpetually eluded him; and when it has eluded a man till he is over forty it is not likely to seek him out later.

“I believe it’s something about the shape of my nose,” he had said to himself that very morning as he shaved in his spacious cabin on the upper deck of the big Mediterranean cruising-steamer.

“Jove—if a fellow was younger!”

Men of forty-six do not gasp as frequently at the sight of a charming face as they did at twenty; but when the sight strikes them it hits harder.

Boyne had not been looking for pretty faces but for interesting ones, and it rather disturbed him to be put off his quest by anything so out of his present way as excessive youth and a rather pathetic grace.

In the moment of her pause Boyne caught a small pale face with anxiously wrinkled brows above brown eyes of tragic width, and round red lips which, at the least provocation, might bubble with healthy laughter.

It did not occur to him now to ask if the face were pretty or not—there were too many things going on in it for that.

As she entered her cabin he heard her say, in her firm quick voice, to some one within: “Nanny, has Chip had his Benger? Who’s got the cabin with Terry?”

Chip laughed a genial well-fed laugh and fingered the brim of her hat appreciatively.

It was evident that the two had the very highest opinion of each other.

It was none of Boyne’s business to tell his new neighbour that the chair she had chosen was Mrs. Cliffe Wheater’s; the less so as she might (he decided on closer inspection) turn out to be a governess or other dependent of that lady’s.

“

Judith’s never been a child—there was no time.

So she got Mr. and Mrs. Wheater together, and they were both sore and unhappy over their blunders, and realised what a mess they’d made—and finally they decided to try again, and they were remarried about three years ago;

“

That doesn’t show you anything but sleeping-cars and Palace Hotels, does it?

Mother and father never even have a guide-book; they just ask the hall-porter where to go. And then something always seems to prevent their going. You must show me everything, everything.”

… to expect that a child of fifteen or sixteen, brought up in complete ignorance of the past, and with no more comprehension than a savage of the subtle and allusive symbolism of art, should feel anything in Monreale but the oppression of its awful unreality.

And yet he was disappointed, for he was already busy at the masculine task of endowing the woman of the moment with every quality which made life interesting to himself.

“Woman—but she’s not a woman! She’s a child.” His thinking of her as anything else was the crowning absurdity of the whole business. Obscurely irritated with himself and her, he stood up, turning his back impatiently on the golden abyss of the apse. “Come along;

One of Rose Sellars’s jolly letters: clever, understanding and humorous. Why did Boyne feel a sudden flatness in it? Something just a trifle mincing, self-conscious—prepared? Yes; if Mrs. Sellars excelled in one special art it was undoubtedly that of preparation.

She led up to things—the simplest things—with the skill of a clever rider putting a horse at a five-barred gate.

All her life had been a series of adaptations, arrangements, shifting of lights, lowering of veils, pulling about of screens and curtains. No one could arrange a room half so well; and she had arranged herself and her life just as skilfully.

Sellars’s. But the question of a woman’s age was almost always beside the point.

When a man loved a woman she was always the age he wanted her to be; when he had ceased to, she was either too old for witchery or too young for technique.

“And five years is too long a time,” he summed it up again, with a faint return of the apprehension he always felt when he thought of his next meeting with Mrs. Sellars.

It was all very well to say that he “wasn’t that kind of man”—the kind to tire of a woman as soon as she could be had.

That was all just words; in matters of sex and sentiment, as he knew, a man was a different kind of man in every case that presented itself.

Only by going to the Dolomites to see her could he really discover what it was that he had found so haunting in Rose Sellars. So he was going.

Not that he was indifferent to the material advantages they offered. Nobody appreciated hot baths and white tiles, electric bedlamps and prompt service, more than he whose lot was usually cast in places so remote from them.

He loved Palace Hotels; but he loathed the mere thought of the people who frequented them.

Judy, he discovered, was of the same mind. Boyne had felt a little resentful of the fact that only the Wheaters’ youngest-born was to share the luxury of their hotel; it seemed rather beastly to banish the others to frowsy lodgings around the corner.

She was on her feet in a flash, quivering with anger. “My age? My age? What do you know about my age?

I’m as old as your grandmother. I’m as old as the hills.

I suppose you think I oughtn’t to say things like that about mother—but what am I to do, when they’re true, and there’s no one but you that I can say them to?”

Judith raised her eyebrows with a faint smile. “We’re more used to fusses than you are.

When there are seven children, and a lot of parents, there’s always somebody fighting about something.

But Zinnia’s nothing like as bad as she looks.” She paused a moment, and then, irrepressibly, as if to rid her heart of an intolerable weight: “But Blanca got away with my present. Did you see that? I knew she would!

Rose Sellars’s world had always been the pole-star of his whirling skies, the fixed point on which his need for permanence could build.

He could only conclude, now, that he combined with the wanderer’s desire for rest the wanderer’s dread of immobility.

“Hang it all, you can’t have it both ways,” he rebuked himself; but secretly he knew that that was how the heart of man had always craved it....

“There you are—that’s what I meant!

It’s the view from you that I’ve missed so, all these years.

”

It was neither doubt nor pride that held him back, nor any uncertainty as to her feeling; but simply his sense of the wellbeing of things as they were.

In the course of his life so much easy love had come his way, he had grown so weary of nights without a morrow, that he needed to feel there was one woman in the world whom he was half-afraid to make love to.

Rose Sellars had chosen that he should know her only as the perfect friend; just at first, he thought, he would not disturb that carefully built-up picture. If he had suspected a rival influence he would not have tolerated delay;

It was years since he had rambled among mountains without having to look at them with an engineering eye, and calculate their relation to a projected railway or aqueduct; and these walks opened his eyes to unheeded beauties.

It was like being led through the flowered borders of an illuminated missal of which he had hitherto noticed only the central pictures.

Better still were the evenings. When he first came a full moon held them late on the balcony, listening and musing, and sent him down dizzy with beauty through the black fir-shadows to his hotel.

Usually they started on foot, with stick and rucksack, getting back only as the great cliffs hung their last lustre above the valley. Mrs. Sellars was a tireless walker, proud of her light foot and firm muscles.

She loved all the delicate detail revealed only to walkers: the thrust of orchis or colchicum through pine-needles, the stir of brooks, the uncurling of perfumed fronds, the whirr of wings in the path, and that continual pulsation of water and wind and grasses which is the heart-beat of the forest.

Boyne, always alive to great landscape, had hitherto been too busy or preoccupied to note its particulars.

It was a quiet embrace, the hushed surface of something deep and still. She had not spoken; he thanked his gods for that.

Almost any word might have marred the moment, tied a tag to it, and fitted it with others into some dusty pigeon-hole of memory.

She had known how to be different—and that was exquisite. Their quiet communion had silently flowered, and she had let it.

“Oh, hang reasons—especially unreasonable ones!

Why have you got to be unhappy now because you were unhappy then?

”

“If you call that a sufficient reason, we shall never get married.

In a family as large as yours there’ll always be somebody stupid left to consider.

”

But since he had parted with the substance of his independence, why cling to the form? He felt her eyes following his inner debate, and knew that the sweetness of her smile was distilled out of satisfaction at his defeat.

“Damn it,” he thought, “what cannibals marriage makes of people.”

He suddenly felt as if they were already married—as if they had been married a long time....

He was willing to assume the blame, since the joy of holding her fast, of plunging into her enchanted eyes, and finding his own enchantment there, was still stronger than any disappointment.

If love couldn’t be friendship too, as he had once dreamed it might, the only thing to do was to make the most of what it was....

Judith Wheater’s letter had been for over a week in Boyne’s pocket when he pulled it out, crumpled and smelling of tobacco.

“So she is; awfully fond. But everything rushes past her in a whirl.

Life’s a perpetual film to those people. You can’t get up out of your seat in the audience and change the current of a film.

”

“The girl in peach-colour, over there by the column—lovely, isn’t she? Only one has seen her a thousand times, in all the ‘Vogues’ and ‘Tatlers.’

Oh, Martin, won’t it be too awful if beauty ends by being standardised too?

”

Judith pondered, her brows gathering in a puzzled frown. “I don’t know that there’s anything more to tell. I brought the children away so that we shouldn’t be separated again.

If children don’t look after each other, who’s going to do it for them? You can’t expect parents to, when they don’t know how to look after themselves.

”

They had gone back into the sitting-room to greet him, and he settled himself Buddha-like on Mrs. Sellars’s knee, and laughed with satisfaction at the sight of Judy and Martin and Nanny grouped admiringly before him.

Whatever came Chip’s way seemed to turn into something as fresh as new milk with the bubbles on it.

“Oh, Chip’s a good enough fellow,” said Judith, fondly disparaging. “But wait till you see Terry....”

In such negotiations the language spoken, when interpreted, usually turned out to be the same. But in his talk with Wheater, Boyne had the sense of using an idiom for which the other had no equivalents.

Superficially their vocabularies were the same; below the surface each lost its meaning for the other.

Wheater continued to toss uneasily on a sea of incomprehension.

“Oh, damn,” Wheater groaned again. It was as if Boyne had proposed to him to ascend the throne of England. What was the use of dealing in impossibles?

There were things which even his money couldn’t buy—and when you stripped him of the sense of its omnipotence he squirmed like a snail out of its shell.

“Why can’t there not be rows?” he began again, perspiring with the oppression of his helplessness.

Lullmer. It would have been unfashionable to be different; and once more Boyne marvelled at the incurable simplicity of the corrupt.

“Blessed are the pure in heart,” he thought, “for they have so many more things to talk about....”

Out in the offing the lights of the “Fancy Girl” drew an unheeded triangle of stars, cruising up and down against the dusk. A breeze, rising as darkness fell, carried the reflection toward the shore on a multitude of little waves;

Cliffe Wheater had scrambled heavily to his feet, and stood casting perplexed glances about him. “I did say I’d be, I believe. Damn it all—I’d no idea it was so late....”

“It’s always late in this place. I don’t see how we any of us stand it,” murmured Mrs. Lullmer.

“I always say we’re the real labouring classes.”

… of peace flowed in on him from those great fastnesses of sun and solitude, with which the little low-ceilinged room, its books and flowers, the bit of needle-work in the armchair, the half-written letter on the desk, had the humble kinship of quietness and continuity.

“I’d forgotten that anything had any meaning,” he thought to himself as he let the spell of the place weave its noiseless net about him.

“Martin—but how tired you look!” She was on the threshold, their hands and lips together. He remembered that kiss afterward.... She lingered close, her arms on his shoulders. “I didn’t even know you’d got back.” There was the faintest shadow of reproach in her tone.

The mere fact of gaining time was nine tenths of the battle; and that he had already achieved. But already, too, he was beginning to wonder how he was to fit Rose Sellars into the picture of his success.

It was curious: when they were apart it was always her courage and her ardour that he felt; as soon as they came together again she seemed hemmed in by little restrictions and inhibitions.

“Do tell me just what happened,” she said.

“I hope to God she won’t. What I’m gambling on is that he and your mother will get so homesick for you children that they’ll patch things up on your account.”

Her smile kept its soft incredulity. “They don’t often, you know; parents don’t.”

“Well, anyhow, you’ve got a reprieve, and you must make the most of it.”

Boyne laughed, and suffered himself to be led onward.

The air on that height was as fresh as youth, and all about them were the secret scents that dew and twilight waken into life.

He knew that he and Judith ought to be turning homeward; but, even if she had released his captive arm, it was growing too dark to consult his watch.

The child at his side had travelled with him into the beauty as far as she could go, and now he needed nothing from her but the warmth of her nearness.

His highest moments had always been solitary....

She seemed to guess that there was nothing else to say, and they continued to mount the hill in silence.

She moved beside him like a sleepy child bringing back an apronful of flowers from a happy holiday; and the fact of having reassured her so quickly awed Boyne a little, as if he had meddled with destiny.

But it was pleasant, for once, to play the god, and he let himself drift away into visions of a vague millennium where all the grown people knew what they wanted, and if ever it happened that they didn’t, the children had the casting vote.

By the time they reached the pension, and Judith had loosed her hold of Boyne’s arm, he was afraid to look at his watch, but pushed her through the gate with a quick goodnight—and then, a moment later, called to her in an imperious whisper.

Dobree. Mr. Dobree’s tact seemed to Boyne like a parody of Mrs. Sellars’s; like one of those monstrous blooms into which hybridizers transform a delicate flower.

It was a “show” tact, a huge, unique, disbudded tact grown under glass, and destined to be labelled, exhibited, given a prize and a name, and a page to itself in the florists’ catalogues.

Such at least was Boyne’s distorted vision of the new guest at the châlet.

Every fibre of him was alive to the exquisite moment; but he had no need to fly from it, no fear of its flying from him.

Judith’s sleep was a calm pool in which he rested.

He fancied he must have been watching her for a long time, his thoughts enclosing her in a sort of calm fraternal vigilance, when she opened her eyes and turned them on him, still dewy with sleep.

He saw that Rose Sellars knew he was glad to be alone with her, and that the knowledge put her at her ease, and made her want to say and do whatever would maintain that mood in him.

There was something pathetic in the proud creature’s eagerness to be exactly what he wished her to be.

“Judith was looking her very prettiest today, wasn’t she? Mr. Dobree was so much struck by her,” she said softly, after a silence.

Sellars. After all, it was because of her old-fashioned scruples, her unwillingness to marry him at once, and let him get back to work, that they were still loitering in the Dolomites.

It probably wasn’t safe for middle-aged people to have too much leisure in which to weigh each other’s faults and merits.

But then, again, suddenly he thought: “If we’d been married, and gone home when I wanted to, what would have become of the children?” It was undoubtedly because Mrs. Sellars had insisted on prolonging their engagement that Boyne had become involved in the Wheater problem;

All around this numbness there was a great margin of pity and of comprehension; but he knew this was not the region by way of which he could reach her.

She who had always lived the life of reason would never forgive him if he called upon her reason now....

“Rose—” he appealed to her.

When ways and means had to be considered, the disenchanted maiden for whom life seemed to have no surprises became once more the helpless little girl in the hands of nurses and governesses.

At such moments, Boyne thought, she was like a young Daphne, half emerging into reality, half caught in the foliage of fairyland.

She always responded to every change in his intonation; and as he spoke he saw the shadow in her eyes before it reached her lips. Trying to keep a smile on them, she interrupted: “Now I’ve said something stupid again.”

But summer was waning in the high valleys of the Dolomites; tourists were scattering, the big hotels preparing to close. By-and-by a cold sparkle began to fill the air in the early mornings, and at night the temperature fell to freezing.

On the lower slopes the larches were turning to pale gold, and the bare cliffs burned with an intenser fire against a sky as hard as metal.

The very magic of the hastening days warned Boyne that they could not last, and that the change in the landscape symbolized another, as imminent, in the fortunes of his party.

“I see. But you seem to have forgotten that they have parents....”

“No. It’s the parents who’ve forgotten,” Judith flashed back.

“Not all of them. Since I’m here,” the Princess smiled.

All the next day the rain continued.

It was one of those steady business-like rains which seem, in mountain places, not so much a caprice of the weather as the drop-curtain punctually let down by Nature between one season and the next.

Behind its closely woven screen one had the sense of some tremendous annual scene-shifting, the upheaval and overturning of everything in sight, from the clouds bursting in snow on the cliff-tops to the mattresses and blankets being beaten and aired in the hotel windows.

Fresh bitterness filled him as he saw one more prop withdrawn from under the crazy structure of his hopes.

“These people,” he reflected, “all act on impulse where their own wants are concerned, and call in a lawyer when it’s a question of anybody else’s.”

But in his heart he was not much surprised. Mrs. Mervin was no longer young, and it is natural for ageing people to shrink from responsibilities.

The difficulty was to find a beginning.

What would have been so simple if kisses could have told it, seemed tortuous or brutal when put in words.

He shrank not so much from the possibility of hurting her as from the sudden fear of her hurting him beyond endurance.

He looked about him with the same estranged stare with which his eyes had rested on her face. Something clear and impenetrable as a pane of crystal seemed to cut him off from her, and from all that surrounded her.

He had been to the country from which travellers return with another soul.

“What I want...?” Ah, he knew that well enough! What he wanted, at the moment, was just some opiate to dull the dogged ache of body and soul—to close his ears against that laugh of Judith’s, and all his senses to her nearness.

“Yes,” she assented, very low. She did not take the hand he held out—perhaps did not even see it.

When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness—as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.

“You’ve forgotten your umbrella,” she said, as he reached the door. He gave a little laugh as he came back to get it.

Yet at times he too felt tenuous and disembodied. Since the fever, particularly—it was always disastrous to him to have to interrupt his work. And this flat soft shore that gave him welcome—so safe, so familiar—how it frightened him!

He didn’t want to come in contact with life again, and life always wooed him when he was not at work.

It was odd, how little, of late, he had thought of the Wheaters. At first the memory of them had been a torture, an obsession. But luckily he had not given his address to Judith, and so she had not been able to write;

he enjoyed the feeling of being lost in the throng, alone and unnoticed, with no likelihood of being singled out, like Uncle Edward, for some agreeable adventure.

Adventure! He had come to hate the very word.

His one taste of the thing had been too bitter. All he wanted now was to be amused; and he hugged his anonymity. For three days he wandered about, in cafés, on terraces above the sea, and in the gaming-rooms.