NOVELS.
ROSE AT HONEYPOT.*
MRS. MANN, whose name on the title-page of a navel always rouses agreeable anticipations in the mind of the reviewer, administers in her new work a salutary rebuke to those writers who contend that normal themes have been exhausted, and that the attention of the intelligent public can only be arrested and held by delineating the products of decadence. Here the scene is laid, and the play played out from begin- ning to end, in a remote Norfolk parish "at the back of beyond," with a dramatis personae, but for one or two excep- tions, representing the lowest and most primitive stratum of the rural population ; and yet the story is full of human as well as of topical interest. To combine artistic success with entertainment on so restricted a canvas, and with materials so unpromising and, in great measure, so unlovely, is no small achievement; but readers of Mrs. Mann's novels have long realised that she is a writer of peculiar gifts. She is a faith- ful observer ; she realises acutely the limitations and the strength of the rustic intellect; she has humour; and her interest in the struggles and sufferings of the poor is not that of the cool and detached researcher, or of the sensational writer anxious to make " copy " out of anything, but springs from a genuine desire to awaken sympathy with the oppressed.
There are two ways of giving a picture of life in a remote countryside. You may either describe a self-contained com- munity, or import an element of dramatic contrast by the introduction of a stranger or outsider. In adopting the latter alternative, Mrs. Mann ingeniously lends her narrative an up-to-date interest, finding a "take-off," so to speak, in the modern fashionable craze for the Simple Life. Rose Aka— we wonder whether the surname of Mrs. Mann's dainty, wilful, high-spirited heroine is a transliteration of citipti—is the girl-wife of a sailor, exiled for three years on a tropical station, and, being an orphan, she has made her home during his absence with his sisters,.—good, prim, narrow-minded, middle-aged women who have never quite forgiven this wayward beauty for marrying their favourite brother. Routine and lack of sympathy have worn out Rose's patience, and pining for a freer life, she hires rooms for a month in a labourer's cottage in the wilds of Norfolk, and resolves to sink her status and associate as far as possible on terms of equality with the country folk.
In so far as Rose's desire was to come to close quarters with Nature it is gratified to the uttermost, but the cost that she pays for her enlightenment is heavy. She was prepared for the roughness of the life, but had not counted on its coarseness and squalor. She finds, however, an unexpected ally and protector in Lorry, a young gamekeeper, a lodger in the same cottage, an honest, clean-living young fellow, who comes of a good stock and has the instincts of a gentleman. The sequel can be readily imagined. Dan Jaggerd—the labourer in whose cottage Rose is staying—becomes intoler- able, and Rose is on the point of beating a hasty retreat, when the unhappy Mrs. Jaggerd, disabled by a bad accident, appeals to her guest to protect her little girl from the brutal father, revealing her gruesome suspicion that he means to make away with the child to secure the few pounds for which her life had been insured. Rose at once resolves to stay on, shares the burden of her secret with Lorry, and drifts through propinquity and good-fellowship into an intimacy which, while purely platonic on her part, is infinitely dis- quieting to the gamekeeper's peace of mind. Of the further development of the plot, which reaches a crisis when Dan Jaggerd deserts his sick wife and elopes with the hired girl, we must not say more than that it enables Lorry, by a supreme act of self-sacrifice, to rise to really heroic stature, and to extricate Rose from embarrassments into which she had been drawn by kind-heartedness quite as much as by indiscretion.
Lorry, who unites with his other merits the signal gift of silence, is the character who above all others enlists and retains the sympathy of the reader. One is resigned to the
* Row Iloneypot. By Mary E. Mann. London Nothnen and Co. [68.1 drab ending of his romance, as in the case of the admirable Mr. Hoopdriver in The Wheels of Chance; but none the less it leaves a pang of regret. Rose is a very charming person, but she owes her escape more to good luck than management. But the other characters—even the most odious—are intensely interesting in their various ways, notably Mrs. Jaggerd, whose whining voice takes audible fortn'as we listen to her elemental home truths and terrible confidences. "You can't niver tell about men, bor," she says to Rose. "They ain't like human creachers, men ain't." Mrs. Jaggerd is, in truth, a grotesquely pitiful figure; and when her husband disappears with his little boy and the hired girl, she "appeared to Rose to fret equally for husband, her only son, and her boots," which had been carried off by Mr. Jaggerd's frowsy siren. But the narrative abounds in charm as well as in surprising strokes of realism. In less skilful hands the situation might easily have been rendered unendurably painful. As it stands, the story is as void of offence as it is fall of humanity.
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