Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Novels and Novelists

Echoes

Echoes

The Tall Villa — By Lucas Malet

‘But I haven't been alone.’

And even this meagre morsel of confession eased; so that there she would, how gladly, have let things rest. For all the encompassing of a thorough and detailed confidence sprang glaringly into evidence directly her cousin made that attemptedly rallying answer: ‘Not alone, darling Fan? So very much the better—but how exciting! And who, if I'm not too impertinently inquisitive in asking, was your much-to-be-envied guest?’

‘Ah, my dear, if I could tell you,’ Frances, after an instant's hesitation, said as she rose, all of a piece, to her feet….

This quotation from ‘The Tall Villa,’ though nicely typical of the author's latest style of writing is, we assure the reader, a by no means extravagant example. For the page 202 first fourteen pages we are not particularly conscious of any peculiarity, but then with a sentence that finishes: ‘so that there really remained to her, as means of locomotion, only bus, Underground, the elusive taxi or her own slender, high-instepped feet,’ this vague reminiscent perfume, as the author might say, begins to unbottle itself. On page forty-one the odour is become so pungent that we do not know whether to laugh or to cry. The heroine, startled by a sound which she takes for a pistol shot and her husband for a motor tyre, is in his arms. He is observing her eyes which are wide open.

Not as he felt that they foolishly or affectedly stared, least of all stared at him—he could, indeed, have put up with a far larger share of their glances, which were notably exquisite just now to his thinking—but searched, looking through, rather than at, all objects presented to them, as though striving to wrest an answer, wrest knowledge, from some not readily penetrable medium.

This is the second short novel within the past three weeks which is an experiment in the manner of Henry James, but while Mrs. Sedgwick dipped her pen with a kind of fastidious caution in the outer edge of the illustrious ink-pot, our present author finds restraint extremely difficult. We are not certain even now whether she means us to take her au grand sérieux. Her Frances Copley, poor pale lady in her silver and greys, playing the piano every afternoon to the ghost of an exquisite young man who haunts her drawing-room, is far too shadowy to be real, and Charlie Montagu, the bloated monster who has assisted her husband, slapping his thigh and crying ‘Congrats,’ is immensely too substantial to be anything but a bad caricature. And yet the last page, ending on a note of high tragedy, contains one convincing paragraph which the author could hardly have written if she had not meant us to be carried away.

(June 11, 1920.)