Orchestra and Solo

Peter Jackson — By Gilbert Frankau
The Dark River — By Sarah Gertrude Millin

In the old untroubled days before the Great Hunting, when London—Heart of Empire—still allowed her sleeping children to be served with meat and drink by spies, murderers, pimps and panders, before the Spirit of England was awake, while yet the Sea, which is England's mother, and Thames, who is the father of England (‘and these twain mate in London Pool for all the world to see’), were the playground of youth, in—let us be honest—the stale old days before 1914, Peter Jackson was a cigar merchant with an almost passionate interest in cigarettes, and Patricia, his wife, was his pal. Not more than that? Reason cried (for she was the daughter of Dr. Heron Baynet, brain specialist, Harley Street, who had taught her to think): ‘Is not that enough?’ Instinct whispered ‘No.’ They had three thousand a year, a house in Lowndes Square, five servants, two children, a governess. Life was made up of family parties, theatre-going, a summer holiday, mornings at home and afternoons at the skating rink, and yet—and yet—all was not well with Patricia. She was thirty, and she wanted something more. As for Peter, he was too absorbed in business to page 156 think of Life. He thought in terms of cigars, he dreamed in cigarettes. It was not that money quâ money mattered so much—it was that Peter Jackson could not bear to be a failure. ‘Weaklings to the wall, to the strong man the fruits of his brain….’

But while Patricia, still unaware of matehood denied, wondered, and the tide in Peter's affairs rose and rose, the ‘Beasts in gray, murder, rape and plunder in their swinish eyes,’ came out of their lair and roared so that civilization might hear. For a month and three days Peter Jackson refused to answer the ‘eternal Questioning,’ tried to ignore ‘the khaki blossoming now like a brown flower at every street corner.’ But one evening, after dinner, after telling his wife a little of what giving up the cigarettes would mean to him, he made her see—‘her eyes kindled at the prospect’—that he must go. And from that moment Patricia's problem was solved, her cup was full and brimming. For now she loved him utterly, beyond friendship. ‘At a word she had become his mate, his woman to do with as he would.’ But from Peter Jackson these things were hidden.

On the strength of having been at one time Corporal Jackson of the Eton Dog-potters Peter got a commission, and gradually, with a man's job to his hand, the city faded. He became absorbed in the care of his men.

… These men! For of the officers one does not write. The well-educated, the well-off, the comfortable classes must needs defend the country from which they draw their riches and their education, and he who did not do it—voluntarily, without compulsion or fear of compulsion—whatever his fancied responsibilities to his profession, to his business, to his house, to his women or his children, is surely anathema maranatha, the moral leper, the pariah among his kind….

Can we not hear, dear reader, an echo of the applause which the Peters and Patricias of that time would have lavished upon such words?

page 157

Nevertheless, throughout the year's training before he left for France, Peter was troubled by business; there was a big drop on the cigars, and, bitterer still, the cigarettes had to go. Patricia saw his suffering.

She suffered, and suffered damnably…. She even grew to resent her own children, their perpetual ‘Daddy's going to France to kill Germans.’ But neither the mate nor the mother in Patricia flinched as pal or as playmate; she did her duty, laughter on her lips, gold head high.

Mr. Gilbert Frankau has called his novel a romance of married life. But why not of war—dreadful, bloody, glorious, stinking, frightful, magnificent war? The middle of his novel is, if one examines it, nothing but a roaring hymn in praise of killing, for killing is the Job of Jobs. True, poor bloody Tommy was blown to bits, men went mad, died in their thousands, filled the lamentable night with their shrieks and groans, but according to Mr. Frankau they died a man's death, and little children to-day, who look with wistful eyes upon their father's sword, may be taught to hope.

His hero came out of it with shell shock, neurasthenia, the fear of consumption, a broken man, enfin—but only for the time. In the country house that Patricia had ‘made’ for him, thanks to Heron Baynet, brain specialist, he soon recovered, and, cigars and cigarettes thrown to the winds, fell in love with his wife. The war had been unto him and unto that woman whom he took for his mate a cleansing fire. And (courage, mes enfants, courage) in a vision that comes to Peter's cousin God promises that:

Never while earth endured would the Beast utterly perish: for God had created the Beast [Germany] even as he had created Man [the Allies] to subdue the Beast. Without this menace of the Beast, man's finest attribute—the very manhood of him—would atrophy. He would become flabby, emasculate; and in his flabbiness he would perish….

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Well, Mr. Frankau knows his public and we know it too. ‘Peter Jackson’ will go the round of that vast family the Hun-Haters, and the men will say: ‘Stout chap, that writing fellow,’ and the women: ‘My dear, it is too marvellous for words—it brings all the old thrill back again.’ But we find ourselves wishing that he had kept his talent in a napkin rather than put it to such uses.

To read ‘The Dark River’ is, after so much wind and brass, to listen to a solo for the viola. Running through the book there is, as it were, a low, troubled throbbing note which never is stilled. Were that note more deliberate—not louder, or more forced, but, musically speaking, firmer—it would be a great deal more effective. This low, throbbing note is essential to Mrs. Millin's novel; and we must be very certain it is there, for though the story plays above and below it, that which gives it significance and holds our attention is the undertone. Perhaps a novel is never the novel it might have been, but there are certain books which do seem to contain the vision, more or less blurred or more or less clear, of their second selves, of what the author saw before he grasped the difficult pen. ‘The Dark River’ is one of these. Very often, when Mrs. Millin just fails to make her point, we feel it is not because she does not appreciate the point that is to be made, but because she is so aware of it herself that she takes it for granted on the part of the reader. It is a fascinating, tantalizing problem, how much an author can afford to leave out without robbing the characters of the ‘situation’; but that is not quite Mrs. Millin's difficulty; she has rather misjudged a little what she has ‘put in.’

The scene of the novel is South Africa, and the first nine chapters describe the life of John Oliver, diamond digger. It may seem, as the story unfolds itself and is found to be not so much concerned with John Oliver as with the Grant family, and Alma Grant in particular, that these chapters are disproportionately long, but Mrs. Millin knew what she was about when she wrote them. page 159 They give a sudden view of a country and of an experience that the Grants could not understand, even though they lived in its very midst. But the heart of the book is Alma Grant and how she, who seemed so made for life, somehow just missed life, just missed the fineness of everything. This girl waiting, at first because she could so well afford to wait—the best was bound to be kept for her—and then gradually realizing that, after all, others had pushed in front of her, they were choosing and taking and sharing, until there was nothing for her—nothing but Van Reede—is an unusual and fascinating character.