BROUGHT DOWN

The girl beat her hands together. 'My dear man,' she cried, 'you don't understand. You're judging those devils by your own standard. They suspect everything—and everybody.'
'What a distressing habit,' he murmured. 'Is it chronic, Or merely due to liver? I must send 'em a bottle of good salts. Wonderful thing—good salts. Never without some in France.'
The girl looked at him resignedly. 'You're hopeless,' she remarked— 'absolutely hopeless.'
'Absolutely,' agreed Hugh, blowing out a cloud of smoke. 'Wherefore your telephone message? What's the worry?'
She bit her lip and drummed with her fingers on the arm of her chair. 'If I tell you,' she said at length, 'will you promise me, on your word of honour, that you won't go blundering into The Elms, or do anything foolish like that?'

Cream: What A Bringdown (Link)

Text:  Sapper, Bulldog Drummond (1920)
 

MEMORY HOLD THE DOOR

One can go back to one’s own home after a year’s absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one had never been away.  Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.

This, of course, he knew now, was not his home. Guilford Street was his home.  He had hoped that wherever Anna was there would be peace:  coming up the stairs a second time, he knew that there would never be peace again while they lived.

To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought.  He knew what he had to do long before he began to climb the stairs.  A phrase of Johns came back to his mind about a Ministry of Fear.  He felt now he had joined its permanent staff.  But it wasn’t the small bureau to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution.  It was a ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged.  If one loved one feared.  That was something Digby had forgotten, full of hope among the flowers and Tatlers.

The door was open as he left it, and it occurred to him almost as a hope that perhaps she had run out into the raid and had been lost forever.  If one loved a woman one couldn’t hope she would be tied to a murderer for the rest of her days.

But she was there—not where he had left her but in the bedroom where they had watched Hilfe sleeping.  She lay on the bed face downward with her fists clenched.  He said, “Anna.”

 

Graham Greene, The Ministry Of Fear, London, William Heinemann, 1943.

COMPREHENSIVE (THINGS AND TIME)

I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration. I want to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle's) as the main line of my story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last, I want to get in, too, all sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me and impressions I got—even although they don't minister directly to my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressed and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed for getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more than people seen in transit, just because it amuses me to recall what they said and did to us, and more particularly how they behaved in the brief but splendid glare of Tono-Bungay and its still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them up, I can assure you! Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere....  

Wailing Souls: Things and Time (Link)

Text:  H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1909)