Alms

The Marbeck Inn — By Harold Brighouse
Lighting-up Time — By Ivor Brown

No, no; our case is not really as desperate as this great number of authors would seem to believe. We are not standing on the back-door step with an empty bag, ready for anything as you may care to part with, sir; we are not sitting at the window of the dead drawing-room, wondering whether the couple on the opposite pavement is engaged or married or likely to be engaged and married. It is true that we have a lean and hungry look, but, oh, that our sympathetic entertainers would realize it is not to be changed by the crusts and the leavings they are so boundlessly willing to bestow! Nothing will satisfy us page 179 but to be invited as guests to the whole rich banquet—but to feel that our host is, for the wonderful time, our new discovered and yet mysterious friend.

We open novel after novel, we turn page after page, and there are the authors rummaging in dusty cupboards, turning over heaps of discarded garments to find something to fling at us; but our pity for their misguided impulse is shot with suspicion at the sight of so much cheerfulness. Can it be—is it possible that they are enjoying themselves? We can understand the noble satisfaction derived from the performance of an act of charity, but the confidence, the buoyancy, the assurance which is the keynote of these novels is different and tempts us to cry, ‘Danger.’ It is so fatally easy, in giving away what one does not need, to delude oneself that the gift really, after all, is no mean one—to find as one brings it into the light and dusts it down and hands it over a quite surprising freshness and newness. How otherwise are we to account for the ‘air’ with which Mr. Brighouse and Mr. Ivor Brown present their heroes, Sam Branstone of ‘The Marbeck Inn’ and Peter Penruddock of ‘Lighting-up Time’?

Now Sam Branstone was the son of a railway porter and a strong, silent mother. He lived in a mean street in the city of Manchester. In Chapter I. we are told how, through his saving a boy's life, the father of the rescued boy gives Sam his first start in life by sending him to the Grammar School. He is ambitious, and his mother is ambitious for him.

You are to picture Anne, with her forty years of a working woman's life behind her, wrestling with algebra and trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic, and by some mental freak, successful…. Day after day, in the intervals of cooking, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books which so puzzled him…. She had no education in particular, nothing but a general capacity and a monstrous will….

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So with, his mother's aid he succeeds at school, and leaves to enter the office of an estate agent.

Meantime, he grew in knowledge of the world, and education came to Sam, not in the cloistered freedom of the Isis, but where in Manchester he went collecting rents…. His eye for the main chance had always a useful squint which could see money round the corner as well as on the straight high road….

In course of time Sam falls in love with Ada, ‘whose intimate clothing was flannelette,’ and marries her against his mother's will. He makes money by scoring off persons, institutions and things, and finally owns a publishing business. The mud of Manchester, we are told, is thick upon him. Enter Effie, a real woman who determines to save him, to rid him of the mud and to reveal him a sparkling Sam, which she accomplishes by taking him away with her to the Marbeck Inn, sacrificing herself to him, and making him bathe in pools and rivers and tarns and all places where water is, that the physical act of cleansing may be unto him a symbol. She succeeds, but not before there has been a struggle between the lawful wife of Sam and his mother, who reappears upon the scene to wrestle with more complicated algebraical problems. And the end is Marbeck Inn again with the prospect of an infant Samuel.

‘There you are. That's Sam. That's Sammy Branstone for you,’ cries Mr. Brighouse, handing us this lifeless figure in a frock coat with a moustache that droops over his mouth. ‘And there's Anne. There's Sam's mother. There's a woman for you,’ he declares, setting down before us a pair of elastic-sided boots, an umbrella and a black bonnet. But his generosity does not stop at that. He goes on measuring yard upon yard of Manchester goods until—we had rather go empty-handed away than burdened with such a parcel.

Mr. Ivor Brown's charitable dole takes the form of a theatrical novel. It tells how Peter Penruddock took pity page 181 on Mary Maroon, an actress whose success was on the wane, and engaged himself as her advance agent for a tour in the provinces. We have no doubt, of course, that the tour is going to be a remarkable success, owing to the remarkable ingenuity of Peter. There will be occasional setbacks: Monday nights which are ‘frosty,’ little difficulties among the company, occasional displays of the familiar theatrical jealousy, and so on. We are not in the least surprised when a Lord appears on the scene, but we are mildly surprised at his immense importance in the author's eyes. There is also an Honourable Cynthia who has had a family scrap with her papa and is come to Peter for a job.

‘I wasn't constructed for use. You see, I was educated at a most frightfully expensive school…. I believe it cost hundreds to get through the doors….’

‘Did you get your money's worth?’

‘I learned comportment,’ she said, and, putting her legs against the fireplace, lit another cigarette.

‘Not a blue stocking then?’

‘No, black milanese. Of course the price is awful, but then the cheap ones ladder straight away.’

Here is a typical example of Mr. Brown's humour. After sampling it the reader will not be surprised to know he makes play with tinned salmon and boarding-house ham and a bottle of stout, and that there is a comic liftboy and …

But enough. Were we the beggars that these authors and their kind suppose us to be, we should not weep and make our moan for what we lack, but for what is ungrudgingly, unblushingly thrust upon us.