“It was the most trying experience of my life. Then the feeling came to me that I must write about it—must do my small part toward banishing the evil.”
Exactly! There you have the idealist in action as well as in literature. It is perfectly plain what some people will think of Mrs. Comstock’s course; it is equally plain that hundreds of thousands will approve it. Do her the fine justice to acknowledge that whatever any one thought of it, that even if every one else in the world condemned her, she would have done as she did.
She has, in a showdown, absolute and unlimited courage. Then and then only is her rooted modesty and her equally rooted humor put aside. As for the humor that is hers, it comes out fully in the narrative of her experiences campaigning for suffrage. As she once wrote:
“And then the anti who became converted and in a burst of gratitude sent me a bottle of Benedictine!
“Maybe she felt as the young girl at a revival once felt who electrified the congregation by shouting:
“‘Good Lord! My jewelry is dragging me down to hell—I am going to give it to my sister!’”
Go out to Flatbush, as Alice Lawton did one sunshiny afternoon, afterward relating her experience in the Book News Monthly; travel along a “broad, tree-shaded street between rows of real homes with full complement of flower gardens and babies and puppies; stop at a pretty, wide-verandaed, white-pillared house and call upon Mrs. Comstock, wife, mother, home-maker, novelist—a Jill of many trades and successful at them all!”
She seats you in a “cozy, brown-walled drawing-room, beside a little round table.” You eat “piping hot buttered toast and crisp jumbles, and drink properly-brewed tea. Sonny comes strolling in, a large, beautifully-marked Burne-Jonesy yellow cat,” a Persian. The creature is polite but heads for a little mahogany desk and sniffs at the single drawer. It contains his catnip.
The hostess is the sort of woman you make confidences to. Mrs. Comstock is cheerful, “has smiling eyes, a loving-toned voice, curly gray hair, wears pretty clothes and almost always flowers. One feels a hearty welcome even when one telephones her. She never sounds annoyed, nor even interrupted.”
Upstairs there’s a bright little room where she works. Couch in one corner, built-in bookcase in another, big desk in the middle. The desk is heaped with piles of closely-written paper and books. On the soft buff paper of the walls are paintings, drawings, photographs—the originals of illustrations to Mrs. Comstock’s books are noticeable. Here she writes most of each novel, subjected to endless interruptions—friends and neighbors of a novelist never take the novelist’s work seriously. When the finishing chapters are to be done Mrs. Comstock packs manuscript, pencils and paper and goes away. Her publishers and her husband have the address—no one else. She is one of the extremely few novelists who do not use a typewriter—she writes it all out longhand and makes several copies before she gets through. She began by writing stories for the school paper, she continued by writing children’s stories, then books for older girls and boys. Janet of the Dunes was her first novel.