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John Fiske - "The Meaning of Infancy"

Various - "The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20,"

Lytton Strachey - "Books and Characters"

W.W. Jacobs - "Bob's Redemption"

Alexie Signs with Little, Brown
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PW Morning Report, November 21, 2008" class="topstory">The PW Morning Report, November 21, 2008
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RH Out of Stock on Shadow Country; Norton Back to Press on Hemingses
Fire with Fire will feature the character Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who first appeared in Alexies debut story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist-Fight in Heaven (Atlantic Monthly, 1993). V-p and editorial director Reagan Arthur will edit the novel.

Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




Yet now, sitting smoking and listening to those records of eastern rule
and eastern battle, in the quiet lamp-light of the long room--with its
dark book-cases, faintly gleaming Chinese images, and dumpy pillars--his
native cheekiness faded into most unwonted humility. For he was
increasingly conscious of being, to put it vulgarly "up against something
pretty big." Conscious of a personality altogether too secure of its own
power to spread itself or, in the smallest degree, bluff or brag. Sir
Charles Verity struck him, indeed, as calm to the confines of cynicism.
He gave, but gave of his abundance, royally indifferent to the cost.
There was plenty more where all this came from, of knowledge, of
initiative and of thought. Only once or twice, during the course of their
long talk, did the young man detect any sign of personal feeling. Then
for an instant, some veil seemed to be lifted, some curtain drawn aside;
while, with dazzling effect, he became cognizant of underlying
bitterness, underlying romance--of secret dealings of man with man, of
man with woman, and the dealing, arbitrary, immutable, final, of Death
and a Greater than Death, with both.

These revelations though of the briefest, over before he fairly grasped
their import, gone like a breath, were still sufficient to discredit many
preconceived ideas and enlarge his mental horizon to a somewhat anxious
extent. They carried him very far from life as lived at Canton Magna
Rectory; very far from all, indeed, in which the roots of his experience
were set, thus producing an atmosphere of doubt, of haunting and
insidious unrest.

And of that atmosphere he was particularly sensible when, standing in
the hall, flat candlestick in hand, he at last bade Sir Charles Verity
good night.

"It has been a wonderful evening, sir," he said, simply and modestly.
"You have been awfully kind in sparing me so much of your time; but,
indeed, it has not been time wasted. I begin to measure a little what
India means, I hope. Certainly I begin to measure the depth of my own
ignorance. I see I have nearly everything of essential importance still
to learn. And that is a pretty large order--almost staggeringly large now
that, thanks to you, I begin to realize the vastness of the amount."

"The majority of men in your Service never realize it," Charles Verity
returned. "They run in blinkers from first to last.--Not that I underrate
their usefulness. They are honest, painstaking, thoroughly reliable,
according to their lights. They do excellent journeyman work. But there
lies the heart of the whole matter.--Are you content to do journeyman
work only; or do you aspire to something greater?--If the former, then
you had best forget me and all I have told you this evening as fast as
possible. For it will prove a hindrance rather than a help, confusing the
issues.--No--no--listen a moment, my dear boy"--

This kindly, indulgently even, as Tom made a gesture of repudiation and
began to speak.

"If the latter--well, the door stands open upon achievement by no means
contemptible, as the opportunities of modern life go; but, it is only
fair to warn you, upon possibilities of trouble, even of disaster, by no
means contemptible either. For, remember, the world is so constituted
that if you elect to drive, rather than be driven, you must be prepared
to take heavy risks, pay heavy penalties. Understand"--

He laid his hand on the young man's shoulder.

"I do not pose as a teacher, still less as a propagandist. I do not
attempt to direct the jury. The choice rests exclusively with
yourself.--And here rid your mind of any cant about moral obligations.
Both ways have merit, both bring rewards--of sorts--are equally
commendable, equally right. Only this--whether you choose blinkers, your
barrel between the shafts and another man's whip tickling your loins, or
the reins in your own hands and the open road ahead, be faithful to your
choice. Stick to it, through evil report as well as through good."

He lifted his hand off Tom's shoulder. And the latter, looking round at
him was struck--in mingled admiration and repulsion--by his likeness to
some shapely bird of prey, with fierce hooked beak and russet-grey eyes,
luminous, cruel perhaps, yet very sad.

"Above all be careful in the matter of your affections," Sir Charles went
on, his voice deepening. "As you value your career, the pride of your
intellect,--yes--and the pride of your manhood itself, let nothing
feminine tempt you to be unfaithful to your choice. Tempt you to be of
two minds, to turn aside, to turn back. For, so surely as you do, you
will find the hell of disappointment, the hell of failure and regret,
waiting wide-mouthed to swallow you, and whatever span of life may remain
to you, bodily up."

He checked himself, breaking off abruptly, the veil lowered again, the
curtain drawn into place.

"There," he said, "we have talked enough, perhaps more than enough. You
have a long day before you to-morrow, so my dear boy, go to bed. My
quarters are down here."

He made a gesture towards the dark corridor opening off the far side
of the hall.

"You know your way? The room on the right of the landing."

"Yes. I know my way, thanks, sir," Tom answered--

And, thus dismissed, went on upstairs, carrying the silver flat
candlestick, while his shadow, black on the panelled wall, mounted beside
him grotesquely prancing step by step.

The furnishing of his room was of a piece with all below, solid yet not
uncomely. It included a four-post bed of generous proportions, hangings,
curtains and covers of chintz, over which faded purple and crimson roses
were flung broadcast on a honey-yellow ground. The colourings were
discreetly cheerful, the atmosphere not unpleasantly warm, the quiet,
save for the creaking of a board as he crossed the floor, unbroken.
Outwardly all invited to peaceful slumber. And Tom felt more than ready
to profit by that invitation this last night on shore, last night in
England. His attention had been upon the stretch for a good many hours
now, since that--after all rather upsetting--good-bye to home and family
at Canton Magna, following an early and somewhat peripatetic breakfast.
Notwithstanding his excellent health and youthful energy, mind and body
alike were somewhat spent. He made short work of preparation, slipped in
between the fine cool linen sheets, and laid his brown head upon the soft
billowing pillows, impatient neither to think nor feel any more but
simply to sleep.

For some two hours or so he did sleep, though not without phantasmagoria
queerly disturbing. The sweep of his visions was wide, ranging from that
redoubtable county lady, Harriet Cowden _nee_ Verity--first cousin of his
father, the Archdeacon, and half-sister to his host--in her violet-ink
hued gown, to fury of internecine strife amid the mountain fastnesses of
Afghanistan,--from the austere and wistful beauty of the grey,
long-backed Norman Abbey rising above the roofs and chimneys of the
little English market-town, to the fierce hectic splendour of Eastern
cities blistering in the implacable sun-glare of the Indian plains. Days
on the Harchester playing fields, days on the river at Oxford, and still
earlier days in the Rectory nursery at home; bringing with them sense of
small bitter sorrows, small glorious triumphs, of laughter and uproarious
fun, of sentimental passages at balls, picnics, garden parties, too, with
charmingly pretty maidens who, in all probability, he would never clap
eyes on again--all these, and impressions even more illusive and
fugitive, playing hide-and-seek among the mazelike convolutions of his
all too active brain.

Then, on a sudden, he started up in bed, aware of external noise and
movement which brought him instantly, almost painfully, broad awake.

For a quite appreciable length of time, while he sat upright in the warm
darkness, Tom failed either to locate the noise which had thus roused
him, or to interpret its meaning. It appeared to him to start at the
river foreshore, pass across the garden, into and through the
ground-floor suite of rooms and corridor which Sir Charles had indicated
as reserved to his particular use.--What on earth could it be? What did
it remind him of?--Why, surely--with a start of incredulous
recognition--the sound of hoofs, though strangely confused and muffled,
such as a mob of scared, over-driven horses might make, floundering
fetlock deep in loose sand.

Alive with curiosity he sprang out of bed, groped his way across to the
window and, putting up the blind, leaned out.

A coppery waning moon hung low in the south-east, and sent a pale rusty
pathway across the sea to where, behind the sand-bar, rippling waves
broke in soft flash and sparkle. Its light was not strong enough to
quench that of the stars crowding the western and the upper sky. Tom
could distinguish the black mass of the great ilex trees on the right.
Could see the whole extent of the lawn, the two sentinel cannon and
pyramid of ammunition set on the terrace along the top of the sea-wall.
And nothing moved there, nothing whatever. The outstretch of turf was
vacant, empty; bare--so Tom told himself--as the back of his own hand.
The sounds seemed to have ceased now that sight denied them visible cause
of existence; and he began to wonder whether his hearing had not played
him false, whether the whole thing was not pure fancy, a delusion born of
agitated dreams.

He pushed the sash up as far as it would go and leaned further out of the
window. The luscious scent of a late flowering species of lonercera,
trained against the house wall, saluted his nostrils, along with a
fetid-sweet reek off the mud-flats of the Haven. Away in the village a
dog yelped, and out on the salt-marshes water-fowl gave faint whistling
cries. Then all settled down into stillness, save for the just audible
chuckle and suck of the river as the stream met the inflowing tide.

The stillness pleased him. For so many nights to come there would be none
of it; but ceaselessly the drumming of the engines, quiver of the screw,
and wash of the water against the ship's side.--All the same he did not
quite like the colour of the moon or that frayed flattened edge of it
westward. Why is there always something a trifle menacing about a waning
moon? He did not like the smell of the mud-flats either. It might not be
actually unhealthy; but it suggested a certain foulness. He yawned, drew
back into the room, and straightening himself up, stretched his hands
above his head. He would get into bed again. He was dog-tired--yes, most
distinctly bed!

Then he stopped short, listening, hastily knelt down by the window and
again leaned out. For once more he heard horses coming up from the shore,
across the garden, into and through the house, hustling and trampling one
another as they shied away from the whip.--There were laggards too--one
stumbled, rolled over in the sand, got on its feet after a nasty
struggle, and tottered onward dead lame. Another fell in its tracks and
lay there foundered, rattling in the throat.

The sounds were so descriptive, so explicit and the impression produced
on Tom Verity's mind so vivid that, carried away by indignation, he found
himself saying out loud:

"Curse them, the brutes, the cowardly brutes, mishandling their cattle
like that! They"--

And he stopped confounded, as it came home to him that throughout the
course of this cruel drama he had seen nothing, literally nothing, though
he had heard so convincingly much. A shiver ran down his spine and he
broke into a sweat, for he knew beyond question or doubt not so much as a
shadow,--let alone anything material--had breasted the sea-wall, passed
over the smooth level turf, or entered--how should it?--the house.

The garden lay outspread before him, calm, uninvaded by any alien being,
man or animal. The great ilex trees were immobile, fixed as the eternal
stars overhead. And he shrank in swift protest, almost in terror, being
called on thus to face things apparently super-normal, forces unexplored
and uncharted, defying reason, giving the lie to ordinary experience and
ordinary belief. Reality and hallucination, jostled one another in his
thought, a giant note of interrogation written against each. For which
was the true and which the false? Of necessity he distrusted the evidence
of his own senses, finding sight and hearing in direct conflict thus.

The two or three minutes that followed were among the most profoundly
disagreeable Tom ever had spent. But at last, a door opened below,
letting forth a shaft of mellow lamp-light. It touched the flower-beds on
the left edging the lawn, giving the geraniums form and colour, laying
down a delicate carpet of green, transmuting black into glowing scarlet.
Tall and spare in his grey and white sleeping-suit, Sir Charles Verity
sauntered out, and stood, smoking, looking out to sea.

Earlier that night, downstairs in the sitting-room, he seemed a storm
centre, generating much perplexity and disquiet. But now Tom welcomed his
advent with a sense of almost absurd satisfaction. To see what was
solidly, incontrovertibly, human could not but be, in itself, a mighty
relief.--Things began to swing into their natural relation, man, living
man, the centre, the dominant factor once more. He, Tom, could now shift
all responsibility, moreover. If the master of the house was on guard,
he might wash his hands of these hateful ghostly goings on--if ghostly
they were--leaving the whole matter to one far stronger and more
competent than himself.

Whereupon he went back to bed; and slept profoundly, royally, until
Hordle the man-servant, moving about the bright chintz bedecked room,
preparing his bath and laying out his clothes, awoke him to the sweetness
of another summer day.




CHAPTER V

BETWEEN RIVER AND SEA


"We had a grand talk last night--Sir Charles was in splendid form. I
enjoyed it down to the ground."

Tom Verity lay, at full length on the upward sloping, sun-warmed bank of
sand and shingle. Only to youth is given enjoyment of perfect laziness
joined with perfect physical vigour. Just because he felt equal to
vaulting the moon or long-jumping an entire continent, should such
prodigious feats be required of him, could he lie thus in glorious
idleness letting the earth cradle and the sun soak into him. Doubts and
disturbances of last night melted in daylight to an almost ludicrous
nothingness and self-confidence reigned; so that he declared the world a
super-excellent place, snapping his fingers at problems and mysteries. A
spark of curiosity pricked him still, it is true, concerning the origin
of certain undeniably queer aural phenomena. He meant to satisfy that
curiosity presently; but the subject must be approached with tact. He
must wait on opportunity.

A few paces from and above him, Damaris sat on the crown of the ridge,
where the light southerly wind, coming up now and again off the sea,
fanned her. A white knitted jersey, pulled on over her linen dress,
moulded the curve of her back, the round of her breasts and turn of her
waist, showing each movement of her gracious young body to the hips, as
she leaned forward, her knees drawn up and her feet planted among the
red, orange, and cream-grey flints and pebbles.

Looking up at her, Tom saw her face foreshortened in the shade of her
broad brimmed garden hat, a soft clear flush on it born of health, fresh
air and sunlight, her eyes shining, the blue of the open sea in their
luminous depths. He received a new impression of her. She belonged to the
morning, formed part of the gladness of universal Nature, an unfettered
nymph-like being. To-day her mood was sprightly, bidding farewell to
ceremony. Yet, he felt, she remained perplexing, because more detached
than is the feminine habit, poised and complete in herself.

And this detachment, this suppression of the sentimental or social
note--he being admittedly a very personable fellow--piqued Tom's male
vanity, so that he rallied her with:

"But by the way, why did you vanish so early, why didn't you stay with us
after dinner last night?"

"I did not want to vanish," she answered. "Nothing is more delightful
than hearing my father talk. But had I stayed Miss Bilson would have
supposed herself free to stay too, and that would have spoiled the
evening. My father doesn't choose to talk freely before Miss Bilson,
because she gets into a foolish excited state and interrupts and asks
questions. She overflows with admiration and that annoys and bores him."

"'She brought him butter in a lordly dish,'" Tom quoted. "The ill-advised
Bilson. Can't one just see her!"

"And it is not her place to admire out loud," Damaris continued. "Over
and over again I have tried to explain that to her. But in some ways, she
is not at all clever. She can't or won't understand, and only tells Aunt
Felicia I am wanting in sympathy and that I hurt her feelings. She has
unreasonably many feelings, I think, and they are so easily hurt. I
always know when the hurting takes place because she sniffs and then
plays Mendelssohn's Songs without Words on the schoolroom piano."

Tom chuckled. She had a caustic tongue on occasion, this
nymph-like creature!

"Alas, poor Bilson!" he said. "For, as Sir Charles walked across the
garden with us down to the ferry, didn't I hear those same sugary
melodies tinkling out of some upper open window?"

"I am afraid you did. You see she had made up her mind to come with me."

"And you were forced to intimate you found yourself quite equal to
conducting the expedition unshepherded?"

"I did not mean to be unkind, but she would have been so dreadfully in
the way"--

Damaris gathered up a handful of little pebbles, and let them dribble
down slowly between her outspread fingers while, turning her head, she
gazed away out to sea.

"This is a day by itself," she said. "It looks like jewels, topazes,
turquoise, and pearls; and it seems full of things which half tell
themselves, and then hide from or pass you by.--I wanted to watch it all
and think; and, she doesn't do it on purpose I know, but somehow Miss
Bilson always interferes with my thinking."

Both the tone and substance of this discourse proved slightly startling
to its hearer. They carried the conversation into regions transcendental;
and to his blissful laziness, the rarefied air of those regions was
unwelcome. To breathe it demanded exertion. So he said, chaffingly:

"Do I interfere with your thinking? I hope not. But if I offend that way,
speak but a word and I disappear like a shot."

"Oh! no," she answered. "How could you interfere? You are part of it. You
started it, you see, because you are going to India."

Whereat, failing to catch the sequence of ideas, male vanity plumed
itself, tickled to the point of amusement. For was not she a child after
all, transparently simple and candid, and very much a woman-child at
that! Tom turning on his side raised himself on one elbow, smiling at her
with easy good-nature.

"How charming of you to adopt me as a special object of thought, and care
so much about my going."

But patronage proved short-lived. The girl's colour deepened, but her
eyes dwelt on him coldly.

"I have only been thinking how fortunate you are, and seeing pictures in
my mind of what you will see which will be new to you--and--and
remembering."

"Oh! of course, I am lucky, tremendously lucky," he hastened to declare,
laughing a little wryly. "Such a journey is a liberal education in
itself, knocking the insularity out of a man--if he has any receptive
faculty that is--and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices. I
don't the least undervalue my good fortune.--But you talk of remembering.
That's stretching a point surely. You must have been a mere baby, my dear
Damaris, when you left India."

"No, I was six years old, and I remember quite well. All my caring for
people, all my thinking, begins there, in the palace of the Sultan-i-bagh
at Bhutpur and the great compound, when my father was Chief
Commissioner."

Her snub duly delivered, and she secure it had gone home, Damaris unbent,
graciously communicative as never before.

"It was all so beautiful and safe there inside the high walls, and yet a
teeny bit frightening because you knew there were other things--as there
are to-day--which you felt but couldn't quite see all about you.
Sometimes they nearly pushed through--I was always expecting and I like
to expect. It hurt me dreadfully to go away; but I had been very ill.
They were afraid I should die and so Dr. McCabe--he was here when you
arrived yesterday--insisted on my being sent to Europe. A lady--Mrs.
Pereira--and my nurse Sarah Watson took me to Paris, to the convent
school where I was to be educated. It was all very strange, but the nuns
were kind. I liked their religion, and I got accustomed to the other
little girls. I had rooms of my own; and French friends of my father's
visited me and took me out on half-holidays. And Aunt Felicia came over
to fetch me for the summer vacations and brought me here"--

Damaris pointed across the tide-way to the river frontage, including with
one sweeping gesture the whole demesne of The Hard from the deep lane on
the one hand, opening funnel-like upon the shore, past sea-wall--topped
at the corner by pink plumed tamarisk, the small twin cannons and pyramid
of ball--the lawn and irregular white house overlooking it, backed and
flanked by rich growth of trees, to a strip of sandy warren and pine
scrub on the other, from out which a line of some half-dozen purple
stemmed, red branched Scotch firs, along with the grey stone built Inn
and tarred wooden cottages on the promontory beyond, showed through a
dancing shimmer of heat haze, against the land-locked, blue and silver
waters of Marychurch Haven.

"I did not like being here at all at first," she told him. "I thought it
a mean place only fit for quite poor people to live in. The house seemed
so pinched and naked without any galleries or verandahs. And I was afraid
because we had so few servants and neither door-keepers or soldiers. I
could not believe that in England there is so little need for protection
against disaffected persons and thieves. The sunshine was pale and thin,
and the dusk made me sad. At Bhutpur the sun used to drop in flame behind
the edge of the world and night leap on you. But here the day took so
long dying. Aunt Felicia used to praise what she called 'the long sweet
English twilight,' and try to make me stop out in the garden to enjoy it
with her. But I could not bear it. The colours faded so slowly. It seemed
like watching some helpless creature bleed to death silently, growing
greyer minute by minute and feebler. I did not want to watch, but go
indoors where the lamps were lighted and it was warm and cosy. I used to
cry dreadfully, when I could get away by myself where Aunt Felicia and
the maids could not see me, cry for my father--he resigned the
Commissionership, you know, when I was sent home and took service in
Afghanistan under the Ameer--and for my darling friend, Mrs. Pereira, and
for the Sultan-i-bagh, where I knew strangers lived now. For the lotus
tank and orange grove, and all my little tame animals and my pretty
play-places I should never, never see any more"--

Overcome by which intimate memories, Damaris' grave voice--which had
taken on a chanting cadence, at once novel and singularly pleasing to the
young man's ear--quavered and broke.

"Poor little exiled princess!" he cried, all his facile kindness to the
fore again. "Yes, it must have been cruelly hard on you. You must have
suffered. No wonder you cried--cried buckets full."

And drawn by pity for that desolate, tropic-bred little child, Tom got on
to his feet and crunched up the loose shingle to the crest of the ridge,
full of a lively desire to pacify and console. But here the soft breeze
met and caressed him, and the whole plain of the tranquil sea came into
view--turquoise shot with pearl, as Damaris recently figured it, and
fringed with topaz where waves, a few inches high and clear as glass,
broke on the yellow sand at the back of the Bar just below.

"How wonderfully lovely!" he exclaimed, carried out of himself by the
extreme fairness of the scene. And, his hands in his trouser pockets he
stood staring, while once again the pull of home, of England, of
tenderness for all that which he was about to leave, dimmed his eyes and
raised a lump in his throat.

"Upon my word, you must be difficult to please if this place doesn't
please you or come up to your requirements, Damaris," he said, presently
sitting down beside her. "No Arabian Nights palace in Asia, I grant you;
yet in its own humbler and--dare I say?--less showy, manner not easy to
beat. Breathe this enchanting air. See the heavenly tints with which our
good dirty useful old Channel has adorned itself. Can you ask for more,
you insatiable person, in the way of beauty?"

Then, slightly ashamed of his outburst, Tom practised a delightful smile,
at once sentimental and flirtatious.