The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXIX, No. 1, 1923)

On Sunday afternoons a heterogeneous crowd was wont to drift over to the Grants’, to piece together the gossip of the week. At supper-time they regularly went through the ritual of expressing formal astonishment at the lateness of the hour, and then reluctantly accepting the expected invitation to stay and partake of a buffet-supper.

When Carl and Tommy arrived they found the usual assembly. For half the afternoon Millicent ignored Tommy, simulating a deep interest in Eddie Pearson’s stuttered and imperfect rendition of all the jokes in the past week’s Orpheum bill. Eddie was one of those people who insist upon showing you how excellently they can imitate the comedian....

Tommy, on the couch, was amiably quarreling with Barbara Peart over the literary merits of modern literature. Barbara held serious and decided views; Tommy didn’t care a damn either way; the subject bored him so that it was an effort to be polite. Millicent finally extricated herself from Eddie’s imperfectly remembered humor with scant courtesy, and sat down beside Tommy. There was satisfaction in taking him away from Barbara, anyway. Thereafter she directed the conversation--to herself, inevitably.

Tommy and Carl stayed on after the rest of the crowd had left. Millicent arranged that. Carl at first refused to accept her hints that he too might leave; but after they had sat in silence for ten minutes, Millicent sulking, Tommy looking into the fire and thinking about the hunting near Richmond, and Carl professing fascination in the automobile pages of the Sunday paper, he relented, and rose to go. Tommy, with elaborately concealed relief, rose to accompany him. Then Millicent took command of the situation, and said, with superb carelessness:

“Well, drive back here and take Tommy home about eleven, because I really must go to bed early to-night if I’m to go on that snow-shoe trip to-morrow.”

So Tommy stayed. The conversation was not animated. Millicent made poor progress. Presently, when the conversation reached Millicent in its usual course, she asked him whether he liked bobbed-hair. He did, on certain girls. She obviously expected to be told that she was one; if not the chief one. He told her so.

The next step would be for him to stretch his arm along the back of the couch, above her shoulders, and comment upon its fluffiness. Tommy took his cue admirably. He stirred her hair with his fingers, and he did not withdraw his arm. Millicent had drawn imperceptibly closer. The fire in the grate had burned down to a drowsy glow, leaving the room in the semi-darkness of late winter twilight. Now her head swayed toward him. The moment was propitious. Tommy knew it. He had been cast as leading man in just such a scene before. He knew that the next move was his....

And rather unexpectedly he made it. Very deliberately he got up, walked over to the table, took up a cigarette and lit it. Neither of them spoke. The silence was unnatural. A tension filled the air. There was nothing to say.

The sound of a horn on the driveway saved the situation.

“That must be Carl,” Tommy said quickly. “Sounds as if he might be in a hurry. Don’t get up; I’ll just grab my things in the hall. Good-night, Millicent--awfully good time.”

He went out, a little breathlessly, before she could speak or get up.

Millicent was furious; furious at Tommy, who had snubbed her with such ironic insolence; furious at herself, who had engineered her own humiliation. The climax of her planning had come to ignominious failure. Consuming anger filled her. For a moment she wondered whether his manner would betray anything of the breach to the rest of the crowd, on the snowshoe trip, the next day. Paul Lyle, in making up the party, had paired them as a matter of course. Millicent knew what the crowd was saying: and she would not be made ridiculous in their eyes, now. Before Tommy went back to school he must propose, and the crowd must know that he had.

She repeated that, mentally. The words were like italics on a page.

* * * * *

There was no perceptible difference in their attitude the next morning. The snowshoe trip to Paul Lyle’s cabin on the St. Croix River had been abandoned, because a vagary of the thermometer had brought balmy winds and a thaw, overnight.

Tommy was relieved. The trip had been planned in his honor, and he had had to feign a deep interest in Northern sports; actually he had had a distinct premonition that he was due to make a general ass of himself on snowshoes.

It was decided that they should drive up to the cabin for dinner, instead. They found the cabin mired in slush, and with a leaking roof, but a crackling fire in the stone hearth, and the uncertain melodies from a small phonograph which some one unearthed, put them all in high spirits. When they had tired of dancing over the uneven floors they constituted themselves into an exploring party, and wandered down to the river and out on the soft ice.

Presently, Providence took a hand.

Millicent, who had run ahead of the rest, shrieked suddenly, balanced wildly for an instant, and fell into an air-hole in the ice.

It took but a very few moments to lift her out, and take her up to the cabin, but in that period she had been seriously chilled from exposure in the icy water. The men had done all that they could. Mary Skinner, small and frail, took command. Millicent was put to bed, before the hearth, bordering on the line of unconsciousness. A doctor was on the way. They could only wait.

Tommy was dazed. Millicent had suddenly became a great deal to him. The play of excited emotion, suddenly released, will do that. He sat on the steps, unmindful of his own damp clothes. Millicent’s light sweater was in his hands. Why, he wondered inconsistently, out of all this crowd of girls did it have to be Millicent who should be endangered?

“Tommy’s taking it pretty hard, I guess,” some one said. “He thinks an awful lot of Millicent.”

And for the first time, he did.

* * * * *

When the doctor had come, and given Millicent a hypodermic, they wrapped her carefully in rugs, and drove slowly back to town.

She would have to stay in bed for a week or so, that was all, the doctor said.

Tommy’s first floral offering came the next morning, and in the course of the following days he sent almost everything in the florist’s stock, from corsage bouquets to funeral lilies. He came himself, and stayed interminably, until Mr. Grant, ordinarily a mild-mannered and ponderously humored man, observed with unwonted choler that “If that young man comes any earlier, I shall have to give him my place at the breakfast table!” His wife, who looked upon Tommy with that eye of wisdom which mothers with marriageable daughters possess, was more kindly disposed. Tommy, in the parlance of her sphere, was an excellent “catch”. He might see Millicent as often as he liked.

Millicent prolonged her stay in bed. She was aware that she made rather a charming invalid, and throned in her bed she received a gratifying court.

The wise commenters became positive.

“Millicent’s really in love, this time,” they said, “and their engagement will be announced before Tommy goes back to school.”

Tommy, the drawling and indifferent, had given way to Tommy, the intense and devoted. Millicent was aware of her victory.

The hearts with E.P. and O.W. had gone. Tommy’s, hidden by the photograph, reigned alone. Perhaps, she thought idly, after they were married she would have it cut into the glass. It was a pretty fancy. She toyed with the idea, toyed with it as she did with everything in her life; a languid, fickle amusement.

The day before Tommy and Carl were to go back to school Millicent got up. She was paler, and more ethereally beautiful, she decided, with characteristic candor. The sweet peas which he had sent that morning looked rather well on her.

She wondered, as she pinned them on, whether he would propose to-day or wait until the last.

He was nervous; a little haggard, too, she noticed, when he came, and she knew that he would propose to-day. Her triumph was at hand, but suddenly she knew that she wanted more time to think. She must make him wait until to-morrow.

They were on the couch again. He kissed her, and in the moment that their lips touched it came to her that Tommy was realty infatuated--but in another moment the old doubt had returned, and when he said:

“Millicent, dear, I’ve only known you--” she stopped him, with a breathless flutter, and said, “To-morrow, Tommy, to-morrow afternoon; I _can’t_ tell you to-day!”... And she ran out of the room.

Millicent did not appear at supper. She was locked in her room, her head buried in her arms on the dressing-table, thinking; half crying. It was the only crisis which had ever come into her life. Always before she had left this to the man; her own way had continued serenely untroubled. Once, in a fit of fancy, she reached up as if to erase the heart, but she did not complete the gesture.

The next morning dragged slowly by.

After lunch Millicent went to her desk, and in a fit of caprice wrote a letter. She read it, and started to tear it up. Then she changed her mind, and left it, sealed, on her desk. It was a quarter past two. Tommy ought to arrive very soon.

She walked over to the pier-glass in the hall. Dispassionately she admired her beauty. She thought that she had never seen anyone so lovely. Others might be merely beautiful, hers was distinctive. Beauty was a power in itself; and when coupled with intellect--the power it might wield was infinite. Great beauties had made history--many of them had had humbler beginnings, by far, than she. She felt in that moment that she too might have been destined to rule.... French novels had taught her these things--and had failed to instil a sense of personal absurdity.

Egotism was her greatest fault; she looked upon it as her highest virtue.

Her thought came back to Tommy. No man had ever been so much in love with her as he was. And he represented so many desirable things. He was appealingly good looking. He was wealthy in his own right, Carl had told her. Life with him would be tranquil and luxurious.... It might grow dull.

* * * * *

She heard him on the walk. She stood there, frozen, as he came up the steps. He rang the bell, and in that instant decision came. The maid was coming through to open the door. Millicent snatched the sealed letter from her desk, and handed it to her.

“Give this to Mr. Squire,” she said, and while the maid gazed stupidly at her, she laughed, half hysterically, and ran up the stairs.

In her room she heard Tommy come in, heard the murmur of the maid’s voice, and then, after a pause longer than she had ever endured, she heard the door close upon him. She waited until she could not hear his footsteps longer--then she walked over to the mirror, and rubbed out the heart.

C. G. POORE.

_Book Reviews_

_Jean Huguenot._ By STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT. (Henry Holt.)

Flowers in writing are like flowers on a grave: they commemorate death. And Benét’s first novel was a little too prone to floral decoration. In his third book, _Jean Huguenot_, his work as a stylist is noticeably improved. He still remains all poet in his prose, and, as ever, reads the better for it. Yet he has reached a saner manner of writing that does not overwhelm and cloy as did parts of _The Beginning of Wisdom_.

Despite mechanical improvement _Jean Huguenot_ marks a lull in the author’s literary progress. You are moved along for two hundred or so pages by glowing language and well-drawn situations. And just when the book has become really enjoyable--well, all pleasure in it begins to subside. You are dropped, like a deflated balloon, into a flat and tasteless completion. Why, oh, why, you say, couldn’t he have given us something else--anything else? The spectacle of Jean Huguenot Ashley turned _cocotte_ is neither appealing nor revolting; it is just plain drab. Perhaps Benét is true to nature in his picture, but--read it and see if it doesn’t affect you in the same fashion. The story is worth while for three-quarters of its course--and then, being so near the end, one might as well finish it, anyway.

J. R. C.

_The Florentine Dagger._ By BEN HECHT. (Boni & Liveright.)

Ben Hecht is mountebank of words par excellence: their swirling shapes, their sounds, their shifting colors, as he juggles them so adroitly before our bewildered eyes. The subject-matter of his books serves only as a pattern, an excuse for weaving a tapestry of fascinating and often amazing phrases. Whether it is a psychological study in the manner of Dreiser, like Gargoyles, or an all-night detective story, like the present book, is an altogether incidental matter. It is the words that count. That may perhaps explain why Mr. Hecht should suddenly decide to perform before such a bourgeois audience, descending, so to speak, from the Palace to the four-a-day. He evidently realized that the world was quite bored by anything he had to say, but perfectly entranced by the way in which he said it.

_The Florentine Dagger_ was written with Prof. Hart’s Psychology of Insanity on one hand and the Memoirs of the de Medici Family on the other. Taken as a dramatic presentation of certain psychological phenomena it is brilliant enough to make itself endeared by every psychology professor in the country. Everyone in the book, from the last member of the fastidious de Medicis to the old actress, is troubled by complexes and obsessions of all sorts, so that a miserable and uncertain rôle is assigned to each. All the time-dishonored devices of the mystery story are faithfully observed, although its technique on the whole is genuinely successful.

Mr. Hecht has in this book, as in all his others, displayed his incredible faculty for choosing a new literary technique as casually as most writers choose their stationery.

W. T.

_The Blind Bow Boy._ By CARL VAN VECHTEN. (Alfred Knopf.)

Carl Van Vechten is an elegant dilettante. His books are the essence of trivial and charming existence. He is fond of cats, George Moore, Rolls Royce motor cars, and cravats by Charvet. He is apathetic to Corot and Monet, to Ibsenism, midwestern mediocrity, and synthetic gin.

_The Blind Bow Boy_ is of inferior quality to _Peter Whiffle_, just as _Peter Whiffle_ is undoubtedly inferior to _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, but it is good reading and by far the most intelligent intellectual mixed grill of which the reviewer has partaken this season.

The fact that Van Vechten is in the good graces of the greatest of all American whim-whammers, Henry Mencken, is in itself a warrant for the six editions into which the book has already run. It may also prevent it from running into another six.

_The Blind Bow Boy_ is the story of a summer opera season in New York, an international alliance in the person of Zimbule O’Grady, and the delightful exploits of the Duke of Middlebottom, who lived by the Julian Calendar and in this case “contrived to evade all unsatisfactory engagements, especially if they were complicated in any way by daylight-saving time, an American refinement of which he was utterly ignorant”. There are also some trivial protagonists who strut through the book in a manner slightly suggestive of exaggerated and overdressed Weiner sausages.

The author has an unfortunate habit of becoming enamoured of one character for a chapter or two, and then without warning shifting his affections to another, a failing which gives the reader a somewhat biographically errant point of view.

It is also unfortunate that Van Vechten cannot follow a more clearly defined theme, for he has no sense of plot, shading, or climax. His stories are a series of photographically vivid scenes, innocent of all structural liaison, and hanging together only by virtue of the bookbinding which keeps them from fluttering away to the various literary hemispheres.

It is, however, very satisfactory reading, for in his multiplex catalogues of names and places the author gives the reader a vivid sense of personal familiarity which is quite flattering. No doubt this effect is obtained by mentioning so many aspects of contemporary civilization that everyone must needs have come in contact with at least some few of them.

L. M. B.

_A Son at the Front._ By EDITH WHARTON. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.)

As the most and vagueness surrounding the late war are slowly cleared away by passing time and subsiding emotions, and the conflict settles into a semblance of perspective, the more recent books that deal with it show an increasing grasp of its essentials, and a higher understanding of its trials and lessons. Where once were only trees, we can see a forest now, whose outlines are becoming more distinct as the shock of the cataclysm becomes a memory. It is past, now, and irrevocable, open to description or interpretation.

Speaking sincerely from the depth of her own experience, Edith Wharton here gives us a faithful picture; not of the mechanics of the war, but of general and specific reactions to it. Paris is the setting almost throughout the narrative, that of an American painter whose son, born in France, is drawn by the logic of his instincts and sympathies into the struggle. The scenes and events of the war, its growing tragedy and sternness, and their gradual effect on John Campton, are recorded with an insight and understanding that fascinate, while their subject-matter grips. The author shows a keen grasp of small details, as well as of large issues and their significance. Her style is delightful--a silver rapier that here waves benignly, and there strikes humorously or satirically, with great precision. Several delicate threads of narrative underlie and emphasize the main theme--Campton’s art, Paris visibly changing, and the younger Campton’s love affair. The story never falters as it traces out that “huge mysterious design which was slowly curving a new heaven over a new earth”. The author, in that design, points us to a philosophy of the war, a personal moral, comprehending its soul.

Our growing literary heritage from the World War contains few contributions more authentic or more inspiring than “A Son at the Front”.

R. P. C., JR.

_The Dove’s Nest._ By KATHERINE MANSFIELD. (Boni & Liveright.)

Here are stories that are literature: they move us by the presence of the genuine elements of literature, and not by the elements of painting, music, or any other art. Their language is neither colorful nor melodious, but it is significantly expressive, related inextricably to the subject matter. They help make the short story as distinct a literary form as a landscape by Cezanne or a sonata by Beethoven. Katherine Mansfield, scarcely a year after her death, has come to be regarded as one of the most finished artists that ever worked with the short story as their medium.

The present collection includes several unfinished fragments which are invaluable to anyone interested in her art or in the short story as a whole. They are cross-sections of her method which enable us to see the processes that produce the half-dozen little masterpieces at the beginning of the book.

“The Doll’s House” is at once the best and the most typical of all the stories she has written. It shows us in an unforgetable manner her complete mastery of the difficult trick of epitomizing the whole of life in a minute and almost ridiculously petty episode. All the aspirations of the many, all the heartless prejudice of the few, are concentrated in a toy lamp in one of the little rooms of a doll’s house. It might easily be sentimental, and very likely ridiculous, if it were not for the implacable aloofness of her art. Again, in “A Cup of Tea” we have a bitter, though inoffensive, exhibition of the quality of mercy by somewhat the same whimsical concentration on little things. A lady of high degree is accosted on Bond Street by another lady of lesser degree who requests the price of a cup of tea. The first lady, thinking it would be a charming adventure, takes the pathetic creature into her own home for her cup of tea. She is impressed by her own magnanimity, even considers doing something more worthwhile for the stranger, when the great lady’s husband appears. Because the latter ventured the remark that the visitor is really quite pretty, because the great lady suddenly detects the shadow of age on her face as she passes the mirror, the visitor is forthwith despatched with a few shillings, and the great lady asks her husband that evening, “Do you think I’m pretty?”