Chapter V

Hulbert Footner does not look like a writer of mystery stories. A tall, handsome, well-dressed, extremely courteous gentleman who, had he the requisite accent, might just have arrived from Bond Street. He has a trim moustache. Awfully attractive blue eyes! He lives on a farm at Sollers, Maryland. No one else, it seems, is so familiar with the unusual corners of New York City, the sort of places that get themselves called “quaint.” No one else manages the affairs of young lovers (on paper) with quite so much of the airy spirit of young love. I can think of no one else who could write such a scene as that inThe Owl Taxi, where the dead-wagon, on its way in the night to the vast cemetery in a New York suburb, is held up for the removal of a much-needed corpse. Such material is bizarre. The handling of it must be very deft or the result will be revolting; and yet the thing can be done.In the latter part of that excellent play,Seven Keys to Baldpate, George M. Cohan and his company bandied a corpse from attic to cellar of a country house. This preposterous scene as presented on the stage was helplessly laughable. Mr. Footner’s scene inThe Owl Taxiis like that.

The man has a special gift for the picturesque person. I do not know whether he uses originals; if I suspect an original for old Simon Deaves inThe Deaves Affair, I get no farther than a faint suspicion that ... No, I cannot identify his character. (Not that I want to; I am not a victim of that fatal obsession which fastens itself upon so many readers of fiction—the desire to identify the characters in a story with someone in real life. The idea is ridiculous.) Mr. Footner knows Greenwich Village. He knows outlying stretches in the greater city of New York; he knows excursion boats such as the Ernestina, whose cruises play so curious a part inThe Deaves Affair. I have a whetted appetite for what Footner will give us next; I feel sure it will be like no other story of the season. A great deal to be sure of!

The peculiarity aboutGold-Killeris the mystery behind the excellent mystery of the book. I mean, of course, the mystery of its authorship. I do not any longer believe that the book is the work of Siamese twins—in a physiological sense of theword “twins.” I know that there is no John Prosper—or, rather, that if there is a John Prosper, he is not the author ofGold-Killer. Yet the book was the work of more than one man. Were two intellects siamesed to write the story? Those who, in my opinion, know the facts point to the name on the title page and say that John is John and Prosper is Prosper and never the twain shall meet, unless for the purpose of evolving a super-Gold-Killer. Whether they will be able to surpass this book, which opens with a murder at the opera and finishes (practically) with a nose dive in an airplane, is beyond my surmise.

If they will try, I give them my word I will read the new yarn.

Mrs. Baillie Reynolds’s latest novel is calledThe Judgment of Charis. It is not a story to tell too much about in advance. I will say that Charis had run away from an all-too-persistent lover and an all-too-gorgeous family, and had been taken under the wing of a kindly, middle-aged millionaire and invited to become his secretary. She expected some complications and in her expectations she was not disappointed; and the readers’ expectations will not be disappointed either, though they may find the ending unexpected.The Vanishing of Betty Varianrestored to readers of Carolyn Wells a detective whose appearance inThe Room with the Tasselsmade that story more than ordinarily worth while. I do notknow, though, whether Penny Wise would be interesting or even notable if it were not for his curious assistant, Zizi. The merit of detective stories is necessarily variable;The Vanishing of Betty Varianis one of the author’s best; but Miss Wells (really Mrs. Hadwin Houghton) is, to me, as extraordinary as her stories. All those books! She herself says that “having mastered the psychology of detachment” she can write with more concentration and less revision than any other professional writer of her acquaintance. Yes, but how—— No doubt it is too much to expect her to explainhowshe is ingenious.

Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, is ingenious in a different direction. Her story ofWhat Timmy Didwas one that attracted especial attention from those periodicals and persons interested in psychic matters. Here was a woman whose husband had died from poison—self-administered, the coroner decided—and here was little Timmy, who knew that something was wrong. Animals also knew it; and then one day Timmy saw at her heels a shadow man, stiff and military, and behind him a phantom dog. Mrs. Lowndes’s gifts, different from her distinguished brother’s, are none the less gifts.

Chapter VREBECCA WEST: AN ARTIST

Whether Rebecca West is writing reviews of books or dramatic criticism or novels she is an artist, above everything. I have been reading delightedly the pages of her new novel,The Judge. It is Miss West’s second novel. One is somewhat prepared for it by the excellence of her first,The Return of the Soldier, published in 1918. Somewhat, but not adequately.

Perhaps I am prejudiced. You see, I have been in Edinburgh, and though it was the worst season of the year—the period when, as Robert Louis Stevenson says, that Northern city has “the vilest climate under Heaven”—nevertheless, the charm and dignity of that old town captured me at the very moment when a penetrating Scotch winter rain was coming in direct contact with my bones. I was, I might as well confess, soaked and chilled as no New York winter snowstorm ever wetted and chilled me. It did not matter; here was the long sweep of Princes Street with its gay shops on one side and its deep valley on the other; across the valley the tenements of the Royal Mile lifted themselves up—the Royal Mile, which runs always uphill from the Palace that is Holyrood to the height that is the Castle. Talk about gestures! The whole city of Edinburgh is a matchless gesture.

REBECCA WEST

And so, when I began the first page ofThe Judge, it was a grand delight to find myself back in the city of the East Wind:

“It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those decent grey streets that lie high on the Northward slope of Edinburgh New Town, and Ellen was looking up the sidestreet that opened just opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare of the southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun though it keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between the cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was ghostly, andshe loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had proudly supported the harsh virile sounds and colours of the drilling regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached bonewhite by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the Cowgate and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly night, the slumdwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of dead men’s mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument. And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army....”

The Judgeis certainly autobiographical in some of the material employed. For instance, it is a fact that Miss West went to school in Edinburgh, attending an institution not unlike John Thompson’s Ladies College referred to inThe Judge(but only referred to). It is a fact, as everyone who knows anything about Miss West knows, that Miss West was an ardent suffragette in that time before suffragettes had ceased from troublingand Prime Ministers were at rest. An amazing legend got about some time ago that Rebecca West’s real name was Regina Miriam Bloch. Then on the strength of the erring “Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature” did Miss Amy Wellington write a sprightly article for the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post. Miss Wellington referred to this mysterious Regina Miriam Bloch who had stunned everybody by her early articles written under the name of one of Ibsen’s most formidable heroines; but unfortunately Miss West wrote a letter in disclaimer. She cannot help Mr. Ibsen. It may be a collision in names, but it is not a collusion. The truth about Rebecca West, who has writtenThe Judge, seems to be dependably derivable from the EnglishWho’s Who, a standard work always worth consulting. This estimable authority says that Rebecca West was born on Christmas in 1892, and is the youngest daughter of the late Charles Fairfield of County Kerry. It further says that she was educated at George Watson’s Ladies’ College, Edinburgh. It states that she joined the staff of The Freewoman as a reviewer in 1911. Her club is the International Women’s Franchise. Her residence is 36 Queen’s Gate Terrace, London S. W. 7. Her telephone is Kensington 7285.

Now is there anything mythical left? What excuse, O everybody, is there any longer for the legend of Regina Miriam Bloch?

But I do not believe Miss West objects to legends.I imagine she loves them. The legend of a name is perhaps unimportant; the legend of a personality is of the highest importance. That Miss West has a personality is evident to anyone familiar with her work. A personality, however, is not three-dimensionally revealed except in that form of work which comes closest to the heart and life of the worker. To write pungent and terrifyingly sane criticisms is a notable thing; but to write novels of tender insight and intimate revelation is a far more convincing thing.The Judgeis such a novel.

iii

There is a prefatory sentence, as follows:

“Every mother is a Judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father.”

There is a dedication. It is:

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

The Judgeis a study of the claim of a mother upon her son. The circumstances of Mrs. Yaverland’s life were such as peculiarly to strengthen the tie between her and Richard. On the other hand, she had always disliked and even hated her son Roger.

The first part of the book, however, does not bring in Richard Yaverland’s mother. It is a picture of Ellen Melville, the girl in Edinburgh, thegirl whose craving for the colour of existence has gone unsatisfied until Richard Yaverland enters her life. Yaverland, with his stories of Spain, and his imaginative appeal for that young girl, is the fulcrum of Ellen Melville’s destiny.

That destiny, carried by the forces of human character to its strange termination, is handled by Miss West in a long novel the chapters of which are a series of delineative emotions. I do not mean that Miss West shrinks from externalised action, as did Henry James whom she has admired and studied. She perceives the immense value of introspection, but is not lost in its quicksands. She can devote a whole chapter to a train of thought in the mind of Ellen Melville, sitting inattentively at a public meeting; and she can follow it with another long chapter giving the sequence of thoughts in the mind of Richard Yaverland; and she can bring each chapter to a period with the words: “She (he) glanced across the hall. Their eyes met.” It might be thought that this constitutes a waste of narrative space; not so. As a matter of fact, without the insight accorded by these disclosures of things thought and felt, we should be unable to understand the behaviour of these two young people.

All the first half of the book is a truly marvelous story of young lovers; all the latter end of the book is a relation scarcely paralleled in fiction of the conflict between the mother’s claim and the claim of the younger woman.

Of subsidiary portraits there are plenty. Ellen’s mother and Mr. Mactavish James and Mr. Philip James are like full-lengths by Velasquez. In the closing chapters of the book we have the extraordinary figure of the brother and son, Roger, accompanied by the depressing girl whom he has picked up the Lord knows where.

And, after all, this is not a first novel—that promise, which so often fails of fulfilment—but a second novel; and I have in many a day not read anything that seemed to me to get deeper into the secrets of life than this study of a man who, at the last, spoke triumphantly, “as if he had found a hidden staircase out of destiny,” and a woman who, at the last, “knew that though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human tendencies, the insane sexual caprice of men, the not less mad excessive steadfastness of women.”

Booksby Rebecca West

Books

by Rebecca West

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIERTHE JUDGE

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

THE JUDGE

Sourceson Rebecca West

Sources

on Rebecca West

Who’s Who. [In England].

Rebecca West: Article by Amy Wellington in theLITERARY REVIEW OF THE NEW YORK EVENING POST, 1921.

Articles by Rebecca West in various English publications, frequently reprinted byTHE LIVING AGE. See theREADERS’ GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE.

Chapter VISHAMELESS FUN

One way to write about Nina Wilcox Putnam would be in the way she writes about everything. It’s not so hard. As thus:

Some dull day in the office. We look up and whom should we see standing right there before us but Nina Wilcox Putnam! Falling over backwards, that being what our swivel chair is made for, we say: “Well, well, well! So today is May 3, 1922! Where from? West Broadway?”

“I should not say so! South Broadway, I guess. I’ve just motored up from Florida. But your speaking of West Broadway reminds me: I’ve written a piece for George Lorimer of Saturday Evening Post. You see my book,West Broadway, brought me so many letters my arm ached from answering them. What car did you drive? Where d’y’ get gas in the desert? What’s the best route? And thus et cetera. So now I have wrote me a slender essay answering everything that anybody can ask on this or other transcontinental subjects. Mr. Lorimer will publish,and who knows—as they say in fiction—it might make a book afterward.”

“How’s Florida?”

“I left it fine, if it doesn’t get in trouble while I’m away. I’ve bought a ranch, for fruit only, on the East Coast, between Palm Beach and Miami, but not paying these expensive prices, no, not never. And I shall live there for better but not for worse, for richer, but most positively not for poorer. I pick my own alligator pears off my own tree unless I want to sell them for fifteen cents on the tree. Bathing, one-half mile east by motor.”

“Been reading your piece, ‘How I Have Got So Far So Good,’ in John Siddall’s American Magazine.”

“Yes, I thought I would join the autobiographists—Benvenuto Cellini, Margot Asquith, Benjamin Franklin, et Al, as Ring Lardner would insist. Do you know Ring? He and I are going to have one of these amicable literary duels soon, like the famousIsn’t That Just Like a Man? Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!which Mrs. Rinehart and Irvin Cobb fought to a finish. But speaking of sport, I have discovered my grandest favourite sport, in spite of motoring, which is deep sea fishing, nothing less. Let me inform you that I landed a 9-pound dolphin which he is like fire-opals all over and will grace the wall of my dining-room no matter if all my friends suffer with him the rest of their lives. He was a male dolphin;get that! It makes a difference from the deep sea fishing sportsman’s standpoint. And this place of mine at the end of South Broadway where I can roll cocoanuts the rest of my life if I want to is at, in or about Delray, Florida. D-e-l-r-a-y; you’ve spelled it.”

“We’re publishing your new book on how to get thin,Tomorrow We Diet.”

“Oh, yes. Well, I am several laps ahead of that. Now, I am going up to my home in Madison, Connecticut, to work. Later, I’ll maybe drive out to Yellowstone Park or some place. Well, I might stay here at the Brevoort for a month; run down to Philadelphia, maybe. Did you know I once wrote a book for children that has sold 500,000 copies? And, besides a young son whom I am capable of entertaining if you’ll let him tell you, I have a few ideas....”

Hold on! This isn’t so easy as it looked.

Probably Nina Wilcox Putnam is inimitable. This one and that may steal Ring W. Lardner’s stuff, but there is a sort of Yale lock effect about the slang (American slanguage) in such books asWest Broadwaywhich is not picked so easily. As for the new Nina Wilcox Putnam novel,Laughter Limited—if you don’t believe what we say about N.W.P. inimitableness just open that book and see for yourself. The story of a movie actress? Yes, and considerable more. Just asWest Broadwaywas a great deal more than an amusing story, being actually the best hunchextant on transcontinental motoring, outside of the automobile blue books, which are not nearly such good reading.

And then there’sTomorrow We Diet, in which Nina Wilcox Putnam tells how she reduced fifty pounds in seven months without exercising anything but her intelligence. But if you want to know about Nina Wilcox Putnam, read her story in her own words that appeared in the American Magazine for May, 1922. Here is a bit of it:

“Believe you me, considering the fact that they are mostly men, which it would hardly be right to hold that up against them, Editors in my experience has been an unusually fine race, and it is my contracts with them has made me what I am today, I’m sure I’m satisfied. And when a fellow or sister writer commences hollering about how Editors in America don’t know anything about what is style or English, well anyways not enough to publish it when they see it, why all I can say is that I could show them living proof to the contrary, only modesty and good manners forbids me pointing, even at myself. I am also sure that the checks these hollerers have received from said Editors is more apt to read the Editor regrets than pay to the order of, if you get what I mean.

“Well, I have had it pretty soft, I will admit, because all the work I done to get where I am, is never over eight hours a day penal servitude, locked up in my study and fighting against only such minor odds and intrusions as please may Ihave a dollar and a quarter for the laundry, or now dear you have been writing long enough, I have brought you a nice cup of tea, just when I am going strong on a important third chapter. But my work is of course not really work since it is done in the home, as my relations often remind me. At least they did until I got George, that’s my pres. husband, and he never lets me be interrupted unless he wants to interrupt me himself for a clean collar or something.

“Also besides working these short hours, four of which is generally what us authors calls straight creative work, I have it soft in another way. I got a pretty good market for my stuff and always had, and this of course has got me so’s I can draw checks as neat and quick as anybody in the family and they love to see me do it.

“All kidding to one side it is the straight dope when I say that from being merely the daughter of honest and only moderately poor parents I have now a house of my own, the very one in our town which I most admired as a child; and the quit-claim deed come out of my own easy money. I also got a car or two—and a few pieces of the sort of second-hand stuff which successful people generally commence cluttering up their house with as a sign of outward and visible success. I mean the junk one moves in when one moves the golden oak out....

“I never commenced going over really big until it was up to me to make good every time I delivered,and this was not until my husband died and left me with a small son, which I may say in passing, that I consider he is the best thing I have ever published. Well, there I was, a widow with a child, and no visible means of support except when I looked into the mirror. Of course, before then I had been earning good money, but only when I wanted something, or felt like it. Now I had to want to feel like it three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

“I’ll tell the world it was some jolt.”

Perfect Behaviouris the calmly confident title of the new book by Donald Ogden Stewart—a work which will rejoice the readers ofA Parody Outline of History. Behaviour is the great obstacle to happiness. One may overcome all the ordinary complexes. One may kill his cousins and get his nephews and nieces deported, and refuse to perform Honest Work—yet remain a hopeless slave to theBook of Etiquette. In a Pullman car, with a ticket for the lower berth, he will take the seat facing backward, only to tremble and blush with shame on learning his social error. Who has not suffered the mortification of picking up the fork that was on the floor and then finding out afterward that it was the function of the waiter to pick up the fork? What is a girl to do if, escorted home at night from the dance, shefinds the hour is rather late and yet her folks are still up? Whether she should invite the young man in or ask him to call again, she is sure to do the wrong thing. Then there are those wedding days, the proudest and happiest of a girl’s life, when she slips her hand into the arm of the wrong man or otherwise gives herself away before she is given away. Tragedy lurks in such trifles. Don Stewart, who has suffered countless mortifications and heartbreaks from just such little things as these, determined that something shall be done to spare others his own unfortunate experiences.

Perfect Behaviouris the result of his brave determination. It is a book that will be constantly in demand until society is abolished. Then, too, there is that new behaviouristic psychology. You have not heard of that? I can only assure you that Mr. Stewart’s great work is founded upon all the most recent principles of behaviouristic psychology. Noted scientists will undoubtedly endorse it. You will endorse it yourself, and you will be able to cash in on it.

Stewart wroteA Parody Outline of Historyfor The Bookman. When the idea was broached, John Farrar, editor of The Bookman, was about the only person who saw the possibilities. Response to theParody Outline of Historywas immediate, spontaneous and unanimous. When the chapters appeared as a book, this magnificent take-off of contemporary American writers as well as of H. G. Wells leaped at once into the place of abest seller. It remains one. The thing that it accomplished is not likely to be well done again for years.

iii

Neither Here Nor Thereis the title of a new book by Oliver Herford, author ofThis Giddy Globe.

I do not know which is funnier, Herford or his books. Among the unforgotten occasions was one when he was in the Doran office talking about a forthcoming book and nibbling on animal crackers. Suddenly he stopped nibbling and exclaimed with a gasp of dismay:

“Good heavens! I’ve been eating the illustrations for my book.”

Timothy Tubby’s Journalis, of course, the diary of the famous British novelist with notes by Theresa Tubby, his wife. Tubby, on his visit to this side, was remarkably observant. He says:

“How weary we were after a few hours of being interviewed and photographed! This deep appreciation on the part of the American people was touching, but exhausting. Yet my publishers telephoned me every two or three hours, to say that editions of my latest novel were flying through multitudinous presses; that I must bear up under the strain and give the public what itdemands; namely, the glimpse of me and of my aristocratic wife. This, it seems, is what sells a book in America. The public must see an author in order to believe that he can write.

“When my distinguished forebear Charles Dickens[1]arrived in the town of Boston, he found his room flooded with offers of a pew at Sunday morning church. This fashion in America has apparently passed, though I was taken on sightseeing expeditions to various cathedrals whose architecture seemed to me to be execrable (largely European copies—nothing natively American). It was never suggested that I attend divine service. On the contrary, I had countless invitations to be present at what is known as a ‘cocktail chase.’ My New York literary admirers seemed tumbling over one another to offer me keys to their cellars and to invite me to take part in one of those strange functions. It is their love of danger, rather than any particular passion for liquor, that has, I believe, given birth to these elaborate fêtes.

“A cocktail chase takes place shortly before dinner. It may lead you into any one of a number of places, even as far as the outlying districts of the Bronx. If you own a motor, you may use that; if not, a taxi will do. Usually a large number of motors are employed. Add to this pursuing motorcycle policemen, and the sight is mostimpressive. The police are for protection against crime waves, not for the arrest of the cocktail chasers. A revenue agent performs this function, when it becomes necessary.

“The number of our invitations was so large that it was hard to pick and choose. Naturally, we did not care to risk attendance at any function which might injure our reputation. Usually my wife has an almost psychic sense of such matters; but the Social Register was of no assistance in this case.[2]Before several hours had passed, however, we decided to hire a social secretary. I phoned my publisher for a recommendation. ‘Dear Tubby,’ he said, ‘what you need is a publicity agent, not a social secretary. I’ll send you the best New York can offer immediately. It was careless of me not to think of it before. You seemed to have a genius for that sort of thing yourself.’

“The publicity agent is difficult to explain. He is somehow connected with an American game which originated in the great northwest, and which is called log-rolling. He stands between you and the public which is clamouring for a glimpse of you. The difference between a social secretary and a publicity agent seems to be that the former merely answers invitations, while the latter makes sure that you are invited. He writesyour speeches for you, sometimes even goes so far as to write your novels, and, in a strange place, will impersonate you at all public functions unless your wife objects.[3]

“Mr. Vernay arrived, fortunately, in time to sort our invitations. ‘First,’ he said, ‘just you and Terry’ (he was one of those brusque new world types and Theresa rather enjoyed his familiarity—‘so refreshing,’ I remember she said) ‘sit right down and I’ll tell you all about literature in this here New York.’”

... I have always been meaning to read Tubby’s novels—so like those of Archibald Marshall and Anthony Trollope, I understand—but have never got around to it. Now I feel I simply must.

[1]The relationship was on my husband’s father’s side. The Turbots were never so closely connected with the bourgeoisie.

The relationship was on my husband’s father’s side. The Turbots were never so closely connected with the bourgeoisie.

[2]We, of course, had entrée to all the best Fifth Avenue homes, but since we have now become literary folk, we chose to remain so. We therefore avoided the better classes.

We, of course, had entrée to all the best Fifth Avenue homes, but since we have now become literary folk, we chose to remain so. We therefore avoided the better classes.

[3]Indeed Mr. Vernay was a most accomplished gentleman, and I never objected to him. I only remarked once that I was glad Timothy was not so attractive to the ladies as Mr. Vernay. This, I did not consider an objection.

Indeed Mr. Vernay was a most accomplished gentleman, and I never objected to him. I only remarked once that I was glad Timothy was not so attractive to the ladies as Mr. Vernay. This, I did not consider an objection.

Such an expert judge as Franklin P. Adams has considered that the ablest living parodist in verse is J. C. Squire. Certainly hisCollected Parodiesis a masterly performance quite fit to go on the shelf with Max Beerbohm’sA Christmas Garland. InCollected Parodieswill be found all those verses which, published earlier in magazines and in one or two books, have delighted the readers of Punch and other magazines—“Imaginary Speeches,” “Steps to Parnassus,” “Tricks of theTrade,” “Repertory Drama, How They Do It and How They Would Have Done It,” “Imaginary Reviews and Speeches” and “The Aspirant’s Manual.”

The great source book of fun in rhyme, however, is and will for a long time remain Carolyn Wells’sThe Book of Humorous Verse. This has not an equal in existence, so far as I know, exceptThe Home Book of Verse. Here in nearly 900 pages are specimens of light verse from Chaucer to Chesterton. Modern writers, such as Bert Leston Taylor and Don Marquis, share the pages with Robert Herrick and William Cowper, Charles Lamb and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Verses whimsical, satiric, narrative, punning—there is no conceivable variety overlooked by Miss Wells in what was so evidently a labour of love as well as of the most careful industry, an industry directed by an exceptional taste.

P. G. Wodehouse used to write lyrics for musical plays in England, interpolating one or two in existing successes. Then he came to America and began writing lyrics, interpolating them in musical comedies over here. Then he began interpolating extremely funny short stories in the American magazines and he has now succeeded in interpolating into modern fiction some of the funniest novels of the last few years. This bit from his latest,Three Men and a Maid, is typical:

“Mrs. Hignett was never a very patient woman. ”‘Let us take all your negative qualities forgranted,’ she said curtly. ‘I have no doubt that there are many things which you do not do. Let us confine ourselves to issues of definite importance. What is it, if you have no objection to concentrating your attention on that for a moment, that you wish to see me about?’

“This marriage.’

“‘What marriage?’

“‘Your son’s marriage.’

“‘My son is not married.’

“‘No, but he’s going to be. At eleven o’clock this morning at the Little Church Around the Corner!’

“Mrs. Hignett stared.

“‘Are you mad?’

“‘Well, I’m not any too well pleased, I’m bound to say,’ admitted Mr. Mortimer. ‘You see, darn it all, I’m in love with the girl myself!’

“‘Who is this girl?’

“‘Have been for years. I’m one of those silent, patient fellows who hang around and look a lot, but never tell their love....’

“‘Who is this girl who has entrapped my son?’

“‘I’ve always been one of those men who....’

“‘Mr. Mortimer! With your permission we will take your positive qualities for granted. In fact, we will not discuss you at all.... What is her name?’

“‘Bennett.’

“‘Bennett? Wilhelmina Bennett? The daughterof Mr. Rufus Bennett? The red-haired girl I met at lunch one day at your father’s house?’

“‘That’s it. You’re a great guesser. I think you ought to stop the thing.’

“‘I intend to.’

“‘Fine!’

“‘The marriage would be unsuitable in every way. Miss Bennett and my son do not vibrate on the same plane.’

“That’s right. I’ve noticed it myself.’

“‘Their auras are not the same colour.’

“‘If I thought that once,’ said Bream Mortimer, ‘I’ve thought it a hundred times. I wish I had a dollar for every time I thought it. Not the same colour! That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.’”

Mr. Wodehouse is described by a friend as “now a somewhat fluid inhabitant of England, running over here spasmodically. Last summer he bought a race-horse. It is the beginning of the end!”

Chapter VIITHE VITALITY OF MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

“The total result ... after twelve years is that I have learned to sit down at my desk and begin work simultaneously,” wrote Mrs. Rinehart in 1917. “One thing died, however, in those years of readjustment and struggle. That was my belief in what is called ‘inspiration.’ I think I had it now and then in those days, moments when I felt things I had hardly words for, a breath of something much bigger than I was, a little lift in the veil.

“It does not come any more.

“Other things bothered me in those first early days. I seemed to have so many things to write about and writing was so difficult. Ideas came, but no words to clothe them. Now, when writing is easy, when the technique of my work bothers me no more than the pen I write with, I have less to say.

MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

“I have words, but fewer ideas to clothe in them. And, coming more and more often is the feeling that, before I have commenced to do my real work, I am written out; that I have for years wasted my substance in riotous writing and that now, when my chance is here, when I have lived and adventured, when, if ever, I am to record honestly my little page of these great times in which I live, now I shall fail.”

These surprising words appeared in an article in the American Magazine for 1917. Not many months laterThe Amazing Interludewas published and, quoting Mrs. Rinehart soon afterward, I said: “If her readers shared this feeling they must have murmured to themselves as they turned the absorbing pages ofThe Amazing Interlude: ‘How absurd!’ It is doubtful if they recalled the spoken misgiving at all.”

Few novels of recent years have had so captivating a quality as had this war story. But I wish to emphasise again what I felt and tried to express at that time—the sense of Mrs. Rinehart’s vitality as a writer of fiction. In what seem to me to be her best books there is a freshness of feeling I find astonishing. I felt it inK; I found it inThe Amazing Interlude; and I find it in her new novel just published,The Breaking Point.

The Breaking Pointis the story of a man’s past and his inability to escape from it. If that were all, it might be a very commonplace subject indeed. It is not all, nor half.

Dr. Richard Livingstone, just past thirty, is supposedly the nephew of Dr. David Livingstone,with whom he lives and whose practice he shares in the town of Haverly; but at the very outset of the novel, we have the fact that—according to a casual visitor in Haverly—Dr. Livingstone’s dead brother had no son; was unmarried, anyway. And then it transpires that, whatever may have been the past, Dr. Livingstone has walled it off from the younger man’s consciousness. The elder man has built up a powerful secondary personality—secondary in the point of time only, for Richard Livingstone is no longer aware of any other personality, nor scarcely of any former existence. He does, indeed, have fugitive moments in which he recalls with a painful and unsatisfactory vagueness some manner of life that he once had a part in. But in his young manhood, in the pleasant village where there is none who isn’t his friend, deeply centred in his work, stayed by the affection of Dr. Livingstone, these whispers of the past are infrequent and untroubling.

The casual visitor’s surprise and the undercurrent of talk which she starts is the beginning of a rapid series of incidents which force the problem of the past up to the threshold of Richard Livingstone’s consciousness. There would then be two ways of facing his difficulties, and he takes the braver. Confronted with an increasingly difficult situation, a situation sharpened by his love for Elizabeth Wheeler, and her love for him, young Dr. Dick plays the man.The title of Mrs. Rinehart’s story comes from the psychological (and physical) fact that there is in every man and woman a point at which Nature steps in and says:

“See here, you can’t stand this! You’ve got to forget it.”

This is the breaking point, the moment when amnesia intervenes. But later there may come a time when the erected wall safeguarding the secondary personality gives way. The first, submerged or walled-off personality may step across the levelled barrier. That extraordinarily dramatic moment does come in the new novel and is handled by Mrs. Rinehart with triumphant skill.

It will be seen that this new novel bears some resemblances toK, by many of her readers considered Mrs. Rinehart’s most satisfactory story. If I may venture a personal opinion,The Breaking Pointis a much stronger novel thanK. To me it seems to combine the excellence of character delineation noticeable inKwith the dramatic thrill and plot effectiveness which madeThe Amazing Interludeso irresistible as you read it.

To say so much is to bear the strongest testimony to that superb vitality, which, characteristic of Mrs. Rinehart as a person, is yet more characteristicof her fiction. There is, I suppose, this additional interest in regard toThe Breaking Point, that Mrs. Rinehart is the wife of a physician and was herself, before her marriage, a trained nurse. The facts of her life are interesting, though not nearly so interesting as the way in which she tells them.

She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia (Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh. From the city’s public and high schools she went into a training school for nurses, acquiring that familiarity with hospital scenes which served her so well when she came to writeThe Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry, the stories collected under the title ofTishand the novelK. She became, at nineteen, the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician.

“Life was very good to me at the beginning,” said Mrs. Rinehart in theAmerican Magazinearticle I have referred to. “It gave me a strong body and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work. I do not know what would have happened had the work come first, but I should have had the children. I know that. I had always wanted them. Even my hospital experience, which rent the veil of life for me, and showed it often terrible, could not change that fundamental thing we call the maternal instinct.... I would forfeit every part of success that has come to me rather than lose any part, even the smallest, ofmy family life. It is on the foundation of my home that I have builded.

“Yet, for a time, it seemed that my sons were to be all I was to have out of life. From twenty to thirty I was an invalid.... This last summer (1917), after forty days in the saddle through unknown mountains in Montana and Washington, I was as unwearied as they were. But I paid ten years for them.”

Mrs. Rinehart had always wanted to write. She began in 1905—she was twenty-nine that year—and worked at a tiny mahogany desk or upon a card table “so low and so movable. It can sit by the fire or in a sunny window.” She “learned to use a typewriter with my two forefingers with a baby on my knee!” She wrote when the children were out for a walk, asleep, playing. “It was frightfully hard.... I found that when I wanted to write I could not and then, when leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say.”

I quote from a chapter on Mrs. Rinehart in my bookThe Women Who Make Our Novels:

“Her first work was mainly short stories and poems. Her very first work was verse for children. Her first check was for $25, the reward of a short article telling how she had systematised the work of a household with two maids and a negro ‘buttons.’ She sold one or two of the poems for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family made a trip to New York.She made the weary rounds in one day, ‘a heartbreaking day, going from publisher to publisher.’ In two places she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down. ‘But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later sentThe Circular Staircase, my first novel. They published it and some eight other books of mine.’

“In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made about $l,200. She was surrounded by ‘sane people who cried me down,’ but who were merry without being contemptuous. Her husband has been her everlasting help. He ‘has stood squarely behind me, always. His belief in me, his steadiness and his sanity and his humour have kept me going, when, as has happened now and then, my little world of letters has shaken under my feet.’ To the three boys their mother’s work has been a matter of course ever since they can remember. ‘I did not burst on them gloriously. I am glad to say that they think I am a much better mother than I am a writer, and that the family attitude in general has been attentive but not supine. They regard it exactly as a banker’s family regards his bank.’”

Most of the work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 was done in Mrs. Rinehart’s home. But when she had a long piece of work to do she often felt “the necessity of getting away from everything for a little while.” So, beginning about 1915, she rented a room in an office buildingin Pittsburgh once each year while she was writing a novel. It was sparsely furnished and, significantly, it contained no telephone. In 1917 she became a commuter from her home in Sewickley, a Pittsburgh suburb. Her earnings had risen to $50,000 a year and more.

“My business with its various ramifications had been growing; an enormous correspondence, involving business details, foreign rights, copyrights, moving picture rights, translation rights, second serial rights, and dramatisations, had made from the small beginning of that book of poems a large and complicated business.

“I had added political and editorial writing to my other work, and also records of travel. I was quite likely to begin the day with an article opposing capital punishment, spend the noon hours in the Rocky Mountains, and finish off with a love story!

“I developed the mental agility of a mountain goat! Filing cases entered into my life, card index systems. To glance into my study after working hours was dismaying.”

More recently, Mrs. Rinehart has become a resident of Washington, D. C. Her husband is engaged in the Government health service and the family lives in the Wardman Park Hotel, having taken the apartment of the late Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania.

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