On the Road

Pilgrims of Circumstances — By G. B. Burgin

‘Pilgrims of Circumstances’ is Mr. Burgin's fifty-ninth novel. We have not read the fifty-eight which preceded it, but, if we may judge by this one, the author is not concerned with anything more serious than to amuse, or, perhaps it were truer to say, to distract his readers. For a long acquaintance with pastime novels forces us to make the distinction between amusement and distraction. By far the greater number of them aim at nothing more positive than a kind of mental knitting—the mind of the reader is grown so familiar with the pattern that the least possible effort is demanded of it, and yet this ravel of wool is just enough to keep one from facing those grim uncomfortable creatures who are only too ready to stare one out of countenance.

O Life! why is it that so many of thy children are homeless, for ever doomed to have a little time to spare between the stages of the tedious journey? What can they do? They cannot spend the time staring out of windows. Is there nothing to go to see or hear or buy? Are there no books? Up and down the miles and miles page 164 of bookstalls range the uneasy travellers. There are so many books that the cities are darkened, the country is buried, the sky is blotted out by them. And somewhere on the shelves there are Mr. Burgin's fifty-eight novels, and a hand hovers, slipping in the fifty-ninth.

‘It must be wonderful to write novels,’ says somebody. ‘It must be the most wonderful feeling, even if you don't take it desperately seriously, to be able to sit down and first create a small world of your very own, where anything can happen that you choose to let happen, where the most enchanting beings can meet one another. There needn't be a soul in it whom you don't want; you can just, being God, remove people by one of those dreadfully unfair “Acts of God.” I think the moment you sit down to a fresh notebook and decide whom you'll have and where you'll put them must be more thrilling even than sitting down to a Bulb Catalogue….’ Well, let us see whom Mr. Burgin, after fifty-eight essays, has chosen: … the comic landlady, the swearing parrot, the ranting old actor roaring of Shakespeare and whiskey glasses, the handsome young man whom the bright girl loves, but whom the reckless beautiful woman, married to a brute of a husband, adores.

… ‘Mrs. Pipples, I'm not sure, but I think I'm on my legs again.’

‘I'm glad to hear it, sir. And though I'm a widow woman as says it, you don't offen see such legs as yours, sir.’

… Polly screaming another comprehensive oath that would have delighted the soul of a buccaneer.

… Said the Wreck sarcastically … ‘I have a devilish thirst upon me which is but partially slaked.’

… She turned for a moment, faced him, then walked slowly down the mossy path, an occasional sunbeam filtering … upon her beautiful face and equally beautiful hair.

… ‘Take me away from him. I would be your page 165 slave, your mistress, anything to get away from the awful degradation of my present life.’

Breathes the reader who, furnished with these quotations, could not imagine ‘Pilgrims of Circumstance’ for himself? But that is not the question. Come, let us begin at the beginning and go on to the end, and then stop. Let us discover that there are even two comic landladies and the second is called Mrs. Wanks, and she lives at daggers drawn with Mrs. Pipples. Let us hear how the parrot uses ‘un'oly langwidge’ to the butcher. Softly—softly, dear reader, and perhaps by the time we have finished, and if we are still waiting, Mr. Burgin will have made the grand choice again, and his sixtieth volume will be ready for our empty hands.