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Novels and Novelists

Dea Ex Machina

Dea Ex Machina

A Man and His Lesson — By W. B. Maxwell

Those readers who are accustomed to, and, indeed, confess a fondness for, the delicate preliminaries of a performance—the light rush of arpeggios, the few page 79 inquiring chords, the little silence—will find themselves strangely shaken and surprised by the first chapter of ‘A Man and his Lesson.’ Alas, poor souls! they will barely have settled themselves, barely have furled their fans and opened their programmes before p. 14, and there is the hero standing up and bowing, the heroine looking back at him from the doorway, kissing the tips of her fingers, their grande passion, that only began on p. 5, enjoyed and resigned, and the first item on the programme, in fact, over and done with.

Certainly, the circumstances were exceptional. Bryan Vaile, playwright and barrister, did not start life until the age of thirty-three. ‘Till then all had been colourless.’ Then, for no reason he could explain, the world smiled and he plunged—into the blue-blooded sea of London aristocracy. The mermaid, the siren who lifted a white arm to him, was Diana Kenion, the greatest beauty and the most celebrated young woman in Mayfair. Tall, slender, exquisite—a nymph in blue gauze, charming the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, painters and poets, alike, she had but to beckon. After being with her ‘he was like a mortal emptied and exhausted by divine excesses. He was not an ordinary young man going home to bed—he had fallen from Olympian heights….’

But she cannot understand why he has not a telephone. He has one installed. And sometimes she rings him up very early in the morning, and ‘while he listened he thought of her standing with sandled feet among daffodils … with the sunbeams touching her bare arm and neck…’ And her telephone? Or late at night when ‘he heard her give a little sigh that was like a breath of air in the foliage of the dark grove where she was lying down to rest.’ With her telephone? And she cannot understand why he has no money. If he had made a real success…. ‘Oh, how I would shove you along!’ But he has not made it and she loves money, so ‘Good-bye’ it must be, and ‘Good-bye’ it is.

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With the exit of Diana the pace becomes more normal. The scene is Bournemouth and the heroine is Mabel, warm and plump and brown. This time he is her Diana, her hero, her knight who cuts the cords that bind the young girl to the tree, and he treats her as Diana had treated him. No, for at heart he is ‘not a bad sort really,’ and so they marry, and acquire children, money, success, a house in Regent's Park and quite a number of friends. ‘On a warm July Sunday there would be sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty or two hundred people in the garden.’ We do not know to what extent Mabel and Bryan enjoyed these parties, but the author simply cannot tear himself away. ‘The Man and his Lesson’ fade and are forgotten while he shows us round the garden, introducing, explaining, and crying the delightful news that ‘Mr. Odo Mainz, the composer, with his wife and clever, charming daughters, came frequently, but never as frequently as his hosts would wish,’ etc., until, nobly sacrificing his enjoyment, he produces ‘on a patch of gravel in front of the verandah’ Diana again, now the wife of the Duke of Middlesborough.

But this time there is Mabel, the sanctity of home life, his reputation, the good opinion of London's dramatic critics to be considered; Diana has to use her telephone quite desperately before he is won back. Four days and nights of bliss, and he returns to Mabel and the children a ruined man, determined to take veronal before his disgrace is made known. But in that dark hour the housemaid brings in the Daily Mail—and war is declared between England and Germany. Hurrah for August, 1914! He is saved. Off he goes to be honourably killed. Off he goes to the greatest of all garden parties—and this time there is no doubt as to his enjoying himself. War has its black side, but the lessons—the lessons it teaches a man! Where else shall a man learn the value of brotherly love, the wisdom and friendliness of the generals at the Base, the beauty of Mr. Lloyd George's phrase ‘the War to end war,’ the solid worth page 81 and charm of a London restaurant, a London club, a London theatre? Diana died while the garden party was at its liveliest, and Vaile was thus freed to live, to be wounded, to confess his fault to Mabel, and to be forgiven. So, after having ‘come out again to the grand old task,’ to ‘strike another blow for England and the cause,’ Bryan Vaile is free to go home, having learned his last and greatest lesson, which is never to answer the telephone again.

(September 26, 1919.)