Part 14 (1/2)
”You ought to have kept your daughter safe at home, Bellwood. Why, good gracious, a dog-fancier could have taught you better wisdom in the matter than you seem to have shown.”
Meanwhile Fondie hears and fells a man who jests about Blanche's delinquency.
”There are those who affirm that Fondie grew into a man from this hour.”
Leonard D'Alroy doesn't answer Blanche's letters and her last hope is wrested from her. She meets Fondie, who tells her at last what he has always felt for her:
”I've never had but one feeling for you, miss, since day I was old enough to have any. You know now what that feeling is, without one having to name it, in case it isn't to your approval.... I should be prouder wi' you, Miss Blanche--than any other man in England is wi' all pride he can muster.”
But she won't let him make that great sacrifice for her: she goes off and drowns herself.
”Who knows, Blanche, save you whose icy lips retain the secret safely locked behind them--who knows but that Destiny led you well and wisely, and that her cruel hand was kindest after all? For now you can never grow old: age can haunt you with no terrors.... Death? Upon your pillow you have lain dead and dreamless many an hour: by the sedgy margin of the muddy pond itself, often on summer afternoons have you laid your face upon your arms, turned from the unbearable brightness of the sun and sky, and tasted a few brief minutes of irresistible, sweet death.
And of the darkness never were you yet afraid.... G.o.d's hand, be sure, is gentler than a child's: there is no thunder on G.o.d's lips, nor dreadful lightnings in His eyes. If Fondie were G.o.d you would not fear him. Fear G.o.d, then, less, nor think G.o.d's infinite mercy will suffer to be put to shame by the finite compa.s.sion of a wheelwright's son.”
And we leave Fondie as ever thinking upon whatsoever things are true, honest, just, lovely and of good report. Fondie has a soul for his inheritance, a soul that was swiftly, wholesomely alive.
Mr Booth has written other books than these two, but they represent him at his best in the vein of rich comedy and in the vein of real tragedy.
That they are worth reading ought to be obvious even from the extracts alone that I have quoted ... they leave one with a feeling that here is a rare artist with a finely developed sympathy and sensitive soul, capable of appreciating and loving all manner of men, sunny-tempered, magnanimous, one who glorifies all such things as are of good report. We read Mr Booth because he makes us love him, and not all authors, not all good authors even, are lovable.
IX
FORD MADOX HUEFFER
We read Mr F. M. Hueffer's work because it shows a versatility that is quite out of the common in modern authors.
He is successful with _vers libre_ (which is decidedly uncommon) and even with rhymed _vers libre_ (which is more uncommon still).
”_Vers libre_,” he says, ”is the only medium in which I can convey more intimate moods. _Vers libre_ is a very jolly medium in which to write and to read, if it be read conversationally and quietly.”
”What is love of one's land?...
I don't know very well.
It is something that sleeps For a year--for a day-- For a month--something that keeps Very hidden and quiet and still And then takes The quiet heart like a wave, The quiet brain like a spell, The quiet will Like a tornado; and that shakes The whole of the soul.”
His poem _On Heaven_, which he afterwards wished to suppress as being ”too sloppy,” contains these lines:
”Nor does G.o.d need to be a very great magician To give to each man after his heart, Who knows very well what each man has in his heart: To let you pa.s.s your life in a night-club where they dance, If that is your idea of Heaven: if you will, in the South of France; If you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the night; Where you will, how you will; Or in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall: He would be a very little G.o.d if He could not do all this, And he is still The great G.o.d of all.”
But it is not as a poet, a taste of whose quality I have just given you, that he would be judged.
It is as the novelist who wrote two of the most interesting novels of our time, _Ladies Whose Bright Eyes_ and _The Good Soldier_.
The former is the best historical romance that I have ever read.
Mr Sorrell, a mining engineer who had taken up publis.h.i.+ng, is travelling up from Plymouth to London when the train goes off the line and he wakes up to find himself living in the fourteenth century possessed of a twentieth-century brain and filled with twentieth-century ideas. He is in possession of a sacred talisman which all the people he meets want to deprive him of: incidentally the fact that he has it causes everyone to treat him with great respect.
With every regard for detail even to language Mr Hueffer builds up a picture for us of life in 1326 in a Hamps.h.i.+re castle: