was, physically, less plainly seen. No, there it was, standing a little
away from the other, standing away, contemptuously, despising it,
deriding it. Fat, soft, white hanging cheeks, wearing anything to cover
its body, but shining in some way through the clothes, so that it was
body that you saw. A soft body, hands soft and the colour of the flesh
pale and unhealthy. But it was the eyes that spoke: the mouth trembled
and was weak, the chin was fat and feeble, but the eyes lived,
lived--were eager, fighting, beseeching, longing, captive eyes!
And this figure, Martin knew, was a prey to every morbid desire, rushed
to sensual excess and then crept back miserably to search for some
spiritual flagellation. Above all, it was restless, as some one presses
round a dark room searching for the lock of the door, restless and
lonely, cowardly and selfish, but searching and sensitive and even
faithful, faithful to something or to some one ... pursued also by
something or some one. A figure to whom this world offered only
opportunities for sin and failure and defeat, but a figure to whom this
world was the merest shadow hiding, as a shade hides a lamp, the life
within. Wretched enough with its bad health, its growing corpulence,
its weak mouth, its furtive desires, but despising, nevertheless, the
strong, healthy figure beside it. Thurston was right. Men are not born
to be free, but to fight, to the very death, for the imprisonment and
destruction of all that is easiest and most physically active and most
pleasant to the sight and touch ...
"And so Hector really hopes that he'll be able to get down to us for
Christmas, although he's been asked to go on this reading party. Of
course, it's simply a question as to whether he works better at home or
with his friends. If he were a weak character, I think Mr. Alweed would
insist in his coming home, but Hector really cares for his work more
than anything. He's never been very good at games; his short sight
prevents him, poor boy, and as he very justly remarked, when he was
home last holidays, 'I don't see, mother, how I am going to do my duty
as a solicitor (that's what he hopes to be) if I don't work now. Many
men regard Cambridge as a time for play. Not so I.'"
"But I hope that if Hector comes home this Christmas he'll attend the
Chapel services. The influence your father might have on such a boy as
Hector, Mr. Warlock, a boy, sensitive and thoughtful ... I was saying,
Miss Pyncheon, that Hector--"
Miss Pyncheon was the soul of good-nature--but she was much more than
that. She was by far the most sensible, genial, and worldly of the
Inside Saints; it was, in fact, astonishing that she should be an
Inside Saint at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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