Belloc / Classics Delphi Complete Works of Hilaire Belloc (Illustrated)

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-913487-47-8
Verlag: Delphi Classics Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 23, 6758 Seiten

Reihe: Delphi Series Five

The Anglo-French writer and historian, Hilaire Belloc also found fame as an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, soldier and political activist, whose comic verses and collaborations with G. K. Chesterton cemented his literary reputation during the early twentieth century. This eBook presents Belloc's complete fictional works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing in digital print for the first time, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 3)

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Belloc's life and works
* Concise introductions to the novels and other texts
* ALL 15 novels, with individual contents tables
* Includes G. K. Chesterton's original illustrations for the novels
* Rare novels available in no other collection
* Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the texts
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry
* Easily locate the poems you want to read
* Includes a large selection of Belloc's non-fiction - spend hours exploring the author's varied works
* Ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres
* UPDATED with 11 non-fiction works

CONTENTS:

The Novels
Emmanuel Burden, Merchant (1904)
Mr. Clutterbuck's Election (1908)
A Change in the Cabinet (1909)
Pongo and the Bull (1910)
The Four Men (1911)
The Girondin (1911)
The Green Overcoat (1912)
Mr. Petre (1925)
The Haunted House (1927)
But Soft: We Are Observed! (1928)
Belinda (1928)
The Missing Masterpiece (1928)
The Man Who Made Gold (1930)
The Postmaster General (1932)
The Hedge and the Horse (1936)

The Poetry Collections
Verses and Sonnets (1896)
The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896)
More Beasts for Worse Children (1897)
The Modern Traveller (1898)
A Moral Alphabet (1899)
Cautionary Tales for Children (1907)
More Peers (1911)
Verses (1916)
Sonnets and Verse (1923)

The Poems
List of Poems in Chronological Order
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

The Translation
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult (1915)

The Non-Fiction
Danton: A Study (1899)
Lambkin's Remains (1900)
The Path to Rome (1902)
Caliban's Guide to Letters (1903)
The Great Inquiry (1903)
Avril: Essays on the French Renaissance (1904)
The Old Road: from Canterbury to Winchester (1904)
Introduction to 'Essays in Literature and History' (1906)
Sussex (1906)
Hills and the Sea (1906)
The Historic Thames (1907)
On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (1908)
On Everything (1909)
Marie Antoinette (1909)
On Anything (1910)
On Something (1910)
Introduction to 'The Footpath Way: An Anthology for Walkers' (1911)
First and Last (1911)
The French Revolution (1911)
The Servile State (1912)
This and That and the Other (1912)
The River of London (1912)
Six British Battles (1913)
The Book of the Bayeux Tapestry (1914)
A General Sketch of the European War, the First Phase (1915)
The Two Maps of Europe (1915)
The Free Press (1918)
Europe and the Faith (1920)
Introduction to 'The Romance of Madame Tussaud's' (1920)
The Jews (1922)
The Mercy of Allah (1922)
Preface to 'Kai Lung's Golden Hours' (1922)
The Road (1923)
On (1923)
Mr. Belloc Still Objects to Mr. Wells's 'Outline of History' (1926)
The Emerald of Catherine the Great (1926)

The Autobiography
The Cruise of the Nona (1925)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Belloc, Hilaire

Classics, Delphi

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

IT IS NEVER possible to assign to any one cause a great catastrophe. It is even difficult to pick out the strongest of the many threads which go to weave a destiny. It is, perhaps, because I knew him so well and was so shocked by his recent death, that I find this difficulty peculiarly apparent in the case of Mr Burden.

It is necessary, however, to make a beginning, and I would beg my readers to consider one of the earliest sources of that tragedy, the unfortunate entanglement into which his son, Cosmo, fell while yet an undergraduate. This entanglement had, indeed, the effect of earning Cosmo the lifelong friendship of such men as Mr Barnett and Mr Harbury, but it proved indirectly a deathblow to his father.

Hints and suspicions have magnified and distorted a story simple enough in itself, and one which in its bare truth throws no dishonour upon the young man whose whole life it has embittered. He may himself read these lines. He will (I am sure) think it no treason in his father’s friend, if I set down briefly and exactly facts, the misapprehension of which alone would injure him. Indeed, it is necessary that I should do so if a comprehension is to be had of what follows.

There lay about eight miles from the University a village of the name of Mallersham. Like Wynthorne, Gapton, Rupworth, Bilscombe, Gorle and many others, it is the most beautiful in England: its cottages and peasants have about them an indefinable air of security and content, and are the property of the Howley family.

Before the recent national invention of the bicycle, Mallersham was a place of resort for the wealthier undergraduates; it retains the character to this day, nor is the annual dinner of the Brummel Club held elsewhere than at the Malden Arms.

For, of course, Mallersham was originally Malden land, and the sign of the inn is a touching example of the deep roots which our English families strike into the soil. For though the Gayles, who sold the estate to the Howleys last year, had originally purchased it in 1857 from the Marlows, who were heirs by marriage of the Hindes, yet the Hindes themselves had bought it from the Kempes of Hoverton, whose early efforts in finance bring us directly through the Rinaldos to Geoffry Malden, the famous soldier husband of Maria Van Huren, the witty Dutch companion of William of Orange.

When Cosmo was at the University the Malden Arms was held as a tied house by a family of the name of Capes, whose only daughter, Hermione, grew to inspire Cosmo with an immature and temporary, but profound, affection.

It is no purpose of these pages to make excuses for the lad. — The example of Athletes, who often mentioned and praised the daughter of the inn, may perhaps have led away a temperament easily impressed by the customary or the fashionable. Nor was the powerful stimulus of universal and incessant rumour the only attraction Hermione wielded. The young woman herself could partly furnish cause for Cosmo’s passion. She was some nine years older than he, a circumstance which lent to her conversation with the youth of the gentry and middle classes a charm of experience and arch intelligence rare enough under the conditions of her birth. She was of a large and commanding presence, her manner was active and determined, her step vigorous. Her voice, which was somewhat loud and unpleasing, was redeemed by features in which the conventional prudery of her rank had long been vanquished, while her eyes, remarkable for the length and darkness of their lashes, had achieved a fixed expression of confident affection.

During Cosmo’s fifth and last year at the University, the young people met, if anything, more frequently than before. Mr and Mrs Capes put no obstacles in the way of their growing intimacy, and, towards the end of what his father well designated his “career,” Cosmo had the incredible folly to open with Hermione a frequent and regular correspondence.

Some lawyers have maintained that this correspondence contained as many as seven distinct expressions equivalent to an offer of marriage. It is a matter upon which I can express no opinion. Nor would I dream of adding, by an impertinent discussion, to the chagrin which a man of Cosmo’s sensitive temperament cannot but experience if he should read these lines. What is certain is, that when the time had come to sever his connection with the Malden Arms, these letters took on an aspect of their own.

He had seen Hermione for the last time (as he hoped) upon a Wednesday towards the end of term. A natural reticence had forbidden him to break it to her that they would not meet again; he had affected in every recent visit an increasing carelessness of demeanour, and had attempted to drag out this final interview to so dull and purposeless a conclusion as might properly let die a wearisome attachment. He neglected in nothing those artifices by which a man of refinement and honour softens the pain he may be compelled to inflict. I record it with the utmost pleasure of my old friend’s son, that he showed such true delicacy in the crisis of this lamentable story.

But her woman’s instinct, aided perhaps by a more general acquaintance with such matters, forbade Hermione to be deceived. Her tenderness increased with every conversation, until, in this last, it became a kind of assiduity whose tone repelled the young man, and lent him, if possible, a yet stronger determination to be free; with her protestations of affection, her enquiries and her detailed reminiscence, was commingled a perpetual record of his cherished letters, of their place in her heart, and of how they seemed to keep him with her always.

He recalled them as she spoke. He could find nothing in them to warrant so extravagant a devotion. There were many recent notes excusing his absence, many earlier ones of appointment; he remembered not a few written from abroad, longer letters full of description. They reflected, of course, his regard; but he could not understand the large part they had played in her simple life, nor why they formed in these days the staple of her fond and persistent memories.

He was troubled and returned on the morrow.

The letters loomed larger than ever across the sunset of their loves. On the Friday (for in his anxiety he came daily) her conversation was of nothing else, and when he showed plainly how insignificant he thought them, she offered to read him the passages that had most comforted her. She whispered their purport and drew closer to him as she told it.

Then indeed this topic, which had at first only wearied and annoyed, grew to alarm him. He dared not withdraw. He came again and again: on the Saturday, the Sunday, the Monday; he no longer avoided the mention of these documents, or turned her away with careless replies. On the contrary, they seemed suddenly — by I know not what morbid possession of his delicate mind — to be of even greater moment to himself than to her. He would have touched them, held them, borne them away with him. She only refused, with a look of possession and pride in her eyes.

Tuesday and Wednesday offered no solution, Thursday was dangerous, and Friday sombre.

In this final phase of their duel, he had at last determined upon a desperate solution of what had grown to be a menace; he would tell her frankly that they must part; it followed that he would receive his letters, and he hoped, by the aid of that tact which he justly believed himself to exercise, to prevent a scene which could only be painful to them both.

With the afternoon of Saturday he set off once more to the Malden Arms.

His spirit as he went was oppressed and confused. I have said that Cosmo was and is (if he will forgive me the phrase) pursued by the accidents of his childhood. His body, too bulky and too slow, suffered from the necessity of these daily journeys; their inconclusive irritation preyed also upon his clear, but retiring mind. For no reason, save that care breeds care, and that his general tone had fallen with the strain of these days, he saw his future blackly as he went wearily up the hill of Mallersham in the summer evening.

A healthy man of his position and inheritance does not consider his debts, for instance; he himself had never given them a thought till now; he had seen them vaguely at the back of his mind, two or three hundred pounds (£250 was the figure at which he averaged them in more careful moments): — he had dismissed them for more immediate things.

But this evening their list seemed interminable! His father’s hearing of them, which he had put off to some future moment of success or necessity, seemed suddenly grown terrible — a thing not to be approached. He recalled this and that obligation which were almost matters of honour, and he got colder as he recalled them. He began to imagine how men whom he knew spoke of him in his absence. He felt as it were enmeshed and held, though hitherto no such imaginary follies had oppressed him in all his youth — so much can one note of friction enfeeble all the soul.

In a wiser moment he would have known that rasp and depression of this sort would weaken him in negotiation. It did indeed weaken him now when he met Hermione. He so conducted his demand that a woman of less strength might have been guilty of a quarrel. She fell to no such weakness. She told him what she had told him a hundred times — all that his letters were to her. If he himself chose to begone, she would retain them as the only thing remaining to her.

In all this her voice was finely self-possessed, she spoke as of a property in land, a fortune; and as...