The Inheritors quotes

her glance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair and gleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them from somewhere.

She was familiar till it occurred to you that she was strange.

“Which way are you going?” she asked.

You are a foreigner, I’ll swear, because you have such a fine contempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a Prussian. But it is obvious that you are of a new nation that is beginning to find itself.”

“Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean,” she said.

“The phrase is comprehensive,” I said. I was determined not to give myself away. “Where in the world do you come from?” I repeated.

“Listen,” she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of wind through a breathless day. “What—what!” I cried.

“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension.”

I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.

What was repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point of view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse.

What one does not understand one shies at⁠—finds sinister, in fact.

And she struck me as sinister.

“What the devil,” I said, hysterically—“what the devil do you play these tricks upon me for?”

“You see,” she answered, “the rudiments of the sense are there.”

“You must excuse me if I fail to understand,” I said, grasping after fragments of dropped dignity. “I am subject to fits of giddiness.” I felt a need for covering a species of nakedness. “Pardon my swearing,” I added; a proof of recovered equanimity.

We, at our worst, had a certain limit, a certain stage where we exclaimed: “No, this is playing it too low down,” because we had scruples that acted like handicapping weights. She uttered, I think, only two sentences of connected words:

“We shall race with you and we shall not be weighted,”

and, “We shall merely sink you lower by our weight.” All the rest went like this:

“No, this is playing it too low down,” because we had scruples that acted like handicapping weights. She uttered, I think, only two sentences of connected words: “We shall race with you and we shall not be weighted,” and,

“We shall merely sink you lower by our weight.”

All the rest went like this:

I managed to maintain an uneasy silence. From her grimly dispassionate reiterations I had attained to a clear idea, even to a visualisation, of her fantastic conception—allegory, madness, or whatever it was. She certainly forced it home.

The Dimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour like locusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable.

They were to come like snow in the night: in the morning one would look out and find the world white; they were to come as the gray hairs come, to sap the strength of us as the years sap the strength of the muscles.

She certainly forced it home. The Dimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour like locusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable.

They were to come like snow in the night: in the morning one would look out and find the world white; they were to come as the gray hairs come, to sap the strength of us as the years sap the strength of the muscles.

As to methods, we should be treated as we ourselves treat the inferior races. There would be no fighting, no killing; we—our whole social system—would break as a beam snaps, because we were worm-eaten with altruism and ethics.

Her figure faded into the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned.

The episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but decidedly charming, chance travelling companion. The girl was a riddle, and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing.

“I’ll just send a wire to Fox to say that you accept,” he said, rising. He seated himself at his desk in the appropriate attitude.

He had an appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his life.

These he had struck before so many people that even in the small hours of the morning he was ready for the kodak wielder. Beside him he had every form of labour-saver; every kind of literary knickknack.

“My God!” I thought—“to these heights the Muse soars.”

As I looked at the gleaming pillars of the typewriters, the image of my own desk appeared to me; chipped, ink-stained, gloriously dusty.

I thought that when again I lit my battered old tin lamp I should see ashes and match-ends; a tobacco-jar, an old gnawed penny penholder, bits of pink blotting-paper, matchboxes, old letters, and dust everywhere.

“You select your characters with charming indiscriminateness,” I said. “Fox is only a sort of toad, you know—he won’t get far.”

“Oh, he’ll go far,” she answered, “but he won’t get there. Fox is fighting against us.”

“Oh, so you don’t dwell in amity?” I said. “You fight for your own hands.”

He had known my parents ages ago. That, indeed, was how I came to know him; I wouldn’t have chosen him for a friend. “I thought Granger said you were dead … but one gets confused. …”

“Oh, we see very little of each other,” she answered.

“Arthur might have said I was dead—he’s capable of anything, you know.” She spoke with an assumption of sisterly indifference that was absolutely striking. I began to think she must be an actress of genius, she did it so well.

She made eyes at me; at her husband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus—great round grey eyes. She was just the same.

The curtain never fell on that eternal dress rehearsal.

I don’t wonder the husband was forever looking at his watch.

“We all like that,” the great actress said. She was quoting from her first great part.

I thought⁠—but, perhaps, I was mistaken⁠—that all her utterances were quotations from her first great part.

Her husband looked at his watch.

Gurnard, Esq. (whom he had described as a fish salesman), was only an adoptive father. His rapid rise seemed to me inexplicable till the same man accounted for it with a shrug:

“When a man of such ability believes in nothing, and sticks at nothing, there’s no saying how far he may go. He has kicked away every ladder. He doesn’t mean to come down.”

This, no doubt, explained much; but not everything in his fabulous career. His adherents called him an inspired statesman; his enemies set him down a mere politician. He was a man of forty-five, thin, slightly bald, and with an icy assurance of manner.

As a memory my pseudo-sister had been something bright and clear-cut and rather small; seen now, she was something that one could not look at for glow.

She moved toward me, smiling and radiant, as a ship moves beneath towers of shining canvas.

I was simply overwhelmed. I don’t know what she said, what I said, what she did or I. I have an idea that we conversed for some minutes. I remember that she said, at some point,

I was agitatedly silent. The train steamed into the glare of the electric lights, and, getting into a fiacre, I breathed again. I seemed to be at the entrance of a new life, a better sort of paradise, during that drive across the night city.

In London one is always a passenger, in Paris one has reached a goal.

The crowds on the pavements, under the plane-trees, in the black shadows, in the white glare of the open spaces, are at leisure—they go nowhere, seek nothing beyond.

She had just introduced me to my aunt—a heavy-featured, tired-eyed village tyrant. She was so obviously worn out, so obviously “not what she had been,” that her face would have been pitiful but for its immovable expression of class pride.

The Grangers of Etchingham, you see, were so absolutely at the top of their own particular kind of tree that it was impossible for them to meet anyone who was not an inferior.

A man might be a cabinet minister, might even be a prince, but he couldn’t be a Granger of Etchingham, couldn’t have such an assortment of graves, each containing a Granger, behind his back. The expression didn’t even lift for me who had.

She made a little gesture; one of those movements that I best remember of her; the smallest, the least noticeable. It reduced de Mersch to nothing; he no longer even counted.

“Oh, as for him,” she said, “he is only a detail.”

I had still the idea that she spoke with a pitying intonation—as if she were speaking to a dog in pain. “He doesn’t really count; not really. He will crumble up and disappear, very soon. You won’t even remember him.”

“And I—I am to take it on trust,” I said, bitterly.

“You couldn’t see the good,” she answered, “it isn’t possible, and there is no way of explaining. Our languages are different, and there’s no bridge⁠—no bridge at all. We can’t meet.⁠ ⁠…”

It was that revolted me. If there was no bridge and we could not meet, we must even fight; that is, if I believed her version of herself. If I did not, I was being played the fool with. I preferred to think that.

It must have been that that was daily, and little by little, pressing down her eyelids and deepening the quivering lines of her impenetrable face.

She had a certain solitary grandeur, the pathos attaching to the last of a race, of a type; the air of waiting for the deluge, of listening for an inevitable sound⁠—the sound of oncoming waters.

It was weird, the time that I spent in that house—more than weird—deadening. It had an extraordinary effect on me—an effect that my “sister,” perhaps, had carefully calculated. She made pretensions of that sort later on;

“

Oh, as for me, I am going to marry Gurnard.

”

It was impossible to walk, impossible to do more than tread on one’s own toes; one was almost blinded by the constant passing of faces.

It was like being in a wheat-field with one’s eyes on a level with the indistinguishable ears.

One was alone in one’s intense contempt for all these faces, all these contented faces; one towered intellectually above them; one towered into regions of rarefaction. And down below they enjoyed themselves. One understood life better; they better how to live.

His nose was a marvel of classic workmanship, but the floods of time had reddened and speckled it—not offensively, but ironically; his hair was turning grey, his eyes were bloodshot, his heavy moustache rather ragged.

He inspired one with the respect that one feels for a man who has lived and does not care a curse.

He had a weird intermittent genius that made it worth Fox’s while to put up with his lapses and his brutal snubs.

A few will be losing their good names too. … I don’t care, I’m off. … By the by: What is he doing it for? Money? Funk?—You ought to know. You must be in it too. It’s not hunger with you.

Wonderful what people will do to keep their pet vice going.

… Eh?” He swayed a little. “You don’t drink—what’s your pet vice?”

The sheer faces of the enormous buildings near at hand seemed to topple forwards like cliffs in an earthquake, and for an instant I saw beyond them into unknown depths that I had seen into before.

It was as if the shadow of annihilation had passed over them beneath the sunshine.

Then they returned to rest; motionless, but with a changed aspect.

I was beginning to wonder how it was that I felt such an absolute conviction of being alone, and it was then, I believe, that in this solitude that had descended upon my soul I seemed to see the shape of an approaching Nemesis.

It is permitted to no man to break with his past, with the past of his kind, and to throw away the treasure of his future.

I began to suspect I had gained nothing; I began to understand that even such a catastrophe was possible. I sat down in the nearest chair. Then my fear passed away. The room was filling; it hummed with excited voices. “Churchill!