Jan 17
I read an article about Elinor Glyn and Edith Hull that mentioned another story called Way of an Eagle, by Ethel Dell. It's free and I put it on the palm, and it is absolutely fascinating. That's the kind of fiction I like, really love.
Jan 21
My Palm's apparently dead. I charged it, but it hasn't shown life all day. I couldn't read any more of Way of an Eagle, so I printed the last section of it with tiny font in five columns, and read the rest of it by flashlight in bed, bawling my eyeballs out, of course. What a magnificent story, melodrama and passion and sacrifice coming out every seam. Refreshing, too, that the characters are all casually assumed to be Christians.
I LOVE the philosophy this author works into everything! Muriel's destined for Nick, but she thinks she wants Blake, who's tall and blond and handsome and gallant. Blake is just totally wrong for her, and Nick is right. She manages to get engaged to Blake at one point (since Daisy, the woman Blake truly loves, has already married someone else):
"What I mean is this," said Nick. "You won't own it, of course, but you are cheating, and you are afraid to stop. There isn't one woman in ten thousand who has the pluck to throw down the cards when once she has begun to cheat. She goes on--as you will go on--to the end of her life, simply because she daren't do otherwise. You are out of the straight, Muriel. That's why everything is such a hideous failure. You are going to marry the wrong man, and you know it."
Yet Daisy's married to a nice guy she doesn't love at all, and a series of crises have parted her from him and exposed her to temptation with her lifelong true love Blake again. Nick says to Daisy:
"Daisy, give him up, dear! Give him up! You can do it if you will, if your love is great enough. I know how infernally hard it is to do. I've done it myself. It means tearing your very heart out. But it will be worth it--it must be worth it--afterwards. You are bound--some time--to reap what you have sown."
The title itself comes from Proverbs as explained on the title page: "There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid."
Here's a passage from the middle. Muriel's in England engaged to Blake, and Nick's in India with the husband Daisy left behind:
Nick seated himself on the edge of the table, and smote him on the shoulder. "My dear chap," he said, with a sudden burst of energy, "you're only at the beginning of things. It isn't just praying now and then that does it. You've got to keep up the steam, never slack for an instant, whatever happens. The harder going it is, the more likely you are to win through if you stick to it. But directly you slack, you lose ground. If you've only got the grit to go on praying, praying hard, even against your own convictions, you'll get it sooner or later. You are bound to get it. They say God doesn't always grant prayer because the thing you want may not do you any good. That's gammon--futile gammon. If you want it hard enough, and keep on clamouring for it, it becomes the very thing of all others you need--the great essential. And you'll get it for that very reason. It's sheer pluck that counts, nothing else--the pluck to go on fighting when you know perfectly well you're beaten, the pluck to hang on and worry, worry, worry, till you get your heart's desire." He sprang up with a wide-flung gesture. "I'm doing it myself," he said, and his voice rang with a certain grim elation. "I'm doing it myself. And God knows I sha'n't give Him any peace till I'm satisfied. I may be small, but if I were no bigger than a mosquito, I'd keep on buzzing."
