...of admission

He sat for a long time in his overcoat, damp and steaming from the rain, hat in hand and silent. She told him about her husband and children, of her bitter years, of her old father. She had, incidentally, brought him with her. He intended to visit a spa. He was there to reassure her jealous husband. They were now doing well. Her husband had made good use of his mediocrity. The others, the speculators with the inborn instinct for business, had been overwhelmed by the storms they had conjured up, like warriors fallen in adventures they had themselves provoked. Herr von Derschatta, however, was one of those mediocre bureaucrats of the business world who gain much though they risk nothing. She spoke in the jargon which is the mother tongue of Director Generals, of the 'position' that permitted certain things but not yet, or no longer, permitted others. A few strangers entered the room where they were sitting. She ceased her account. But the silence that ensued was capable of expressing all the admissions and completing all the half-admissions that she had minimized and half-suppressed earlier. This silence disconcerted her the more in the presence of the other people. As if they were both as young as they had once been in the cafe, the fortuitousness of the external situation left them at a loss. Outside it was raining. Here strangers were sitting. 'If she comes to my room now,' he thought, 'it is decided. She is expecting it.' He said nothing.

[The Silent Prophet, Roth, J.]

...of diplomatic rivals

Friedrich ran into a number of people here whom he had known well in Zurich. He even saw Bernadin and Dr Schleicher again. They had both become diplomats and maintained their understanding. They had sealed an alliance for life, were inseparable, and promenaded silently together because they had no more to say to each another. They had talked themselves out. They knew everything about one another. Now they were united by their bartered confessions. They were peace comrades just as two men who once met in the trenches were war comrades. Each also represented his country. And as both were concerned with so-called peaceful relations between Germany and France, and as they might have been reproached with remissness for any clouding of these relations, they both cherished peace like their own careers and their ambition accorded it to the value that generals accord to war. And just as professional marriage-brokers are concerned about the bliss of the parties they have brought together, because their living depends on it, so Dr Schleicher and Bernadin were similarly concerned about peace between the two countries. They trafficked in peace as they had trafficked in state secrets during the war. Their friendship was troubled only if the name of one of them was mentioned in the newspapers more often than that of the other, or if, in the group photographs of conference participants published in the illustrated magazines, the face of one was more distinctly recognizable than that of his friend. This 'congenial gathering' too was taken by the photographer for publicity purposes, to appear under the title 'A diplomatic tea-party' in the Sunday supplements. Bernadin and Dr Schleicher seperated since they took it for diplomatic subtlety not to let their association become apparent to the other nations. While they stationed themselves in the background with heroic modesty, they pressed their faces between the shoulders of the front row so as to appear on the plate nonetheless. And furtively but persistently, in their anxiety at the critical moment when the flash blazed out, they would discard the facial expressions they had donned as advantageous, cast sidelong glances at each other, and consider which of them was standing in a better and more prominent position. The journalists whose vocation is ever to scent out secrets, believed that the glances of the two were the equivalent of abbreviated diplomatic Notes. And every reporter who spotted this exchange of glances thought at once of the possibility of drawing attention to it in the morning paper under the magic formula of 'as rumoured in exclusive circles'.

[The Silent Prophet, Roth, J.]

...of studying pornography

Sometimes Colonel Lelewicz came himself. Sometimes he would send one of his friends. He brought bread, tinned food, newspapers. At irregular intervals there was a visit from Len-Min-Tsin, the Chinese trader, with newspapers, books and cheap pornography. This consisted of packets of postcards like those offered to foreigners in the dazzling nights of the great cities by timid little dealers with encouraging whispers. The Chinaman purveyed the postcards in series through the lost townships of Siberia and lent them out like books. He would then collect them again from his subscribers and exchange them for new ones. The pictures were worn like old playing-cards by the covetous fingers of many hundreds. Efrejnov, Lion and Berzejev scrutinized the cards together in unpolitical and purely sexual accord. Efrejenov kept a dignified silence as he became engrossed in the details. He puckered his eyebrows, combed his fair beard with his fingers, narrowed his eyelids and peered at the cards through a narrow slit with the appraising glance of a connoisseur. Against his will, he simultaneously opened his bewhiskered lips in the same measure as he closed his eyelids. His tongue crept inquisitively between his teeth, he began to smile, his face relaxed and, despite the powerful neck on which it rested, despite the beard in which it was framed and embedded, acquired a boyish expression. Lion held his pince-nez in his hand, hard against his eyes, and tapped one foot incessantly, causing his body to break into a delicate rocking tremor. Berzejev was red under the normal brown of his countenance and it seemed, not that his skin was flushed, but that the red complexion of his second inner self was appearing through the brown of the outer man. Impatient as he was, he wanted to turn over faster than the others, who appeared to have a more thorough approach.

[The Silent Prophet, Roth, J.]

...of incomprehension

The times were strongly in favour of freedom for the female sex; not so Herr von Maerker, who had meanwhile become permanent head of a ministerial department and was therefore well aware of the lack of masculine freedom. His daughter's opinions made him feel half embittered and half ashamed at belonging to the previous generation, for men feel shame at becoming old as if it were a secret vice. He retreated silently before his daughter's vigorous offensive. He suffered and even gradually became wise. He belonged to that breed of average men who acquire understanding only in later years because they have had to keep silent for so long, and for whom nothing remains but to become meditative. When Hilde, on behalf of all the daughters of the world exclaimed: 'Our mother's were exploited and betrayed!' Herr von Maerker felt it as a calumny on his dead wife and an insult by his daughter. He wondered where Hilde had acquired so much robust callousness and shocking rhetoric. He still knew nothing of his daughter.

[The Silent Prophet, Roth, J.]

...of seduction

After he had gone we sat for some moments in silence. I kept my eyes on the pattern of the carpet, a decoration of small intertwined snakes among ivy leaves, and for some reason my mind went back to the time when I had been sitting on the bed with Bess's mother and had so closely examined the patchwork quilt. Now I felt the same intensity of atmosphere between the two of us, the certainty that some word or action of extraordinary significance was impending, but this time I was master of myself, and I watched Eustasia out of the corner of my eye, since I felt no urge to make the first move. She was sitting with her head thrust slightly forward, and of her broad determined face was a look of such softness that I was startled; for all the stubbornness and self-will and strain seemed to have gone from her face, leaving it with a strange purity like an April sky, so that she appeared unearthly, a spirit whose whole essence was compassion. Yet I could feel the divan dented by her heavy limbs, and saw the blood just pulsing in a tiny vein above one cheek.

[The Aerodrome, Warner, R.]

...of pain

"I'm sorry," she said, "if this has upset you," and then, since I made no reply, she added: "I never meant to do anybody any harm." She looked hard into my face, as though claiming my sympathy, but I had none to spare, and so, after a moment or two, she turned away from me and began to comb her hair in front of the small mirror that hung from a nail in one of the walls. I watched her as she stood with her back to me, and found it painful to see the delicate carriage of her hips and the dress creased below the armpits as she raised her hands to her head. Still I had nothing to say, and yet felt strongly that it was time for me to speak, so that my own silence became embarrassing to me.

[The Aerodrome, Warner, R.]

...of grief

We took our places in one of the front pews and soon the bell ceased to toll. The cessation of sound seemed to me like one of those strange silences that one notices in the summer, sitting in the woods, perhaps, when the birds suddenly stop singing and the sound of insects dies away and one strains one's ears after what is audible. I could think of nothing now but my grief for the dead man whose body, however unlike the living it might be, was soon to be taken wholly away from us. I turned my head involuntarily towards the Rector's wife and saw that she was looking at me. Her lips were tightly compressed. I had no idea of what thoughts were passing through her mind.

[The Aerodrome, Warner, R.]

...of a revelation

Here there succeeded a long silence, and I peered out again into the room from behind the curtain. The Rector had let his head fall upon his arms and, though his lips were moving, he uttered no words that were audible. I looked to the right and saw his wife's head, with the night-cap on top of it, protruding from the other alcove. Her eyes were clouded in a kind of mistiness, though not from tears, and I thought that her face expressed sorrow and, mingled with it, something peaceful. She was gazing at the kneeling figure of her husband, but not as though she took a great interest in the sight. For myself, I was too shocked and alarmed by what I had heard to pay any minute attention to her. I had now thought of leaving the room, no consciousness of the dishonest position in which we were both placed. I listened as the Rector began to speak again, more slowly and in a low voice.

[The Aerodrome, Warner, R.]

...of the soul

(The following lines, written on the margin of this page, heavily over scored are still just legible:)

I wrote this in a moment of overwhelming agony, agony of the heart and of all my senses. A mad rush of thoughts, words, images. In my soul nothing. God is silent. Silence.

[Diary of a Country Priest, Bernanos, G.]

- submitted by Pearce, M.A.

...of prayer

My prayer was sad and so was the image. I could hardly bear such sadness and yet I was anxious to share it, to assume it in its entirety, to let it flood my soul, my heart, my bones, my whole being. The confused rumble of inner hostile voices which troubled me for the last few weeks was silenced by it. The old silence had returned to me. The blessed quiet wherein the voice of God can be heard-God will speak…

[Diary of a Country Priest, Bernanos, G.]

- submitted by Pearce, M. A.

...of a vow

My fingers were beginning to bleed a little, the skin had blistered. She tore up a handkerchief and bandaged them. We exchanged no words. The peace I had invoked for her had descended also upon me; and it so ordinary, so simple that no outsider could ever have shaken it. For indeed he had returned so quietly to everyday life, that not the most attentive onlooker could have gauged the mystery of this secret, which already was no longer ours. She has asked me to hear her confession tomorrow. I have made her promise to tell nobody of what passed between us, and on my side I have vowed absolute silence. ‘No matter what may happen’ I said; and my heart sank with these last words, and again sadness overcame me, ‘God’s will be done’.

[Diary of a Country Priest, Bernanos, G.]

- submitted by Pearce, M. A.