FICTION
HIGH LIFE AND LOW LIFE
ON the first page of her new novel Miss Royde Smith challenges and excites the reader. He is prepared to make acquaintance
with several characters both in high and in low society and to see them drawn into a concatination of dramatic clashes by the seemingly unimportant ambitions of a housemaid wilmown to most of them.
The actual story begins with a detailed description of the life of Ann Wahnisly and of John Page, who married her because he had fallen in love with her voice at the Unitarian chapel they both attended. Miss Royde Smith has a great deal of that love of local colour which characterizes Mr. Arnold Bennett, whom she resembles much more than she does the authoress of Lummox. She certainly has the power to build up the quiet existences of obscure people into intellectu- ally satisfying and dramatic fiction. Without any waste of words the atmosphere of Sir Joshua Sampson's home, where Ann was parlourmaid before her marriage, is made tangible. The tiny suburban house which John Page had called home since childhood, and to which Ann moved as a bride, becomes positively familiar, though so little actual description is given. The lamp burns, John satisfies his thirst for knowledge with a book, and on the other side of the fire Ann, who though a wife is still a domestic treasure, sews primly. The brass bedstead in the one fairly large bedroom, the zinc bath kept in the back- yard ready for Saturday's ablutions in the scullery, are enough to supply imagination with the whole picture. There must have been something a little unpleasant to Miss Royde Smith in Ann herself, as she created this decent young woman with the beautiful voice, half a dozen good songs learnt from her mistress, a set of terrifically artificial teeth, and an outlook and emotions infinitely circumscribed. The little husband with his Emerson and his lectures at Kings College clearly seems absurd to her as well. She is farther above them than Mr. Bennett would be, or less skilled as yet in disassociating her own personal reactions from her creative faculty.
Remote from the humble characters of The Housemaid, we are asked, too, to know Michel Sherlock, an archaeologist who, from rage and indifference combined, refuses to divorce his ill-suited wife. It is the rarest thing in the world, even among serious writers, to find educated characters who are as individual, as queer, as likeable and interesting as lowlier Souls often turn out in the same books. It takes a Meredith, or to-day Sir Harry Johnston, to be quite fair to rich people. None of the well-to-do characters in The Housemaid has a quarter of the truth with which, in spite of her slightly aloof attitude, Miss Royde Smith irradiates her common folk. You would recognize Mr. Page in the tube, but Michel Sherlock is only the hero of a hundred lending library successes.
It is this in part which a little mars an otherwise delightful book. It does not quite fulfil the expectations aroused. And though the unexpected call which Mr. Page's daughter makes at her father's place of business in pursuit of her ambitions does actually, mechanically, bring about catastrophes, it remains in the reader's mind as a mere accident, and not, as the writer wishes to prove, the mysterious hand of fate. But this is 'Partly due to thelact that, warmly as our sympathies have been aroused for the Pages, they have been unstirred by the much more conventional and unreal smart people, whose intrusion is almost unwelcome in a tender and thoughtful tale of modest and' unbeautiful heroes and heroines.
While The Housemaid is an ambitious, serious book, care- fully and crisply written, with sound character creation, Marie Halkett belongs to another order of novels altogether. Mr. Robert Chambers knows exactly how to write an eventful narrative in which no one is asked to helieve and he has done that. He has however written better books.
Against a background of rum-running and general villainy a seittimental love story moves toward the final kiss, only staying occasionally for a little anti-Prohibitionist propaganda.
The heroine, Marie Halkett, is a modern version of those devoted Victorian sisters who suffered all to save the reputation of an erring brother.. • She is a resourceful and spirited creature, lilreable if not credible; and _the hero, in pursuit of her has endleis adventures. and- to spare.. The. contemporary pirates who dog their footsteps speak a language which is as lively-as it is lurid ; a point in favour of most similar books, but partieu- laity•ab when, as-here, the gunshots ring putin America.
Mr. Richard Hughes, a young poet in the early twenties who has already won• his spuri as, a dramatist, now collects. in one'volinine some short stories already published in the more seriotis weeklies and journals. There exist short stories Of all kindS, and one of the kinds is the essay-sketch of a thousand words or little more.. Fresh and graceful as each one of those hi:A Moment of Time is, a sequence of such slight pieces is not. wholly agreeable, and gives to the book a certain mono- tony which is apparent rather than real. Mr. Hughes' thumb- nail sketches of life among gipsies, ,tinkers and rural folk are sensitively written. Even in the narrow proportions of the shOrtest, of possible stories, Mr. Hughes manages with- a singular felicity to maintain the proper psychological relations of his characters.- But like other young writers of imagination to-day he must beware_ of an excessiye Jove 9( the fantastic. It: is not his :forte ; nor is a talent for writing and a_ careful avoidanee of the obvious that is needed for-the making-of a short story. Most of the effects this volume are got through. understressing, but continual-_ underatressipg_.is_ a trick which is tiresome and mannered. _Far and away_ the best-story in the volume is the longest and the most matter of fact in plot, one called Lochinvarovic.. Told with _E.Cm:tow, brilliance and sureness,-this one realty is a story, not a slsetch, and it creates a_p_eculiar good humour in reader by its nice management of the affairs of an unwilling that and his dnliet. It:is:praise, not criticism, to say that it could stand b;'..vely beside the-best_of 0. Henry. -
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