Cecilia was an amazing wife for a country bookseller, and she tries, one sometimes thinks, to be grande dame in conversation, setting the whole of the little provincial town by the ears with her outlandish brilliance and daring, making it grovel at her feet because of her beauty and amiability.
Can a lady kiss her toe?
Yes; she might—she might do so—sang another novelist, who indulged in rhyme. So it is with Cecilia; she might, she might have done so, but Mr. Beresford has failed to make it inevitable of her.
Old Kirkwood, the father, dies insane, and Stephen, adopted by a rich builder who was sympathetic because his own wife was a little difficult, works hard and finally superintends the erection of a big newspaper office in London. There he falls in with his mother once more, and with the schoolmaster's daughter who had smiled upon him long ago. The old tussle is re-enacted. The mother is jealous of the girl. She sees her son blundering in his courtship, and she only has to hold her tongue to keep him by her side, a devoted slave. She is not happy. Her organist-composer is jovial, but unfaithful. She longs for the fealty of Stephen. At this point Mr. Beresford introduces a little Freudian interest in the explanation of what was, for all he says about it, a matter of secondary importance to Stephen—his disgust at his mother's hysterical and untimely laughter, and we feel that, whilst he was about it, he might have examined Cecilia's psyche a little more thoroughly. There were one or two dark places in her character and disposition upon which a more searching light might, with some profit to the story, have been thrown. There is much enjoyable reading in An Imperfect Mother, but on the whole, coming from Mr. Beresford, it is a little disappointing.
In Eli of the Downs Mr. C. M. A. Peake introduces himself to the public with a distinguished piece of work. He has been content to make his own variation of the archetype of great stories—the joys and sorrows at home, the adventures, and, finally, the return of the wanderer. This is the story of Eli Buckle, as gleaned by the teller from Eli himself, and from his old friend and neighbour Anne Brown, and it is the story of a perfectly simple and sincere man, a shepherd, who is perfectly happy in the remote solitudes which his calling entails upon him, with the wild flowers which arouse feelings his creator does not try to make him express. He is proud and happy when as a boy of twenty-one he has saved five pounds. These facts are simply stated, and yet there is not the least hint of sentimentality or of bathos. He marries the girl of his heart, and unexpectedly the knowledge comes to him of what he has been in need. "Oh, Mary, my dear, my dear!" he whispered. "You won't never know how lonely I've a-been." A little while goes by and he is lonely again, for while he is out in the night in the lambing season Mary falls from a chair, and by the time Eli gets home she and the child that should have been born to them are dead.
After that, in sheer desperation, Eli leaves his old home and goes away to sea. His is the old quest of a wounded man for the purpose which lies behind all events. Once before, when Mary had told him that he could be a preacher if he had the ambition, he had for a moment found his voice.
"... I believe I could study fast enough, and I know I could preach. I could make them listen to me; aye, have 'em all gaping after me like a nest of young thrushes, if I chose. But I'd have to tell 'em what they wanted to hear, an' dress it up the way they likes, which is what they mean by the Gospel and the Truth. But that I won't do, for I'm not sure that their Gospel is my Gospel, or their Truth any Truth at all for the matter o' that. And about God, my dear. Whether He is, or whether He isn't, what folks say, I can't testify till I know, know of my own knowledge, and not because I read it in a book or someone told me."
Occasionally the narrator of the story makes a little confidence to the reader which, apart from its humorous candour, serves a definitely useful purpose.
Now the scenes of Eli's childhood were the scenes I lived among when I too was a child, and the land where he spent the years of his middle age I knew and loved, as youth and man, but though I have crossed many waters, I am no sailor, and I cannot see the ocean as a mariner sees it.
In the course of his life as a sailor Eli has many adventures, which are wonderfully told, dramatic without one word of melodrama. Here the author who can lovingly describe the wild flowers in the lost corners of the Downs excels again, for in a few words he can truthfully describe how a particular species of liar describes himself, or how nervousness passes into wild terror in the eyes of a San Francisco crimp who is discovered trying to drug his victims. But well as Mr. Peake describes the rascalities of the adventurous life, he is more at home with the kindlinesses of the countryside and the gentle wisdom of Cathay. This is a novel, uneven in quality to be sure, but touching at certain points real beauty.