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Novels and Novelists

A Set of Four

A Set of Four

The Countess of Lowndes Square; and Other Stories — By E. F. Benson

Just Open — By W. Pett Ridge
A Man of the Islands — By H. de Vere Stacpoole
Colour Blind — By S. P. B. Mais

Mr. Benson is a writer to whom, one imagines, everything comes in useful. He is a collector of scraps, snippets, patches, tid-bits, oddments, which give him such a great deal of pleasure that it is with the utmost confidence he displays his little collection to all the other guests in this immense rambling, very noisy and overcrowded hotel. He knows himself to be—his behaviour is that of—a favourite guest. ‘Mr. E. F. Benson is so popular—so entertaining.’ And so in his easy, effortless page 298 way out comes another book. Here, he even explains, you've got cats, cranks, spiritualistic séances, blackmailers —choose whichever you like; there's something for everybody. So down drops the knitting; the cards are put away; the picture paper is concealed behind a cushion for another time, and ‘The Countess of Lowndes Square’ is no doubt discovered to be just like Mr. Benson—most entertaining this time.

Reader! We are the forlorn guest on these occasions. We are that strange-looking person over in the corner who seems so out of everything and never will mix properly. Spare your knitting-needle; put up your paper-knife, sir. Do not stab us. It is not our fault that we look grim. It isn't pleasant to be bored. Will you believe us when we say we love smiling, we love to be amused? We always think, until faced by these occasions, that it takes too little to make us smile. But there is an atmosphere of bright chatter, of quick, animated glare which is warm South to Mr. Benson and his admirers while it freezes our risible folds.

… I had been asked by telephone just at luncheon-time as I was sitting down to a tough and mournful omelette alone, and I naturally felt quite certain that I had been bidden to take the place of some guest.

Or listen to the ‘adorable Agnes Lockett’:

… If Mrs. Withers had told me any more of what the great ones of the earth said to her in confidence, I should either have gone mad or taken up a handful of those soft chocolates and rubbed her face with them.

But it is perhaps hardly fair to take to pieces what the author himself calls ‘digestible snacks.’ This, we venture to suggest, should have been the title of the volume. And would it not be an admirable idea if there were a covering title for stories of the author's own description? ‘Snacks’ for instance, could hardly be improved upon. ‘Digestible Snacks’ is illuminating; it tells us exactly what we are buying.

page 299

We speak thus openly, for Mr. Benson confesses that in his opinion ‘the short story is not a lyre on which English writers thrum with the firm delicacy of the French, or with the industry of the American author.’ He opines that if the ten best short stories in the world were proclaimed they would be French stories; while if the million worst were brought together, they would be found to be written in America. Chi lo sa? as d'Annunzio's heroines were so fond of murmuring. But our eye wanders to the small green volumes of Turgeniev and Tchehov. Russia is evidently torn out of Mr. Benson's atlas.

A word as to the wrapper. It is of a young lady in a white dress with very flowing hair. Behind her is the Egyptian night; before, a pack of gibbering (in the story they are most particularly apish) apes. But the illustrator has drawn French poodles instead. This makes it very hard to understand why she looks so frightened.

‘Just Open,’ by Mr. Pett Ridge, is adapted for a railway journey on which the train stops at all the stations—one of those journeys when one is constantly rearranging one's knees, saying one does not mind at all having the golf-clubs thrown on to one's paper of violets, and swearing that it is not—and never was, thank God!—one's copy of The Daily Mirror on the floor. In these surroundings dips are all the reader is fit for, and dips are all that the author provides—they are sketches of little people who, entangled for ever in the net of circumstance, are yet alive enough to make some protest when they feel an extra jerk. There is a slight commotion, a swimming together, a lashing of tails, a wriggle or two. But it lasts only a minute; with the turn of the blank page there is calm…

The old theatrical star is tempted to go to see the show one night, and she is recognized and taken behind the scenes and made much of. Again she lifts the glass to her lips, but there is no wine. Just a breath, a sweetness—a memory that she sips—and then all is over. Well—mightn't that be a marvellous story? Isn't it one of the page 300 stories that we all keep, unwritten, to write some day, when we have realized more fully that moment, perhaps, when she steps out of the theatre into the cold indifferent dark, or perhaps, that moment when the light breaks along the edge of the curtain and the music sinks down, lower, lower, until the fiddles are sounding from under the sea? … But Mr. Pett Ridge gives us his version of it as though he expected it to be read between nine forty-five and ten-thirteen.

‘Poor old soul!’ we presume his admiring reader thinks, slapping her book together and asking her neighbour if he would mind not sitting on her coat any longer as this is her station and she can't afford to jump bodily out of her coat on to the platform? But is that tribute enough? Does that content the author? We wonder because there are ‘hints’ in several stories that lead us to believe he could, if he would, tell it all so differently.

Mr. de Vere Stacpoole, to judge by ‘A Man of the Islands,’ still believes he has only to shake a coral island at us to set us leaping. But we have cut our teeth on it so dreadfully often. We have counted the cocoanuts, discovered the square bottle half-buried in the deserted beach, and fished the lagoon of its last false pearl. The only episode that arrested our attention in this book was when Sigurdson saw the front end of Pilcher down on the coral, scrabbling along on its hands like a crab.

He'd been bitten off below the waist by a shark that had took him just as a child takes a piece of candy and bites it in two!

What a degradation is this when nothing less fearful will draw us to the ship's side! As to that slender, dark girl with the scarlet hibiscus flower behind her ear and her hand lifted in the familiar ‘Come to Motuaro’ gesture—she makes us almost inclined to signal ‘full steam ahead’ for the opposite direction. It is not enough to know that the fate of that great, strong man lay in those small, scented hands. What did he feel about it? Did he feel page 301 anything? Did they talk together? What did they share? How was his love for her different from his love for a white girl? … Or, if the question is all of the scenery, let us feel the strangeness of it. Sigurdson is a Dane. Did he have more of the feelings of an exile? Here, indeed, is our whole point about coral islands, dark blue seas and crescent beaches pale as the new moon. We will not be put off with pictures any longer. We ask that someone should discover the deeper strangeness for us, so that our imagination is not allowed to go starving while our senses are feasted.

There remains ‘Colour-Blind,’ a new novel with an old hero, by Mr. S. P. B. Mais. The hero is still that unsympathetic figure, the amorous schoolmaster.

She was mine, all mine for the taking! In that moment of triumph I forgot everything but the glory of her … but the moment passed and I braced myself to meet my great temptation. ‘Margey, dear,’ I began as gently as I could, ‘it won't do. Think.’

This is followed by little dinners ‘on the strict Q.T.’ with the fair Evelyn in a yellow osprey—to be followed again by the blackboards and Smith minor next morning.

But it is not until little Joan, fragile in her pyjamas, crept into his arms that Jimmy knew the greatest night of his life. Here is Mr. Mais at his brightest, best, most fanciful.

Jimmy has rung for the chambermaid, who came in ‘smiling.’

‘We're going to have our breakfast in bed as a special treat,’ I said. ‘Grown-up people don't think it a treat because the crumbs get all mixed up with their bed-clothes, but that'll be all the greater fun for us. We've run away, and we want to do all the things we shouldn't be allowed to do at school.’

Was the chambermaid still smiling at the end of that page 302 speech, we wonder, and didn't she guess the hero's vocation without his telling her he had run away from it?

(November 26, 1920.)