Fiction
By WILLIAM PLOMER The Thibaults. II: High Summer and Consulting-Day. By
TEE quality of The Thibaults may not be to everyone's taste, but of its existence there can be no doubt. The first part of this thoroughly workmanlike French novel was mainly concerned with Monsieur Thibault and his two sons, one of whom was rescued by the other from the reformatory to which his father had condemned him. In the new instalment Monsieur Thibault is no longer to the fore : he has become an invalid, and does not leave his room. The principal theme here is the development of the career and character of his elder son Antoine, a rising young doctor full of the parental energy, and Antoine's love affair with Rachel Goepfert. A capable doctor with imagination—there are few kinds of human being more impressive and worthy of respect, and few, in a way, more for- tunate. Antoine is such a doctor, and his creator seems like one. One would say that they had the vocation in common, and that they would be in agreement over Antoine's "firm conviction that in the science of medicine we may see the fine flower of all man's intellectual efforts in the past, the most signal reward of twenty centuries' research in every branch of knowledge, and the richest field available for human genius. It knew no limits on the speculative side, yet it was founded on the very bedrock of reality and kept in close and constant contact with humanity itself. He had a special leaning towards its human aspect."
Take the case of Rumelles, an ambitious, self-important man of high official rank, who comes to Antoine for treatment. We note his "premature adoption of a statesmanlike urbanity, and his interest in world problems" which "always disclosed, sooner or later, a streak of meanness, a crude concern with personal advancement." We note his friendlessness, his one genuine affection—for his wife. We see him "stretched out on the table under the harsh light, jerking his legs spas- modically, like a frog on the dissecting-table." Antoine sees him too, and
"could not help picturing the dapper chauffeur with his tricolour cockade awaiting, statue-like upon his seat, His Excellency's delegate. And then—at this very moment, perhaps, they were unfurling under the awnings of the Flower Show the roll of carpet along which, only an hour hence, friend Rumelles, who now lay there wriggling and writhing like a new-born babe, would advance in solitary state with measured steps, resplendent in his frock-cost, his cat-like moustache uptilted in a smile, to greet the little queen."
Reality, that is the key-word—the reality of seeing people in two different aspects, naked and adorned. It is this reality to which M. du Gard admits us : he gives us the exciting sen- sation of sharing professional secrets. Is that not exactly the sensation we require of a novelist, the privilege of hearing in confidence the diagnosis of an expert ?
It is significant that it was while Antoine was performing impromptu and with brilliance a dangerous operation that Rachel was first attracted to him. We follow them through the "high summer" of their relationship, and share the delight of the somewhat clinically-minded author in manifestations of robust health. We remember Rachel lying on the bed with her hands behind her head and asking for a thick slice of cake—" I'm hungry," she mur- mured, "exhibiting an open mouth, pink as a cat's." We continue to follow also the fortunes of Jacques, and the Fontanins, and other characters, with admiration for a really vigorous talent.
Miss Kate O'Brien, whose novel Without My Cloak was received with warm appreciation two years ago, takes us into an atmosphere quite as wa-English as that in which the Thibaults have their being. The Ante-RoOm describes three days in the life of the family of a well-to-do merchant in an Irish town in the eighties of the last century. The period atmcisphere is conveyed unobtrusively : a red merino skirt, mahogany furniture, an allusion to Parnell, are incidental to this concentrated family life, highly charged with emotion, in an isolated house, to which come the sound of church bells or the clop-clop of a horse's hoofs. "Under the cold sky the winter-coloured scene was desolately noble," and a kind of desolate nobility belongs also to the players. One uses the word players advisedly, for the unities are observed as carefully as they might be in a play, and a number of situations occur that would be effective on the stage.
An unusual characteristic of the book is that it is pervaded by an acceptance—more, a celebration—of orthodox Catholicism. To more than one of the characters it seems "that the Catholic Church provides as good a system as may be found for keeping the human animal in order." And what a house to keep in order ! What unruly, all too human bodies and souls ! Like M. du Gard, Miss O'Brien is aware of the import- ant part played by illness in human affairs, and two members of the Mulqueen family are victims of two of the most appalling diseases : while Mrs. Mulqueen is dying upstairs, her son Reggie shuffles his ruined body in helpless misery round the house, occasionally seeking consolation in a little Chopin. Essentially the story is of two sisters, who seem to make "a glorious picture of vitality and promise" but who find themselves trapped by circumstances. Marie-Rose's marriage to Vincent has proved a failure, not least because he began by "furnishing it with his own dreams, and leaving no room for another's." She turns to the beloved and beauti- ful Agnes for consolation, and Agnes and Vincent fall in love. Rather than apply to this novel the trite word "distinguished," let us repeat that the hopes and sufferings it describes have something of the "desolate nobility" of the landscape in which it is set. The character of Vincent is likely to please female readers more than male ones, but the two sisters, the mother, and Nurse Cunningham may be praised without reserve.
To say that in This Little World, a novel of over six hundred pages, Mr. Francis Brett Young writes like "an officer and a gentleman" is not, I think, to do him any in- justice. He provides safe, pleasant family reading, can tell a smooth story, is kindly, cheerful and patriotic, not busied with dark doings or feelings, no bruin-teaser, and indeed something of a stranger to subtleties. The "little world" in question is the Worcestershire village of Chaddesbourne D'Abitot. A prelude mentions Roman legionaries, Domesday Book, Piers Plowman, a Georgian house, and the Boer War, but the story itself belongs to the nineteen-twenties.
Mr. Young peoples his village with more or less stock figures —they are types, never individuals. There is Colonel Miles Ombersley, hard-pressed devotee of an "obsolete feudalism," who tells himself "It's my nature to ride straight at my fences" ; there is Mr. Hackett, the genial profiteer, who settles in the parish and contributes to a somewhat Galsworthian situation ; there is the doctor—" there wasn't a man in Chaddesboume with whom one would rather find oneself in a tight hole," and he speaks of a long life as "a remarkable innings" ; there is an evangelical spinster, a wearer of mittens, full of other people's business and righteous indignation about it ; there is the farmer who drinks and whose wife bears up bravely ; there is a thoroughly un-pukka Welsh schoohnaster ; there is a wildly romantic magazine-story seaman who sometimes talks like a public schoolboy and sometimes through the appropriate hat :
"Give me something east of Suez, or the Pacific. Ay. the Pacific . . . Now Samoa's a place Did I ever tell you . . .
Finally there is an assortment of young women who act like so many wheels in helping the plot to run along— Miss Ombersley, who conveniently has a taste for music in common with the doctor ; Miss Lydgate, who is meek ; Miss Cookson, a vamp ; Miss Bunt, who stands for squalor ; Mrs. Hadley, the publican's wife. Everything is worked out most satisfactorily, and it becomes more and more likely that in the long run all is for the best in the best of all possible little worlds—provided they are English, and seen with conven- tional, middle-class, good-natured,' and slightly sentimental eyes. The happy ending is not really marred by the raising of a lump or two in the throat, and tears even "obstinately brimmed" to the eyes of Miss Loach, the spinster. There is a reference to the building of Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land, somebody blows the Reveille on a bugle, and the author appends a note to the effect that the book was begun on H.M.S. Hood. It is not a book for highbrows or proletarians, but it cannot fail to please many people whose conception of the English village and its inhabitants it will do nothing to heighten or disturb.
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