The Good Soldier quotes

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs.

Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart.

I had known the shallows.

I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people.

or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little foursquare coterie was such another unthinkable event.

Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together at one of the little tables in front of the club house, let us say, at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go, …

and we could rise and go, all four together, without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters. No, indeed, it can’t be gone.

You can’t kill a minuet de la cour.

You may shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles;

Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?

No, by God, it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison⁠—a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.

And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins.

It doesn’t so present itself now though the two of them are actually dead. I don’t know. …

I know nothing⁠—nothing in the world⁠—of the hearts of men.

I only know that I am alone—horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever again witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths.

I know nothing—nothing in the world—of the hearts of men.

I only know that I am alone⁠—horribly alone.

No hearthstone will ever again witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths.

At what, then, does it all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man—the man with the right to existence—a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour’s womankind?

I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us.

And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone?

And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn’t see any call to do it.

Why does one do things?

I just drifted in and wanted Florence. First I had drifted in on Florence at a Browning tea, or something of the sort in Fourteenth Street, which was then still residential. I don’t know why I had gone to New York;

But the brick pink of his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of his inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression—like a mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china.

And that chap, coming into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls.

It was most amazing. You know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen balls at once and they all drop into pockets all over his person, on his shoulders, on his heels, on the inner side of his sleeves;

And the wrist was at its best in a black or a dog-skin glove and there was always a gold circlet with a little chain supporting a very small golden key to a dispatch box.

Perhaps it was that in which she locked up her heart and her feelings.

Anyhow, she sat down opposite me and then, for the first time, she paid any attention to my existence. She gave me, suddenly, yet deliberately, one long stare.

But upon my word, I don’t know how we put in our time. How does one put in one’s time? How is it possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it?

Nothing whatever, you understand. Not so much as a bone penholder, carved to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top through which you could see four views of Nauheim.

And, as for experience, as for knowledge of one’s fellow beings—nothing either. Upon my word, I couldn’t tell you offhand whether the lady who sold the so expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the station, was cheating me or no;

But upon my word, I don’t know how we put in our time. How does one put in one’s time?

How is it possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it?

Nothing whatever, you understand. Not so much as a bone penholder, carved to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top through which you could see four views of Nauheim. And, as for experience, as for knowledge of one’s fellow beings—nothing either.

The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty.

After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t.

I think the modern civilized habit—the modern English habit of taking everyone for granted—is a good deal to blame for this. I have observed this matter long enough to know the queer, subtle thing that it is;

Her face was perfectly clear, sharp and defined; her hair was glorious in its golden coils. Her nostrils twitched with a sort of contempt. She appeared to look with interest at a gypsy caravan that was coming over a little bridge far below us.

“Don’t you know,” she said, in her clear hard voice, “don’t you know that I’m an Irish Catholic?”

For, all that time,

I was just a male sick nurse.

And what chance had I against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal their hands from me? What earthly chance? They were three to one—and they made me happy.

I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she had to take up during her long Calvary of a life. …

You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at all.

It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are dead;

And, do you know, at the thought of that intense solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to rush forward and comfort her.

You cannot, you see, have acted as nurse to a person for twelve years without wishing to go on nursing them, even though you hate them with the hatred of the adder, and even in the palm of God.

But, in the nights, with that vision of judgement before me, I know that I hold myself back. For I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness.

I, as I said, was sitting in the deep chair, Leonora was standing in the window twirling the wooden acorn at the end of the window-blind cord desultorily round and round. She looked across the lawn and said, as far as I can remember:

“Edward has been dead only ten days and yet there are rabbits on the lawn.”

I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass in England. And then she turned round to me and said without any adornment at all, for I remember her exact words:

I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass in England. And then she turned round to me and said without any adornment at all, for I remember her exact words:

“I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide.”

I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of leisure that we two seemed to have at that moment.

And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her.

We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away;

So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth.

But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials.

It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor—a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one’s character or in one’s career.

For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one’s small meannesses.

It is really death to do so—that is why so many marriages turn out unhappily.

But it has always been as a matter for study, not for remembrance.

She just went completely out of existence, like yesterday’s paper.

I was so deadly tired.

I know that sort of feeling came to the surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe told me that he had seen her coming out of that fellow’s bedroom.

I thought suddenly that she wasn’t real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates.

It is even possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I just couldn’t do it;

But, from that moment until her worse than death, I do not suppose that I much thought about anything else. I don’t mean to say that I sighed about her or groaned;

I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.

Do you understand the feeling—the sort of feeling that you must get certain matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly negligible complications before you can go to a place that has, during all your life, been a sort of dream city?

I don’t, of course, like the tradition, but I am bound to say that it gave Nancy—or at any rate Nancy had—a sense of rectitude that I have never seen surpassed.

It was a thing like a knife that looked out of her eyes and that spoke with her voice, just now and then.

It positively frightened me. I suppose that I was almost afraid to be in a world where there could be so fine a standard.

(The little digression as to my Philadelphia experiences was really meant to lead around to this.)

For who in this world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart⁠—or of his own?

I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave.

She was a virtuous business woman with a mother and two sisters and her own old age to be provided comfortably for. She did not expect more than a five years’ further run. She was twenty-four and, as she said:

“We Spanish women are horrors at thirty.”

Edward swore that he would provide for her for life if she would come to him and leave off talking so horribly; but she only shrugged one shoulder slowly and contemptuously.

I call this the Saddest Story, rather than “The Ashburnham Tragedy,” just because it is so sad, just because there was no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end.

There is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny.

There is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny.

Here were two noble people⁠—for I am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble natures⁠—here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the mind and death.

And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.

The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora.

“I know it,” she said. “And I am dying for love of him.”

Leonora uttered an “Ah,” that, in spite of herself, was an “Ah” of horror and of grief.

to have taken the tickets; to have caught the trains; to have chosen the cabins; to have consulted the purser and the stewards as to diet for the quiescent patient who did nothing but announce her belief in an Omnipotent Deity.

That may sound romantic⁠—but it is just a record of fatigue.

I don’t know why I should always be selected to be serviceable. I don’t resent it—but I have never been the least good. Florence selected me for her own purposes, and I was no good to her;

to have chosen the cabins; to have consulted the purser and the stewards as to diet for the quiescent patient who did nothing but announce her belief in an Omnipotent Deity. That may sound romantic—but it is just a record of fatigue.

I don’t know why I should always be selected to be serviceable. I don’t resent it⁠—but I have never been the least good.

Florence selected me for her own purposes, and I was no good to her; Edward called me to come and have a chat with him, and I couldn’t stop him cutting his throat.

So off I go, rushing through Provence, to catch the steamer at Marseilles. And I wasn’t the least good when I got to Ceylon; and the nurse wasn’t the least good.

Nothing has been the least good.

The doctors said, at Kandy, that if Nancy could be brought to England, the sea air, the change of climate, the voyage, and all the usual sort of things, might restore her reason. Of course, they haven’t restored her reason.

I didn’t really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer and fantastic world.

Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.

Only she is mad. It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.

Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?

Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?

It was the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of Edward’s house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of the body politic.

Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the extinction of proud, resolute and unusual individuals.

Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the sentimentalist about him; and society does not need too many sentimentalists. Nancy was a splendid creature, but she had about her a touch of madness.

All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What would you have?

Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But, if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled.

If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. She was made for normal circumstances—for Mr.

Because that may just as well have been for the sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it may have been for the sake of both of them.

I don’t know. I know nothing. I am very tired.

Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the girl didn’t love Edward. She wanted desperately to believe that. It was a doctrine as necessary to her existence as a belief in the personal immortality of the soul.