The Book of Susan: A Novel

by Lee Wilson Dodd

But what other explanation can be given for the success of Susan's play, both here and in England, than its sheer beauty? Beauty of substance, of mood, of form, of quiet, heart-searching phrase! It is not called "The Magic Circle," but it might have been; for its magic is genuine, distilled from the depths of Nature, and it casts an unescapable spell—on poets and bankers, on publicans and prostitutes and priests, on all and sundry, equally and alike. It even casts its spell on those who act in it, and no truer triumph can come to an author. I have never seen it really badly played. Susan has never seen it played at all.

On the first wave of this astonishing triumph, Susan's pen-name was swept into the newspapers and critical journals of America and England, and a piquant point for gossip was added by the revelation that "Dax," who for several months had so wittily enlivened the columns of Whim, was one and the same person. Moreover, it was soon bruited about that the author was a slip of a girl—radiantly beautiful, of course; or why romance concerning her!—and that there was something mysterious, even sinister, in her history.

"A child of the underworld," said one metropolitan journal, in its review of her poems. Popular legend presently connected her, though vaguely, with the criminal classes. I have heard an overdressed woman in a theater lobby earnestly assuring another that she knew for a fact that —— (Susan) had been born in a brothel—"one of those houses, my dear"—and brought up—like Oliver Twist, though the comparison escaped her—to be a thief.

And so it was that the public eye lighted for a little hour on Susan's shy poems. Poetry was said to be looking up in those days; and influential critics in their influential, uninfluenced way suddenly boomed these, saying mostly the wrong things about them, but saying them over and over with energy and persistence. The first edition vanished overnight; a larger second edition was printed and sold out within a week or two; a still larger third edition was launched and disposed of more slowly. Then came the war. . . .

V

If I can say anything good of the war, it is this: Since seemingly it must have come anyway, sooner or later, so far as Susan is concerned it came just in time. A letter from Phil to Susan, received toward the close of July, 1914, at the château of the Comtesse de Bligny, near Brussels, will tell you why.

"Dear Susan: If the two or three notes I've sent you previously have been brief and dull, I knew you would make the inevitable allowances and forgive me. In the first place, God didn't create me to scintillate, as you've long had reason to know; and since you left us I've been buried in a Sahara of work, living so retired a life in my desert that little news comes my way. But Jimmy breaks in on me, always welcomely, with an occasional bulletin, and last night Hunt came over and we had a long evening together. He's worried, Susan, not without great cause, I fear; he looks tired and ill; and after mulling things over, with my usual plodding caution—I've thought best to explain the situation to you.

"It can be put in very few words. The deserved success of your play and the poems, following a natural law that one too helplessly wishes otherwise, has led to a crisis in the gossip—malicious in origin, certainly—which has fastened upon you and Hunt; and this gossip lately has taken a more sinister turn. More and more openly it is being said that the circumstances surrounding Mrs. Hunt's death ought to be probed—'probed' is just now the popular word in this connection. The feeling is widespread that you were in some way responsible for it.

"I must use brutal phrases to lay the truth before you. You are not, seemingly, suspected of murder. You are suspected of having killed Mrs. Hunt during a sudden access of mental irresponsibility. It is whispered that Hunt, improperly, in some devious way, got the matter hushed up and the affair reported as an accident. As a result of these absurd and terrible rumors, Hunt finds himself a pariah—many of his oldest acquaintances no longer recognize him when they meet. It is a thoroughly distressing situation, and it's difficult to see how the mad injustice of it can be easily righted.

"The danger is, of course, that some misguided person will get the whole matter into the newspapers; it is really a miracle that it has not already been seized on by some yellow sheet, the opportunity for a sensational story is so obviously ripe. Happily"—oh, Phil! oh, philosopher!—"the present curious tension in European politics is for the moment turning journalistic eyes far from home. But as all such diplomatic flurries do, this one will pass, leaving the flatness of the silly season upon us. This is what Hunt most fears; and when you next see him you will find him grayer and older because of this anxiety.