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the anonymous, faceless travelers, their humanity nearly exhausted, their separate sufferings, memories, intentions and baffled wills locked within them,
Her pale blue eyes asked frankly for pity.
Mrs. Treadwell shuddered with a painful twinge of foreboding. “Even here,” she thought. “How inevitable. I shall spend this voyage listening to someone’s sorrows,
it was not really a deception as those interesting friends would have been happy to send her flowers on this as on many another occasion, except for the lamentable circumstance that they were both dead—
His wife, a dumpy plain woman with a roll of faded dry hair bristling with wire hairpins, observed the scene with her habitual expression, long ago settled into a blend of constant disapproval and righteous ill-humor. “It is only to make a show in the beginning,” she remarked. “They will begin to economize on all of us before the trip is over. A new broom,” she said, “sweeps clean.”
She did not know what she believed, indeed she believed nothing: and her unbelief was formless, a darkly moving cloud of suspicion that her husband’s trouble, once known, would prove to be some kind of terrible reproach upon her.
“Yes, of course; always that precious private life which winds up in galleries and magazines and art books if we have any luck at all—should we go on trying to fool ourselves? Look, we live on handouts, don’t we? from one job to the next, so maybe we should look at all this monument stuff like this—every one of them meant a commission and a chance to work for some sculptor.”
if Jenny’s mind refracted his thought instead of absorbing his meaning, or even his feelings about certain things—
His wife sighed and shook her head, accepting once more the sad truth that there is no cure for the troubles of life, no peace nor repose anywhere. Her comfortable fat quivered with some intimation of suffering, but she could not bear to think of it.
He stood and contemplated the inviolable mystery of poverty that was like a slow-working incurable disease, and there was nothing in his own mind, his history or his temperament that could even imagine a remedy for it.
“Where we are going,” he reassured her sweetly, “people and things and ways change slowly. We will be among those of our own age, our own way of thinking and feeling; they were the friends of our childhood and youth, they cannot now be strangers to us—or so we may only hope,”
the boundless rolling waters of the mighty deep inspired noble thoughts.
“If those young American persons are not married, they ought to be. But in that monstrous country all the relations of life are so perverted, more especially between the sexes, it is next to impossible to judge them by any standards of true civilization.”
that’s getting entirely the wrong kind of things mixed up, she decided, enslaved as she was to her notions of what life should be, her wish to shape, to direct, to make of it what she wished it to be;
He retired into the dark and airless ghetto of his soul and lamented with all the grieving wailing company he found there; for he was never alone in that place.
But it is in the cause of your safety and comfort that I deprive myself,” he told them, putting them forever in his debt. Little Frau Schmitt blushed at her own boldness but managed to utter in a tiny voice, “Even if it is for our own good, we are also deprived.”
“I wish you’d look at the zarzuela troupe. Aren’t they simply weird?” For some reason she could not admit the human existence of the Spanish company. They seemed to be life-sized dolls moved by strings, going gracefully through a perpetual pantomime of graceless emotions. Their frowning faces, their gestures of anger, ill-humor, mockery, contempt, all seemed too farfetched and overrehearsed to be probable; she did not believe that any of it came out of living organisms.
Conscience, duty, attentiveness, obedience—all the granite foundations of her marriage, her wifely career slid from under her without a sound, and she sank into a hideous luxury of moral collapse.
Let somebody else wait on him hand and foot for a change.
Let science do what it might, there was a mystery in the destiny of man beyond fathoming except in the light of divine revelation; at the very bottom of life there is an unanswerable riddle, and it is just there, concluded Dr. Schumann, his softened eyes still observing La Condesa, just there, where man leaves off, that God begins.
Lizzi
He lay down with his rosary in his fingers, and began to invite sleep, darkness, silence, that little truce of God between living and dying;
They were strolling together, came upon the scene and paused there, amiable, distant, like charmed visitors from another planet.
At great damage to his Pennsylvania Quaker conscience, he had committed methodically the two greatest sins possible (or so he had understood it as a child, from precept and example): he had spent on frivolities money meant for better purposes, and he had pampered his bodily vanity. Not that he gave a damn, as he was fond of assuring himself; but those tight-mouthed, tight-handed, tight-souled old gaffers had left some kind of poison in his blood that kept him from ever really enjoying his life,
Mary must be his native land and he must be hers, and they would have to carry their own climate with them wherever they went; they must call that climate home and try not to remember its real name—exile.
He could not feel fated, destined for catastrophe; actually he could not imagine himself being driven out of a place, or in peril of his life; surely he and Mary would never be put on a ship, penniless, prisoners, to be thrust into still another country that did not want them either—like that unbalanced Spanish countess prisoner with her wild tale of terror.
In
there’s nothing to be afraid of! It’s only this world! Let’s not mind it!”
The place you are going towards doesn’t exist yet, you must build it when you come to the right spot.
He
She had always believed so deeply that human beings wished only to be quiet and happy, each in his own way: but there was a spirit of evil in them that could not let each other be in peace. One man’s desire must always crowd out another’s, one must always take his own good at another’s expense. Or so it seemed. God forgive us all.
She disagreed with him altogether. She thought he was just sitting down and letting things run over him. Nothing was incurable, not even human nature. And if you waited to get to the root you would never get anywhere. The top surface was quite enough to keep anyone busy! If you wanted things changed—always for the better, of course!—you just kicked over the nearest applecart, spilled the first available bag of beans.
her very presence on board in such circumstances was a serious symptom of the disorder abroad in the world.
there is nothing like trouble to divide the human heart from you,
“I am exceedingly sorry, ladies,” he began, in a voice of blistering courtesy, and his glance took them all in: their unbalanced female emotions, their shallow, unteachable minds, their hopeless credulity, their natural propensity to rebellion against all efforts of men to bring order and to preserve rule in life. “Oh, very sorry indeed, ladies, to distress your kind hearts, but let me confess
But God, who was taking away his life little by little, meant for him to suffer all affliction, all possible abasement of mind and flesh to balance the great gift he had conferred upon his spirit.
She did not turn to them at last for help, or consolation, or praise, or understanding, or even love; but merely at last because she was incapable of turning away.
Frau Otto Schmitt was still feeling somewhat intimidated by her recent encounters with a world of male unaccountability which she found dismaying in her new and tender state of widowhood. She was beginning to realize with astonishment that she had never really known any man but her husband; no women except wives of her husband’s friends, or old maid teachers as remote from her womanly confidences as if they belonged to another species.
“I mean to be harsh,” said the Doctor, calmly. “I am the voice of rebuke itself lifted in the wilderness, or over the waste of waters! I wish my words were stones that I might throw them to crack the heads of those savages.” “Or their hearts,” said Frau Schmitt. “No, they have no hearts,” said the Doctor.
“One has no new weaknesses, no new strengths, but only developments, accentuations, diminishments, or perversions of original potentialities.
Mrs.
Dropping her brush and picking it up, without fail she would say in her insolent imitation of courtesy, “So sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you,” in that voice which affected Mrs. Treadwell’s nerves like the sound of a file on metal. It was absurd to pretend to go on sleeping after that.
I’d love to have Paris all to myself for even one day. Slowly, with strangely blissful tears forming under her closed lids, she drifted from her waking dream to quiet sleep.
something strange in those savage rhythms that moved the blood even against all efforts of the will; indeed, he recognized it for what it was, the perpetual resistance of the elemental forces of darkness and disorder against the very spirit of civilization—that great Germanic force of life in which—and the Captain began to feel a little more cheerful—in which Science and Philosophy moved hand in hand ruled by Christianity.
Haben Sie gut geschlafen?”
“It is something so wonderful it makes me happy and I want to laugh.” She did laugh and Mrs. Treadwell heard it wondering, thinking that if a hyena suffered from hysteria it would laugh like that.
“Those Spaniards are not people whose morals can be judged by their diet, my dear, whatever it may be. What good does mere abstinence from alcohol do people who are so sunk in every other vice?”
Her mind was full of thoughts that did not belong there, strange ideas were bumping around colliding and threatening her with a headache. She added a line before closing her diary. “All this can be very wearing, but I must suppose it is necessary, and that the meaning of it will become clear later.”
“I tell you something, I believe we get what we want!” “Oh!” said Herr Glocken with a groan, and he began moving towards the door. “Oh no, excuse the strong word, it is not for you, but for this so-false belief—it is one of the great lies of life! Ah no, no—for I wanted only one thing in the world—” He paused to make his effect. “What was that?” asked David, obligingly. “To be a violinist!” said Herr Glocken as movingly as if he expected them to shed tears. “But why was that impossible?” asked David. “You can wonder in such a way, after one look at me?” Herr Glocken’s eyes were stricken … “Ah,
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She sat back and held her napkin to her lips, staring over it in distress at Lizzi, whose laugh was a long cascade of falling tinware.
