Fiction
By L. A. G. STRONG
7s. lid.) The Inner Journey. By Kurt Houser, (Seeker, 'is,. 6c1.)
MISS STERN is an extraordinarily interesting writer. Every new novel discovers new possibilities in 'her art, and Little Red Horses reveals to me that I, at least, have hitherto been doing her an injustice. I have always appreciated - and rejoiced in her creative energy, the sheer fecundity of her , powers, but I have never before realized with what meticulous care her stories are organized. Nor, perhaps, have I given her full credit for the delicacy with which she can steer past quick- sands. " A stern, rather good author," said of Hal's play that "there was nothing . . . in being merely youthful and inexperienced which need bring tears to the eyes. BI:t nowadays one had only to take for One's hero or heroine, , in fiction or in fact, an adolescent type, a boy of seventeen, . a girl of twelve, and immediately voices began to quaver, throats to tighten, and an ecstasy of tenderness was aroused." Miss Stern might well have written her story in defiance of this dictum. The obstinate love for one another of her two infant prodigies, a subject full of perils, has neither tightened her throat nor caused her voice to quaver : and her readers will be duly grateful.
Halcyon Day, aged eleven, was a much fitted and emetic child poet in New York, until her father, Captain Richard Day, R.N. (retired), arrived and whisked her off to " Mariners," his Hampshire home, to become a "happy, healthy, normal, romping little girl." Eden Herring was a thin, red-haired child actor, who supported a seedy and unpleasant family on his earnings. He and Halcyon (now Margery, clad in a reefer coat) met at Beaulieu Abbey, to which she had free access. Thereafter, despite intense parental disapproval, they met whenever possible.
The crisis of the book is set in Munich, where Eden felt compelled to sell his love to a Spanish woman twice his age, because he needed eighty marks for Hal. The way in which this scene is brought about is an admirable instance of Miss Stern's careful craftsmanship. Hal needed the eighty marks to make good a theft from a school fund of which she was the treasurer. She had embezzled it becatIse she and Eden had overslept on an outing, missed the train by which he was to get back for his evening performance, and been obliged to take a cab. Eden lent her his salary afterwards, but that meant that he could not send home his usual weekly money for the rent ; and Chiquita was his last resource. Eden was working in Munich because Hal was there and he thought she was in difficulties ; and I MI was therebeeause her escapades with Eden had horrified both her family and the English convent school to which they had at first sent her. If Miss Stern has learnt her craft from Fielding, whom such care suggests, she is a credit to her master.
There are two twists in the story, which, judged by the high standard of the, rest, struck Inc as "contrived" and relatively unconvincing. One is the quarrel which so eon- veriently kept the pair apart till they met at a rehearsal of Hal's play, and the other is the conversion of Captain Day to the idea of their marriage by making him read Romeo and Juliet. But these are small matters in a full and crowded book. Little Red Horses is a fine, sustained piece of work, and I am not sure that the ironic end is not the best thing in it.
I : do not know when Sir Ronald Ross's romance was written. Its manner, and particularly its dialogue, suggests the last century, if not the time of the Crimea. Whenever written, it is the most astonishing blend of imagination, scholarship, love of nature, melodrama, and sheer nonsense that I have ever come across. Its distinguished author has not the remotest idea of how to tell a story, but the book forces its way along by its own -Momentum. Such a scene as the appearance of the Child as a Sign to the labouring ship is quite off the beaten track of fiction. The storl, is Robinson
Mr. Basil Maine has written a very attractive second novel. Its attraction lies principally in the character of its hero, Oswald Hallows, who, in spite of being earnest and rather ineffectual, claims and holds the reader's interest front his first appearance, when he is vainly trying to keep order at the Settlement, to his last, where he gives himself up for manslaughter. St. Augustine's Settlement was at Plummer's Cut, in Rotherhithe, and Oswald was the curate in charge. He fell in love with an artist's model. They were to be secretly married, but a thunderstorm broke his nerve, and the lady, hearing that her pugilist admirer had been beaten at the Albert Hall, walked out of the hotel and left him. Wh( he was back at work, she visited him, as Mrs. Fiddy, wife of a tea merchant, and summed up the situation in a few sentences :
" Yer know, me and you'd never 'ave made a success of marriage. . . . I don't think I sbauld 'ave been any good as a clergyman'a wife some'ow. Wot's more, I don't think you're a marrying man, Oswald. I may he wrong. But that's my opinion."
As a novel, Plummer's Cut has serious defects. Oswald is the only real character ; Ivy, Len, Miss Crotch, and the others are little more than sketches, and Mr. Maine's technique is often amateurish, as in the first chapter, where, after a spirited opening, he gives us a long chunk of retrospective explanation and analysis. Yet these defects matter little in comparison with the power of the central character to hold our interest. When a novelist has this gift, all else will be added unto him.
Miss Lehmann also begins her novel amateurishly. Its opening chapters have feeling, as well as knowledge ; yet except for an individual scene or two, such as the appearance of the doctor outside Jane's room, she fails to "get them across." The material is there. It is only a matter of tech- nique. Once she has brought Richard to Cornwall for the second time, however, she gains control of her story, and from that point on it is excellent. Miss Lehmann has the uncommon power of making one accept, without question, the behaviour of her characters. She convinces us of Susan's abrupt changes of mood, and the anguish of perplexity they caused to Richard. We see, perfectly, the domination of the loved over the lover ; and then, when Miss Lehmann gives us the real explanation for Susan's conduct, it is as convincing in logic as the conduct was in narrative. To have achieved these last chapters is earnest of uncommon perceptions and no little skill. But Wisdom Lingers is a most interesting debut, with a promise of much more to come.
The journey upon which Jeronimo, the land surveyor, set out had a double purpose. He wished to chart unexplored regions, but he wished even more to find his own soul :
"The blacks carried only their loads ; but he carried a burden of memories and regrets ; he bore his portion of the curse which every occidental man must bear. And he knew that he bore it."
The reader soon knows that Ile bore it, too. I confess that I find the objective scenes in which the book abounds very much more to my taste than its pages of philosophizing, and to Herr Heuser's tither ponderous habit of taking one by the sleeve and whispering impressively in one's ear. As what the films call "Africa with the lid off," The Inner Journey is often excellent : but, like Jeronimo, it carries more than its fair load.
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