Yes, it is even so, and I, who, a few nights ago only, determined to keep aloof from all possibility of this, preferring to stifle and drown the best of one’s nature, for fear of being thrown out of gear as regards the second best, am led captive, glorying in the chain which, please God, I shall never be able to break. How witless and impotent is man, how futile and unreasonable all his reasonings, when love, like dawn, lights with rosy feet on his dark horizons, and the morning mists of all the schemes he has made, all rules and designs of life, vanish and have never been.
For what was I trying to do? To turn this garden of the Lord into a desert, to withdraw light from the day, love from life; when, had I known, it is love which turns the desert into the garden, into the home of one’s soul.
‘And thouBeside me singing in the wilderness,The wilderness were Paradise enow.’
‘And thouBeside me singing in the wilderness,The wilderness were Paradise enow.’
‘And thouBeside me singing in the wilderness,The wilderness were Paradise enow.’
How did it happen? How did it happen? Ah, it is because we do not know that it is so exquisite.
But the manner of it was this:
They came, as you know, to lunch some three days ago, and I dined there next day, though I had made up my mind, as you also know, not to see her again. That was my plan, and the sweet rain of blows battered it down and crushed it with supreme and certain suddenness. One moment—it was after dinner, I remember, and we were playing cards—I was looking at her, seeing in every line of her face that friend whom I had lost, and the next she looked up, and in her eye there sat, not Margery nor another, but Helen, wraith no longer, but herself. And as at that moment, now three years ago, when Margery, with the sun kindling her hair, said, ‘It’s going in; what a darling!’ even so now I surrendered; I gave up all I had or was. The moment was to me so tremendous that I felt as if the whole world must know it. But even she did not know it, for she smiled and said, ‘I think there must be another in,’ and playedthe thirteenth card, losing the game for herself and me.
Is it not prosaic that I remember that? Yes, if you wish, but it is just that prosaicness which makes the romance of life, the intertwining of the common little everyday affairs with the great lords of romance, Love and Death, who by their presence lift life entire into their domain, so that nothing is common or commonplace.
That night, as I walked home, it seemed to me that never before had Margery been so close to me. Do you know how sometimes you can almostheara voice you are familiar with, so that it seems as if the person to whom it belongs had just spoken? It was so with me. Each moment it seemed as if she had just said something to me, and I waited and waited for what she should say next. Each moment I expected to see her walking by me, her arm in mine, as we had walked together in the garden the evening before she died. She knew, I must believe, what had happened, and, like the dear friend she always was, she came to tell me, as far as the laws of her world permitted,that she was glad. Yet some immense but subtle change had come over our relations; less dear she could not be, but I no longer ached for her. And that, too, I think she knew, and at that also she was glad.
Again that night I sat long by the fire, where those visions and inhuman schemes of self-isolation and petty mediocrity had beset me a few evenings ago. How infinitesimal had been their scope, and, thank God, how futile they proved! Like some timid child, my soul had sat shivering on the brink of the great ocean of human life, not daring to put out, distrusting the frail vessel which should carry it towards the golden island which no man can reach unless he adventures. Even then the golden gleam shone on me; I saw the bright shining of those shores, and turned my face earthwards, saying that it was good to play with the shells and seaweed on the beach. Every day those waters which divide us from the golden island are thick with sails; every day hundreds of happy adventurers land on its shores; every day, too, hundreds are shipwrecked. But for me the wind beckons, my vessel flaps its sail, andthough I do not cast away the shells and seaweeds I have gathered, I put them in my locker and think no more of them just now. The tide favours: my vessel tugs its chain, and I put out.
Snowover all, and it is summer. Frost binds the icy fields, and in my heart every nightingale in the world makes melody. The bare trees are hung with icicles, and a shrill wind whistles through them; yet to me they are the green habitations of mating birds, and in the hedgerows, with their mask of snow where the wind has drifted it, are the nests of the hedge-sparrows with the blue eggs that reflect the skies of April. December! Was there ever such a December? All the honey of the summer, all the warmth of the long days, all the mellow autumn, all the promise of spring, is gathered here into one sheaf—the sheaf that we put in the chancel at the harvest festival, symbol of offering, symbol of the fruitful, kindly earth offering in kind to the Lord of the harvest.
Did you see the sun to-day about eleven in the morning come suddenly out through parted cloudsand shine on the great fields of virgin snow? He came on purpose to see me. Did you see the maddened whirl of the snow-flakes in the afternoon flying in eddies through the air? They were dancing together at my party. I engaged them to dance. They did it well, did they not? Did you hear the cathedral bells ringing this afternoon, sounding dim and deep through the snow? They were also my guests. Everything in the world to-day was my guest, and stars were ranged on my ceiling, and the Pleiades lay in my hand, and close by my heart there lay the moon, and it was not cold, as it looks, but warm.
Day after day and all day, night after night and all night, I have dreamed of the moon, loving it, desiring it. And last night I dreamed that I cast a slender silver thread into the sky, which caught the moon, and I drew it closer and closer to myself, till it rested on my heart. And it was not the moon at all, but the heart of a woman, beating full and strong. And the wonder of it is that the moon is mine. You shall see it sometimes, you other people on the earth, but all the time it is mine. I know, too, the other side ofit, when we are alone together. You cannot see that, and you will never see it. The moon says it is all for me.
To-day the moon had to be away all day, but the silver thread was between us (it leads to the other side of the moon), so I scarcely envied the folks in London, who would see her face merely. Yet all day I fevered for evening, and as evening approached my fever abated not. But you came back, my moon, and we were together again. Other people were there, and for them, as for me, melody after melody flowed from the sweet stress of your fingers. They heard only, but I knew, and to me the sound revealed not the poor clay that wrote those exquisite notes, but you who played them. Your soul it was, not Schubert’s, that shone in the symphony that shall never be finished; your soul, not Beethoven’s, was passion and pathos—you, not he, turned night into a flame, and in that flame I burned and was consumed, happy as the gods are happy, and happier because I was not content. I shall never be content.
Oh, my own who did this, thanks is no wordbetween you and me. Do we thank the star that shines in the dark-blue velvet of the skies? We gaze only, and are drawn thither. For we thank a giver for a human gift; it is in silence that we give thanks for the things that are divine. Oh, I try to speak of what cannot be spoken! Who shall set words to your music?
Let me picture you again, with face half turned from where I sat, tuning the keys which I thought so rebellious into a rain of enchanted harmony. Rebellious, too, was your hair, rising upward in waves of smouldering gold from your face. And through Schubert you spoke to me, he but the medium or the alphabet of your thought, and I was almost jealous of the dead because he touched the tips of your fingers. Then from the trim garden at Leipsic spoke that sweet formal soul, a message of congratulation to me, or so I took it, and Beethoven with fuller voice said the same, and from frozen Poland and from wind-beaten Majorca came another smile. And when those sweet words were done, came other sweet words without interpreter; and the room was emptied and the larger lights were quenched, andonly on the walls leaped the shadows and the shine of the flames that plunged on the hearth. Once by night the Temple was bright to the prophet with the glory of the Lord, and the hot coal from the altar opened and inspired his lips. With what new vision and eyes enlightened must he have looked on the world after that night when God revealed Himself. And by this revelation which has come to me all things are made new, winter is turned to spring, the lonely places are desert no more, and the whole world is in flower with the royal purple of the blossoms of Love.
And now that I know it was inevitable from the first, I can hardly believe that it was I who only a few weeks ago made plans to force myself from the possibility. It was ordained from the beginning, and the patient march of the centuries, every step, every year, was bringing us together; myriads of subtle influences conspired to work it, and how excellent is the miracle they have made! Sunlight and wind, and the love and sorrow and joy of a thousand generations, have made the body and soul of this girl; for me was she predestined,and for me has the whole creation laboured. Blindly but inevitably it wrought, even as the shell deep in some blue cave of the ocean thinks only that some piece of grit has got between its iridescent valves, yet all the time it is busy making the pearl that shall lie on the neck of some queen yet unborn.
An immense silence and whiteness lies over the whole earth. Snow fell a week ago, then came several nights of frost, and to-day again a fresh mantle of white was laid down. All roughnesses and inequalities are smoothed away. The whole land lies in delicate curves, swelling and subsiding in gradations too fine to follow. With bar and chevron, and a million devices of this celestial heraldry, trees and palings are outlined and emblazoned, and in the graveyard opposite the tombstones are capped with whiteness. From eaves and gutters hang the festooned icicles, and most people find it cheerless weather. But not so we, for between us, with the aid of a prodigiously stupid carpenter, we have designed and executed a toboggan, which is the chariot of love, and on the steep down-sides (attended by the puzzled collies,who cannot understand how it is that snowballs, which so closely resemble tennis-balls, vanish in the retrieving) we spend vivifying afternoons. The toboggan has a decided bias, and it is only a question of time before it gets broadside to the slope of the hill, ejecting its passengers. That is the moment for which the collies (Huz and Buz) are waiting, and they fly after us and lick our faces before we can regain our feet, to congratulate us on the success of this excellent new game. Indeed, the ‘Alliance of Laughter’ is in league again, but below the laughter is love, which penetrates to the centre of the world and rises to the heaven of heavens. Then we tramp back, towing the slewing toboggan uphill, and getting our heels kicked by it downhill to the muffled town at dusk, and the long evenings begin.
I have told her all about Margery, as was only natural, but it was no news to her. She had guessed it, with woman’s intuition, to which lightning is a snail, on the day when I told her how like she was to Margery. I had said ‘She was my best friend’ in a voice, it appears, that was the most obvious self-betrayal. I have toldher, too, the grim determination I had made not to see her any more. That, it appears on the same authority, was harmless though silly, since it was utterly out of my power to do anything of the kind. I couldn’t have done it: that was all. I, of course, argued that I could; so she said, ‘Well, do it now, then. It is not too late.’
But when I told her about Margery, she did not laugh, but she answered:
‘I wanted so to comfort you. And I saw at first that you looked at me and thought of her. Then, by degrees, I wanted to take her place. And by degrees you let me have a place of my own. You looked at me and thought of me. That was one evening we played cards here.’
‘You saw that?’ I asked.
‘How could a girl avoid seeing it, when all the time she——’
‘What?’
‘Nothing—at least, not much.’
‘What, then?’
She came a little closer in the gleam of the firelight.
‘When all the time she longed to see it,’ she whispered.
‘And is that not much? Is there anything in the world bigger than that?’
‘No; it is bigger than the world.’
Oh, I am loved—I am loved!
* * * * *
It is Christmas Eve, and she has just gone home with her father, and outside in the moonlight the waits are singing. I know that they are not in tune, and thatquasinging it is a deplorable performance, but there is such a singing in my heart that I do not hear the false notes, and the thrill of Christmas, too, is upon me. I have never quite got over (and I hope I never shall) the childish awe and mystery in hearing the voices from the night, being awakened by the sounds, and being carried, wrapped up in blankets, to the window, where I could see dim forms outside black against the snow. I did not know in those earliest years who they were. It was Christmas, and there were mysterious beings singing in the night. On no other night werethey there, for they were of the family, I must suppose, of Father Christmas and Santa Claus and the fairy Abracadabra, to whose awful presence—she appeared to be about nine feet high—we had been introduced, not without delightful inward quailings, before we went to bed. She brought with her a vessel of the shape certainly of a clothes-basket, but as it was of solid gold it could not have been a clothes-basket. And inside were exactly those things for which we each of us had pined and audibly hungered. Such a clever fairy! She never made a mistake or confused my wants with those of my brothers; so probably she was omniscient as well as beneficent. And my good fairies have been just as clever ever since. They never make mistakes, and now they have given me the best gift of all. So, listening to the singing in the night now, the years slip back, the child within me stirs and awakens, and out of the rose-coloured mists of early years that queer little figure, wrapped in blankets and carried to the window, looks wonderingly at me and smiles because I am happy. Abracadabra, too, is with me to-night, not nine feet high any longer, norgirt about with delicious terrors for me, but still my dear fairy, who never fails me. You should have seen her meeting with Helen; the two who are dearest to me out of all the world, saw each other and loved each other on the moment, and Helen ran to her and called her ‘mother.’
The singing in the night is long since silent; midnight has struck, and the house is very still in this first hour of Christmas Day. All afternoon, following the custom I have known from childhood, we made wreaths of evergreens for decoration of the doors, and the holly berries glow red in the dark green of the ivy. The scraps we burned on the hearth, and the green leaves are still crackling and popping, and the room is aromatic with the smell of them—the smell, so it always seemed to me, of Christmas. Outside the same wonderful windless frost still binds the earth, and in the dryness of the air the stars are visible nearly down to the horizon, and the sheets of snow sparkle dimly in the soft twilight of them. Yet I still linger here, finishing the few words that remain to be written of thislittle book of months, which tells of happenings so tremendous and momentous to me, so infinitesimal to the world at large. It is a very inconsecutive performance, I know, very often dealing with interests so minute that, even as I write them, the time when what one writes assumes its greatest importance to one’s self, I know I am risking boredom for somebody. But the remedy for such boredom is so simple: one has only to shut the book.
How well I remember the first day of the year, a morning of fog, with fugitive gleams of sun, type of the inscrutable young year, which now is flaming to its close in a glory of rose-coloured sunset! All I ever desired, all that I scarcely dared to desire, is mine, and yet this is only the promise of what shall be. The love which is mine is like a golden thread passing through the scattered beads of my days, threading them into a necklace which I place round her neck, so that it lies on her heart, and day and night moves to its beating, and rises and falls with her breath. O my beloved, whether you sleep or wake, it is there; it is yours. Do you remember a day ortwo ago how, quite suddenly, your eyes filled with tears, and when I asked you what that meant, you said, ‘It is only because it is us, just you and I’? Even so.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
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In One Volume, price 6s.
The Pall Mall Gazette.—‘Mrs. Steel’s latest wonderful romance of Indian life. It is ‘57 in little, and in our own day. Mrs. Steel has again subtly and keenly shown us how unique is her power of realising the unstably poised, the troubled half-and-half mind that is the key to the Indian problem.’
The Daily Chronicle.—‘No one, not even the Kipling of an earlier day, quite does for India what Mrs. Steel does; she sees Indian life steadily, and sees it whole with a vision that is truthful, sympathetic. Such is the wealth of her observation that her page is rich with colour as an Eastern bazaar, and fragrant as a basket of quinces.’
VOICES IN THE NIGHT
ByFLORA ANNIE STEEL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Times.—‘It is the native mind which Mrs. Steel shows us as no other writer has done. She sketches in the native scenes with intimate detail, with ease in obtaining her effects.’
Black and White.—‘Mrs. Steel works on a crowded canvas, yet every figure stands out distinctly.Voices in the Nightis a book to be read carefully. It is a book to be kept and to be read more than once. It is a novel of the best kind, and deserves the attention of the readers who find nothing praiseworthy in the effusions of the popular successes.’
ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS
ByFLORA ANNIE STEEL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Spectator.—‘We have read Mrs. Steel’s book with ever-increasing surprise and admiration—surprise at her insight into people with whom she can scarcely have been intimate, admiration for the genius which has enabled her to realise that wonderful welter of the East and West, which Delhi must have presented just before the Mutiny. There is many an officer who would give his sword to write military history as Mrs. Steel has written the history of the rising, the siege, and the storm. It is the most wonderful picture. We know that none who lived through the Mutiny will lay the book down without a gasp of admiration, and believe that the same emotion will be felt by thousands to whom the scenes depicted are but lurid phantasmagoria.’
The Daily Chronicle.—‘A picture, glowing with colour, of the most momentous and dramatic events in all our Empire’s later history. We have read many stories having for their setting the lurid background of the Indian Mutiny, but none that for fidelity to fact, for vivacity of imagination, for masterly breadth of treatment, comes within half a dozen places of this.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
IN THE PERMANENT WAY
ByFLORA ANNIE STEEL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Spectator.—‘While her only rival in this field of fiction is Mr. Kipling, her work is marked by an even subtler appreciation of the Oriental standpoint—both ethical and religious—a more exhaustive acquaintance with native life in its domestic and indoor aspects, and a deeper sense of the moral responsibilities attaching to our rule in the East. The book is profoundly interesting from beginning to end.’
The Pall Mall Gazette.—‘A volume of charming stories and of stories possessing something more than mere charm. Stories made rich with beauty and colour, strong with the strength of truth, and pathetic with the intimate pathos which grows only from the heart. All the mystery and the frankness, the simplicity and the complexity of Indian life are here in a glowing setting of brilliant Oriental hues. A book to read and a book to buy. A book which no one but Mrs. Steel could have given us, a book which all persons of leisure should read, and for which all persons of taste will be grateful.’
FROM THE FIVE RIVERS
ByFLORA ANNIE STEEL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Times.—‘Mrs. Steel has evidently been brought into close contact with the domestic life of all classes, Hindu and Mahommedan, in city and village, and has steeped herself in their customs and superstitions.... Mrs. Steel’s book is of exceptional merit and freshness.’
The Athenæum.—‘They possess this great merit, that they reflect the habits, modes of life, and ideas of the middle and lower classes of the population of Northern India better than do systematic and more pretentious works.’
The Globe.—‘She puts before us the natives of our Empire in the East as they live and move and speak, with their pitiful superstitions, their strange fancies, their melancholy ignorance of what poses with us for knowledge and civilisation, their doubt of the new ways, the new laws, the new people, “Shah Sujah’s Mouse,” the gem of the collection—a touching tale of unreasoning fidelity towards an English “Sinny Baba” is a tiny bit of perfect writing.’
THE POTTER’S THUMB
ByFLORA ANNIE STEEL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Globe.—‘This is a brilliant story—a story that fascinates, tingling with life, steeped in sympathy with all that is best and saddest.’
The Manchester Guardian.—‘The impression left upon one after readingThe Potter’s Thumbis that a new literary artist, of very great and unusual gifts, has arisen.... In short, Mrs. Steel must be congratulated upon having achieved a very genuine and amply deserved success.’
The Scotsman.—‘It is a capital story, full of variety and movement, which brings with great vividness before the reader one of the phases of Anglo-Indian life. Mrs. Steel writes forcibly and sympathetically, and much of the charm of the picture which she draws lies in the force with which she brings out the contrast between the Asiatic and European world.The Potter’s Thumbis very good reading, with its mingling of the tragedy and comedy of life. Its evil womanpar excellence... is a finished study.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
RED ROWANS
ByFLORA ANNIE STEEL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Daily Chronicle.—‘Judge it by what canons of criticism you will the book is a work of art.... The story is simple enough, but it is as lifelike as anything in modern fiction. The people speak and act as people do act and speak. There is not a false note throughout. Mrs. Steel draws children as none but a master-hand can draw.’
The Westminster Gazette.—‘Far and away above the average of novels, and one of those books which no reader should miss.’
The Daily News.—‘The book is written with distinction. It is moving, picturesque, the character drawing is sensitive and strong.’
Black and White.—‘It reveals keen sympathy with nature and clever portraiture, and it possesses many passages both humorous and pathetic.’
THE FLOWER OF FORGIVENESS
ByFLORA ANNIE STEEL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Academy.—‘Nothing here ought to be neglected, for there is in most places something profitable for not too obtrusive exhortation, and almost everywhere something for enjoyment.’
The Glasgow Herald.—‘A clever book which should tend to widen Mrs. Steel’s circle among the reading public.’
The Scotsman.—‘They have a rich imaginative colour always.’
The Manchester Guardian.—‘Much sympathy with humanity however dark the skin, and a delicate touch in narrative, raise Mrs. F. A. Steel’s Indian Stories into a high rank. There is a pathos in them not common among Anglo-Indian story-tellers.’
MISS STUART’S LEGACY
ByFLORA ANNIE STEEL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Saturday Review.—‘It throbs with the vigour of real creative power.’
The Spectator.—‘It is remarkably clever; it is written in a style which has ease, dignity, grace, and quick responsiveness to the demands of the theme; it has passages of arresting power and fine reticent pathos; and it displays a quick eye for character and a power of depicting it with both force and subtlety.’
The Westminster Gazette.—‘A most faithful, vivid impression of Indian life.’
The Daily Telegraph.—‘A singularly powerful and fascinating story.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
BOWERY TALES
(George’s Mother, and Maggie.)
BySTEPHEN CRANE
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Morning Post.—‘Mr. Crane never wrote anything more vivid than the story in which Maggie takes the heroine’s part. It is as admirable in its own field asThe Red Badge of Couragein another.’
The Illustrated London News.—‘Stephen Crane knew the Bowery very well, and in these two stories its characteristics come out with the realism of Mr. Arthur Morrison’s studies of the East End. Both are grim and powerful sketches.’
PICTURES OF WAR
(The Red Badge of Courage, and The Little Regiment.)
BySTEPHEN CRANE
In One Volume, price 6s.
Truth.—‘The pictures themselves are certainly wonderful.... So fine a book as Mr. Stephen Crane’sPictures of Waris not to be judged pedantically.’
The Daily Graphic.—’ ... A second reading leaves one with no whit diminished opinion of their extraordinary power. Stories they are not really, but as vivid war pictures they have scarcely been equalled.... One cannot recall any book which conveys to the outsider more clearly what war means to the fighters than this collection of brilliant pictures.’
THE OPEN BOAT
BySTEPHEN CRANE
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Saturday Review.—’ ... The most artistic thing Mr. Crane has yet accomplished.’
The St. James’s Gazette.—‘Each tale is the concise, clear, vivid record of one sensational impression. Facts, epithets, or colours are given to the reader with a rigorousness of selection, an artfulness of restraint, that achieves an absolute clearness in the resulting imaginative vision. Mr. Crane has a personal touch of artistry that is refreshing.’
ACTIVE SERVICE
BySTEPHEN CRANE
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Athenæum.—‘The characters are admirably sketched and sustained. There is tenderness; there is brilliancy; there is real insight into the minds and ways of women and of men.’
The Spectator.—‘Mr. Crane’s plot is ingenious and entertaining, and the characterisation full of those unexpected strokes in which he excels.’
The Academy.—‘The book is full of those feats of description for which the author is famous. Mr. Crane can handle the epithet with surprising, almost miraculous dexterity.Active Servicequite deserves to be called a remarkable book.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
THE THIRD VIOLET
BySTEPHEN CRANE
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Athenæum.—‘We have never come across a book that brought certain sections of American society so perfectly before the reader as doesThe Third Violet, which introduces us to a farming family, to the boarders at a summer hotel, and to the young artists of New York. The picture is an extremely pleasant one, and its truth appeals to the English reader, so that the effect of the book is to draw him nearer to his American cousins.The Third Violetincidentally contains the best dog we have come across in modern fiction. Mr. Crane’s dialogue is excellent, and it is dialogue of a type for which neitherThe Red Badge of Couragenor his later books had prepared us.’
AFRICAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENT
ByA. J. DAWSON
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Pall Mall Gazette.—‘His stories have the special attraction of stories of a country by a man who has knowledge of it and is under its fascination; and are good stories into the bargain. He has a pretty humour, and the gift of telling a story well, and special knowledge to work upon; the result is an entertaining book.’
The Scotsman.—‘The stories are all invented and written with that glow of imagination which seems to come of Eastern sunshine.... They are besides novel and readable in no ordinary degree, and they make a book which will not fail to interest every one who takes it up.’
THE STORY OF RONALD KESTREL
ByA. J. DAWSON
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Athenæum.—‘The sketches of life and scenery in Morocco and in New South Wales are attractive, the literary composition keeps a good level throughout. Mr. Dawson is a writer of ability who has seen men and things, and should go far.’
JOSEPH KHASSAN: HALF-CASTE
ByA. J. DAWSON
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Athenæum.—‘Since Mr. Kipling’s famous ballad, which emphasised the underlying unity of martial spirit common to East and West, we have read no more striking or suggestive study of Oriental and Occidental modes of thought than this work, which deals with their fundamental differences. The story is laid at first and last in Morocco, which the author knows better than most Englishmen. Mr. Dawson’s style is vivid and not without distinction. His work is virile as well as good reading: he can command both humour and pathos.’
The Pall Mall Gazette.—‘It is strong, undeniably strong; a well-written book with many admirable character-studies. The book is undoubtedly a powerful one.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN,21 Bedford Street, W.C.
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
ByRICHARD HARDING DAVIS
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Pall Mall Gazette.—‘Eight short stories, each of them written with a brilliance worthy of the author ofSoldiers of Fortune, and each a perfect piece of workmanship. Every one of them has a striking and original idea, clothed in the words and picturesque details of a man who knows the world. They are genuine literature. Each is intensely fresh and distinct, ingenious in conception, and with a meaning compounded of genuine stuff. There is something in all of the stories, as well as immense cleverness in bringing it out.’
The Daily Telegraph.—‘Stories of real excellence, distinctive and interesting from every point of view.’
SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
ByRICHARD HARDING DAVIS
In One Volume, price 6s. Illustrated.
The Athenæum.—‘The adventures and exciting incidents in the book are admirable; the whole story of the revolution is most brilliantly told. This is really a great tale of adventure.’
The Daily Chronicle.—‘We turn the pages quickly, carried on by a swiftly moving story, and many a brilliant passage: and when we put the book down, our impression is that few works of this season are to be named with it for the many qualities which make a successful novel. We congratulate Mr. Harding Davis upon a very clever piece of work.’
THE NIGGER OF THE ‘NARCISSUS’
ByJOSEPH CONRAD
In One Volume, price 6s.
A. T. Quiller-Couch in Pall Mall Magazine.—‘Mr. Conrad’s is a thoroughly good tale. He has something of Mr. Crane’s insistence; he grips a situation, an incident, much as Mr. Browning’s Italian wished to grasp Metternich; he squeezes emotion and colour out of it to the last drop; he is ferociously vivid; he knows the life he is writing about, and he knows his seamen too. And, by consequence, the crew of theNarcissusare the most plausibly life-like set of rascals that ever sailed through the pages of fiction.’
THE INHERITORS
ByJOSEPH CONRADANDE. M. HUEFFER
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Athenæum.—‘This is a remarkable piece of work, possessing qualifications which before now have made a work of fiction the sensation of its year. Its craftsmanship is such as one has learnt to expect in a book bearing Mr. Conrad’s name.... Amazing intricacy, exquisite keenness of style, and a large, fantastic daring in scheme. An extravaganzaThe Inheritorsmay certainly be called, but more ability and artistry has gone to the making of it than may be found in four-fifths of the serious fiction of the year.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN,21 Bedford Street, W.C.
JACK RAYMOND
ByE. L. VOYNICH
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Pall Mall Gazette.—‘This is a remarkable book. Mrs. Voynich has essayed no less than to analyse a boy’s character as warped even to the edge of permanent injury by the systematic sternness—aggravated on occasion into fiendish brutality—of his guardian. We know nothing in recent fiction comparable with the grim scene in which the boy forces his uncle to listen to the maledictions of the Commination Service directed against himself.Jack Raymondis the strongest novel that the present season has produced, and it will add to the reputation its author won byThe Gadfly.’
THE GADFLY
ByE. L. VOYNICH
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Academy.—‘A remarkable story, which readers who prefer flesh and blood and human emotions to sawdust and adventure should consider as something of a godsend. It is more deeply interesting and rich in promise than ninety-nine out of every hundred novels.’
The World.—‘The strength and originality of the story are indisputable.’
The St. James’s Gazette.—‘A very strikingly original romance which will hold the attention of all who read it, and establish the author’s reputation at once for first-rate dramatic ability and power of expression.’
VOYSEY
ByR. O. PROWSE
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Standard.—‘The analytical power displayed makes this book a remarkable one, and the drawing of the chief figures is almost startlingly good.’
The Daily News.—‘A novel of conspicuous ability.’
FROM A SWEDISH HOMESTEAD
BySELMA LAGERLOF
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Athenæum.—‘The very strangeness of her genius is one of its chief charms. Her domain lies on the outskirts of fairyland, and there is an other-worldliness about her most real and convincing characters.’
The Spectator.—‘We are glad to welcome in this delightful volume evidence of the unabated vitality of that vein of fantastic invention which ran purest in the tales of Andersen. The influence of Gœthe’sWilhelm Meisteris obvious in the longest and most beautiful story of the collection. But when all deductions are made on the score of indebtedness, the originality of plot and treatment remain unquestioned. The story is rendered touching and convincing by the ingenious charm and sincerity of the narrator.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN,21 Bedford Street, W.C.
THE MANTLE OF ELIJAH
ByI. ZANGWILL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Athenæum.—‘Contains cleverness of a very varied kind—traits of fine imagination, of high spiritual feeling, keen observation, and a singular sense of discrimination in character and dialogue.’
The Outlook.—‘His story and the figures which people its pages are of a vivid and absorbing interest, instinct with life, and on every page some witty and memorable phrase, or trenchant thought, or vivid picture.’
THEY THAT WALK IN DARKNESS
ByI. ZANGWILL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Spectator.—‘No reader, who is not blinded by prejudice, will rise from the perusal of this engrossing volume without an enhanced sense of compassion for, and admiration of, the singular race of whose traits Mr. Zangwill is, perhaps, the most gifted interpreter.’
The Standard.—‘These stories are of singular merit. They are, mostly, of a tragic order; but this does not by any means keep out a subtle humour; they possess also a tenderness ... and a power that is kept in great restraint and is all the more telling in consequence.’
DREAMERS OF THE GHETTO
ByI. ZANGWILL
In One Volume, price 6s.
W. E. Henley in ‘The Outlook.’—‘A brave, eloquent, absorbing, and, on the whole, persuasive book.... I find them all vastly agreeable reading, and I take pleasure in recognising them all for the work of a man who loves his race, and for his race’s sake would like to make literature.... Here, I take it—here, so it seems to me—is that rarest of rare things,a book.’
The Daily Chronicle.—‘It is hard to describe this book, for we can think of no exact parallel to it. In form, perhaps, it comes nearest to some of Walter Pater’s work. For each of the fifteen chapters contains a criticism of thought under the similitude of an “Imaginary Portrait.” ... We have a vision of the years presented to us in typical souls.’
THE MASTER
ByI. ZANGWILL
With a Photogravure Portrait of the Author
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Queen.—‘It is impossible to deny the greatness of a book likeThe Master, a veritable human document, in which the characters do exactly as they would in life.... I venture to say that Matt himself is one of the most striking and original characters in our fiction, and I have not the least doubt thatThe Masterwill always be reckoned one of our classics.’
The Literary World.—‘InThe Master, Mr. Zangwill has eclipsed all his previous work. This strong and striking story is genuinely powerful in its tragedy, and picturesque in its completeness.... The work strikes a truly tragic chord, which leaves a deep impression upon the mind.’
London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO
ByI. ZANGWILL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Times.—‘From whatever point of view we regard it, it is a remarkable book.’
The Guardian.—‘A novel such as only our own day could produce. A masterly study of a complicated psychological problem in which every factor is handled with such astonishing dexterity and intelligence that again and again we are tempted to think a really great book has come into our hands.’
Black and White.—‘A moving panorama of Jewish life, full of truth, full of sympathy, vivid in the setting forth, and occasionally most brilliant. Such a book as this has the germs of a dozen novels. A book to read, to keep, to ponder over, to remember.’
The Manchester Guardian.—‘The best Jewish novel ever written.’
THE KING OF SCHNORRERS
ByI. ZANGWILL
With over Ninety Illustrations byPhil Mayand Others.
In One Volume, price 6s.
The Saturday Review.—‘Mr. Zangwill has created a new figure in fiction, and a new type of humour. The entire series of adventures is a triumphant progress.... Humour of a rich and active character pervades the delightful history of Manasseh. Mr. Zangwill’s book is altogether very good reading. It is also very cleverly illustrated by Phil May and other artists.’
The Daily Chronicle.—‘It is a beautiful story.The King of Schnorrersis that great rarity—an entirely new thing, that is as good as it is new.’
THE CELIBATES’ CLUB
ByI. ZANGWILL
In One Volume, price 6s.
The St. James’s Gazette.—‘Mr. Zangwill’sBachelors’ ClubandOld Maids’ Clubhave separately had such a success—as their sparkling humour, gay characterisation, and irresistible punning richly deserved—that it is no surprise to find Mr. Heinemann now issuing them together in one volume. Readers who have not purchased the separate volumes will be glad to add this joint publication to their bookshelves. Others, who have failed to read either, until they foolishly imagined that it was too late, have now the best excuse for combining the pleasures of two.’
THE PREMIER AND THE PAINTER
ByI. ZANGWILLANDLOUIS COWEN