FICTION.
IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY.*
As the inimitable joint-authors of In Mr. Irnoir's Country remind us, it has been said that " in Ireland the inevit-
able never happens and the impossible invariably occurs." The saying can be richly illustrated from their own pages; indeed, one of its most conspicuous illustrations is to be found in the book itself. For they have suc- ceeded at the second attempt in achieving what has generally been supposed to pass the wit of men of letters —the writing of a satisfactory sequel. We say "at the second attempt" advisedly, for the second instalment of the R.11L, brilliantly written as it was, undoubtedly suffered from comparison with that classic work, Here, however, we have the true sequel, and the miracle has been accomplished. The old mood has been recaptured, and in incident, dialogue, and description the old level is maintained. We miss the Slipper, it is true, and. Sally Kuoz, tamed by matrimony, only appears in the background. But nearly all our old friends reappear, and in the finest feather. "Tie a pity ye should ever die," an Irish beggar once gratefully remarked to a venerable benefactor, and Mrs. Knox, woolly dog and all, still continues to defy, the ravages of time. Flurry, ambiguous and impenetrable as of yore, is alone capable of coping with her, and, in evidence of her unabated vigour of mind, we read that he "always treated her as a combatant in his own class, and did not for a moment consider himself bound to allow her
weight for either age not sex." We cannot blame Flurry, for his grandmother did not mellow with age. When she was in
one of her perverse moods, her maid was overheard to lament to a sympathizer on the backstairs that "the divil in the wild woods wouldn't content her." Yet, as the authors assert, and make good the assertion, she had "that mysterious quality of attraction given to some persons, and some dogs, of forming a social vortex into which lesser beings inevitably swim." She employed her henwoman to make up the fires, the cook to wait at tea, . and the butler to shoot rabbits, " having, like all successful rulers, the power of divining in her under- lings their special gifts and of wresting them to the sphere in which they shone, no matter what their normal funotions
might be." Finally, "her personality was the only thing that counted; it reduced all externals to a proper insignificance." For old Mrs. Knox looked like "a, rag-bag held together by diamond. brooches." She was not a "'shabby genteel," but a dingy gran& dame. Miss Bobbie Bennett, that undefeated horse-coper, reappears in her best form, as may be gathered from her responee to Major Yeates's- inquiry about Tomsy Flood:—
" Ah, poor Tomsy ! Ho took to this, y'know,' bliss Bennett slightly jerked her little finger, 'and he wouldn't ride a donkey over a sod of turf. They sent him out to South Africa, to an ostrich farm, and when the, people found he couldn't ride, they put him. to a bed with a setting of ostrich eggs to keep them
1* Mr. Knox's Country. 134- CE, Somerville and Martin Rosa. London :
Lonsmaus and Co, [Go.]
warm, and he did that grand, till seine one gave him a bottle of whisky, and he got rather lively and broke all the eggs. They say it's a lay-preacher he's going to be now !' " Philippa, though grown more matrouly,has not renounced the chase, and remains as incorrigibly romantic as ever ; and Major "notes himself, as narrator, retains, amongst many other excellent qualities, the priceless gift of appreciating a joke at his own expense. But not only are the old characters well to the fore ; the east is reinforced by a number of new and engaging personages. Some, like the Chicken-Farmers, represent the spread of higher education, for Miss Fraser is a lady doctor, with a gift of second-sight and horse-taming d la Rarey thrown in, while her companion agreeably combines the attributes of Feminism and femininity. The Derryolares, again, are a great acquisition, a family who "were in the habit of hurling themselves, at intervals, out of civilisation and into the wilderness with the same zest with which those who live in the wilderness hurl them- selves into civilisation. In the wilderness, twenty miles from a railway station, they had built themselves a nest, and there lived that variety of the simple life that is founded on good servants, old clothes, and a total indifference to weather," supplemented with a forty-ton yacht and a powerful motor-car. Then we welcome Captain Larpent, a strenuous sapper with a devastating love of the pianoforte, Ma and Mrs. McEvoy, and the amazing family of the McRorys, whose profuse and reckless entertainments are a source of mingled emotions to the more tolerant of their neighbours. But then, as the narrator remarks with profound wisdom, the West of Ireland cannot be smart, nor should any right-minded person desire that it should be so. If country life in Ireland were regularized and conventionalized, such books as this could not be written, and the supply of food for honest mirth would be sensibly diminished.
Evasions of the inevitable and achievements of the impos- sible are the very salt of the book, and abound in every chapter. When Dr. Jerome Hickey allowed some inmates of an asylum to attend a local sports meeting, their keepers, hopelessly drunk, were carefully escorted back to the station at the end of the day by the lunatics. Again, when Mrs. Knoxname to the rescue of a tenant who was about to be sold up by a gombeen man, and effected his release on the pay- ment of £5, the money had to be borrowed by Major Yeates from the gotnbeen man. In a poaching case, where the delinquent was charged with illegally catching salmon, the water bailiff was able to give conclusive evidence because he had assisted the poacher to gaff the fish. And d. propos de poissons, there is the story of the proprietors of a fish-shop who closed it "because they said that morning, noon, and night people were bothering them for fish "—a perfect epitome of the Irish economic problem. Only in Ireland, again, can a train be stopped to enable a passenger to hunt for an escaped canary; or a local mason be found who never accepted a job without suggesting that some one else could do it better ; or, most wonderful of all, can girls be encountered, like Miss Larkie MoRory, who redeem their vulgarity by their intrepidity and enchanting naivete. Alto- gether, this is a wonderful book, a godsend to readers and reviewers, and a crowning proof of the supremacy of its joint- authors as interpreters of the Irish comic spirit.
Previous page
