Fiction

BY L. A.

G. STRONG

-1Haids and Mistresses. By Beatrice Kean Seymour. (Heinemann. lts . 6d.)

The Wise and the Foolish Virgins. By Marguerite Steen. (Gollanca. 7s. 6d.)

MRS. BEATRICE KEAN SEYMOUR has tackled a huge subject with a success that must greatly advance her reputation. Her book is not merely the story of Sally, Mildred, Sanchia, and the rest : it lives up to its generic title, and the easy, loose- jointed manner in which it is written cannot hide the austerity and symmetry of the plan. Sally, its heroine, is one of Nature's aristocrats. She is generous, beautiful, capable of repose, and, best of all, she never judges. After her first brief situation with " the Spearses," she goes to the Yorkes, and becomes devoted to her beautiful mistress. From Mildred Yorke, who will not satisfy her husband, she passes to Sanchia Hanson, whose husband cannot satisfy her. The lives and loves of these families Mrs. Kean Seymour treats as fully as she treats Sally. Sanchia is trapped by her cold-hearted lover, and Sally finds a new mistress. Colin Stawell pays court to her, and she falls deep in love with him, only to be dismissed. Thinking of suicide, she is rescued by the elderly John Saril, serves him faithfully, becomes his mistress, and after his death is thrown out by his hateful relatives.

This big novel is easily the best thing Mrs. Kean Seymour has done. The characterization is very good indeed. Sally is a perfect figure, and her many colleagues are not simply foils to her grace of mind and body. Mrs. Kean Seymour is at home above and below stairs, and she deals with each world faith- fully. Her prose is vigorous, conversational, and easy to read : but she has adopted one or two strange locutions :

" To Sally, always sensitive to physical beauty, the dark and sullen looks of Sanchia Hanson appealed as earlier had those of the fair Brunhild° type that was Mildred Yorke at twenty-eight."

And elsewhere :

" The cold, clear voice that was Mrs. Stawell's bade her come in.''

Nothing is gained by this inversion, which is used many times in the book ; and the following sentence is a dead loss :

"Faced with the pleasing sight of a plate of thick freshly-cut sandwiches upon a coffee-stall, the fact of death and its advantages temporarily receded."

The context tells us that it was Sally who was confronted with the sandwiches, not the eternal verities ; but that does not 'Save the sentence from being plain nonsense. It is un- generous to carp at trifles in so excellent a performance ; but, being the work of a fme writer, the achievement that is Mrs. Kean Seymour's novel would be happier without these oddities.

Mr. Mottram resuscitates, with skilled and careful pen, the English Miss. This time she is called Cara, and lives at a vicarage with her father and mother. When the boys conic home for the holidays two incongruous elements are intro- duced into the essential goodness, the bacon-and-eggs-for- breakfast atmosphere, of the vicarage. These are the young highbrow Daverly, and the sophisticated and resting actress Carissima, sister to the vicar's wife. Cam, interested but repelled by Daverly, suddenly sees him effortlessly annexed by her aunt. She stands outside a bedroom door, knowing what she mill find if she opens it. "The indignity of it all, thought the sheltered girl." Mr. Mottram lets us see what happened as it affected each of his people in turn. He is im- partial, but none of his characters is profound—except perhaps Cara, whom we have met before. The vicarage is lovingly drawn, and makes one wish one were in Daverly's place, to be nice and friendly to these nice and friendly people, and to exalt Cara above her superlative relation.

Mr. Gathome-Hardy's novel begins as a nineteenth-century conversation piece, having for its scene New Berkshire, "a self-governing island, England's oldest colony, lying in the Atlantic, off the coast of Canada." Its note suddenly deepened by an epidemic of cholera, it shifts to England, then back again. For burden it has the talk and the love-affairs of a number of ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Feltham, pinching his own jowl, is a good character, but Miss Flick's mannerism is surely overworked. Dickensian characterization needs more rigour: in this staidly humorous chronicle, it gives the reader a shock, as might a cabbage in a rock garden. In other respects, Mr. Gathorne-Hardy's touch is sure and delicate :

For many years she had dominated Anne, and she saw her free with a sense both of regret and had conscience, much as a slave. owner might regard his compulsorily emancipated slaves. Again, her sense of propriety had been shocked by the runaway match, and this old feeling was resuscitated by Anne's marked absence of self- consciousness or shame. Eliza was vicariously bashful for her. But her strongest grievance was that Anne's elopement had mad° any similar action on her part utterly impossible.

The successor to Unicorn is an excellent piece of work. Catherine lived in a filthy slum, with her mother and a crowd of brothers and sisters. " Father " was the generic title applied to a succession of men who came and went, and were usually responsible for an extra brother or sister. Catherine Was different from the rest. like Mrs. Kean Seymour's Sally, she had real beauty of character. Miss Steen takes her on a series of visits, variously occasioned, to different environ- ments. She visits one sister, who married a Chinaman, and another who lives in a house of ill-fame. She does Miss Gatty's cleaning, and encounters Steve Bruner, skipper of the 'Sweet Alice,' with whom she finds happiness. The story gets its quality from Miss Steen's apparent ability to deal with any situation and to understand any type of character.

She has a fine range of invective, passing with ease and con- viction from the squalid brawls of her Doll Tearsheets to the spinsterly biekerings of her school teachers. Unless I ant badly mistaken, she is going to be a first-rate novelist.

It is good to have something new from the practised pen of Mr. Morley Roberts. His garrulous old salt has a good deal more to say about wimmin than about ships, and is agreeably definite in his classification of both. The manner dates a little at times, and the book is one to dip into rather than to read at a sitting ; but it contains some very good yarns and a deal of homely philosophy.

The last book on the list raises a serious problem—the problem of reading it decorously in public. Here is a funny book that is really funny. Mr. Mottram's vicar would prob- ably have shaken his head over it, and his wife would cer- tainly have shaken hers : but the unregenerate will rejoice Mightily over its cakes and ale—and its ginger.

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