When Winter Comes to Main Street Part 18

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 pa.s.sionately 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 surpa.s.s _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 ma.n.u.script 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. G.o.d 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 Va.s.sar, 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 j.a.pan and coming upon a still younger j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese stories, like _A j.a.panese 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sociate 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 pa.s.sport 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 d.a.m.ning 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 G.o.d--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 antic.i.p.ated), 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 pa.s.sion 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 att.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce to quote them all, and so select as typical the comment of Walter Prichard Eaton: