The Case of Mr. Newte

The Extra Lady — By Horace W. C. Newte

The case of Mr. Horace W. C. Newte is a strange one. In spite of the fact that three million pairs of eyes devoured ‘Sparrows,’ ‘The Extra Lady’ is, we confess, page 260 the first of his novels that we have read. Brilliant paper covers on the bookstalls satisfied our curiosity by telling us (so we imagined) all there was to know in their would-be ensnaring sub-titles—‘The Story of an Unprotected Girl’ or ‘The Story of a Tense Human Passion.’ These conjured up a vision of certain theatrical posters of provincial melodrama—girls in the act of being chloroformed and spirited away in malignant-looking cabs by auburn-haired villains in check riding breeches, or, in the case of that Tense Human Passion, two tailors' dummies—en costume de bal—embracing between a red lamp and a fan. But while we are aware that it is the fashion nowadays among our higher intelligentsia to find in these exhibitions something exquisitely amusing, we must confess, for our part, that to ‘discover’ them deliberately does seem to us to take the edge off their humour. And so we have passed Mr. Newte by.

To read ‘The Extra Lady’ is, however, to realize that its author cannot be dismissed as a maker of melodrama. For some not easily discoverable reason he has chosen to cloak, to partly disguise his remarkable talent in the ‘regulation get-up’; he is the professional writer as one speaks of the professional actor—the real right-down ‘pro’ who knows the whole affair from A to Z and is never for a moment unconscious of his audience. And since what the great dependable public care about is ‘a good plot,’ a good sound plot they shall have with a happy ending at all costs—‘quite regardless,’ in fact.

His performance is as good as his promise, but the affair, as they say, does not end there. Mr. Newte's talents come issuing forth from that stage ink-pot, they seize on that flowing pen and impose their will upon it. There are chapters, scenes, episodes, in ‘The Extra Lady’ when a whole peculiar world—the world of Mr. Newte the artist—is shadowed forth, and we are made astonishingly aware of his possession and knowledge of it. His strange, fantastic figures whose lives are spent in the corridors of life, in the dressing-rooms, at the stage-door, whose sole page 261 ambition is a good part, and yet whose reply to Mary's question to poor Lehel: ‘Are you on the stage?’ would have to be his: ‘Infrequently—infrequently’ … refuse to be kept within bounds. They talk, they weep, they drink too much, they spend half their lives trying to find somebody who will listen to the secret (which eats them away and is yet their pride) of how they went on the stage and yet never need have gone. They are terrified of the future, but it is never out of their sight. Dark, lean, impoverished, it follows on their heels; it has a trick of leaping and suddenly rushing forward.

If we followed Mr. Newte's plan of pointing the moral, we should say that ‘The Extra Lady’ proved the danger of unselfishness when it is carried too far—it may be a form of weakness, an indulgence which will be the ruin of the lives it sets out to save.

But a fig for Mr. Newte's plan! Why can he not leave the moral alone? What he has very nearly succeeded in doing is giving us an imaginative study of a girl called Mary Bray, who is persuaded that she owes it to her family to go on the stage to ‘keep the home together,’ and who spends all the best years of her life gradually, terribly, giving way, learning the boundless extent of her folly and its everlasting consequences, and in the process becoming unfitted either to withstand those consequences or to accept them. If he had left her on the side of the road, crying bitterly, holding her shabby collapsible basket….

How dare that motor-car come along with its eighty-thousand a year inside—how dare it! We should understand Mr. Newte if we knew.