“Give this to Mr. Squire,” she said, and while the maid gazed stupidly at her, she laughed, half hysterically, and ran up the stairs.
In her room she heard Tommy come in, heard the murmur of the maid’s voice, and then, after a pause longer than she had ever endured, she heard the door close upon him. She waited until she could not hear his footsteps longer—then she walked over to the mirror, and rubbed out the heart.
C. G. POORE.
Book Reviews
Jean Huguenot. By Stephen Vincent Benét. (Henry Holt.)
Flowers in writing are like flowers on a grave: they commemorate death. And Benét’s first novel was a little too prone to floral decoration. In his third book, Jean Huguenot, his work as a stylist is noticeably improved. He still remains all poet in his prose, and, as ever, reads the better for it. Yet he has reached a saner manner of writing that does not overwhelm and cloy as did parts of The Beginning of Wisdom.
Despite mechanical improvement Jean Huguenot marks a lull in the author’s literary progress. You are moved along for two hundred or so pages by glowing language and well-drawn situations. And just when the book has become really enjoyable—well, all pleasure in it begins to subside. You are dropped, like a deflated balloon, into a flat and tasteless completion. Why, oh, why, you say, couldn’t he have given us something else—anything else? The spectacle of Jean Huguenot Ashley turned cocotte is neither appealing nor revolting; it is just plain drab. Perhaps Benét is true to nature in his picture, but—read it and see if it doesn’t affect you in the same fashion. The story is worth while for three-quarters of its course—and then, being so near the end, one might as well finish it, anyway.
J. R. C.
The Florentine Dagger. By Ben Hecht. (Boni & Liveright.)
Ben Hecht is mountebank of words par excellence: their swirling shapes, their sounds, their shifting colors, as he juggles them so adroitly before our bewildered eyes. The subject-matter of his books serves only as a pattern, an excuse for weaving a tapestry of fascinating and often amazing phrases. Whether it is a psychological study in the manner of Dreiser, like Gargoyles, or an all-night detective story, like the present book, is an altogether incidental matter. It is the words that count. That may perhaps explain why Mr. Hecht should suddenly decide to perform before such a bourgeois audience, descending, so to speak, from the Palace to the four-a-day. He evidently realized that the world was quite bored by anything he had to say, but perfectly entranced by the way in which he said it.