Francis Brett Young > Quotes

“An autumn garden has a sadness when the sun is not shining...”
― Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour

“The longer one lives, the more mysterious life seems.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour

“All primitive people are frightened of owls,' said Harley. 'The villagers here are scared to death of the gufo. Birds of ill omen. If they see one, they think they'll die. But they never do. See one, I mean, of course,' he added with a laugh.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour

“Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus

Arthur is gone…Tristram in Careol
Sleeps, with a broken sword - and Yseult sleeps
Beside him, where the Westering waters roll
Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.

Lancelot is fallen . . . The ardent helms that shone
So knightly and the splintered lances rust
In the anonymous mould of Avalon:
Gawain and Gareth and Galahad - all are dust.

Where do the vanes and towers of Camelot
And tall Tintagel crumble? Where do those tragic
Lovers and their bright eyed ladies rot?
We cannot tell, for lost is Merlin's magic.

And Guinevere - Call her not back again
Lest she betray the loveliness time lent
A name that blends the rapture and the pain
Linked in the lonely nightingale's lament.

Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover
The bower of Astolat a smokey hut
Of mud and wattle - find the knightliest lover
A braggart, and his lilymaid a slut.

And all that coloured tale a tapestry
Woven by poets. As the spider's skeins
Are spun of its own substance, so have they
Embroidered empty legend - What remains?

This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
That age had sapped and cankered at the root,
Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke
The miracle of one unwithering shoot.

Which was the spirit of Britain - that certain men
Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood
Loved freedom better than their lives; and when
The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood

And charged into the storm's black heart, with sword
Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed
With a strange majesty that the heathen horde
Remembered when all were overwhelmed;

And made of them a legend, to their chief,
Arthur, Ambrosius - no man knows his name -
Granting a gallantry beyond belief,
And to his knights imperishable fame.

They were so few . . . We know not in what manner
Or where they fell - whether they went
Riding into the dark under Christ's banner
Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.

But this we know; that when the Saxon rout
Swept over them, the sun no longer shone
On Britain, and the last lights flickered out;
And men in darkness muttered: Arthur is gone…”
― Francis Brett Young

“And as we stood there, a curious thing happened: a kind of window opened in the rain, just as if a cloud had been hitched aside like a curtain, and in the space between we saw a landscape that took our breath away. The high ground along which the road ran fell away through a black, woody belt, and beyond it, for more miles than you can imagine, lay the whole basin of the Black Country, clear, amazingly clear, with innumerable smokestacks rising out of it like the merchant shipping of the world laid up in an estuary at low tide, each chimney flying a great pennant of smoke that blew away eastward by the wind, and the whole scene bleared by the light of a sulphurous sunset. No one need ever tell me again that the Black Country isn't beautiful. In all Shrophire and Radnor we'd seen nothing to touch it for vastness and savagery. And then this apocalyptic light! It was like a landscape of the end of the world, and, curiously enough, though men had built the chimneys and fired the furnaces that fed the smoke, you felt that the magnificence of the scene owed nothing to them. Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental. It made me wonder why you people who were born and bred there ever write about anything else.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour

“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

“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

“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

“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

“He prayed to goodness that the relationship might be reasonably remote. He remembered, anxiously, that a man may not marry his grandmother...”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“her mind was full not of facts, but of glamour;”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Fortunately, also, that very night the wolfish English summer discarded its lamb-skins.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“Peaceful and lovely though his country seemed, there was nothing in it that clutched at his heart and dragged it out by the roots. He didn't belong to it, could never belong to it. He knew those picturesque cottages! It was probable that not one in five hundred possessed a bathroom, much less up-to-date plumbing or steam-heating or electric refrigeration. All this talk about "calls of the blood" was simply bunk. He had always described himself as a hundred-per-cent. American. At that moment the percentage had risen to a hundred and fifty. Probably, by the time he had got to Ludlow, it would reach two hundred.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“more”
― Francis Brett Young, They Seek a Country

“The desert's illimitable freedom," the officer murmured, as he poured out Simon's whiskey. "It's not altogether her fault, Mr. Jackson. It's these damned novelists. Every novel written about the desert should be censored by the police.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“It didn't occur to him to make allowances for the long English twilight. That twilight gave to the landscape a curious effect of suspended life. It cast upon everything (or was that, perhaps, the beer?) an eerie, magical bloom. Every mile that he went - and now he was hurrying - he felt surer and surer that he was on the verge of some shattering experience.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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