NOVELS
AN IMPERFECT MOTHER. By J. D. Beresford. Collins. 7s. 6d. net.
ELI OF THE DOWNS. By C. M. A. Peake. Heinemann. 7s. net.
THE BANNER. By Hugh F. Spender. Collins. 7s. net.
ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM. By Edna Ferber. Methuen. 6s. net.
In An Imperfect Mother Mr. J. D. Beresford has set himself the extraordinarily difficult and delicate task of describing a mother's unorthodoxy as seen by her grown-up children. Of Mr. Beresford it can generally be said that he is quite fearless of the troubles he makes for himself. Yet in this particular instance some doubt might be left in the reader's mind as to whether his designing of the book was hurried or certain obvious issues deliberately shirked. Some compromise may be arrived at between the two alternatives when we consider the overwhelming evidence of this author's sincerity and his inflexible allegiance to his art. Here the reader cannot fail to ask himself—what would I do—what could I say, if my mother had run off with someone?—well knowing that in an enormous preponderance of cases such a question is comfortably absurd. It is even indecent to put such a question to yourself, is it not? It is the defilement of a sacred place? Exactly. So is the book condemned at the very outset because its theme is "disagreeable" or "delicate" or "unusually unpleasant"? That is where one's first doubts of Mr. Beresford's complete fearlessness are bred. In his treatment of that disagreeable idea there is nothing disagreeable. You feel that there should be. Mr. Beresford has gilded his pill with a sugar of a too vigorous refinement. He has been at pains too great to disguise the fact of its nastiness.
What did these children think and do? The boy Stephen, just leaving school, is the only one that counts for much, though his two sisters, sketchy as is their appearance in the story, are excellently considered. Before the actual crash comes they whisper together about their mother's goings on, try to make their father speak of what they believe should be uppermost in his mind, and insist on a full discussion with Stephen. One of them was a school teacher, the other subsequently married an elderly chemist. In a way they enjoy the scandal; you feel that some excitement has come into their dull lives, with the piquancy of self-righteousness added to outraged innocence. They want to make the most of it. They are not genuinely ashamed.
Emily turned the embarrassment of her steady gaze immovably upon her father.
"I don't know what's come to mother lately," she said.
Mr. Kirkwood began to fidget with his sparse little beard. "She's a little out of sorts, perhaps," he hazarded feebly.
"Well, oughtn't we to do something, father?" Emily continued, still pinning him with her stare.
"Oh! What can you do?" put in Stephen irritably....
Emily turned herself about and focused her attention upon her brother. "If she's out of sorts she ought to see a doctor," she said.
"That wouldn't be any good," Stephen returned without hesitation.
"Well, but why wouldn't it?" Emily inquired, with a meaning in her tone that could not be mistaken.
"No good asking me," was Stephen's evasion.
"Well, I think it's time something was done," Emily said, sharpening the point of her now obvious intention.
"I don't know what you mean, Emily," little Kirkwood put in nervously.
Emily knew, they all three knew, that their father's remark had been intended as a reminder that any open discussion of a mother's failings was impossible between father and children; but Emily had made up her mind that the time had come when they must, in her own phrase, "face the facts."
"I don't think it's right for us to let things go on and not make any effort to stop them," she said in a low but determined voice. "I don't see the good of our going on pretending, when we all know perfectly well what's happening. Do you, Hilda?"
"No, I don't," Hilda emphatically agreed.
But with Stephen it is different. He really cares very little about appearances, though he dreads facing his schoolfellows. He is wounded because his mother prefers another man to his father and himself. And there is an occasion when he might have changed his mother's decision had he known. Does he really want her, does he need her? she asks herself. And just on that very day Stephen had been smiled upon by the little daughter of his headmaster. She is fourteen, he seventeen. Impossible dreams fill his mind. He has said nothing to his mother, but she knows. As though she had seen the whole of the little trifling play enacted—for it was no more than one bright smile cast over a dainty shoulder; no word had been spoken—she knew that another interest had come, since yesterday, into the boy's life. He doesn't need her any more. His protestations would have been passionate had they been genuine. She goes.
The view of the children towards the problem must depend entirely upon their upbringing and the degree of sensitiveness in their relation to their mother. In regard to Cecilia Kirkwood's family, Mr. Beresford has expected a good deal of our faith in him. They were born and bred in a small cathedral town, their father was a bookseller, their degree was humble but respectable. Yet from beginning to end Stephen can only find it in his heart to think of his mother's flight as a callous desertion. He appears to be completely oblivious of the moral involved and of all that is implied by his mother's running away with the handsome organist. A closer scrutiny would have been horrible! Yes: but would not Stephen have made it, and, unpleasant or not, should there not be in the story some indication that he did make it?
To speak of a "handsome organist" is, in passing, liable to misconstruction, for Dr. Threlfall was not only good-looking but clever and accomplished in manner; not only an organist, for when he left Medboro' he gave up playing the organ for the composition of light opera, and became an emphatic success. Taking Cecilia for granted, we can well imagine that she would run away with Threlfall, and would do all the other things that Mr. Beresford makes her do, and talk as she does. But it is hard for the reader to take her for granted, just as it was hard for her neighbours in Medboro'. Cecilia's father was a philosophic tuner of pianos. He had been against her marriage in the first instance, but he rather approves of her adultery ... but it is understood that the nature of piano-tuners is warped.
Cecilia was an amazing wife for a country bookseller, and she tries, one sometimes thinks, to be grande dame in conversation, setting the whole of the little provincial town by the ears with her outlandish brilliance and daring, making it grovel at her feet because of her beauty and amiability.
Can a lady kiss her toe?
Yes; she might—she might do so—sang another novelist, who indulged in rhyme. So it is with Cecilia; she might, she might have done so, but Mr. Beresford has failed to make it inevitable of her.
Old Kirkwood, the father, dies insane, and Stephen, adopted by a rich builder who was sympathetic because his own wife was a little difficult, works hard and finally superintends the erection of a big newspaper office in London. There he falls in with his mother once more, and with the schoolmaster's daughter who had smiled upon him long ago. The old tussle is re-enacted. The mother is jealous of the girl. She sees her son blundering in his courtship, and she only has to hold her tongue to keep him by her side, a devoted slave. She is not happy. Her organist-composer is jovial, but unfaithful. She longs for the fealty of Stephen. At this point Mr. Beresford introduces a little Freudian interest in the explanation of what was, for all he says about it, a matter of secondary importance to Stephen—his disgust at his mother's hysterical and untimely laughter, and we feel that, whilst he was about it, he might have examined Cecilia's psyche a little more thoroughly. There were one or two dark places in her character and disposition upon which a more searching light might, with some profit to the story, have been thrown. There is much enjoyable reading in An Imperfect Mother, but on the whole, coming from Mr. Beresford, it is a little disappointing.
In Eli of the Downs Mr. C. M. A. Peake introduces himself to the public with a distinguished piece of work. He has been content to make his own variation of the archetype of great stories—the joys and sorrows at home, the adventures, and, finally, the return of the wanderer. This is the story of Eli Buckle, as gleaned by the teller from Eli himself, and from his old friend and neighbour Anne Brown, and it is the story of a perfectly simple and sincere man, a shepherd, who is perfectly happy in the remote solitudes which his calling entails upon him, with the wild flowers which arouse feelings his creator does not try to make him express. He is proud and happy when as a boy of twenty-one he has saved five pounds. These facts are simply stated, and yet there is not the least hint of sentimentality or of bathos. He marries the girl of his heart, and unexpectedly the knowledge comes to him of what he has been in need. "Oh, Mary, my dear, my dear!" he whispered. "You won't never know how lonely I've a-been." A little while goes by and he is lonely again, for while he is out in the night in the lambing season Mary falls from a chair, and by the time Eli gets home she and the child that should have been born to them are dead.
After that, in sheer desperation, Eli leaves his old home and goes away to sea. His is the old quest of a wounded man for the purpose which lies behind all events. Once before, when Mary had told him that he could be a preacher if he had the ambition, he had for a moment found his voice.
"... I believe I could study fast enough, and I know I could preach. I could make them listen to me; aye, have 'em all gaping after me like a nest of young thrushes, if I chose. But I'd have to tell 'em what they wanted to hear, an' dress it up the way they likes, which is what they mean by the Gospel and the Truth. But that I won't do, for I'm not sure that their Gospel is my Gospel, or their Truth any Truth at all for the matter o' that. And about God, my dear. Whether He is, or whether He isn't, what folks say, I can't testify till I know, know of my own knowledge, and not because I read it in a book or someone told me."
Occasionally the narrator of the story makes a little confidence to the reader which, apart from its humorous candour, serves a definitely useful purpose.
Now the scenes of Eli's childhood were the scenes I lived among when I too was a child, and the land where he spent the years of his middle age I knew and loved, as youth and man, but though I have crossed many waters, I am no sailor, and I cannot see the ocean as a mariner sees it.
In the course of his life as a sailor Eli has many adventures, which are wonderfully told, dramatic without one word of melodrama. Here the author who can lovingly describe the wild flowers in the lost corners of the Downs excels again, for in a few words he can truthfully describe how a particular species of liar describes himself, or how nervousness passes into wild terror in the eyes of a San Francisco crimp who is discovered trying to drug his victims. But well as Mr. Peake describes the rascalities of the adventurous life, he is more at home with the kindlinesses of the countryside and the gentle wisdom of Cathay. This is a novel, uneven in quality to be sure, but touching at certain points real beauty.
Mr. Hugh F. Spender in The Banner describes a revolution in England, organised by the League of Youth, backed by the People's Army, and inspired by Helen Hart, daughter of a millionaire, who has a bias against the landed gentry. Most elderly people in the book come in for a good deal of facetiousness directed against their ponderously old-fashioned views. One young lordling, deaf and dumb from shell shock, has his senses restored by the mere sight of the new Joan of Arc, and falls in love with her. She refuses him at first because she is vowed to The Cause.... "For a moment she resisted, resisted almost fiercely, and then she lay passively like a child in his arms." Mr. Spender has invented a young man who willingly throws up both title and title-deeds at the call of the People and becomes plain Citizen; but it is a pity that the author in creating another peer should have given him an existing name. Regarded either as fiction or as propaganda this is a poor book.
Roast Beef, Medium is the curious title that Miss Edna Ferber has given to the Business Adventures of Emma McChesney. This American authoress, who writes vivaciously in her own language, gives bright and cheerful expression to her belief that people should be earnest and good and that Roast Beef (not too underdone is conveyed by "medium") should as a staple diet take precedence of flaked crab meat with Russian sauce. These business adventures are certainly not caviare. Emma McChesney is a bagwoman, representing T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. Rivals make love to her and try to get the better of her alternately, and she has a young cub of a son to support. Very sick of hotel life, she longs for a house of her own—especially a kitchen. In the last chapter she gets them. The book is full of homely advice. Emma was fresh and wholesome in appearance, though not so young as the picture on the wrapper deceitfully indicates. But she was a good sort and refused to Marry T. A. Buck himself because she didn't love him. She was, in fact, a "worth-while" woman.