The Lost Girl quotes

Take a mining townlet like Woodhouse, with a population of ten thousand people, and three generations behind it.

This space of three generations argues a certain well-established society. The old “County” has fled from the sight of so much disembowelled coal, to flourish on mineral rights in regions still idyllic. Remains one great and inaccessible magnate, the local coal owner:

Being of a romantic-commercial nature, he never forgave her, but always treated her with the most elegant courtesy. To see him peel and prepare an apple for her was an exquisite sight. But that peeled and quartered apple was her portion.

This elegant Adam of commerce gave Eve her own back, nicely cored, and had no more to do with her.

Meanwhile Alvina was born.

But still he believed in his own excellence: and quite justly. What he failed to perceive was that the crowd hated excellence.

Woodhouse wanted a gently graduated progress in mediocrity, a mediocrity so stale and flat that it fell outside the imagination of any sensitive mortal.

Woodhouse wanted a series of vulgar little thrills, as one tawdry mediocrity was imported from Nottingham or Birmingham to take the place of some tawdry mediocrity which Nottingham and Birmingham had already discarded.

He thought he had not been clever enough, when he had been far, far too clever already. He always thought that Dame Fortune was a capricious and fastidious dame, a sort of Elizabeth of Austria or Alexandra, Princess of Wales, elegant beyond his grasp. Whereas

Dame Fortune, even in London or Vienna, let alone in Woodhouse, was a vulgar woman of the middle and lower middle-class, ready to put her heavy foot on anything that was not vulgar, machine-made, and appropriate to the herd.

When he saw his delicate originalities, as well as his faint flourishes of draper’s fantasy, squashed flat under the calm and solid foot of vulgar Dame Fortune, he fell into fits of depression bordering on mysticism, and talked to his wife in a vague way …

She knew the same would ring in her mother’s dying cry. Married or unmarried, it was the same—the same anguish, realized in all its pain after the age of fifty—the loss in never having been able to relax, to submit.

Alvina felt very strong and rich in the fact of her youth. For her it was not too late. For Miss Frost it was forever too late.

“I don’t want to go, dear,” said Alvina to the elder woman. “I know I don’t care for him. He is nothing to me.”

If it had she would certainly never have entertained it. But she had heard Alexander speak of Nurse This and Sister That. And so she had rapped out her declaration. And having rapped it out, she prepared herself to stick to it.

Nothing like leaping before you look.

“A nurse!” repeated Miss Frost. “But do you feel yourself fitted to be a nurse? Do you think you could bear it?”

For well-to-do mothers she would charge from three to five guineas. At this calculation she would make an easy three hundred a year, without slaving either. She would be independent, she could laugh everyone in the face.

She bounced back into Woodhouse to make her fortune.

But be sure they are quite as detestable, quite as full of lies and hypocrisy, as any of the mistakes of our parents. There is no such thing as absolute wisdom.

Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains forever an infinite field for mistakes.

You can’t know beforehand.

She expected to be made happy. Every woman in Europe and America expects it. On her own head then if she is made unhappy: for her expectation is arrogant and impertinent. The be-all and end-all of life doesn’t lie in feminine happiness—or in any happiness.

Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet

—he won’t be happy till he gets it, and when he’s got it, the precious baby, it’ll cost him his eyes and his stomach. Could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn’t happy: like a baby in the bath!

The be-all and end-all of life doesn’t lie in feminine happiness—or in any happiness. Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet—he won’t be happy till he gets it, and when he’s got it, the precious baby, it’ll cost him his eyes and his stomach.

Could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn’t happy: like a baby in the bath!

Poor Clariss, however, was dead—and if she had developed heart-disease because she wasn’t happy, well, she had died of her own heart-disease, poor thing. Wherein lies every moral that mankind can wish to draw.

She preferred Miss Pinnegar, and admired Miss Pinnegar’s humble wisdom with a new admiration. The two were talking of Dr. Headley, who, they read in the newspaper, had disgraced himself finally.

“I suppose,” said Miss Pinnegar, “it takes his sort to make all sorts.”

Such bits of homely wisdom were like relief from cramp and pain, to Alvina. “It takes his sort to make all sorts.” It took her sort too. And it took her father’s sort—as well as her mother’s and Miss Frost’s.

It would be simply disastrous, because it had no master. There was no dark master in the world. The puerile world went on crying out for a new Jesus, another Saviour from the sky, another heavenly superman.

When what was wanted was a Dark Master from the underworld.

So they streamed past her, home from work—grey from head to foot, distorted in shape, cramped, with curious faces that came out pallid from under their dirt. Their walk was heavy-footed and slurring, their bearing stiff and grotesque.

By this time James Houghton had a pathetic, childish look which touched the hearts of Alvina and Miss Pinnegar. They began to treat him with a certain feminine indulgence, as he fluttered round, agitated and bewildered.

He was like a bird that has flown into a room and is exhausted, enfeebled by its attempts to fly through the false freedom of the window-glass.

Sometimes he would sit moping in a corner, with his head under his wing.

And was he not going to speak to her—not one human word of recognition?

Men are the most curious and unreal creatures.

After all he had made use of her. Think how he had pressed her hand gently but firmly down, down over his bruise, how he had taken the virtue out of her, till she felt all weak and dim.

“Cocksure people are often most mistaken,” said Miss Pinnegar.

“I’d rather have my own mistakes than somebody else’s rights,” said Alvina.

“Then don’t expect anybody to pay for your mistakes,” said Miss Pinnegar.

But we protest that Alvina is not ordinary.

Ordinary people, ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates.

Or else no fate at all. The all-to-one-pattern modern system is too much for most extraordinary individuals. It just kills them off or throws them disused aside.

And ordinary people are no malmsey. Just ordinary tap-water. And we have been drenched and deluged and so nearly drowned in perpetual floods of ordinariness, that tap-water tends to become a really hateful fluid to us. We loathe its out-of-the-tap tastelessness.

We detest ordinary people.

We are in peril of our lives from them: and in peril of our souls too, for they would damn us one and all to the ordinary. Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points.

And so the slow years crept round, and the completed coil of each one was a further heavy, strangling noose. Alvina had passed her twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth and even her twenty-ninth year. She was in her thirtieth.

It ought to be a laughing matter. But it isn’t.

Ach, schon zwanzig Ach, schon zwanzig Immer noch durch’s Leben tanz’ ich Jeder, Jeder will mich küssen Mir das Leben zu versüssen.

“Yes. We will another time,” said Miss Pinnegar.

Not another word about the cinema: not another breath.

As soon as James had eaten his plum tart, he ran away.

“That’s where it is,” said Miss Pinnegar.

There was something fatal about her feelings. Once they had gone cold, they would never warm up again. As well try to warm up a frozen mouse. It only putrifies.

But poor Miss Pinnegar after this looked older, and seemed to get a little round-backed. And the things she said reminded Alvina so often of Miss Frost.

“Because they don’t see the flesh-and-blood people. I’m sure that’s it. The film is only pictures, like pictures in the Daily Mirror. And pictures don’t have any feelings apart from their own feelings. I mean the feelings of the people who watch them.

Pictures don’t have any life except in the people who watch them. And that’s why they like them. Because they make them feel that they are everything.

”

Alvina did not care. She rather liked it.

She liked being déclassée. She liked feeling an outsider. At last she seemed to stand on her own ground.

She laughed to herself as she went back and forth from Woodhouse to Lumley, between Manchester House and the Pleasure Palace. She laughed when she saw her father’s theatre-notices plastered about. She laughed when she saw his thrilling announcements in the Woodhouse Weekly.

She laughed when she saw her father’s theatre-notices plastered about. She laughed when she saw his thrilling announcements in the Woodhouse Weekly. She laughed when she knew that all the Woodhouse youths recognized her, and looked on her as one of their inferior entertainers.

She was off the map: and she liked it.

For after all, she got a good deal of fun out of it. There was not only the continual activity. There were the artistes. Every week she met a new set of stars—three or four as a rule.

Odd, eccentric people they were, these entertainers. Most of them had a streak of imagination, and most of them drank. Most of them were middle-aged. Most of them had an abstracted manner; in ordinary life, they seemed left aside, somehow.

Odd, extraneous creatures, often a little depressed, feeling life slip away from them. The cinema was killing them.

Alvina had quite a serious flirtation with a man who played a flute and piccolo. He was about fifty years old, still handsome, and growing stout. When sober, he was completely reserved. When rather drunk, he talked charmingly and amusingly—oh, most charmingly.

He made another gesture this time: pressed down the corners of his mouth as if he didn’t like it. Then he turned with the slow, fine smile.

“Does a man want two mothers? Eh?” he said, as if he posed a conundrum.

“I shouldn’t think so,” laughed Alvina.

“I think he’s nice,” she said. “He seems so sensitive.”

“In England,” he answered suddenly, “horses live a long time, because they don’t live⁠—never alive⁠—see? In England railway-engines are alive, and horses go on wheels.”

He smiled into her eyes as if she understood. She was a trifle nervous as he smiled at her from out of the stable, so yellow-eyed and half-mysterious, derisive. Her impulse was to turn and go away from the stable.

“Alvina, are you mad!” said her father.

“Wonder I’m not,” said Alvina, “considering what my life is.”

“I say, Cic’—” he said, “why did you change the scene? It might have spoiled everything if Madame wasn’t such a genius. Why did you say that?”

“Why,” said Ciccio, answering Louis’ French in Italian, “I am tired of being dead, you see.”

Madame and Max heard in silence.

But he was weary, worn very thin and weary. He had lived his day. How different it all was, now, at his death, from the time when Alvina knew him as a little child and thought him such a fine gentleman.

You live and learn and lose.

For one moment she looked at Madame, who was shuddering with cold, her face hidden behind her black spotted veil. But Madame seemed immensely remote: so unreal. And Ciccio—what was his name? She could not think of it. What was it?

“Oh la-la! Dreadful! If it was Max, who is sentimental, then no, the money is nothing. But all the others—why, you see, they are men, and they know which side to butter their bread.

Men are like cats, my dear, they don’t like their bread without butter. Why should they? Nor do I, nor do I.

”

“I’m sure the dead are all right. Why must you pity him?”

“You’re a lost girl!” cried Miss Pinnegar.

“Am I really?” laughed Alvina. It sounded funny.

“Yes, you’re a lost girl,” sobbed Miss Pinnegar, on a final note of despair.

“I like being lost,” said Alvina.

Miss Pinnegar wept herself into silence. She looked huddled and forlorn. Alvina went to her and laid her hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t fret, Miss Pinnegar,” she said. “Don’t be silly. I love to be with Ciccio and Madame. Perhaps in the end I shall marry him. But if I don’t—” her hand suddenly gripped Miss Pinnegar’s heavy arm till it hurt—

“I wouldn’t lose a minute of him, no, not for anything would I.”

Poor Miss Pinnegar dwindled, convinced.

“Never mind,” said Alvina, kissing her.

“Woodhouse isn’t heaven and earth.”

“It’s been my home for forty years.”

“Never mind,” said Alvina, kissing her. “Woodhouse isn’t heaven and earth.”

“It’s been my home for forty years.”

“It’s been mine for thirty. That’s why I’m glad to leave it.” There was a pause.

“It’s been my home for forty years.”

“It’s been mine for thirty. That’s why I’m glad to leave it.”

There was a pause.

To tell the truth, she rather disliked him: the great, red-faced bachelor of fifty-three, with his bald spot and his stomach as weak as a baby’s, and his mouthing imperiousness and his good heart which was as selfish as it could be.

Nothing can be more cocksuredly selfish than a good heart which believes in its own beneficence.

He was a little too much the teetotaller on the one hand to be so largely manly on the other. Alvina preferred the labourers with their awful long moustaches that got full of food.

He pondered as to whether he would have children. A child would take her away from him. That was his first thought. But then—! Ah well, he would have to leave it till the time.

Love’s young dream is never so delicious as at the virgin age of fifty-three.

But he was quite cautious. He made no definite advances till he had put a plain question. It was August Bank Holiday, that forever black day of the declaration of war, when his question was put.

“Really!” she said. “You’ve done all those things!” And she scrutinized Alvina’s face. “You’ve had some effect on him, that’s evident,” she said. Then she shuddered, and dabbed her nose with her handkerchief.

“Oh, the flesh is a beastly thing!” she cried.

“To make a man howl outside there like that, because you’re here. And to make me howl because I’ve got a child inside me. It’s unbearable! What does he look like, really?”

The day was still grey, with sweepy rain-clouds on the sea—gruesome, objectionable. It was a prolongation of yesterday. Well, despair was no good, and being miserable was no good either. She got no satisfaction out of either mood.

The only thing to do was to act: seize hold of life and wring its neck.

She took the timetable that hung in the hall: the timetable, that magic carpet of today. When in doubt, move. This was the maxim. Move. Where to?

She took the timetable that hung in the hall: the timetable, that magic carpet of today.

When in doubt, move. This was the maxim.

Move. Where to?

Why didn’t she revolt? Why couldn’t she? She was as if bewitched. She couldn’t fight against her bewitchment. Why? Because he seemed to her beautiful, so beautiful. And this left her numb, submissive. Why must she see him beautiful? Why was she will-less?

She felt herself like one of the old sacred prostitutes: a sacred prostitute.

In the morning, very early, they left for Scarborough, leaving a letter for the sleeping Tommy. In Scarborough they went to the registrar’s office: they could be married in a fortnight’s time. And so the fortnight passed, and she was under his spell.

She was evil. And yet she had no power to be otherwise. They were legally married. And she was glad. She was relieved by knowing she could not escape. She was Mrs. Marasca. What was the good of trying to be Miss Houghton any longer?

Marasca, the bitter cherry. Some dark poison fruit she had eaten. How glad she was she had eaten it!

How beautiful he was! And no one saw it but herself. For her it was so potent it made her tremble when she noticed him. His beauty, his dark shadow. Ciccio really was much handsomer since his marriage. He seemed to emerge.

And Alvina’s heart suddenly contracted. She caught Ciccio’s arm, as the boat rolled gently. For there behind, behind all the sunshine, was England. England, beyond the water, rising with ash-grey, corpse-grey cliffs, and streaks of snow on the downs above.

England, like a long, ash-grey coffin slowly submerging.

She watched it, fascinated and terrified. It seemed to repudiate the sunshine, to remain unilluminated, long and ash-grey and dead, with streaks of snow like cerements. That was England! Her thoughts flew to Woodhouse, the grey centre of it all. Home!

Alvina found herself at last before a table where bearded men in uniforms were splashing open the big pink sheets of the English passports: she felt strange and uneasy, that her passport was unimpressive and Italian. The official scrutinized her, and asked questions of Ciccio.

Nobody asked her anything⁠—she might have been Ciccio’s shadow.

So they went through to the vast, crowded cavern of a Customs house, where they found their porter waving to them in the mob. Ciccio fought in the mob while the porter whisked off Alvina to get seats in the big train.

The train seemed to be tripping on the edge of the Mediterranean, round bays, and between dark rocks and under castles, a nighttime fairyland, for hours. She watched spellbound: spellbound by the magic of the world itself. And she thought to herself:

“Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.”

This thought dozed her off again. Yet she had a consciousness of tunnels and hills and of broad marshes pallid under a moon and a coming dawn. And in the dawn there was Pisa. She watched the word hanging in the station in the dimness:

He took a long iron tube or blowpipe, which rested on two little feet at the far end. This he gave to Giovanni to blow the fire.

Giovanni was a fire-worshipper.

His eyes sparkled as he took the blowing tube. He put fresh faggots behind the fire—though Pancrazio forbade him. He arranged the burning faggots. And then softly he blew a red-hot fire for the coffee.

It was stuffed with dry maize-leaves, the dry sheathes from the cobs—stuffed enormously high.

He rustled like a snake among dead foliage.

Alvina washed her hands. There was nothing to do with the water but throw it out of the door. Then she washed her face, thoroughly, in good hot water. What a blessed relief! She sighed as she dried herself.

There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl.

She was cut off from everything she belonged to. Ovid isolated in Thrace might well lament. The soul itself needs its own mysterious nourishment. This nourishment lacking, nothing is well.

There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl. She was cut off from everything she belonged to. Ovid isolated in Thrace might well lament.

The soul itself needs its own mysterious nourishment. This nourishment lacking, nothing is well.

At Pescocalascio it was the mysterious influence of the mountains and valleys themselves which seemed always to be annihilating the Englishwoman: nay, not only her, but the very natives themselves. Ciccio and Pancrazio clung to her, essentially, as if she saved them also from extinction.

It seems there are places which resist us, which have the power to overthrow our psychic being.

It seems as if every country has its potent negative centres, localities which savagely and triumphantly refuse our living culture.

And Alvina had struck one of them, here on the edge of the Abruzzi.

… and again he would balk the stream, while a violet-blue dusk descended on the white, wide streambed, and the scrub and lower hills became dark, and in heaven, oh, almost unbearably lovely, the snow of the near mountains was burning rose, against the dark-blue heavens.

How unspeakably lovely it was, no one could ever tell, the grand, pagan twilight of the valleys, savage, cold, with a sense of ancient gods who knew the right for human sacrifice.

It stole away the soul of Alvina. She felt transfigured in it, clairvoyant in another mystery of life. A savage hardness came in her heart. The gods who had demanded human sacrifice were quite right, immutably right.

It stole away the soul of Alvina. She felt transfigured in it, clairvoyant in another mystery of life. A savage hardness came in her heart.

The gods who had demanded human sacrifice were quite right, immutably right. The fierce, savage gods who dipped their lips in blood, these were the true gods.

The terror, the agony, the nostalgia of the heathen past was a constant torture to her mediumistic soul. She did not know what it was.

Over all the constant speech of the passing river, and the real breathing presence of the upper snows. And a wild, terrible happiness would take hold of her, beyond despair, but very like despair. No one would ever find her.

She had gone beyond the world into the pre-world, she had reopened on the old eternity.

And then Maria, the little elvish old wife of Giovanni, would come up with the cows.