Ross Poldark (Poldark, #1)

by Winston Graham

A wet October evening is depressing, but it drapes some soft shadows on the rough edges of ruin and decay. Not so the light of morning.

He wondered if the real world was that one in which men fought for policies and principles and died or lived gloriously—or more often miserably—for the sake of an abstract word like patriotism or independence, or if reality belonged to the humble people and the common land.

The soft yellow candlelight trembled over the colors of the dresses, the gold and the cream, the salmon and the mulberry. It made the graceful

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and the beautiful more charming, the graceless and the ungainly tolerable; it smoothed over the tawdry and cast soft creamy-gray shadows becoming to all.

“You’re very free with your answers, child. I think his attentions must have gone to your head. Perhaps I shall have a word with him after supper.”

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“No, no, Mama, you mustn’t do that!” “Well, we shall see,” said Mrs. Teague, who really hadn’t the slightest intention of discouraging an eligible man. Hers was a token protest to satisfy her sense of what was right and proper, of how she would behave if she had only one daughter and that one with a fortune of ten thousand pounds. With five on the books and no dowry for any of them, it deprived one of scope.

From the cottage of the woman Margaret he rode straight home, reaching Nampara as the first threads of daylight were unpicking the clustered clouds of the night.

The words of Jack Tripp the agitator came to him as he watched the people pass by. For the most part they were weakly, stinking, rachitic, pockmarked, in rags—far

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less well found than the farm animals that were being bought and sold. Was it surprising that the upper classes looked on themselves as a race apart? Yet the signs he had seen of a new way of life in America made him impatient of those distinctions. Jack Tripp was right. All men were born in the same way: no privilege existed that was not of man’s own contriving.

Garrick lifted a whiskery eye at him and trotted past. There had been talk concerning himself, he felt, at the fork roads, but the matter had been amicably settled.

This is my favorite quote from the book! A little insight into the thinking of the dog...and spot on.

“Ye don’t think to count me, an?” said Prudie, rubbing her big red nose. “Thur’s no man born o’ woman I can’t deal with if I’ve the mind. Puffed up pirouettes, that’s what men are. Hit ’em acrost the ’ead wi’ a soup ladle, an’ what happens? They crawl away as if you’d ’urt ’em.”

Ahh Jud and Prudie! Quote continued in next below...

“Can’t be every place at once,” said Jud, changing shoulders with his long pitchfork. “Tedn’t to be expected of mortal man. If there was forty-six Jud Paynters poddlin’ about the farm, then mebbe one of ’em would be in the right place to suit you. But as there’s only one, Lord be thanked—”

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“Amen,” said Prudie. “All right, all right. Then ye can’t expect ’im to be within earshot every time you start cryin’ out.”

“No, but I don’t expect ’im to be deaf on purpose, when I’m o...

“He says, ‘There never was an Illogan man what wasn’t the dirty cross-eyed son of an unmarried bitch wi’

no chest and spavin shanks out of a knacker’s yard.’

“Impudence,” said Ross at the door. “To go off and involve yourselves in a brawl and leave me at home to look after the women. What d’you think I am?” There was silence. “Understand, quarrels of my own

making I’ll settle in my own way.” “Yes, sur.” “Well, go on to bed, it’s done now. But don’t think I shall not remember it.” Whether it was a threat of punishment or a promise of reward, Jud and his partner could not be sure, for the night was too dark to see the speaker’s face. There was a catch in his voice that might have been caused by a barely controlled anger. Or it might have been laughter, but they did not think of that.

Then ye could pat yourself on the ’ead and say, ‘Thur, I’m doing a tidy job, learning her to be respectable.’ But what are ’ee doing? Tedn’t ’ard to answer. Tedn’t ’ard to see. You’re learning her to be sassy.”

Prudie, ‘learning Demelza to be sassy’ 😆

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Zacky, “that I holds wi’ secret chatter between grown men. Whispering together just like they was babies. What was you whispering about, Zachariah?” “About how many spots there was on the moon,” said Zacky. “Mark says ninety-eight and I says an hundred and two, so we agrees to leave it till we see the preacher.” “I’ll have none of your blaspheming in here,” said Mrs. Zacky. But she said

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it without conviction. She had far too solid a faith in her husband’s wisdom, built up through twenty years, to do more than make a token protest at his bad behavior. Besides, she would get it out of him in the morning.

“Tedn’t true!” shouted Jud, toothless with indignation. “You’re barking up the wrong door. What for do ’ee want to take that man’s word ’fore mine. Tedn’t fair. Tedn’t just. Tedn’t British.

Tedn’t British.

It was not a question of their being reformed by contact with the pure and lovely spirit of a child, for the child had as much original sin as they had.

and in the deliberate self-control, the self-containment of all his movements, one caught the echo of past struggles and guessed the measure of the victory won.

They had been together, child and clock, girl and clock, woman and clock, through illness and nightmare and fairy stories and daydreams, through all the monotony and the splendor of life.

There were no tears in her. The wound went too deep, or she was not so constituted to give way to it. Hers would be the perpetual ache of loss and loneliness, slowly dulled with time until it became a part of her character, a faint sourness tinged with withered pride.

Instead, the room, which had seen her grow to maturity, would see her dry up and fade.

The previous year she had drifted on a tide of custom and habit. She might have so drifted, without protest, into a contented and unambitious middle age. But that year, from then on, she must swim against the stream, not finding stimulus in the struggle but only bitterness and regret and frustration.

“I’m proper sorry to be leaving, sir,” he said. “But it’s a good pitch. I know that. Wi’ luck I shall make thirty or thirty-five shillings a month, and that’s what we’ve got to think on. If we could stay on at the cottage, we’d like to pay rent for it.” “So you shall,” said Ross, “when I think you can afford it. Don’t be so generous with your money till you see if it goes around.”

He supposed that the gossips of the countryside could not conceive of the son of Joshua living a celibate life. Some women had minds like addle gutters; if there was no stench they had to create one.

A perverse spirit within him was glad that he was not to have the easy way of meeting the scurrilous gossip. Let them talk till their tongues

dropped out.

The birth of her child had been the supreme experience of her life, and looking down at the crown of Geoffrey Charles’s fluffy pale head so close to her own white skin, she was filled with a frightening sense of pride and power and fulfillment. In the instant of his birth her existence was changed; she had accepted, had seized upon a lifelong commission of motherhood, a proud and all-absorbing task beside which ordinary duties became void.

But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction,

Ross finished his pacing and stared down at the sandy earth. The eternal enigma of the prospector faced him: whether the acre of ground held under its surface riches or frustration.

Well, if the worst came to the worst, they would be giving a few miners the chance of feeding their families. Conditions, everyone agreed, could hardly be worse throughout the county,

throughout the country as a whole.

The whole nation felt down in the mouth after the unequal struggle against France and Holland and Spain, the perverse unbrotherly war with America, and the threat of further enemies in the north. It was a spiritual as well as a material slough. Twenty-five years before she had been leader of the world, and the fall had been all the greater. Peace had come at last, but the country was too weary to throw off the effects of war.

Love this British perspective of the Revolutionary war. Continued in next quote below..

It would take fifty years, some people said, before things righted themselves. Even in America, Ross had been told, disillusion was no less. The United States had so far been united only in a dislike for overlordship, and with that gone and all the afterwar problems in train, they seemed on the point of breaking up into local self-governing republics quarrelling endlessly among themselves like the cities of medieval Italy.

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Other things too the Cornish knew, or sensed, with their constant illicit traffic between the French ports and their own. England might be down in the mouth, but things were even worse in Europe. Strange whiffs of a volcanic unrest came to them from time to time from across the Channel. Dislike for an old enemy as much as idealism for a new friend had tempted France to pour out her gold and men to help American freedom. She found herself with an extra war debt of fourteen hundred million livres and a knowledge of the theory and practice of revolution bred in the minds and

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blood of her thinkers and soldiers. The crust of the European despotisms was being weakened at its weakest spot.

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In two years Ross had seen little of his own family and class. What he had overheard in the library on the day of Geoffrey Charles’s christening had filled him with contempt for them, and though he would not have admitted to being influenced one way or the other by Polly Choake’s gossip, an awar...

His listeners felt uncomfortable when he was speaking, and resentful when he had finished. Many of them were hard hit themselves by the slump in mining and the increased taxation. Many were helping those hard cases with which they came in contact, and if that barely touched the fringe of the distress they did not see that Ross was doing any more. What they were not prepared to accept was that they had any sort of liability for the hardships of the day, or that laws could be framed to offer some less soul-destroying form of relief than the poorhouse and the parish cart. Even Francis could not see it. Ross felt like another Jack Tripp preaching reform from an empty tub.

They walked down the hill together. Normally he took her very much for granted, but the interest of the others made him steal a sidelong glance at

There were plenty of times when he was lonely and glad of companionship. Verity no longer had the heart to come over, and Demelza took her place.

Sometimes she even sat with him in the evening. It had begun with her going to ask him for orders about the farm, by her staying to talk, and then somehow she was sitting in the parlor with him two or three evenings a week.

Her sense of personal danger was at all times nonexistent,

And in her quest about the countryside she had begun to bring home seeds and roots from the hedgerows. They were

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no easy things to rear: they had all the waywardness of wild things, ready to luxuriate in desolate places of their own choosing but apt to pine and die when confined within the luxury of a garden.

On the way home she had been unusually silent. “Don’t you think animals feel hurt like we?” she got out eventually. Ross considered his answer. He had been led once or twice before into pitfalls by making unthinking replies to her questions.