The Courts of the Morning quotes

But he was so downcast at my refusal, and so earnest that something should be done, that I promised to put the matter before Sandy Arbuthnot. I proposed in any case to go to Laverlaw for a couple of days on my way to Machray.

Laverlaw is a very good imitation of the end of the world.

You alight at a wayside station in a Border valley, and drive for eight miles up a tributary glen between high green hills;

She rather fancied the East. Sandy was discouraging. The East, he said, was simply dusty bric-a-brac, for the spirit had gone out of it, and there were no mysteries left, only half-baked Occidentalism. “

Go to Samarkand, and you will get the chatter of Bloomsbury intellectuals. I expect in Lhasa they are discussing Freud.

”

It’s too big and badly put together, like a child’s mud castle. There’s cannibal fish, and every kind of noxious insect, and it’s the happy home of poisons, and the people are as ugly as sin.

The land isn’t built according to our human scale, and I have no taste for nightmares.

”

“Because I don’t want to. I’d rather eat cold mutton in a cabman’s shelter, as Lamancha once observed about political banquets. Good Lord, Dick, I can’t begin to tell you how I loathe the little squirrel’s cage of the careerists.

All that solemn twaddle about trifles!

Oh, I daresay it’s got to be done by somebody, but not by me.

“I wish I had been born an Englishman,” he said at last. “Then I could have lived for that place, and been quite content to grow old in it. But that has never been our way.

Our homes were only a jumping-off ground. We loved them painfully and were always homesick for them, but we were very little in them.

That is the blight on us—we never had any sense of a continuing city, and our families survived only by accident. It’s a miracle that I’m the sixteenth Clanroyden. … It’s not likely that there will be a seventeenth.”

… guest on another occasion, I will take you to a club as well equipped as any in Pall Mall, or to a theatre where you will see better acting than in London, and I will give you a supper afterwards which Voisin’s could not better.

We have civilisation, you see⁠—for what it is worth.

”

I do not believe in the League of Nations, and I do not love the United States, and I regard the Monroe Doctrine as an insult to my race. But what would you have, my dear Sir Archibald?

We have chosen prosperity, and the price we pay for it is our pride.

Olifa is a well-nourished body without a soul. Life and property are as safe here as in England, and what more can the heart of man desire? We have a stable Government because our people have lost interest in being governed.

But what would you have, my dear Sir Archibald? We have chosen prosperity, and the price we pay for it is our pride.

Olifa is a well-nourished body without a soul.

Life and property are as safe here as in England, and what more can the heart of man desire? We have a stable Government because our people have lost interest in being governed.

“Be content, my friends, with what we can offer—our beauty and our civilisation. Think of us as a little enclave of colour between the glooms of the great sea and the clouds of the great mountains.

Here man has made a paradise for himself, where during his short day of life he can live happily without questioning.

”

Suddenly Archie’s spirits awoke. He seemed to see Olifa as what he had hoped—not a decorous city of careerists, but a frontier post on the edge of mysteries.

The unknown was there, crowding in upon the pert little pride of man.

In the golden brume to the east were mountains—he could almost see them—running up to icefields and splintered pinnacles, and beyond them swamps and forests as little travelled as in the days of Cortes.

In the golden brume to the east were mountains—he could almost see them—running up to icefields and splintered pinnacles, and beyond them swamps and forests as little travelled as in the days of Cortes.

Between the desert of the ocean and the desert of the hills lay this trivial slip of modernity, but a step would take him beyond it into an antique land.

The whiff of a tropical blossom from the shrubberies and the faint odour of wood smoke unloosed a flood of memories—hot days in the African bush, long marches in scented Kashmir glens, shivering camps on Himalayan spurs.

“

Olifa is a mask⁠—you have not seen her face.

Look in front of you. You see nothing but flat pastures. But beyond you know that there are wild mountains. So I tell you that behind the flatness of Olifa there are wild things.”

“Olifa is a mask—you have not seen her face. Look in front of you. You see nothing but flat pastures. But beyond you know that there are wild mountains.

So I tell you that behind the flatness of Olifa there are wild things.

”

“I am positive Sir Archibald will understand,” said the Gobernador. “We have established, as it were, a Sheffield and a Birmingham in a rude hill-country, and we must limit our administrative problems.

The sixteenth century and the twentieth can coexist only if the latter is given in small doses.

Slowly they will harmonise—but slowly. You have the same problem in your India. I understand that you do not permit tourists, however well accredited, even to enter some of the hill-states.”

“That is right.

No section of humanity deserves blame. It is governments, not peoples, that offend.

”

on one side a wilderness of furnaces and converters, with beyond them the compounds where the workmen are housed; on the other a modern city with high buildings and clanking electric trams.

By day it is an inferno of noise and dust and vapours, with a dull metallic green the prevailing tint; by night a bivouac of devils warmed by angry fires.

Mr. Perry is right. The place has the look of a gangrening sore, with for the surrounding skin the pale shaley hills. And the climate is in itself a disease.

Hourly the sense of the bivouac expands in the traveller’s mind.

The place is one great caravanserai for pilgrims.

These busy, preoccupied people are here for the day only and tomorrow will be gone.

and their visit to the smelting plant was attended by the same exasperating buffoonery.

Presently it appeared that their idiocy was congenital and not a pose.

Their jazz chatter and jazz manners were the natural expression of jazz minds, and must be endured because of the prestige of Mr. Burton Rawlinson.

It is called the Tierra Caliente, for there is little shade from a merciless sun, and the stages are long from water to water.

The midday heat falls like a suffocating curtain, and does not lift till night arrives with the speed of a wind from the far snows.

It was patrol not escort duty, but the new recruit saw many of his fellow-policemen engaged in the latter task.

“We are going into the Poison Country—El País de Venenos—where lead and powder are trivial things. A gun is of as little use as a single lifebelt would be to a man proposing to cross the Atlantic in a skiff.

We are now in the hands of the older gods.

”

“They terrify me,” said Black. “I have seen men very near to the brutes, but these fellows are uncannier than any beast.

They are not inhuman, they are unnatural.

How on earth did you get a graft here?”

Luis had been listening closely. “You are very near the truth, Señor Roylance,” he said. “

We in Olifa have all that science and money can give us, but we have not enough soul.

What is your English word—‘guts’?”

The motive is the same in every case—rootlessness, an unbalanced consciousness of ability, and an overweening pride.

They want to rule the world, but they do not see that by their methods they must first deprive the world of its soul, and that what would be left for their dictatorship would be an inanimate corpse.

You see, for all their splendid gifts they have no humour.”

I hate cruelty. I hate using human beings as pawns in a game of egotism. I hate all rotten, machine-made, scientific creeds. I loathe and detest all that superman cant, which is worse nonsense than the stuff it tries to replace.

I really believe in liberty, though it’s out of fashion.

… And because America in her queer way is on the same side, I’m for America.”

But, unlike the First Consul, he did not need to keep a close eye on his subordinates; they had become automata, minor replicas of himself, whose minds worked in accurate conformity with his.

Of this loyalty there could be no doubt; they had lost the capacity for treason, since treason implies initiative.

But on certain matters he kept his own counsel. There were letters from Europe and the United States, specially marked, which he opened himself, and which were never answered or filed by his most efficient secretaries.

The Gobernador frowned. “It has never been my custom, as you know, Señor.

A man who goes in fear of his life is a fool⁠—he had better be dead.

”

“Getting up steam, sir,” Archie observed. “We’ve said goodbye to Olifa and we start in the small hours.

A place always looks its jolliest when you are leaving it.

”

It is an ugly picture, and I know you hate it. So do I. … All the same it is a false picture, for we are the worst publicity agents on earth. The trouble is that we have had no second Columbus.

Nobody from outside has ever discovered the true America.

”

“

You are tolerant, because you do not like America. I am intolerant because I love it.

”

“Yes, in the field. We’ve been frozen into convention for two thousand years. The autumn of 1918 saw the end of that regime. Now mankind is going to discover new ways of exercising superiority—in the field, but not by the old field tactics.

Conquest is always a spiritual conquest, and means will be found for making spirit act directly on spirit.

”

“You are very clever, Excellency, but I think that there is always an unknown x which will defeat you. You are too clever, for you would make science and reason rule over a dimension to which they don’t apply.

Humility may be more scientific than arrogance.

”

Below her the chasm of blue mist slowly became luminous, and features detached themselves, tall trees near at hand clinging to scarps, outjutting headlands of green far down.

The noise of the falling stream grew louder, as if it had been asleep during the darkness and had only begun to talk with the morning.

The immediate foreground cleared, and curious things were revealed.

To the southeast lay the great wall of the sierras, but as it bent inland the land in front seemed to sink in craggy and forested foothills, giving the eyes a great prospect towards what seemed a second and lower plateau.

The air was filled with an exquisite morning freshness, half of the sea and half of the hills, and the place seemed part eyrie, part sanctuary⁠—an observation point over the kingdoms of the world, and also a tiny sheltered kingdom, brooded over by virgin peaks and guarded by untravelled seas.

The four stopped before one of the larger tents. A little way off a small party of Indians were off-saddling weary horses. The girl pointed to them.

Everything worked by rule, and even your lawlessness was nicely calculated. And all the old stagnant things were your puppets which you could move as you pleased. But there’s another side of which you know nothing at all.

You have your science; well, it will be matched against hope and faith and the simplicity that takes chances.

We may go down, but we’ll go down cheerfully, and, if we win, by God, we’ll make you a new man.”

“Yes—yes. But it is only one kind of imagination.

Milton could imagine the scenery of Hell and Heaven, but he hadn’t enough imagination to understand his wife.

He is still a little puzzled by us, and that makes him puzzled about himself. Up till now he had been mathematically certain about everything. If we make him uncertain, we may win.

“Isn’t that begging the question?” the girl replied. “

Reality for us is what we make of things. We may make them conform to our picture.

It is what we all do. It is what you have been doing all your life, Excellency.”

“You are the romantic.

You have tried to force the world inside a theory, and it is too big for that.

We humble people never attempt the impossible. You are a self-deceiver, you know.”

“Because of your intellectual pride.

It is only humility that sees clearly and knows its limitations.

”

Janet laughed. “I think he was.

Jack saw that the giants were far bigger than himself, but that, being overgrown, unnatural things, they were bound to be stupid and weak.

”

“

I have always been rather lonely.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps⁠ ⁠… if I had met someone like you⁠ ⁠… long ago⁠ ⁠… I should not be so lonely today.

”

Barbara, busy with her hospital stores, seemed to be unconscious of the change, but Janet fell a prey to a perpetual apprehension. She tried to laugh at herself, but the ghost would not be laid.

The shelf of mountain, which had seemed so secure and homelike, was now but a narrow ledge on a great cliff, and she herself a climber sick with vertigo.

… The enemy was down below in the woody shelves, slowly creeping nearer, and the army of defence was apparently at the other side of the Gran Seco.

“Yes. I had a clear course marked out, like a chart.

Now the chart is overboard, and the rudder is swinging loose.

”

“I? How could I?

You cannot fear what you despise.

I have been too unhappily fortunate in life. I began with advantages. I was educated by my father, who was an embittered genius. I inherited very young a great fortune. … I was born in Austria, and therefore had no real country.

I was educated by my father, who was an embittered genius. I inherited very young a great fortune. … I was born in Austria, and therefore had no real country. Even before the war Austria was a conglomerate, not a people. …

I was brought up to despise the world, but I did not learn the lesson fully, for I excepted myself.

I found that I was cleverer than other people, and that my brains enabled me to use those others. How could I ever be afraid of what I could use?

“They will come—never fear. From starvation, if not from bullets. Make no mistake, they will come. Do you know what we are now, General Escrick?

A rebellion on the defensive, and that is the feeblest thing known to history.

”

… then she had realised that this was a merciful provision, that she had at any rate the hours of night to herself, and that not till the sun rose again and the blocks were removed would she have to face the true burden of captivity.

Here in this vast dark place, like the inside of a mountain, she was for the moment free.

She tried to compose herself to sleep again, for she knew that she needed all her physical and nervous strength for the strain of a new day. But she could not stop her mind from racing.

Why should he trouble himself to read the mind of this guerrillero; he knew by instinct the kind of mind he had—the ingenious schoolboy, treating war as a holiday game and banking on the unexpected.

There was no such thing as the unexpected. War was an exact mathematical science.

Cleverness and daring might delay for a week or two the advance of the great military machine, but in the end it crept forward, crushing opposition as a tank went through barbed wire and breastworks.

Mr. Judson appeared to be going to be sick at the recollection. He recounted haltingly something of his troubles, first in the forest and then in the glens of the foothills. Famine had been the worst.

“A biscuit would ha’ rattled in my stomach like a buckshot in a tin pan.”

He had several times decided that he was about to perish. “This world one time, then the fireworks,” was the way he expressed his anticipation.

“He is not angry.” It was Luis who answered. “He does not trouble.

The ordinary man everywhere in the world only wishes to be left alone. Revolutions are not made by the many but by the few.

Yet there are enough of the discontented, I think, to do our business.”

“But can you harness him?” Janet persisted. “

Can you turn Niagara into a useful stream which will irrigate gardens?

”

But even if we’re scuppered, you may still win. … Let ’em know you’re coming. No, no! No flag of truce business. Get Archie to fly you to the Plaza de Toros. They’ll be hungry to see you.

We’re gambling on the outer edge of sanity, and the wildest course is the safest.

You must impress them—it’s their nerves we’re gunning for. Goodbye, sir. Goodbye, all of you. If I see Veiro again, we’ll be smoking the peace-pipe.”

It’ll stiffen their backs, for it looks as if it were built for eternity. We should have aimed to shift them somewhere where they could get a sight of Sandy’s braves or Melville’s roughnecks.

You can’t scare kings sitting in their palace.

”

It’ll stiffen their backs, for it looks as if it were built for eternity. We should have aimed to shift them somewhere where they could get a sight of Sandy’s braves or Melville’s roughnecks. You can’t scare kings sitting in their palace.”

“Dwellers in palaces,” said Luis oracularly, “have weaker nerves than dwellers in tents.”

The aide-de-camp appeared again. “Their Excellencies are ready to receive you,” he announced, and, holding himself very stiff and straight, he opened a door which led to the Council Chamber.

Presently the remainder of his men straggled in, and after a short rest Sandy led his force southward, to where Olivarez’s guns could be heard at their noisy bombardment.

The charge of that wild commando at dawn is a tale not for dull prose but for some swinging ballad.

The surprise was complete, and most of the batteries were taken in the rear. Olivarez was a stout soldier, and he rallied gallantly, but he was caught between two fires, whose magnitude he could not guess.

… My colleagues have made their plans. Veiro will be isolated. … Why in the name of God did you leave your friends in that lonely place? They should have been in the midst of an army.

When men are desperate, they think only of revenge.

”