THE real Anna Katharine Green is a terrible mystery. We do not mean Mrs. Charles Rohlfs of 156 Park Street, Buffalo, whose husband is an expert maker of fine furniture and who wroteInitials OnlyandThe Leavenworth Case. We mean the Anna Katharine Green Mind, a Mind no longer young counted by years, a Mind as subtle and powerful and clever as ever, counted by achievement. ReadThe Mystery of the Hasty Arrow, published at the close of 1917, if you doubt that Mind’s unabated mastery. Anna Katharine Green—but hush! What awe-inspiring quality invests the mere whisper of that name? Why do cold shivers run up and down our backs? Why in our commonplace surroundings—porch, porch chairs, typewriter, manuscript—why, why do we chill all over? Why do the thrills in dots and dashes like a hurrying Morse code torture our nerves?
We will tell you.
It is because last night we opened a book and read:
IWHERE IS BELA?“A high and narrow gate of carefully joined boards, standing ajar in a fence of the same construction! What is there in this to rouse a whole neighborhood and collect before it a group of eager, anxious, hesitating people?“I will tell you.“This fence is no ordinary fence, and this gate no ordinary gate; nor is the fact of the latter standing a trifle open, one to be lightly regarded or taken an inconsiderate advantage of. For this is Judge Ostrander’s place....”
IWHERE IS BELA?
“A high and narrow gate of carefully joined boards, standing ajar in a fence of the same construction! What is there in this to rouse a whole neighborhood and collect before it a group of eager, anxious, hesitating people?
“I will tell you.
“This fence is no ordinary fence, and this gate no ordinary gate; nor is the fact of the latter standing a trifle open, one to be lightly regarded or taken an inconsiderate advantage of. For this is Judge Ostrander’s place....”
We read. And we read. The others retired for the night. The pale moon swam slowly through the heavens, regarding us with a calm, cold indifference. The town clock boomed midnight, then one, then two. Fatality hung in the air. Horror coursed in the veins and the blood ceased to pulse through the arteries. Occasionally a ripened apple dropped from the nearby tree to the ground. At the thud we jumped. But we could not stop until, on page 381, the last ofDark Hollow, we had read the solemn words: “Peace for him; and for Reuther and Oliver, hope!” Then we crept off to bed. Utter exhaustion of all sensation brought swift sleep....
It must have been about a third of the way through that the conviction stole over us of Judge Ostrander’s guilt. Who murdered Algernon Etheridge in DarkHollow? Did John Scoville, executed for the crime? Did—shuddering thought—young Oliver Ostrander slay that friend of his father’s whom he hated so? Neither ... neither! Then who? Why, the unlikeliest person in the book, of course, and trust Anna Katharine Green to make it plausible!
Mrs. Green—it is difficult to know whether to call Mrs. Rohlfs “Miss Green” or “Mrs. Green”—Mrs. Green cannot write “for a cent,” as slang has it; but she can write and has written for a good many dollars! And by that we don’t mean her motive is purely businesslike; we prefer to believe that she writes for the exercise of her marvelous and peculiar talent, and to afford excitement and entertainment to many thousands who read her books. What is this talent? (It is impossible in writing about her to avoid falling into the theatricism of her narrative style!)
Did you ever try to write a mystery story? If you have tried you will understand much better than we can tell you. And if you haven’t it will be necessary to take a single specimen of Mrs. Green’s work to illustrate her powers.
Dark Hollow—and she never wrote a more excellent yarn—centers about the murder of Algernon Etheridge twelve years before the narrative begins. John Scoville, keeper of a tavern, was tried and executed for the crime, swearing his innocence. Etheridge was the closest personal friend Judge Archibald Ostrander had. Circumstances compelled Judge Ostrander to preside at Scoville’s trial and the Judge was not merely impartial, but manifestly favored, so far as was compatible with fairness, the defense. The evidenceagainst Scoville was purely circumstantial but strong. He had been in Dark Hollow that night at the time of the crime. Etheridge was killed with Scoville’s stick. Scoville’s character was bad.
For twelve years since the crime Judge Ostrander has lived shut off from the world, except for his appearances on the bench. His grounds are walled off by a high board fence within a high board fence and he lives alone with a huge negro servant. His son and he have parted irrevocably.
When the story opens this negro, Bela, has gone forth on morning errands, unprecedentedly leaving the gate in the fence ajar! A woman in purple, heavily veiled, has entered the grounds. The gaping neighborhood ventures in after her but does not find her. The crowd comes upon the Judge sitting erect and apparently lifeless in his house! It is an attack of catalepsy. A little later the negro, mortally wounded by an automobile, returns and dies trying to guard the iron door in the house which preserves his master’s secret.
The woman in purple turns out to be Mrs. Scoville. She sees the Judge and tells him that his son, Oliver, has fallen in love with her daughter, Reuther. She also tells him of her conviction that her husband did not slay Etheridge. It is a conviction arrived at since his execution. Late as it is, she is determined to do what she can to uncover new evidence.
Chapter by chapter, piling sensation on sensation, Mrs. Green writes of Mrs. Scoville’s quest. There is the shadow of the man in the peaked cap seen advancing into Dark Hollow at the hour of the crime. There is the picture of Oliver Ostrander secreted in his father’s house with a band of black painted across the eyes. There is the point of a knife blade in the stick with which Etheridge was killed, and the blade from which it was broken lies folded in Oliver’s desk. A peaked cap hangs in Oliver’s closet! Just when every circumstance drives home the conviction of Oliver’s guilt Judge Ostrander shows Mrs. Scoville a written statement that establishes the fact of an earlier murder by her husband. She is taken all aback and for the moment she believes again that the right man was put to death for the murder of Etheridge. But the Judge allows her to look at the document a moment too long. It has been tampered with at the close; forgery has been done!
Oliver must be found, for an accusation against him has got abroad and the police are looking for him. There is a race between the agents of the district attorney and the messengers of the Judge. He is found in a remote spot in the Adirondacks and flees, but whether to return home at his father’s summons or to escape to Canada, who knows? By a desperate drop over the side of a cliff he has landed in a tree top. The train is not due for fifteen minutes. He’ll catch it.
“‘The train south?’
“‘Yes, and the train north. They pass here.’”
Is it a return or a flight to escape? Thus, in chapter after chapter, Mrs. Green creates new suspense, introduces new thrills. As each lesser uncertainty is resolved a fresh one takes its place and always the great major questions hang unanswered over her story—till the very close. Then the one closed avenue toa solution is unbarred, the stunning surprise is sprung and the curtain falls swiftly on a stupefying dénouement. Between the big revelation and the very end of the tale there is just time enough and just explanation enough to convince the reader of what he would least have believed before.
This faint outline of a capital story illustrates Mrs. Green’s talent. Now for the explanation. The whole art of it consists in a truly infinite capacity for taking pains. Before writing this story it was necessary to write, or get clearly in mind, the biographies of half a dozen people. Their lives had to be fully known to the author, even to innumerable incidents which would not be used in her story. Particularly was it necessary to know every aspect in the past of the relations of these people to each other.
It was next necessary to reconstruct the crime. A period of twenty minutes or half an hour at a given place was under consideration. Where was this place and where did it stand with respect to every other place in the story—Judge Ostrander’s house, the Claymore Inn, the ruin of Spencer’s Folly? A map had to be made. It is an illustration in the book. But much more than a map was necessary. The exact whereabouts of every one of half a dozen persons for the whole twenty minutes or half hour had to be settled. Etheridge, Scoville, Mrs. Scoville, Oliver and Judge Ostrander were all in or near Dark Hollow. Just where was each at every moment? Just what was each doing? Just what could, and did, each say and do and hear and see? The author must knowallthese things in order to spare the reader what isirrelevant. She must have every inch of the ground at her fingertips and every instant clear. You don’t believe this? Try writing a story likeDark Hollow, improvising as you go along, or working from a mere outline, and see what happens to you!
The only improvisation in such work as Mrs. Green’s is in respect of what might be called chapter climaxes—the brief thrills, one or more to a chapter, which arise, administer their shock to the reader’s nerves, and are cleared up some pages later. Many of these are planned in advance, a few suggest themselves as the writer goes along, others are real inspirations which have suggested themselves during the writing and are substituted for planned but less effective climaxes. Such is the incident cited above where two trains, one bound south and the other bound for Canada, meet and pass at the little mountain station.
It is frequently said that the whole art of a mystery story or detective story of the kind Mrs. Green writes is to direct suspicion at every person except the right one, until the end! This is clever and partly true, but it takes no account of the vast amount of construction which must go forward before a sentence of the story can be put on paper; it ignores the fact that the criminal, to be convincing, must have figured in the story from the start, for otherwise he will appear as a desperate invention to help the author out of an otherwise insoluble situation. Looking atDark Hollowin retrospect it is quite easy to see why certain things had to be—so. Judge Ostrander had to be the murderer because he was the person least likely to kill his dearest friend. Oliver had to be under suspicion to make Judge Ostrander’s confession plausible. The Judge had to be the murderer, furthermore, that Reuther Scoville might not be an unfit person to become the wife of Oliver. Oliver had to be cleared that he might be fit to mate with Reuther! Yes, yes; but all this wisdom after the event gets nowhere. It does not penetrate to the heart of the action and throws no light on the author’s cunning. Do you suppose for a moment that she made her story out of such nice little expediencies as these? You can’t build a story that way. It won’t hold together for a moment.
No! The real starting point inDark Hollowwas the conception on the part of Mrs. Green of a man who should, in a moment’s fit of passion, slay his closest friend and who should thereafter, for twelve years, inflict on himself a peculiar punishment, imprisoning himself in a convict’s cellin his own home! All the rest—the painting of a black band across the eyes of his son’s portrait that they might not look on his father, murderer and coward; the sending of that son away from home for all time; the building of a double fence to guard against intrusion by so much as an eye at a knothole—all these followed. Then on this solid foundation of a single life, a single idea, a single stricken conscience arose, course by course, the complicated and wonderful (but solid and sound) structure of the book.
That is the talent of Anna Katharine Green, explained, analyzed and illustrated. Things there are about it that cannot be explained or analyzed. These we pass. We have said that she cannot write. It is true.The Leavenworth Case, andThe Mystery ofthe Hasty ArrowandDark Hollow—every one of her many books is wretchedly written, full of trite and cheap expressions, full of cliches, dotted with ludicrous trifles of thought and expression, spotted with absurdities, as where the negro Bela is struck and fatally injured by an automobile at the outset ofDark Hollow. The car inflicted a terrible gash in his head and we are informed that “it took a sixty horsepower racing machine going at a high rate of speed to kill him”! And then it didn’t do it instantaneously! If Mrs. Green could have had a collaborator with only average literary skill she would carry everything irresistibly before her. Her mind, joined to a pen capable of writing freshly, simply, with dramatic effect but without theatricism, without sentimental mawkishness, would have achieved books to be put on the shelf alongside the stories of Poe, classical, perfect, immortal.
But if she is not immortal she will live a long, long time! Without ever having created a character to compare with Sherlock Holmes she has constructed tales more baffling than any of the crimes Sir Conan Doyle’s detective solved. She has not had to resort to exotic coloring as Doyle has sometimes had to do to conceal thinness of story. She has not had to depend upon abstruse mathematical ciphers and codes as Poe did inThe Goldbug. She has not had to carry us through generations and coincidences as Gaboriau did inFile No. 113. She never employs the fanciful inversions and mystical paradoxes by which Gilbert K. Chesterton establishes, not so much the existence of crime and criminals, asThe Innocence of Father Brown. She can handle more complex strands than Melville Davisson Post. But Mr. Post can write rings around her! When we get the Anna Katharine Green Mind and the Melville Davisson Post Art joined in a single person America will produce the detective and mystery stories not of a decade nor of a generation but of all time. Meanwhile let us give Mrs. Green her due. In her way, and we have tried to show her way and to differentiate it from the ways of others, she is the most accomplished story-teller in American literary history. She is unique, and with anything unique it is well to be satisfied!
The Leavenworth Case.A. L. Burt Company, New York.A Strange Disappearance.The Sword of Damocles.Hand and Ring.The Mill Mystery.Marked “Personal.”Miss Hurd—An Enigma.Behind Closed Doors.Cynthia Wakeham’s Money.Dr. Izard.The Old Stone House and Other Stories.7 to 12.X. Y. Z.The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock.That Affair Next Door.Lost Man’s Lane.Agatha Webb.Risifi’s Daughter: A Drama.A Difficult Problem and Other Stories.The Circular Study.Doubleday, Page & Company.One of My Sons.The Filigree Ball.Bobbs-Merrill Company.The Defense of the Bride and Other Poems, 1894. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.The Millionaire Baby, 1905. Burt.The House in the Mist, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.The Amethyst Box, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.The Chief Legatee, 1906. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.The Mayor’s Wife, 1907. Bobbs-Merrill Co.Three Thousand Dollars, 1909.The House of the Whispering Pines, 1910. Putnam’s. Burt.Initials Only, 1911. Dodd, Mead. Burt. Reprinted in the Army and Navy Library of Detective Fiction, 1918.Masterpieces of Mystery, 1912. Dodd, Mead. Republished in 1919 asRoom No. 3.Dodd, Mead.Dark Hollow, 1914. Dodd, Mead. Burt.The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, 1915.The Woman in the Alcove, 1916. Burt.The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow, 1917. Dodd, Mead.The Step on the Stair, or, You Are the Man, 1922. Dodd, Mead.
ACHAPTER on Helen R. Martin can hardly be anything but a prolonged interview, or a pieced interview, somewhat like a patchwork quilt, constructed from talks of various persons with her at various times. And always on the same subject—her subject—the Pennsylvania Dutch.
What there is to say about the writer and her work shall first be said. She is the daughter of the Rev. Cornelius Reimensnyder, who came from Germany to accept the pastorate of Lancaster county, so the daughter was brought up among the Mennonites. She has written a novel every year or so for the last fourteen years, writing in the time left over after taking care of her home and her children, a boy and a girl; canvassing for suffrage and campaigning for Socialism. Her home is in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. Her first novel was not of the people among whom she had spent her life but “a romance of life as she would like it to be.” Fortunately it did not sell, so she was led to look about her for her future material. She did not begin to write until she met Frederick R. Martin, to whom she was afterward married. He is an instructor in music. And Mrs.Martin was herself a teacher. At one time she taught children in a fashionable private school in New York City. She knew the youngsters rather better than their parents.
Mrs. Martin, like Marjorie Benton Cooke and Harriet T. Comstock, is interested in social questions. She has decided views on bringing up children, wealth and poverty; she does not subscribe to Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s views of motherhood; she is not a feminist in any general meaning of the word, because she believes that feminism in many of its aspects is a passing phase. As a rule her preoccupation with these problems is kept out of her work—the older generation of the people she wrote about were blandly unaware that such questions reared their heads—but her last two novels,Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian?andMaggie of Virginsburg, introduce them extensively and disastrously. Mrs. Martin’s failure withGertie Swartzarose entirely from her inability to assimilate such matterbeforewriting her story. As a result industrial conditions and employees’ welfare are indigestible lumps in the novel. Some subjects cannot be introduced bodily into a piece of fiction. They must arise as they arise in life out of situations and character. They cannot be discussed in a story as they are discussed from a platform. They can only act upon the people of the tale or be acted upon by them; they can be discussed, if the representation of life is to be fairly accurate, only to the extent that the situations of the story call for. It is true that life contains many futile and windy discussions, some academic, some not; but the only things that count are those which involveaction or precipitate action or express or mold character. The novelist must exclude all else, otherwise the novel will lack illusion and resemble nothing so much as the minutes of the last meeting of the Society for the Suppression of Sociological Sores.
Gertie Swartzaside, the real controversy over Mrs. Martin’s work arises from her studies of Pennsylvania Dutch life, and is of a sort to give satisfaction to her as a writer. For the very nature of the controversy carries with it the plain implication that she has got under the skin of her people. It is alleged and deposed that she does not do the Pennsylvania Dutch justice. The allegation was most completely made in the New YorkEvening Postfor April 29, 1916, by Isaac R. Pennypacker.
Briefly, Mr. Pennypacker declared that those who knew the Pennsylvania Dutch “in a broader way” than Mrs. Martin’s stories reflect them “have never taken her pictures of the life very seriously.” George Schock’sHearts Contending, a novel repeatedly praised by William Dean Howells, “should be read as a corrective of Mrs. Martin’s tales.” Elsie Singmaster also has had a better understanding of the Pennsylvania Germans. The Moravians and the famous Bethlehem Bach Choir are proof of Pennsylvania German culture. Read Whittier’s poem,The Pennsylvania Pilgrim(he thought it better thanSnowboundbut said the public would never find it out!). Pennsylvania German troops did bravely in the Revolution and the Civil War. Mrs. Martin admits that the Pennsylvania Dutch rise but it is ungracious of her to call attention to the lingeringaccent, because Americans speak French and German badly. Besides, she does not cite all the instances of their rise to high station. She refers to their unpolished manners but great men, like Dr. Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton, seldom have nice manners. “Mrs. Martin’s curious comment on the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutchman’s barn is larger than his house would be paralleled if she were to find it curious that Mr. Wanamaker’s department store is larger than his residence.” Is it? But how would Mr. Pennypacker account for the fact that Judge Gary’s house on Fifth avenue is larger than his office at 71 Broadway? “A punctilious regard for good manners by which she sets such store would forever have prevented Mrs. Martin from publishing her books, because the portraits of the people in them are caricatures.” Look out, Mrs. Martin! Some one sees resemblances in your caricatures!
There is the case against Mrs. Martin and it is the highest compliment her work could have. The next highest compliment is the fact that Minnie Maddern Fiske madeBarnabettainto a play,Erstwhile Susan, and appeared herself in the title-rôle. And the next highest compliment is what Richard Watson Gilder of theCenturyonce said to Mrs. Martin: “Your people do not converse on paper—they talk. When a community is written up that community always resents it, even if it is described flatteringly. You can’t praise any community enough to satisfy its own conceit about itself.”
So much for compliments. If you call for proofsask Mrs. Martin to show you or read to you (she won’t allow them, as a rule, to be published) some of the hundreds of letters she has received from Pennsylvania Germans wanting to know if So-and-so was the original of this character, asking why such and such a person was “put in your book,” complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch good traits, complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch bad traits, as stinginess and selfishness toward the womenfolk; praising her delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life, condemning her for her delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life. The truth is this, as Mrs. Martin says:
“The Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like my stories. That is, the educated descendants of the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like them. The people of whom I write generally are people who read nothing, not even newspapers, except, as one woman told me, ‘sometimes meby the comic section.’ But the Pennsylvania Dutch citizens of such places as Reading, Lancaster, Lebanon, Bethlehem and other cities resent my commentaries upon the race from which they have risen. Overlooking the finer and lovable characters described in my books, they prefer to dwell upon the harsh people. I wish more of them would take comfort from Tillie, Mrs. Dreary, and the rest of my heroines.
“The only Pennsylvania Dutch who enjoy my stories seem to be those who have moved West and to whom my books seem to come like a visit home.”
We think the reader of Mrs. Martin’s novels will thank us if we forego a synoptic discussion of hertales and give instead what she has to say, outside her books, about the people in them.
“It is a part of the common misconception that the Pennsylvania Dutch of whom I write are all Mennonites. Now, Mennonites are a religious sect, not a race or a nationality! I have written very little about Mennonites. They are as inoffensive and mild as the Quakers, and it is absurd to confound characters like Mrs. Dreary of the playErstwhile Susanand her foster son Jake (who are, of course, Pennsylvania Dutch) with the sect of Mennonites. Once a Pennsylvania Dutchman becomes a Mennonite, he gives over his harshness and other grievous faults and leads a mild, gentle and inoffensive life. Of course they are all very frugal and ‘close’—they never outgrow that.
“The Amishmen are set apart from the world by their hooks and eyes. They never wear buttons and buttonholes because buttons and buttonholes are worldly. All of them wear the same sort of garb. The women fold kerchiefs over their shoulders and across the breast that their too seductive charms may not be revealed.
“I remember the suspicion with which Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and their wives would invariably regard me when, applying for a few days’ board, I would confess to being a married woman, not even a widow. Why, then, was I going about without my husband? This made it harder for me to obtain board than if I had been an old maid. ‘Where’s her husband, anyhow?’ the farmer and his wife would speculate. ‘Her out here alone fur three days yet and him not showin’ his face! It’s somepin awful funny!’ Then the wifewould tell me how in twenty-five years of married life she had never yet spent a night away from her spouse.
“One morning as I was sitting on the kitchen porch writing to my husband the farmer’s wife bent over my shoulder to read what I was writing. ‘Now that there writin’,’ she remarked, ‘I can’t read it so very good.’ I quickly laid the blotter over the page. ‘I am writing to my husband,’ I said hastily, ‘to let him know where I am.’ She stared at me. ‘He don’t know where you’re at?’ she gasped. ‘Well, I guess anyhow, then!’ Which, being interpreted, meant: ‘I should think it was about time!’”
The following further account of these people is taken from a talk Joseph Gollomb had with Mrs. Martin while she was in New York to see the opening of Mrs. Fiske inErstwhile Susan. The interview, printed in the New YorkEvening Postof January 22, 1916, provoked Mr. Pennypacker’s blanket indictment which we have already recapitulated:
“You can tell the Pennsylvania Dutchman by his speech, even after he sheds his queer clothes and barbering and takes on the guise of the average American,” explained Mrs. Martin. “A bellboy in Allentown once disarmed my wrath with, ‘Was you bellin’ for me? I didn’t hear it make.’ I knew him then as coming from my people. His father probably would say, cocking his weather eye, ‘It looks for rain. I’m sure it’s going to make something down.’ Or his mother, pricing at market, would ask, ‘For what do you sell your chickens at? I want to wonder. I feel for getting that fat one.’ Your washerwoman, with all the deference in the world, will refer to your husband and hers: ‘Does your Charlie like his shirt ironed? My mister don’t.’
“Enter Cashtown, Virginsville, or Bird-In-The-Hand (these are actual towns). You’ll see houses painted flagrant red or yellow or pink; flower gardens gorgeous with color. And there all the display, or even trace of love of physical beauty, stops. The homes are immaculate but ugly. The parlor is furnished at marriage, then shut up for years.
“Most of the living is in the kitchen. The barn is bigger than the house and is more modern than the kitchen. That is because the Pennsylvania Dutchman is parsimonious with everything but the labor of his women. He’ll buy modern plows, an automobile to take his products to market, modern harness to save his horse. Up-to-dateness in the barn means more money in his pocket. But he won’t spend a cent to save his wife or his daughter a bit of work. That is what they are for—to work for the men folks in the kitchen or near it.
“When a young man goes courting, his eyes are not blinded with Cupid’s bandage. They are wide open to note how the prospective bride qualifies as a frugal, hardworking housewife. I watched a young man studying three girls, his object matrimony. They were sewing and he made a test of their frugality by the way they tore off their threads. The girl who tore off her thread closest to the stitch appealed to him most. Later he watched them at pie making. With another test in mind he asked each of them for the waste dough scraps. One of the girls, wanting to make a hit, gave him generously. The girl who had won inthe first test scrimped a few crumbs for him—and won his hand and heart. Soon after, his foot was seen on the rocker of her chair as they talked—which is Pennsylvania Dutch for ‘I mean to marry this girl!’ ...
“What has given them the passion for pinching their souls I don’t know. It may be a narrow and too literal interpretation of the Bible—for they are intensely religious in the orthodox sense. The great majority of them sooner or later join one of the several religious sects—Mennonites, Dunkards, Amish, or some other. ‘I feel to be plain,’ they say, and join one of these sects.
“Their word is as good as gold—but they’ll quibble with their word. A grower will get his wife to water the tobacco leaf, to make it weigh more. ‘Did you water this tobacco?’ the intending buyer asks the farmer. ‘No,’ the farmer answers with literal truth. But once he gives his literal word it is good to the last penny.”
These people are without the sense of citizenship. “They don’t think about it at all,” said Mrs. Martin to an interviewer whose report of her was printed in theEvening Sun, New York, April 7, 1915. “They have no problems and therefore they are contented with their lot. They are wary of education; they think it makes rogues. ‘Look at those grafters in Harrisburg!’ they will say.”
Mrs. Martin once told a capital story of the Amish. This sect has a rule that any one who breaks a law of the meeting shall be penalized by living apart from his wife or, in the case of a woman, her husband;denied even the solace of recrimination. The wife of a particularly stingy member of the sect devised a cunning punishment for him by herself breaking one of the laws of the meeting. “I don’t know what rule she broke,” Mrs. Martin said. “It may have been sewing a button on her dress instead of a hook and eye, or she may have advocated painting the house. In any event her husband became an outcast, unable even to speak to his wife.
“I used the instance, somewhat colored, in a story. The result was that I got a letter from an Amish preacher informing me that if I would give him the name of the man who was so stingy to his wife the church would punish him properly. Of course I replied that the instance was purely fictitious. To which the reply of the minister was that he could not understand why I wrote such lies about the sect!”
Introducing Mrs. Martin, a bright, cheerful, little bit of a woman, at a booksellers’ convention in New York, William Hard declared that she and Margaret Deland were like two large railroad systems each operating exclusively in its own territory by a tacit understanding. Mrs. Martin, to accept the simile, freights great quantities of valuable stuff and yields far better dividends than some of the big transcontinental lines!
Elusive Hildegarde.Her Husband’s Purse.His Courtship.Warren Hyde.Tillie, a Mennonite Maid, 1904.Sabina, a Story of the Amish, 1905.The Betrothal of Elypholate and Other Tales of the Pennsylvania Dutch, 1907.The Revolt of Anne Royle, 1908.The Crossways, 1910.When Half-Gods Go, 1911.The Fighting Doctor, 1912.The Parasite, 1913.Barnabetta, 1914.For a Mess of Pottage, 1915.Martha of the Mennonite Country, 1915.Those Fitzenbergers, 1917.Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian?1918.Maggie of Virginsburg, 1918.The Schoolmaster of Hessville, 1920.The Marriage of Susan, 1921.
Mrs. Martin’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York, and the Century Company, New York.
“July 19, 1918.
“My dear Mr. Overton:
“IT has been almost impossible for me to write this. I have made a dozen beginnings and invariably found myself drifting off into reminiscences of my childhood and funny lies about what I think and feel. Good heavens! what do I think and feel? I don’t know. I really don’t. I have never had the time nor found myself of sufficient interest to sit down and think about myself subjectively. I am afraid that this is a very queer narrative and very dull, but at least I have tried to give only facts....
“I was born near Denton, Maryland, a small town located in the ‘sandy belt’ of the Eastern Shore. It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted, conventional, self-respecting community, not very enterprising—an average little semi-Southern town. My father had a nursery and fruit farm, and cared more, I think, for beautiful trees than he did for people. We had lovely arborvitæ and red japonica hedges, magnolia trees, an extraordinary collection of evergreens, and many unusual foreign flowering shrubs.
“I went to school at Denton, the public school, and the embryo High School of twenty to twenty-five years ago. And then I went to college.
“As a child I read everything that I could lay hands on and we always had books and magazines at home. But my reading was not guided and it was my great misfortune not to find among my teachers, either in school or college, even one with any special mental quality or deep and sound culture, or even any vital enthusiasm—with the exception of the psychology teacher at college.
“I began to write at college, the sort of imitative stuff that most college girls write—very highbrow essays on Maeterlinck, and that kind of thing. Not much fiction or poetry, as I remember. But I had my ideas of a writing career, for all that. When I was graduated from college I was just eighteen and I came home and told my father that I was going to be an author and he might as well buy me a typewriter—I was always of a severely practical turn of mind. I got the typewriter and began to write stories, first in longhand, then copying them single-spaced on the machine; they made terrifying manuscripts. One got into theLadies’ World, and one into theCountry Gentleman, and one intoTruth, which was then a flourishing publication. And about that time, after I had been home for a couple of years, at the suggestion of an old friend of my father’s I went to the University of Vermont for a year of graduate work. And I began to take a special course in history there with Professor Samuel Emerson.
“I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and painfully became aware that I did not know how to use mymind, and that my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality.
“It is a fine thing to know what you do not know. It set me to work to try to get what I did not have—a disciplined, well-ordered, logical mind, a store of knowledge, a really broad culture. Alas, I never got any of them, and I never shall. It takes different training and environment from infancy to produce them, as well as greater capabilities than mine. But I did at least get this—the habit of thinking things out for myself, and a poor opinion, thought out by the individual, is better than a lazy acceptance of some one else’s say-so.
“Naturally, my year with Professor Emerson gave me a very low opinion of my chances to become a writer. I let writing alone for a while, and then began doing little light things for the PittsburghGazette, one of whose staff I had met while on a visit to Pittsburgh. They were mostly little essays—though that word is really too dignified for them—on the foibles and fashions of the time. Sometimes a drop or two of sentiment and little amusing incidents thatI gathered when visiting in Washington and Baltimore—we Southerners are great visitors, you know—occasionally a scrap of very light verse.
“But this was not enough. I got restless and I wrote to theGazettepeople and asked for a job. I got it—I was to run the woman’s page of their evening paper, and do Sunday specials. After I arrived the duties of music critic were added, and later I had charge of a Sunday supplement. The people on theGazettewere very kind and patiently tutored me through my greenhorn days. The training was excellent and I worked there very happily for several years.
“But I had been trying some magazine work—more light, semi-humorous stuff, and theWoman’s Home Companionbought several of my pieces. I went to New York to see them in the spring and in the fall I asked them for a job. And got it,—assistant to Miss Gertrude B. Lane, who was then the assistant editor, and is now the editor.
“I have stayed with theCompanionever since, save for a year when I went with the ill-starredCircle, and now I am managing editor. All this covers a period of over ten years.
“After I got to New York the writing fever got me, and I tried some stories and more short articles of sentiment and humor. Some of these were published and some of them came back to me. More and more I tried to do fiction, and more and more I did it: now I have three books out—Love at Large,The Blue EnvelopeandThe Golden Block—and another in the works, and I’ve written innumerable short stories, most of which have been published. Of coursethe very best story I ever wrote I cannot sell. I occasionally run across a copy of that story in my rejected manuscript drawer and I say, ‘Never mind—some day I’ll wish you on an editor, yet.’
“None of my stories are in the least autobiographical, and I rarely—almost never—put real people or incidents in my stories, and then only as a foundation on which the action of the story may go forward. My stories are built up from my imagination, character after character, plot, action and finale. I try to work out everything logically, and after I have written a story I go over it and turn the cold eye of criticism on its chronology and the convincingness of its detail. Heaven forefend that I should intimate that I make no mistakes in these,—but at least I try to get them right. That is where my long editorial training is an asset.
“Furthermore, what my various characters say does not necessarily reflect my own views or beliefs—I have no propaganda spirit—the story’s the thing. Time and time again have indignant readers berated me for beliefs expressed in the speeches of my characters—beliefs which were at wide variance with my own, but perfectly in keeping with the character who expressed them.
“(I seem to be wandering away from my theme, Mr. Overton, and truly, it all seems very silly and flat to me. Here are some unrelated facts which you may be able to use somehow—they sound like the answers to anAlice in Wonderlandquestionnaire.)
“I read heaps of biography and autobiography and fiction and poetry, and I do not read any of these because of the possible effect they may have on my work, but because I like to. I read all the magazines, too, but because it is part of my job to see what they are doing. I would rather be unhappy than uncomfortable. I am a good cook and like to do it; indeed I can make better gingerbread and better spoon-bread and better strawberry preserves than any one in the world—this is not arrogance, but a beautiful exceptional truth, as Mr. Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, editor ofMunsey’s Magazine] would say. I work very hard, all the time, and I do not like parties and teas and such and never go to them, when I can get out of it. I write whenever I have any time and I have trained myself to use any time I can get and to go on with a story without re-reading what I’ve already written, even after a lapse of several days. I am an individualist without having the least conviction that it’s the best thing to be. I do not take my own—or most other people’s—writing very seriously. I believe that there was never a time when so many people were writing and writing well, but saying nothing of interest or value. On the other hand, I believe that there is a lot of big work being done and that the mediocre stuff doesn’t really obscure it. I’d rather be an editor than a writer, but I like to be both.
“(Now, really—this is getting ‘curiouser and curiouser,’ to revert again toAlice. Will it do—or won’t it? And, if not, what have I left unsaid that I ought to have said? I am gradually working myself up, I am afraid, into a state of self-conscious muzziness. And I don’t wantthatto go into your book.)”
So writes Sophie Kerr (Mrs. Sophie Kerr Underwood) in response to an appeal for some information about herself that might legitimately gratify the natural curiosity of her readers. Her readers are a multitude! She has had stories in “all the magazines,” so to speak; the statement doesn’t exaggerate much. She hasn’t had a story, so far as we know, in theNew Republicbut when that Effort decides to take up the publication of short stories doubtless she will!
Mrs. Underwood’s short stories need no introduction (to use the sacred formula), and anyway we are here concerned with her as a novelist, and primarily with her as the author ofThe Blue EnvelopeandThe Golden Block.
Both these stories are concerned with women in business and there the resemblance pretty nearly stops.The Blue Envelopehas for its heroine a young girl (who tells the story) under twenty. Leslie Brennan is pretty, a pretty butterfly, used to nothing but spending money and having a joyous if innocent time. She lives with Mrs. Alexander, a woman of family and breeding and wealth. Her guardian, Uncle Bob, pays her bills. But when Mrs. Alexander is summoned to Maine by illness Leslie goes to live with the Morrisons and meets Randall Heath. Heath makes love to her and the shock when she finds out that he was only after her money makes somewhat easier compliance with the unusual wish of her dead father that she spend two years earning her living.
This adventure—earning your living is the greatest adventure in the world and Sophie Kerr can prove it to you!—this enterprise takes Leslie to New York.And there she meets Minnie Lacy who has long earned a living and knows a lot about men’s neckties, being engaged in the business of making them. And there, also, after getting a stenographer’s training and some education in the work of a secretary, Leslie enters the employ of Ewan Kennedy, inventor of explosives.
The “blue envelope” doesn’t make its appearance until along toward the end of the story. It contains the formula for a powder which he is going to give to the United States Government—sarnite. The formula must be delivered to the Chief of Ordnance in Washington. Certain persons, agents, presumably, of a foreign government, are bending heaven and earth to get the sarnite formula. They will stop at nothing. And Leslie Brennan has the task of delivering it to the Chief of Ordnance.
Does it sound like a good story? It does. And is it? It is. So good that you feel much more like telling it than analyzing it. But to “give it away” would be a very unfair piece of business. In analyzing it what shall we say?The Blue Envelopeis simple, straightforward, absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable because of the perfect naturalism of narration. We don’t mean realism—abused word! We mean naturalism. And what is naturalism? Why, simply the knack, art, faculty or gift of inventing incidents, drawing characters, writing conversation, describing action in such an unaffected manner that it all seems the most natural thing in the world!
Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a realist because he makes us see in what he sets before us things we never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical—we are dead in earnest—it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so.
It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is evidenced for everybody in the contrast betweenThe Blue Envelopeand its successor from her pen,The Golden Block.
The Golden Blockis part of the life story of a business woman, Margaret Bailey, and the most importantpart. The novel finds her a secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year. The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman—a much better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most skillful thing in that admirable storyThe Golden Blockis the way in which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism. Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of course the surest way to promotetheirhappiness is to succeed herself.
Margaret Bailey is a character to be proud of and we hope Sophie Kerr is proud of her. She is as clear-visioned as any heroine of fiction; she is as clear-visioned as such women are in life! She is not afraid of being called unwomanly, because she knows that this only means that she does not conform to a handed-down ideal. She does not attempt to formulate a philosophy of sex or love or life on the basis of her own feelings. She speaks and thinks only for herself—not of herself except when asked to explain. She finds no time to indulge in self-pity, but that does not mean that she is hard. No! She is merely happy! She is doing what she can do best and what she most wants to do. “You ought to have been a man,” is the recurring refrain dinned in her ears, usually as a tribute of admiration but frequently with an implication of disapproval, as if the Creator had made a mistake somehow. “It’s my belief that there’s no sex in brains,” Margaret falls into the habit of replying. She might have added: “And there’s no brains in sex, either!”
If young writers must imitate, must go through a period of playing the sedulous ape, as Stevenson called it, we hope that more of them will cease to imitate the Great and Peculiar Few and imitate such exemplars of intelligent and growing naturalism as Mrs. Underwood. It will make the approach to a recognition of their own powers less painful. And for Sophie Kerr we hope only that she may continue as she has begun and keep growing.
Love at Large, 1916.The Blue Envelope, 1917.The Golden Block, 1918.The See-Saw, 1919.Painted Meadows, 1920.One Thing Is Certain, 1922.
Love at Large was published by Harper & Brothers, New York. The Blue Envelope, The Golden Block and The See Saw were published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; the last two books were published by George H. Doran Company, New York.
OF course Marjorie Benton Cooke is Bambi, or, if you prefer, Bambi is simply Marjorie Benton Cooke. The heroine of the most amusing novel by an American woman in many, many years couldn’t be solely the product of an imagination however fine. She couldn’t be anything but an imaginative introspection—by which we mean that Miss Cooke could only have created her by following the advice of O. Henry and others before him, to “look into your heart and write.”
No matter if not a single event of Bambi’s life is autobiographical; no matter if her Father Professor with his mathematical flowerbeds never lived; still less if Jarvis Jocelyn is a pure fantasy. The point is that to write Bambi Miss Cooke had to put her real self in the midst of imagined people and subject her real self to imagined events. This is completely different from the usual method of the skilled fictioneer. He builds his hero or heroine in the first place, but having made the character and infused into it the breath of life the character does the rest. The writer has little governance over his character’s actions; these are determined by the character himself and the writer does not much more than set them down. Incredible?Not in the least. Thackeray, Scott—we don’t know how many writers—testify to the obstinacy with which their people insist on being themselves. Why, an author is really no better off than a parent who brings a child into the world. The parent may transmit to the child certain traits and the author may endow his person with certain qualities; but as the child grows up he takes his own course rather oftener than not, and the fictional person does always! Or if he doesn’t we see the author jerking the strings and despise him for it, for the story rings false.
But the bookBambiis another matter and precisely what the difference consists in we have tried to show. Let us illustrate it anew.Bambiis imagined autobiography. Instead of creating Bambi and letting her go her way Miss Cooke conducted herself through the story. Or, if you want to put it in another way, you may say that she created Bambi and endowed her with certain of her own traits—gayety, courage, tenderness, wit, a love of drama—and then let her go her way. It is because of the intimate personal quality of her heroine that Miss Cooke dedicated her book “To Bambi, with thanks to her for being Herself! M. B. C.”
The book is a marvel—an absolute marvel. It sold heavily and promptly, that was to be expected; but the marvel consists not in the book’s popularity but in the extraordinary enthusiasm it stirred in its readers. Since no one who has read it seems to be able to avoid the use of superlatives in speaking of it—certainly this writer isn’t—it might be best to put aside any attempt at characterization. What follows shall be—analysis!
The first chapter takes the reader off his feet. Bambi, loving the dreamer Jarvis though perhaps not very consciously loving him, sends for a minister and has herself wedded to him, despite the absent-minded objections of her father, the professor of mathematics. Jarvis needs looking after. This perfectly implausible proceeding is made entirely plausible—you swallow it whole and with immense relish—by just two technical triumphs on Miss Cooke’s part.
1. Everything is in dialogue. You are not asked to believe that the Professor is one kind of a person, Bambi another, and Jarvis a third, and all three eminently unlikely; you see them do this and that and you hear them say so and so. Miss Cooke doesn’t ask you to believeher, she asks you to believe your senses!
2. The dialogue is witty—the wittiest—but there we go off on superlatives again. The dialogue is witty but natural in the completest sense of the word and the wit springs entirely from the situation. No other wit is so good, as any dramatist will tell you.
These two things are the key to the whole story and the key to the utter amazement which overcomes the reader when he applies the test of probability to it—after he has read it through. Of course the wonder of that first chapter could not be entirely sustained through 366 pages, but by the time Miss Cooke’s capital starting situation has lost its sharpest edge the plot has reared its head! Oh, yes, there’s a plot; all such a story asBambiwill stand; a plot with adequate suspense and a steady sweep toward a dénouement. For in a tale likeBambiyou must not have too much plot;the chief interest is ever in the charming and lovable heroine.
But this sketch is all Bambi and none of it Marjorie Benton Cooke, of whom Bambi is only a projection, in dotted lines, as a draughtsman would say. Miss Cooke herself is the daughter of Joseph Henry Cooke and Jessie (Benton) Cooke. She was born in Richmond, Indiana. In 1899 she received the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. In the same year she began writing for the magazines. In fact her first printed “novel” exists as a yellowed clipping in her mother’s scrapbook. Underneath it is penned a memorandum: “Published the Sunday after Marjorie received her degree.” It was a whimsical episode, the story of a lost dime, divided into two “chapters,” and appeared in the ChicagoRecord-Herald. It contained no promise ofBambi.
“Marjorie and her doting parents,” as Mrs. Cooke once remarked, “thought fame and fortune were hers to command.” They weren’t. She traveled a long, hard road, writing scraps of humor and satire for newspapers and magazines, concocting little stories and selling them. She was fifteen years away fromBambiwhen she started. But she had the gift for dramatic recitation with which she later endowed that young woman. In 1902 she began touring the United States as a monologist. Dozens of her monologues have been published but will not be found listed at the end of this chapter. Miss Cooke would be the last to expect them to be. They are interesting only as the preparation necessary to writeBambi, particularly that first chapter. Miss Cooke has always been interested in social questions, as any one who remembers Jarvis Jocelyn’s experiences in New York will understand. She is a member of the Little Room Club in Chicago, the Heterodoxy Club and the Women’s University Club in New York.
Her books, as distinguished from her printed monologue booklets, began in 1903 withModern Monologues, continued in 1905 withDramatic EpisodesandPlays for Children, marked time in 1907 withMore Modern Monologuesand budded with a novel, her first novel, in 1910—The Girl Who Lived in the Woods.Dr. Davidappeared in 1911; and there wereTo a Mother,The Twelfth Christian, a dramatic poem, and three one-act plays which were produced—all beforeBambi.
AndMiss Cooke will play a Chopin ballade for you and talk to you with the same lightness, deftness, and fun that Bambi displays. She has forgotten more about the art of talking than the authors of all the conversation books ever knew. She is not obtrusive. The manuscript of her happiest book came to the publishers quite unheralded—just a manuscript in a cardboard box with a note from Miss Cooke saying she would like to have Doubleday, Page & Company consider it. Eugene F. Saxton began it one Sunday afternoon about 5 o’clock, intending to read until six, then go for a walk and have dinner uptown somewhere. He read till seven, looked at the clock, and—went on reading. You can eat any day, you know....
Later a telegram went forth: “Bambiis ours. Love at first sight.”
Miss Cooke sat to Mary Green Blumenschein for the illustrations to her book; that’s why they are whatthey ought to be. And you are to picture her just as you would picture Bambi, say as sitting on a low couch, her feet tucked in, enthroned among billowy cushions, that is, of course, if you, the caller, are really acquainted. It will be sufficient to be acquainted with Bambi when you call.
What else?Bambiwas followed byCinderella Janeand that interesting tale of the studio cleaner who was married to the painter without love on either side—they made a success of it and were rewarded by becoming lovers—that tale was succeeded byThe Threshold, in which Miss Cooke chose a theme which would give full and legitimate play to her interest in social problems. A rich bachelor, Gregory Farwell, employs Joan Babcock as housekeeper and companion for himself and his 17-year-old nephew. Farwell’s employees strike; the nephew, inspired by Joan, takes the workers’ side. The result is a thoroughly dramatic story in which the problems of capital and labor, social relations and the like arise fairly and squarely out of the action and are not foisted on the reader. Miss Cooke manages exceedingly difficult material well.
If you go to interview Miss Cooke about her own beliefs on serious subjects she will answer you out of the mouths of her people inThe Threshold, and chiefly from the utterances of Joan Babcock—which does not mean that she makes her characters say what she wants to say to the world at large. No! It means merely that she herself has advanced no farther along the path to an answer to all these questions than Joan Babcock got. When Miss Cooke started to writeThe Thresholdshe knew, as a good novelist does, exactlywhat she wanted to do. She wanted to find out how a certain type of ardent young American woman feels about the future and its social and industrial problems. You ask: why didn’t she go out and, finding a woman of that type, ask her? To do that was to run risks. You might not find the young woman. She might return evasive answers or answers either intentionally or unintentionally misleading—so few of us really know what we think about anything in the future! There was just one safe and certain way to set about it, and that was to create a young woman of the sort Miss Cooke had in mind, put her in the midst of events, and see what she would say and do, what she would come to believe about the things ahead.
Miss Cooke’sThe Clutch of Circumstance, on the other hand, is just a good mystery yarn about secret service work and international plots—but based on fact. It has a serious defect in that the heroine, some of whose qualities are plainly exhibited for the reader’s admiration, is guilty of atrocious treachery, becoming, in fact, a German spy!
Miss Cooke? She is going ahead, thank you! She is going ahead in the wisest way in the world for a person of her special gifts. What was said inThe Thresholdabout Joan is the best thing to say about her author: “The world is thrust forward by such dynamic personalities as yours, even by your mistakes. There is danger in action, but more in tranquil inaction, in feeble acquiescence in the face of injustice and wrong.”
I have left untouched this chapter, written in Miss Cooke’s lifetime, because, for the readers of her books,the picture of her as she lived is the picture to remember; and for the time they are under the spell of one of her stories, the fact is without significance that, in April, 1920, while in Japan at the commencement of a world tour, Marjorie Benton Cooke died.
Modern Monologues, 1903.Dramatic Episodes, 1905.Plays for Children, 1905.More Modern Monologues, 1907.The Girl Who Lived in the Woods, 1910.Dr. David, 1911.Bambi, 1914.The Dual Alliance, 1915.Cinderella Jane, 1917.The Threshold, 1918.The Clutch of Circumstance, 1918.The Cricket, 1919.Married?1921.
The Girl Who Lived in the Woods and Dr. David are published by A. C. McClurg & Company, Chicago; Miss Cooke’s later novels are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; but The Clutch of Circumstance is published by George H. Doran Company, New York.