I don’t dislike him because he’s a Jew,’ said Mr. Nunnery. ‘One can’t dismiss whole races at a time.’ ‘He’s all right.’ ‘You’d hardly know he was a Jew.’ ‘Oh, no. Hardly at all.
Maclintick did not answer. He removed the cork from a bottle, the slight ‘pop’ of its emergence appearing to em-body the material of a reply to his wife, at least all the reply he intended to give.
A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise. That happens at different moments in different careers.
Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.
However, at that stage in the walk one of those curious changes took place in circumstances of mutual intercourse that might almost be compared, scientifically speaking, with the addition in the laboratory of one chemical to another, by which the whole nature of the experiment is altered: perhaps even an explosion brought about.
So aggressive was the manner in which this question was put that at first I thought the pair of them were probably drunk: a state which, in addition, the discrepancy between their respective heights for some reason quite illogically helped to suggest.
In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.
It was an occasion that undoubtedly did more credit to Mr. Deacon’s social adroitness than to my own, because I was still young enough to be only dimly aware that there are moments when mutual acquaintance may be allowed more wisely to pass unrecognised.
It is, indeed, strange how often persons, living in other respects quite unobjectively, can suddenly become acutely objective about some specific concern of their own.
Albert’s shutters may have kept out the suffragettes: they did not effectively exclude the Furies.
For my own part, I liked Lady Warminster, although at the same time never wholly at ease in her presence. She was immaculately free from any of the traditional blemishes of a mother-in-law; agreeable always; entertaining; even, in her own way, affectionate; but always a little alarming: an elegant, deeply experienced bird – perhaps a bird of prey – ready to sweep down and attack from the frozen mountain peaks upon which she preferred herself to live apart.
That answer was such a simple one that I could not imagine why I had not guessed it without having to be told. Those very obvious tactical victories are always the victories least foreseen by the onlooker, still less the opponent.
Like everything that’s any good, it has about twenty different meanings.
For a brief second, for an inexpressibly curtailed efflux of time, so short that its duration could be appreciated only in recollection, being immediately engulfed at the moment of birth, I was conscious of a sensation I had never before encountered: an awareness that Stringham was perhaps a trifle embarrassed.
Clearly some complicated process of sorting-out was in progress among those who surrounded me: though only years later did I become aware how early such voluntary segregations begin to develop; and of how they continue throughout life.
I was aware of an unexpected drift towards intimacy, although this sudden sense of knowing her all at once much better was not simultaneously accompanied by any clear portrayal in my own mind of the kind of person she might really be. Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition.
Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.
I was far from understanding that the capacity of men interested in power is not necessarily expressed in the brilliance of their conversation.
They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain.
For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.