The Great Impersonation quotes

“The difference between us,” Von Ragastein pronounced, “is something which is inculcated into the youth of our country and which is not inculcated into yours.

In England, with a little money, a little birth, your young men expect to find the world a playground for sport, a garden for loves.

The mightiest German noble who ever lived has his work to do. It is work which makes fibre, which gives balance to life.”

In England, with a little money, a little birth, your young men expect to find the world a playground for sport, a garden for loves. The mightiest German noble who ever lived has his work to do.

It is work which makes fibre, which gives balance to life.

”

“The colonies,” Dominey pronounced, “are a kill or cure sort of business.

You either take your drubbing and come out a stronger man, or you go under.

I had the very narrowest escape from going under myself, but I just pulled together in time. Today I wouldn’t have been without my hard times for anything in the world.”

“You’ve lost all your manners,” she complained. “

You make love like a garden rake.

You should have leaned towards me with a quiver in your voice when you said those last two words, and instead of that you look as though you were sitting at attention, with a positive glint of steel in your eyes.”

“You’ll find that no one will have a word to say against you,” she told him, “now that you are wealthy and regenerate.

They’ll forget everything you want them to.

When will you come and dine here and meet all your relatives?”

“Three times a week for many months I have been drumming the fact into the handful of wooden-headed Englishmen who have deigned to come to our meetings. I have made myself a nuisance to the House of Lords and the Press.

It is a terrible thing to realise how hard it is to make an Englishman reflect, so long as he is making money and having a good time.

—You are just back from Africa, Everard?”

“He reminds me of the geese who saved the Capitol,” he said, “a brainless man obsessed with one idea.

It is queer how often these fanatics discover the truth.

That reminds me,” he added, taking a small memorandum book from his waistcoat pocket and glancing it through. “His Grace has a meeting tonight at the Holborn Town Hall. I shall make one of my usual interruptions.”

“Man, you are young!” he exclaimed. “You are like the rest of us. You carry your life in your hands. Don’t nourish past griefs. Cast the memory of them away.

There’s nothing which narrows a man more than morbidness.

You have a past which may sometimes bring the ghosts around you, but remember the sin was not wholly yours, and there is an atonement which in measured fashion you may commence whenever you please. I have said enough about that.

You have a past which may sometimes bring the ghosts around you, but remember the sin was not wholly yours, and there is an atonement which in measured fashion you may commence whenever you please. I have said enough about that.

Greatness and gaiety go hand in hand.

There! You see, I was a philosopher before I became a professor of propaganda. Good! You smile. That is something gained, at any rate. Now we will take a taxicab to Holborn and I will show you something really humorous.”

“The miracle of it extends further,” Seaman agreed. “Tonight, in its small way, is a supreme example of the transcendental follies of democracy.

England is being slowly choked and strangled with too much liberty. She is like a child being overfed with jam.

Imagine, in our dear country, an Englishman being allowed to mount the platform and spout, undisturbed, English propaganda in deadly opposition to German interests. The so-called liberty of the Englishman is like the cuckoo in his political nest. Countries must be governed.

“I wish that I could get it out of my blood that I want to kill you. Then you could take me right away. Other married people have lived together and hated each other. Why shouldn’t we?

We may forget even to hate.

”

“Fidelity,” the doctor grunted, “is second nature with all good women. Lady Dominey is a good woman, and she is no exception to the rule.

Her brain is starved because her heart is aching for love.

If she could believe in your repentance and reform, if any atonement for the past were possible and were generously offered, I cannot tell what the result might be.

“In my heart I know that,” she answered simply. “

These storms are part of our lives. They come with birth, and they shake the world when death seizes us.

One should not be afraid, but I have been so ill, Everard. Shall I call you Everard still?”

“I learnt many things there, Rosamund,” he told her quietly. “I learnt a little of the difference between right doing and wrongdoing.

I learnt, too, that all the passions of life burn themselves out, save one alone.

”

“The wind shall not hurt you, or anything else,” he promised. “

I have come back to take care of you.

”

She stood quite still, looking at him. Then she came a little nearer and leaned forward, as though studying his face.

“Eleven years,” she muttered, “do change many men, but I never knew a man made out of a weakling.”

“I have nothing more to say to you,” Dominey replied, “except to let you know that I am coming to see my wife in the space of a few minutes.”

“Henry is blinded by prejudice,” Dominey declared a little impatiently. “

He cannot imagine a German who feasts with anyone else but the devil.

”

“My dear Lady Maddeley,” he declared, “Germany is not governed like England.

When the war comes, the people will have had nothing to do with it. A great many of them will be just as surprised as you will be, but they will fight all the same.

”

“My friend,” she continued, “

I am terrified to think, besides your name, how much of humanity you have lost in your new identity.

To proceed it suited my convenience to remain for a few days in Berlin, and I was therefore compelled to present myself at Potsdam. There I received a great surprise. Wilhelm spoke to me of you, and though, alas!

“Have pity on me, Stephanie,” he begged. “

Until our time has come there is dishonour even in a single kiss.

Wait for the day, the day you know of.”

She is still weak-minded, just as she is tenderhearted. I watched her as she passed through the hall with you just now.

She turns to you for love as a flower to the sun after a long spell of cold, wet weather.

Von Ragastein, you are a man of honour. You must find means to deal with this situation, however difficult it may become.”

“You carry yourself so much more stiffly.

Sometimes you have the air of being surprised that you are not in uniform.

”

“There is one thing more,” Caroline began hesitatingly.

That one thing lacked forever the clothing of words.

There came a curious, almost a dramatic interruption. Through the silence of the hall there pealed the summons of the great bell which hung over the front door. Dominey glanced at the clock in amazement.

All other memories faded away. They were as though they had never been. Those dreary years of exile in Africa, the day by day tension of his precarious life, were absolutely forgotten.

His heart was calling all the time for an unknown boon.

He felt himself immeshed in a world of cobwebs, of weakness more potent than all his boasted strength. Then he suddenly felt that the madness which he had begun to fear had really come.

All other memories faded away. They were as though they had never been. Those dreary years of exile in Africa, the day by day tension of his precarious life, were absolutely forgotten. His heart was calling all the time for an unknown boon.

He felt himself immeshed in a world of cobwebs, of weakness more potent than all his boasted strength.

Then he suddenly felt that the madness which he had begun to fear had really come. It was the thing for which he longed yet dreaded most—the faint click, the soft withdrawal of the panel, actually pushed back by a pair of white hands.

“There’s nowt like this wood in the world, sir,” the old man asserted doggedly. “The bottom’s rotten from end to end and the top’s all poisonous.

The birds die there on the trees.

It’s chockful of reptiles and unclean things, with green and purple fungi, two feet high, with poison in the very sniff of them. The man who enters that wood goes to his grave.”

His will is for peace, and for the great triumphs to which our country is already entitled by reason of her supremacy in industry, in commerce, in character and in genius. These are the weapons which will make Germany the greatest Power in the world.

No empire has ever hewn its way to permanent glory by the sword alone.

We have reached our stations, I see. Come to me after this drive is finished, my host. All that I have said so far has been by way of prelude.”

Rosamund wouldn’t mind me, because there are a few grey hairs in my sandy ones.—And here comes your man across the park—looks as though he had a message for you.

So long as nothing has happened to your cook, I feel that I could face ill tidings with composure.

”

Delay! He found words then which would have melted an iceberg. He found words the memory of which comes to me sometimes in the night and which mock me.

He had no country then save the paradise where lovers walk, no ruler but a queen, and I was she.

And now—”

He will plead his own cause when the time comes. But I am here to plead for patience, I am here to implore you to take no rash step, to do nothing which might imperil in any way his position here.

I stand outside the gates of the world which your sex can make a paradise.

I am no judge of the things that happen there. But in your heart I feel there is bitterness, because the man for whom you care has chosen to place his country first. I implore your patience, Princess.

“There is no doubt,” he said, “that his departure was indicative of a certain distrust in us. He came to find out something, and I suppose he found it out. I envy you your composure, my friend.

We live on the brink of a volcano, and you shoot pheasants.

”

“I can no more tell you that,” Seaman replied, “than why Johann Wolff was sent over here to spy upon our perfect work. I am most unhappy, my friend.

The things which I understand, however threatening they are, I do not fear. Things which I do not understand oppress me.

”

“I expect he would do it,” Dominey replied. “He would do it pluckily, wholeheartedly and badly. He is a type of the upper-class young Englishman, over-sanguine and entirely undisciplined.

They expect, and their country expects for them that in the case of emergency pluck would take the place of training.

”

“You are so like him and yet so different,” she went on meditatively. “You drink so little wine, you are always so self-controlled, so serious.

You live as though you had a life around you of which others knew nothing.

The Everard I remember would never have cared about being a magistrate or going into Parliament. He would have spent his time racing or yachting, hunting or shooting, as the fancy took him. And yet—”

You would think that in Germany there was excitement. There is none. The task of everyone is allotted, their work made clear to them.

Like a mighty piece of gigantic machinery, we move towards war.

Every regiment knows its station, every battery commander knows his positions, every general knows his exact line of attack. Rations, clothing, hospitals, every unit of which you can think, has its movements calculated out for it to the last nicety.”

Men and women were going about their business as usual, but an air of stupefaction was everywhere apparent. Practically every loiterer was studying a newspaper, every chance acquaintance had stopped to confer with his fellows.

War, alternately the joke and bogey of the conversationalist, stretched her grey hands over the sunlit city.

Even the lightest-hearted felt a thrill of apprehension at the thought of the horrors that were to come. In a day or two all this was to be changed. People went about then counting the Russian millions; the steamroller fetish was to be evolved.