Entertainment—and Otherwise

The House by the River — By A. P. Herbert
Larry Munro — By G. B. Stern
The Fourth Dimension — By Horace A. Vachell

Hundreds of years hence, we venture to prophesy, the curtains will divide and discover a young man in a check suit with a bow-tie much too big for him and a straw hat much too small, standing with his back to a glade of yellowing beech trees and reddening bracken and saying: ‘A friend of mine came home late one night—early one morning, I should say—and his wife's mother happened to be staying with them at the time. I ought to hare mentioned that he hadn't been married longer than you might have expected…. What are you laughing at?’ Yes, they will be laughing, and at the word ‘twins’ the laughter will swell into a roar. For—and the reasons are many and curious, and well worth inquiring into—it is the melancholy fact that precious little is needed to amuse and divert people. They are ready to accept almost anything, and really, there are times when it seems that the staler the entertainment the more successful it is likely to be. … Let the song be—not the same song we heard last time, but a ‘new’ one so like it that we know just when to laugh and beat. Let us be able to recognize the heroine the moment she tosses her bright head, and grant us the flattering sensation of never being taken in by the dark but too good-looking young man. The effect upon popular fiction of this easy acceptance is to fill the page 267 book-shelves ninety times nine with the old, old story. After all, if the public is content, why bother to give it the new, new story? And why, when success is so easy, not have it and hold it from this time forth for evermore? It is not as though the pastime novel were out to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

At this dismal juncture we should like to introduce an exception; it is ‘The House by the River’ by Mr. Herbert. Here is a novel which does set out deliberately to be an amusement and a distraction, and, at the same time, its author has succeeded in giving a wonderfully vivid and convincing portrait of a certain ‘type’ of young man—one Stephen Byrne, a young man who has the great misfortune to murder the housemaid almost by accident when he is alone with her in the house one evening. We heartily commend this book to the readers of The Athenœum; it is excellent entertainment, and it is, in a way not quite easy to define, ‘something new.’ How far does Mr. Herbert intend to deceive us with that high-spirited and rather ordinary beginning? And then, little by little, just when we imagine we begin to see what the picture is like, with a stroke here, a stroke there, a sharpening of this line, an accenting of that—all is changed. Stephen Byrne and his wife Margery emerge—real, brilliantly seen—in the case of Stephen indeed, diabolically real. You see Mr. Herbert's method is to change nothing, alter nothing, present Life in a cultured little back-water just as it is—rather delightful, rather vain—to keep the surface, in fact, untroubled and yet broken with charming little emotions. And then, just as we are caught in the glow from some old-world dining-room window, we are permitted to see what is inside that ideal house for a poet, and there is the poet strangling the housemaid. The affair was easy enough to explain. He had dined very well, he had come home in a glow himself, and, full of vague kindling feelings, he had watched the sun set over the river. Then, because he was not in the humour for writing and there was no one to share his emotion with page 268 him, he felt vaguely dissatisfied, and drank a glass of port just as Emily came downstairs, rosy and uncommonly pretty after her warm bath. He said fatuously, ‘Had a nice bath, Emily?’ and ‘he put one arm round her as she passed, lightly, almost timidly.’ Then he did a thing he had never done before—kissed the housemaid—and she screamed; and the scream startling him back to reality and a consciousness of the neighbours, … ‘Playfully almost, he put his hands at Emily's throat.’ But the idiotic girl would take it seriously, would make a noise, bit his hand, maddened him, so that when he let go she was dead.

What would you do if you, a successful young poet, with a delightful wife, charming home, delicious little-daughter-and-her-rabbits, and a golden future, found yourself in such an incredibly unexpected ‘hole’? Couldn't you act well enough, lie convincingly enough to deceive the stupid world? And mightn't the fact that you were an imaginative writer be an immense help? It nearly saved Stephen Byrne, but then the temptation to see the thing from the writer's point of view, to ‘use it’ as copy (changed, of course, out of all knowledge, disguised as a romance of chivalry with Emily buried most beautifully, most movingly in a lonely lake instead of thrust into a sack and tipped into the Thames), was too strong for Stephen. He yielded and was undone. As to having murdered Emily, that in itself, Mr. Herbert's pen makes us feel, was the kind of thing that might happen to any man. It's the fuss afterwards that matters—the law—hanging—the last morning's breakfast—that can't be got over …

‘Larry Munro’ is for other readers. Is this Miss G. B. Stern the author of ‘Children of No Man's Land’? In that novel she packed so many talents that it would not hold together; it flew apart and was all brilliant pieces, but in this! Larry Munro, we repeat, and once again Larry Munro. That is all there is to be said for it. Miss Stern herself strings a quantity of more or less bright page 269 little beads in between, but they are scarcely visible for the flashing, all-a-quivering Larry Munros of which her chain is composed. It is not stupid—it is silly; not clever—but bright; and it is so sentimental that it makes the reader hang his head.

‘Within three days she was in the thick of it, slightly befogged but happy. She had told herself she was an outsider, beyond the pale that encompassed these smart London folks. It astonished her how easy it was to get on with them.’ This is your country mouse arrived at the Castle to help the Duchess with her theatricals. ‘Amongst the guests who were not concerned … might be found a Cabinet Minister, a famous doctor and a hanging Judge.’ That hanging Judge, who appears from time to time in novels without his black cap, strikes the key for us. Mr. Vachell plays the familiar tune. It is entirely without surprises.