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the official stethoscope was on the heart of the world just then;
the lively satisfaction which we might be suspected of having derived from the accomplishment of a task so important in the saving of civilization from the clutches of Prussian tyranny was in some degree inhibited, unhappily, by a complete absence of cordial relations between the man whom fate had placed over us and ourselves. Or, to use the vulgar American idiom, B. and I and Mr. A. didn't get on well.
Two appertained to a splendid old dotard (a face all ski-jumps and toboggan slides),
The train rushed lazily across the earth, between farmhouses, into fields, along woods … the sunlight smacked my eye and cuffed my sleepy mind with colour.
The pinard went straight to my brain, I felt my mind cuddled by a pleasant warmth, my thoughts became invested with a great contentment.
It was a fine night for a little promenade; not too cool, and with a promise of a moon stuck into the sky.
The road was absolutely deserted; the night hung loosely around it, here and there tattered by attempting moonbeams.
the delicious silence of the night (in which our words rattled queerly like tin soldiers in a plush-lined box) boosted me into a condition of mysterious happiness.
I crawled on hands and knees to the sound of silver-trickling water and found a little spring-fed stream. Prone, weight on elbows, I drank heavily of its perfect blackness. It was icy, talkative, minutely alive.
Occasionally some night-noise pricked a futile, minute hole in the enormous curtain of soggy darkness.
I needed no second invitation to sleep.
Snores had already begun in various keys at various distances in various directions.
I shall (on the contrary) lift from their grey box at random certain (to me) more or less astonishing toys; which may or may not please the reader, but whose colours and shapes and textures are a part of that actual Present—without future and past—whereof they alone are cognizant who—so to speak—have submitted to an amputation of the world.
By treason I refer to any little annoying habits of independent thought or action which en temps de guerre are put in a hole and covered over, with the somewhat naïve idea that from their cadavers violets will grow, whereof the perfume will delight all good men and true and make such worthy citizens forget their sorrows.
By some mistake he had three moustaches, two of them being eyebrows.
had come to our society by way of solitary confinement, bread and water for months, and other reminders that to err is human, etc.
Punctually at the expiration of thirty minutes
her legs far apart and propping with difficulty her hinging body,
like a morsel of white wind,
moved not an atom.
extraordinarily unhandsome if not positively ugly.
With him disappeared unspeakable sunlight, and the dark keen bright strength of the earth.
searched every wrinkle and crevice of his tranquil anatomy
And in response would come peals of laughter from the girls' windows, shrill peals and deep guttural peals intersecting and breaking joints like overlapping shingles on the roof of Craziness.
A barnyard crammed with pigs, cows, horses, ducks, geese, hens, cats and dogs could not possibly have produced one-fifth of the racket that emanated, spontaneously and inevitably, from the cour.
It struck me at the time as intensely interesting that, in the case of a certain type of human being, the more cruel are the miseries inflicted upon him the more cruel does he become toward anyone who is so unfortunate as to be weaker or more miserable than himself.
The door opened at last. Entered a beautiful pillar of black strutting muscle topped with a tremendous display of the whitest teeth on earth. The muscle bowed politely in our direction, the grin remarked musically: "Bo'jour, tou'l'monde"; then came a cascade of laughter.
render to Caesar what is Caesar's.
The Autumn wore on. Rain did, from time to time, not fall: from time to time a sort of unhealthy almost-light leaked from the large uncrisp corpse of the sky, returning for a moment to our view the ruined landscape. From time to time the eye, travelling carefully with a certain disagreeable suddenly fear no longer distances of air, coldish and sweet, stopped upon the incredible clearness of the desolate, without-motion, Autumn. Awkward and solemn clearness, making louder the unnecessary cries, the hoarse laughter of the invisible harlots in their muddy yard, pointing a cool actual finger at
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Once I was sitting alone on the long beam of silent iron and suddenly had the gradual complete unique experience of death…. It became amazingly cold.
that brilliant and extraordinary and impossible something: Life.
When finally I made my exit, the part of me popularly referred to as "mind" was still in a slightly bent if not twisted condition.
Not until some weeks of American diet had revolutionized my exterior did my interior completely resume the contours of normality.
I looked at him in eleven-tenths of amazement.
The land of the flea and the home of the dag'—short for dago of course.
