Why we should read Part 15

"The breath from her lips was sweet, like the breath of cows that have come out of the clover fields: closer and closer they drew to each other.

"'Before you came,' she said, 'there was nothing in the whole world----'

"'There was no sweetness in the world before I came here to you,' he answered.... 'I have come down to you through centuries; all the men of my past are like a few phantoms--there is only you in all the world.'

"With a great rustling there came from the wood a wild sow, but they did not hear it.... There stole in Mr Sorrell's nostrils a penetrating perfume. An immense dread swept down on him, the dumb agony of a nightmare. He seemed unable to move ... agony was in his heart, on his lips that would not speak, in his throat whose muscles would not act.

The perfume overwhelmed him, suffocating, warm, sweet in the throat, sinister and filling him with a mad foreboding. It was the odour of chloroform. He screamed out loud; great beads of sweat burst out on his forehead.

"He stretched out his hand like a madman and clutched at her dress.

"'Are you there?' he asked, and she answered:

"'I am here, beloved of my heart,' and he lifted his face towards hers which was slightly cold with dew and the night.

"'It is so well with me,' she whispered: but Mr Sorrell was full of fears."

The cleverness of that touch of the chloroform at that particular stage in the story is amazing. I know nothing quite like that chapter in all fiction.

We are then swept back at once to a pageant of colour where the ladies hold a tourney and Mr Sorrell is knighted by Sir Ygorac of Fordingbridge as Sir Guilhelm de Winterburne de St Martin. The Lady Dionissia fights in the lists against the Lady Blanche, first with spears and then with axes, which fight the Lady Dionissia, of course, wins. She then goes with Mr Sorrell to his new castle and her husband returns and kills the new knight of Winterburne ... and Mr Sorrell wakes up, wakes up to intolerable agony in a hospital.

Two months afterwards he goes back to Salisbury to retrace the steps and rides all over the country-side in search of----"A girl shot past them going very fast. She had a face of conspicuous fairness, a dress of light blue print, a white linen coif that hid all her hair.

"'My G.o.d!' Sir William said suddenly. [He is now Sir William Sorrell.]

'Did you see? Who was that? In G.o.d's name who was that?'

"'Why,' young Lee-Egerton said, 'that was Nurse Morane. The one who nursed you till the first time they trepanned you. She broke down the day before they trepanned you the second time. My mother says she couldn't stand the excitement, because she was in love with you."

Sir William galloped off down the road and up the hill towards a cl.u.s.ter of old and falling buildings.... "It was so old that you could hardly recognise it for a house, and so forlorn that you shivered when you pa.s.sed it ... the living-room into which Sir William went was large, long and low. It was quite empty ... a door ... opened gently. There appeared a girl in a blue dress.

"'You are Sir William Sorrell,' she said. 'I am Dionissia Morane.... I was born in this room....'

"'What does it all mean?' he asked.

"'I can't tell,' she answered. 'Do you know, after they trepanned you for the first time you said suddenly, "Es tu la?" and reached out your hand to me, and I took your hand ... and I kept saying to myself, "It is very well with me," which is what the country people about here say when they are glad.'"

Sir William builds a replica of the fourteenth-century castle and Dionissia ruminates on the future.

"'In the summer it will be very pleasant: the birds will sing, and we shall walk in the gardens. And in the winter we shall go into our little castle, and we shall sit by our fire, and our friends will come and we shall pa.s.s the time in talking and devising. And all around us there will be the oceans of time and the ages of s.p.a.ce----'

"'I've heard that before,' he said.

"'Yes, certainly you've heard all that before,' she answered. 'It's nothing new; it's the oldest wisdom or the oldest folly. You will find it in Chaucer ... you will find it in the Bible, because there's nothing else really to say.... It's the only thing that's worth saying in life.'"

Quite another vein is struck in _The Good Soldier_, which is essentially a modern novel. It is a story of betrayals. The man who tells the story finds that his wife is the mistress of his friend, the good soldier.

"I can't believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks."

Edward Ashburnham, the man in the case, "was the cleanest-looking sort of chap: an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one of the best landlords in Hampshire."

There is practically no conversation; the whole novel is a monologue, a going forward or a harking back to unravel intricate motives and to lay bare the souls of men and women.

Florence, the wife of the narrator, had apparently always been a harlot at heart, but had successfully hoodwinked him for years. Leonora, the betrayed wife of the good soldier, adored her husband with a pa.s.sion that was like an agony, and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea.

Florence one day had laid one finger on Captain Ashburnham's wrist. "I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, something evil in the day.... In Ashburnham's face I knew that there was absolute panic.... 'I can't stand this,' said Leonora, with a most extraordinary pa.s.sion. 'I must get out of this.' I was horribly frightened.... 'Don't you see,' she said, 'don't you see what's going on?... Don't you see that that's the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal d.a.m.nation of you and me and them?' Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of h.e.l.l and seeing horrors there." But he sees nothing. In Florence he thought he had a wife and an unattained mistress--and in the retaining of her in the world (she pretended to have serious heart trouble) he had his occupation, career and ambition.

Ashburnham had begun his intrigues by being arrested for kissing a servant girl in a train. He left servants alone after that and ran amok with girls of his own cla.s.s. There was Mrs Maidan, who died--of heart trouble, at twenty-three. Florence had come upon Leonora boxing Mrs Maidan's ears.... There had been an affair with a harpy mistress of a Russian Grand Duke, who exacted a twenty-thousand-pound pearl tiara from Edward as the price of her favours for a week. It was not that he was a promiscuous libertine: he was a sentimentalist.

We find it hard to realise all through this rambling discourse that until Edward and the last girl concerned and Florence were all dead the narrator had not the shadow of a suspicion that there was anything wrong. "I suppose that during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimping for Edward.... You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband.... It is not h.e.l.l, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven.... I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness ... she cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was Edward's mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his wife?... Once she said to Florence in the early morning: 'You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my proper place. I know it, thank you.... Yes, you would give him up. And you would go on writing to each other in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I know the pair of you, you know. No. I prefer the situation as it is.'"

Mrs Maidan had died on the 4th of August 1904 and then nothing happened until the 4th of August 1913. It was on the 4th of August 1901 that the narrator had married Florence, who had then hinted that she did not want much physical pa.s.sion from her husband. She elaborated rules so that she should never be caught. "I must never enter her room without knocking, or her poor little heart might flutter away to its doom." Her first lover, Jimmy, she discarded for Edward as soon as he appeared on the scene. It was because she was afraid that her husband would murder her that she took such precautions.

"Well, there you have the position ... the husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears ... and the blackmailing lover ... and then ... Edward Ashburnham, who was worth having." But within three years he was sick of Florence and would willingly have let the husband see what his wife was like, but Leonora threatened to wreak appalling vengeance if any inkling of the truth filtered through. The worst vengeance would have been to refuse herself ever to see him again ... but the husband discovers the truth about his wife from a stranger in an hotel.

"'Do you know who that is?' asked the stranger of me as Florence burst past. 'The last time I saw that girl she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man at five o'clock in the morning....'

"A long time afterwards I ... went up to Florence's room. She had not locked the door--for the first night of our married life. She was lying ... on her bed. She had a little phial ... in her right hand. That was on the 4th of August 1913.

"Florence had found that Edward for the first time in his life was really finally in love with a young girl called Nancy Rufford.

"For every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He travels over no more horizons ... that was the case with Edward and the poor girl."

Anyway that was the end of Florence. "You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the end of Florence. From that day to this I have never given her another thought ... she just went completely out of existence, like yesterday's paper.... It was as if an immensely heavy knapsack had fallen off my shoulders. I was in love with Nancy Rufford--I who was forty-five and she twenty-two, a miracle of patience who could be almost miraculously impatient."

Edward then began to drink heavily, owing to his frustrated pa.s.sion for her: she looked on him as an uncle and he could not make love to her and it was killing him.

The chronicler at this stage goes over his tracks as he often does to give us the earlier history of Leonora and Edward, who had come together in an extraordinary state of innocence. He had admired her for her truthfulness, her cleanness of mind, the clean-run-ness of her limbs, the fairness of her skin, the gold of her hair, her religion, her sense of duty. But she failed to have for him a touch of magnetism, while in her admiration for his qualities soon became love of the deepest description. "There could not have been a happier girl for five or six years." They never had any children: they did not even know how they were produced for some years after their marriage. He came to regard her as physically and mentally cold: she wished for the child that never came. Meanwhile after the episode of the servant girl Edward could not have a mistress without falling violently in love with her; but the Spanish dancer cured him of that. The pa.s.sion that he had for her arose "like fire in dry corn" ... and from the moment of his unfaithfulness with her Leonora never acted the part of wife to him, though there were moments when she was within a hair of yielding to her physical pa.s.sion for him. She had the vague, pa.s.sionate idea that when Edward had exhausted a number of other types of women he must turn to her....

Florence knocked all that on the head.

The cleverest and most interesting thing in the book is the masterly way in which the narrator manages to convey to us all the points of view of everybody concerned--Leonora's, Edward's, Florence's and his own.

Never till the moment when Florence began to gain ascendency over Edward did Leonora despair of getting him back. But when she saw Florence lay her hand upon Edward's wrist she knew that that touching of hands gave that woman an irrevocable claim--to be seduced. And she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid. But she said nothing to Florence's husband. She had to give Edward to understand "that if ever I came to know of his intrigue she would ruin him beyond repair." And then Florence had died, and the girl Nancy with whom the narrator is in love becomes the object of Edward's fiercest pa.s.sion: his love for her threatened to kill him and she knew ... and she offered him herself and he could not accept the offer of her virtue and they sent her back to her father in India.

"'You can't let that man,' said Leonora, 'go on to ruin for want of you.

You must belong to him.'

"'I knew you would come to that,' answered Nancy very slowly. 'But we are not worth it--Edward and I.'"

And because she wouldn't Edward killed himself and Nancy went mad: they sent the narrator out to bring Nancy home.

"She is, I am aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from where I am now writing.... I should marry Nancy if her reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service.... Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?

Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people--like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords--broken, tumultuous, agonised, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies?... I can't conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham--and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did."

We read novels like _The Good Soldier_ and _Ladies Whose Bright Eyes_ for their freshness and honesty of outlook. They follow no stereotyped form of writing; they lay bare character in an unusual manner; they demand intelligent reading and an appreciation of the quietly subtle.

They give a picture of life which is devoid of sentimentality, true to experience and courageously uncoloured. Most of all they give the impression of being written by a careful and highly gifted artist.

Mr Hueffer is a master of English prose style.