The Necromancers quotes

It was indeed a rather trying time for the old lady. She was a tranquil and serene soul; and it seemed as if she were doomed to live over a perpetual volcano.

It was as pathetic as an amiable cat trying to go to sleep on a rifle range; she was developing the jumps.

The first serious explosion had taken place two years before, when her son, then in his third year at Oxford, had come back with the announcement that Rome was the only home worthy to shelter his aspiring soul, and that he must be received into …

He had plenty of brains, an exceedingly warm heart, and had lately embraced a religion that satisfied every instinct of his nature. It was the best of all possible worlds, and fitted him like his own well-cut clothes.

It consisted of privileges without responsibilities.

And now the crash had come, and all was over.

Even before Laurie came downstairs it appeared that the lady did not go to church, yet that, such was her broad-mindedness, she did not at all object to do so. It was all one, it seemed, in the Deeper Unity.

Nothing particular was true; but all was very suggestive and significant and symbolical of something else to which Mrs. Stapleton and a few friends had the key.

Mrs. Baxter made more than one attempt to get back to more mundane subjects, but it was useless. When even the weather serves as a symbol, the plain man is done for.

Mrs. Baxter made more than one attempt to get back to more mundane subjects, but it was useless.

When even the weather serves as a symbol, the plain man is done for.

He looked very self-contained and rather pinched this morning, and shook hands with the lady without a word. Then they moved across presently to the green-hung dining room across the hall, and the exquisite symbol of luncheon made its appearance.

Laurie drank up his cup of tea.

It is a humiliating fact that extreme grief often renders the mourner rather cross.

There was a distinct air of crossness about Laurie at this moment. His nerves were very near the top.

Crossness, as I have said, had been the natural psychological result of his emotions; but his emotions were none the less real.

The froth of whipped cream is real cream, after all.

Now Laurie had seen perfectly well the extreme unconvincingness of Mrs. Stapleton, and had been genuine enough in his little shrug of disapproval in answer to Maggie’s, after lunch; yet that lady’s remarks had been sufficient just to ignite the train of thought.

It was a fragrant, kindly night. From the hamlet of half a dozen houses beyond the garden came no sound; and the house, too, was still behind him.

An illuminated window somewhere on the first floor went out as he looked at it, like a soul leaving a body;

once a sleepy bird somewhere in the shrubbery chirped to its mate and was silent again.

she will send out vibration after vibration of sympathy and longing; and you, on this side, will be tuned to her as none other can be—you, on this side, will be empty for her love, for the sight and sound of her. …

Is death then so strong?⁠—stronger than love? Can a Christian believe that?

”

She made an effort, unlatched the gate, and moved on, a beautiful, composed figure, with great steady eyes and well-cut profile, a model of dignity and grace, interiorly a raging, self-contemptuous, abject wretch.

It must be remembered that she was convent-bred.

By the time that Laurie’s answer came, poor Maggie had arranged her emotions fairly satisfactorily.

He was staring at her with an expression that might have meant anything. She would not have been surprised if he had burst into a fit of laughter.

It was horrible and unnatural.

“Laurie! Laurie! Don’t look like that!”

The silence was profound, and the little noises of the night outside, the drip from the eaves slow and deliberate, the rustle of released leaves, and even the gentle thud on the lawn from the yew branches—all these helped to emphasize the stillness.

It was not like the murmur of day; it was rather like the gnawing of a mouse in the wainscot of some death chamber.

It requires almost superhumanly strong nerves to sit at night, after a conversation of this kind, opposite an apparently reasonable person who is white and twitching with terror, even though one resolutely refrains from looking at him, without being slightly affected.

He was being drawn forward, it seemed, by a process as inevitable as that of spring or autumn; and, once he had yielded to it, the conflict and the excitement were over. Certainly this made very few demands.

Christianity said that those were blessed who had not seen and yet believed; Spiritualism said that the only reasonable belief was that which followed seeing.

So then Laurie sat and meditated.

“

Merely fireworks⁠ ⁠… only to show off. People are convinced by such queer things.

”

He switched on the light by his bed, glanced at his watch, switched off the light, and sank down again into the sheets. He need not get up just yet.

When an event of an entirely new order comes into experience, it takes a little time to be assimilated.

It is as when a large piece of furniture is brought into a room; all the rest of the furniture takes upon itself a different value. A picture that did very well up to then over the fireplace must perhaps be moved.

But when one has seen—so long as memory does not disappear—this agnostic instinct is an impossibility. Every single act therefore has a new significance.

There is no venture about it any more; there is, indeed, very little opportunity for heroism.

Once it is certain, by the evidence of the senses, that death is just an interlude, this life becomes merely part of a long process. …

Mrs. Baxter possessed one of the two secrets of serenity.

The other need not be specified; but hers arose from the most pleasant and most human form of narrow-mindedness.

His sermons consisted of cold-cut blocks of dogma taken perseveringly from sermon outlines and served up Sunday by Sunday with a sauce of a slight and delightful brogue.

He could never have kindled the Thames, nor indeed any river at all, but he could bridge them with solid stones; and this is, perhaps, even more desirable.

Maggie had begun by disliking him. She had thought him rather coarse and stupid; but she had changed her mind. He was not what may be called subtle;

“Good God!” broke in the other again suddenly. “Do all Catholics believe this rubbish?”

“My dear friend, of course they don’t. Not one in a thousand. I wish they did. That’s what’s the matter. But they laugh at it⁠—laugh at it!”

… His voice cracked into shrill falsetto. … “Laugh at hellfire. … Is Sunday the day, did you say?”

but the whole thing was upon a different plane. Religion bade him approach in one way, Spiritualism in the other. The senses had nothing to do with one; they were the only ultimate channels of the other.

And it is extraordinarily easy for human beings to regard as more fundamentally real the evidence of the senses than the evidence of faith.

…

He looked at her gravely, in spite of the incessant twinkle in his eyes.

She perceived that this old man’s eyes would twinkle at a deathbed.

He stroked his grey beard smoothly down.

A nicely bound copy of it, which she had ordered specially, had arrived by the parcels post that morning; and she had been sitting in the drawing room ever since looking through it, and marking it with a small silver pencil.

Religion was to this lady what horticulture was to Maggie, except of course that it was really important, while horticulture was not.

She often wondered that Maggie did not seem to understand: of course she went to Mass every morning, dear girl; but religion surely was much more than that;

The steps passed the end of the lane and died away again. Over the trees to the right were visible the high twisted chimney of the old house where the terror dwelt.

“Two points then to remember,” said the voice in the darkness⁠—“courage and love. Can you remember?”

Maggie bowed her head again in answer.

and she stared at that bowed head and shaking shoulders with a horror that she had not felt before. The laughter was worse than all: and it was a little while before she perceived its unreality.

It was like a laughing machine.

And the silence of it gave it a peculiar touch.