In an instant the girl's arms were about the man's neck, and her lips upon his lips, as though they would have sucked the poor remaining life out of his body into her own ... yea—though Death stood by their side ... yet could he not arrest this moment.
"'Oh—my love, my love!' the girl wept through the wet lips that clung to him. 'What do I care about dying now? I would rather a thousand times die to learn that you had loved me—than live and never know it. Promise me—you will not—let go of me—when the time comes.... Don't let me go. I want to die with you.'
"And there being nothing else to do, they stood and waited for death...."
But this is a love romance: it could not be allowed to end like that. Drunken Barclay, having missed Tankard's Bus that night, hears Pam's calls for help and saves them both and gives us and Mr Booth a fuller chance to revel in a regular orgy of love. The Spawer was glad to be thus helpless on his back, for the glory of being cradled in such a love, and learning his love over again, from the lips and looks and actions, the dear, large-hearted A B C Primer of Pam. "Her very love of him, issuing towards him from every pore of her body, fertilised the girl's own beauty, like the sap in the lush hedgerows at spring. Her soft, velvet eyes ... darkened and deepened ... till they were beyond all plumb of mortal gaze. Her lips ... coloured now to a deeper, clearer carmine, with little pools of love visible lurking in the corners of them ... her lashes ... grew black as ebony ... her freckles ... more purely golden.
"And Pam stooped over him as she was always doing, and slipped her linked fingers under his neck, and looked into his face first, and kissed him ... and buried her face by his, and lifted it to look at him once more, and kissed him again.... Who should stop her now from telling him she loved him, loved him, loved him?"
Yes, there is no doubt about it: Mr Booth, whose gift for seeing things is so remarkably acute, can describe the passion of love with the best of them. Not easily does one forget those dear, kissable, candid freckles, powdered in pure gold-dust about the bridge of the nose and the brows ... the great round eyes with the blacky-brown velvety softness of bulrushes ... the rapt red lips ... the big beneficence of hair ... the oaten-tinted cheeks ... the little pink lobes ... the tanned russet neck ... and the pale blue tam-o'-shanter of our beloved Pam. She is one of the most alive heroines in fiction, and the man who doesn't find himself a good deal more in love with her than the Spawer was is not to be envied.
Fondie is a novel of quite another sort. It is the grim tragedy of a flirtatious daughter of an impoverished country parson who gets "let down" by an undergraduate and drowns herself.
It has the same excellent qualities that so distinguish The Cliff-End, in that it is leisurely, the dialect is wonderfully reproduced, the scenery painted with an exquisite sense of colour and exactness, the characters all live ... and there is Fondie the wheelwright, Fondie the foolish, who "never used bad language even when unprovoked," who was not a bit of good among the girls, who did his best work when he was not being paid for it, who was always respectfully in love with the girl, Blanche, and offered to marry her when she had already got into trouble with the other man. "'Lad's fond,'" said his father, who was as "laughterless as Jehovah and as summary. 'He'll do owt onnybody tells him.'"
There are many inimitable anecdotes scattered irrelevantly through these pages, the best of which is perhaps that of the black bull which coughed grass and spittle all down the back of Bless Allcot's neck while he was engaged in fervent prayer in the chapel: "'Thoo's best not ti pray public of a Sunday or two, Bless Allcot, till thoo's had a chance ti pray private,'" shouts Fondie's father to the prayer ... and an altercation starts during divine service which nearly develops into a fight.