The Middle of the Road: A Novel

“These fellows cringe, if you treat ’em rough,” he told Bertram. “When they start their highfalutin about ‘the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ ask them why they look so well f...

“But with the same share in the eternal scheme of things,” said Bertram. “You and I went to St. Mary Abbot’s under the same divine impulse as those two tits set up housekeeping...

They had let him speak out, without a single interruption, in dead silence. He had been aware of their faces about him. Joyce had become quite white. She was still standing with...

England had escaped calamities like that, but unemployment was creeping up like a dark wave—millions were idle because of the Strike—and trade was at a standstill. What was the...

“Still continuing to destroy the Empire, that’s all,” was the answer, delivered with a quiet ferocity. “Look at India, seething with revolt and delivered over to a Jewish conspi...

“This little one knows why her father abandoned her. It was because he loved her, and could not bear to hear her crying out for food when there was nothing in the house.”

He smiled at the lowering face of the Colossus through the glass window with its dirty lace curtains, and then went up four flights of a staircase which smelt abominably of drai...

The rest of mankind, to her child mind, was entirely taken up with the duty and honour and delight of providing a pleasant life to those born in the higher sphere—mowing the law...

She and Bertram sat at a little table in the corner. Katia waited on them delightedly, kissing Nadia’s neck, or hair, or hand, every time she came to the table. And Nadia was jo...

Bertram’s father became absorbed in _The Morning Post_. After breakfast he retired to his study for an hour. At ten o’clock he drove down to the Temple. Occasionally he returned...

She sat on the arm of the old leather chair, and put her arm round Christy’s neck and her cheek against his cheek, and called him a beautiful pterodactyl, and a most wise old pl...

They drove to Battersea Park, and she gave him her hand up the long flight of stone steps to her fourth floor flat, where she stopped and panted a little before fumbling in her...

It was Susan, his sister, and she had a man with her, standing back a little behind her in the darkness of the porch. She came into the hall with a “Hullo, Bertram!” and the man...

He sat dumb among them at times because of their wild talk. They were pretty Bolshevists, who frightened him with their revolutionary ideals. The Russian experiment had not been...

THE STREET OF ADVENTURE WOUNDED SOULS PEOPLE OF DESTINY THE SOUL OF THE WAR THE BATTLES OF THE SOMME THE STRUGGLE IN FLANDERS THE WAY TO VICTORY, _2 Vols._ NOW IT CAN BE TOLD MO...

He remembered there were other tragedies in life besides his own, more death than that of his still-born child when he bought an evening paper at the Underground station in the...

Yet never once in any company did any German, man or woman, acknowledge the guilt of Germany in having started the war. Russia had “moved first.” England had hemmed in Germany....

“For Heaven’s sake!” said Bertram, aloud. Sheer rage was rising in his brain. What did all this mean? Did these people seriously believe all that dark and monstrous nonsense sug...

Officers of every battalion of the British Army surged along the narrow street—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were down from the line, while their Division was in reserve...

He put these ideas to a French priest as they sat together in a little wooden presbytery near the ruins of a church on the west side of St. Quentin. They had met in a cemetery w...

“Foreigners mostly in these places. Jews. Profiteers,”—she said the word _Schieber_ for the last class. “This isn’t Germany. It’s the same hell as in other great cities of the w...

There was a great silence in Petrograd. Heavy snow had fallen, and lay deep in the streets, except where gangs of men and women had shovelled a passage-way for sleighs which dro...

In Europe geographically, but Oriental in character and race. It did not need Christy’s remark, “This is the East and not the West, which explains a lot,” for Bertram to see tha...

An armoured car passed, with its machine guns poking through the loop-holes, and people stared at it sullenly or fell back on the sidewalks as it went by. Many of them ran quick...

His own moodiness, his private doubts and difficulties, even his bigger apprehensions of political troubles at home and abroad, were made trivial by the intense world-ranging an...

“That’s how I treat ’em,” he told Bertram. “A touch of good humour works wonders with them. Look at those two young murderers! Laughing like hell! It’s the first time they’ve la...

Once or twice he had murmured, “Oh, Lord! I suppose I’ll have to go!” and then, as familiar objects lose their force of impression, he’d forgotten the lecture and its date. It w...

Captain Arthur Izzard, D.S.O., said it was no game, but the real business. Like thousands of other officers of the Great War, he had worn out many boots, seeking a job in London...

Bertram looked at her, and though he did not believe the ridiculous explanation of the silver slipper, he could not resist a tribute of admiration in his eyes. Joyce had more pl...

She gave her address, at a number in the rue de la Pompe, Passy, and told him that she was living with Betty O’Brien, who, like herself, had abandoned England since Dennis’s mar...

When she went upstairs, he turned over the pages of _Country Life_. Holme Ottery was not the only house for sale, as well he knew. Page after page was filled with the usual anno...

There were other living people in the room. Bertram heard a faint stir above the stove where, on the shelf above, Russians sleep in winter. A woman lay there with a little girl....