Page:Punch (Volume 147).pdf/553

December 16, 1914.]

Voice from the darkness.



The Prussian Officer, a study of morbidly vicious cruelty practised by a captain of Cavalry on his helpless orderly (and the first of a sheaf of collected stories, short or shortish, by Mr. Author:D. H. Lawrence, issued by Messrs. ), had been written since the declaration of war it would certainly be discounted as a product of the prevailing odium bellicosum. But it appeared well in the piping times of peace, and I remember it (as I remember others of the collection) with a freshness which only attaches to work that lifts itself out of the common ruck. An almost too poignant intensity of realism, expressed in a distinguished and fastidious idiom, characterises Mr. method. It is a realism not of minutely recorded outward happenings, trivial or exciting, but of fiercely contested agonies of the spirit. None of these stories is a story in the accepted mode. They are studies in (dare one use the overworked word?) psychological portraiture. I don't know any other writer who realises passion and suffering with such objective force. The word "suffering" drops from his pen in curiously unexpected contexts. The fact of it seems to obsess him. Yet it is no morbid obsession. He seems to be dominated by sympathy in its literal meaning, and it gives his work a surprising richness of texture… I dare press this book upon all such as need something more than mere yarns, who have an eye for admirably sincere workmanship and are interested in their fellows—fellows of all sorts, soldiers, keepers, travellers, clergymen, colliers, with womenfolk to match.

On a map of the North you may be able to find an island named after one Margaret. It should lie, though I have sought it in vain, just about where the florid details of the Norwegian coast-line run up to those blank spaces that are dotted over, it would seem, only by the occasional footprints of polar bears. Anyhow it was so christened by two bold mariners who lived in the Spacious Days of. That they both loved the lady (, of course, too—but I mean Margaret) may be assumed; but that they should eventually, with one accord, desire to resign their claims upon her affection must be read to be understood. I for one did not quarrel with them on this score. For had not their mistress in the meantime found companionship more suitable than theirs? Besides, if even the author is so little courteous to his heroine as to invite her to appear only in two chapters between the third and the twenty-seventy, why should two rough sea-dogs—or you and I—be more attentive? And indeed it is a correct picture of his period that Mr. Author:Ralph Durand is concerned to present rather than a love story. In the writing of the love scenes considered necessary to the mechanism of the plot he seems very little at his ease; and so marked at times is his discomfort that I must confess to having felt some irritation when my willingness to be convinced was not met halfway. In the handling of his sheets and oars I like the author better, though even here I miss what might have brought me into a companionship with his people as close as I could wish on a most adventurous journey of nearly four hundred pages. But perhaps that is my fault; and, at the least, here is a straightforward sea story—as honest as the sea and as clean.

