The Voice of Jerusalem
Book Description
London, so angry was I at this increasing practice of intrusion into my rural privacy: this unheralded descent by the ill-timed train that brought beggars and bores to my door in the very middle of the luncheon hour. To aggravate matters and my righteous wrath there was no train to deport them till teatime, unless they were jetted back with the velocity of a tennisreturn, and the stroke was not ea...
MoreLondon, so angry was I at this increasing practice of intrusion into my rural privacy: this unheralded descent by the ill-timed train that brought beggars and bores to my door in the very middle of the luncheon hour. To aggravate matters and my righteous wrath there was no train to deport them till teatime, unless they were jetted back with the velocity of a tennisreturn, and the stroke was not easy. Thus, as the village held no place of rest, amusement, or provender, and it was the dry interval even at the foodless inn, and as violent rain-storms would maliciously coincide with these visitations, I must perforce shelter, feed and entertain niy persecutors, to the destruction of my working-hours. My soul was yet bitter with the memory of the gaunt, hollow-eyed lady who only the week before had profited by her opportunity to pour out for two hours on end as if in emulation of the rain, without a tragic torrent of words, a pitiless, pitiful flow, unrelieved even by a comma, some sordid but unintelligible tale of a shell-shocked son in a, lunatic asylum. The only point at all clear from her impassioned incoherence had been that not even Heaven could help her, and the wisdom of Shakespeare had been borne in on me, as so often of late: Things without remedy should be without regard At the best it was not easy to work with the insistent dull booming of the guns from across the Channel, that unresting reminder of civilisation in its agony of dissolution; of millions of breaking hearts. The one compensation the war brought me I used to tell myself grimly was that it cut off the bulk of my callers from quartering themselves upon me for the night, for they were mainly aliens, friendly or neutral, and the coast was a prohibited area7 The latest pilgrim bore a Polish name: I was to that extent safe. Perhaps soothed by this circumstance or some digestive process, I modif
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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