There was no talk of it for a fortnight. We spoke of latitude and longitude and the proper manufacture of sherry cobblers, while the steamer cut open a glassy-smooth sea. Then we turned towards China and drank farewell to the nearer East. “We shall reach Hongkong without being it,” said the nervous lady. This is from “It” collected in Abaft the Funnel (Unauthorised and Authorised Editions), 1909. It continues my present fixation with opening lines. As the song goes (so the background notes tell me) – “So if the boys don’t fall for you – There’s just no hope at all for you – Give up and quit – You’ll never hit – If you have not got IT”.
and… John Radcliffe’s “Three Quotations”
‘I have taken your keys away from that fat foreigner, and sent him away; and the studs are in the shirt for mess. Who should know if I do not know? And so the baby has become a man, and forgets his nurse; but my nephew shall make a good servant, or I will beat him twice a day’…
He sat up in bed and looked round. There was a murmur of voices from the other side of the nursery door. It was better to face the terrible unknown than to choke in the dark. He slipped out of bed, but his feet were strangely wilful, and he reeled once or twice. Then he pushed the door open and staggered – a puffed and purple-faced little figure – into the brilliant light of the dining-room full of pretty ladies…
At the end of the garden stood a hedge of flaming poinsettias higher than anything in the world, because, childlike … (his) … eye could not carry to the tops of the mango trees. Their green went out against the blue sky, but the red poinsettias he could just see … as his legs grew under him, he found that by scaling an enormous rampart – three foot of broken-down mud wall at the end of the garden – he could come into a ready-made kingdom, where everyone was his slave…
Here are the sources of these extracts