Wolf Solent quotes

There arose before him, complicated and inhuman, like a moving tower of instruments and appliances, the monstrous Apparition of Modern Invention.

He felt as though, with aeroplanes spying down upon every retreat like ubiquitous vultures, with the lanes invaded by ironclad motors like colossal beetles, with no sea, no lake, no river, free from throbbing, thudding engines, the one thing most precious of all in the world was being steadily assassinated.

In the dusty, sunlit space of that small tobacco-stained carriage, he seemed to see, floating and helpless, an image of the whole round earth! And he saw it bleeding and victimized, like a smooth-bellied, vivisected frog.

He pulled in his legs and clasped his hands over his knees, leaning forward, frowning and intent.

“I don’t care whether I make money. I don’t care whether I get fame. I don’t care whether I leave any work behind me when I die. All I want is certain sensations!”

And with all the power of his wits he set himself to try and analyze what these sensations were that he wanted beyond everything.

… and he noticed that one marked quality of her ugliness was the dusky sallowness of her cheeks combined with the ghastly pallor of her upper lip, which projected from her face very much as certain funguses project from the brown bark of a dead tree.

“I’ve decided that your favourite cat is the white one,” he brought out after an uncomfortable pause.

She did relax at this, and, moving to the chair occupied by the grey cat, took up the animal in her arms and sat down, holding it on her lap.

She nodded; and then, quite suddenly, with an effort as though a gust of wind had swept aside a mass of dead leaves, uncovering the fresh verdure below, her whole face relaxed into a smile of disarming sweetness.

“I’ve never had a John,” she said. “And I never will.”

Wolf Solent was quick enough to take advantage of this change of mood. He moved across to her, bent down over her chair, and scratched Matthew’s head. “I thought I’d like to go over and see where the grave is.”

Selena Gault’s reply made his touchiness seem captious and misplaced.

“Can’t you see what that is, boy? It’s the slaughterhouse! You’ve only to take the shadiest, quietest road to find ’em in any town!”

They were soon skirting the edge of the neat oak palings that ran along the leafy purlieus of Ramsgard Cemetery.

But though his emotions were cold, his imagination worked freely. The few feet of Dorsetshire clay, the half-inch of brittle West Country elm-wood, that separated him from the upturned skull of his begetter, were like so much transparent glass.

He looked down into William Solent’s empty eye-sockets, and the empty eye-sockets looked back at him.

Steadily, patiently, indifferently they looked back; and between the head without a nose looking up and the head with so prominent a nose looking down there passed a sardonic wordless dialogue. “So be it,” the son said to himself. “I won’t forget.

“Do you know what he said when he was dying?” she began suddenly. “He didn’t say it particularly to me. I just happened to be there. He said it to everyone in general.

He said, ‘Christ! I’ve enjoyed my life!’ He used the word ‘Christ’ just in that way, as an exclamation.

There was a young clergyman there, straight down from Cambridge, an athlete of some sort; and when your father cried out ‘Christ!’ like that—and he was dead the next second—I heard him mutter, ‘Good for you, Sir!’

Mr. Urquhart proceeded.

“We must select, my friend. We must select. All history lies in selection. We can’t put in everything. We must put in only what’s got pith and sap and salt. Things like adulteries, murders, and fornications.”

“Are we to have any method of selection?” Wolf enquired.

While he was considering this phenomenon, he became conscious that Mr. Urquhart had left the matter of Dorset Chronicles and was speaking of religion.

“I was brought up an Anglican and I shall die an Anglican,” he was saying. “That doesn’t in the least mean that I believe in the Christian religion.”

There was a pause at this point, while the squire refilled his own glass and that of his visitor.

There was a pause at this point, while the squire refilled his own glass and that of his visitor.

“I like the altar,” the man continued. “The altar, Mr. Solent, is the one absolutely satisfactory object of worship left in our degenerate days.”

There came into Mr. Urquhart’s face, as he uttered these words, an expression that struck Wolf as nothing less than Satanic.

Oh, Tilly-Valley’s all right. Tilly-Valley’s as docile as a ewe-lamb.” He leaned forward with a sardonic leer, lowering his head between the candles as if he possessed a pair of sacred horns. “Tilly-Valley’s afraid of me; just simply afraid.” His voice sank into a whisper.

“I make him say Mass every morning. D’ye hear? I make him say Mass whether there’s anyone there or not.”

The tone in which Mr. Urquhart uttered these words roused a definite hostility in Wolf’s nerves.

There was a pause; and the expression of the man changed from extreme gravity to hobgoblinish humour.

“In the mud!” he shouted.

Then, once more grave, he rose to his feet and fetched from its pedestal a hideous East Indian idol, about six inches high, and placed it in the middle of the Boule table, just opposite Wolf.

… girl, could hear the woman muttering viciously to herself and clattering angrily with the plates behind the kitchen-door—a door she seemed to have left open on purpose, so that she might combine the pleasure of listening to the conversation with the pleasure of disturbing it.

“Missus be cantiferous wi’ I ’cos them ’taties be so terrible rotted,”

remarked the man, in a loud, hoarse whisper, leaning forward towards his guest and confidentially tapping his knee with his pipe. “And them onions what she been and cooked all morning, she’ve a-boiled all taste out o’ they.

He made up his mind that by hook or by crook he would possess her. He knew perfectly well that he could not, properly speaking, be said to have fallen in love with her.

He was like a man who suddenly finds out that he has suffered all his life from thirst, and simultaneously with this discovery stumbles upon a cool cellar of the rarest wine.

To have caught sight of her at all was to be dominated by an insatiable craving for her—a craving that made him feel as if he had some sixth sense, some sense that must be satisfied by the possession of her, and that nothing but …

“Who are you, young man?” he said sternly. “Who were your parents?”

Not Dante himself, when in the Inferno he heard a similar question from that proud tomb, could have been more startled than Wolf was at this extraordinary enquiry.

“My name is Wolf Solent, Mr. Malakite,” he answered humbly. “My father’s name was William Solent. He was a master at Ramsgard School. My mother lives in London. I am acting now as Secretary for Mr. Urquhart.”

“The tone of thought,” he threw in, “that suits you best, I suppose?”

She looked at him as if she had been blowing soap-bubbles and he had thrown his stick at one of them.

“I’m afraid I’m hopeless at expressing myself,” she said. “I don’t think I regard philosophy in the light of ‘truth’ at all.”

“Injoy theeself like the wheel at the cistern, be my text, Mr. Redfern, I beg pardon, Mr. Solent.

The Lord gives beef, but us must go to the Devil for sauce, as my granddad used to murmur.

I warrant this meat were well fed and well killed, as you might say. ’Tain’t always so wi’ they Darset farmers.”

It seemed to hold, in the sphere of sound, what amber-paved pools surrounded by hart’s-tongue ferns contain in the sphere of substance.

It seemed to embrace in it all the sadness that it is possible to experience without crossing the subtle line into the region where sadness becomes misery.

He listened, spellbound, forgetting hamadryads, Daphne’s pearl-white knees and everything.

Even his tow-coloured hair, protruding from the front of his cap, seemed conscious of his humiliation. Waves of electricity shivered through it; while beads of perspiration ran down his forehead into his scowling eyebrows.

For he realized, in one rush of shame, that Gerda was the blackbird!

He realized this before she made a sound other than that long-sustained tremulous whistle. He realized it instantaneously by a kind of sudden absolute knowledge, like a slap in the face.

He realized this before she made a sound other than that long-sustained tremulous whistle.

He realized it instantaneously by a kind of sudden absolute knowledge, like a slap in the face.

And then, immediately afterwards, she came forward, quite calmly and coolly, pushing aside the hazels and the elder-bushes.

Her smile was suspended and hung like a faltering wraith over every feature of her face. She seemed to hesitate; and her hesitation brought a depth into her eyes that darkened their colour so that they became a deep violet.

“I’ve never once whistled for anybody,” she said slowly.

Wolf sent a wordless cry of appeal down into the abysses of his consciousness. They were ready to help him, those powers in the hidden levels of his being. They responded to his cry and he knew that they responded.

But memories of this kind were—and he had long known it!—the very essence of his life. They were more important to him than any outward event. They were more sacred to him than any living person. They were his friends, his gods, his secret religion.

Like a mad botanist, like a crazed butterfly-collector, he hunted these filmy growths, these wild wanderers, and stored them up in his mind.

For what purpose did he store them up? For no purpose! And yet these things were connected in some mysterious way with that mythopoeic fatality which drove him on and on and on.

“I think I’d be all right now, married to you,” said Gerda, suddenly.

She made the remark in as unemotional and matter-of-fact a tone as if she had said, “I think I’d be all right now if I used low-heeled boots.”

In that chilly twilight, with the white mist rising around them, everything seemed so phantasmal, that this surprising observation gave him no kind of shock. But he did remember how startled he had felt when Christie Malakite introduced the same idea.

Darnley yielded to it at once, though he never liked the boy. I resisted it. I am of iron in these things. I know too much. But by degrees, can’t you understand, though I didn’t yield to it, it began to bother my mind.

Pity’s the most cruel trap ever invented.

You can see that, I suppose? Take it that there were only one unhappy person left, why, it might spoil all the delight in the world! That is why I’d like to kill pity—why I’d like to make people see what madness it is.”

“Like it?” The man’s voice sank to a whisper.

“ ’Tis easier to enter a gentleman’s service than to leave it, Sir, when that gentleman be the sort of Nebuchadnezzar my master be!”

“You aren’t a Dorset man, then?” enquired Wolf.

Providence came to his rescue with an answer that was really quite an inspiration.

“Mothers are as mothers do,” he responded.

But he caught, all the same, a reddening of Mattie’s cheeks and a hurried turning away of the churchwarden’s eyes. Mr. Albert Smith kept pouring out whiskey for himself and for Wolf; but though Mrs.

The whole house looked as though its owner had long since relinquished every kind of effort to get that personal happiness out of life which is the inheritance of the meanest.

Its shabby desolation seemed to project, in opposition to every human instinct, a forlorn emptiness that was worse than squalor.

Its effect upon Wolf’s senses was ghastly. No one could conceive a return to such a house as a return “home”! What it meant was simply that this wretched little priest had no home.

He was silent for a space; while Wolf found himself giving way to a strange, almost sensual spasm of nervous sympathy. There was something about the man’s abject humility that excited him in a way he could not have explained.

“It doesn’t matter what T. E. Valley does,” he began again, his voice rising to a shrill squeal, like the voice of a prophet among mice.

“It doesn’t matter whether I drink or whether I stay sober! The blessed Sacrament remains the same, whatever happens to T. E. Valley!”

and a great yellowish fragment of sky that leaned towards it became a tawny-skinned centaur, who, bending down his human head from his animal body, quenched his thirst in its purity.

A yellow man-beast drinking draughts of blue water!

Wolf stopped dead-still and gazed at what he saw, as ever more nearly and more nearly what he saw became what he imagined. This was what he wanted! This was what he sought! The brown earth was that tawny-skinned centaur;

She raised her eyes. They had the tension of a sudden, difficult resolution in them.

“Do men ever leave girls alone after they’ve married them?”

The words were so unexpected that he could only press her cold fingers and glance away from those troubled eyes. What his own gaze encountered was a single tarnished celandine, whose bent stalk lay almost flat on a wisp of rain-sodden grass.

But there, by those two pointed flames, one isolated consciousness kept up the old familiar interest, in love, in birth, in death, all the turbulent chances of mortal events.

That simple, pallid, spectacled head became for him at that moment a little island of warm human awareness in the midst of the vast nonhuman night.

He thought to himself how, in some future time, when these formidable scientific inventions would have changed the face of the earth, some wayward philosopher like himself would still perhaps watch through a window a human head reading by candlelight, and find such a sight …

… he recognized clearly enough that the very strength in his mother which had been such security to him in his childhood was the thing now with which he had to struggle to gain his liberty—that protective, maternal strength, the most formidable of all psychic forces!

She was like a witch⁠—his mother⁠—on the wrong side in the fairy-story of life.

She was on the side of fate against chance, and of destiny against random fortune. “I don’t care how she feels when I tell her about Gerda,” he said to himself;

Her brown eyes looked really angry now.

“Why are men so stupid?” she cried.

“When I said that, I meant pretending something that wasn’t my real self. It’s because I’ve been absolutely natural with you that you’ve got angry with me.”

All this while,

Wolf was pondering in his soul how it was that Nature had placed in the minds of all mothers, refined or unrefined, so large a measure of the heart of a procuress.

“And she were light enough—” Mrs. Torp was beginning again, when Gerda, jumping up in haste, ran round the table and clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Even when they love a person?” he enquired.

“What is love?” said Mrs. Solent.

He was silent; and the conversation between them took a less personal tone, till he saw her safely mounted in Mr. Urquhart’s dogcart, beside the tall manservant.

She looked straight into his face and smiled, while one of her eyebrows rose humorously and twitched a little.

“You and I are a funny pair, Wolf,” she said. “I believe we actually like to be driven and hunted.”

They exchanged a long, confused look. Then he protruded his underlip and drew down the corners of his mouth.

Wolf stuck out his underlip at the oracular thorn-tree and strode on. What he asked now, of that grey luminosity above him and of those diaphanous wraithlike corn-shocks, was why there should be, between his deepest desire and his complicated activity, such an unbridged gulf?

He had only one life. That was a basic and relentless fact.

An eternity of “something or other” lay behind him, and an equally obscure eternity of “something or other” lay in front of him.

His mother’s massive face, under her weight of silver hair, darkened to a dull red.

“I’m afraid you spoil us all, Lambkin,” she said, with a wicked, airy little laugh.

“But your Gerda knows how to play her cards.”

Smith’s death.

Roads and lanes! Lanes and roads!

What a part these tracks for the feet of men and beasts, dusty in Summer, muddy in Winter, had played in his mental consciousness!

“There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of itself.

There is nothing but a mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in water opposite water in a sky.

”

“How does Dimity put up with Miss Smith, Roger?” enquired Wolf slyly.

“Past all expectancy, Mr. Solent,” replied the other. “But she’s a real lady, that young woman, whoever her Dad were.”

“Why, wasn’t Mr. Smith her father, then?”

But we don’t know each other well enough, Sir … not nearly well enough. Besides”—and once more Wolf got the benefit of that fixed, monomaniacal gaze—

“I don’t approve of exposing a father to his son. It’s an impiety, an impiety!”

Wolf finished his tea in silence after this, and handed Mr. Malakite a cigarette. When they were both smoking, and Wolf, at any rate, was enjoying that faint rarification of human thought, like the distilling of an essence, which tea-drinking can induce, he asked Mr.

“Why, they don’t expect me, do they? Your mother doesn’t expect me, does she?”

“All women,” said Jason, with a chuckle, his spirits reviving when he saw Wolf’s discomfort and indecision, “expect all men!”

“Well, I must come another time,” said Wolf. “I can’t leave Gerda like that without telling her. But I hope ‘my girls,’ as you call them, are all right? I hope you don’t find Olwen too much of a handful?”

The reply of Jason was so violent and so abrupt that it had an uncanny effect upon the placidity of those vaporous elm-trees.

“He’s got God against him!” cried the poet. “What he tries to smooth down are the porcupine-quills of God!”

“We’d better walk a little faster,” said Wolf. “They’ll be turning soon, and I’ve got to go the other way.”

“Ask her, my dear man, that’s all! I daresay she won’t come, but ask her!” He paused for a second.

“Everyone likes to be asked,” he added gravely.

Wolf swung round. It was Jason chuckling like a goblin in the darkness.

“I am the weakest, most gullible fool,” he thought, as he watched Gerda spreading a large slice of bread and then very deliberately taking little bites out of it, “ever born into the world. I oughtn’t to be called Wolf Solent at all!

I ought to be called Mr. Thin Soup or Mr. Weak Beer.

”

it was the look of a wounded snake’s eye that he had had time to mark long ago, out on some country road near London, before he ended its suffering.

It was, in fact, the Life-Eye, looking out on what hurts it, that he now knew he had caught glimpses of, all the days of his existence, in a thousand shapes and forms.

From air, earth, water, had he intercepted the appeal of that little round living hole … that hole that went through the wall … straight into something else. Into what else? No one knew or would ever know. But into something else.

His whole being seemed dissolving into some lovely liquid-floating substance, lighter than human flesh, and he became capable of thinking now with every portion of his identity, easily, freely, spontaneously.

“I’ve learnt one thing tonight,” he thought, as he crossed the room and felt about in the darkness for the handle of the door. “I’ve learnt that one can’t always get help by sinking into one’s own soul. It’s sometimes necessary to escape from oneself altogether.”

He ran down the little staircase with happy agility. He burst into the kitchen, where he found Gerda placidly and abstractedly polishing her knives and forks.

“

Nothing is against nature!

” he retorted. “That’s the mistake people make; and it causes endless unhappiness.”

“Well, goodbye, Chris, till tomorrow night!” And then, as they released each other’s hands, “You’re not to look round now!” he added querulously.

“I’ve never looked round in my life!” retorted Christie Malakite, as she gave him her parting nod.

It was still about half-an-hour before church-time when he reached the gate of King’s Barton Vicarage. And there was T. E. Valley himself, in his ragged brown ulster, scraping with a hoe at one side of the drive!

At the gate of Pond Cottage garden he glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes past four. “I should have sworn it was five,” he said to himself. “

Time’s like a telescope. It compresses itself or lengthens itself according to our feelings.

”

The poet’s whole frame seemed to hug itself together, to contract, to tighten. Then he said: “I’m not in the least annoyed by anyone’s ways.

We’re all beetles in the dung of the earth.

If you go about with me, Solent, you won’t be able to think of yourself like you like to do, or about any of your young ladies either!

He stood disconsolately watching the splashing of the water-drops in the puddles by the roadside. “They don’t dance!” he said to himself. “

Reality’s always different from the way people put it.

”

Was Christie, too, sitting by her fire, acting the devoted daughter to Mr. Malakite?

Three fires and three women⁠—and Mr. Wolf Solent leaning against the pigsty!

The rain now began to find his skin. A little trickle of ice-cold drops descended between his coat-collar and his neck.

“

The stream of life is made of little things

,” he said to himself. “To forget the disgusting ones and fill yourself with the lovely ones … that’s the secret. What a fool I was to try and make my soul into a round, hard crystal!

“What people call ‘futility,’ ” so his thoughts ran on, “is just the failure of great emotions. But it’s a good thing for them to fail. Let them fail! Only when they fail does the under-tide of life itself rise to the surface.

Futility is the transparency of the lake⁠ ⁠… what makes the shadows fall and float⁠ ⁠… beautiful⁠ ⁠… like leaves!

”

Once you’ve got it arranged there, the whole thing’s settled … all is well. What you never seem to realize, for all your talk about ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ is that events are something outside any one person’s mind.

Nothing’s finished⁠ ⁠… until you take in the feelings of everyone concerned!

And what’s more, Wolf,” she went on, “not only do you refuse really to understand other people; but I sometimes think there’s something in you yourself you’re never even aware of, with all your self-accusations.

Where you make your great mistake, Wolf”—here her voice became gentler and her eyes strangely illuminated—“is in not recognizing the loneliness of everyone.

We have to do outrageous things sometimes, just because we are lonely!

It was in a mood like yours when you came in just now that God created the world. What could have been more outrageous than to set such a thing as this in motion? But we’re in it now;

“He lapped up the cream of those silly women’s love like a leering cat. He laughed at people who did anything in life. He wasn’t afraid of being broken, because there wasn’t anything in him hard enough to break.

He oozed and seeped into women’s hearts like bad water into leaky pipes.

And he justified himself all the time. He never said, ‘This is outrageous, but I’m going to do it.’ He said—” But at this point Wolf began wondering why his mother kept her window shut when the wind was in the east.

The stonecutter looked about for some imaginary spittoon and then spat with extraordinary clumsiness upon the face of the big unlettered headstone in front of him. Wolf watched the white spittle slowly trickling down the yellowish surface, and he thought: “

What things there are in the world that have a definite place in Time and Space!

There’s Mr.

He leaned upon his stick and contemplated that card in an hypnosis of misery.

Life seemed entirely composed of weeping faces, old men sneaking up bedroom-stairs, tombstones with spittle trickling down, and black-edged calling-cards.

He felt as if the First Cause of the Universe were a small, malignant grub, radiating a deadly blight in withering, centrifugal airwaves!

He was half tempted to drop down on his knees again and crawl back. He stood still, listening attentively; but there was not the faintest sound from in there.

The living woman was as quiet as the dead man.

Ay! the god of human sorrow is a man; but Love crucifies women.

… he began wondering to himself in a heavy logger-headed way why it was, that when all was pitch-dark except for those pinpricks in the firmament, he could distinguish so clearly between the liquid darkness of the water and the solid darkness of the surrounding earth.

He swung round at last, like a man who turns away from the extinguished footlights of an empty theatre, and began retracing his steps across the field.

His dominant sensation, as he performed this retreat, was a singular one.

As he moved between the well-known hedges of that road, along which just a year ago he had been driven by Darnley, he experienced a singular sensation.

He felt as though he were beginning a posthumous life⁠—a life that his own cowardice had snatched from the end intended.

It was as if such an end had actually been reached upon some psychic plane; so that now he but “usurped his life.”

Then, to his infinite relief, she burst into a flood of tears. He never afterwards forgot the extremity of those tears.

Her face seemed literally to dissolve; it seemed to melt, as if the very stuff of it were changing from moulded flesh into streaming water!

She flung herself down on the sofa and buried her head in its faded embroidered roses.

Oh, she would be all right now! Whatever had passed between her and the old man—whatever plague-spot of unspeakable remorse had appeared upon some sensitive fibre in her consciousness—these tears would wash out everything!

How could there be so much saltwater in one tiny skull?

The tears of women! How from the beginning of time they had washed away every kind of evil thing, every kind of deviltry!

How could there be so much saltwater in one tiny skull?

The tears of women! How from the beginning of time they had washed away every kind of evil thing, every kind of deviltry!

Down the centuries had flowed those tears, clearing our race’s conscience from poisons, washing clean the mind of man from the torture of rational logic, washing it clean from the torture of memory, recreating it, fresh, careless, free, like a child new-sprung from the womb!

Doesn’t it make you want to be drowned in water, Chrissie, or burnt into cinders?” He paused for a minute, struggling to keep back from her one of those forbidden thoughts to which he was so hopelessly subject. But their mood was too close.

They were like a couple of excited starlings perched on a gallows that sways in the wind.

… The love that was between them gave a mad gusto to that incongruous moment, with Mr. Torp waiting below-stairs to wash an incestuous old man with soap and water, and Christie’s parlour-door shut forever to Mr. Malakite!