She has written short stories for all the most popular American magazines—the Saturday Evening Post perhaps particularly; McClure’s, Everybody’s, Collier’s, the American and the Metropolitan are others she enumerates offhand. And her short stories are among the most excellent produced by a living American writer. Some of them, unified by possession of the same principal character or characters, have been published in book form, as Tish and Bab, a Sub-Deb. The stories in Tish relate various escapades of an unmarried woman of advanced years, the heroine of Mrs. Rinehart’s earlier novel, The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry. Letitia Carberry, “Tish,” is a person without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement-loving, curious, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other maidens like herself, Lizzie and Aggie; with a nephew, Charlie Sands, who throws up hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Miss Carberry is unique and funny beyond easy characterization. She pokes at the carburetor with a hairpin, rides horseback in a divided skirt, puts great faith in blackberry cordial, shoulders a shotgun and mends the canoe with chewing gum. These things in the tales composing Tish; in The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry we have a story in which the mystery of extraordinary and scandalous occurrences in a hospital where Tish is a patient is finally solved by her efforts. Nothing affords a better exhibition of Mrs. Rinehart’s skill as a story-teller than this novel. Things that with less skillful handling would be both ghoulish and shocking, are so related that they strike the reader merely as bizarre or outrageously laughable, or as heightening the unguessable puzzle of what is to come. The technical triumph is very great, as great as that achieved in the last half of George M. Cohan’s play, Seven Keys to Baldpate, where a corpse is lugged about without offending the observer. The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry is a remarkable evidence of the lengths to which farce can be carried and remain inoffensive—and become the source of helpless mirth.
Bab, a Sub-Deb, with its account of the doings of a girl who has not yet “come out,” a sub-débutante, is also unique and, to the extent of the character’s capacity, just as diverting. Mrs. Rinehart does nothing by halves, she exploits the possibilities of her people to the top of their bents—and hers. She exploits—always legitimately—her own affairs, as in My Creed, the autobiographical article in the American Magazine upon which we have drawn so heavily in this sketch, and The Altar of Freedom, an account of her struggle to part with a son who felt he must answer America’s call for men in 1917. With gusto she gives us the account of a vacation trip—see Through Glacier Park or Tenting To-Night. With the heaviest possible charge of sentiment but never an explosive cap of sentimentality, she puts before us a small boy, the crown prince of a mythical but completely real kingdom, whose pitifully circumscribed existence, whose scrapes and friendships and admiration of Abraham Lincoln, have for their background court intrigues and the uncovering of treason; read Long Live the King! With complete self-knowledge comes complete knowledge of others; Mrs. Rinehart can go straight to the American heart and does it in The Amazing Interlude, that story of Sara Lee Kennedy, who went from a Pennsylvania city to the Belgian front to make soup for the soldiers. Here is romance so heady and strong that most readers overlook, purposely and gladly, the improbability of Henri’s return to Sara Lee and the little house of mercy after daybreak discovered him, delirious and in a Belgian uniform, dangling on the German wire. Artistically The Amazing Interlude excels by its portrait of Harvey, Sara Lee’s fiancé back home, Harvey who resisted her “call” to service, who brought her back home, whose hard selfishness as an American and whose lack of comprehension as a man make him entirely typical of thousands in this country prior to April 6, 1917.
The novel K.—or story K., if we accept Mrs. Rinehart’s disclaimer as to novel writing—is possibly more representative of her work than any other single book. It illustrates perfectly her ingenuity in contriving and handling a plot; for the book ends on page 410 and the most necessary revelation does not come until page 407. It exemplifies her finished gift for telling a story; there are no wasted words and in half a page she can transport you from laughter to tenderness. Half a page? On page 70 you may see it done in seven lines. The girl Sidney Page has slipped from a rock into the river, alighting on her feet and standing neck deep. Rescued by K. Le Moyne, she remarks:
“‘There wasn’t any danger, really, unless—unless the river had risen.... I dare say I shall have to be washed and ironed.’
“He drew her cautiously to her feet. Her wet skirts clung to her; her shoes were sodden and heavy. She clung to him frantically, her eyes on the river below. With the touch of her hands the man’s mirth died. He held her very carefully, very tenderly, as one holds something infinitely precious.”
K. shows its author’s power to portray character effectively in sweeping outlines filled in, on occasion, with solid or mottled masses of color. K. himself is the kind of a person that Mary S. Watts might have put before us in some 600 closely printed pages. It is a difference of method merely and while not every one would be able to appreciate the thousand little touches with which Mrs. Watts drew her hero, Mrs. Rinehart’s more vigorous delineation is effective at all distances, in all lights, with almost all readers. She manages in this tale to present a wide variety of persons and a great range of emotions and she manages it less by atmospheric details and a single setting—the Street—than by an astonishing number of relationships between a man and a woman; or, in the case of Johnny, “the Rosenfeld boy,” and Joe Drummond, a youth and a woman or girl. It will be worth the reader’s while to note that the story contains no less than ten such relationships. First there are K. and Sidney and Joe and Sidney. Then there are Max Wilson and Sidney, Max Wilson and Carlotta Harrison, Tillie and Mr. Schwitter, Christine Lorenz and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Johnny Rosenfeld, K. and Tillie and K. and Christine. This is very complicated and unusual art—if it is not novelizing, then we do not know what novelizing is. Consider the gamut run. K. and Sidney are the ripe lovers. Joe’s unrequited love for Sidney is the desperate passion of immaturity. Max Wilson’s feeling for Sidney is the infatuation of a nature inherently fickle where women are concerned. Carlotta Harrison’s love for Max Wilson is the dark passion. The relation between Tillie and Schwitter goes to the bedrock of human instincts, is a thing Thomas Hardy might have concerned himself with. It is pathetic; he would have made it tragic as well; we are satisfied that in her disposition of it Mrs. Rinehart is sufficiently faithful to the truth of life. Christine Lorenz and Palmer Howe are the disillusioned married; but in this case, as Christine said: “‘The only difference between me and other brides is that I know what I’m getting. Most of them do not.’”
Grace Irving and Palmer Howe bring before us the man and the woman in their worst relationship in the story, or in life either. Grace Irving and Johnny Rosenfeld are a picture of thwarted motherhood and a blind feeling for justice. K. and Tillie are proofs of the reach of friendship and the efficacy of understanding. K. and Christine give us the woman saved from herself.
The height—or the depth—to which Mrs. Rinehart attains in this story is a thing to marvel at, and just as marvelous is the surety with which she gets her distance. The tenth chapter of K. will not easily be overmatched in American fiction or that of any other country. Here is Mr. Schwitter, the nurseryman, middle-aged or older, not very articulate, with a wife in an asylum playing with paper dolls; and here is Tillie, punching meal tickets for Mrs. McKee, not becoming younger, lonelier every day, suffering heartaches and disappointment without end. Mr. Schwitter has proposed a certain thing.
“Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her, embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the look in her eyes and stared out of the front window.
“‘Them poplars out there ought to be taken away,’ he said heavily. ‘They’re hell on sewers.’”