Cage Bird, And Other Stories Quotes

“Of course I knew what to expect. He told me the story of his reef. Very much as Blagden had told it. Shyly, at first, as though he felt I was too young to be interested, or, perhaps, that I was listening from the point of view of a mental specialist. Well, if that old man were mad, he certainly had a good excuse for his
insanity. He spoke, as usual, with a simple, courtly precision; but it was his very directness that made that old horror live with a vividness that had never appeared in Blagden’s version. If I could have written
it down, word for word, as he told it, you would have given me credit for an imaginative masterpiece. I can’t, alas! All that remains with me now is the incommunicable atmosphere of an actual, intense, lonely
terror — so present and compelling that it swept all consciousness of my real surroundings, the whitewashed temple and the high festoons of exotic foliage, out of
my mind. “At that point,” Shellis was saying, “I felt that the quartermaster and I were looking at each other almost greedily. We weren’t civilized human beings any longer — just hungry cannibals. I determined that if anybody were going to be killed and eaten I would rather it was I.”
He told me these ghastly details with a detached and dreamy coldness.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“I think of him, in those days, as a remote
figure — a square-shouldered silhouette posed motionless on the bridge against a background of burning blue sky.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“Through all that period my mind was absorbed, excited and entranced by a series of visions that remain with me to this day. Gibraltar, grey and monstrous against the
dawn; the snows of Crete, flamingo-hued in the fire of sunset; Port Said, where first the smell of the East begins; pink mountains of Sinai in their lunar desolation; Colombo, sweltering under a vertical sun.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“All through the journey, except when she was locked in her sleeper, he did his manly best to entertain her with his rich store of personal and political gossip; but his best, alas, was far too manly for Helena.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“All the' expensive artificialities of life at Cannes, where one saw exactly the same people as at home in slightly thinner clothes, bored her equally. Their transplanted conventions made her feel a traitor to her kind. Her only relief from that hothouse atmosphere was to be found in the flowery foothills of the Maritime Alps, where she went for long, lonely walks, always thinking
of Cyril, in a pagan setting that called for his faun-like presence.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“I want you to be my mistress.”
Of course she had known what was coming; yet, when it came, some radical prudishness within her was offended by the word. She stifled its promptings vigorously. They were unworthy of her — unworthy of her fine, free, emancipated, passionate modernity. What
would become of their frank and glorious equality, their high-flown theories, if she refused him? And yet...”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“And all the time, as the train went whirling through reverberant tunnels, then out into the unspeakable' squalors of the East End
— Bow, Stepney, Whitechapel, Barking — she was thinking how strangely unromantic this honeymoon journey was contrasting it, in spite of herself, with that other southward journey in the Blue Train with Ledwyche.
She didn’t love Ledwyche; she supposed she did love Cyril. And yet, when she came to think of it, how safe she had felt with the other — how many essential, though trivial, things they had had in common! Trivial?
Were they so trivial after all? Weren’t they, in fact, the whole basic structure of her life, her birth, her breeding? With Ledwyche, she knew just exactly where she was, while' 'with this dark stranger. . . .
It came as a shock to her to remember that she didn’t even know his name, nor he hers. That, to begin with, was enough to make the' whole adventure unreal, unsubstantial, uncertain. Yet, hadn’t they agreed — oh,
long ago! — that it was this very circumstance that made the affair so romantically thrilling? Eros and Psyche! . . . To question the illusion was to shatter it. And yet she knew nothing about him, nothing whatever, except
that they shared a few tastes and theories. Why, for all she knew, he might even be a criminal, a murderer!
“Well, here I am,” she thought. “Ca y est! I’ve got to go through with it.”
And of course, to be logical, this journey had not begun at Liverpool Street that morning; it had begun at the moment when Ledwyche had shown her into the train at Cannes. It would end, God knew how, in some
sordid lodging in Southend. “I’m a free woman,” she told herself. “Well, this is the price of freedom.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“She was secure in the armour of her anonymity. Even if he did kiss her again, as he
probably would, the person whom he kissed would be an imaginary person, a creature whom she had invented for her own amusement, not herself.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“It was rather fun, as a matter of fact, to adventure into this world of make-believe; it gave her a feeling of rich, unexerted power; kept open a safe line of retreat with her boats unburned. His little, high-brow superiority was really comical — almost pathetic.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“This dark young man, on the other hand, was just what he should be — Charlie Ledwyche’s physical and temperamental opposite. There was something, she decided, elemental about him. When the lights went down again they danced “Apres-midi d’un Faune.” Shyly
glancing at him, while the oboe reedily skipped and quavered above a shimmer of strings, she knew that — apart from the whiskers — there was something southern
about his pale face. He was like a sleek-skinned faun himself. The light in those lazy, black-fringed eyes was undeniably pagan.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“Next time?" he smiled; his eyes brightened; he was no longer a divinely superior person, but an interested male.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“When they crossed the street, he didn't even take her arm. Of course, a faun wouldn't.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“She had chosen the gallery because of its intellectual altitude; because she had heard it whispered that all the best people (in her sense, not in her mother’s) frequented it. She had chosen the gallery as a symbol of
emancipation, of rebellion; its very discomfort was a psychological luxury. She had chosen it — most of all — because, if she had descended, in a physical and artistic
sense, to her mother’s box, she would have been pursued and devoured all evening by the earnest, amorous, pale- blue eyes of her admirer, Lord Ledwyche (pronounced
Ledditch) whom her family and his had decided she was destined to marry. Even in the country a little of Ledwyche went a long way. Against the highly sophisti-cated, intensely modern background of the Russian
Ballet his presence was discordant. Not that Helena disapproved of discords. On the contrary, she adored them just as long as they didn’t happen to be generally
admired by the wrong people, such as Charlie Ledwyche. If Charlie had been frankly eighteenth-century baroque she could have tolerated him; if he had been Cubistic, like a skyscraper, she could have been proud of him; but his style was all wrong — it belonged
neither to the day before yesterday nor to the day after to-morrow; he was just the wrong period. Sham Gothic, like the Houses of Parliament, which he so decorously adorned.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“His speech . . . well, she couldn’t be quite so sure of that. It certainly wasn’t the kind of
speech to which she was accustomed} the vowels were either slightly foreign or slightly cockney. It was better, on the whole, to decide that they were foreign.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“You are an educated man, sir,” he said. “Possibly you have read Turgenev? He wrote a novel. Fumée. Smoke. That was his best title. Everything in Russia ends in smoke — like my poor manuscripts.”
The waiter placed our cognac on the table; I handed my friend his glass.
“Everything in Russia,” he repeated. “In smoke, like my poor manuscripts, or in liquor, like myself.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“They thought I was mad, and Russians are always sympathetic with mad men.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“No doubt they were genuine Russian
refugees. North Africa, from Cairo to Tangiers, was full of them. And these were like the rest; thin, indolent, with high cheek-
bones, wide, supercilious mouths, and lank, ashen hair. Their manner cut them off from the rest of the people in the cafe as definitely as though they belonged to a distant and superior planet.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“His self-esteem was a mass of smarting pin-
pricks. Whenever he assured himself, as he tried to do, that he was the heroic victim of a grand and melancholy passion, the memory of some new and petty indignity
stabbed him awake.
“I’m darned if I’m going to put up with it,” he told Matilda that evening. “What I want to know is this: Am I the master of my own house?”
Matilda only smiled.
And so it went on. You might, Jimmy thought, have supposed that treatment of this kind would arouse the fair one’s pity, poor substitute as that might be for the warmer emotion which, by all romantic canons, she
owed to her rescuer. In protest he adopted an air of injured tenderness and nobility. But Matilda soon knocked the bottom out of that.
“Don’t take any notice,” she told their guest, “if he happens to touch your hand when he’s passing the butter. He’s quite harmless, is Jimmy, and even if he does like to dream he’s a Don Juan, that doesn’t take me in! I know him! We haven’t been married six
years for nothing.”
“Oh, haven’t we?” said Jimmy, darkly. ‘That’s
where you’re mistaken! ”
“Just listen to him!” laughed Matilda. “He hates you to think he’s been faithful. Isn’t he just a lamb?”
And the object of Jimmy’s frustrated passion merely smiled. She was always smiling. The tragic figure of the Boulogne boat, the distressed beauty of the Customs House, the vision of pathetic loveliness whom he, James Marler, had swept off her feet with such
manly magnificence, no longer existed. Those grave, impassioned dialogues which he had imagined taking place under the romantic towers of the Crystal Palace had never materialized. She was gay, she was childish,
perhaps she was even more beautiful; but her gaiety, her childishness, her beauty were not for him.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“My wife will look after you, madam,” he said. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. Sleep well — pleasant dreams!” he added, with daring familiarity; then climbed the stairs slowly, feeling more like a slapped child than the hero of romance which he had imagined
himself an hour before.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“The police,” he said. “You can’t carry firearms in England without a licence. Just like dogs. You’ll be getting into trouble before you know where you are. Now look here, ma’am,” he went on, with increasing confidence, “you’d far better make a clean breast of it.”
“A clean breast? What do you mean? Why do you pester me like this?” she cried, with sudden terror.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“And he stayed. For three years he stayed in the shadow of Meerlust; a model of the uttermost devotion; a lost soul in purgatory. It would have been better, as the doctor had said, if Catherine Stone had died. Within twenty-four hours of the original disaster
she recovered consciousness, lying, as the half-dead lie, with one side paralysed and without the power of speech. She could not speak, but she could see. Her eyes never stopped seeing. Through the long hours of
day and night when Morton sat by her, watching in silence, those blue eyes dwelt on him. There was no bitterness, no accusation in them — only a supernatural power of penetration, terribly impersonal, which
seemed to pierce through into the depths of his consciousness, stripping bare the pretences of tenderness, the realities of remorse with which he comforted him-
self.He might easily deceive himself, but never Catherine’s eyes.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“It was past midnight when the doctor from Stellenbosch drove splashing through the drift. Warned by the beam of his car’s headlights, which dredged up, as it were, the white ghost of the house from depths of a
dense, hot darkness, Hans Malan stalked out on to the stoep to meet him.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“The night was still, of a milk-warm loveliness.
Moonlight sprayed silver on the shining camphor- leaves; late orange-blossom swathed the cottage in a perfume so dense that it could almost be felt. The spirit of Meerlust had never been more subtly intoxicating.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“How precarious that safety was, he didn’t realize. It was shattered, at last, by means of a trifling accident. Christmas had passed. By this time the sudden splendours of spring had waned. Now Meerlust lay like an island of heavier green in a tawny sea of veld that
swept upward wave beyond wave to the arching sky. The rivers ran down to the sea in a gin-clear trickle. The scattered rocks of the wilderness radiated fierce heat.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“To Morton Stone, all those first weeks at Meerlust had a strange, dream-like quality. The contours and smells of the country, the odd style of the house’s architecture, the stinkwood furniture and ancient brass with
which its rooms were furnished, had an exotic flavour that left him slightly bewildered.
They didn’t, naturally, bewilder Catherine at all. She was rapturously recapturing the days when she and Hans had been children together. To Morton there was something beautiful, and at the same time pathetic,
in the quickness with which she responded to each remembered detail: the bird-song, the flowers that now bloomed in incredible profusion, the smell of the veld, the soft accents of Cape-Dutch dialect. It was pathetic for two reasons. First because these memories, which he could neither share nor understand, increased the distance between them; once again, because all her rapture was shadowed for him by the gloom of an in-
definite apprehensiveness.
This very excess of happiness took it out of her. She wasn’t, as he could see, and as the Malans’ Dutch doctor told him, any better for the change. It seemed to spur her to a morbid restlessness. She was catching at every
memory, within, or just out of reach, as though some inward consciousness told her that the time for its enjoyment was limited. It irked her to find him, as it seemed to her, dull and unresponsive. As for Morton, the sense
of impending disaster never left him. He could have faced it more easily, he felt, at home, amid familiar surroundings, than in this strange, unreal oasis of beauty, five thousand miles from anywhere.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“But Catherine — or rather the Catherine of happy memory — had so much more. Even in her present invalid state, she enforced her hard, brilliant personality with a definiteness that reduced little Daphne to the pallor of a still-life pastel beside a strongly-coloured portrait in oils.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“His attitude towards her changed. When they had been settled for less than a month at La Fiorita, as their villa was called, they were sitting out one night in the belvedere at the end of their pergola watching the full moon climb above the mountains of Sorrento.
The night was not chilly; but fearing that Willoughby might take cold, she came down the garden with an Alpine cloak that she had bought for him in Munich. She found him rapt, gazing at the snaky track of yellow
moonlight on the water. Even before he spoke she was aware of something tense and emotional in the air; but when she threw the cloak over his shoulders he did not thank her as usual. He stood gazing down at her with a look in his eyes that she had never seen
before except when he was playing. She felt herself blushing beneath his gaze. Then, clasping her in his arms, he kissed her lips. It was the kiss of a lover, the like of which she had never known before, and she, with her curious, spinsterly instinct, shrank from it.
“What are you doing?” he cried. “What’s the matter with you? Can’t I kiss you?”
“Julian, you’re so rough. I don’t understand kisses like that.”
“Aren’t you my wife?” he said. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t love you?”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“For the first time in her life she was aware of the man ’s potential strength; and it came as a shock to her, for, so far, she had merely been concerned with his physical weakness; and though she was flattered by this display of passion she couldn’t quite persuadeherself
that it was seemly, or be sure that incidents of this kind wouldn’t interfere with his music. She could never really think of him as anything but the white-faced invalid whom she had rescued from the cinema. So, con-
scientiously, and in spite of his irritation, she restrained these ardours. She couldn’t see that the man had been suddenly smitten with beauty, that the thawed blood was beginning to move in his veins, that love was a necessity.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“Gradually a change came over Willoughby. It
showed itself first in a distinct gain of strength that overjoyed her. All his life, in the sodden midlands and in the clearer cold of Central Europe, Willoughby’s body had simply struggled for existence; whatever vitality he possessed had been poured out daily to nourish the pale, exotic flower of his music. In this blander climate, like a starved plant that rejoices in a genial soil, the musician became a man.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“He lived and moved in a curiously exalted, isolated world between his office on Fifth Avenue, which resembled a millionaire's apartment, and his bachelor apartment on Park, which resembled a business man's office. He moved in a vicious circle so rapid that he hadn't even time to realize how rich he was. It was only during his hurried passage between these two high perches [...] that Ludlow Walcot's feet had any contact with his mother earth. All day and all night (for not even his dreams were his own) his giddy brain was assailed by business details which hammered at it with the persistence of a riveting machine, his stomach insulted by snacks and patent nerve-foods, that jostled each other in competing for the attention of his bewildered digestion.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories