True, many snug, comfortable people, shaken for a moment out of their apathy, dismiss it all carelessly, even contemptuously. Many who are gripped to the heart as they read brush away the tears with a sign of relief and say, “Well, it’s only a story.” But what a “story!”
It is told in a tense, staccato style which hurries the reader on—on even through the idealistic descriptions of the English country and the stretching moor, across which, in its little garden planted by loving hands, stands the “dear home” of the officer’s gentle widow and her two daughters, the Elder Sister in whose words the story is told and whose name is never mentioned, and the Little Sister, Bettina, all golden and bright, a creature so touchingly exquisite, so like a flower.
Through the sweet, lightly sketched scenes of the childhood, girlhood and dawning womanhood of these two fair young creatures there is woven a dark thread of fear, dread, tragedy. Some experience of brutality this dainty, tenderly devoted mother has had, an experience which is never more than darkly hinted at. She forgets the terror of it only in those happy memories that cluster about her lover-husband. His body was brought home to her from a fatal tiger hunt. Her only consolation in his loss, she tells the Elder Sister, was that she knew that there are worse dangers than those of the jungle! She had the joy of knowing that he died while all was “bright and untarnished.”
The narrative hastens on, always with a hovering sense of doom. The innocent, tender love stories of the sisters develop. They are but seventeen and nineteen, but they are women. It is impossible to do justice to the telling of this story, so we will pass to the main event, the invitation of the London aunt, the failing health and fortune of the mother, which nerves her to accept an offer that will separate her from her children, and the almost happy bustle of preparation for the first visit from home, and for that wonder of wonders—a London season! The sinister part played by Madame Aurore, the little London dressmaker who, while working for them in their country home lays the plans that are to decoy them to their ruin in London, is worked out with sure, rapid touch. Then comes the arrival in London, the meeting of the girls by the pseudo “aunt,” who has been dressed for the part by the aid of a photograph sent on to the procurers by Madame Aurore. Then follows the terrible scene in the house with the barred windows and the strange overwhelming scent, the escape of the Elder Sister, the heart-breaking search for the younger—the madness, the despair! One of the most pathetic things in the book is the heart-broken young lover who traces Bettina from London to “their house in Paris”—thence from one place to another “always too late.” The merciful death of the mother, and the fixed conviction, the subliminal inspiration, that comes toward the end to the tortured brain of the elder sister that Bettina has found her release in death, alleviate and spiritualize the misery of it all.
Now as to the truth of this tremendous story. I suppose that having put the very soul of truth and reality into the narrative itself, having written it from the very depths of her own pitying heart, the author has not reckoned with the callous incredulity which the book often meets, or she might well have added an introductory note in regard to the actual facts in this case from real life. The story, she told me subsequent to its publication, was absolutely true, but much softened at many points. In the true story, for instance, the mother is not dead, but is in a state of dementia on the continent, whither the family have moved, being unable to endure England and its memories.
Moreover, although Miss Robins’ experience in working for women and the woman’s cause in England had brought to her knowledge many life histories more unspeakable than this, after she had finished this book she said to herself, “Now here is a story that I know to be absolutely true, but how valuable is it to give to the world an individual instance of this kind; how far can it be generalized?” To test this she went, with that sincerity of spirit that characterizes all she does, to a noted police justice in London and laid the story before him, asking him what he would do if a person came to him with such a story. He answered sadly, with no show of being at all roused by anything unusual, that he would begin to take evidence immediately and see what he could do about it. He added that the story was really a commonplace.
Such is the reticence of the English press, and such is the stern family pride concerning the “blot on the scutcheon,” and all those traditions which grow out of the double moral standard whereby the escapade of the son of the house can even be repeated lightly while the slightest shadow on the name of the daughter is an unspeakable disgrace, that no one knows how many tragedies of this kind are hidden from sight in the records of numerous respectable families.
To satisfy herself more completely that the story was susceptible of extensive application, Miss Robins took it to several London police inspectors. No one for a moment stopped to doubt or question the facts. The most horrible stories that the human mind can conceive are old stories to them. When the Home Secretary was asked a question on this subject in the House of Commons only a few weeks ago, he answered that in London city alone, to his knowledge, there had been reported fifty-three girls lost and never heard of within a few months. Such facts as this explain the tragic intensity with which the book is written.
Danger! Danger! Danger! That is the dominant note that sounds throughout the narrative. How pathetically the mother’s poignant fears contrast with her ineffectiveness. Ever this haunting danger, whether mother and daughters are walking in the sunset, or planting in the garden, or sitting by the hearth. What a wonderful picture Miss Robins gives of the mother’s desperate dependence on the four walls of her home—“Soon home, now, little girl, soon safe in our dear home.” The danger signal of the night-bird’s note is introduced with inimitable art—a subtle suggestion, even in those early days, of the gray hawk whose shadow hovers over bright young lives.
The unutterable sadness of it all and the stern warning to mothers that children’s homes are not just in four walls, but are in towns and cities and nations! How utterly ineffectual seem an individual mother’s effort for the safety of her child. How evident is it that a mother’s care must have back of it power—power in council and legislative hall. How strongly the lack of social sympathy is brought out; the mother’s indifference to the great crying needs of the world. This mother’s “place was the home,” and to what did all her negative efforts avail in shutting the danger away from her cherished daughters in a nation, in a world, which holds a traffic system of such Machiavellian adroitness, a system which can afford, so great are its profits, to reach into the inner recesses of a home, to work with endless patience and resourcefulness and which can enlist on its side such power that even the London police, perhaps the least corrupt in the world, can answer evasively to the frantic cry, “Do you know such a house?”—“We have a great many on the list, but not many such as you describe;” and follow this statement with the maddening inactivity which Miss Robins describes with vivid accuracy.