Sans Merci

The Tender Conscience — By Bohun Lynch

To be a young man with agreeable manners, a tender heart, a large unearned income, and a passion for nothing in particular, is to be a young man doomed…. Here he comes, sauntering along the sunny side, laughing, looking his fill at the queer things and the delightful things displayed, making friends at a glance, sunning himself, wondering as he jingles the money whether or no he shall spend it, and blissfully unaware of Life, peering at him from behind the lifted blind, waiting for the moment when, all at once, some one's shouting, he's been cheated, he's being page 64 accused, they are pointing at him, the sun's gone in. Until there comes a grim figure to lead him away and she lets the blind fall, muttering in her wicked old triumph: ‘I knew it. I could have told you from the moment I set eyes on him….’

This is an everyday occurrence in fiction as well as in life. But while we do not expect the victim to know, at any rate until long after the event, how or why he was captured, we do ask of our author that he should have been on the spot and the witness of every slightest move. Here, surely, is his golden opportunity of engaging our sympathetic attention, of conveying to us the innocence or the stupidity of his hero, of, at least, presenting him to us in the very centre of the stage, and making us feel how tremendously important it is that he should escape.

Mr. Lynch, who has chosen this theme for ‘The Tender Conscience,’ withholds the account of his young hero's capture until chapter seven. Then he relates it, retrospectively, we must confess, to our extreme confusion. The book opens with an account of the convalescence after shell-shock of Jimmy Guise at his sister's home in the country. Bathing, and chopping down trees, and playing with the houseful of small children bores Jimmy's wife, who wants—‘London, chocolates—and some cushions … and papers first thing in the morning, and air raids, I expect.’ So back her adoring husband goes, and because there is a war on, he, who has never done a stroke of work in his life, enters a Government department—again for Blanche's sake.

… Blanche with her lovely helplessness, her charming ennui, her delicious clothes, her exquisite refinement, her loveliness.

Time passes. With the death of one of his friends at the front Jimmy is reminded of a very horrible episode which happened before he and Blanche were ‘properly’ married. They had supper one Boat-Race Night with three of Jimmy's friends, and under the influence of the page 65 wine, he confessed that Blanche was not really his wife. Blanche had never noticed, but ever since then, ‘for her sake,’ he has been haunted—which brings us to chapter seven and the episode in Athens where Jimmy, travelling alone, picks up with a guide who gives him the history of the little lady with dark-red hair married to an obese old Greek. The guide does not spare her, even to a description of how he'd met her in London when she had a ‘very fine mash,’ and there is no hint that the lady is anything but bored. But fine, sensitive, lovable, chivalric Jimmy is determined to save her, and she to catch him. They engage a lawyer (the old Greek is only too willing), and while the entanglement is dissolved they live together in Provence and Paris and London. Thus, to the dismay of all his friends, is Jimmy captured by a woman who, for all that bewildering description of her charms, does not want a home, hates children, enjoys the society of women of filthy reputations, and talks in this strain:

‘I must finish that fatuous book. Such tripe you never! I think I shall slip on a cloak and go for a walk, and I shall probably get off with a nice young man.’

He suggests she should accompany him, and she is agreeable. ‘It's no good being so mighty particular in these days—so long as I don't meet hairy men who smell of beer.’

Frankly, there is not a single hint given why this promiscuous little rowdy should ever have captured this young man; and the idea that she should care whether four young men knew she was not church-married is so preposterous that Jimmy in his agony becomes a figure in the laughing-stocks of our imagination. Mr. Lynch cannot pretend there is a key in such a prison-door; there is indeed no prison—but only a lady with orchids, who never ought to have been there, disappearing to the right, and a thin girl with a baby carriage entering timid.