The Powerhouse quotes

Inside a dull debate was winding on, and an advertising member had been trying to get up a row with the Speaker. The contrast between the frowsy place and the cheerful world outside would have impressed even the soul of a Government Whip.

Tommy sniffed the spring breeze like a supercilious stag.

“This about finishes me,” he groaned. “What a juggins I am to be mouldering here! Joggleberry is the celestial limit, what they call in happier lands the pink penultimate. And the frowst on those back benches! Was there ever such a moth-eaten old museum?”

“Poor old beggar!” he said. “To spend your days on such work when the world is chockful of amusing things.

Life goes roaring by and you only hear the echo in your stuffy rooms.

You can hardly see the sun for the cobwebs on these windows of yours. Charles is a fool, but I’m blessed if he isn’t wiser than you. Don’t you wish you were coming with me?”

He laughed. “That is the lawyer’s view, but believe me you are wrong. Reflect, and you will find that the foundations are sand.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.

A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”

“You have put your finger on the one thing that matters. Civilisation is a conspiracy. What value would your police be if every criminal could find a sanctuary across the Channel, or your law courts if no other tribunal recognised their decisions?

Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. And it will succeed till the day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare.

”

“You have put your finger on the one thing that matters.

Civilisation is a conspiracy.

What value would your police be if every criminal could find a sanctuary across the Channel, or your law courts if no other tribunal recognised their decisions? Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

It is the same with our commerce. One or two minute changes might sink Britain to the level of Ecuador or give China the key of the world’s wealth. And yet we never dream that these things are possible.

We think our castles of sand are the ramparts of the universe.

”

“I should think we have several hundreds of such pet names on our records,” he said. “Everything from the Lodge of the Baldfaced Ravens to Solomon’s Seal No. X.

Fancy nomenclature is the relaxation of the tired anarchist, and matters very little.

The dangerous fellows have no names, no numbers even, which we can get hold of. But I’ll get a man to look up our records. There may be something filed about your Powerhouse.”

That meeting with Lumley scared me badly, but it also clinched my resolution.

The most pacific fellow on earth can be gingered into pugnacity.

I had now more than my friendship for Tommy and my sympathy with Pitt-Heron to urge me on. A man had tried to bully me, and that roused all the worst stubbornness of my soul.

I could see him beaming through his glasses on his neighbours, and now and then he would take them off and look mildly at a speaker.

I wondered why nobody realised, as I did, what was in his light wild eyes.

The dinner, I believe, was excellent and the company was good, but down at my end I could eat little, and I did not want to talk.

“It is the wrong word. I am not courageous.

To be brave means that you have conquered fear, but I have never had any fear to conquer.

Believe me, Mr. Leithen, I am quite impervious to threats. You come to me tonight and hold a pistol to my head. You offer me two alternatives, both of which mean failure. But how do you know that I regard them as failure?

He raised a deprecating hand. “I am a sceptic about most things,” he said, “but, believe me, I have my own worship.

I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flowerpot.

From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.”

It was with profound relief that I found myself in Piccadilly in the wholesome company of my kind. I had carried myself boldly enough in the last hour, but I would not have gone through it again for a king’s ransom.

Do you know what it is to deal with a pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.

I drove to the club and telephoned to Macgillivray, asking him to take no notice of my statement till he heard from me in the morning. Then I went to the hospital to see Chapman.