The reader of The Four Stragglers will say, with entire truth: “There is no principal motif of either regeneration or sacrifice here.” No, but there is another motif which Frank L. Packard has reiterated with an equal persistence—punishment for evildoing. The story has, furthermore, a distinctly more ironical quality than Mr. Packard, in his warm indignation at moral disorder, in his determined institution of a moral order, has generally been able to fall back upon. If the wages of sin is death, as his story reminds us, the reward of greed is defeat and the possession of money as money is a grim futility. It is a sharp lesson from one who has learned it—how? I think of the fortunes made by The Miracle Man and feel a Jimmie Dale smile on my lips (“his lips thinned”; “a mirthless smile was on his lips”) as it occurs to me that Mr. Packard could easily have learned it from simply watching others learn it at his expense. The bill for the lesson, so presented, does not seem unreasonable.
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Frank L. Packard and his wife and boys live in a particularly pleasant, and rather a roomy, house set back from the avenue which winds along the north bank of the St. Lawrence at Lachine. In the summer Mrs. Packard and the children may go to Kennebunkport in Maine or some other spot on the seashore. Then will the husband and father spend all the hours of daylight at the Royal Montreal Golf Club, the oldest golf club on this continent, with a clubhouse whose very wide veranda is 300 feet long and whose two eighteen-hole courses are a test of good playing. In the evening he likes to get in three friends, including M. Henri B——, a notary of an old Quebec family, for bridge. Monsieur B—— and his friend, the writer, are likely to have exchanges in French, even though Packard insists that his French is somewhere short of perfection and less good, even, than in his youth when he was a student at Liége. If Robert H. Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, or some other old friend from New York is a house guest he will be golfed by day and admitted to the bridge game by night. There are, also, occasions for talk ... and there are superlative meals, whether at the Royal Montreal, the University Club in Montreal, or at the Packard house. Not only these meals, but the hours between the meals, are made more grateful to many a visitor by the fact that the Province of Quebec is not dry. In fact, the Province is in the liquor business, to the exclusion of all private selling. By establishing government shops where liquor is sold in bottles only, the Province has abolished the saloon and made unnecessary a Provincial income tax.
A few years ago Robert H. Davis used to be able to lure Packard up North on camping and hunting expeditions in which a truly incredible degree of hardship was endured in the name of recreation and healthful exercise. But lately Packard has refused to go. He is content to take his healthful exercise at the Royal Montreal and have a little physical comfort with it.
He is not tall. He has a weathered face, blue eyes, and a grim-looking mouth that is never through smiling. He has been pretty much around the world. Back in 1912 (I think) he sailed from Montreal to Cape Town and then went on to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. From there he stepped over to Auckland, New Zealand, and investigated Maoriland. He continued through the Pacific, visiting Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii. At Samoa he went from Apia to one of the smaller islands, where he lived for a couple of weeks in a chief’s hut in native fashion.
Again, in 1923, he went to South America.
Twelve years Mr. Packard waited while an idea that he came upon in the course of his round the world trip took shape. The Locked Book is in characteristics somewhat like The Four Stragglers. It begins with a yacht drifting, disabled, in Malay waters and proceeds without hesitation to the moment when Kenneth Wayne finds on a barbaric altar a book bound in leather, very old, clasped by the design of a dragon in thick brass, and locked in a strange fashion. The dragon’s tail and mouth meet over the edges and the tail is solidly brazed into the mouth. One cannot move the covers by the fraction of an inch. It seems probable that the book holds the secret of a Rajah’s treasure in gold and jewels.... The reader, after the first flush of enjoyment has passed, will be distinctly interested in analyzing Mr. Packard’s methods in the plot and his use of the plot as a vehicle for effects more important.
He believes in having a story. If you ask him to write something about fiction he will emphasize two things: the story and the character of the story, the moral character, that is, and the “moral responsibility” of those who write.[98] And once, certainly, his sense of drama and his sense of the ideal fused in a story of such simplicity and force and elevation as to be intrinsically a work of art. No faults of execution can take away that core of beauty from Frank L. Packard’s legend of The Miracle Man.