The Good Companions quotes

What is so queer about it now is that the road itself cannot be seen at all. A grey-green tide flows sluggishly down its length.

It is a tide of cloth caps.

These caps have just left the ground of the Bruddersford United Association Football Club. Thirty-five thousand men and boys have just seen what most of them call “t’United” play Bolton Wanderers. Many of them should never have been there at all.

He has walked this way, home from the match, hundreds of times, but this Saturday in late September is no ordinary day for him—although he does not know it—for it is the very threshold of great events.

Chance and Change are preparing an ambush.

Only a little way before him there dangles invitingly the end of a thread. He must be followed and watched.

“Na Jim!” returned Mr. Oakroyd. This “Na,” which must once have been “Now,” is the recognized salutation in Bruddersford, and the fact that it sounds more like a word of caution than a word of greeting is by no means surprising.

You have to be careful in Bruddersford.

“Well,” said Jim, falling into step, “what did you think on ’em?”

For a minute or two nothing more was said. No doubt both of them felt that this last speech had reached the limits to which confession might be pushed.

Beyond were extravagance and indecency, and a good Bruddersfordian left such wild regions to actors and Londoners and suchlike.

Mr. Oakroyd looked out of the window.

“I dunno, I dunno,” said the other meditatively. “P’raps I can, p’raps I can’t. Who knows?” Then in a tone of great melancholy he added: “

Nobody knowsh. And nobody⁠—nobody⁠—caresh.

Nobody.” He seemed to be overcome by the pathos of this reflection.

Then something inside him flared and went shooting through this bewildered dark like a rocket, and Mr. Oakroyd committed a crime.

“Oh, to hell wi’ t’card!” he cried, and tore it across and threw the pieces into the fire.

Then, leaving horror-stricken amazement behind him, he picked up his bag of tools and his little basket trunk and made for the door.

“Now you’ve done it,” they were crying. “Where yer going?”

“Down South,” he replied, and vanished into the night.

Its ripe gold became hot and dusty gilt. The Hall itself seemed smaller in this strange atmosphere, made up of straw and string and petrol and stares and silly jokes and perspiring bargainers.

The place gaped vacantly, like a once handsome old idiot.

As she skirted the crowd in front and made her way to a side door, she had a glimpse of certain familiar tables and chairs and pictures now being lifted into vans and carts, and that glimpse made her feel, as nothing that had happened …

“I beg your pardon,” shouted Mrs. Rathbury, now purpler than ever from bending so far forward. “Where did you say you where going? We were coming over to look at the Hall again. We may want to see you.”

“I’m going to be invisible.”

Yes, she actually heard herself saying it. And then she turned her attention to the clutch and gears, for everybody was moving again.

The vague sadness of a prairie has fallen upon this plain of dried marshes.

Like a rich man who gives but never smiles, this land yields bountifully but is at heart still a wilderness.

Somewhere in the middle of this region, a narrow side-road finds its way to a hamlet, made up of about twenty houses, a tiny shop, and an alehouse, and then wanders on another mile or so in order to arrive at a house of some …

He wears a blue pullover, no coat, a generous bow-tie, and baggy and rather discoloured flannel trousers. He is smoking a ridiculously long cherrywood pipe.

There is about him the air of one who is ready to fail gloriously at almost anything.

We realize at once that his History, French, English Literature, his cricket and football, are dashing but sketchy.

Her round eyes and parted lips were sufficient to frame the question. But Inigo’s sense of the dramatic compelled him to wait a few moments. His stare was heavy with doom.

“A bust-up,” he said at length, “and a bust-up of the most astounding and shattering proportions.”

He gave her another fateful glance, then quite suddenly grinned at her, waved his hand, and went striding down the corridor, whistling his tune, that tune which is perhaps the leitmotif of the piece.

There was a knock, and Felton looked in, all neat and shining. The very sight of his trim brown felt hat, his dreary blue tie, his flashing eyeglasses, gave Inigo an awful sense of dullness.

A walk with Felton would be like a stroll across the Gobi Desert.

Inigo gave him a long head-shake. “No, thanks. Some other time when I’m a stronger and saner man and the wild Northeaster does whatever what’s his name—Mr. Kingsley—says it does. But not today.”

Now, it’s all cars and lorries. And what ’appens? They don’t stop at a place like this but goes on to big towns and stops there. That’s what’s hit this business so ’ard, my friend. It isn’t what it was, I can tell you.”

“Nowt’s what it wor,” said Mr. Oakroyd with a kind of cheerful melancholy.

“I’ve seen some changes i’ my time. You take textile trade nar—”

“Ho, indeed! And what’s that?”

“You can’t fry eggs.” And Mr. Oakroyd, chuckling, closed the door behind him.

Down the sunny length of Everwell he wandered, a man desperately situated. He had not a penny, was far from home and, indeed, not certain where he was, had no work at a time when work was scarce, and had not even an insurance card.

“Eh,” he cried, “but I’ve seen summat this week. I’ve had a bit o’ fun on me travels if I never see nowt no more.”

Perhaps that began it all. They were brave words, manfully spoken from the heart, and we do not know how far such words may travel nor what they may set in motion.

A minute or two later, he turned a corner and saw that the length of road before him was empty except for a single stationary object some distance away. It was a small car. He walked towards it, leisurely, incuriously.

It would, too, be a friendly gesture towards the eagerly-forgetting-all-about-yourself, which only needed what she determined now to call “a swallower.” Buildings and anti-medievalism and progress were apparently all swallowers for this old gentleman, now galloping rather noisily through his blackberry tart.

Perhaps she had served other people’s swallowers too long; it was time she had one of her own.

But then there might be one waiting for her at Liverpool.

In another five minutes they were hurrying out, and Miss Trant heard a car give a familiar gasp or two, then a rattle, then a roar immediately afterwards.

Never had a car sounded so guilty; there was nervous apprehension in every diminishing hoot.

Miss Trant was left to ponder the mystery of Mr. Eric Tipstead and his partner, without whom the dining-room was very commonplace, just so much boiled mutton and treacle pudding, so many fat men and whisky advertisements.

“Don’t, don’t!” she cried, and moved a step or two forward, with the intention of doing something. But she did not know what to do.

The usual consolatory little actions seemed absurd, like trying to give a pat or two to an earthquake.

“Now what’s up here?” Uncle Arthur was puffing and blowing before them, looking from one to the other. “Has that chap gone?” he asked Miss Trant. “I thought I heard him. Nay, lass, bear up, bear up.”

Uncle Arthur winked again.

“What the eye doesn’t see, the heart won’t miss,” he observed.

“I’m only on duty, you might say, from the waist up, and I could wear a kilt or clogs and it ’ud make no difference you see. You notice next time you’re at the theatre, and you’ll see what I mean.”

“

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,

” said Inigo, who was wondering how this incredible personage had ever been able to land himself at Dullingham Junction in the middle of the night. It was really surprising that he had been able to find this small island of ours at all.

Grudy in a very deep voice. There was certainly something patriarchal about him. He was a gaunt elderly man carefully dressed in black. His eyebrows were bushy, intimidating; his nose had a masterful Semitic curve; his long white moustache was not altogether of this world.

It was a face you could see framed in the smoke of a desert sacrifice.

Inigo said he was very pleased too, and then took Mr. Timpany on one side and asked him about washing and brushing. Mr. Timpany remembered that Inigo would have to spend the night somewhere. He consulted Mr. Grudy, who advanced upon Inigo again.

Mrs. Bevison-Burr, the commanding woman, came next. Her subject was Unbelief. She referred to Unbelief as if it were a very obnoxious person who was in the habit of insulting her every morning and evening.

Mrs. Bevison-Burr commanded them to do all manner of things to Unbelief.

She did not hold out any great hopes for them when they had done all these things. Only a few of them were wanted by Jehovah, but the least they could all do was to settle Unbelief.

At that moment a voice came ringing from the centre of the group. “Come on, you two,” it cried. “Don’t be shy. Hurry up and join in.”

It was a girl’s voice, casual but a trifle mocking.

Inigo heard it with a curious little thrill of excitement that afterwards he was at great pains to explain. He has not forgotten it yet, and perhaps he never will. It came ringing—and up went a curtain.

Hurry up and join in.” It was a girl’s voice, casual but a trifle mocking. Inigo heard it with a curious little thrill of excitement that afterwards he was at great pains to explain. He has not forgotten it yet, and perhaps he never will.

It came ringing⁠—and up went a curtain.

“Nowt shy about yon lass,” said Mr. Oakroyd. “Well, we’ve come a fair way, we mun join in.”

Her voice trailed away into a speculative silence, broken at last by the voice of common sense, pointing out that she was a fool. But then, wasn’t it high time she was a fool?

You can’t go on being cool and sensible all the time, forever.

Miss Longstaff leaned forward again and whispered: “Jimmy Nunn could tell you—he’s been working it out, I know, because he’s tried hard to get somebody to back us.

“I suppose so,” she replied. “And if it is silly, I don’t really mind.

It’s time I did something really silly. It’s terrible being quiet and sensible all your life, isn’t it?

”

As he groaned “Can’t look at ’em—poison to me!,” he did not seem to be refusing a little mutton and tart, but a gigantic host of dishes; waving away the very fat of the land.

He referred to his stomach as if it were a haughty and eccentric guest he had brought with him.

He crumbled his toast and sipped his whisky and soda (“Can’t touch wine or beer”) with a melancholy pride. He found time, however, to talk business with Miss Trant, who explained briefly and rather nervously her complete ignorance and comparative poverty.

Everybody’s—well, not everybody, but a lot of people—are out for a good time—and that’s all right, of course; I’m all for it; the more the merrier, so to speak—but it’s nearly always their own good time and nobody else’s they’re out after, isn’t it?

An awful lot of hard nuts about now, somehow⁠—and only soft in the wrong places.

Well, of course, I’m not any better than anybody else, bit worse, I dare say, but I’d like one or two people to say I was a good companion. That’s one of the things that’s attracted me about this what’s it—concert party;

Then he remembers he is making a speech. “As I said before, I’m not very sure what a trouper is, except that he or she is one who—er—troupes. Therefore, I don’t exactly know what constitutes a good trouper.

But if it means being a good companion, or trying to be a good companion, then I’m proud to be called one, absolutely.

Somehow”—he was in earnest now, saying for once something that was very real and important, felt in the heart, and not being, in spite of all his easy chatter, one of that rapidly increasing horde of glib self-confessors, he could only stammer it out—“somehow—there isn’t …

“Listen, everybody,” Miss Trant calls out at once. “Mr. Jollifant has given me the name. I’m sure it’s never been used before. We’ll call ourselves ‘The Good Companions.’ What do you think of that?” She is very excited now.

The Good Companions. They are all turning it over and over tasting it.

Inigo approves of it at once and with enthusiasm.

His voice was no better than it is now, was indeed the same plaintive and rather nasal croon, hardly worth calling a voice at all, yet most artfully adapted for the work it had to do.

Jazz, which had begun as an explosion of barbaric high spirits, a splash of crimson and black on a drab globe, had become civilized; it was quieter, more subtle, and flirted with sentiment and cynicism;

its first bold colours faded to autumnal tints; its butterfly gaieties were forever fluttering down into melancholy;

“I was going to say I’d seen a lot more of life than you have. Then I thought I wouldn’t. ‘It might hurt his nice little conceit of himself,’ I said to myself. So I didn’t.

If you want to be friends with a man, you mustn’t ever say anything to hurt his precious vanity, and as that’s always as big as a row of houses and tender all over, you have to be awfully careful.

”

“So there you are,” she cried. “If I’ve to lock myself in this room, give out I’m ill again, I’ll do it.

Let’s have a bit of life, I say.

Now tell me what you want and show me what you’ve got.”

And very strange it was to go outside and find the night there, the glitter of the promenade, the mysterious and murmuring dark of the sea, the lonely lights far out, the chill salt breath that now seemed so sweet.

Out they came, dim shapes with jubilant voices.

A cigarette went curving over the side like a tiny meteor, and a voice said: “Ah, I’d rather taste the air than that.” They gathered round her. “Well, this was a Night, wasn’t it?” they chorused: and “What a send-off!”

He had never been a constant theatregoer or music-hall patron, though he still liked seven-pennorth of pit at the second house of the Bruddersford Imperial, but nevertheless he considered himself to be a man who knew a good turn when he saw it.

Your Bruddersfordian is a hanging judge of anything that costs money.

And Mr. Oakroyd, after having seen the show from almost every possible angle, was convinced that the Good Companions were good turns. He thought least of Elsie, whose rather mechanical little frivolities he dismissed as “summat and nowt.”

but it was Mr. Oakroyd’s opinion that she had plenty of money and had it so long that she never thought about it. “

Brass might graw on trees so far as she knaws, or cares,

” he said of her; and this opinion, which would have enraged a democrat of an earlier generation, only tended to increase his wondering respect for her. Bruddersford had its rich and its poor, but he never remembered meeting anyone there like Miss Trant.

“So this is Hicklefield,” said Inigo, looking about him with distaste and shivering a little. “

Methinks the air doth not smell wooingly here, my Sue. In fact the place gives me the hump, absolutely.

”

A policeman, an antique taxicab, a man with newspapers, a woman in an imitation sealskin coat, and a few other persons and things, were standing there, apparently waiting for Doomsday to break.

Nothing broke the grey monotony but the pavement itself, which was startlingly black in its grime.

There was no colour, no sparkle of life, anywhere.

“

I’m cold, hungry, and an ass,

” that young gentleman replied, and made a desperate attempt to smooth his hair before a waiter caught sight of him.

Once again Susie pointed out that it would be marvellous to have a lot of money. She dwelt rather wistfully on the subject of riches.

England is preeminently the country in which it is difficult for two to agree: if one turns realist, the other turns idealist; a cynic instantly creates a sentimentalist.

Inigo stoutly denied that money, beyond a necessary competence, was important; he denounced the life of luxury, even going to the length of refusing a third chocolate; and he declared that Susie’s attitude pained him.

“Well,” said Inigo impatiently, “and how do you find it?”

“Here,” said Mr. Oakroyd, bending forward and curving a hand round his mouth. “It’s bloody awful.”

Having delivered this verdict, he looked solemnly at Inigo, shook his head, then stumped away to find the baggage, with the air of a man who would continue to do his duty whatever it cost.

Industrial towns, like steam engines, are only even tolerable if they are in working order and puffing away.

Tewborough was like an engine with a burst boiler lying on the side of a road; it was a moneymaking machine that had almost stopped working, for only a wheel here and there shakily revolved or a pulley gave a groan or two;

it was a factory that could now show you nothing but broken windows and litter and mouldering ledgers and a mumbling caretaker; it was nothing but an old cashbox containing only dust and cobwebs and a few forgotten pence.

Joe told her. Then she went on, passionately: “Was there an audience at all tonight? Was there anybody in the house? I thought I heard a sound once from somewhere, but was I mistaken? Does Tewborough know we’re here?” she asked wildly.

“It knows but it doesn’t care,” said Susie.

“I said to Joe last night: ‘Mark my words, Joe, this is going to be a bad week. I feel it in my bones,’ I said.

The March wind went shrieking over the Midland Plain.

Under a sky as rapid, ragged, and tumultuous as a revolution, all the standing water, the gathered thaws and rains of February, filling the dykes and spreading over innumerable fields, was ruffled and whitened, so that the day glittered coldly.

The March wind went shrieking over the Midland Plain.

Under a sky as rapid, ragged, and tumultuous as a revolution, all the standing water, the gathered thaws and rains of February, filling the dykes and spreading over innumerable fields, was ruffled and whitened, so that the day glittered coldly.

There was ice even yet in this wind, but already there were other things too, shreds and tatters of sunlight, sudden spicy gusts, distant trumpetings of green armies on the march.

“You want a good mouth-wash,” cried Jimmy angrily to Mr. Ridvers. “It’s asking for a good clean-out, that big mouth of yours.”

“I’ve been in places where you’d have had a bullet through you⁠—like that⁠—zip!⁠—for saying less than you’ve said about a lady.”

And Mr. Mitcham, drawing the Silver King round him with a noble gesture of scorn, attempted to wither the furious cinema proprietor with one magnificent glance.

and a mouth that was a perpetual crimson circle of faint astonishment. The upper half of her, her neck and shoulders and the thin arms ending so curiously in little dumpy hands, was poor; but her legs were really beautiful.

It was as if she were being carried about by two fine sonnets.

Those two exquisite, twinkling silky calves of hers seemed to be always making charmingly witty and impudent comments on the world.

And when she returned to her room, she reminded herself that it was all nothing.

It is not much fun being so intimately concerned with nothing.

The thought of it can even rob you of your legitimate pleasure in a good historical novel. Louis the Eleventh of France and the Duke of Burgundy made a poor show of capturing Miss Trant’s interest for the rest of that afternoon.

“Very well indeed,” said Miss Trant, who had just come to the conclusion that

Effie resembled nothing so much as a tropical sunset accompanied by rumours of earthquake.

“You’re a little thinner perhaps.”

“Oh, am I, by jingo!” With that, the outraged young man sat up, suddenly flung an arm round her, twisted her round towards him, and kissed her soundly and well before she could do or say a single thing.

There are heavens that await only reckless men, and he spent a delirious minute in one of them.

Then he found himself shot out of it, and back in Ye Jollie Dutche Café with all his courage evaporated.

His bravado returned with a rush at the sound. “And that’s the kind of man I am,” he announced.

“Well, it’s not the kind of girl I am,” she told him, “especially at twelve in the morning in an imitation Dutch café. So don’t try it again, that’s all.”

“It made me feel quite sick,” she said calmly, turning an impudent face, still rosy and brilliant, towards him. “No, not again! Who do you think you are? Now listen.” She looked serious. “When I said you were feeble, I didn’t mean that.

Behind the footlights she was a ravishing creature, but at close range everything about her, her face, her figure, her clothes, her voice, her whole personality, was overpowering, too stunning.

Inigo felt as if he were being introduced to an amiable blonde tigress.

“He’s just popped in from Little Woozlum or Puddleton-on-the-Slag,” Mr. Tanker explained, “and brought in a bunch of winners. That’s one you’ve just heard.”

“Delighted! And, thank you. But I warn you,” Inigo added, “I shan’t unbend.

The more food and drink I have, the more iron goes into my will. Even now it’s got a metallic sound.

”

“Get me a boy,” said Mr. Mortimer to a waiter. Though the lunch was still going on, he took Inigo to one side, away from the table.

A great man does not announce a decision when he is barely eighteen inches from a mixed grill.

“I’ll do it,” he said impressively. “It wrecks the rest of this day, but I can fix that. Tell me where I’ve got to go and don’t forget to see I’ve got a decent seat. Better wire now.

She opened her eyes, which discovered a world very bright, solid, looking as if it had just been made. He was standing by the door. She was not surprised to see him. She had not been surprised to hear his voice.

It was as if she had spent years and years being surprised not to see him and hear his voice, and that that state of things had now quietly stopped.

He came forward, smiling. He looked older, of course, but not strangely so. On the contrary, he looked more himself, as if this were the age he had been aiming at when she had known him, years ago. “Miss Elizabeth Trant,” he said, with deliberation.

“Don’t pay a penny piece,” he cried, rising from his chair.

Because a man has been working hard on parathyroid glands, and in addition has contrived to remember a girl he once knew on a voyage years ago, that does not mean that he cannot be appalled at the thought of good money being paid out like that.

It was a prospect to make hundreds of McFarlanes turn in their graves. It now made this McFarlane stride up and down the room. “You’ve heard nothing definite yet?” he asked, finally.

Susie’s face fell. “Yes, it is, isn’t it? I’d forgotten that. Yes, it’s all right laughing, but it’s rather sad, really. Why can’t we have one nice thing without having to give up another nice thing?”

“That, my dear lady, is Life.” Mr. Memsworth did this magnificently.

“I suppose it is, but it’s beastly all the same,” said Susie. “Oh, and what about the others, Jimmy and the Joes? What are they going to do now, poor darlings? Can’t you do anything for them, Mr. Memsworth? They’re awfully good, really.