It is a long and discursive chapter, as we warned you. So much there is to be said about genius, so many ways of saying the same thing! Miss Johnston’s novels had sold over 1,000,000 copies before the publication of The Long Roll, when she had only some six books to her credit and of these only four of a character to make a wide appeal.
Books by Mary Johnston
Prisoners of Hope, 1898.
To Have and to Hold, 1900.
Audrey, 1902.
Sir Mortimer, 1904.
The Goddess of Reason, 1907.
Lewis Rand, 1908.
The Long Roll, 1911.
Cease Firing, 1912.
Hagar, 1913.
The Witch, 1914.
The Fortunes of Garin, 1915.
The Wanderers, 1917.
Foes, 1918.
Michael Forth, 1919.
Sweet Rocket, 1920.
Silver Cross, 1922.
1492, 1922.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; Sir Mortimer, Foes, Michael Forth and Sweet Rocket by Harper & Brothers, New York; Silver Cross and 1492 by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.
CHAPTER XII
CORRA HARRIS
THEY rise before dawn, gentle souls who find peace in the labor of their hands and in their astonishing faith. They are the silent companions of their husbands. People do not talk much in the valley because there is not much to say. They know the weather, a few psalms, a few golden texts and a few hymns by heart. They also know each other the same way, which is a good deal more than husbands and wives can always claim in this place.
“I do not know a single lazy woman in the valley nor one who is unhappily married. They worry some over the bees when they swarm inopportunely and over the chickens when they take the roup, and over the children when they have a bad cold or do not learn their Sunday school lessons, but they do not worry over their husbands. They are not angry with mankind. As near as I can make out they want better schools and they long for a closer walk with God. But I never knew one to want a limousine or a servant to do her work or a nurse for her baby.
“And you could not put one of these fashionable split corkscrew skirts upon any of them. Call it what you please, evil-mindedness or modesty, but they are as far removed from the fashionable clothes one sees upon women in New York as these women would appear to them removed from decency and thrift.
“I do not know how long such a state of sweetness and homely goodness will last there. The feet of youth take hold upon the ways of the world. When I return this spring I may see some girl at the singing school on Sunday afternoon wearing a tight skirt. But I am thankful I have seen what I have of the simple, direct living of these men and women in the valley, whose only problem is to perform the day’s work well, to love one another and to believe in God and His mercies.”
Thus Corra Harris in the spring of 1914 in New York. It is almost superfluous to say that. No other man or woman of the writers of this country could have uttered the words, because no other American writer has that homely vigor and Biblical phraseology, nor that peculiar directness of uttered thought which can express in one breath the longing for better schools and a closer walk with God, which can contrast the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit in the same sentence. From the day when the first installment of A Circuit Rider’s Wife appeared in the Saturday Evening Post it was manifest that America had a new writer of distinction.