And so it is with us: we carry away, after putting Night and Day down for the last time, an atmosphere of a room full of deep shadows, firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with its frail burden of silver trays and china tea-cups, red parrots swinging on the chintz curtains and arm-chairs warming in the blaze.
And so we come to read Night and Day in a mood very different from that which sends us to Tom Jones or Wuthering Heights: there is no full-blooded narrative full of incident or wild, insatiable passion. It is a penetrating, shrewd comedy wherein many feckless people are portrayed to the life. It is essentially modern in so far as there is no attempt to make us fall in love with the hero or heroine: we are never on the verge of tears through pity of their fate, though we are interested by their confused states of mind.
We are never unable to put the book down: on the other hand, there are few that we are more inclined to pick up and read for the nth time. There is a rich harvest of beauty on almost every page; there is true satirical humour; there is brilliance of intellect, clarity of aim and complete fearlessness: above all, there is strangeness and individuality, and the reader who turns away from Night and Day because the atmosphere has failed to ensnare him in the first three hundred or so pages deserves our pity. He has missed a real treat, both emotional and intellectual.
VIII
E. C. BOOTH
There are many people whose taste in fiction is so fastidious that the sight of dialect in a novel makes them refuse to read it. To such people Mr Edward C. Booth makes no appeal. Both in The Cliff-End and Fondie (his two great books) well-nigh every character speaks in a broad Yorkshire accent. They are stories of the soil, of people who move in a world very different from that which Mr Stephen M'Kenna has annexed as his own. His novels move in a most leisurely manner, like the people in them: anyone who reads novels for their plots alone may omit Mr Booth's name from his library list. Neither in The Cliff-End nor Fondie does the actual plot matter much. In point of fact, the basic idea in each is rather stupid. Pamela is so sweet a girl that the Spawer would never have hesitated at all in real life; Blanche in reality would never have drowned herself for so little a reason as one illegitimate child.
No: we read The Cliff-End for its spaciousness, its freshness, its rippling current of humour, its myriad living characters, its beautiful setting and its picture of love. For it is first and last a rattling good love romance.
You can test your appreciation of Mr Booth by his opening chapters. If the description of Tankard's Bus fails to charm you, don't read on. Such fare is not for you. But there are many of us who can be sufficiently grateful for such a beginning as this:
"Tankard's Bus is the most beautiful bus in the world—the biggest, blandest, noblest, longest, good-naturedest, most magnanimous ... no fewer than five steps swing at its tail-end to two yards out, with balustrades of real brass. Five steps form the complement of a full-grown flight of stairs in Ullbrig—as many, indeed, as take most of us up to bed ... only to take one sacramental sniff of its cushions is to be filled as a perfumed vase with the breath and spirit and sympathy of the district; is to divine the soul of the soil, the heart of the heavy-headed corn, a-flush to the cliff-edge; the sensuous sway of the barley in ceaseless stir of mystic communion; the stillness of turnips; the rustle of oats; the grateful green of pasture, traversed slowly here and there with streaks of dun and white-and-tan, and the fleecy grey blots of nibbling sheep; the murmur of many waves; the rippling cadence of the reaper; the busy hum of the threshing-machine, in indefatigable ascent and descent of its three semitones ... it is timed to leave the Market Arms at three o'clock. To make quite sure of a corner seat you would do well to be sitting in it by four o'clock at the latest...." All the way through the first chapter we watch this 'bus filling and emptying like a bee-hive, threading its way at last out of Hunmouth, away into the country-side ... "and so on and so on and so on, along the dusty hedge-lined road, homeward in the slanting beams of gold, with the sun spinning dizzily behind and the great elongated shadow of Tankard and his colleagues thrown far away out before, till that last moment when the mill spreads its mighty arms to the left-hand window in welcome of home-coming, and the squat, square-towered church stares stolidly through the other with its unwinking blue-diamond clock eye, and the little red roofs gathered round its midway give warm greeting over the latticed hedges in the mellowed evening light."