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When Winter Comes to Main Street, a non-fiction book by Grant Martin Overton |
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Chapter 16. An Armful Of Novels, With Notes On The Novelists |
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_ CHAPTER XVI. AN ARMFUL OF NOVELS, WITH NOTES ON THE NOVELISTS =i= "The quiet, the calm, the extreme individualism, and the easy-going self-content of my birthplace and early habitat--the Eastern Shore of Maryland, have been, I fear, the dominating influences of my life," writes Sophie Kerr. "Thank heaven, I had a restless, energetic, and very bad-tempered father to leaven them, a man with a biting tongue and a kind heart, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a passion for honesty in speech and action. I, the younger of his two children, was his constant companion. I tagged after him, every day and all day. Even when I was very small he interested me--and very few fathers ever really interest their children. "The usual life of a girl in a small semi-Southern town was mine. I learned to cook, I made most of my own frocks, I embroidered excessively, I played the violin worse than any other person in the world, I went away to college and I came back again. I wasn't a popular girl socially for two reasons. I had inherited my father's gift of sarcasm, and there was the even greater handicap of a beautiful, popular, socially malleable older sister. Beside her I was nowhere. "But I wanted to write, so I didn't care. I got my father to buy me a second-hand typewriter, and learned to run it with two fingers. And I wrote. I even sold some of the stuff. The Country Gentleman bought one of my first stories, and the Ladies' World bought another. This was glorious. "Then I got a job on the Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegraph, an afternoon newspaper owned by Senator Oliver. Later I went to The Gazette-Times, the morning paper also owned by the Senator. A few years later I came to New York and found a place on the staff of the Woman's Home Companion, eventually becoming Managing Editor. Two years ago I resigned my editorial job to give all my time to writing. Of course I had been writing pretty steadily anyway, but holding my job too. "I had expected, when I gave up office work, to find my leisure time an embarrassment. I planned so many things to do, how I would see all my friends often, how I would travel, read, do all sorts of delightful things that double work had before made impossible. But I've done none of them. I haven't nearly as much time as I had when I hadn't any time at all, and that's the honest truth. "If only I could arrange a multiple existence--one life for work; one for the machinery of life, housekeeping, getting clothes made, shopping; one for seeing my friends, travel, visiting; one life for the other diversions such as music, the theatre, clubs, politics, one life for just plain loafing. Now that would be wonderful. But to crowd it all into twenty-four hours a day--no, too much of it gets squeezed out. "What do I like the most? Comfort, I think. And old painted satinwood, and cats and prizefights, and dancing, and Spanish shawls, and looking at the ocean, and having my own way. And I dislike argument, and perfume, and fat women, and people who tell the sort of lies that simply insult your intelligence, and men who begin letters 'Dear Lady,' and long earrings, and intolerance." All of which is excellent preparation for the reader of Sophie Kerr's new novel, One Thing Is Certain. Those who read her Painted Meadows will expect and will find in this new novel the same charming background, but they will find a much more dramatic story. Since the novel is one of surprise, with an event at its close which throws everything that went before in a new, a curious, a startling and profoundly significant light, I cannot indulge in any further description of it in this place. But I do wish to quote some sentences from a letter Sophie Kerr wrote me: "I wanted to show that when lives get out of plumb, the way to straighten them is not with a violent gesture. That when we do seize them, and try to jerk them straight again, we invariably let ourselves in for long years of unhappiness and remorse. Witness Louellen. In two desperate attempts ... she tries to change the whole current and colour of her life." So much for the essential character of the story, but there is a question in my mind as to what, in the story, readers will consider the true essential! I think for very many it will not be the action, unusual and dramatic as that is, but the picture of a peculiar community, one typical of Maryland's Eastern Shore, where we have farmer folk in whom there lives the spirit and tradition of a landed aristocracy. The true essential with such readers, will be the individuals who are drawn with such humour and skill, the mellowness of the scene; even such a detail as the culinary triumph that was Louellen's wedding dinner. A marvellous and incomparable meal! One reads of it, his mouth watering and his stomach crying out. =ii= The House of Five Swords, by Tristram Tupper, is a gallant representative of those novels which we are beginning to get in the inevitable reaction from such realism as Main Street and Moon-Calf, a romantic story of age and youth, of love and hate, of bitter unyielding hardness, and of melting pity and tenderness. It begins with the Robin, age seven, with burnished curls, viewing with awestruck delight five polished swords against the shining dark wall in Colonial House, where she had gone to deliver the Colonel's boots! She forgot the boots. She lifted two of the swords from the wall, crossed them on the floor and danced the sword dance of Scotland. From the doorway a white-haired old figure watched with narrowed eyes and tightened mouth. Then the storm broke.... The House of Five Swords is Mr. Tupper's first novel. A native of Virginia, he has done newspaper work, has tramped a good deal and was fooling with the study of law when American troops were ordered to the Mexican border. After that experience he went overseas. On his return from the war, he tried writing and met with rapid success. =iii= Readers of Baroness Orczy's novels will welcome Nicolette. This is essentially a love story, with the scene laid in the mountains of Provence in the early days of the Restoration of King Louis XVIII to the throne of France. An ancient half-ruined chateau perches among dwarf olives and mimosa, orange and lemon groves. There is a vivid contrast between the prosperity of Jaume Deydier, a rich peasant-proprietor, and the grinding poverty of the proud and ancient family of de Ventadour, whose last scion, Bertrand, goes to seek fortune in Paris and there becomes affianced to a wealthy and beautiful heiress. Nicolette, the daughter of Jaume Deydier, whose ancestor had been a lackey in the service of the Comte de Ventadour, is passionately in love with Bertrand, but a bitter feud keeps the lovers for long apart. There will be a new novel this autumn, Ann and Her Mother, by O. Douglas, whose Penny Plain gave great pleasure to its readers. "Penny plain," if you remember, was the way Jean described the lot of herself and her brothers whom she mothered in the Scottish cottage; but matters were somewhat changed when romance crossed the threshold in the person of the Honourable Pamela and a bitter old millionaire who came to claim the house as his own. Ann and Her Mother is the story of a Scotch family as seen through the eyes of the mother and her daughter. The author of Penny Plain and Ann and Her Mother is a sister of John Buchan, author of The Thirty-nine Steps, The Path of the King, and many other books. December Love, by Robert Hichens, will have a greater popularity than any of his novels since The Garden of Allah. It is a question whether this uncannily penetrative study of power and the need for love of a woman of sixty does not surpass The Garden of Allah. In Lady Sellingworth, Mr. Hichens is dealing with a brilliant woman. The theme is daring and calls for both skill and delicacy. Of the action, one really should not say very much, lest one spoil the book for the reader. The loss of the Sellingworth jewels in Paris had caused a sensation in the midst of which Lady Sellingworth was silent. She declined to discuss the disappearance of the jewels. There followed the advent at No. 4 Berkeley Square of Alick Craven, a man of thirty, vigorous, attractive and decidedly a somebody. But inexplicably--at any rate without explanation--Lady Sellingworth retired from society when Craven appeared. Tell England by Ernest Raymond is a novel which has been sensationally successful in England. It is a war story and I will give you some of the opening paragraphs of the "Prologue by Padre Monty": "In the year that the Colonel died he took little Rupert to see the swallows fly away. I can find no better beginning than that. "When there devolved upon me as a labour of love the editing of Rupert Ray's book, Tell England, I carried the manuscript to my room one bright autumn afternoon and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark. I could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas. Nor, perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness. There are times when one prefers the twilight. Doubtless the tale held me fascinated because it revealed the schooldays of those boys whom I met in their young manhood and told afresh that wild old Gallipoli adventure which I shared with them. Though, sadly enough, I take Heaven to witness that I was not the idealised creature whom Rupert portrays. God bless them, how these boys will idealise us! "Then again, as Rupert tells you, it was I who suggested to him the writing of his story. And well I recall how he demurred, asking: "'But what am I to write about?' For he was always diffident and unconscious of his power. "'Is Gallipoli nothing to write about?' I retorted. 'And you can't have spent five years at a great public school like Kensington without one or two sensational things. Pick them out and let us have them. For whatever the modern theorists say, the main duty of a story-teller is certainly to tell stories.'" This prologue is followed by the novel which begins with English public school life in the fashion of Sonia and other novels American readers are familiar with. The main theme of the book is Gallipoli. The new novel by J. E. Buckrose is A Knight Among Ladies. Mrs. Buckrose says that the character of Sid Dummeris in this book is modelled upon an actual person. "He did actually live in a remote country place where I used to stay a great deal when I was a child and as he has been gone twenty years, I thought I might employ my exact memories of him without hurting anyone." This was in answer to questions asked by The Bookman (London) of a number of English writers. The London Bookman wanted to find out if novelists generally drew their characters from actual people. The replies showed that this proceeding was very rare. Mrs. Buckrose recalled only one other instance in which she had used an actual person in her fiction. Mrs. Buckrose is Mrs. Falconer Jameson. She lives at Hornsea, East Yorkshire, and says: "My real hobby is my writing--as it was my secret pleasure from the age of nine until I was over thirty when I first attempted to publish. I look after my chickens, my house and a rather delicate husband; write my books and try to do my duty to my neighbour!" =iv= Back of the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning, Spellbinders, is the question: Has the vote and its consequent widening of the mental horizon introduced a brand new element of discord or a factor for mutual support into modern marriage? The household of the George Flandons was almost wrecked by it. That his wife should accept the opportunity to play her part in State and National affairs seemed to George Flandon a desertion of her real duty. Mrs. Banning has written a novel which will surprise those who remember her only by her first novel, This Marrying. The surprise will be less for those who read her second novel, Half Loaves, for they must have been struck by the real understanding she showed of the married relationship and the marked increase in her skill as a writer. Spellbinders is the sort of work one looks for after such a good novel as Half Loaves. Mrs. Banning, who was married in 1914, lives in Duluth. A graduate of Vassar, her first novel was written in one of Margaret Mayo's cottages at Harmon, New York. She is of purely Irish ancestry, related to the Plunkett family which bred both statesmen and revolutionaries for Ireland. On the other side there was a Colonel Culkin, who, Mrs. Banning says, "came over at the time of the Revolution but unfortunately fought on the wrong side, so we forget him and begin our Culkin lineage in this country with the Culkin who came over at the famous time of the 'potato-rot.'" That would be the Irish famine of 1846, no doubt. Sunny-San, Onoto Watanna's first novel in six years, has been the signal for her re-entrance not only into the world of fiction, but the world of motion pictures and plays. Even before Sunny-San was ready as a book, the motion picture producers were on the author's track. A large sum was paid cash down for the picture rights to the novel and then the prospect of a picture was laid aside while the possibilities of a play were estimated. These were seen to be exceptionally good. Here was a story of young American boys travelling in Japan and coming upon a still younger Japanese girl, threatened with cruelty and unhappiness. The young men endowed Sunny-San, so to speak, planking down enough money to secure her protection and education. Thereupon they continued blithely on their travels and forgot all about her. Some years later a well-educated, dainty and exceedingly attractive Japanese girl presents herself on the doorstep of a house in New York where one of the young men resides. Situation! What shall the young man do with his charming and unexpected protegee! In view of the prolonged success of Fay Bainter in the play, East Is West, it was obviously the thing to make a play out of Sunny-San. And this, I believe, is being done as I write. In the meantime Onoto Watanna, who is really Mrs. Winnifred Reeve, and who lives on a ranch near Calgary, Canada, is very busy with her Canadian stories which have excited the enthusiasm of magazine editors. I am confident that she will do a Canadian novel; the more so because she tells me that, despite the success of Sunny-San and the enormous success of her earlier Japanese stories, like A Japanese Nightingale, her interest is really centred at present in Canada, its people and backgrounds. =v= Pending Dorothy Speare's second novel, let me suggest that those who have not done so read her first, Dancers in the Dark. That a young woman just out of Smith College should write this novel, that the novel should then begin immediately selling at a great rate, and that David Belasco should demand a play constructed from the novel is altogether a sequence to cause surprise. I have had letters from older people who said frankly that they could not express themselves about Dancers in the Dark, because it dealt with a life with which they were utterly unfamiliar--which, in some cases, they did not know existed. And yet it does exist! The demand for the book, the avidity with which it has been read and the intemperance with which it has been discussed testify that in Dancers in the Dark Miss Speare wrote a book with truth in it. I suppose it might be said of her first novel--though I should not agree in saying it--that, like F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, it had every conceivable fault except the fatal fault; it did not fail to live. The amount of publicity that this book received was astonishing. I have handled clippings from newspapers all over the country--and not mere "items" but "spreads" with pictures--in which the epigrammatic utterances of the characters in Dancers were reprinted and their truth or falsity debated hotly. Is the modern girl an "excitement eater"? Does she "live from man to man and never kill off a man"? There was altogether too much smoke and heat in the controversy for one to doubt the existence, underneath the surface of Miss Speare's fiction, of glowing coals. And Miss Speare? Well, it is a fact that, like her heroine in Dancers, she has an exceptional voice; and I understand that she intends to cultivate the voice and to continue as a writer, both. That is a very difficult programme to lay out for one's self, but I really believe her capable of succeeding in both halves of the programme. Another distinctly popular novel, The Moon Out of Reach, by Margaret Pedler, is the fruit of a well-developed career as a novelist. The Hermit of Far End, The House of Dreams Come True, The Lamp of Fate, and The Splendid Folly were the forerunners of this immediate and distinct success. Mrs. Pedler is the wife of a sportsman well known in the West of England, the nearest living descendant of Sir Francis Drake. They have a lovely home in the country and Mrs. Pedler, besides the joys of her writing, is a collector of old furniture and china and a devotee of driving, tennis and swimming. It is interesting that as a girl she studied at the Royal Academy of Music with a view to being a professional singer. Marriage diverted her from that, but she still retains her interest in music; and it is characteristic of such novels as The Splendid Folly and The Moon Out of Reach that a lyric appearing in the book embodies the theme of the story. These lyrics of Mrs. Pedler's have mostly been set to music. What shall I say about Corra Harris's The Eyes of Love except that it offers such a study of marriage as only Mrs. Harris puts on paper? Shrewd and homely wisdom, sympathetic and ironical humour, the insight and the fundamental experience,--above all, imagination in experience--which made their first deep and wide impression with the publication of A Circuit Rider's Wife. I open The Eyes of Love at random and come upon such a passage as this, and then I don't wonder that men as well as women read Corra Harris and continue to read her: "Few women are ever related by marriage to the minds of their husbands. These minds are foreign countries where they discover themselves to be aliens, speaking another smaller language and practically incapable of mastering the manners and customs of that place. This is sometimes the man's fault, because his mind is not a fit place for a nice person like his wife to dwell, but more frequently it is the wife's fault, who is not willing to associate intimately with the hardships that inhabit the mind of a busy man, who has no time to ornament that area with ideas pertaining to the finer things. So it happens that both of them prefer this divorce, the man because the woman gets in the way with her scruples and emotions when he is about to do business without reference to either; the woman because it is easier to keep on the domestic periphery of her husband, where she thinks she knows him and is married to him because she knows what foods he likes, and the people he prefers to have asked to dine when she entertains, the chair that fits him, the large pillow or the small one he wants for his tired old head at night, the place where the light must be when he reads in the evening rather than talk to her, because there is nothing to talk about, since she is only the wife of his bosom and not of his head." =vi= Phyllis Bottome is just as interesting as her novels. When scarcely more than a child with large, delightful eyes, she began to write, and completed at the age of seventeen a novel which Andrew Lang advised an English publisher to accept. Thereafter she wrote regularly and with increasing distinction. Ill-health drove her to Switzerland where, living for some years, she met all kinds of people from all the countries of Europe and America as well. It is interesting that her father was an American, although after his marriage to an Englishwoman, he settled in England. Later Mr. Bottome came to America and for six years during Phyllis Bottome's childhood he was rector of Grace Church at Jamaica, New York. Phyllis Bottome is the wife of A. E. Forbes Dennis, who, recovering from dangerous wounds in the war, has been serving as passport officer at Vienna. They were married in 1917. Those who know Phyllis Bottome personally say that the striking thing about her is the extent of her acquaintance with people of all sorts and conditions of life and her ready and unfailing sympathy with all kinds of people. She herself says that she "has had friends who live humdrum and simple lives and friends whose stories would bring a rush of doubt to the most credulous believer in fiction." "My friendships have included workmen, bargees, actresses, clergymen, thieves, scholars, dancers, soldiers, sailors and even the manager of a bank. It would be true of me to say that as a human being I prefer life to art, even if it would at the same time be damning to admit that I know much more about it. I have no preferences; men, women, children, animals and nature under every aspect seem to me a mere choice of miracles. I have not perhaps many illusions, but I have got hold of one or two certainties. I believe in life and I know that it is very hard." The hardness of life, its uproar, its agony, its magnificence and its duty, is the theme of Phyllis Bottome's latest and finest novel. When it was published, because it was so different from Phyllis Bottome's earlier work, I tried to draw attention to it by a letter in which I said: "I don't know whether you read J. C. Snaith's The Sailor. People said Snaith got his suggestion from the life of John Masefield. The Sailor sold many thousands and people recall the book today, years afterward. But, as an ex-sailor and a few other things, I never found Snaith's 'Enry 'Arper half so convincing as Jim Barton in Phyllis Bottome's new novel, The Kingfisher. "Jim, a boy of the slums, reaching toward 'that broken image of the mind of God--human love,' goes pretty deeply into me. Since reading those last words of the book--'Beauty touched him. It was as if he saw, with a flash of jewelled wings, a Kingfisher fly home'--I keep going back and rereading bits.... "Won't you tackle The Kingfisher? If you'll read to the bottom of page 51, I'll take a chance beyond that. Read that far and then, if you stop there, I've no word to say." Although this letter called for no special reply, I received dozens of replies promising to read the book and then enthusiastic comments after having read the book. I do not consider The Kingfisher the greatest book Phyllis Bottome will write, but it marks an important advance in her work and it is a novel whose positive merits will last; it will be as moving and as significant ten years from now as it is today. =vii= I come to a group of novels of which the chief aim of all except two is entertainment. The Return of Alfred, by the anonymous author of Patricia Brent, Spinster, is the diverting narrative of a man who found himself in another man's shoes. What made it particularly difficult was that the other man had been a very bad egg, indeed. And there was, as might have been feared (or anticipated), a girl to complicate matters tremendously. E. F. Benson's Peter is the story of a young man who made a point of being different, of keeping his aloofness and paying just the amount of charm and gaiety required for the dinners and opera seats which London hostesses so gladly proffered. Then he married Silvia, not for her money exactly, but he certainly would not have asked her if she hadn't had money. No wonder E. F. Benson has a liberal and expectant audience! In Peter he shows an exquisite understanding of the quality of the love between Peter and his boyish young wife. A. A. Milne is another name to conjure with among those who love humour and charm, gentleness and a quiet shafting of the human depths. There is his novel, Mr. Pim. Old Mr. Pim, in his gentle way, shuffled into the Mardens' charming household. Mr. Pim said a few words and went absentmindedly away,--leaving Mr. Marden with the devastating knowledge that his wife was no wife, that her first husband, instead of lying quietly in his grave in Australia, had just landed in England. In short, the Mardens had been living in sin for five years! Then Mr. Pim came back for his forgotten hat and the Marden household was again revolutionised. Beauty for Ashes, by Joan Sutherland, is a story with a more serious theme. It really raises the question whether a man who has wrongly been named as co-respondent is in honour bound to marry the defendant. The affair of Lady Madge with Lord Desmond was an entirely innocent one, despite what London said. Lady Madge's husband, wrought upon by shame and anger, began his action for divorce; and Desmond found himself not merely face to face with dishonour but bound by conventional honour for life to a girl with whom he had simply been friendly. William Rose Benet had been known chiefly as a poet until the publication of his first novel, The First Person Singular. The scene of The First Person Singular shifts between the kinetic panorama of modern New York and the somewhat stultifying quietude of a small Pennsylvania town. A mysterious Mrs. Ventress is the centre of its rapidly unfolding series of peculiar situations. Mrs. Ventress is a puzzle to the townspeople. They believe odd things about her. The particular family in Tupton with which she comes in contact is an eccentric one. The father is a recluse--for reasons. His adopted daughter, Bessie Gedney, is an odd character among young girls in fiction. Dr. Gedney's real daughter had disappeared years before. Why? What has become of her? This complicates the mystery. The First Person Singular is a light novel, avowedly without the heavy "significance" and desperately drab realism of many modern novels. And yet it flashes with tragedy and implicates grim spiritual struggle without tearing any passion to tatters. The author's touch is light, the variety of his characters furnish him much diversion. The amusing side of each situation does not escape him. His style has a certain effervescent quality, but, for all that, the tragic developments of the story are not shirked. Another treatment of a problem of marriage, a treatment sympathetic but robust, is found in the new novel of F. E. Mills Young, The Stronger Influence. Like Miss Mills Young's earlier novels, Imprudence and The Almonds of Life, the scene of The Stronger Influence is British Africa. The story is of the choice confronting a girl upon whom two men have a vital claim. To be somebody is more ethical than to serve somebody. The individual has not only a right but an obligation to sacrifice family entanglements in the cause of a necessary personal independence. This is the attitude expressed in Richard Blaker's novel, The Voice in the Wilderness. The story centres around the figure of Charles Petrie, popular playwright in London but known in Pelchester merely as a shabby fellow and to his family a singularly sarcastic and annoying father. Sarcasm was Petrie's one defence against the limp weight that was Mrs. Petrie His children would have been astonished to hear him called a charming man of the world, yet he was. It is probable that he never would have come out into the open to combat if he hadn't been moved constantly to interfere and save his daughter Cynthia from offering herself as a willing sacrifice to her mother. Richard Blaker is new to America, a novelist of acutely pointed characterisations and careful atmosphere. =viii= Nene, the work of an unknown French school teacher, a novel distinguished in France by the award of the Goncourt Prize as the most distinguished French novel of the year 1920, had sold at this writing 400,000 copies in France. Three months after publication, it had sold in this country less than 3,000 copies. I am glad to say that it was sufficient to draw to the attention of Americans this deplorable discrepancy to arouse interest in the novel. People of so divergent tastes as William Lyon Phelps, Corra Harris, Ralph Connor, Walter Prichard Eaton, Mary Johnston, Dorothy Speare and Richard LeGallienne have been at pains to express the feeling to which Nene has stirred them. I have not space to quote them all, and so select as typical the comment of Walter Prichard Eaton: "I read Nene with great interest, especially because of its relation to Maria Chapdelaine. It seems to me the two books came out most happily together. Maria Chapdelaine gives us the French peasant in the new world, touched with the pioneer spirit, and though close to the soil in constant battle with nature, somehow always master of his fate. Nene gives us this same racial stock, again close to the soil, but an old-world soil its fathers worked, and the peasant here seems ringed around with those old ghosts, their prejudices and their passions. I have seldom read any book which seemed to me so unerringly to capture the enveloping atmosphere of place and tradition, as it conditions the lives of people, and yet to do it so (apparently) artlessly. This struck me so forcibly that it was not till later I began to realise with a sigh--if one himself is a writer, a sigh of envy--that Nene has a directness, a simplicity, a principle of internal growth or dramatic life of its own, which, alas! most of us are incapable of attaining." The author of Carnival, Sinister Street, Plasher's Mead; of those highly comedic novels, Poor Relations and Rich Relatives; of other and still more diverse fiction, Compton Mackenzie, has turned to a new task. His fine novel, The Altar Steps, concerns itself with a young priest of the Church of England. We live in the England of Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria--the England of 1880 to the close of the Boer War--as we follow Mark Lidderdale from boyhood to his ordination. The Altar Steps, it is known will be followed by a novel probably to be called The Parson's Progress. Evidently Mr. Mackenzie is bent upon a fictional study of the whole problem of the Church of England in relation to our times, and particularly the position of the Catholic party in the Church. "Simon Pure," who writes the monthly letter from London appearing in The Bookman (and whose identity is a well-known secret!) thus describes, in The Bookman for September, 1922, a visit to Mr. Mackenzie: "I have recently seen the author of The Altar Steps upon his native heath. The Altar Steps is the latest work of Compton Mackenzie, and it has done something to rehabilitate him with the critics. The press has been less fiercely adverse than usual to the author. He is supposed to have come back to the fold of the 'serious' writers, and so the fatted calf has been slain for him. We shall see. My own impression is that Mackenzie is a humorous writer, and that the wiseacres who want the novel to be 'serious' are barking up the wrong tree. At any rate, there the book is, and it is admitted to be a good book by all who have been condemning Mackenzie as a trifler; and Mackenzie is going on with his sequel to it in the pleasant land of Italy. I did not see him in Italy, but in Herm, one of the minor Channel Islands. It took me a night to reach the place--a night of fog and fog-signals--a night of mystery, with the moon full and the water shrouded--and morning found the fog abruptly lifted, and the islands before our eyes. They glittered under a brilliant sun. There came hurried disembarking, a transference (for me, and after breakfast) to a small boat called, by the owner's pleasantry, 'Watch Me' (Compton Mackenzie), and then a fine sail (per motor) to Herm. I said to the skipper that I supposed there must be many dangerous submerged rocks. 'My dear fellow!' exclaimed the skipper, driven to familiarity by my naivete. And with that we reached the island. Upon the end of a pier stood a tall figure, solitary. 'My host!' thought I. Not so. Merely an advance guard: his engineer. We greeted--my reception being that of some foreign potentate--and I was led up a fine winding road that made me think of Samoa and Vailima and all the beauties of the South Seas. Upon the road came another figure--this time a young man who made a friend of me at a glance. He now took me in hand. Together we made the rest of the journey along this beautiful road, and to the cottage of residence. I entered. There was a scramble. At last I met my host, who leapt from bed to welcome me! "From that moment my holiday was delightful. The island is really magnificent. Short of a stream, it has everything one could wish for in such a place. It has cliffs, a wood, a common fields under cultivation, fields used as pasture, caves, shell beaches, several empty cottages. Its bird life is wealthy in cuckoos and other magic-bringers; its flowers have extraordinary interest; dogs and cattle and horses give domestic life, and a boat or two may be used for excursions to Jethou, a smaller island near by. And Mackenzie has this ideal place to live in for as much of the year as he likes. None may gather there without his permission. He is the lord of the manor, and his boundaries are the sea and the sky. We walked about the islands, and saw their beauties, accompanied by a big dog--a Great Dane--which coursed rabbits and lay like a dead fish in the bottom of a small boat. And as each marvel of the little paradise presented itself, I became more and more filled with that wicked thing, envy. But I believe envy does not make much progress when the owner of the desired object so evidently appreciates it with more gusto even than the envious one. Reason is against envy in such a case. To have said, 'He doesn't appreciate it' would have been a lie so manifest that it did not even occur to me. He does. That is the secret of Mackenzie's personal ability to charm. He is filled with vitality, but he is also filled with the power to take extreme delight in the delight of others and to better it. Moreover, he gives one the impression of understanding islands. Herm has been in his possession for something more than a year, and he has lived there continuously all that time (except for two or three visits to London, of short duration). It has been in all his thoughts. He has seen it as a whole. He knows it from end to end, its rocks, its birds, its trees and flowers and paths. What wonder that his health is magnificent, his spirits high! What wonder the critics have seen fit to praise The Altar Steps as they have not praised anything of Mackenzie's for years? If they had seen Herm, they could have done nothing at all but praise without reserve." _ |
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