Mrs. Richmond is a doctor’s wife. In 1910 she created the character for whom she is most widely known and thanked—Redfield Pepper Burns, the generous, red-haired young doctor of uncertain temper and humane impulses of whom we haven’t heard the last yet. Red Pepper Burns was followed by Mrs. Red Pepper and Red Pepper’s Patients. But hold on—not so fast. In 1906, between the two Juliet books, Mrs. Richmond had given us the story of The Second Violin. In 1908 came Around the Corner in Gay Street, in 1909 A Court of Inquiry; there were also the two Christmas booklets—On Christmas Day in the Morning (1908) and On Christmas Day in the Evening (1910). Between Red Pepper Burns and Mrs. Red Pepper appeared Strawberry Acres and a year after Mrs. Red Pepper was published The Twenty-fourth of June.
But this is becoming a mere catalogue, and the place for a list of Mrs. Richmond’s books is at the end of this chapter. What we want to do here is to consider her writing, or a few fragments of it as representative as may be, and try to see what she does and how she does it.
Let it be said at the outset that she makes slips which would be inexcusable if we did not all make the same slips. In the second chapter of Red Pepper’s Patients Dr. Burns has sheltered a Hungarian violinist who is now playing for the physician and his wife: “Warmed and fed, his Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to the exaltation of the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely pathetic.” The Hungarians are not a Latin race, but we know what she means, so why be bothered? “His attitude, as he stood before his hosts, had the unconscious grace of the foreigner.” Of any foreigner—they are all graceful! Hang it! We always think of them as unconsciously graceful. Why quibble?
Mrs. Richmond can be humorous in the most natural way. From The Twenty-fourth of June:
“‘Rufus,’ said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled bathroom, ‘I want you should look at those bath-towels. I never in my life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost—I don’t know what they cost—I didn’t know there were such bath-towels made!’
“‘I don’t want to wrap myself in a blanket,’ asserted her husband. ‘I want to know I’ve got a towel in my hand, that I can whisk round me and slap myself with. Look here, let’s get to bed....
“‘Ruth,’ said he, with sudden solemnity, ‘I forgot to undress in my dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take ’em off again in there?’”
It is funny because it is so exactly what we do say in such situations. It is naturalism of a very high order and the more humorous for being entirely unforced.
In the creation of character Mrs. Richmond is at her best simply because she differentiates her people ever so slightly from what, lacking a better word, we generally call types. Her main triumph is evenly shared in this field and that other, of which we spoke at the outset. Red Pepper Burns was a very great success as novels go and Redfield Pepper Burns is a very distinct success as the persons of fiction go; but the Christmas stories that Mrs. Richmond has written and such intimate little heart messages as The Enlisting Wife and The Whistling Mother are just as successful. Take the opening of The Enlisting Wife:
“Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last paragraph of a letter from her young husband.