The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Burning Spear, by John Galsworthy

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Title: The Burning Spear

Author: John Galsworthy

Release Date: June 14, 2006 [EBook #2905]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BURNING SPEAR ***

Produced by David Widger

THE BURNING SPEAR

by John Galsworthy

Being the Experiences of Mr. John Lavender in the Time of War

Recorded by: A. R. P--M [John Galsworthy]

[NOTE: John Galsworthy said of this work: "'The Burning Spear' was
revenge of the nerves. It was bad enough to have to bear the dreads and
strains and griefs of war." Several years after its first publication he
admitted authorship and it was included in the collected edition of his
works. D.W.]

"With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air
In the wilderness I wander;
With a night of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end
For me it is no journey."

TOM O'BEDLAM

THE BURNING SPEAR

I

THE HERO

In the year ---- there dwelt on Hampstead Heath a small thin gentleman
of fifty-eight, gentle disposition, and independent means, whose wits
had become somewhat addled from reading the writings and speeches of
public men. The castle which, like every Englishman, he inhabited was
embedded in lilac bushes and laburnums, and was attached to another
castle, embedded, in deference to our national dislike of uniformity,
in acacias and laurustinus. Our gentleman, whose name was John Lavender,
had until the days of the Great War passed one of those curious
existences are sometimes to be met with, in doing harm to nobody. He
had been brought up to the Bar, but like most barristers had never
practised, and had spent his time among animals and the wisdom of the
past. At the period in which this record opens he owned a young female
sheep-dog called Blink, with beautiful eyes obscured by hair; and was
attended to by a thin and energetic housekeeper, in his estimation
above all weakness, whose name was Marian Petty, and by her husband, his
cha