Monday, November 26, 2012
It wasn’t too much to ask
It wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
According to Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping—all of which the library received—it was. In those magazines, it seemed that every article stated that it was completely up to the woman to keep the excitement alive in a relationship. But wasn’t a relationship supposed to be just that? A relationship? Both partners doing everything they could to keep the other satisfied?
See, that was the problem with many of the married couples she knew. In any marriage, there was a fine balance between doing what you wanted and doing what your partner wanted, and as long as both the husband and the wife were doing what the other wanted, there was never any problem. The problems arose when people started doing what they wanted without regard to the other. A husband suddenly decides he needs more sex and looks for it outside of the marriage; a wife decides she needs more affection, which eventually leads to her doing exactly the same thing. A good marriage, like any partnership, meant subordinating one’s own needs to that of the other’s, in the expectation that the other will do the same. And as long as both partners keep up their end of the bargain, all is well in the world.
But if you didn’t feel any passion for your husband, could you really expect that? She wasn’t sure. Doris, of course, had a ready answer. “Trust me, honey, that passes after the first couple of years,” she would say, despite the fact that, to Lexie’s mind, anyway, her grandparents had the kind of relationship that anyone would envy. Her grandfather was one of those naturally romantic men. Until the very end, he would open the car door for Doris and hold her hand when they walked through town. He had been both committed and faithful to her. He clearly adored her and would often comment on how lucky he was to have met a woman like her. After he passed on, part of Doris had begun to die as well. First the heart attack, now worsening arthritis; it was as if they’d always been meant to be together. When coupled with Doris’s advice, what did that mean? Did that mean Doris had simply been lucky in meeting a man like him? Or had she seen something in her husband beforehand, something that confirmed he was the right one for her?
More important, why on earth was Lexie even thinking about marriage again?
Probably because she was here at Doris’s house, the house she’d grown up in after her parents had died. Cooking with her in the kitchen was comforting in its familiarity, and she remembered growing up thinking that she would one day live in a house like this. Weathered planking; a tin roof that echoed the sound of rain, making it seem that it was raining nowhere else in the world; old-fashioned windows with frames that had been painted so many times that they were almost impossible to open. And she did live in a house like that. Well, sort of, anyway. At first glance, it would seem that Doris’s home and hers were similar—they were built in the same era—but she’d never been able to replicate the aromas. The Sunday afternoon stews, the sun-dried scent of sheets on the bed, the slightly stuffy smell of the ancient rocker where her grandfather had relaxed for years. Smells like those reflected a way of life worn smooth with comfort over the years, and whenever she pushed through the door here, she was flooded with vivid childhood memories.
她会听我念给她听的每一本书
她会听我念给她听的每一本书，每一首诗。一天我读了一首自己写的给她听。我凑得很近。我对着枕头轻轻耳语：
我想成为
海里的浪，风中的云，
但我还只是小小的我。
有一天我要
跳出自己的身躯
我要摇晃天空
像一百把小提琴。
很好。非常好。她用有气无力的声音说。记住你要写下去，埃斯佩朗莎。你一定要写下去。那会让你自由，我说好的，只是那时我还不懂她的意思。
那天我们玩了同样的游戏。我们不知道她要死了。我们装作头往后仰，四肢软弱无力，像死人的一样垂挂着。我们学她的样子笑。学她的样子说话，那种盲人说话的时候不转动头部的样子。我们模仿她必须被人托起头颈才能喝水的样子。她从一个绿色的锡杯里把水慢慢地吮出来喝掉。水是热的，味道像金属。露西笑起来，拉切尔也笑了。我们轮流扮演她。我们像鹦鹉学舌一样，用微弱的声音呼喊托奇过来洗碗。那很容易做到。
可我们不懂。她等待死亡很长时间了。我们忘了。也许她很愧疚。也许她很窘迫：死亡花了这么多年时间。孩子们想要做成孩子，而不是在那里洗碗涮碟，给爸爸熨衬衫。丈夫也想再要一个妻子。
于是她死了。听我念诗的婶婶。
于是我们开始做起了那些梦。
Chapter 37 Elenita, cards, plam, water
She makes the sign of the cross over the water three times and then begins to cut the cards.
They're not like ordinary playing cards, these cards. They're strange, with blond men on horses and crazy baseball bats with thorns. Golden goblets, sad-looking women dressed in old-fashioned dresses, and roses that cry.
There is a good Bugs Bunny cartoon on T.V. I know, I saw it before and recognize the music and wish I could go sit on the plastic couch with Ernie and the baby, but now my fortune begins. My whole life on that kitchen table : past, present, future. Then she takes my hand and looks into my plam. Closes it. Closes her eyes too.
Do you feel it, feel it cold?
Yes , I lie, but only a little.
她用手在水面上画了三次十字，开始抽牌。
这可不是平常玩的牌。这些牌，它们有点奇怪，上面有骑在马上的金发白肤的男人，吓人滴长了刺的棒球棒、金色圣杯、穿着旧式服装的悲伤的女人，还有哭泣玫瑰。
我知道电视上在演一部好玩的《兔八哥》卡通片。我以前看过，听出了它的音乐，我希望可以走过去和埃尼、包包一起坐在塑料沙发上，可我的命运开始显现了。我的一生都在这厨桌子上：过去、现在和将来。接着她拿起我的手看手掌。合上它。同时合上的还有她的眼睛。
你感觉到了吗？感觉到冷了吗？
是的，我撒谎说，有一点冷。
Chapter 39 The Earl of Tennessee
Earl lives next door in Edna`s basement,behind the flower boxes Edna paints green each year,behind the dusty geraniums.We used to sit on the flower boxes until the day Tito saw a cockroach with a spot of green paint on its head.Now we sit on the steps that swing around the basement apatrment where Earl lives.
Earl works nights.His blinds are always closed during the day. Sometimes he comes out and tells us to keep quiet.The little wooden door that has wedged shut the dark for so long opens with a sigh and lets out a breath of mold and dampness,like books that have been left out in the rain.This is the only time we see Earl except for when he comes and goes to work. He has weo little black dogs that go everywhere with him. They don`t walk like ordinary dogs,but leap and somersault like an apostrophe and comma.
埃尔住在隔壁埃德娜家的地下室里，在埃德娜每年都要漆成绿色的花箱后面，在那些灰蒙蒙的天竺葵后面。我们以前常坐在花箱上，直到有一天，提陀看到一只脑袋上有一点绿漆的蟑螂。现在我们坐在拐向埃尔住的地下室的楼梯步上。
埃尔上夜班。他的百叶窗在白天总是合上的。有时他会出来叫我们保持安静。已经开裂的小木门把黑暗关在里面那么久，现在它打开了，呀的一声叹息，吐出一口潮湿的霉气，就像放在外面淋过雨的书，这是惟一一次我们不是在他回来和去上班的时候看到他。他有两条与他形影不离的小黑犬。它们不是像平常的狗那么走路，而是一蹦一跳，翻着筋斗前进，像一个撇号和一个逗号。。
Chapter 40 Sire
I don't remember when I first noticed him looking at me—Sire. But I knew he was looking. Every time. All the time I walked past his house. Him and his friends sitting on their bikes in front of the house, pitching pennies. They didn't scare me. They did, but I wouldn't let them know. I don't cross the street like other girls. Straight ahead, straight eyes. I walked past. I knew he was looking. I had to prove to me I wasn't scared of nobody's eyes, not even his. I had to look back hard, just once, like he was glass. And I did. I did once. But I looked too long when he rode his bike past me. I looked because I wanted to be brave, straight into he dusty cat fur of his eyes and the bike stopped and he bumped into a parked car, bumped, and I walked fast. It made your blood freeze to have somebody look at you like that. Somebody looked at me. Somebody looked. But his kind, his ways. He is a punk, Papa says, and Mama says not to talk to him.
我想成为
海里的浪，风中的云，
但我还只是小小的我。
有一天我要
跳出自己的身躯
我要摇晃天空
像一百把小提琴。
很好。非常好。她用有气无力的声音说。记住你要写下去，埃斯佩朗莎。你一定要写下去。那会让你自由，我说好的，只是那时我还不懂她的意思。
那天我们玩了同样的游戏。我们不知道她要死了。我们装作头往后仰，四肢软弱无力，像死人的一样垂挂着。我们学她的样子笑。学她的样子说话，那种盲人说话的时候不转动头部的样子。我们模仿她必须被人托起头颈才能喝水的样子。她从一个绿色的锡杯里把水慢慢地吮出来喝掉。水是热的，味道像金属。露西笑起来，拉切尔也笑了。我们轮流扮演她。我们像鹦鹉学舌一样，用微弱的声音呼喊托奇过来洗碗。那很容易做到。
可我们不懂。她等待死亡很长时间了。我们忘了。也许她很愧疚。也许她很窘迫：死亡花了这么多年时间。孩子们想要做成孩子，而不是在那里洗碗涮碟，给爸爸熨衬衫。丈夫也想再要一个妻子。
于是她死了。听我念诗的婶婶。
于是我们开始做起了那些梦。
Chapter 37 Elenita, cards, plam, water
She makes the sign of the cross over the water three times and then begins to cut the cards.
They're not like ordinary playing cards, these cards. They're strange, with blond men on horses and crazy baseball bats with thorns. Golden goblets, sad-looking women dressed in old-fashioned dresses, and roses that cry.
There is a good Bugs Bunny cartoon on T.V. I know, I saw it before and recognize the music and wish I could go sit on the plastic couch with Ernie and the baby, but now my fortune begins. My whole life on that kitchen table : past, present, future. Then she takes my hand and looks into my plam. Closes it. Closes her eyes too.
Do you feel it, feel it cold?
Yes , I lie, but only a little.
她用手在水面上画了三次十字，开始抽牌。
这可不是平常玩的牌。这些牌，它们有点奇怪，上面有骑在马上的金发白肤的男人，吓人滴长了刺的棒球棒、金色圣杯、穿着旧式服装的悲伤的女人，还有哭泣玫瑰。
我知道电视上在演一部好玩的《兔八哥》卡通片。我以前看过，听出了它的音乐，我希望可以走过去和埃尼、包包一起坐在塑料沙发上，可我的命运开始显现了。我的一生都在这厨桌子上：过去、现在和将来。接着她拿起我的手看手掌。合上它。同时合上的还有她的眼睛。
你感觉到了吗？感觉到冷了吗？
是的，我撒谎说，有一点冷。
Chapter 39 The Earl of Tennessee
Earl lives next door in Edna`s basement,behind the flower boxes Edna paints green each year,behind the dusty geraniums.We used to sit on the flower boxes until the day Tito saw a cockroach with a spot of green paint on its head.Now we sit on the steps that swing around the basement apatrment where Earl lives.
Earl works nights.His blinds are always closed during the day. Sometimes he comes out and tells us to keep quiet.The little wooden door that has wedged shut the dark for so long opens with a sigh and lets out a breath of mold and dampness,like books that have been left out in the rain.This is the only time we see Earl except for when he comes and goes to work. He has weo little black dogs that go everywhere with him. They don`t walk like ordinary dogs,but leap and somersault like an apostrophe and comma.
埃尔住在隔壁埃德娜家的地下室里，在埃德娜每年都要漆成绿色的花箱后面，在那些灰蒙蒙的天竺葵后面。我们以前常坐在花箱上，直到有一天，提陀看到一只脑袋上有一点绿漆的蟑螂。现在我们坐在拐向埃尔住的地下室的楼梯步上。
埃尔上夜班。他的百叶窗在白天总是合上的。有时他会出来叫我们保持安静。已经开裂的小木门把黑暗关在里面那么久，现在它打开了，呀的一声叹息，吐出一口潮湿的霉气，就像放在外面淋过雨的书，这是惟一一次我们不是在他回来和去上班的时候看到他。他有两条与他形影不离的小黑犬。它们不是像平常的狗那么走路，而是一蹦一跳，翻着筋斗前进，像一个撇号和一个逗号。。
Chapter 40 Sire
I don't remember when I first noticed him looking at me—Sire. But I knew he was looking. Every time. All the time I walked past his house. Him and his friends sitting on their bikes in front of the house, pitching pennies. They didn't scare me. They did, but I wouldn't let them know. I don't cross the street like other girls. Straight ahead, straight eyes. I walked past. I knew he was looking. I had to prove to me I wasn't scared of nobody's eyes, not even his. I had to look back hard, just once, like he was glass. And I did. I did once. But I looked too long when he rode his bike past me. I looked because I wanted to be brave, straight into he dusty cat fur of his eyes and the bike stopped and he bumped into a parked car, bumped, and I walked fast. It made your blood freeze to have somebody look at you like that. Somebody looked at me. Somebody looked. But his kind, his ways. He is a punk, Papa says, and Mama says not to talk to him.
That was two months ago
"That was two months ago," says I, reaching up for the banjo.
The Ransom of Red Chief
IT LOOKED like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama -- Bill Driscoll and myself -- when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, "during a moment of temporary mental apparition"; but we didn't find that out till later.
There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants Of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.
Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities; therefore and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things. We knew that Summit couldn't get after us with anything stronger than constables and maybe some lackadaisical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers' Budget. So, it looked good.
We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser. The kid was a boy of ten, with bas-relief freckles, and hair the colour of the cover of the magazine you buy at the news-stand when you want to catch a train. Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent. But wait till I tell you.
About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a dense cedar brake. On the rear elevation of this mountain was a cave. There we stored provisions. One evening after sundown, we drove in a buggy past old Dorset's house. The kid was in the street, throwing rocks at a kitten on the opposite fence.
"Hey, little boy!" says Bill, "would you like to have a bag of candy and a nice ride?"
The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.
"That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars," says Bill, climbing over the wheel.
That boy put up a fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We took him up to the cave and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away, where we had hired it, and walked back to the mountain.
Bill was pasting court-plaster over the scratches and bruises on his features. There was a burning behind the big rock at the entrance of the cave, and the boy was watching a pot of boiling coffee, with two buzzard tailfeathers stuck in his red hair. He points a stick at me when I come up, and says:
"Ha! cursed paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Chief, the terror of the plains?
"He's all right now," says Bill, rolling up his trousers and examining some bruises on his shins. "We're playing Indian. We're making Buffalo Bill's show look like magic-lantern views of Palestine in the town hall. I'm Old Hank, the Trapper, Red Chief's captive, and I'm to be scalped at daybreak. By Geronimo! that kid can kick hard."
The Ransom of Red Chief
IT LOOKED like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama -- Bill Driscoll and myself -- when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, "during a moment of temporary mental apparition"; but we didn't find that out till later.
There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants Of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.
Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities; therefore and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things. We knew that Summit couldn't get after us with anything stronger than constables and maybe some lackadaisical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers' Budget. So, it looked good.
We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser. The kid was a boy of ten, with bas-relief freckles, and hair the colour of the cover of the magazine you buy at the news-stand when you want to catch a train. Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent. But wait till I tell you.
About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a dense cedar brake. On the rear elevation of this mountain was a cave. There we stored provisions. One evening after sundown, we drove in a buggy past old Dorset's house. The kid was in the street, throwing rocks at a kitten on the opposite fence.
"Hey, little boy!" says Bill, "would you like to have a bag of candy and a nice ride?"
The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.
"That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars," says Bill, climbing over the wheel.
That boy put up a fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We took him up to the cave and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away, where we had hired it, and walked back to the mountain.
Bill was pasting court-plaster over the scratches and bruises on his features. There was a burning behind the big rock at the entrance of the cave, and the boy was watching a pot of boiling coffee, with two buzzard tailfeathers stuck in his red hair. He points a stick at me when I come up, and says:
"Ha! cursed paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Chief, the terror of the plains?
"He's all right now," says Bill, rolling up his trousers and examining some bruises on his shins. "We're playing Indian. We're making Buffalo Bill's show look like magic-lantern views of Palestine in the town hall. I'm Old Hank, the Trapper, Red Chief's captive, and I'm to be scalped at daybreak. By Geronimo! that kid can kick hard."
Sunday, November 25, 2012
When I heard of Callus's arrest I was sorry that I had just quarrelled with him
When I heard of Callus's arrest I was sorry that I had just quarrelled with him. It was only a literary quarrel. He had written a silly book called: A Comparison between my Father, Asinius Pollio and his Friend Marcus Tiberius Cicero, as Orators. If the ground of the comparison had been moral character or political ability or even learning, Pollio would have easily come off the best. But Gallus was trying to make out that his father was the more polished orator. That was absurd, and I wrote a little book to say so; which, coming shortly after my criticism of Pollio's own remarks about Cicero, greatly annoyed Callus. I would willingly have recalled my book from publication if by doing so I could have lightened Callus's miserable prison life in the least degree. It was foolish of me, I suppose, to think in this way.
SeJanus was at last able to report to Tiberius that the power of the Leek Green Party was broken and that he need have no further anxieties. Tiberius rewarded him by saying that he had decided to marry him to his granddaughter Helen (whose marriage with Nero he had dissolved) and hinting at even greater favours. It was at this point that my mother who, you must remember, was Livilla's mother too, interposed. Since Castor's death Livilla had been living with her, and was now careless enough to let her find out about a secret correspondence which she was carrying on with Sefanus,jeremy scott adidas wings. My mother had always been very economical, and in her old age her chief delight was saving candle-ends and melting them down into candles again, and selling the kitchen refuse to pig-keepers, and mixing charcoal-dust with some liquid or other and kneading it into cake which, when dried, burned almost as well as charcoal, Livilla, on the other hand, was very extravagant and my mother was always scolding her for it. One day my mother happened to pass Livilla's room and saw a slave coming out of it with a basket of wastepaper. "Where are you going, boy,SHIPPING INFO.?" she asked.
"To the furnace. Mistress; the Lady Livilla's orders." My mother said: "It's most wasteful to stoke the furnace with perfectly good pieces of paper; do you know what paper costs? Why, three times as much as parchment, even,jeremy scott wings. Some of these pieces seem hardly written on at all."
"The Lady Livilla ordered most particularly…"
"The Lady Livilla must have been very preoccupied when she ordered you to destroy valuable paper. Give me the basket. The clean parts will be useful for household lists, and all sorts of things. Waste not, want not."
So she took the papers to her room and was 'about to clip the good pieces off one of them when it struck her that she might as well try to remove the ink from the whole thing. Until now she had honourably refrained from reading the writing; but when she began rubbing away at it, it' was impossible to avoid doing so. She suddenly realized that these were rough drafts, or unsatisfactory beginnings, of a letter to Sejanus; and once she began reading she could not stop, and before she had done she knew the whole story,ladies rolex datejusts. Livilla was clearly angry and jealous that Sejanus had consented to marry someone else-her own daughter tool But she was trying to conceal her feelings-each draft of the letter was toned down a little more. She wrote that he must act quickly before Tiberius suspected that he really had no intention of marrying Helen: and if he was not yet ready to assassinate Tiberius and usurp the monarchy had she not better poison Helen herself?
SeJanus was at last able to report to Tiberius that the power of the Leek Green Party was broken and that he need have no further anxieties. Tiberius rewarded him by saying that he had decided to marry him to his granddaughter Helen (whose marriage with Nero he had dissolved) and hinting at even greater favours. It was at this point that my mother who, you must remember, was Livilla's mother too, interposed. Since Castor's death Livilla had been living with her, and was now careless enough to let her find out about a secret correspondence which she was carrying on with Sefanus,jeremy scott adidas wings. My mother had always been very economical, and in her old age her chief delight was saving candle-ends and melting them down into candles again, and selling the kitchen refuse to pig-keepers, and mixing charcoal-dust with some liquid or other and kneading it into cake which, when dried, burned almost as well as charcoal, Livilla, on the other hand, was very extravagant and my mother was always scolding her for it. One day my mother happened to pass Livilla's room and saw a slave coming out of it with a basket of wastepaper. "Where are you going, boy,SHIPPING INFO.?" she asked.
"To the furnace. Mistress; the Lady Livilla's orders." My mother said: "It's most wasteful to stoke the furnace with perfectly good pieces of paper; do you know what paper costs? Why, three times as much as parchment, even,jeremy scott wings. Some of these pieces seem hardly written on at all."
"The Lady Livilla ordered most particularly…"
"The Lady Livilla must have been very preoccupied when she ordered you to destroy valuable paper. Give me the basket. The clean parts will be useful for household lists, and all sorts of things. Waste not, want not."
So she took the papers to her room and was 'about to clip the good pieces off one of them when it struck her that she might as well try to remove the ink from the whole thing. Until now she had honourably refrained from reading the writing; but when she began rubbing away at it, it' was impossible to avoid doing so. She suddenly realized that these were rough drafts, or unsatisfactory beginnings, of a letter to Sejanus; and once she began reading she could not stop, and before she had done she knew the whole story,ladies rolex datejusts. Livilla was clearly angry and jealous that Sejanus had consented to marry someone else-her own daughter tool But she was trying to conceal her feelings-each draft of the letter was toned down a little more. She wrote that he must act quickly before Tiberius suspected that he really had no intention of marrying Helen: and if he was not yet ready to assassinate Tiberius and usurp the monarchy had she not better poison Helen herself?
Zoyd wouldn't look him in the face
Zoyd wouldn't look him in the face. The son of a bitch wanted an answer out loud. "OK."
"Believe me," Brock with the salesman's instinct for congratulating the customer on his purchase, "she'd have done the same to you."
"Helps a lot, thanks."
"So . . . I'll just get the paperwork started on this. But we'll have to do something about your tone of voice." Brock went to the door and hollered, "Ron?" Bootsteps approached, and Ron, a large athletic U.S. Marshal,rolex gmt, unlocked. "Ron, are you cleared for nonjudicial motivation?"
"Sure am,mens rolex datejust, Mr. Vond."
"Hit him," Brock ordered on his way out the door.
"Yes, sir. How many —"
"Oh, once will be plenty," a fading steel echo.
Ron wasted no time, chasing Zoyd to the corner of the cell and hitting him with a blinding solar-plexus punch that sent him down into paralysis and pain,Rolex Submariner Replica, and unable to breathe. Ron stood awhile, as if evaluating the job — Zoyd could presently make out in a blur his motionless boots and, still too desolate even to cry out, waited for a kick. But Ron turned and left, locking up, and shortly after that the lights went off. And Zoyd curled in anguish and looked for his breath, and didn't drift under till just before the count at 5:30 A.M.
Hector showed up right after breakfast, beaming at him over a mustache the maintenance of whose microstructure back then was costing him twenty minutes a day of precious time. "Political office decides they don't need you after all. But even if we call you the mule,fake uggs boots, you're still lookín at a zip six indeterminate for that half a metric ton in your house, and somebody figured I could be of help. ... You look like shit, by the way."
"Get yourself bounced by Wyatt Earp out there, see how you feel." Zoyd exhaled loudly through his nose, red-eyed, accusative. "Really a fuckin' late hit, man ... all these years I thought you respected me enough not to force me to snitch. Now, what's so fuckin' important, to make you do this?"
A strange trick of the light, no doubt, or else Zoyd was inopportunely hallucinating, but the highlights on each of Hector's eyeballs had vanished, the shine faded to matte surfaces that were now absorbing all light that fell on them. "You know what, I got to start thinkín about lunch. Do we have to keep playín fuck-fuck with this? órale, get you the right judge, dig it! a nice minimum joint, a farm, you can grow vegetables? flowers, you people like flowers, right? All's I need, really Zoyd, is to know the story on this gentleman, a mutual contact I am sure, name of ... Shorty?"
"Christ, Hector," croaking, shaking his head, "only Shorty I ever knew lives out in Hemet now and since his Vietnam days is takin' zero chances, won't even fly on the airplane no more, not too promising for you, outside of a little Darvon he cops off his ol' lady, he ain't even good for a Class III beef far 's I know."
"That's him!" cried Hector, "that's the fucker all right, down in EPT they know him as Shorty the Bad, and it took supersnitch potential like yours to just break this case wi-i-i-ide open! Muy de aquellos, wait'll I tell my boss — you got a future in this business, ése!"
"Believe me," Brock with the salesman's instinct for congratulating the customer on his purchase, "she'd have done the same to you."
"Helps a lot, thanks."
"So . . . I'll just get the paperwork started on this. But we'll have to do something about your tone of voice." Brock went to the door and hollered, "Ron?" Bootsteps approached, and Ron, a large athletic U.S. Marshal,rolex gmt, unlocked. "Ron, are you cleared for nonjudicial motivation?"
"Sure am,mens rolex datejust, Mr. Vond."
"Hit him," Brock ordered on his way out the door.
"Yes, sir. How many —"
"Oh, once will be plenty," a fading steel echo.
Ron wasted no time, chasing Zoyd to the corner of the cell and hitting him with a blinding solar-plexus punch that sent him down into paralysis and pain,Rolex Submariner Replica, and unable to breathe. Ron stood awhile, as if evaluating the job — Zoyd could presently make out in a blur his motionless boots and, still too desolate even to cry out, waited for a kick. But Ron turned and left, locking up, and shortly after that the lights went off. And Zoyd curled in anguish and looked for his breath, and didn't drift under till just before the count at 5:30 A.M.
Hector showed up right after breakfast, beaming at him over a mustache the maintenance of whose microstructure back then was costing him twenty minutes a day of precious time. "Political office decides they don't need you after all. But even if we call you the mule,fake uggs boots, you're still lookín at a zip six indeterminate for that half a metric ton in your house, and somebody figured I could be of help. ... You look like shit, by the way."
"Get yourself bounced by Wyatt Earp out there, see how you feel." Zoyd exhaled loudly through his nose, red-eyed, accusative. "Really a fuckin' late hit, man ... all these years I thought you respected me enough not to force me to snitch. Now, what's so fuckin' important, to make you do this?"
A strange trick of the light, no doubt, or else Zoyd was inopportunely hallucinating, but the highlights on each of Hector's eyeballs had vanished, the shine faded to matte surfaces that were now absorbing all light that fell on them. "You know what, I got to start thinkín about lunch. Do we have to keep playín fuck-fuck with this? órale, get you the right judge, dig it! a nice minimum joint, a farm, you can grow vegetables? flowers, you people like flowers, right? All's I need, really Zoyd, is to know the story on this gentleman, a mutual contact I am sure, name of ... Shorty?"
"Christ, Hector," croaking, shaking his head, "only Shorty I ever knew lives out in Hemet now and since his Vietnam days is takin' zero chances, won't even fly on the airplane no more, not too promising for you, outside of a little Darvon he cops off his ol' lady, he ain't even good for a Class III beef far 's I know."
"That's him!" cried Hector, "that's the fucker all right, down in EPT they know him as Shorty the Bad, and it took supersnitch potential like yours to just break this case wi-i-i-ide open! Muy de aquellos, wait'll I tell my boss — you got a future in this business, ése!"
Friday, November 23, 2012
Who cares
"Who cares?" Fallopian shrugged. "We don't try to make scripture out of it. Naturally that's cost us a lot of support in the Bible Belt, where we might've been expected to go over real good. The old Confederacy.
"But that was the very first military confrontation between Russia and America. Attack, retaliation, both projectiles deep-sixed forever and the Pacific rolls on. But the ripples from those two splashes spread, and grew, and today engulf us all.
"Peter Pinguid was really our first casualty. Not the fanatic our more left-leaning friends over in the Birch Society chose to martyrize."
"Was the Commodore killed, then?" asked Oedipa.
Much worse, to Fallopian's mind. After the con-frontation, appalled at what had to be some military alliance between abolitionist Russia (Nicholas having freed the serfs in 1861) and a Union that paid lip-service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery, Peter Pinguid stayed in his cabin for weeks, brooding.
"But that sounds," objected Metzger, "like he was against industrial capitalism. Wouldn't that disqualify him as any kind of anti-Communist figure?"
"You think like a Bircher," Fallopian said. "Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the under-lying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Un-derneath, both are part of the same creeping horror." "Industrial anything," hazarded Metzger.
"There you go," nodded Fallopian.
"What happened to Peter Pinguid?" Oedipa wanted to know.
"He finally resigned his commission. Violated his upbringing and code of honor. Lincoln and the Czar had forced him to. That's what I meant when I said casualty. He and most of the crew settled near L.A.; and for the rest of his life he did little more than acquire " wealth."
"How poignant," Oedipa said. "What doing?"
"Speculating in California real estate," said Fallo-pian. Oedipa, halfway into swallowing part of her drink, sprayed it out again in a glittering cone for ten feet easy, and collapsed in giggles.
"Wha," said Fallopian. "During the drought that year you could've bought lots in the heart of downtown L. A. for .63 apiece."
A great shout went up near the doorway, bodies flowed toward a fattish pale young man who'd appeared carrying a leather mailsack over his shoulder.
"Mail call," people were yelling. Sure enough, it was, just like in the army. The fat kid, looking harassed, climbed up on the bar and started calling names and throwing envelopes into the crowd. Fallopian excused himself and joined the others.
Metzger had taken out a pair of glasses and was squinting through them at the kid on the bar. "He's wearing a Yoyodyne badge. What do you make of that?"
"Some inter-office mail run," Oedipa said.
"This time of night?"
"Maybe a late shift?" But Metzger only frowned. "Be back," Oedipa shrugged, heading for the ladies' room.
On the latrine wall, among lipsticked obscenities, she noticed the following message, neatly indited in engineering lettering:
"Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only, Box 7391, L. A." WASTE? Oedipa wondered. Beneath the notice,
"But that was the very first military confrontation between Russia and America. Attack, retaliation, both projectiles deep-sixed forever and the Pacific rolls on. But the ripples from those two splashes spread, and grew, and today engulf us all.
"Peter Pinguid was really our first casualty. Not the fanatic our more left-leaning friends over in the Birch Society chose to martyrize."
"Was the Commodore killed, then?" asked Oedipa.
Much worse, to Fallopian's mind. After the con-frontation, appalled at what had to be some military alliance between abolitionist Russia (Nicholas having freed the serfs in 1861) and a Union that paid lip-service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery, Peter Pinguid stayed in his cabin for weeks, brooding.
"But that sounds," objected Metzger, "like he was against industrial capitalism. Wouldn't that disqualify him as any kind of anti-Communist figure?"
"You think like a Bircher," Fallopian said. "Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the under-lying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Un-derneath, both are part of the same creeping horror." "Industrial anything," hazarded Metzger.
"There you go," nodded Fallopian.
"What happened to Peter Pinguid?" Oedipa wanted to know.
"He finally resigned his commission. Violated his upbringing and code of honor. Lincoln and the Czar had forced him to. That's what I meant when I said casualty. He and most of the crew settled near L.A.; and for the rest of his life he did little more than acquire " wealth."
"How poignant," Oedipa said. "What doing?"
"Speculating in California real estate," said Fallo-pian. Oedipa, halfway into swallowing part of her drink, sprayed it out again in a glittering cone for ten feet easy, and collapsed in giggles.
"Wha," said Fallopian. "During the drought that year you could've bought lots in the heart of downtown L. A. for .63 apiece."
A great shout went up near the doorway, bodies flowed toward a fattish pale young man who'd appeared carrying a leather mailsack over his shoulder.
"Mail call," people were yelling. Sure enough, it was, just like in the army. The fat kid, looking harassed, climbed up on the bar and started calling names and throwing envelopes into the crowd. Fallopian excused himself and joined the others.
Metzger had taken out a pair of glasses and was squinting through them at the kid on the bar. "He's wearing a Yoyodyne badge. What do you make of that?"
"Some inter-office mail run," Oedipa said.
"This time of night?"
"Maybe a late shift?" But Metzger only frowned. "Be back," Oedipa shrugged, heading for the ladies' room.
On the latrine wall, among lipsticked obscenities, she noticed the following message, neatly indited in engineering lettering:
"Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only, Box 7391, L. A." WASTE? Oedipa wondered. Beneath the notice,
The Senator sighs
The Senator sighs, nods as I grip the handle. “Oh. You too, huh.” He leans back against the desk, looking defeated.
I start to open the door but it’s the same lost look on the Senator’s face as the one Stuart had when he showed up on my parents’ porch. I feel like I have no choice but to ask, “Me too what . . . sir?”
The Senator looks over at the picture of Missus Whitworth, huge and cold, mounted on his office wall like a warning. “I see it, is all. In your eyes.” He chuckles bitterly. “And here I was hoping you might be the one who halfway liked the old man. I mean, if you ever joined this old family.”
I look at him now, tingling from his words . . . joined this old family.
“I don’t . . . dislike you, sir,” I say, shifting in my flats.
“I don’t mean to bury you in our troubles, but things have been pretty hard here, Eugenia. We were worried sick after all that mess last year. With the other one.” He shakes his head, looks down at the glass in his hand. “Stuart, he just up and left his apartment in Jackson, moved everything out to the camp house in Vicksburg.”
“I know he was very . . . upset,” I say, when truthfully, I know almost nothing at all.
“Dead’s more like it. Hell, I’d drive out to see him and he’d just be sitting there in front of the window, cracking pecans. Wasn’t even eating em, just pulling off the shell, tossing em in the trash. Wouldn’t talk to me or his mama for . . . for months.”
He crumples in on himself, this gigantic bull of a man, and I want to escape and reassure him at the same time, he looks so pathetic, but then he looks up at me with his bloodshot eyes, says, “Seems like ten minutes ago I was showing him how to load his first rifle, wring his first dove-bird. But ever since the thing with that girl, he’s . . . different. He won’t tell me anything. I just want to know, is my son alright?”
“I . . . I think he is. But honestly, I don’t . . . really know.” I look away. Inside, I’m starting to realize that I don’t know Stuart. If this damaged him so much, and he can’t even speak to me about it, then what am I to him? Just a diversion? Something sitting beside him to keep him from thinking about what’s really tearing him up inside?
I look at the Senator, try to think of something comforting, something my mother would say. But it’s just a dead silence.
“Francine would have my hide if she knew I was asking you this.”
“It’s alright, sir,” I say. “I don’t mind that you did.”
He looks exhausted by it all, tries to smile. “Thank you, darlin’. Go on and see my son. I’ll see y’all out there in a while.”
I ESCAPE TO THE back PORCH and stand next to Stuart. Lightning bursts in the sky, giving us a flash of the eerily brilliant gardens, then the darkness sucks it all back in. The gazebo, skeleton-like, looms at the end of the garden path. I feel nauseous from the glass of sherry I drank after supper.
The Senator comes out, looking curiously more sober, in a fresh shirt, plaid and pressed, exactly the same as the last one. Mother and Missus Whitworth stroll a few steps, pointing at some rare rose winding its neck up onto the porch. Stuart puts his hand on my shoulder. He is somehow better, but I am growing worse.
I start to open the door but it’s the same lost look on the Senator’s face as the one Stuart had when he showed up on my parents’ porch. I feel like I have no choice but to ask, “Me too what . . . sir?”
The Senator looks over at the picture of Missus Whitworth, huge and cold, mounted on his office wall like a warning. “I see it, is all. In your eyes.” He chuckles bitterly. “And here I was hoping you might be the one who halfway liked the old man. I mean, if you ever joined this old family.”
I look at him now, tingling from his words . . . joined this old family.
“I don’t . . . dislike you, sir,” I say, shifting in my flats.
“I don’t mean to bury you in our troubles, but things have been pretty hard here, Eugenia. We were worried sick after all that mess last year. With the other one.” He shakes his head, looks down at the glass in his hand. “Stuart, he just up and left his apartment in Jackson, moved everything out to the camp house in Vicksburg.”
“I know he was very . . . upset,” I say, when truthfully, I know almost nothing at all.
“Dead’s more like it. Hell, I’d drive out to see him and he’d just be sitting there in front of the window, cracking pecans. Wasn’t even eating em, just pulling off the shell, tossing em in the trash. Wouldn’t talk to me or his mama for . . . for months.”
He crumples in on himself, this gigantic bull of a man, and I want to escape and reassure him at the same time, he looks so pathetic, but then he looks up at me with his bloodshot eyes, says, “Seems like ten minutes ago I was showing him how to load his first rifle, wring his first dove-bird. But ever since the thing with that girl, he’s . . . different. He won’t tell me anything. I just want to know, is my son alright?”
“I . . . I think he is. But honestly, I don’t . . . really know.” I look away. Inside, I’m starting to realize that I don’t know Stuart. If this damaged him so much, and he can’t even speak to me about it, then what am I to him? Just a diversion? Something sitting beside him to keep him from thinking about what’s really tearing him up inside?
I look at the Senator, try to think of something comforting, something my mother would say. But it’s just a dead silence.
“Francine would have my hide if she knew I was asking you this.”
“It’s alright, sir,” I say. “I don’t mind that you did.”
He looks exhausted by it all, tries to smile. “Thank you, darlin’. Go on and see my son. I’ll see y’all out there in a while.”
I ESCAPE TO THE back PORCH and stand next to Stuart. Lightning bursts in the sky, giving us a flash of the eerily brilliant gardens, then the darkness sucks it all back in. The gazebo, skeleton-like, looms at the end of the garden path. I feel nauseous from the glass of sherry I drank after supper.
The Senator comes out, looking curiously more sober, in a fresh shirt, plaid and pressed, exactly the same as the last one. Mother and Missus Whitworth stroll a few steps, pointing at some rare rose winding its neck up onto the porch. Stuart puts his hand on my shoulder. He is somehow better, but I am growing worse.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
About this time there came to York a company of strolling actors from the neighbouring Republic
About this time there came to York a company of strolling actors from the neighbouring Republic, whose fortunes were at a low ebb, and whose dignity had very much run down at the heels. To revive their fortunes, they gave an entertainment in the extemporized theatre of the town, under the kindly proffered patronage of the members of the Legislature. It was New Year's Eve, and the fun--the age was still a bibulous one--waxed fast and furious. At last the curtain dropped, and the modest orchestra struck up "God save the king!" Hats were at once doffed, and from among the standing audience came a loud but unsteady voice, calling upon the orchestra to "play up" Hail Columbia! or Yankee Doodle.
The sober section of the play-house was stunned. Was it possible that Democracy could go to such lengths--within sight of the "royal arms," over the Lieutenant-Governor's box, and with the decaying notes of the national anthem in Tory ears?
It was but too true. Again and again rose the shout for the seditious tunes. Abashed loyalty sought to escape from the house, but the crowd jostled and intervened. The scene now became uproarious. Affrighted Conservatives were seen to jam their hats on their heads--the only mark of disapproval possible--and glare defiance at those who impeded the exit. The Tory member for Stormonth--it was afterwards admitted in evidence--stripped his coat and threatened to knock any two of the opposing Radicals down. Meanwhile the orchestra, unable to accomplish the higher flight of "Hail Columbia!" struck up the commoner and more objectionable tune; and three grave legislators, it is said, danced while "Yankee Doodle" was played. The Democratic orgie at last spent itself with the music, and after a while all breathed the outer, communistic air of heaven.
After the racket comes the reckoning; and Captain Matthews, whose share in inducing the play-house fiddlers to discourse republican music to monarchical ears was reported with due exaggerations and aspersions on his loyalty, to the military authorities, speedily found himself the victim of an infamous plot. Distorted accounts of the scene at the theatre had been sent to the Commander of the Forces, at Quebec; and the member for Middlesex was specially singled out as the seditious rioter on the occasion, and the leader in what was termed "a disloyal and disgraceful affair." Presently there came an order for Capt. Matthews to report himself to the military authorities at Quebec, and at that port to take ship for England, where he was to be tried by court-martial. To enable him to obey the summons it was first necessary to obtain leave of absence from the Legislature; and the motion that was to come up in the Assembly that evening, was, whether the House, on the evidence before it, would agree to release the incriminated officer from his Parliamentary duties so as to face the frivolous charge at the "Horse-Guards" in London.
The discussion opened by the presentation to the House of the report of the Committee of Inquiry that had sat upon the matter--a report which exonerated Captain Matthews from the charge preferred against him, and relieved him from the scandalous accusation of disloyalty. The report closed with a protest against the tendency, on the part of the Government, to resort to espionage and inquisitorial measures, in endeavouring to rid the Province of those obnoxious to the ruling faction, and in attempting to undermine the independence of the Legislature by scandalizing its members and awing them into political subserviency. The conviction was reiterated that there was no ground for the charge against Captain Matthews, the malignity and falsity of which was due to political hostility to that gentleman.
Emerging from a pool the size of a small reservoir in plaid swim trunks from Brooks Brothers
Emerging from a pool the size of a small reservoir in plaid swim trunks from Brooks Brothers, unable even at first glance to be mistaken for any of the white marble statues surrounding it, Ralph Wayvone, Sr., caped himself with a towel stolen not that long ago from the Fairmont, ascended a short flight of steps, and stood looking out over a retaining wall that seemed in the morning fog to mark the edge of a precipice, or of the world. With only a few tree silhouettes, and both the freeways and El Camino Real miraculously silent, for just these moments Ralph Sr., appreciative of peace as anybody, could take another of what he'd come to think of as microvacations on an island of time fragile and precious as any Tahiti or one of them.
Registering upon strangers as the kind of executive whose idea of power is a secretary on her knees under his desk, Ralph in fact was more considerate of others than at times was good for him. He liked, and was genuinely attentive to, the platoons of children who always showed up at family gatherings like the one today. The kids picked up on this, appreciated it, and flirted back. Friends he valued for their willingness to talk to him straight said things like, "Your problem, Ralph, is you're not enough of a control freak for the job you're in," or, "You're supposed to allow yourself the illusion that what you do matters, but it don't look like you really give a shit." His shrink told him the same things. What did Ralph know? He looked in mirrors and saw somebody in OK shape for his age, he went and put in his regular time at the spa and the tennis court, had in his mouth some high-ticket dental work, with which he ate carefully and in style. His lovely wife, Shondra, what could he say? His kids — well, there was still time, time would tell. Gelsomina, the baby, was getting married today to a college professor from L.A., of a good family with whom Ralph had done complaint-free and even honorable business. Dominic, "the movie executive," as Ralph liked to call him, had flown in the night before from Indonesia, where he was line producer on a monster movie whose budget required readjusting on an hour-to-hour basis, so he'd been spending a lot of time on the phone, expensive but maybe managing to confuse whoever happened to be tapping it. And Ralph Jr., who was expected someday to take over Ralph Wayvone Enterprises, had driven down for a day off from his duties as manager of the Cucumber Lounge road-house up in Vineland.
"One thing you have to know," Ralph confided to his namesake the day the kid turned eighteen and got his ventunesimo party three years early, at the time a sensible move given the many talents then surfacing in his character for getting into trouble, "before you get too involved, is that we are a wholly-owned subsidiary."
"What's that?" inquired Ralph Jr. In olden times the father might have shrugged, turned without further talk, and gone away to enjoy his despair in private. The two Wayvones were down in the wine cellar, and Ralph could have just left him there, among the bottles. Instead he took the trouble to explain that strictly speaking, the family "owned" nothing. They received an annual operating budget from the corporation that owned them, was all.
Registering upon strangers as the kind of executive whose idea of power is a secretary on her knees under his desk, Ralph in fact was more considerate of others than at times was good for him. He liked, and was genuinely attentive to, the platoons of children who always showed up at family gatherings like the one today. The kids picked up on this, appreciated it, and flirted back. Friends he valued for their willingness to talk to him straight said things like, "Your problem, Ralph, is you're not enough of a control freak for the job you're in," or, "You're supposed to allow yourself the illusion that what you do matters, but it don't look like you really give a shit." His shrink told him the same things. What did Ralph know? He looked in mirrors and saw somebody in OK shape for his age, he went and put in his regular time at the spa and the tennis court, had in his mouth some high-ticket dental work, with which he ate carefully and in style. His lovely wife, Shondra, what could he say? His kids — well, there was still time, time would tell. Gelsomina, the baby, was getting married today to a college professor from L.A., of a good family with whom Ralph had done complaint-free and even honorable business. Dominic, "the movie executive," as Ralph liked to call him, had flown in the night before from Indonesia, where he was line producer on a monster movie whose budget required readjusting on an hour-to-hour basis, so he'd been spending a lot of time on the phone, expensive but maybe managing to confuse whoever happened to be tapping it. And Ralph Jr., who was expected someday to take over Ralph Wayvone Enterprises, had driven down for a day off from his duties as manager of the Cucumber Lounge road-house up in Vineland.
"One thing you have to know," Ralph confided to his namesake the day the kid turned eighteen and got his ventunesimo party three years early, at the time a sensible move given the many talents then surfacing in his character for getting into trouble, "before you get too involved, is that we are a wholly-owned subsidiary."
"What's that?" inquired Ralph Jr. In olden times the father might have shrugged, turned without further talk, and gone away to enjoy his despair in private. The two Wayvones were down in the wine cellar, and Ralph could have just left him there, among the bottles. Instead he took the trouble to explain that strictly speaking, the family "owned" nothing. They received an annual operating budget from the corporation that owned them, was all.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Whenever Gervaise saw Father Bru she called him in
Whenever Gervaise saw Father Bru she called him in, made a place for him near the stove and gave him some bread and cheese. Father Bru, with his white beard and his face wrinkled like an old apple, sat in silent content for hours at a time, enjoying the warmth and the crackling of the coke.
"What are you thinking about?" Gervaise would say gaily.
"Of nothing--of all sorts of things," he would reply with a dazed air.
The workwomen laughed and thought it a good joke to ask if he were in love. He paid little heed to them but relapsed into silent thought.
From this time Virginie often spoke to Gervaise of Lantier, and one day she said she had just met him. But as the clearstarcher made no reply Virginie then said no more. But on the next day she returned to the subject and told her that he had talked long and tenderly of her. Gervaise was much troubled by these whispered conversations in the corner of her shop. The name of Lantier made her faint and sick at heart. She believed herself to be an honest woman. She meant, in every way, to do right and to shun the wrong, because she felt that only in doing so could she be happy. She did not think much of Coupeau because she was conscious of no shortcomings toward him. But she thought of her friend at the forge, and it seemed to her that this return of her interest in Lantier, faint and undecided as it was, was an infidelity to Goujet and to that tender friendship which had become so very precious to her. Her heart was much troubled in these days. She dwelt on that time when her first lover left her. She imagined another day when, quitting Adele, he might return to her--with that old familiar trunk.
When she went into the street it was with a spasm of terror. She fancied that every step behind her was Lantier's. She dared not look around lest his hand should glide about her waist. He might be watching for her at any time. He might come to her door in the afternoon, and this idea brought a cold sweat to her forehead, because he would certainly kiss her on her ear as he had often teased her by doing in the years gone by. It was this kiss she dreaded. Its dull reverberation deafened her to all outside sounds, and she could hear only the beatings of her own heart. When these terrors assailed her the forge was her only asylum, from whence she returned smiling and serene, feeling that Goujet, whose sonorous hammer had put all her bad dreams to flight, would protect her always.
What a happy season this was after all! The clearstarcher always carried a certain basket of clothes to her customer each week, because it gave her a pretext for going into the forge, as it was on her way. As soon as she turned the corner of the street in which it was situated she felt as lighthearted as if she were going to the country. The black charcoal dust in the road, the black smoke rising slowly from the chimneys, interested and pleased her as much as a mossy path through the woods. Afar off the forge was red even at midday, and her heart danced in time with the hammers. Goujet was expecting her and making more noise than usual, that she might hear him at a great distance. She gave Etienne a light tap on his cheek and sat quietly watching these two--this man and boy, who were so dear to her--for an hour without speaking. When the sparks touched her tender skin she rather enjoyed the sensation. He, in his turn, was fully aware of the happiness she felt in being there, and he reserved the work which required skill for the time when she could look on in wonder and admiration. It was an idyl that they were unconsciously enacting all that spring, and when Gervaise returned to her home it was in a spirit of sweet content.
Dip up some ice cream
"Dip up some ice cream, will you, Bucky?"
"I've been managing without the refrigerator. But I'll go out and get some if you want."
"What are you doing in that chair?"
"Change of scene."
"Not that it's not good riddance. This bed isn't meant for more than one, unless it's wee folk we're talking about, and even then they'd better lie still."
"Do you need a doctor?" I said.
"What for?"
"Nausea and vomiting. Cramps. Back pains. Body tremors. Fevers. Headaches. Coughing spasms,fake uggs. Severe depression."
"That sounds more like you than me. You're the one who looks on the verge. I take medication for my inner organs, to show them I care whether or not they function. I take medication, Bucky. What do you take? You look on the absolute brink. You're functioning day to day on leftover nervous energy. I take medication. Except when I forget."
"Do you want me to go out for some?"
"Some what?" she said.
"Ice cream."
"Some basic weed to suck up might be nice."
"I'd have to get in touch with Hanes. He'd probably have access to just about anything."
"Not Hanes for now. All the fun's gone out of sexual ambiguity. Hanes was never one of my favorite people anyway. Remember how he was always underfoot? A very snaky boy. Sheer snake. Heavy-lidded reptile eyes. But the real reason I don't like him is because he's hard to forget. Every so often I find myself thinking of Hanes,cheap jeremy scott adidas. I hate people I don't like who are hard to forget."
"And you're jealous of his heavy-lidded eyes," I said.
True.
"You've always wanted heavy-lidded eyes,cheap jeremy scott adidas wings."
"Too true."
"Why did you come back? What kind of business? It's cold here, Opel. You're never happy when it's cold."
"I need money, Bucky. Some people offered me an assignment. I'm taking them up on it."
"Maybe I can arrange for you to have some money,jeremy scott wings. Whatever you need for now."
"No, this is business. I'm here to deal. What I make is mine. There's a package here, right?"
"In that trunk."
"Have you peeked inside?"
"I assume it's dope."
"The package contains a raw sampling of what was described to me as the ultimate drug," she said. "Happy Valley Farm Commune stole this stuff from a research installation out on Long Island. The stuff is new, just been developed, has no trade name. They think it's some kind of massive-strength product. But really massive. A colossal downer. They'll know for sure once they get it tested. Happy Valley's anxious to market the stuff but this is their first dope venture on a large scale and they want to be sure not to fuck things up. They don't want to operate out front either. They prefer to work through intermediaries and cover people and so on. I don't want to sound like a gossip columnist of the underground but people have been whispering about this event for weeks now. The dope was taken from a top-secret installation. U.S. Guv. So people figure it's something vicious, mean and nasty. Something U.S. Guv has been putting together to brainwash gooks or radicals. People are anxious to try it and see. People are agog. They're convening in out-of-the-way places and whispering to each other. They're stopping cars on the street and passing the word. Everybody's anxious to get off on this stuff. If U.S. Guv is involved, the stuff is bound to be a real mind-crusher. Anyway that's the consensus. People are agog. It's the dawning of the age of God knows what."
"I've been managing without the refrigerator. But I'll go out and get some if you want."
"What are you doing in that chair?"
"Change of scene."
"Not that it's not good riddance. This bed isn't meant for more than one, unless it's wee folk we're talking about, and even then they'd better lie still."
"Do you need a doctor?" I said.
"What for?"
"Nausea and vomiting. Cramps. Back pains. Body tremors. Fevers. Headaches. Coughing spasms,fake uggs. Severe depression."
"That sounds more like you than me. You're the one who looks on the verge. I take medication for my inner organs, to show them I care whether or not they function. I take medication, Bucky. What do you take? You look on the absolute brink. You're functioning day to day on leftover nervous energy. I take medication. Except when I forget."
"Do you want me to go out for some?"
"Some what?" she said.
"Ice cream."
"Some basic weed to suck up might be nice."
"I'd have to get in touch with Hanes. He'd probably have access to just about anything."
"Not Hanes for now. All the fun's gone out of sexual ambiguity. Hanes was never one of my favorite people anyway. Remember how he was always underfoot? A very snaky boy. Sheer snake. Heavy-lidded reptile eyes. But the real reason I don't like him is because he's hard to forget. Every so often I find myself thinking of Hanes,cheap jeremy scott adidas. I hate people I don't like who are hard to forget."
"And you're jealous of his heavy-lidded eyes," I said.
True.
"You've always wanted heavy-lidded eyes,cheap jeremy scott adidas wings."
"Too true."
"Why did you come back? What kind of business? It's cold here, Opel. You're never happy when it's cold."
"I need money, Bucky. Some people offered me an assignment. I'm taking them up on it."
"Maybe I can arrange for you to have some money,jeremy scott wings. Whatever you need for now."
"No, this is business. I'm here to deal. What I make is mine. There's a package here, right?"
"In that trunk."
"Have you peeked inside?"
"I assume it's dope."
"The package contains a raw sampling of what was described to me as the ultimate drug," she said. "Happy Valley Farm Commune stole this stuff from a research installation out on Long Island. The stuff is new, just been developed, has no trade name. They think it's some kind of massive-strength product. But really massive. A colossal downer. They'll know for sure once they get it tested. Happy Valley's anxious to market the stuff but this is their first dope venture on a large scale and they want to be sure not to fuck things up. They don't want to operate out front either. They prefer to work through intermediaries and cover people and so on. I don't want to sound like a gossip columnist of the underground but people have been whispering about this event for weeks now. The dope was taken from a top-secret installation. U.S. Guv. So people figure it's something vicious, mean and nasty. Something U.S. Guv has been putting together to brainwash gooks or radicals. People are anxious to try it and see. People are agog. They're convening in out-of-the-way places and whispering to each other. They're stopping cars on the street and passing the word. Everybody's anxious to get off on this stuff. If U.S. Guv is involved, the stuff is bound to be a real mind-crusher. Anyway that's the consensus. People are agog. It's the dawning of the age of God knows what."
I am sticking to music
"I am sticking to music, Bucky,jeremy scott adidas wings. Being into blackness the way I am, I'm getting interested in root forms of rock 'n' roll. I'm beginning to delve real deep in that area. But I also have this other part of my life that I'm trying to find a place for. There's so much to be afraid of in contemporary society. I'm establishing a permanent relationship with these people I've mentioned on the Coast in order, among other things, to examine and find the sources of my own fear. Together we've come up with a plan whereby you with your influence and mystique can make an offer to the Happy Valley Farm Commune, this or that faction, flip a coin, whoever's got control of the product, and you can do it without letting on that I'm involved or my people on the Coast are involved or anybody's involved except who you say the involved party is. Do you want to hear the details?"
I shook my head and once again pointed out a chair. Azarian wanted to stand, remaining in a far corner, apparently trying to avoid the center of the room, an area he seemed to regard as dangerous, if not totally unapproachable, Opel's deathly fumes still clinging to furniture and choice belongings, and he talked of the old days, his uncomplicated fame, the girls who walked in and out of his bed, several every night, coming and going like popcorn vendors at a circus,rolex gmt. We shook hands again. Then he went uptown to be interviewed on stereo FM.
Chapter 13
nothing changed, altered or varied. There were no plants in the room to climb or die. I saw no insects. Sleet struck the window with sparse fragile impact and all demolition in the area was halted by weather. Time did not seem to pass as much as build, slowly gathering weight. This was the sole growth in the room and against it hung the silence, peeled back to reveal the white nightmares voiced on the floor below. I tried to remember places and things. Rain on the runway of the international airport. Rain on the simulated hamlet. Rain in the terminal province. Rain at vespers in the heliport near the river,cheap jeremy scott adidas wings. Rain in the abstract garden. Rain in the boots of the bitch in Munich. Rain on the nameless moor. I returned to the radio, to watching the firehouse, to becoming fixed in place. The artist sits still, finally, because the materials he deals with begin to shape his life, instead of being shaped, and in stillness he seeks a form of self-defense, one that ends with putrefaction,fake uggs, or stillness caught in time lapse. But I wasn't quite at that point in my career. I dreamed a return to the old palaces, the great jaded hulks of rock 'n' roll, boarded up but still standing, as far as I knew, in this city and that, always on the edge of comatose slums.
A man came to see me. He was wrapped in a double-breasted suit and high tight shirt collar. His custom-styled hair was rigid and thick, sprayed into place and fitted trimly over his forehead — a work of Renaissance masonry, it seemed. He stood in the doorway, coat over his arm, earnest hand waiting to be taken.
"Who are you?"
"ABC," he said.
"Forget it."
"Nothing big or elaborate. An abbreviated interview. Your televised comments on topics of interest. Won't take ten minutes. We're all set up downstairs. Ten minutes. You've got my word, Bucky. The word of a personal admirer."
I shook my head and once again pointed out a chair. Azarian wanted to stand, remaining in a far corner, apparently trying to avoid the center of the room, an area he seemed to regard as dangerous, if not totally unapproachable, Opel's deathly fumes still clinging to furniture and choice belongings, and he talked of the old days, his uncomplicated fame, the girls who walked in and out of his bed, several every night, coming and going like popcorn vendors at a circus,rolex gmt. We shook hands again. Then he went uptown to be interviewed on stereo FM.
Chapter 13
nothing changed, altered or varied. There were no plants in the room to climb or die. I saw no insects. Sleet struck the window with sparse fragile impact and all demolition in the area was halted by weather. Time did not seem to pass as much as build, slowly gathering weight. This was the sole growth in the room and against it hung the silence, peeled back to reveal the white nightmares voiced on the floor below. I tried to remember places and things. Rain on the runway of the international airport. Rain on the simulated hamlet. Rain in the terminal province. Rain at vespers in the heliport near the river,cheap jeremy scott adidas wings. Rain in the abstract garden. Rain in the boots of the bitch in Munich. Rain on the nameless moor. I returned to the radio, to watching the firehouse, to becoming fixed in place. The artist sits still, finally, because the materials he deals with begin to shape his life, instead of being shaped, and in stillness he seeks a form of self-defense, one that ends with putrefaction,fake uggs, or stillness caught in time lapse. But I wasn't quite at that point in my career. I dreamed a return to the old palaces, the great jaded hulks of rock 'n' roll, boarded up but still standing, as far as I knew, in this city and that, always on the edge of comatose slums.
A man came to see me. He was wrapped in a double-breasted suit and high tight shirt collar. His custom-styled hair was rigid and thick, sprayed into place and fitted trimly over his forehead — a work of Renaissance masonry, it seemed. He stood in the doorway, coat over his arm, earnest hand waiting to be taken.
"Who are you?"
"ABC," he said.
"Forget it."
"Nothing big or elaborate. An abbreviated interview. Your televised comments on topics of interest. Won't take ten minutes. We're all set up downstairs. Ten minutes. You've got my word, Bucky. The word of a personal admirer."
He looped the rope around the chimney
He looped the rope around the chimney, then inched back down, backward, until he hit a patch of ice and slid for two feet. Catching himself, he paused and allowed his heart to start working again. He looked down in terror. If by some tragedy he fell, he'd free-fall for a very brief flight, then land among the metal patio furniture sitting on hard brick. Death would not be instant,SHIPPING INFO., no sir. He'd suffer, and if he didn't die he'd have a broken neck or maybe brain damage.
How utterly ridiculous. A Fifty-four-year-old man playing games like this.
The most horrifying trick of all was to remount the ladder from above, which he managed to do by digging his fingernails into the shingles while dangling one foot at a time over the gutter,Link. Back on the ground, he took a deep breath and congratulated himself for surviving the first trip to the top and back.
There were four parts to Frosty-a wide, round base, then a snowball, then the trunk with one arm waving and one hand on hip, then the head with his smiling face, corncob pipe, and black top hat. Luther grumbled as he put the damned thing together, snapping one plastic section into another. He screwed the lightbulb into the midsection, plugged in the eighty-foot extension cord, hooked the nylon rope around Frosty's waist, and maneuvered him into position for the ride up.
It was a quarter to five. His daughter and her brand-new fiancé would land in an hour and fifteen minutes. The drive to the airport took twenty minutes, plus more for parking, shuttling, walking, pushing, shoving.
Luther wanted to give up and start drinking,mens rolex datejust.
But he pulled the rope tight around the chimney, and Frosty started up. Luther climbed with him, up the ladder, worked him over the gutter and onto the shingles. Luther would pull, Frosty would move a little,jeremy scott adidas wings. He was no more than forty pounds of hard plastic but soon felt much heavier. Slowly, they made their way up, side by side, Luther on all fours, Frosty inching along on his back.
Just a hint of darkness, but no real relief from the skies. Once the little team reached the crown, Luther would be exposed. He'd be forced to stand while he grappled with his snowman and attached him to the front of the chimney, and once in place, illuminated with the two-hundred-watt, old Frosty would join his forty-one companions and all of Hemlock would know that Luther had caved. So he paused for a moment, just below the summit, and tried to tell himself that he didn't care what his neighbors thought or said. He clutched the rope that held Frosty, rested on his back and looked at the clouds above him, and realized he was sweating and freezing. They would laugh, and snicker, and tell Luther's skipping Christmas story for years to come, and he'd be the butt of the jokes, but what did it really matter?
Blair would be happy. Enrique would see a real American Christmas. Nora would hopefully be placated.
Then he thought of the Island Princess casting off tomorrow from Miami, minus two passengers, headed for the beaches and the islands Luther had been lusting for.
He felt like throwing up.
How utterly ridiculous. A Fifty-four-year-old man playing games like this.
The most horrifying trick of all was to remount the ladder from above, which he managed to do by digging his fingernails into the shingles while dangling one foot at a time over the gutter,Link. Back on the ground, he took a deep breath and congratulated himself for surviving the first trip to the top and back.
There were four parts to Frosty-a wide, round base, then a snowball, then the trunk with one arm waving and one hand on hip, then the head with his smiling face, corncob pipe, and black top hat. Luther grumbled as he put the damned thing together, snapping one plastic section into another. He screwed the lightbulb into the midsection, plugged in the eighty-foot extension cord, hooked the nylon rope around Frosty's waist, and maneuvered him into position for the ride up.
It was a quarter to five. His daughter and her brand-new fiancé would land in an hour and fifteen minutes. The drive to the airport took twenty minutes, plus more for parking, shuttling, walking, pushing, shoving.
Luther wanted to give up and start drinking,mens rolex datejust.
But he pulled the rope tight around the chimney, and Frosty started up. Luther climbed with him, up the ladder, worked him over the gutter and onto the shingles. Luther would pull, Frosty would move a little,jeremy scott adidas wings. He was no more than forty pounds of hard plastic but soon felt much heavier. Slowly, they made their way up, side by side, Luther on all fours, Frosty inching along on his back.
Just a hint of darkness, but no real relief from the skies. Once the little team reached the crown, Luther would be exposed. He'd be forced to stand while he grappled with his snowman and attached him to the front of the chimney, and once in place, illuminated with the two-hundred-watt, old Frosty would join his forty-one companions and all of Hemlock would know that Luther had caved. So he paused for a moment, just below the summit, and tried to tell himself that he didn't care what his neighbors thought or said. He clutched the rope that held Frosty, rested on his back and looked at the clouds above him, and realized he was sweating and freezing. They would laugh, and snicker, and tell Luther's skipping Christmas story for years to come, and he'd be the butt of the jokes, but what did it really matter?
Blair would be happy. Enrique would see a real American Christmas. Nora would hopefully be placated.
Then he thought of the Island Princess casting off tomorrow from Miami, minus two passengers, headed for the beaches and the islands Luther had been lusting for.
He felt like throwing up.
I think he would want you to have these
"I think he would want you to have these."
Too choked up to respond, she nodded a silent thank-you.
* * *
Theresa couldn't remember much about her first few days back in Boston, and in retrospect she knew she didn't really want to. She did recall that Deanna was waiting for her at Logan Airport when her plane touched down. After taking one look at her, Deanna immediately called her husband, instructing him to bring some clothes to Theresa's because she planned to stay with her for a few days.
Theresa spent most of the time in bed,imitation rolex watches, not even bothering to get up when Kevin came home from school.
"Is my mom ever going to be okay?" Kevin asked.
"She just needs a little time, Kevin," Deanna answered. "I know it's hard for
you, too, but it's going to be okay."
Theresa's dreams, when she could remember them, were fragmented and disorienting. Surprisingly, Garrett never appeared in them at all. She didn't know if that was an omen of sorts or even if she should attach any meaning to it. In her daze, she found it difficult to think about anything clearly, and she went to bed early and remained there, cocooned in the soothing darkness for as long as she could.
Sometimes upon awakening, she experienced a split second of confused unreality when the whole thing seemed like a terrible mistake, too absurd to have actually occurred. In that split second, everything would be as it should. She would find herself straining for the sounds of Garrett in the apartment, sure that the empty bed meant only that he was already in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper. She would join him in a moment at the table and shake her head: I had the most terrible dream ,mens rolex datejust. ,fake uggs for sale. .
Her only other recollection about that week was her relentless need to understand how this could have happened. Before she left Wilmington, she made Jeb promise to call her if he learned anything else about the day Garrett had gone out on Happenstance . In a curious twist of reason, she believed that knowing the details-the-why -would somehow lessen her grief. What she refused to believe was that Garrett had sailed into the storm without planning to return.
Whenever the phone rang, her hopes rose in the expectation of hearing Jeb's voice. "I see," she imagined herself saying. "Yes . . . I understand. That makes sense. . . ,ladies rolex datejusts."
Of course, deep down, she knew that would never happen. Jeb didn't call with an explanation that week, nor did the answer come to her in a moment of contemplation. No, the answer eventually came from a place she would never have predicted.
* * *
On the beach at Cape Cod, one year later, she reflected without bitterness on the turn of events that had led her to this place. Ready at last, Theresa reached in her bag. After removing the object she had brought with her, she stared at it, reliving the hour in which her answer had finally come. Unlike her recollection of the days immediately following her return to Boston, this memory was still unshakably clear.
After Deanna had left, Theresa had tried to reestablish a routine of sorts. In her confusion over the last week, she'd ignored the aspects of life that nonetheless had gone on. While Deanna had helped with Kevin and kept the house up, she'd simply piled the mail that accumulated in the corner of the dining room. After dinner one night while Kevin was at the movies, Theresa absently began to sort through the pile.
Too choked up to respond, she nodded a silent thank-you.
* * *
Theresa couldn't remember much about her first few days back in Boston, and in retrospect she knew she didn't really want to. She did recall that Deanna was waiting for her at Logan Airport when her plane touched down. After taking one look at her, Deanna immediately called her husband, instructing him to bring some clothes to Theresa's because she planned to stay with her for a few days.
Theresa spent most of the time in bed,imitation rolex watches, not even bothering to get up when Kevin came home from school.
"Is my mom ever going to be okay?" Kevin asked.
"She just needs a little time, Kevin," Deanna answered. "I know it's hard for
you, too, but it's going to be okay."
Theresa's dreams, when she could remember them, were fragmented and disorienting. Surprisingly, Garrett never appeared in them at all. She didn't know if that was an omen of sorts or even if she should attach any meaning to it. In her daze, she found it difficult to think about anything clearly, and she went to bed early and remained there, cocooned in the soothing darkness for as long as she could.
Sometimes upon awakening, she experienced a split second of confused unreality when the whole thing seemed like a terrible mistake, too absurd to have actually occurred. In that split second, everything would be as it should. She would find herself straining for the sounds of Garrett in the apartment, sure that the empty bed meant only that he was already in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper. She would join him in a moment at the table and shake her head: I had the most terrible dream ,mens rolex datejust. ,fake uggs for sale. .
Her only other recollection about that week was her relentless need to understand how this could have happened. Before she left Wilmington, she made Jeb promise to call her if he learned anything else about the day Garrett had gone out on Happenstance . In a curious twist of reason, she believed that knowing the details-the-why -would somehow lessen her grief. What she refused to believe was that Garrett had sailed into the storm without planning to return.
Whenever the phone rang, her hopes rose in the expectation of hearing Jeb's voice. "I see," she imagined herself saying. "Yes . . . I understand. That makes sense. . . ,ladies rolex datejusts."
Of course, deep down, she knew that would never happen. Jeb didn't call with an explanation that week, nor did the answer come to her in a moment of contemplation. No, the answer eventually came from a place she would never have predicted.
* * *
On the beach at Cape Cod, one year later, she reflected without bitterness on the turn of events that had led her to this place. Ready at last, Theresa reached in her bag. After removing the object she had brought with her, she stared at it, reliving the hour in which her answer had finally come. Unlike her recollection of the days immediately following her return to Boston, this memory was still unshakably clear.
After Deanna had left, Theresa had tried to reestablish a routine of sorts. In her confusion over the last week, she'd ignored the aspects of life that nonetheless had gone on. While Deanna had helped with Kevin and kept the house up, she'd simply piled the mail that accumulated in the corner of the dining room. After dinner one night while Kevin was at the movies, Theresa absently began to sort through the pile.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Evie replied Helen's right enough
Evie replied: "Helen's right enough, but I can't stand the toothy one. And I shouldn't have called either of them girls."
Evie had grown up handsome. Dark-eyed,adidas jeremy scott wings, with the glow of youth under sunburn, built firmly and firm-lipped, she was the best the Wilcoxes could do in the way of feminine beauty. For the present, puppies and her father were the only things she loved, but the net of matrimony was being prepared for her, and a few days later she was attracted to a Mr. Percy Cahill, an uncle of Mrs. Charles, and he was attracted to her.
Chapter 17
The Age of Property holds bitter moments even for a proprietor. When a move is imminent, furniture becomes ridiculous,Link, and Margaret now lay awake at nights wondering where, where on earth they and all their belongings would be deposited in September next. Chairs, tables, pictures, books, that had rumbled down to them through the generations, must rumble forward again like a slide of rubbish to which she longed to give the final push, and send toppling into the sea. But there were all their father's books--they never read them, but they were their father's, and must be kept. There was the marble-topped chiffonier--their mother had set store by it, they could not remember why. Round every knob and cushion in the house sentiment gathered, a sentiment that was at times personal,imitation rolex watches, but more often a faint piety to the dead, a prolongation of rites that might have ended at the grave.
It was absurd, if you came to think of it; Helen and Tibby came to think of it: Margaret was too busy with the house-agents. The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. The Schlegels were certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer. He has built flats on its site, his motor-cars grow swifter, his exposures of Socialism more trenchant. But he has spilt the precious distillation of the years, and no chemistry of his can give it back to society again.
Margaret grew depressed; she was anxious to settle on a house before they left town to pay their annual visit to Mrs. Munt. She enjoyed this visit, and wanted to have her mind at ease for it. Swanage, though dull, was stable, and this year she longed more than usual for its fresh air and for the magnificent downs that guard it on the north. But London thwarted her; in its atmosphere she could not concentrate. London only stimulates, it cannot sustain; and Margaret, hurrying over its surface for a house without knowing what sort of a house she wanted, was paying for many a thrilling sensation in the past. She could not even break loose from culture, and her time was wasted by concerts which it would be a sin to miss, and invitations which it would never do to refuse. At last she grew desperate,adidas jeremy scott; she resolved that she would go nowhere and be at home to no one until she found a house, and broke the resolution in half an hour.
Evie had grown up handsome. Dark-eyed,adidas jeremy scott wings, with the glow of youth under sunburn, built firmly and firm-lipped, she was the best the Wilcoxes could do in the way of feminine beauty. For the present, puppies and her father were the only things she loved, but the net of matrimony was being prepared for her, and a few days later she was attracted to a Mr. Percy Cahill, an uncle of Mrs. Charles, and he was attracted to her.
Chapter 17
The Age of Property holds bitter moments even for a proprietor. When a move is imminent, furniture becomes ridiculous,Link, and Margaret now lay awake at nights wondering where, where on earth they and all their belongings would be deposited in September next. Chairs, tables, pictures, books, that had rumbled down to them through the generations, must rumble forward again like a slide of rubbish to which she longed to give the final push, and send toppling into the sea. But there were all their father's books--they never read them, but they were their father's, and must be kept. There was the marble-topped chiffonier--their mother had set store by it, they could not remember why. Round every knob and cushion in the house sentiment gathered, a sentiment that was at times personal,imitation rolex watches, but more often a faint piety to the dead, a prolongation of rites that might have ended at the grave.
It was absurd, if you came to think of it; Helen and Tibby came to think of it: Margaret was too busy with the house-agents. The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. The Schlegels were certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer. He has built flats on its site, his motor-cars grow swifter, his exposures of Socialism more trenchant. But he has spilt the precious distillation of the years, and no chemistry of his can give it back to society again.
Margaret grew depressed; she was anxious to settle on a house before they left town to pay their annual visit to Mrs. Munt. She enjoyed this visit, and wanted to have her mind at ease for it. Swanage, though dull, was stable, and this year she longed more than usual for its fresh air and for the magnificent downs that guard it on the north. But London thwarted her; in its atmosphere she could not concentrate. London only stimulates, it cannot sustain; and Margaret, hurrying over its surface for a house without knowing what sort of a house she wanted, was paying for many a thrilling sensation in the past. She could not even break loose from culture, and her time was wasted by concerts which it would be a sin to miss, and invitations which it would never do to refuse. At last she grew desperate,adidas jeremy scott; she resolved that she would go nowhere and be at home to no one until she found a house, and broke the resolution in half an hour.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
He shook his head
He shook his head. "They don't want the sacred fire. They want the high-balls--and they have money enough to be drunk straight through the next world!" He was thoughtful. "They are the classics," he added.
I didn't see that he had gone back to my word. "Roman Empire, you mean?"
"No, the others; the old people we're bidding good-by to. Roman Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that, and they are our true American classics. Nothing like them will happen again,fake uggs."
"Perhaps," I suggested, "our generation is uneasily living in a 'bad quarter-of-an-hour'--good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles." And on this I made to him a much-used and consoling quotation about the old order changing.
"Who says that?" he inquired; and upon my telling him, "I hope so," he said,fake uggs usa, "I hope so. But just now Uncle Sam 'aspires to descend.'"
I laughed at his counter-quotation. "You know your classics, if you don't know Tennyson."
He, too, laughed. "Don't tell Aunt Eliza!"
"Tell her what?"
"That I didn't recognize Tennyson. My Aunt Eliza educated me--and she thinks Tennyson about the only poet worth reading since--well, since Byron and Sir Walter at the very latest,fake chanel bags!"
"Neither she nor Sir Walter come down to modern poetry--or to alcoholic girls." His tone, on these last words, changed.
Again, as when he had said "an urgent matter," I seemed to feel hovering above us what must be his ceaseless preoccupation; and I wondered if he had found, upon visiting Newport, Miss Hortense sitting and calling for "high-balls."
I gave him a lead. "The worst of it is that a girl who would like to behave herself decently finds that propriety puts her out of the running. The men flock off to the other kind."
He was following me with watching eyes.
"And you know," I continued, "what an anxious Newport parent does on finding her girl on the brink of being a failure."
"I can imagine," he answered, "that she scolds her like the dickens."
"Oh, nothing so ineffectual! She makes her keep up with the others, you know. Makes her do things she'd rather not do."
"High-balls, you mean?"
"Anything, my friend; anything to keep up."
He had a comic suggestion. "Driven to drink by her mother! Well, it's, at any rate, a new cause for old effects." He paused. It seemed strangely to bring to him some sort of relief,Cheap Adidas Jeremy Scott Big Tongue Shoes. "That would explain a great deal," he said.
Was he thus explaining to himself his lady-love, or rather certain Newport aspects of her which had, so to speak, jarred upon his Kings Port notions of what a lady might properly do? I sat on my gravestone with my wonder, and my now-dawning desire to help him (if improbably I could), to get him out of it, if he were really in it; and he sat on his gravestone opposite, with the path between us, and the little noiseless breeze rustling the white irises, and bearing hither and thither the soft perfume of the roses. His boy face, lean, high-strung, brooding, was full of suppressed contentions. I made myself, during our silence, state his possible problem: "He doesn't love her any more, he won't admit this to himself; he intends to go through with it, and he's catching at any justification of what he has seen in her that has chilled him, so that he may, poor wretch! coax back his lost illusion." Well, if that was it, what in the world could I, or anybody, do about it?
I didn't see that he had gone back to my word. "Roman Empire, you mean?"
"No, the others; the old people we're bidding good-by to. Roman Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that, and they are our true American classics. Nothing like them will happen again,fake uggs."
"Perhaps," I suggested, "our generation is uneasily living in a 'bad quarter-of-an-hour'--good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles." And on this I made to him a much-used and consoling quotation about the old order changing.
"Who says that?" he inquired; and upon my telling him, "I hope so," he said,fake uggs usa, "I hope so. But just now Uncle Sam 'aspires to descend.'"
I laughed at his counter-quotation. "You know your classics, if you don't know Tennyson."
He, too, laughed. "Don't tell Aunt Eliza!"
"Tell her what?"
"That I didn't recognize Tennyson. My Aunt Eliza educated me--and she thinks Tennyson about the only poet worth reading since--well, since Byron and Sir Walter at the very latest,fake chanel bags!"
"Neither she nor Sir Walter come down to modern poetry--or to alcoholic girls." His tone, on these last words, changed.
Again, as when he had said "an urgent matter," I seemed to feel hovering above us what must be his ceaseless preoccupation; and I wondered if he had found, upon visiting Newport, Miss Hortense sitting and calling for "high-balls."
I gave him a lead. "The worst of it is that a girl who would like to behave herself decently finds that propriety puts her out of the running. The men flock off to the other kind."
He was following me with watching eyes.
"And you know," I continued, "what an anxious Newport parent does on finding her girl on the brink of being a failure."
"I can imagine," he answered, "that she scolds her like the dickens."
"Oh, nothing so ineffectual! She makes her keep up with the others, you know. Makes her do things she'd rather not do."
"High-balls, you mean?"
"Anything, my friend; anything to keep up."
He had a comic suggestion. "Driven to drink by her mother! Well, it's, at any rate, a new cause for old effects." He paused. It seemed strangely to bring to him some sort of relief,Cheap Adidas Jeremy Scott Big Tongue Shoes. "That would explain a great deal," he said.
Was he thus explaining to himself his lady-love, or rather certain Newport aspects of her which had, so to speak, jarred upon his Kings Port notions of what a lady might properly do? I sat on my gravestone with my wonder, and my now-dawning desire to help him (if improbably I could), to get him out of it, if he were really in it; and he sat on his gravestone opposite, with the path between us, and the little noiseless breeze rustling the white irises, and bearing hither and thither the soft perfume of the roses. His boy face, lean, high-strung, brooding, was full of suppressed contentions. I made myself, during our silence, state his possible problem: "He doesn't love her any more, he won't admit this to himself; he intends to go through with it, and he's catching at any justification of what he has seen in her that has chilled him, so that he may, poor wretch! coax back his lost illusion." Well, if that was it, what in the world could I, or anybody, do about it?
So rapid and bewildering was the motion of these two great powers--the river and the sky--that the i
So rapid and bewildering was the motion of these two great powers--the river and the sky--that the imagination could not believe in silence,jeremy scott adidas wings. It was as though the earth were full of shoutings and of tumults. And yet in reality the night was as still as a tropical evening. The wolves and the sledge-dogs answered each other undisturbed; the beautiful songs of the white-throats stole from the forest as divinely instinct as ever with the spirit of peace.
Virginia leaned against the railing and looked upon it all. Her heart was big with emotions,jeremy scott adidas 2012, many of which she could not name; her eyes were full of tears. Something had changed in her since yesterday, but she did not know what it was,fake chanel bags. The faint wise stars, the pale moon just sinking, the gentle south breeze could have told her, for they are old, old in the world's affairs. Occasionally a flash more than ordinarily brilliant would glint one of the bronze guns beneath the flag-staff. Then Virginia's heart would glint too. She imagined the reflection startled her.
She stretched her arms out to the night, embracing its glories, sighing in sympathy with its meaning, which she did not know. She felt the desire of restlessness; yet she could not bear to go. But no thought of the stranger touched her, for you see as yet she did not understand.
Then, quite naturally, she heard his voice in the darkness close to her knee. It seemed inevitable that he should be there; part of the restless, glorious night, part of her mood. She gave no start of surprise, but half closed her eyes and leaned her fair head against a pillar of the veranda. He sang in a sweet undertone an old chanson of voyage.
"Par derrier ches man pere,
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
Par derrier' chez mon pere
Li-ya-t-un,jeremy scott wings, pommier doux."
"Ah lady, lady mine," broke in the voice softly, "the night too is sweet, soft as thine eyes. Will you not greet me?"
The girl made no sign. After a moment the song went on,
"Trois filles d'un prince,
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
Trois filles d'un prince
Sont endormies dessous."
"Will not the princess leave her sisters of dreams?" whispered the voice, fantastically, "Will she not come?"
Virginia shivered, and half-opened her eyes, but did not stir. It seemed that the darkness sighed, then became musical again.
"La plus jeun' se reveille,
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
La plus jeun' se reveille
--Ma Soeur, voila le jour!
The song broke this time without a word of pleading. The girl opened her eyes wide and stared breathlessly straight before her at the singer.
"--Non, ce n'est qu'une etoile,
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
Non, ce n'est qu'une etoile
Qu' eclaire nos amours!"
The last word rolled out through its passionate throat tones and died into silence.
"Come!" repeated the man again, this time almost in the accents of command.
She turned slowly and went to him, her eyes childlike and frightened, her lips wide, her face pale. When she stood face to face with him she swayed and almost fell.
"What do you want with me?" she faltered, with a little sob.
The man looked at her keenly, laughed, and exclaimed in an every-day, matter-of-fact voice:
Virginia leaned against the railing and looked upon it all. Her heart was big with emotions,jeremy scott adidas 2012, many of which she could not name; her eyes were full of tears. Something had changed in her since yesterday, but she did not know what it was,fake chanel bags. The faint wise stars, the pale moon just sinking, the gentle south breeze could have told her, for they are old, old in the world's affairs. Occasionally a flash more than ordinarily brilliant would glint one of the bronze guns beneath the flag-staff. Then Virginia's heart would glint too. She imagined the reflection startled her.
She stretched her arms out to the night, embracing its glories, sighing in sympathy with its meaning, which she did not know. She felt the desire of restlessness; yet she could not bear to go. But no thought of the stranger touched her, for you see as yet she did not understand.
Then, quite naturally, she heard his voice in the darkness close to her knee. It seemed inevitable that he should be there; part of the restless, glorious night, part of her mood. She gave no start of surprise, but half closed her eyes and leaned her fair head against a pillar of the veranda. He sang in a sweet undertone an old chanson of voyage.
"Par derrier ches man pere,
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
Par derrier' chez mon pere
Li-ya-t-un,jeremy scott wings, pommier doux."
"Ah lady, lady mine," broke in the voice softly, "the night too is sweet, soft as thine eyes. Will you not greet me?"
The girl made no sign. After a moment the song went on,
"Trois filles d'un prince,
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
Trois filles d'un prince
Sont endormies dessous."
"Will not the princess leave her sisters of dreams?" whispered the voice, fantastically, "Will she not come?"
Virginia shivered, and half-opened her eyes, but did not stir. It seemed that the darkness sighed, then became musical again.
"La plus jeun' se reveille,
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
La plus jeun' se reveille
--Ma Soeur, voila le jour!
The song broke this time without a word of pleading. The girl opened her eyes wide and stared breathlessly straight before her at the singer.
"--Non, ce n'est qu'une etoile,
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
Non, ce n'est qu'une etoile
Qu' eclaire nos amours!"
The last word rolled out through its passionate throat tones and died into silence.
"Come!" repeated the man again, this time almost in the accents of command.
She turned slowly and went to him, her eyes childlike and frightened, her lips wide, her face pale. When she stood face to face with him she swayed and almost fell.
"What do you want with me?" she faltered, with a little sob.
The man looked at her keenly, laughed, and exclaimed in an every-day, matter-of-fact voice:
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figure of old Lord Wardingham
I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figure of old Lord Wardingham,jeremy scott adidas 2012, asleep in the largest armchair in the library of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of those things--I think they are called gout stools. He had been playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted to irascible important men whose insteps are painful. Among other things he had flouted the idea that women would ever understand statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in population, regretted he could not censor picture galleries and circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were people who pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established Church. "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue about religion," he said. "They mean mischief." Having delivered his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to the left of him from which they had arisen, he became,cheap chanel bags, after an appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice that are so dear to the forensic mind. Now he reposed. He was breathing heavily with his mouth a little open and his head on one side. One whisker was turned back against the comfortable padding. His plump strong hands gripped the arms of his chair,adidas jeremy scott wings, and his frown was a little assuaged. How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence, respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it had made his unguarded expression!
I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
9
One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowly and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning my own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views. It was as nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly, I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned, chintz-bright room,cheap jeremy scott adidas wings, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.
At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and reality again."
I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
9
One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowly and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning my own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views. It was as nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly, I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned, chintz-bright room,cheap jeremy scott adidas wings, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.
At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and reality again."
2 Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the cocked hat and wooden sword
2
Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays and abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale, than you can profess religion and refuse to think about God. In the past it was possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to unexamined things. One could be loyal to unexamined things because they were unchallenged things. But now everything is challenged. By the time of his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious and deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal responsibility had already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he was, as it were, an uncrowned king in the world. To be noble is to be aristocratic, that is to say, a ruler. Thence it follows that aristocracy is multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake both of the nature of philosopher and king....
Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality, petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited, fall far short of kingship. Nevertheless, there IS nobility,cheap chanel bags, there IS kingship,fake uggs, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of skin-disease upon a planet. From that it is an easy step to this idea, the idea whose first expression had already so touched the imagination of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and voluntary kingship scattered throughout mankind. The aristocrats are not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, those who are enthroned are but pretenders and SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real king and ruler is every man who sets aside the naive passions and self-interest of the common life for the rule and service of the world.
This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary writing,jeremy scott adidas 2012. It is one of those ideas that seem to appear simultaneously at many points in the world, and it is impossible to say now how far Benham was an originator of this idea, and how far he simply resonated to its expression by others. It was far more likely that Prothero, getting it heaven knows where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, leaving it to germinate in the mind of his friend....
This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to Benham as his life went on. When Benham walked the Bisse he was just a youngster resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled in the jungle by night he was there for all mankind. With every year he became more and more definitely to himself a consecrated man as kings are consecrated. Only that he was self-consecrated, and anointed only in his heart. At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going unsuspected about the world, because the palace of his security would not tell him the secrets of men's disorders. He was no longer a creature of circumstances, he was kingly, unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the Danes. In the great later accumulations of his Research the personal matter, the introspection, the intimate discussion of motive, becomes less and less. He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness. He worries less and less over the particular rightness of his definite acts. In these later papers White found Benham abstracted, self-forgetful, trying to find out with an ever increased self-detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions,cheap jeremy scott adidas, why we let famine, disease and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast multitudes in the midst of possible plenty. And when he found out and as far as he found out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to apply his knowledge....
Sunday, November 4, 2012
At evening
At evening, before he took his place at the pay table, he repeated the announcement. The rooms of the Temple were crowded and the flock was silent, hanging with acute interest on the Soopreemest's words. Honey Tone held up his hand. He bowed right and left, and the glittering tinsel on the mandarin cap reflected the colour of minted gold from the yellow lights. He held aloft the hilt of the gilded sword that swung from his yellow belt,chanel 2.55 bags. He sheathed his sword and parked his nervous left hand in the folds of the yellow sash that draped across his chest. "Brethren ob de Temple: Sow an' reap. As you sows, you likewise reaps. De Goddess of Gold, an' de lady's husban' ol' man Midas, has smiled agin upon ou' humble efforts. Tonight Ah makes a momentous announcement befo' Ah returns wid intres' de 'vestments you made las' week. Up to now de 'financial repayments has been two fo' one. F'm now on us pays twice dat much!"
He paused to let his words sink in. "Fo' eve'y dollah you 'vests you gits de dollah back, anotheh dollah for intres', an', as a special bonus, anotheh dollah whut makes de th'ee fo' one. Dis Special 'Vestment Depahtment is open now an' will be run wid de lef han' whilst de right, not knowin' whut de lef' han' does, pays out yo' las' week's cash. Fawm in line. Ah pays an' receives at de same table. Who is de fust brotheh? Yass indeed! Heah's yo' money--an' you says you craves to 'vest it in de th'ee fo' one fund,cheap moncler jackets. Praise de Lawd! De los' sheep sees de light."
Some there were who failed to see the light, but by strenuous persuasion Honey Tone managed to reclaim enough of his payments to piece out the missing thousand,replica chanel handbags.
Over and above the success he enjoyed in keeping his epidermis free from the parked razors of revenge, he pouched a few hundred dollars' surplus before the hour of payment ceased. With it, including the borrowed and juggled thousand, he had incurred an obligation to repay another staggering sum on the following Saturday night.
Thankful for his escape from the crisis of the moment and a little bit shaken by the acute peril which had confronted him, he sat heavily at the pay table, and sagged down in his soopreem robes. He ran his eye over the pay list, and for the first time he noticed an unpaid investor. "Pike Canfield--$100.00."
A knock sounded at the outer door. The outer guard clattered in. "Brotheh Canfield, an' a strange brotheh who desires to be led straight."
"Tell Brotheh Canfield to enteh unto de Soopreem presence,moncler womens jackets," Honey Tone returned, according to the ritual. Then, under his breath, "Dam 'at Trombone nigger. How come he so promp' at de las' minute?"
Chapter 20
1.
A little late at the Sutter Street lunch counter by reason of his added responsibilities at the dock, the Wildcat had found his friend Trombone impatiently awaiting him.
"Wilecat, does us miss de meetin' Ah loses a hund'ed dollahs. Grab yo' vittles an' eat on de run!"
"Whut time is you due at de Temple?"
"De meetin' done stahted a houah back--'less us gits dah in fifteen minnits de do's closed."
"Trombone, us has plenty ob time. Ah 'sorbs mah nutriment in five minnits--'at leaves ten fo' de trip. Ain't et me nothin' all day, 'ceptin' breakfus' an' some san'wiches at noon time. Sho' been busy loadin' de ol' Empire fo' N'Awl'uns. Dey made me de gang boss--I'se got mo' niggers dan ol' cunnel had in de Fust Service Battalion. Sho' is busy. Niggers craves to mope--ah un-craves 'em like de Lootenant used to--gits 'em all laffin' so ha'd dey forgits de wuk. Fo' long dey ain't no mo' w'uk, an' eve'ybody feels noble. Dat's all de talk--heah's mah ham, sizzlin' in de gravy.... Stan' up heah, Lily; eat dese lettuce greens."
He paused to let his words sink in. "Fo' eve'y dollah you 'vests you gits de dollah back, anotheh dollah for intres', an', as a special bonus, anotheh dollah whut makes de th'ee fo' one. Dis Special 'Vestment Depahtment is open now an' will be run wid de lef han' whilst de right, not knowin' whut de lef' han' does, pays out yo' las' week's cash. Fawm in line. Ah pays an' receives at de same table. Who is de fust brotheh? Yass indeed! Heah's yo' money--an' you says you craves to 'vest it in de th'ee fo' one fund,cheap moncler jackets. Praise de Lawd! De los' sheep sees de light."
Some there were who failed to see the light, but by strenuous persuasion Honey Tone managed to reclaim enough of his payments to piece out the missing thousand,replica chanel handbags.
Over and above the success he enjoyed in keeping his epidermis free from the parked razors of revenge, he pouched a few hundred dollars' surplus before the hour of payment ceased. With it, including the borrowed and juggled thousand, he had incurred an obligation to repay another staggering sum on the following Saturday night.
Thankful for his escape from the crisis of the moment and a little bit shaken by the acute peril which had confronted him, he sat heavily at the pay table, and sagged down in his soopreem robes. He ran his eye over the pay list, and for the first time he noticed an unpaid investor. "Pike Canfield--$100.00."
A knock sounded at the outer door. The outer guard clattered in. "Brotheh Canfield, an' a strange brotheh who desires to be led straight."
"Tell Brotheh Canfield to enteh unto de Soopreem presence,moncler womens jackets," Honey Tone returned, according to the ritual. Then, under his breath, "Dam 'at Trombone nigger. How come he so promp' at de las' minute?"
Chapter 20
1.
A little late at the Sutter Street lunch counter by reason of his added responsibilities at the dock, the Wildcat had found his friend Trombone impatiently awaiting him.
"Wilecat, does us miss de meetin' Ah loses a hund'ed dollahs. Grab yo' vittles an' eat on de run!"
"Whut time is you due at de Temple?"
"De meetin' done stahted a houah back--'less us gits dah in fifteen minnits de do's closed."
"Trombone, us has plenty ob time. Ah 'sorbs mah nutriment in five minnits--'at leaves ten fo' de trip. Ain't et me nothin' all day, 'ceptin' breakfus' an' some san'wiches at noon time. Sho' been busy loadin' de ol' Empire fo' N'Awl'uns. Dey made me de gang boss--I'se got mo' niggers dan ol' cunnel had in de Fust Service Battalion. Sho' is busy. Niggers craves to mope--ah un-craves 'em like de Lootenant used to--gits 'em all laffin' so ha'd dey forgits de wuk. Fo' long dey ain't no mo' w'uk, an' eve'ybody feels noble. Dat's all de talk--heah's mah ham, sizzlin' in de gravy.... Stan' up heah, Lily; eat dese lettuce greens."
By this time the whole camp was up and doing
By this time the whole camp was up and doing. Figures in_deshabille_, dashing the last vestiges of sleep away with theirknuckles, trooped on to the scene in twos and threes, full of inquiryand trenchant sarcasm.
"What are you men playing at,Link? What's all the row about? Can't youfinish that game of footer some other time, when we aren't trying toget to sleep? What on earth's up?"Then the voice of one having authority.
"What's the matter? What are you doing?"It was perfectly obvious what the guard was doing. It was trying toget out from underneath the fallen tent. Private Jones explained thiswith some warmth.
"Somebody jumped at me and sat on my head in the ditch. I couldn't getup. And then some blackguard cut the ropes of the guard-tent. Icouldn't see who it was. He cut off directly the tent went down."Private Jones further expressed a wish that he could find the chap.
When he did, there would, he hinted, be trouble in the old homestead.
The tent was beginning to disgorge its prisoners.
"Guard, turn out!" said a facetious voice from the darkness.
The camp was divided into two schools of thought. Those who werewatching the guard struggle out thought the episode funny. The guarddid not. It was pathetic to hear them on the subject of theirmysterious assailants. Matters quieted down rapidly after the tent hadbeen set up again. The spectators were driven back to their lines bytheir officers. The guard turned in again to try and restore theirshattered nerves with sleep until their time for sentry-go came round.
Private Jones picked up his rifle and resumed his beat. The affair wasat an end as far as that night was concerned.
Next morning, as might be expected, nothing else was talked about.
Conversation at breakfast was confined to the topic. No halfpennypaper, however many times its circulation might exceed that of anypenny morning paper, ever propounded so fascinating and puzzling abreakfast-table problem. It was the utter impossibility of detectingthe culprits that appealed to the schools. They had swooped down likehawks out of the night, and disappeared like eels into mud, leaving notraces.
Jimmy Silver, of course, had no doubts.
"It was those Kay's men," he said. "What does it matter aboutevidence? You've only got to look at 'em,http://www.fakeuggsforsales.com/. That's all the evidence youwant. The only thing that makes it at all puzzling is that they didnothing worse,fake uggs. You'd naturally expect them to slay the sentry, at anyrate."But the rest of the camp, lacking that intimate knowledge of theKayite which he possessed, did not turn the eye of suspicion towardsthe Eckleton lines. The affair remained a mystery. Kennedy, who nevergave up a problem when everybody else did, continued to revolve themystery in his mind.
"I shouldn't wonder,jordan 11," he said to Silver, two days later, "if you wereright."Silver, who had not made any remark for the last five minutes, withthe exception of abusive comments on the toughness of the meat whichhe was trying to carve with a blunt knife for the tent, asked for anexplanation. "I mean about that row the other night.""What row?""That guard-tent business.""Oh, that! I'd forgotten. Why don't you move with the times? You'realways thinking of something that's been dead and buried for years.""You remember you said you thought it was those Kay's chaps who didit. I've been thinking it over, and I believe you're right. You see,it was probably somebody who'd been to camp before, or he wouldn'thave known that dodge of loosing the ropes.""I don't see why. Seems to me it's the sort of idea that might haveoccurred to anybody. You don't want to study the thing particularlydeeply to know that the best way of making a tent collapse is to loosethe ropes. Of course it was Kay's lot who did it. But I don't see howyou're going to have them simply because one or two of them have beenhere before.""No, I suppose not," said Kennedy.
"What are you men playing at,Link? What's all the row about? Can't youfinish that game of footer some other time, when we aren't trying toget to sleep? What on earth's up?"Then the voice of one having authority.
"What's the matter? What are you doing?"It was perfectly obvious what the guard was doing. It was trying toget out from underneath the fallen tent. Private Jones explained thiswith some warmth.
"Somebody jumped at me and sat on my head in the ditch. I couldn't getup. And then some blackguard cut the ropes of the guard-tent. Icouldn't see who it was. He cut off directly the tent went down."Private Jones further expressed a wish that he could find the chap.
When he did, there would, he hinted, be trouble in the old homestead.
The tent was beginning to disgorge its prisoners.
"Guard, turn out!" said a facetious voice from the darkness.
The camp was divided into two schools of thought. Those who werewatching the guard struggle out thought the episode funny. The guarddid not. It was pathetic to hear them on the subject of theirmysterious assailants. Matters quieted down rapidly after the tent hadbeen set up again. The spectators were driven back to their lines bytheir officers. The guard turned in again to try and restore theirshattered nerves with sleep until their time for sentry-go came round.
Private Jones picked up his rifle and resumed his beat. The affair wasat an end as far as that night was concerned.
Next morning, as might be expected, nothing else was talked about.
Conversation at breakfast was confined to the topic. No halfpennypaper, however many times its circulation might exceed that of anypenny morning paper, ever propounded so fascinating and puzzling abreakfast-table problem. It was the utter impossibility of detectingthe culprits that appealed to the schools. They had swooped down likehawks out of the night, and disappeared like eels into mud, leaving notraces.
Jimmy Silver, of course, had no doubts.
"It was those Kay's men," he said. "What does it matter aboutevidence? You've only got to look at 'em,http://www.fakeuggsforsales.com/. That's all the evidence youwant. The only thing that makes it at all puzzling is that they didnothing worse,fake uggs. You'd naturally expect them to slay the sentry, at anyrate."But the rest of the camp, lacking that intimate knowledge of theKayite which he possessed, did not turn the eye of suspicion towardsthe Eckleton lines. The affair remained a mystery. Kennedy, who nevergave up a problem when everybody else did, continued to revolve themystery in his mind.
"I shouldn't wonder,jordan 11," he said to Silver, two days later, "if you wereright."Silver, who had not made any remark for the last five minutes, withthe exception of abusive comments on the toughness of the meat whichhe was trying to carve with a blunt knife for the tent, asked for anexplanation. "I mean about that row the other night.""What row?""That guard-tent business.""Oh, that! I'd forgotten. Why don't you move with the times? You'realways thinking of something that's been dead and buried for years.""You remember you said you thought it was those Kay's chaps who didit. I've been thinking it over, and I believe you're right. You see,it was probably somebody who'd been to camp before, or he wouldn'thave known that dodge of loosing the ropes.""I don't see why. Seems to me it's the sort of idea that might haveoccurred to anybody. You don't want to study the thing particularlydeeply to know that the best way of making a tent collapse is to loosethe ropes. Of course it was Kay's lot who did it. But I don't see howyou're going to have them simply because one or two of them have beenhere before.""No, I suppose not," said Kennedy.
Mrs Ford shrugged her shoulders impatiently
Mrs Ford shrugged her shoulders impatiently.
'Oh, let her go. I'm sick of amateurs.'
'Thank you, dear,' said Cynthia.
'Oh, I know you did your best. For an amateur you did wonderfullywell. But amateurs never really succeed. There were a dozen littleeasy precautions which we neglected to take. What we want is aprofessional; a man whose business is kidnapping,chanel 2.55 bags; the sort of manwho kidnaps as a matter of course; someone like Smooth SamFisher.'
'My dear Nesta! Who? I don't think I know the gentleman.'
'He tried to kidnap Ogden in 1906, when we were in New York. Atleast, the police put it down to him, though they could provenothing. Then there was a horrible man, the police said he wascalled Buck MacGinnis. He tried in 1907. That was in Chicago.'
'Good gracious! Kidnapping Ogden seems to be as popular asfootball. And I thought I was a pioneer!'
Something approaching pride came into Mrs Ford's voice.
'I don't suppose there's a child in America,Home Page,' she said, 'who hashad to be so carefully guarded. Why, the kidnappers had a specialname for him--they called him "The Little Nugget". For years wenever allowed him out of our sight without a detective to watchhim.'
'Well, Mr Ford seems to have changed all that now. I saw nodetectives. I suppose he thinks they aren't necessary in England.
Or perhaps he relied on Mr Broster. Poor Reggie,cheap moncler clerance!'
'It was criminally careless of him. This will be a lesson to him.
He will be more careful in future how he leaves Ogden at the mercyof anybody who cares to come along and snap him up.'
'Which, incidentally, does not make your chance of getting himaway any lighter.'
'Oh, I've given up hope now,' said Mrs Ford resignedly.
'_I_ haven't,' said Cynthia.
There was something in her voice which made her companion turnsharply and look at her. Mrs Ford might affect to be resigned, butshe was a woman of determination, and if the recent reverse hadleft her bruised, it had by no means crushed her.
'Cynthia! What do you mean? What are you hinting?'
'You despise amateurs, Nesta, but, for all that,cheap moncler jackets, it seems thatyour professionals who kidnap as a matter of course and all therest of it have not been a bit more successful. It was not my wantof experience that made me fail. It was my sex. This is man'swork. If I had been a man, I should at least have had brute forceto fall back upon when Mr Mennick arrived.'
Mrs Ford nodded.
'Yes, but--'
'And,' continued Cynthia, 'as all these Smooth Sam Fishers ofyours have failed too, it is obvious that the only way to kidnapOgden is from within. We must have some man working for us in theenemy's camp.'
'Which is impossible,' said Mrs Ford dejectedly.
'Not at all.'
'You know a man?'
'I know _the_ man.'
'Cynthia! What do you mean? Who is he?'
'His name is Peter Burns.'
Mrs Ford shook her head.
'I don't know him.'
'I'll introduce you. You'll like him.'
'But, Cynthia, how do you know he would be willing to help us?'
'He would do it for me,' Cynthia paused. 'You see,' she went on,'we are engaged to be married.'
'Oh, let her go. I'm sick of amateurs.'
'Thank you, dear,' said Cynthia.
'Oh, I know you did your best. For an amateur you did wonderfullywell. But amateurs never really succeed. There were a dozen littleeasy precautions which we neglected to take. What we want is aprofessional; a man whose business is kidnapping,chanel 2.55 bags; the sort of manwho kidnaps as a matter of course; someone like Smooth SamFisher.'
'My dear Nesta! Who? I don't think I know the gentleman.'
'He tried to kidnap Ogden in 1906, when we were in New York. Atleast, the police put it down to him, though they could provenothing. Then there was a horrible man, the police said he wascalled Buck MacGinnis. He tried in 1907. That was in Chicago.'
'Good gracious! Kidnapping Ogden seems to be as popular asfootball. And I thought I was a pioneer!'
Something approaching pride came into Mrs Ford's voice.
'I don't suppose there's a child in America,Home Page,' she said, 'who hashad to be so carefully guarded. Why, the kidnappers had a specialname for him--they called him "The Little Nugget". For years wenever allowed him out of our sight without a detective to watchhim.'
'Well, Mr Ford seems to have changed all that now. I saw nodetectives. I suppose he thinks they aren't necessary in England.
Or perhaps he relied on Mr Broster. Poor Reggie,cheap moncler clerance!'
'It was criminally careless of him. This will be a lesson to him.
He will be more careful in future how he leaves Ogden at the mercyof anybody who cares to come along and snap him up.'
'Which, incidentally, does not make your chance of getting himaway any lighter.'
'Oh, I've given up hope now,' said Mrs Ford resignedly.
'_I_ haven't,' said Cynthia.
There was something in her voice which made her companion turnsharply and look at her. Mrs Ford might affect to be resigned, butshe was a woman of determination, and if the recent reverse hadleft her bruised, it had by no means crushed her.
'Cynthia! What do you mean? What are you hinting?'
'You despise amateurs, Nesta, but, for all that,cheap moncler jackets, it seems thatyour professionals who kidnap as a matter of course and all therest of it have not been a bit more successful. It was not my wantof experience that made me fail. It was my sex. This is man'swork. If I had been a man, I should at least have had brute forceto fall back upon when Mr Mennick arrived.'
Mrs Ford nodded.
'Yes, but--'
'And,' continued Cynthia, 'as all these Smooth Sam Fishers ofyours have failed too, it is obvious that the only way to kidnapOgden is from within. We must have some man working for us in theenemy's camp.'
'Which is impossible,' said Mrs Ford dejectedly.
'Not at all.'
'You know a man?'
'I know _the_ man.'
'Cynthia! What do you mean? Who is he?'
'His name is Peter Burns.'
Mrs Ford shook her head.
'I don't know him.'
'I'll introduce you. You'll like him.'
'But, Cynthia, how do you know he would be willing to help us?'
'He would do it for me,' Cynthia paused. 'You see,' she went on,'we are engaged to be married.'
With Lily at his heels
4.
With Lily at his heels, the favourite of Lady Luck made his way into the midnight fog which lay above the city. He walked to Market Street, and at the ferry building he headed down the Embarcadero toward the pier where the Empire was loading. In the deep shadows cast by a post in the long pier he removed his trailing robe. He rolled his insignia under his arm. Under the arc lights along the pier the men of the night shift were rustling the last of the freight to the Empire's side.
With Lily at his heels, the Wildcat went aboard the ship. The officer on watch recognized him. "What you doin' out so late, boy? Thought you run the day shift?"
"Cap'n,--yessuh,--I does. Me an' Lily was projectin' roun' some. Us ain't got no place to go."
The Wildcat lingered on this last statement. "No place to go." Then he summoned courage enough to voice a request which expressed a longing that had developed since he had first known the Empire's destination.
"Cap'n, suh," he said slowly, "kin me an' Lily ride wid you to New Awl'uns?--Us craves to git south."
"I'll say you can. We need about nine good waiters for the trip."
"Cap'n, suh, dat's me! When us starts I'se de same as nine."
"You're hired. Sign on tomorrow."
In his eagerness the Wildcat jerked heavily at Lily's leading string. "Come on heah, goat, le's git down in de ol' boat's cellar whah de kitchen is an' git to work. Say you's 'bliged to de cap'n."
"Blaaa!" Lily voiced her gratitude.
On the third deck down, the Wildcat tied Lily to a stanchion. He threw his official costume on the deck in front of the mascot goat.
"See kin you eat dis soopreem raiment. Us is done bein' soopreem. Hot dam! New Awl'uns boun'! Den Memphis--dat's home!"
The Wildcat felt the thick packages of bank notes in the inside pockets of his yaller suit. "Sho' big money. Money--dis time stan' by me."
"I kin ride a steamboat--I don' pay no fare,
I kin ride a steamboat--anywhere.
Dat's de reason I'se as happy as a bee,
Me an' Lily's Memphis boun'--Memphis, Ten-o-see."
The End
Oh---- his contempt was unbounded
"Oh----" his contempt was unbounded. "I mean a bigperformance like this, illuminated boats, and all therest."She flushed at the picture. "Do they send them up fromthe Lake, too?""Rather. Didn't you notice that big raft wepassed? It's wonderful to see the rocketscompleting their orbits down under one's feet." Shesaid nothing, and he put the oars into the rowlocks.
"If we stay we'd better go and pick up something toeat.""But how can we get back afterwards?" she ventured,feeling it would break her heart if she missed it.
He consulted a time-table, found a ten o'clock trainand reassured her. "The moon rises so late that itwill be dark by eight, and we'll have over an hour ofit."Twilight fell, and lights began to show along theshore. The trolleys roaring out from Nettleton becamegreat luminous serpents coiling in and out among thetrees. The wooden eating-houses at the Lake's edgedanced with lanterns, and the dusk echoed with laughterand shouts and the clumsy splashing of oars.
Harney and Charity had found a table in the corner of abalcony built over the Lake, and were patientlyawaiting an unattainable chowder. Close under them thewater lapped the piles, agitated by the evolutions of alittle white steamboat trellised with coloured globeswhich was to run passengers up and down the Lake.
It was already black with them as it sheered off on itsfirst trip.
Suddenly Charity heard a woman's laugh behind her. Thesound was familiar, and she turned to look. A band ofshowily dressed girls and dapper young men wearingbadges of secret societies, with new straw hats tiltedfar back on their square-clipped hair, had invaded thebalcony and were loudly clamouring for a table. Thegirl in the lead was the one who had laughed. She worea large hat with a long white feather, and from underits brim her painted eyes looked at Charity with amusedrecognition.
"Say! if this ain't like Old Home Week," she remarkedto the girl at her elbow; and giggles and glancespassed between them. Charity knew at once that thegirl with the white feather was Julia Hawes. She hadlost her freshness, and the paint under her eyes madeher face seem thinner; but her lips had the same lovelycurve, and the same cold mocking smile, as if therewere some secret absurdity in the person she waslooking at, and she had instantly detected it.
Charity flushed to the forehead and looked away.
She felt herself humiliated by Julia's sneer, andvexed that the mockery of such a creature should affecther. She trembled lest Harney should notice that thenoisy troop had recognized her; but they found no tablefree, and passed on tumultuously.
Presently there was a soft rush through the air and ashower of silver fell from the blue evening sky. Inanother direction, pale Roman candles shot up singlythrough the trees, and a fire-haired rocket swept thehorizon like a portent. Between these intermittentflashes the velvet curtains of the darkness weredescending, and in the intervals of eclipse the voicesof the crowds seemed to sink to smothered murmurs.
Charity and Harney, dispossessed by newcomers, were atlength obliged to give up their table and strugglethrough the throng about the boat-landings. For awhile there seemed no escape from the tide of latearrivals; but finally Harney secured the last twoplaces on the stand from which the more privileged wereto see the fireworks. The seats were at the end of arow, one above the other. Charity had taken off herhat to have an uninterrupted view; and whenever sheleaned back to follow the curve of somedishevelled rocket she could feel Harney's kneesagainst her head.
"If we stay we'd better go and pick up something toeat.""But how can we get back afterwards?" she ventured,feeling it would break her heart if she missed it.
He consulted a time-table, found a ten o'clock trainand reassured her. "The moon rises so late that itwill be dark by eight, and we'll have over an hour ofit."Twilight fell, and lights began to show along theshore. The trolleys roaring out from Nettleton becamegreat luminous serpents coiling in and out among thetrees. The wooden eating-houses at the Lake's edgedanced with lanterns, and the dusk echoed with laughterand shouts and the clumsy splashing of oars.
Harney and Charity had found a table in the corner of abalcony built over the Lake, and were patientlyawaiting an unattainable chowder. Close under them thewater lapped the piles, agitated by the evolutions of alittle white steamboat trellised with coloured globeswhich was to run passengers up and down the Lake.
It was already black with them as it sheered off on itsfirst trip.
Suddenly Charity heard a woman's laugh behind her. Thesound was familiar, and she turned to look. A band ofshowily dressed girls and dapper young men wearingbadges of secret societies, with new straw hats tiltedfar back on their square-clipped hair, had invaded thebalcony and were loudly clamouring for a table. Thegirl in the lead was the one who had laughed. She worea large hat with a long white feather, and from underits brim her painted eyes looked at Charity with amusedrecognition.
"Say! if this ain't like Old Home Week," she remarkedto the girl at her elbow; and giggles and glancespassed between them. Charity knew at once that thegirl with the white feather was Julia Hawes. She hadlost her freshness, and the paint under her eyes madeher face seem thinner; but her lips had the same lovelycurve, and the same cold mocking smile, as if therewere some secret absurdity in the person she waslooking at, and she had instantly detected it.
Charity flushed to the forehead and looked away.
She felt herself humiliated by Julia's sneer, andvexed that the mockery of such a creature should affecther. She trembled lest Harney should notice that thenoisy troop had recognized her; but they found no tablefree, and passed on tumultuously.
Presently there was a soft rush through the air and ashower of silver fell from the blue evening sky. Inanother direction, pale Roman candles shot up singlythrough the trees, and a fire-haired rocket swept thehorizon like a portent. Between these intermittentflashes the velvet curtains of the darkness weredescending, and in the intervals of eclipse the voicesof the crowds seemed to sink to smothered murmurs.
Charity and Harney, dispossessed by newcomers, were atlength obliged to give up their table and strugglethrough the throng about the boat-landings. For awhile there seemed no escape from the tide of latearrivals; but finally Harney secured the last twoplaces on the stand from which the more privileged wereto see the fireworks. The seats were at the end of arow, one above the other. Charity had taken off herhat to have an uninterrupted view; and whenever sheleaned back to follow the curve of somedishevelled rocket she could feel Harney's kneesagainst her head.
And as they sailed or rowed or loitered by beach and shore
And as they sailed or rowed or loitered by beach and shore, Miss Stella drew from Aunt Winnie's boy the hopes and fears he could not altogether hide. She learned how Aunt Winnie was "pining" for her home and her boy; she read the letters, with their untold love and longing; she saw the look on the boyish face when Dan, too mindful of his promise to Father Mack to speak plainly, said he 'reckoned she wouldn't be here long if he didn't get her somehow home.' She learned, too, all Dan could tell about poor old Nutty's medal.
"Get it for me the next time you go to town, Danny," she said to him. And Danny drew it from old Jonah's junk shop and put it in Miss Stella's hand.
And then, when at last her patient was able to sit up in Great-uncle Joe's big chair in the cabin doorway and look out at the sea, Miss Stella wrote to dad and Polly to come and take her home.
"Lord, but we'll all miss her!" Captain Jeb voiced the general sentiment of Killykinick when this decision was made public. "I ain't much sot on women folks when you're in deep water, but this one suttenly shone out like a star in the dark."
"And kept a-shining," added Neb,--"a-shining and a-smiling straight through."
"She's a good girl," said Brother Bart. "And I'm thinking--well, it doesn't matter what I'm thinking. But it's a lonely time laddie's poor father will be having, after all his wild wanderings; and it will be hard for him to keep house and home. But the Lord is good. Maybe it was His hand that led Miss Stella here."
"Oh, what will we do when she is gone, daddy?" mourned Freddy. "Of course you are getting well now, and Dan and I can wait on you and get you broth and jelly; but it won't be like having dear Miss Stella. Oh, I just love her! Don't you, daddy? She is almost as good as a real mother."
And daddy's pale cheek had flushed as he answered:
"Almost, little Boy Blue!"
"Well, we're all going home in a week," said Dan, as he stood out under the stars that night. "But I'll miss you sure, Miss Stella; for you don't mind being friends with a rough sort of a boy like me, and you know Aunt Winnie; and if I give up and--and go down you'll--you'll understand."
"Give up and go down!" repeated Miss Stella. "You give up and go down, Danny? Never,--never! You're the sort of boy to climb, however steep and rough and sharp the way,--to climb to the stars."
"That's what Aunt Winnie dreams," was the answer. "That's what I dream, too, sometimes. Miss Stella. But it isn't for me to dream: I have to wake up and hustle. I can't stay dreaming and let Aunt Winnie die. So if I have to give up and go down, Miss Stella, you'll--you'll understand."
And Miss Stella steadied her voice to answer:
"Yes, Danny, I'll understand."
But, in spite of this, Miss Stella's parting from Killykinick was not altogether a sad one; for "The Polly" came down next morning, with flying colors, to bear her away. Dad was aboard; also Polly, jubilant at recovering her dear Marraine after three weeks of desertion; and Captain Carleton, and Miss Stella's girl friends who had been picked up from the camp at Shelter Cove. It was such a picnic party altogether that sighs and tears seemed quite out of place; for, after all, things had turned out most cheerfully, as everybody agreed.
"Get it for me the next time you go to town, Danny," she said to him. And Danny drew it from old Jonah's junk shop and put it in Miss Stella's hand.
And then, when at last her patient was able to sit up in Great-uncle Joe's big chair in the cabin doorway and look out at the sea, Miss Stella wrote to dad and Polly to come and take her home.
"Lord, but we'll all miss her!" Captain Jeb voiced the general sentiment of Killykinick when this decision was made public. "I ain't much sot on women folks when you're in deep water, but this one suttenly shone out like a star in the dark."
"And kept a-shining," added Neb,--"a-shining and a-smiling straight through."
"She's a good girl," said Brother Bart. "And I'm thinking--well, it doesn't matter what I'm thinking. But it's a lonely time laddie's poor father will be having, after all his wild wanderings; and it will be hard for him to keep house and home. But the Lord is good. Maybe it was His hand that led Miss Stella here."
"Oh, what will we do when she is gone, daddy?" mourned Freddy. "Of course you are getting well now, and Dan and I can wait on you and get you broth and jelly; but it won't be like having dear Miss Stella. Oh, I just love her! Don't you, daddy? She is almost as good as a real mother."
And daddy's pale cheek had flushed as he answered:
"Almost, little Boy Blue!"
"Well, we're all going home in a week," said Dan, as he stood out under the stars that night. "But I'll miss you sure, Miss Stella; for you don't mind being friends with a rough sort of a boy like me, and you know Aunt Winnie; and if I give up and--and go down you'll--you'll understand."
"Give up and go down!" repeated Miss Stella. "You give up and go down, Danny? Never,--never! You're the sort of boy to climb, however steep and rough and sharp the way,--to climb to the stars."
"That's what Aunt Winnie dreams," was the answer. "That's what I dream, too, sometimes. Miss Stella. But it isn't for me to dream: I have to wake up and hustle. I can't stay dreaming and let Aunt Winnie die. So if I have to give up and go down, Miss Stella, you'll--you'll understand."
And Miss Stella steadied her voice to answer:
"Yes, Danny, I'll understand."
But, in spite of this, Miss Stella's parting from Killykinick was not altogether a sad one; for "The Polly" came down next morning, with flying colors, to bear her away. Dad was aboard; also Polly, jubilant at recovering her dear Marraine after three weeks of desertion; and Captain Carleton, and Miss Stella's girl friends who had been picked up from the camp at Shelter Cove. It was such a picnic party altogether that sighs and tears seemed quite out of place; for, after all, things had turned out most cheerfully, as everybody agreed.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
As soon as our eyes became accustomed to the dazzling glare of the flaming pillars
As soon as our eyes became accustomed to the dazzling glare of the flaming pillars, we saw that some great rite was in progress in the temple, for in front of the divine statue of Motherhood, white-robed and arranged in serried ranks, stood the company of the priests to the number of over two hundred, and behind these the company of the priestesses. Facing this congregation and a little in advance of the two pillars of fire that flared on either side of the shrine, Ayesha herself was seated in a raised chair so that she could be seen of all, while to her right stood a similar chair of which I could guess the purpose.
She was unveiled and gorgeously apparelled, though save for the white beneath, her robes were those of a queen rather than of a priestess. About her radiant brow ran a narrow band of gold, whence rose the head of a hooded asp cut out of a single, crimson jewel, beneath which in endless profusion the glorious waving hair flowed down and around,retro jordans, hiding even the folds of her purple cloak.
This cloak, opening in front, revealed an undertunic of white silk cut low upon her bosom and kept in place by a golden girdle, a double-headed snake, so like to that which She had worn in Kor that it might have been the same. Her naked arms were bare of ornament, and in her right hand she held the jewelled sistrum set with its gems and bells.
No empress could have looked more royal and no woman was ever half so lovely, for to Ayesha’s human beauty was added a spiritual glory, her heritage alone. Seeing her we could see naught else. The rhythmic movement of the bodies of the worshippers, the rolling grandeur of their chant of welcome echoed from the mighty roof, the fearful torches of living flame; all these things were lost on us. For there re-born, enthroned, her arms stretched out in gracious welcome, sat that perfect and immortal woman, the appointed bride of one of us, the friend and lady of the other, her divine presence breathing power, mystery and love.
On we marched between the ranks of hierophants,cheap moncler jackets, till Oros and the priests left us and we stood alone face to face with Ayesha. Now she lifted her sceptre and the chant ceased. In the midst of the following silence, she rose from her seat and gliding down its steps, came to where Leo stood and touched him on the forehead with her sistrum, crying in a loud, sweet voice —“Behold the Chosen of the Hesea!” whereon all that audience echoed in a shout of thunder —“Welcome to the Chosen of the Hesea!”
Then while the echoes of that glad cry yet rang round the rocky walls, Ayesha motioned to me to stand at her side, and taking Leo by the hand drew him towards her, so that now he faced the white-robed company,cheap chanel bags. Holding him thus she began to speak in clear and silvery tones.
“Priests and priestesses of Hes, servants with her of the Mother of the world, hear me. Now for the first time I appear among you as I am, you who heretofore have looked but on a hooded shape, not knowing its form or fashion. Learn now the reason that I draw my veil. Ye see this man, whom ye believed a stranger that with his companion had wandered to our shrine. I tell you that he is no stranger; that of old, in lives forgotten, he was my lord who now comes to seek his love again,chanel 2.55 bags. Say, is it not so, Kallikrates?”
She was unveiled and gorgeously apparelled, though save for the white beneath, her robes were those of a queen rather than of a priestess. About her radiant brow ran a narrow band of gold, whence rose the head of a hooded asp cut out of a single, crimson jewel, beneath which in endless profusion the glorious waving hair flowed down and around,retro jordans, hiding even the folds of her purple cloak.
This cloak, opening in front, revealed an undertunic of white silk cut low upon her bosom and kept in place by a golden girdle, a double-headed snake, so like to that which She had worn in Kor that it might have been the same. Her naked arms were bare of ornament, and in her right hand she held the jewelled sistrum set with its gems and bells.
No empress could have looked more royal and no woman was ever half so lovely, for to Ayesha’s human beauty was added a spiritual glory, her heritage alone. Seeing her we could see naught else. The rhythmic movement of the bodies of the worshippers, the rolling grandeur of their chant of welcome echoed from the mighty roof, the fearful torches of living flame; all these things were lost on us. For there re-born, enthroned, her arms stretched out in gracious welcome, sat that perfect and immortal woman, the appointed bride of one of us, the friend and lady of the other, her divine presence breathing power, mystery and love.
On we marched between the ranks of hierophants,cheap moncler jackets, till Oros and the priests left us and we stood alone face to face with Ayesha. Now she lifted her sceptre and the chant ceased. In the midst of the following silence, she rose from her seat and gliding down its steps, came to where Leo stood and touched him on the forehead with her sistrum, crying in a loud, sweet voice —“Behold the Chosen of the Hesea!” whereon all that audience echoed in a shout of thunder —“Welcome to the Chosen of the Hesea!”
Then while the echoes of that glad cry yet rang round the rocky walls, Ayesha motioned to me to stand at her side, and taking Leo by the hand drew him towards her, so that now he faced the white-robed company,cheap chanel bags. Holding him thus she began to speak in clear and silvery tones.
“Priests and priestesses of Hes, servants with her of the Mother of the world, hear me. Now for the first time I appear among you as I am, you who heretofore have looked but on a hooded shape, not knowing its form or fashion. Learn now the reason that I draw my veil. Ye see this man, whom ye believed a stranger that with his companion had wandered to our shrine. I tell you that he is no stranger; that of old, in lives forgotten, he was my lord who now comes to seek his love again,chanel 2.55 bags. Say, is it not so, Kallikrates?”
Sutherland straightened himself
Mr. Sutherland straightened himself; there was a great reserve of strength in this broken-down man yet. Fixing Frederick with a gaze more penetrating than any he had yet bestowed upon him, he folded his hands behind him with the document held tightly between them,cheap chanel bags, and remarked:
“When you borrowed that money from me you did it like a man who expected to repay it. Why? Whence did you expect to receive the money with which to repay me? Answer, Frederick; this is your hour for confession.”
Frederick turned so pale his father dropped his eyes in mercy.
“Confess?” he repeated. “What should I confess? My sins? They are too many. As for that money, I hoped to return it as any son might hope to reimburse his father for money advanced to pay a gambler’s debt. I said I meant to work. My first money earned shall be offered to you,cheap moncler clerance. I—”
“Well? Well?” His father was holding the document he had just read, opened out before his eyes.
“Didn’t you expect THIS?” he asked. “Didn’t you know that that poor woman, that wretchedly murdered, most unhappy woman, whose death the whole town mourns, had made you her heir? That by the terms of this document, seen by me here and now for the first time, I am made executor and you the inheritor of the one hundred thousand dollars or more left by Agatha Webb?”
“No!” cried Frederick, his eyes glued to the paper, his whole face and form expressing something more akin to terror than surprise. “Has she done this? Why should she? I hardly knew her.”
“No, you hardly knew her. And she? She hardly knew you; if she had she would have abhorred rather than enriched you. Frederick, I had rather see you dead than stand before me the inheritor of Philemon and Agatha Webb’s hard-earned savings.”
“You are right; it would be better,” murmured Frederick, hardly heeding what he said. Then, as he encountered his father’s eye resting upon him with implacable scrutiny, he added, in weak repetition: “Why should she give her money to me? What was I to her that she should will me her fortune?”
The father’s finger trembled to a certain line in the document, which seemed to offer some explanation of this; but Frederick did not follow it. He had seen that his father was expecting a reply to the question he had previously put, and he was casting about in his mind how to answer it.
“When did you know of this will?” Mr. Sutherland now repeated. “For know of it you did before you came to me for money.”
Frederick summoned up his full courage and confronted his father resolutely.
“No,jordans for sale,” said he, “I did not know of it. It is as much of a surprise to me as it is to you.”
He lied. Mr. Sutherland knew that he lied and Frederick knew that he knew it. A shadow fell between them, which the older, with that unspeakable fear upon him roused by Sweetwater’s whispered suspicions, dared no longer attempt to lift.
After a few minutes in which Frederick seemed to see his father age before his eyes, Mr. Sutherland coldly remarked:
“Dr. Talbot must know of this will. It has been sent here to me from Boston by a lawyer who drew it up two years ago. The coroner may not as yet have heard of it. Will you accompany me to his office to-morrow,retro jordans for sale? I should like to have him see that we wish to be open with him in an affair of such importance.”
“When you borrowed that money from me you did it like a man who expected to repay it. Why? Whence did you expect to receive the money with which to repay me? Answer, Frederick; this is your hour for confession.”
Frederick turned so pale his father dropped his eyes in mercy.
“Confess?” he repeated. “What should I confess? My sins? They are too many. As for that money, I hoped to return it as any son might hope to reimburse his father for money advanced to pay a gambler’s debt. I said I meant to work. My first money earned shall be offered to you,cheap moncler clerance. I—”
“Well? Well?” His father was holding the document he had just read, opened out before his eyes.
“Didn’t you expect THIS?” he asked. “Didn’t you know that that poor woman, that wretchedly murdered, most unhappy woman, whose death the whole town mourns, had made you her heir? That by the terms of this document, seen by me here and now for the first time, I am made executor and you the inheritor of the one hundred thousand dollars or more left by Agatha Webb?”
“No!” cried Frederick, his eyes glued to the paper, his whole face and form expressing something more akin to terror than surprise. “Has she done this? Why should she? I hardly knew her.”
“No, you hardly knew her. And she? She hardly knew you; if she had she would have abhorred rather than enriched you. Frederick, I had rather see you dead than stand before me the inheritor of Philemon and Agatha Webb’s hard-earned savings.”
“You are right; it would be better,” murmured Frederick, hardly heeding what he said. Then, as he encountered his father’s eye resting upon him with implacable scrutiny, he added, in weak repetition: “Why should she give her money to me? What was I to her that she should will me her fortune?”
The father’s finger trembled to a certain line in the document, which seemed to offer some explanation of this; but Frederick did not follow it. He had seen that his father was expecting a reply to the question he had previously put, and he was casting about in his mind how to answer it.
“When did you know of this will?” Mr. Sutherland now repeated. “For know of it you did before you came to me for money.”
Frederick summoned up his full courage and confronted his father resolutely.
“No,jordans for sale,” said he, “I did not know of it. It is as much of a surprise to me as it is to you.”
He lied. Mr. Sutherland knew that he lied and Frederick knew that he knew it. A shadow fell between them, which the older, with that unspeakable fear upon him roused by Sweetwater’s whispered suspicions, dared no longer attempt to lift.
After a few minutes in which Frederick seemed to see his father age before his eyes, Mr. Sutherland coldly remarked:
“Dr. Talbot must know of this will. It has been sent here to me from Boston by a lawyer who drew it up two years ago. The coroner may not as yet have heard of it. Will you accompany me to his office to-morrow,retro jordans for sale? I should like to have him see that we wish to be open with him in an affair of such importance.”
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