A copy of Mr. Cook’s latest book had been frozen in the ice cake.
“‘Mr. Loring,’ said Cook solemnly. He paused, swallowing with a mighty effort, even some slight contortion of the facial muscles.... ‘Mr. Loring, my work has seldom had a—a token of appreciation that I—I value m-more—ahem—ho, ha—ahem, hem—!’”
Tears! Yes, there are tears for those who can shed them in Nathan Burke, where, indeed, the chapters describing Jim Sharpless’s critical illness in the shabby little boarding house kept by the exasperating but pitiful Mrs. Slaney read more like Dickens than Thackeray. Tenderness? There is first and last a good deal of it, expended oftentimes upon individuals with whom Mrs. Watts teaches us a wise patience. There is a deserved tenderness in the close of the first part of The Boardman Family, relieved instantly by one of those swift transitions which occur in life. Sandra Boardman has decided to go to New York. She intends to become a professional dancer.
“She went to bed early that night; and after a while Mrs. Alexander Boardman, going quietly upstairs, stopped at her granddaughter’s door and looked in. There was some disorder; Sandra’s trunk had already gone, but her little valise stood open on a chair, waiting for the last odds and ends; there were her gloves and hat and her nattily rolled umbrella laid together. Mrs. Alexander went in a step; by the light from the hall she could see Sandra sound asleep, with her long, thick, black hair braided and tied up in a ribbon, lying across the pillow; she looked very small and young. On the night-stand beside the bed, there was the watch her father had given her on her nineteenth birthday, a girl’s watch that never kept time, a foolish elegant trifle; and there was a half-eaten apple which she had probably been too sleepy to finish. Somehow these things, this inefficient watch, this apple with a bite or two out of it, suddenly seemed to the old lady poignantly pathetic; a hundred times she had seen Sandra thus in her crib, with a toy, a cooky alongside; Richard, too, when he was a baby. Old Sarah Chase Boardman, whose past, like everybody’s past, must have held some unpleasing chapters, who went to church and subscribed to charities and practiced an unswerving courtesy all for no better reason than because it appeared to her the part of a lady, who believed nothing about God save that, if He existed, He must surely be a gentleman—old Sarah Boardman got down on her knees then and there and put up some lame petition for this young girl.
“Mrs. Richard, passing by, saw her in the attitude with surprise and alarm. ‘Good gracious, Mother, what is the matter?’ she wanted to know, in a guarded voice.
“‘Nothing,’ said Mrs. Alexander, rising stiffly. ‘I dropped my little gold pin. Never mind, Lucy, I found it, thank you!’”
A beautifully illustrative passage. It shows the Defoe method, the enumerative narration, at its best. So many writers would have failed to infect us with the feeling that Mrs. Watts conveys. It is not until you have stepped inside Sandra’s room and seen, bit by bit, what old Sarah Boardman saw, that you can share her feeling and understand how a very fine (but also very worldly) old lady came to kneel and “put up some lame petition for this girl.” The conclusion emphasizes what we said at the start of this discussion. Would you, well as you might have known Sarah Boardman, have known just how she would behave when her daughter-in-law caught her upon her knees in Sandra’s bedroom? Mrs. Watts knew, knew perfectly the rather pathetic deception the old lady’s pride—reserve, worldliness, whatever you choose to call it—would inspire; knew also the presence of mind which would enable her to effect it.
In order of popularity Mrs. Watts’s books stand thus: Nathan Burke, then The Legacy, her next book after Nathan Burke; then The Rise of Jennie Cushing. The comparison is somewhat vitiated by the fact that Van Cleve, coming between The Legacy and Jennie Cushing, was published serially in the Atlantic Monthly and must have reached a great many of Mrs. Watts’s readers that way before it appeared in covers. The Rudder was less successful than any of the others, though it is too early to judge of the popularity of The Boardman Family, published in the spring of 1918. For some reason which the present writer is unable to fathom, The Rudder was criticised with a most unusual severity of opinion by those who “review” books and commonly mistake their opinions for infallible fact. I have been unable to perceive its inferiority to the bulk of Mrs. Watts’s work. It is a less dramatic story, so far as external incident goes, than most of the novels, but in its portraiture, its fidelity to personal characteristics, its humor, its sharpness of observation and skillful selection for recording, The Rudder leaves nothing to be desired. I should rate it with The Legacy while freely conceding that the developed story of the girl and woman, Letty Breen, chief figure in The Legacy, more readily holds the average reader’s attention and interest.
The close of The Legacy, where Letty Breen asks herself: “Am I a good woman—a bad woman?” and then answers “I do not know,” clearly foreshadowed The Rise of Jennie Cushing, which, since its presentation in motion pictures with Elsie Ferguson in the title rôle, will be in its main outlines familiar to more people than any other story of Mrs. Watts’s, not even excepting Nathan Burke. It is a pity that the film representation twists the conclusion of the tale so as to affix the conventional happy ending. Not the inevitable happy ending—none can object to a happy ending where it is inevitable, nor desire another; it is where an unhappy or neutral ending is inevitable that we resent anything else being foisted upon us. And the true ending, the book ending, of The Rise of Jennie Cushing is neutral. It could not be otherwise. There is in Jennie Cushing, built up by her solid will and fortified by her experience, a force sufficiently great to neutralize her love for Don and save her from herself.
The Rise of Jennie Cushing is the most dramatic, the most artistic, and will be the most enduring of Mrs. Watts’s books. It is without any question a really great novel and both in its conception and its execution it would reflect luster upon any name in American literature and upon the literature of any land on earth. The popularity of Nathan Burke, with its richness of detail, its warmth of feeling, its lively narration and its distinctly good and distinctly bad characters, is natural and to be expected. Any one who likes Dickens will revel in Nathan Burke. The popularity of The Legacy is partly attributable to the fact that it followed Nathan Burke. But the popularity of Jennie Cushing represents the fresh and admiring discovery of Mrs. Watts by an audience in large part different from that she had acquired with her earlier books. It was a popularity wholly earned by Jennie Cushing and not a “carry-over” from a preceding book, as in the case of The Legacy. That it was earned by the merit of the book itself is clear enough from this fact: In the case of Nathan Burke and The Legacy the reprintings fell within three or four months; the books sold off quickly. But Jennie Cushing was published in October, reprinted in November—and the next reprinting was the following June! This was not a book of ephemeral success and made its way slowly by sheer power.