I shall die of having lived.
He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible.
I belong on a farm. I’m never lonesome here like I used to be in town. You remember what sad spells I used to have, when I didn’t know what was the matter with me? I’ve never had them out here. And I don’t mind work a bit, if I don’t have to put up with sadness.
I could feel his heart pump and his muscles strain,” she said, “when he balanced himself and me on the rocks. I knew that if we fell, we’d go together; he would never drop me”.
Niel felt tonight that the right man could still save her, even now. She was still her own indomitable self, going through her old part, – but only the stage hands were left to listen to her. All those who had shared in fine undertakings and bright occasions were gone.
What Hicks had wanted most in this world was to run a garage and repair shop with his old chum, Dell Able. Beaufort ended all that. He means to conduct a sort of memorial shop, anyhow, with “Hicks and Able” over the door. He wants to roll up his sleeves and look at the logical and beautiful inwards of automobiles for the rest of his life.
He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the tangle to other hands;.
Her sarcasm was so quick, so fine at the point – it was like being touched by metal so cold that one doesn’t know whether one is burned or chilled.
As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point.
She had seen it when she was at home last summer – the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward serious effort.
Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself.
The prayers of all good people are good,” he said quietly.
We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.
In their death as in their life the Latins are more socially disposed than we, and the graves in their cemeteries almost always touch each other, they are so closely crowded together.
Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart. One.
But this afternoon the closed roads opened, the gates dropped. What she had so often tried to reach, lay under her hand. She had only to touch an idea to make it live.
Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it seemed to transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river of melody.
Are you going to let me love you a little, Bartley?
How deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them fiercely. It was to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden things in people responded.
It was just this solitariness of love in which a priest’s life could be like his Master’s. It was not a solitude of atrophy, of negation, but of perpetual flowering.