Romance Novels

"The whole world and all the meaning of the world was changing for her. A branch of chestnut slipped from her hand. "Do you mean to say," she repeated stupidly, "that there are other giants in the world? That some food ?" He caught her amazement. "You know nothing?" he cried. "You have never heard of us? You, whom the Food has made akin to us!" There was terror still in the eyes that stared at him. Her hand rose towards her throat and fell again. She whispered " No!""

"It seemed to her that she must weep or faint. Then in moment she had rule over herself and she was speaking and thinking clearly. "All this has been kept from me," she said "It is like a dream. I have dreamt — I have dreamt such things. But waking — No. Tell me! Tell me! What are you? What is this Food of the Gods? Tell me slowly — and clearly. Why have they kept it from me, that I am not alone?""

"You must figure them both, flushed and startled in their bearing, getting at one another's meaning through endless half-heard, half-spoken phrases, repeating, making perplexing breaks and new departures — a wonderful talk, in which she awakened from the ignorance of all her life. And very slowly it became clear to her that she was no exception to the order of mankind, but one of a scattered brotherhood, who had all eaten the Food and grown for ever out of the little limits of the folk beneath their feet."

"We are in the beginning of a beginning," he said; "this world of theirs is only the prelude to the world the Food will make."

"My father believes — and I also believe — that a time will come when littleness will have passed altogether out of the world of man. When giants shall go freely about this earth — their earth-doing continually greater and more splendid things. But that — that is to come. We are not even the first generation of that — we are the first experiments."

""There are times when it seems to me almost as if we had come too soon. Someone, I suppose, had to come first. But the world was unprepared for our coming and for the coming of all the lesser great things that drew their greatness from the Food. There have been blunders; there have been conflicts. The little people hate our kind… "They are hard towards us because they are so little… And because our feet are heavy on the things that make their lives. But at any rate they hate us now; they will have none of us — only if we could shrink back to the common size of them would they begin to forgive…"

"They are happy in houses that are prison cells to us; their cities are too small for us; we go in misery along their narrow ways; we cannot worship in their churches… "We see over their walls and over their protections; we look inadvertently into their upper windows; we look over their customs; their laws are no more than a net about our feet."

""Every time we stumble we hear them shouting; every time we blunder against their limits or stretch out to any spacious act… Our easy paces are wild flights to them, and all they deem great and wonderful no more than doll's pyramids to us. Their pettiness of method and appliance and imagination hampers and defeats our powers. There are no machines to the power of our hands, no helps to fit our needs. They hold our greatness in servitude by a thousand invisible hands. We are stronger, man for man, a hundred times, but we are disarmed; our very greatness makes us debtors; they claim the land we stand upon; they tax our ampler need of food and shelter, and for all these things we must toil with the tools these dwarfs can make us — and to satisfy their dwarfish fancies. "They pen us in, in every way. Even to live one must cross their boundaries. Even to meet you here to-day I have passed a limit. All that is reasonable and desirable in life they make out of bounds for us."

"Though I thought I was alone in the world," she said, after a pause, "I have thought of these things. They have taught me always that strength was almost a sin, that it was better to be little than great, that all true religion was to shelter the weak and little, encourage the weak and little, help them to multiply and multiply until at last they crawled over one another, to sacrifice all our strength in their cause. But... always I have doubted the things they taught."

"All the means of death are in their hands, and made for their hands. For hundreds of thousands of years, these little people, whose world we invade, have been learning how to kill one another. They are very able at that. They are able in many ways. And besides, they can deceive and change suddenly… I do not know… There comes a conflict. You — you perhaps are different from us. For us, assuredly, the conflict comes. The thing they call War. We know it. In a way we prepare for it. But you know — those little people! — we do not know how to kill, at least we do not want to kill."

"Until you came upon me, I had lived in a world where I was great — alone. I had made myself a life — for that. I had thought I was the victim of some strange freak of nature. And now my world has crumbled down, in half an hour, and I see another world, other conditions, wider possibilities — fellowship —"

"I want now to think alone; and think out this change in things, think away the old solitude, and think you and those others into my world. . . . I shall go. I shall go back to-day to my place in the castle, and tomorrow, as the dawn comes, I shall come again — here."

"All day I shall dream and dream of this new world you have given me. Even now, I can scarcely believe —"

"These two met altogether fourteen times before the beginning of the end."

"Very soon they had passed from the realisation that in them and through them a new world of giantry shaped itself in the earth, from the contemplation of the great struggle between big and little, in which they were clearly destined to participate, to interests at once more personal and more spacious. Each time they met and talked and looked on one another, it crept a little more out of their subconscious being towards recognition, that something more dear and wonderful than friendship was between them, and walked between them and drew their hands together. And in a little while they came to the word itself and found themselves lovers, the Adam and Eve of a new race in the world."

""It is not that we would oust the little people from the world," he said, "in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards from their littleness, may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves. … We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves — for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the World. So you, Father Redwood, taught us. Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word and birth and act it must pass — to still greater lives. This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to live than they. And they in turn might yield to the ants and vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on for ever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit for evermore. To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater," he said, speaking with slow deliberation, "greater, my Brothers! And then-still greater. To grow and again-to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God. Growing. . . . Till the earth is no more than a footstool. … Till the spirit shall have driven fear into nothingness, and spread. … " He swung his arms heavenward — "There!" His voice ceased. The white glare of one of the searchlights wheeled about, and for a moment fell upon him, standing out gigantic with hand upraised against the sky. For one instant he shone, looking up fearlessly into the starry deeps, mail-clad, young and strong, resolute and still. Then the light had passed and he was no more than a great black outline against the starry sky, a great black outline that threatened with one mighty gesture the firmament of heaven and all its multitude of stars."

"Then suddenly a strange doubt took hold of him, that this place and present greatness were but the texture of a dream; that he was dreaming and would in an instant wake to find himself in his study again, the giants slaughtered, the Food suppressed, and himself a prisoner locked in. What else indeed was life but that — always to be a prisoner locked in! This was the culmination and end of his dream. He would wake through bloodshed and battle, to find his Food the most foolish of fancies, and his hopes and faith of a greater world to come no more than the coloured film upon a pool of bottomless decay. Littleness invincible! So strong and deep was this wave of despondency, this suggestion of impending disillusionment, that he started to his feet. He stood and pressed his clenched fists into his eyes, and so for a moment remained, fearing to open them again and see, lest the dream should already have passed away… The voice of the giant children spoke to one another, an undertone to that clangorous melody of the smiths. His tide of doubt ebbed. He heard the giant voices; he heard their movements about him still. It was real, surely it was real — as real as spiteful acts! More real, for these great things, it may be, are coming things, and the littleness, bestiality, and infirmity of men are the things that go. He opened his eyes."

"About him were the young giants, huge and beautiful, glittering in their mail, amidst the preparations for the morrow. The sight of them lifted his heart. They were so easily powerful! They were so tail and gracious! They were so steadfast in their movements! There was his son amongst them, and the first of all giant women, the Princess."

"They will fight," said young Redwood. "If we refuse these terms, I doubt not they will fight. Indeed I hope they will be open and fight. If after all they offer peace, it will be only the better to catch us unawares. Make no mistake, Brothers; in some way or other they will fight. The war has begun, and we must fight to the end. Unless we are wise, we may find presently we have lived only to make them better weapons against our children and our kind. This, so far, has been but the dawn of battle. All our lives will be a battle. Some of us will be killed in battle, some of us will be waylaid. There is no easy victory, no victory whatever that is not more than half defeat for us. Be sure of that. What of that? If only we keep a foothold, if only we leave behind us a growing host to fight when we are gone!" "And to-morrow?" "We will scatter the Food; we will saturate the world with the Food."

"For the next generation there must be great and little —" said Redwood, with his eyes on his son's face. "For many generations. And the little will hamper the great and the great press upon the little. So it must needs be, Father." "There will be conflict." "Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness — waiting for the Food."

"They cannot help but take the Food now. Suppose we were to resign our heritage and do this folly that Caterham suggests! Suppose we could! Suppose we give up this great thing that stirs within us, repudiate this thing our fathers did for us, that you, Father, did for us, and pass, when our time has come, into decay and nothingness! What then? Will this little world of theirs be as it was before? They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be? "To help others?" "To grow. It is still, to grow. Unless we help them to fail.""

"We are not beaten. No, Sir. You cannot say we are beaten. But your sons have broken the rules of war. Once last night, and now again. After our attack had been withdrawn. This afternoon they began to bombard London —" "That's legitimate!" "They have been firing shells filled with poison." "Poison?" "Yes. Poison. The Food — " "Herakleophorbia?" "Yes, Sir. Mr. Caterham, Sir — " "You are beaten! Of course that beats you. It's Cossar! What can you hope to do now? What good is it to do anything now? You will breathe it in the dust of every street. What is there to fight for more? Rules of War, indeed! And now Caterham wants to humbug me to help him bargain. Good heavens, man! Why should I come to your exploded windbag? He has played his game... murdered and muddied. Why should I?"

"Mankind was surely not so mad as that — surely not! It was impossible, it was incredible, it could not be. What good would it do, to kill the giant human when the gigantic in all the lower things had now inevitably come? They could not be so mad as that!"

"You lea' me alone. I got to live as well as you. I got to think. I got to eat. You lea' me alone." "It's the Law," said the little policeman, coming no further. "We never made the Law." "Nor me," said young Caddles. "Your little people made all that before I was born. You and your law! What I must and what I mustn't. No food for me to eat unless I work a slave, no rest, no shelter, nothin', and you tell me —" "I ain't got no business with that," said the policeman. "I'm not one to argue. All I got to do is to carry out the law."

"What was he seeking? He wanted something the pigmy world did not give, some end which the pigmy world prevented his attaining, prevented even his seeing clearly, which he was never to see clearly. It was the gigantic social side of this lonely dumb monster crying out for his race, for the things akin to him, for something he might love and something he might serve, for a purpose he might comprehend and a command he could obey."

"He came back to Piccadilly Circus between eleven and twelve at night and found a new sort of multitude. Clearly they were very intent: full of things they, for inconceivable reasons, might do, and of others they might not do. They stared at him and jeered at him and went their way. The cabmen, vulture-eyed, followed one another continually along the edge of the swanning pavement. People emerged from the restaurants or entered them, grave, intent, dignified, or gently and agreeably excited, or keen and vigilant, beyond the cheating of the sharpest waiter born. The great giant, standing at his corner, peered at them all. "What is it all for?" he murmured in a mournful vast undertone, "What is it all for? They are all so earnest. What is it I do not understand?" And none of them seemed to see, as he could do, the drink-sodden wretchedness of the painted women at the corner, the ragged misery that sneaked along the gutters, the infinite futility of all this employment. The infinite futility! None of them seemed to feel the shadow of that giant's need, that shadow of the future, that lay athwart their paths."

""Work in that old pit, until I die and rot and stink! What worm did they think was living in my giant body? Dig chalk for God knows what foolish purpose! Not I!"

"All unaware of the trend of events, unaware of the laws that were closing in upon all the Brethren, unaware indeed that there lived a Brother for him on the earth, young Caddles chose this time to come out of his chalk pit and see the world. His brooding came at last to that. There was no answer to all his questions in Cheasing Eyebright; the new Vicar was less luminous even than the old, and the riddle of his pointless labour grew at last to the dimensions of exasperation. "Why should I work in this pit day after day?" he asked. "Why should I walk within bounds and be refused all the wonders of the world beyond there? What have I done, to be condemned to this?" And one day he stood up, straightened his back, and said in a loud voice, "No!" "I won't," he said, and then with great vigour cursed the pit."

"What place is there for us among these multitudes? They who are little can hide from one another, but where are we to hide? There is no place where we could eat, no place where we could sleep. If we fled — night and day they would pursue our footsteps."

"Who cares what they can do, or what they will do? I am yours and you are mine. What is there more than that? I am yours and you are mine — for ever. Do you think I will stop for their little rules, for their little prohibitions, their scarlet boards indeed! — and keep from you?"

"That their laws should fetter us! That we, at the first spring of life, should be tripped by their old engagements, their aimless institutions!"

"What business is it of these little wretches, where we love, how we love? What have they and their world to do with us?"

"He said, it would be better for you, better for all the giants, if we, two — abstained from conversation. That was how he put it."

"I mean that without knowing it we have been trampling on the most sacred conceptions of the little folks. We who are royal are a class apart. We are worshipped prisoners, processional toys. We pay for worship by losing our elementary freedom. And I was to have married that Prince — You know nothing of him though. Well, a pigmy Prince, He doesn't matter… It seems it would have strengthened the bonds between my country and another. And this country also was to profit. Imagine it! — strengthening the bonds!"

"They say that we must part," the Princess said to her lover. "But why?" he cried. "What new folly have these people got into their heads?" "Do you know," she asked, "that to love me — is high treason?"

"You may imagine the spreading consternation in this ordered world when it became known that the Princess who was affianced to the Prince, the Princess, Her Serene Highness! with royal blood in her veins! met — frequently met — the hypertrophied offspring of a common professor of chemistry, a creature of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talked to him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no order, no reverence — nothing but Giants and Pigmies in the world, talked to him and, it was only too certain, held him, as her lover."

"They ceased to be beings of flesh and blood to one another and themselves; they passed into a bodily texture of tenderness and desire. They gave it first whispers and then silence, and drew close and looked into one another's moonlit and shadowy faces under the infinite arch of the sky. And the still black pine trees stood about them like sentinels. The beating steps of time were hushed into silence, and it seemed to them the universe hung still. Only their hearts were audible, beating. They seemed to be living together in a world where there is no death, and indeed so it was with them then. It seemed to them that they sounded, and indeed they sounded, such hidden splendours in the very heart of things as none have ever reached before. Even for mean and little souls, love is the revelation of splendours. And these were giant lovers who had eaten the Food of the Gods."

"In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who, though they dislike it extremely, are very properly called "Scientists.""

"There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have such obvious littlenesses. They live so far as their human intercourse goes; in a narrow world; their researches involve infinite attention and an almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. To witness some queer, shy, misshapen, grey-headed, self-important little discoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wide ribbon of an order of chivalry and holding a reception of his fellow men, or to read the anguish of Nature at the "neglect of science" when the angel of the birthday honours passes the Royal Society by, or to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist commenting on the work of another indefatigable lichenologist, such things force one to realise the unfaltering littleness of men. And withal the reef of science that these little "scientists" built and are yet building is so wonderful, so portentous, so full of mysterious half-shapen promises for the mighty future of man! They do not seem to realise the things they are doing."

"The Food of the Gods I call it, this substance that Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood made between them; and having regard now to what it has already done and all that it is certainly going to do, there is surely no exaggeration in the name. But Mr. Bensington would no more have called it by that name in cold blood than he would have gone out from his flat in Sloane Street clad in regal scarlet and a wreath of laurel. The phrase was a mere first cry of astonishment from him. He called it the Food of the Gods in his enthusiasm, and for an hour or so at the most altogether. After that he decided he was being absurd."

"How many big wasps came out that day it is impossible to guess. There are at least fifty accounts of their apparition. There was one victim, a grocer, who discovered one of these monsters in a sugarcask and very rashly attacked it with a spade as it rose. He struck it to the ground for a moment, and it stung him through the boot as he struck at it again and cut its body in halves. He was first dead of the two..."

"The sort of thing that pleased the public mind was caricatures of eminent politicians after a course of Boom-feeding, uses of the idea on hoardings, and such edifying exhibitions as the dead wasps that had escaped the fire and the remaining hens. Beyond that the public did not care to look, until very strenuous efforts were made to turn its eyes to the remoter consequences, and even then for a while its enthusiasm for action was partial. "There's always somethin' New," said the public--a public so glutted with novelty that it would hear of the earth being split as one splits an apple without surprise, and, "I wonder what they'll do next.""

"And presently little Redwood, pioneer of the new race, first child of all who ate the food, was crawling about his nursery, smashing furniture, biting like a horse, pinching like a vice; and bawling gigantic baby talk at his "Nanny" and "Mammy" and the rather scared and awe-stricken "Daddy," who had set this mischief going. The child was born with good intentions. "Padda be good, be good," he used to say as the breakables flew before him. "Padda" was his rendering of Pantagruel, the nickname Redwood imposed upon him."

"I shall have to look out a lot of books to put in his way, and they'll have to be big type. Now what sort of books will he need? There is his imagination to be fed. That, after all, is the crown of every education. The crown — as sound habits of mind and conduct are the throne. No imagination at all is brutality; a base imagination is lust and cowardice; but a noble imagination is God walking the earth again. He must dream, too, of a dainty fairy-land and of all the quaint little things of life, in due time. But he must feed chiefly on the splendid real; he shall have stories of travel through all the world, travels and adventures and how the world was won; he shall have stories of beasts, great books splendidly and clearly done of animals and birds and plants and creeping things, great books about the deeps of the sky and the mystery of the sea; he shall have histories and maps of all the empires the world has seen, pictures and stories of all the tribes and habits and customs of men. And he must have books and pictures to quicken his sense of beauty, subtle Japanese pictures to make him love the subtler beauties of bird and tendril and failing flower; and western pictures too, pictures of gracious men and women, sweet groupings, and broad views of land and sea."

"Henceforth our whole story is one of dissemination. To follow the Food of the Gods further is to trace the ramifications of a perpetually branching tree; in a little while, in the quarter of a lifetime, the Food had trickled and increased from its first spring in the little farm near Hickleybrow until it had spread, it and the report and shadow of its power, throughout the world. It spread beyond England very speedily. Soon in America, all over the continent of Europe, in Japan, in Australia, at last all over the world; the thing was working towards its appointed end. Always it worked slowly, by indirect courses and against resistance. It was bigness insurgent. In spite of prejudice, in spite of law and regulation, in spite of all that obstinate conservatism that lies at the base of the formal order of mankind, the Food of the Gods, once it had been set going, pursued its subtle and invincible progress."

"The Children of the Food grew steadily through all these years; that was the cardinal fact of the time. But it is the leakages make history. The children who had eaten grew, and soon there were other children growing; and all the best intentions in the world could not stop further leakages and still further leakages. The Food insisted on escaping with the pertinacity of a thing alive. Flour treated with the stuff crumbled in dry weather almost as if by intention into an impalpable powder, and would lift and travel before the lightest breeze."

"Meanwhile, quietly, taking their time as children must, the Children of the Food, growing into a world that changed to receive them, gathered strength and stature and knowledge, became individual and purposeful, rose slowly towards the dimensions of their destiny. Presently they seemed a natural part of the world; all these stirrings of bigness seemed a natural part of the world, and men wondered how things had been before their time. There came to men's ears stories of things the giant boys could do, and they said "Wonderful!" — without a spark of wonder. … They were said to be digging a well, deeper than any well or mine that man had ever made, seeking, it was said, for treasures hidden in the earth since ever the earth began."

"These Children, said the popular magazines, will level mountains, bridge seas, tunnel your earth to a honeycomb. "Wonderful!" said the little folks, "isn't it? What a lot of conveniences we shall have!" and went about their business as though there was no such thing as the Food of the Gods on earth. And indeed these things were no more than the first hints and promises of the powers of the Children of the Food. It was still no more than child's play with them, no more than the first use of a strength in which no purpose had arisen. They did not know themselves for what they were. They were children, slow-growing children of a new race. The giant strength grew day by day-the giant will had still to grow into purpose and an aim."

"Jake, Seth thought, they aren't our enemies. Shut up, kid! Just 'cause you've got some kind of sick hero worship thing going on with that bloodsucker, it doesn't change the law. They are our enemies. [...] I don't care if you had fun fighting alongside Edward Cullen once upon a time."

"You ever think about dating?" [...] "I don't see them either, Quil. I don't see their faces."