The Splendid Fairing quotes

A tender, laughing day might have laid a healing finger on old sores. A clean, frosty day might have braced the naturally sane old mind. But Fate, out of all the days in the year, took upon itself to send just this.

The human soul, which seems so utterly out of reach, is only shut away from every other soul.

In every other respect it is like a harp hung on a tree. Even the actual day as it comes is itself a lever in many a fate.

The end came as nearly always after a prolonged fight—smoothly, painlessly, with a curious lack of interest or personal will. The burden had been so heavy that the last straw passed almost unnoticed which brought them finally to the ground.

They had lived so close to the edge for so many years that the step which carried them over it scarcely jarred.

They were climbing the long hill that runs from Doestone Hall, the Tudor house standing close to the crossroads. By turning their heads they could see its gabled front with the larches set like lances beside its door.

“Ay, but it’s different, some way. … It’s more nor that. There’s a blind look about things, seems to me.”

“Blind weather for blind folk!” Sarah put in with a grim laugh.

Simon grunted a protest but she took no notice. “I never thought as I should be blind,” she went on, almost as if to herself. “I’ve always been terble sharp wi’ my eyes; likely that’s why I’ve managed to wear ’em out.

Canada, which has so many links with Westmorland now, seemed farther away then than the world beyond the grave.

Death at least left you with bones in a green yard and a stone with a graven name, but Canada made you childless, and there was no sign of your grief beneath the church’s wall.

Geordie had written, indeed, from time to time, but though the letters were light enough on the top, there was heartache underneath. He was a failure there, they gathered, after a while, just as they were failures here;

She saw the lorry pass reluctantly away into the great, homeless place that was the world. And last of all she saw herself and Simon shutting the door that finally shut them out.

There was all the difference in ten thousand worlds between the sound of a door that was shutting you in and the sound of the same door shutting you out.

…

He wanted to tell them that God had certainly liked them best, but he knew they would not believe him if he did. They were so certain that it was Eliza who had had the beautiful hour.

They were too simple to know that it was only they who had any of the beauty to carry home.

…

He was sorry and sympathetic, but he did not know those things. It was Eliza who knew, and used the knowledge for her private ends.

You could always be sure that Eliza knew where your hidden things were kept.

Today, tired as they were with the hours in town, and already reacting from their great decision, a jovial party seemed more than they could stand.

They often laughed, she knew, since she had ceased to be able to stop them with a glance. She shivered, standing there, and her bones ached with the damp, but she was in no hurry to enter the warm, crowded room.

It was better to shiver in the coldest spaces of earth than to be shut into Heaven itself with Eliza and her tongue.

The green house-door with its brass knocker was close at her left hand, but she did not attempt to open it and go in. That was a privilege only accorded to the rich and proud, not to a poor relation come to beg.

“Jim’s dead, I reckon!” she said, clearly and cruelly … “ay, I doubt he’s dead. Geordie’d never be coming without him if he was over sod. You’d best make up your mind, Eliza, as he’s dead and gone!”

It was the voice of an oracle marking an open grave, of Cassandra, crying her knowledge in Troy streets.

It held them all spellbound until she had gone out. Even Eliza was silent for once on her red plush chair. …

… I’m right glad about it, I’m sure! I’ve always thought it hard lines, him going off like that. And you said he’d done well for himself, didn’t you, Aunt Sarah? … Eh, but I wish Elliman could make some brass an’ all!”

“There’s a deal o’ power in brass.” The words came as if of themselves from behind the mask-like face.

“Folks say it don’t mean happiness, but it means power. It’s a stick to beat other folk wi’, if it’s nowt else.”

“I don’t want to beat anybody, I’m sure!” Sally laughed, though with tears in her voice. “I only want what’s my own.”

“Ay, we all on us want that,” Sarah said, with a grim smile. “But it’s only another fancy name for the whole world!”

She sat still for some time after the girl had gone out, as if she were afraid that she might betray herself before she was actually alone.

Eliza would have turned her out of both long since, she knew, if she had not been clad in that new importance as in cloth of gold.

The impossible lies nearer than mere probability to the actual fact; so near at times that the merest effort seems needed to cross the line.

Desire, racking both soul and body with such powerful hands, must surely be strong enough to leap the slender pale. The peculiar mockery about ill-luck is always the trifling difference between the opposite sides of the shield.

The ease of the road home is the ineffable ease of the mind. Stout hearts and limbs may carry us out, and barely suffice to stagger us back, but the running and leaping mind can comfort the body on.

There is always a lamp set high at the end of the road that is going home.

…

With Will beside him, they would lie in front as they used to do, rolling meadowlands still untouched by the plough of time.

Because they had been young together it would be impossible for them to be really old.

Because they had been young together they could took smiling, shoulder to shoulder, into the unbelievable grave.

Yet, side by side with that impression of final retreat, of waste that had always been waste and would never be reclaimed, was one of a brooding terror that was only waiting its hour.

The sea and the sands were like cat and mouse, May thought⁠—the one, aloof, indifferent, yet always poised to leap; the other, inert, paralysed though apparently free, and always the certain victim in the end.

She looked behind and before from the quiet home which she had left to the still more lonely and quiet house which was her goal.

…” She stopped, recalling the scene in which Nature had shone like a star in Eliza just for once. … “Nay, Simon,” she went on quietly, “there’s no sense in our getting mad. It’s over late to go preaching love atween Eliza and me.

Men don’t know what hate can be between women when it’s gitten hold.

It’s a thing best let alone—never mentioned—let alone. It’s a big thing, caged-like, as was small once, and then comes full-grown. It’s over late to go trying to stroke it through the bars.”

If there’s owt to think shame on it’ll be stuff like yon. You’re the same lad to me as when we was wed, just as Eliza’s the same cruel, jibing lass. I reckon that’s where the trouble lies, if it come to that.

Love and hate don’t change, neither on ’em, all our lives. D’you think I’d ha’ kept my hate so warm if I hadn’t ha’ kept love?

”

But long-deferred trouble, like suspended joy, has a meaner quality in fulfilment, and a subtle humiliation in its ache. That when the gods come they come quickly is true for both libations from the emptied cup.

Royal sorrows, like royal joys, fall swift as thunderbolts from heaven.

She had always known in her heart that there was no fighting Blindbeck luck, that even the dregs of it were more potent than the best of the Sandholes brand.

It could hardly fail to reach even across the sea, so that one of the failures would be less of a failure than the other in the end.

The trouble of being the underdog too long is that even the dog himself begins at last to think it his rightful place.

For all her dreaming and lying on Geordie’s behalf, she would have found it hard to believe in his ultimate success. Not for nothing had Eliza carefully tended her Method all this while, and watered it weekly with the Simons’ tears.

Behind it, she felt the knocking ring on her brain, but now she had come within range of a more persistent power than that. Plainly, through the wooden barrier that was raised between them, she felt the presence of the man who stood without.

There is always an effort, a faint dread, about the opening of a door, as if the one who entered were admitted to more than a room.

From each personality that enters even for a moment into one’s life something is always involuntarily received. The opening is only a symbol of the more subtle admission of the two, which leaves an intruder behind when the actual bodily presence has passed away.