The House by the River quotes

The Whittakers were At Home every Wednesday. No one else in Hammerton Chase was officially At Home at any time. So everyone went to the Whittakers’ on Wednesdays.

There are still a few intimate corners in London where people, other than the poor, are positively acquainted with their neighbours. And Hammerton Chase is one of these.

After them came Mr. and Mrs. Stimpson. Stimpson was a Civil Servant, but his lifework was cabinetmaking. Mrs. Stimpson was an execrable housekeeper and mother, but knitted with extraordinary finish. Knitting was her craft; cabinetmaking was her husband’s craft.

Everybody had a craft of some kind in The Chase. They all made things or did things, which nobody made or did in Kensington.

Sometimes this making or doing was their profession; sometimes it was a parergon carried on deliciously in leisure hours. In either case it was the most important part of their lives. Mr. Dunk kept rabbits; Mr.

He was arguing with the Reverend Peter about the poetry of John Donne. He, too, was excited and pleased and reluctant to go home. But he knew that Margery ought to go home.

And of such stuff are the real temptations of man.

He looked an apology and an appeal at his wife and said, “One minute, my dear. … Would you mind?” knowing well that she minded. Mrs.

In moments of crisis the human mind can become extraordinarily efficient.

Before the bell was silent in the basement, the mind of Stephen Byrne, kneeling in a sweat by the dead body of a housemaid, had covered a vast field of circumstance and performed two or three distinct logical processes.

Stephen was doing something with an anchor at the mouth of the sack, breathing audibly through his nose. John sculled obliquely across the river, struggling against the tide, steadily losing ground, he felt. “Losing ground,” he thought insanely, “ought to be losing water, of course.”

So strangely do the minds of men move in critical hours.

When they were halfway over, the chunk-chunk of a motorboat came lazily upstream. “God!” said Stephen, “a police-boat.” John thought, “Will it never end?” It was appalling, this accumulation of obstacles and delays and potential witnesses.

There was an aspect of fragility and virtue about her which stirred in the bold and shameless male the almost atrophied instincts of chivalry and protection. After a little they ceased to stare, but opened doors for her with a conscious knighthood.

There are women who make a man feel evil at the sight of them. Margery made a man feel good.

But this aspect of fragility was without any suggestion of feebleness. It was just that she was slight and fair, and her face small and her features intensely delicate and refined.

… He was a friend worth keeping, old John. And his opinion was worth having, his respect. Anyhow, it was going to be awkward. One would always feel a bit mean and ashamed now with John—in the wrong, somehow. …

Stephen hated to feel in the wrong.

Cook lumbered breathlessly up the stairs, and halted with a loud sigh on the landing. She knocked delicately on Mrs. Byrne’s door and threw out a tentative, “If you please, mum.” Stephen went out. The acting must begin.

When the cold chime of St. Peter’s struck three he lay still maddeningly awake in a feverish muddle of thought. Then at last he slept, dreaming wildly.

Emily Gaunt shifted uneasily in her oozy bed, tugging at her anchor, as the tide rolled down.

Mr. Dimple always talked like that.

He was a noble little man, with a thin, peaked, legal countenance and mild eyes that expressed unutterable kindness and impartiality to the whole world.

His natural benevolence and a long training in the law had produced in him a complete incapacity for downright censure. His judgments were a tangle of parentheses;

he liked saying “Good morning” to milkmen and porters and policemen and paperboys. And the fear that any day any of these people might ignore him or insult him was a terrible fear.

Contrary to the common belief, it is more difficult for an innocent man, if he be shy and sensitive, to look the whole world in the face than it is for the abandoned evildoer with his guilt fresh upon him.

So John avoided people he knew as much as he could. He avoided even his friends. The kindly Whittakers made special efforts to bring him to their house.

And sometimes he even formed this thought into an arrogant phrase, “

They think they know me, the damned fools⁠—but they don’t!

”

To judge by their movements, John thought, many of the dancers had in fact been there, and carefully studied the best indigenous models.

They were doing some quite extraordinary things.

No two couples were doing quite the same thing for more than a few seconds; so that there was an endless variety of extraordinary motions and extraordinary postures.

Bodies buffeted John from behind, and while he was yet looking round in apology or anger, other bodies buffeted him from the flank, and more bodies buffeted his partner and pressed her against his reluctant frame.

It was like swimming in a choppy sea, where there is no time to recover from the slap and buffets of one wave before the next one smites you.

Miss Atholl whispered, “Hold me tighter,” and John, blushing faintly at these unnatural advances, tightened a little his ineffectual grip. The result of this was that he kicked her more often on the ankle and trod more often on her toes.

He held her very reverently and loosely, though dimly aware that this made things much more difficult, but he could not bring himself to seize that soft and altogether sacred form in the kind of intimate clutch which the other men affected—Stephen, he noticed, included.

It was a maddening complexity of emotion, that dance

—the incredible awe and rapture of holding his adored, however lightly, in his arms, the intoxication of her nearness the fragrance of her dress, and the touch of her hair upon his face—and all this ruined by the exasperating futility of the actual dance, the …

… able to be born, because this labour of writing is so long, the hideous labour of writing and rewriting and correcting, of futile erasions and vacillations and doubt, of endless worryings over little words and tragic sacrifices and fresh starts and rearrangements—these are terrible things.

An author is to his work as a rejected lover his love, forever drawn yet forever repelled.

Stephen sometimes in the morning would almost long to be transformed into a clerk, or a railway porter, someone who need ask little of himself since little is asked of him but the simple observance of a routine;

But it is romance, this—it is poetry, and rich experience—so it is justified.”

And what he meant was, “It is copy.”

The tide turned at last, and they drifted softly and luxuriously down to Hammerton Reach, and stole at midnight under the hushed gardens of The Chase to the Tarrants’ wall. And there again they kissed upon the steps. He whispered hotly, “Tomorrow!”

A cat wailed at its wooing in a far garden—a sickly amorous sound. The last pair of lovers rowed slowly past, murmuring gently.

Then all was still, and Muriel was left alone, alone of the world’s lovers thwarted and forgotten.

Midnight struck, and she crept into the house and into her bed, sick with longing and the rage of shame.

A cat wailed at its wooing in a far garden—a sickly amorous sound. The last pair of lovers rowed slowly past, murmuring gently. Then all was still, and Muriel was left alone, alone of the world’s lovers thwarted and forgotten.

Midnight struck, and she crept into the house and into her bed, sick with longing and the rage of shame.

Stephen at midnight went in contentment to his bed. He had written a hundred lines.

Midnight struck, and she crept into the house and into her bed, sick with longing and the rage of shame.

Stephen at midnight went in contentment to his bed. He had written a hundred lines.

But in the morning she gave it to him, and John tore it carefully into small pieces and threw them on the fire. And this he did without the sense or the circumstance of drama.

For John Egerton was no artist. But he was a good man.

They met at the Whittakers’, and Lord Milroy presided. Lord Milroy was one of those useful and assiduous noblemen who live in a constant state of being in the chair.

One felt that at the Last Day he would probably be found in the chair, gravely deprecating the tone of the last speaker and taking it that the sense of the Committee was rather in favour of the course which commended itself to him.

For although he was courteous and statesmanlike and suave, he was passionately attached to his own opinions, and generally saw to it that they prevailed.