Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Novels and Novelists

A Batch of Five

A Batch of Five

Lady Lilith — By Stephen McKenna
The Adventurous Lady — By J. C. Snaith
The Widow's Cruse — By Hamilton Fyfe
Inisheeny — By George Birmingham
The People of the Ruins — By Edward Shanks

In stating that ‘Lady Lilith’ is only Part I. of a trilogy which has for covering title ‘The Sensationalists,’ page 284 Mr. McKenna passes a vote of confidence in his powers as an entertainer which we should be sorry to have to second. He is doubtless perfectly right in believing there is a public ready to lap up Part II. and Part III., but it is not the kind of fact we are proud to acknowledge. For Mr. McKenna has chosen to cater for those persons who have an insatiable appetite for the spicy crumbs that fall from the rich man's table—whose supreme happiness it would be, not to have to wait until the feast is over, but to be under the table or behind the door, all the time. Oh, to know more details! To have a fuller, completer account of what goes on when the press is excluded and the Court is not sitting! To hear what they were saying when that photograph was taken! Oh, to be told by one who really knows…. And here is the cue for Mr. McKenna; here is where he steps in with such a feast of old champagne corks, soiled gloves, ends of ‘goodish cork-tipped Turkish Régies’ and the like that, even without Lady Barbara Neave, daughter of Lord Crawleigh, ‘little Barbara,’ ‘Babs darling’ to her friends, ‘the haggard Venus’ to other friends and Lady Lilith to Val Arden, the table groans. But she is, after all, the occasion of the feast, the dish of the evening. Take any famous young Society beauty, daughter of one of the ‘great’ families, who at the age of seventeen has been everywhere, met everybody, read everything; who can sing, dance, play better than any professional; give her that fatal charm which knocks the stoutest of us off our legs; let her be so thin, hollow, white-cheeked, ring-eyed, that we ‘would not be surprised to hear she was consumptive’; let her be so wild, so untamed, so reckless that no man or woman can hold her; dip her in and out of poker-parties, scandals, coroners' courts, heavily scented mysterious tea parties—and you have Lady Lilith. She is the Social Paragraph blown into two hundred and ninety-four pages.

If Mr. McKenna's novels were witty, amusing, an aspect of the Human Comedy, or just nonsense—or even page 285 melodrama—we should not protest. But to butcher his gifts to make a Snob's Banquet is surely a very lamentable pastime. It would be interesting to know whether he has—a dozen, say—readers of his own sex.

With Mr. J. C. Snaith we continue to dwell in marble halls. His ‘Adventurous Lady’ is the daughter of a Marquis who changes places in the train with a poor little mouse of a governess. So that the governess goes to the Great House as Lady Elfreda, and the other goes to The Laurels as Miss Girlie Cass. Of course they were the same height, the same size; of course nobody at the Great House had ever met the Marquis's daughter, and being for the most part newly-rich (and insufferably stupid), they had no familiar standard by which to judge Girlie. And she had Pikey, Lady Elfreda's maid, a griffon of a female, who nevertheless was determined not to let the honour of the family suffer. The adventures are very little adventures and dreadfully dull. How poor Girlie was forced by Pikey to take off her woolly combinations and to submit to having her toe-nails cut before putting on the ravishing clothes of the other, does not, we confess, move us deeply. How the governess superbly ‘squashed’ her employers and won the heart of their guest, the General, does not surprise us. We knew it was bound to come; we knew Lord Duckingfield with his £60,000 a year was bound to marry the governess. We wished very much that Mr. Snaith had not bothered to tell us, especially when we remembered other and very different books of his.

Why is it that a spiritualist séance is—always the same séance? There are the same questions, the same medium, the same little awkwardness about the fee.

The table gave no answer, but swayed a little, suggesting uneasiness and indecision.

‘Repeat,’ said Lewis in a low voice, and Florence asked her question again. The result was the same.

‘The spirit,’ announced the medium, ‘wishes to page 286 make some statement. Call out the letters of the alphabet, please,’

‘A-B-C-D …” began Lewis, and went on until he got to ‘S,’ the table rapping after each letter.

We have read this kind of thing so often that it produces no impression at all. And yet Mr. Hamilton Fyfe in ‘The Widow's Cruse’ leads us to this scene as though the very heart of the joke were hidden in it. The truth is that by summoning the spirit of Everard he has caused his never-too-substantial novel to vanish into the vague. The idea which might have filled a story was never big enough for a novel; it had to be stretched very thin indeed to be made to cover such an expanse; it is many a time and oft at breaking-point before the final catastrophe. Florence, fluffy little tame cat of a woman, had never loved or understood Everard. When he died she was only too willing to marry Lewis Dane. But Dane discovered some manuscripts of his dead friend which, when published, raised such a flame of interest that Florence preferred to shine and to warm herself in the rosy reflected glow as ‘the well-known widow’ rather than to remarry. More, she reconstructed her late married life and posed as her husband's inspiration. Another woman disputes her claim, but Florence triumphs. Those little women always do—in their own little way—but it is hardly enough to make a book about.

Time is killed very softly, very mildly, by Mr. Birmingham. There is scarce enough of the sweet poison in ‘Inisheeny’ to render him unconscious, even. He nods while Mr. Birmingham's hero explains how he was in the orchard teaching his nephew Tommy to spray the pear trees with soap and water—but the old fellow needs a more potent charm to carry him past the nodding stage. Mr. Birmingham is famous, and rightly so, for his unfailing sense of humour. But his humour lacks temperature; it stands too often at normal. ‘Inisheeny’ would be a pleasant, nicely-rounded tale of an island off the coast of page 287 Ireland and a charming elderly parson and a professor and a boat and a girl and a boy—if only it were a little less mild. We are asked to take too much for granted. Now the professor might have been well worth listening to, and the parson might have been a whimsical semi-philosopher—but they don't talk. Instead of a long delectable conversation while they rock in the boat together, we are given an account of how Tommy and the girl ate biscuits and golden syrup. This episode should have provided a passing chuckle, to be followed by: ‘True,’ said the professor, ‘but according to Salmacius …’ They order these things better in Anatole France.

The time could not be riper for Mr. Shanks' novel of the English Revolution—and after. But is not ‘after’—the year of our Lord 2074—a trifle too far ahead? But having accepted the fact that Jeremy Tuft has remained in a state of suspended animation for so long, we do expect Mr. Shanks to do something better with him than to let him fall in love. A book of this kind is easy and delightful to plan, but extremely difficult to write. If Mr. Shanks had tapped a rich vein of invention and described existence as a thousand times more difficult, he would have set himself an easier task than this attempt to conjure up an England in which the railways are ceasing to run, and the window-panes have turned green again, and the huge and crudely spiced dishes are passed round the table. At England's head is the Speaker, an ancient who aspires to manufacture guns, and Mr. Shanks gets a little fun out of the idea. But it is the Speaker's daughter, and she has grown so dear—so dear to Jeremy Tuft, who cheats us of further adventures, and smooths the author's path for him. Love never changes. And yet—why is it that in all romances of this kind the females should be so formidable? One thinks of the Lady Eva, for instance, in her gown ‘straight from neck to hem,’ as at least nine foot high. And though she is a noble, selfless, loyal creature, strong as a lion and gentle as a lamb—what a terrifying bedfellow!

(November 5, 1920.)