"The Crossing."
Richard Petafor (Mr. Hubert Harben), the apostle of Materialism and Physical Exercise, trying to convert Antony Grimshaw (Mr. Herbert Marshall), the believer in Mysticism and Armchairs.
Mr. Algernon Blackwood and Mr. Bertram Forsyth (assisted by Mr. Donald Calthrop) present to us in The Crossing a certain Mr. Anthony Grimshaw, a princely egotist of the poetic-idealist type who gets up on the hearth-rug and says to his family, "I am a humanitarian before everything," and things like that, and then wonders why his wife is estranged from him. He has a daughter, Nixie, who is not old enough to know how bad all this is, and together they hear the wind singing glees without words (or in Volapuk, but anyway not intelligible to us poor normals), a thing Mr. Algernon Blackwood has been doing or pretending to do for years without once taking me in.
Anthony is run over and (as we say) dies. After an extraordinarily tiresome conversation in the morning-room with his friend and his son and his mother (who are also what people call dead) it dawns upon him that something odd has happened to himself also. His wife and two children, after his (so-called) death, become blissfully happy and set to work to finish his book, that being, as they think, his wish. Well, I wonder. At any rate in death (as we say) he was not divided—from his egotisms.
One knows well enough, alas, how the temptation to spiritual drug-taking has grown as the result of the accumulated sorrows of these past years, but it is not well that such a treatment of the eternal question should be taken seriously. Is this sort of thing really better than the harp-and-cloud theory? It is not. One looked in vain for any trace of real vision, any true sense of the height and depth of the problem.
Mr. Marshall struggled quite manfully with the part of Anthony, and of course he had his moments. I hope so good a player is not developing the "actor's pause," of which I detected signs. Miss Irene Rooke had nothing in particular to do and did it very well. Mr. Hubert Harben as the impenitent profiteer from Lancashire, Anthony's brother-in-law, was better suited than I have seen him for some time, and provided the very necessary relief. The precocious children infuriated me, but that is purely temperamental. The actors who played the parts of those who had "crossed" were wrapped in such an atmosphere of gloom, to the strains of such meretricious music that (on the evidence) I can only advise people to defer their crossing as long as possible; a thing they will doubtless do, even if they have a friendlier feeling to the new religion than I can command.... I am afraid I proved a bad sailor.
T.