The Side Of The Angels. Basil King
Читать онлайн.| Название | The Side Of The Angels |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Basil King |
| Жанр | Языкознание |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Языкознание |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 4057664565600 |
Basil King
The Side Of The Angels
A Novel
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664565600
Table of Contents
"I'M CLAUDE. DON'T YOU REMEMBER ME?"
CHAPTER I
"I'M CLAUDE. DON'T YOU REMEMBER ME?"
THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS
"My lord, I am on the side of the angels."—Disraeli.
CHAPTER I
The difficulty was, in the first place, one of date—not the date of a month or a year, but of a generation or a century. Had Thorley Masterman found himself in love with Rosie Fay in 1760, or even in 1860, there would have been little to adjust and nothing to gainsay. In 1860 the Fays were still as good as the Thorleys, and almost as good as the Mastermans. Going back as far as 1760, the Fays might have been considered better than the Thorleys had the village acknowledged standards of comparison, while there were no Mastermans at all. That is, in 1760 the Mastermans still kept their status as yeomen, clergymen, and country doctors among the hills of Derbyshire, untroubled as yet by that spirit of unrest for conscience' sake which had urged the Fays and the Thorleys out of the flat farmlands of East Anglia one hundred and thirty years before.
During the intervening period the flat farmlands remained only as an equalizing symbol. Thorleys, Fays, Willoughbys, and Brands worked for one another with the community of interests developed in a beehive, and intermarried. If from the process of intermarriage the Fays were, on the whole, excluded, the discrimination lay in some obscure instinct for affinity of which no one at the time was able to forecast the significance.
But by 1910 there was a difference, the difference apparent when out of the flat farmlands seismic explosion has thrown up a range of mountain peaks. For the expansion of the country which the middle nineteenth century had wrought, the Thorleys, Mastermans, Willoughbys, and Brands had been on the alert, with eyes watchful and calculations timed. The Fays, on the other hand, had gone on with the round of seed-time and harvest, contented