quotes_april8.htm

…’It would seem’, said he, ‘the choice lies between two sins. To deny the world a Light which is under our hand, or to enlighten the world before her time…this birth, my sons, is untimely. It will be but the mother of more death, more death, more torture, more division, and greater darkness in this dark age…’…

This is from ‘The Eye of Allah’ in Debits and Credits. A monk has come back from a journey to the Moors with a microscope, which reveals new minute universes in a drop of water. But Hhs Abbot judges that this knowledge is too dangerous.

…The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh sown grass toward the naked black crosses.

‘Come with me’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies’…

This is from ‘The Gardener’ in ‘Debits and Credits’.

Helen’s Turrell’s ‘nephew’ – really her illegitimate son – has been killed on the battlefield, and she has come to find his grave.

…’That’s all right,’ said she contentedly, and went up to the house, where she scandalised the whole routine by taking a luxurious hot bath before tea, and came down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw her lying all relaxed on the other sofa, ‘quite handsome’….

This is from ‘Mary Postgate’ in ‘A Diversity of Creatures’.

Mary, a respectable spinster lady, has lost her much loved adopted son in the War. Later, a German Zeppelin comes over her village, and drops a bomb which she believes has killed a child. She finds a dying German pilot who has crashed, lying broken in the shrubbery. She ignores his pleas for help, and listens, with satisfaction to his painful death.