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Two Novels of Worth

Christopher and Columbus — By the author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’
What Not — By Rose Macaulay

If one pauses to consider the nature of that very considerable number of novels concerned with the fortunes of young females who fly out of the home nest, one is almost tempted to believe that they are written by the forsaken parents themselves. The mind conjures up a vision of those solitary ones sitting by the bedside of their wounded pride, and distracting it from its pains with these horrific tales of the torments and disasters which must inevitably overtake the bold, guilty stray. Who else would find the same gloomy relish in making the very worst of it—in picturing a path one simply cannot see for lions? Who else would dare to end upon that lullaby note—with such a sting in it!—the peaceful, happy ending with the good simple man whom she might, far more suitably and comfortably, have met in her own mother's drawing-room?

One likes to think that the escaped children are too happy to bother about proving their parents to be wrong. Nevertheless, one does wish sometimes that their song was not quite without words. True, no bird, however golden, flies fully fledged from the nest up into the sun. But trying your wings, so long as you are perfectly certain that you have wings to try, so long as you are confident that you fall only to rise again, and that all these little essays and flutters are but the prelude to exquisite flight, need not of necessity be tragic.

Christopher and Columbus, the twin orphans and heroines of ‘Elizabeth's’ novel, are, indeed, the most unconscious but radiant little proofs to the contrary, in spite of the fact that they do not fly of their own accord, but are quite unmercifully thrown at a tender age, at just seventeen, with their hair still in gold and silver pigtails page 6 and with ‘perambulator faces,’ from England to America, in the middle of the war, by that loyal British citizen their Uncle Arthur.

It is true, the poor man had provocation. For although they had been brought up to love England and Milton and Wordsworth above all other loves by their mother, Uncle Arthur's sister-in-law, they were the children of a German father, a von Twinkler. And whenever they opened their mouths, which was very often, out their disgraceful r's came rolling right under the infinitely suspicious and patriotic noses of Uncle Arthur's friends. This was not to be borne; Uncle Arthur did not bear it. He equipped them with two introductions, two hundred pounds and two second-class fares, and sent them flying. The delightful miracle is that, helped by Mr. Twist, of Twist's Non-Trickier Teapot fame, from the very first moment they flew.

We shudder to think what might have happened had the twins not been twins, but Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas rolled into one, and had Mr. Twist not been ‘a born mother.’ America certainly did not help them. That great heart beat very fast and hard at the sight of their innocence and childish unbroken courage, but curiosity, suspicion and the tingling air of scandal set it going; America turned her broad back, but looked over her shoulder and coldly, frigidly stared. So well is the devastating quality of that glance conveyed that it might serve as a warning never to go to America with nothing but your own watery reflection in the mirror for prop and comfort, for a shadow twin, as it were, and never to find yourself in America with a young man who does not glory, as Mr. Twist gloried, in the fact of his being a mother.

But, after all, when the triumph of the twins is complete even to wedding bells, these two advantages, great as they are, do not explain it wholly. Above and through everything runs their laughter—their laughing comment upon the grown-up world and its ways. And this it is which is irresistible.

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We are still very dazed, very dumb and stiff after the four years' winter sleep; the winter has lasted too long; our sleep has been like death. We are dazed creatures, ‘lizards of convalescence,’ creeping back into the sun. And then, in the quiet, we hear Christopher and Columbus laughing—laughing at everything. Is it not cruel to make merry after such a winter? But they themselves are spring. Round-eyed and even a little unsteady, they wander among these preposterous grown-ups, the big, fat, cold-blooded ones and the lean elderly prying ones, never dreaming that these same grown-ups could, in an instant, turn—not into lions, perhaps, but into malignant toads and spiders.

‘Elizabeth’ appreciates their danger, for the minds of toads and spiders are open books to her. But having them by heart, she, with her delicate impatient pen, is not in the least tempted to make a solemn copy of them. All that she wants she can convey with a comment—at a stroke. There is a whole volume for one of our psychological authors in Mr. Twist's quarrel with his mother; she dismisses it in a little chapter.

And therein perhaps lies her value as a writer; she is, in the happiest way, conscious of her own particular vision, and she wants no other. She is so enchanted with the flowers growing in the path she has chosen that she has not, as the twins might say, a ‘single eye to spare’ for her neighbours. In a world where there are so many furies with warning fingers it is good to know of someone who goes on her way finding a gay garland, and not forgetting to add a sharp-scented spray or two and a bitter herb that its sweetness may not cloy.

‘What Not,’ Miss Rose Macaulay's brilliant little comedy, is played in a vastly different world. One does not dream of questioning the large freedoms enjoyed by the heroine, Miss Kitty Grammont; one can only admire her excellent control of them. Dare we hope that this fascinating creature is the fore-runner of the business woman, the ‘political’ woman, the woman whose page 8 business it is to help to govern the country? Miss Macaulay presents us to her when she is attached to the Ministry of Brains—a vast organization which has been started after the war to control, stimulate, reward and punish the brains of the nation, and to safeguard the intellects of the Great Unborn. The wonderful system of classification with which we have become so familiar serves this time a twofold purpose; it not only registers the mental category of every man and woman in England, it also tells him or her whom to marry and whom not to marry. Miss Grammont, whose brains were of the highest order, was classified ‘A’; but the Minister of Brains, for all his brilliant powers, was uncertificated for matrimonial purposes because of mental deficiency in his family. He was ‘A’ (Deficiency), and thereby hangs the tale. Moving spirits though they are of Brains Week, the Mental Progress Act, the Mind Training Bill and the great Explanation Campaign, they find their official co-partnership inadequate, and as though these obstacles were nothing more than convenient stiles to lean across, like any simple two, they fall in love. Realizing ‘it will come out as certainly as flowers in spring or the Clyde engineers next week,’ they marry. And it does come out. The dreadful truth wrecks the Ministry of Brains and ruins their careers, but leaves them ‘laughing ruefully.’

This is the bare theme from which Miss Macaulay composes her ingenious and delightful variations. Although one feels her fertility of invention is so great that nothing would be easier for her than to obtain an ‘easy effect,’ it is their chief excellence that each one is as unexpected as the last. It is only in the enjoyment of Miss Macaulay's nice sense of humour, matched with her fine, sensitive style, that one realizes how rarely the two qualities are found together. We are so accustomed to the horse without the rider, roaming very free, or the rider very desperate, looking for the horse.