Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories Part 53

A MOTH OF PEACE

Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould, distinguished as a writer of essays and stories and novels, is the wife of Gordon Hall Gerould, Professor at Princeton.

Aside from the unusually strong and flowing style here so impressively revealed, we have a story marked by a sympathetic penetration into the atmosphere of Andecy--an atmosphere, when first felt, richly laden with the languor of a lonely and pervading provincial peace. This peace is suddenly broken by the rumors and processes of war, and we feel the dread of the impending German attack and the personal solicitude of Miss Stanley, the American heroine lovingly anxious for the fate of her English fiance. Nearer and nearer comes the threatened danger. Finally the heroine goes out to meet the troop of enemy soldiers without the gates--whether to meet a tragic end, the author does not say.

There is little dialogue and little haste in the action. The narrative is continuously guided by the controlling spirit of Miss Stanley, who grimly triumphs over the fear and dread of the perilous situation. Her body may have suffered defeat; her soul is splendidly victorious. The author's skill at the end is finely revealed in the graphic portrayal of the psychology of the situation.

IN NO STRANGE LAND

Katharine Butler, a young writer of few and distinctive stories, lives at Danvers, Ma.s.sachusetts.

The significant merit of this story is the mystical creation of a man's experience with death. The things of earth and heaven become perplexingly intermingled. Realism becomes strongly blended with the thoughts that move in weird circles on the tenuous wings of wanton fancy, and we live a puzzled moment as we try to visualize the man's experiences in his new realm of consciousness with its 'incredible freedom and joy.' The whole narrative is wrought in the delicate tracery of one whose temperament is obviously the temperament of a poet.

LITTLE BROTHER

Madeleine Z. Doty, of New York, learned the true story of 'Little Brother' when at The Hague, in the summer of 1915, as a delegate to the Woman's International Congress. Miss Doty is a lawyer by profession; by practice, a writer, investigator, and traveler.

With terrible concreteness _Little Brother_ weights our soul-sense with the horror and tragedy of war. The story is told with a bared realism which the poignancy of the occasion freely extenuates. In short crisp sentences the opening scene is exposed. There follow in dizzy succession and in the same quick-breathing style the little tragic ordeals that fill the story with a terrible pa.s.sion. It penetrates the very essence of our being and starkly confronts us with the bleak mystery of the existing condition of world-carnage--a carnage that wantonly wreaks its unselected vengeance on little sufferers unskilled and unschooled in squaring their strength to ill-proportioned trials.

WHAT ROAD GOETH HE?

'F. J. Louriet' is a pseudonym representing the dual authorship of Captain and Mrs. F. J. Green, long of Australia and now of Honolulu.

By the free but not too lavish use of sea terms and common sailor talk, we are brought into immediate and intimate knowledge of the affairs of a ship floundering in a storm. Through graphic sensory images, with their vivid and varied appeals, the whole perilous situation is wonderfully intensified. Seldom indeed are details better ma.s.sed to secure an intended effect. But the interest later comes to centre in the great theme of sacrifice--a sacrifice all the more significant because it is performed with such absolute spontaneity. The story is a noteworthy example of strong effect secured with great economy of time and material.

THE CLEARER SIGHT

Ernest Starr, a writer of occasional stories, lives in North Carolina.

The most interesting element in Mr. Ernest Starr's narrative is the dramatic conflict of emotions. Placed first in the gnomish atmosphere of a chemical laboratory, the tone soon changes from scientific to ethical--each interest being intensified and directed by the deep emotion of romantic love. A serious accident in the laboratory creates the crisis; it reveals to Noakes, the young scientist, the inexcusable baseness in his character--a baseness which allowed him to act with direct disloyalty to his employer and with somewhat obvious disloyalty to the ideals cherished by the girl whom he loved. The situation is finally relieved by his confessions and by the physician's hope that the young scientist's physical blindness is not necessarily permanent.

The author shows unusual skill in dialogue, in a.n.a.lysis, and in the handling of both conventional and dramatic situations.

THE GARDEN OF MEMORIES

C. A. Mercer is an American author who has, unfortunately, been altogether silent of late years.

In this story the traditions and influence of Hawthorne are picturesquely revived. The experience is one which is a bit fragile and tenuous, but to readers who reproduce in their fancy the more delicate picturings of their childhood, who delight in the re-creation of mood, who frequently re-live their childhood sentiments--to all such will come a sense of pleasure in the contemplation of the tracery here so artistically etched.

THE CLEAREST VOICE

Margaret Sherwood, a singularly sincere and graceful writer, is Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.

The clear voice which here speaks under Miss Sherwood's guidance is the voice of the absent. And, individually, as we read the story, we listen sympathetically to the separate messages of those voices which have entered sympathetically into our past experiences and wisely guided or wisely thwarted our separate deeds.

A Harvard graduate who had taken Professor Charles Eliot Norton's course in fine arts was years afterward selecting a cravat pin in a jeweler's shop in Paris. As he finally decided upon one of plain, simple, and silently impressive design, he said, 'I think Professor Norton would have chosen this.' In decisions minor and in decisions major, we are almost invariably influenced by the unconscious thought of those whose counsel we value. This significant truth Miss Sherwood has impressively revealed in _The Clearest Voice_.

THE MARBLE CHILD

E. Nesbit (Mrs. Hubert Bland) is an English writer who for many years has enjoyed widespread and deserved popularity as a writer of children's books.

'The world where children live is so full of amazing and incredible-looking things that turn out to be quite real.' This sentence from the story supplies us with the theme the wording of the bald a.n.a.lyst requires. For him who simply reads for the mere narrative, no such a.n.a.lyzing is really necessary--provided there still linger with him the manifold fancies that peopled his childhood. Of course Ernest was an extraordinary child--like Sh.e.l.ley or William Blake, it may be. Just such a child as Hawthorne would adore. To appreciate the story in all its fineness, we must ourselves have something of that abnormality. Else we shall be as impervious as the crinolined aunts, and as unsympathetic toward Ernest's experience as are some readers to Hawthorne's fanciful _Snow Image_.

THE ONE LEFT

E. V. Lucas is an English essayist, a lover and biographer of Lamb, known for many delicate and appreciative essays, and for books of travel in familiar places. It is semi-occasionally only that Mr. Lucas addresses himself to fiction.

This admirably written story--so brief as to be little more than a sketch--is rich in emotional values which are safely held within the bonds of restraint. Scientifically, I am told there is nothing wrong in the description of the ingenious device which provides the means for the expression of the emotion, though readers unfamiliar with such devices may question the verisimilitude of the action. It is but one instance among thousands which provide modern literature with a broadened range within the field of realism.

THE LEGACY OF RICHARD HUGHES

Margaret Lynn, member of the English Department of the State University of Kansas, at Lawrence, is best known for her sympathetic appreciation of prairie life.

This story is a tragedy--the tragedy of a wife's failure to understand the finer side of her husband's nature. She learns her misjudgment all too late--when the husband lies dead. The emotional values are the greater because the reader inevitably contemplates the long years they lived together in their isolation. The psychology of the situation is portrayed with remarkable clarity. The method is very different from the method of such writers as de Maupa.s.sant. De Maupa.s.sant's a.n.a.lysis and dissecting is usually done with cold and relentless indifference; Miss Lynn's processes are here carried out determinedly, but with full and lingering sympathy.

OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT

Margaret P. Montague, living among the West Virginia mountains, has written many successful stories of the Hill people whom she knows so well.

The chain of incidents narrated by the simple-hearted Virginia dressmaker is of absorbing interest, and seems to be the real experiences of one who had actually endured the tragedy of having lived in the horror of the aftermath of battle. But even more interesting than these scenes of pitiful suffering is the effect produced upon the woman who endures it all. Her whole att.i.tude toward life was changed. What matters it now that her father was not an aristocratic Virginian? What if she were a poor dressmaker at the little village of Johnson's Falls?

What though she was not elected a member of the Laurel Literary Society?

She had been face to face with war and death and h.e.l.l and G.o.d. The little things of life had unconsciously sunk away and the great enduring themes had boldly emerged to re-create her spiritual self.

MR. SQUEM

Reverend Arthur Russell Taylor, Rector of the Episcopal Church at York, Pennsylvania, whose career as a writer of fiction opened so auspiciously with 'Mr. Squem' and a few companion stories, died very suddenly early in January, 1918.

Here the central interest is in character. In creating such a personage as Mr. Squem, the writer of this story has boldly penetrated the veneer of culture and shown us that the character elements which are of enduring worth may be far aloof from any knowledge of art or religion or philosophy, or any form of polite learning.

It is interesting to note the part which the railroad wreck plays in this story. While there is enough in the situation to have made the wreck a point of central objective interest, it is utilized here simply as the background for the display of Mr. Squem--genial, direct, efficient, ingenuous, dominating, interestingly crude.

In the February, 1918, _Atlantic_ Mr. Squem is equally interesting in a different environment.

Soon after the death of Reverend Arthur Russell Taylor, Bishop James Henry Darlington sent to the Atlantic office an interesting appreciation of Dr. Taylor's work and character. From Bishop Darlington we learn that Dr. Taylor 'had for years been suffering from a tumor on the brain which had totally destroyed the sight of one eye and which by its pressure caused him constant pain, sleepless nights, and the gradual failing of the other eye. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, he was cheerful and brightened the lives of others until the very last, and almost his final writings were sent to _The Atlantic_.'