quotes_may7.htm

…George looked at long stone walls upholding reaches of silvery-oak weather boarding; buttresses of mixed flint and bricks; outside stairs, stone upon arched stone; curves of thatch where grass sprouted; roundels of house-leeked tiles, and a huge yard populated by two cows…he had not thought of himself or of the telegraph office for two and a half hours…

This is from ‘An Habitation Enforced’ in ‘Actions and Reactions’. George Chapin, a wealthy American business-man, has collapsed from over-work. He and his young wife have found their way to a farm in deepest Sussex, where there is a beautiful old neglected house. They buy the estate, with its farms and its tenants, and set down their roots there. As the months go by, he recovers his health and his sense of balance.

…’This has power to cut off all pain from a man’s body’.

‘I have seen it’, said John.

‘But for pain of the soul there is, outside God’s Grace, but one drug; and that is a man’s craft, learning, or other helpful motion of his own mind.’

‘That is coming to me too’, was the answer…

This is from ‘The Eye of Allah’ in ‘Debits and Credits’.

The Abbot of St Illod’s is talking to John of Burgos, who has brought back drugs for the monastery from his travels in Moorish Spain. On that journey he had lost his lady and her newborn child.

…Someone in front of me tightened a belt on a stiffly silent person in civil clothes with discharge-badge. ‘ ‘Strewth! This is comfort again,’ I heard him say. The companion nodded.

The man went on suddenly: ‘ Here! What’re you doing? Leave off! You promised not to! Chuck it! ‘ and dabbed at his companion’s streaming eyes.

‘ Let him leak,’ said an Australian signaller, ‘ Can’t you see how happy the beggar is’…

This is from ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’ in ‘Debits and Credits’.

With its comradeship and fortifying ritual, the Masonic Lodge ‘Faith and Works 5837’ is a sanctuary to many men who are wounded and broken by their fearful experiences in the Great War trenches.