Page:The Recluse by W Paul Cook.djvu/78

 from the trees; the road was powdered with acacia-bloom, lying thick like sodden snow; great pools of yellow water were in possession of the lanes; and new-born streams, bubbling of their own importance, trickled sleek and swollen, across the fields and under the hedges.”

In “The Sentimental Studies,” consisting of three long and two short stories, we find a real advance over the earlier volume. For the first time, if we except “A Dead Woman,” literature begins to creep in. Never altogether absent, the influence of Henry James is made more suggestive and conspicuous in the motivation or mental activities of the characters concerned. They suffer, not so much for the things they do as for the things that of their own diffidence they leave undone. One and all, analysis would find them potential victims of what Crackanthorpe discerningly terms their “trepidating curiosity,” a delicate but aloof spiritual sluggishness that continually fringes the line of complete decision—yet never quite comes up to it.

“A Commonplace Chapter,” really a novelette in two parts, opens the volume. Here we have Crackanthorpe with his favorite motif, the man of genius, in this instance a successful poet, beloved by a beautiful and impulsive young woman. This type of Crackanthorpe’s femininity possesses the power, when occasion calls for it, to leap into instant maturity; adolescence being only temporary and a foil to match the complete sophistication of the male. Hillier Hasleton, the poet, dreams of marriage, “an ideal marriage—a simultaneous satisfaction of intellectual, emotional and physical desires.” Yet over this marrigaemarriage [sic], following an association of professed respectability in which the heroine, Ella, remembers “nothing but his goodness and the abandomentabandonment [sic] of the intoxication of his love”—arises the shadow of another, a certain Mrs. Hendrick, beneath whose smile and gentle voice there lurks “an air of bitterness restrained and refined.” Hillier is drawn body and soul into her toils. So completely does he justify himself in his intrigue, that he finds himself unable to live without her. Swann, a cousin of Hillier’s, enters into the story, and between the alienated wife and this high-spirited relative an attraction is formed that grows insensibly into love. “Swann had become necessary to her, almost the pivot, as it were, of her life; to muse concerning the nature of his feeling towards her, to probe its sentimental aspects, to accept his friendship otherwise than with conscious ease, that was not her way.” Aware of Hillier’s unfaithfulness, Swann approaches him and in a burst of pleading exacts a promise that the poet, who is traditionally weak, will explain the entire matter to his wife. This he does, but not before Swann has secretly bidden her farewell. We are led to believe that ever after this man who had so spurned and cheapened her love would be hers devotedly and alone; we are certain, however, that this woman could never love her husband again. He kisses her as he pleads:

“ “‘ [sic]I have been punished, Nellie,’ he began in a broken whisper. ‘Good God! it is hard to bear…… Help me Nellie…… help me to bear it!”’ [sic]

”“ [sic]She unclasped his fingers, and started to stroke them; a little mechanically, as if it were her duty to ease him of his pain.…”

“Battledore and Shuttlecock,” the second long story, with its gentle yet bitter cynicism treats of the eternal cocotte, the refined woman to whom fidelity or infidelity are merely experiences in a life of absorbing futility. Of all Crackanthorpe’s heroines, “Midge” (Nita) Bashford is by far the loveliest. Ronald Thornycroft meets her in a theatre and beside her “he felt himself clumsy and clownish.” He notes her “large-brimmed black velvet hat; the soft duskiness of her skin, which a feather boa caressed; her white, tight-fitting gloves, and the golden bangles on her wrists.” They spend days together, idly and pleasantly chatting in her rooms, walking the streets of the city that ceases to be only a conventional assembly of dreary thoroughfares; the man, on his part, never entirely unconscious of the complete elusiveness, the delightful uncertainty of this mercurial being at his side. She disappears, and her return a few days later elicits the astounding information that only recently had she been separated from her husband, an actor. He had beaten her, she tells him. Her trip to Brighton was with another man, she