Nocturne. Frank Swinnerton
more completed, and with less turbidity. There the business begins and ends for him. He does not want you or any one to do anything.
Mr. Swinnerton is not alone among recent writers in this clear, detached objectivity. We have in England a writer, Miss Dorothy Richardson, who has probably carried impressionism in fiction to its furthest limit. I do not know whether she will ever make large captures of the general reader, but she is certainly a very interesting figure for the critic and the amateur of fiction. In Pointed Roofs and Honeycomb, for example, her story is a series of dabs of intense superficial impression; her heroine is not a mentality, but a mirror. She goes about over her facts like those insects that run over water sustained by surface tension. Her percepts never become concepts. Writing as I do at the extremest distance possible from such work, I confess I find it altogether too much—or shall I say altogether too little?—for me. But Mr. Swinnerton, like Mr. James Joyce, does not repudiate the depths for the sake of the surface. His people are not splashes of appearance, but living minds. Jenny and Emmy in this book are realities inside and out; they are imaginative creatures so complete that one can think with ease of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf is one of the most perfect Cockneys—a type so easy to caricature and so hard to get true—in fiction. If there exists a better writing of vulgar lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly full of the craving for happiness than this that we have here in the chapter called After the Theatre, I do not know of it. Only a novelist who has had his troubles can understand fully what a dance among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false note, one fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay brutality; a hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally, with the soul left out, we’ve loads of such “strong stuff” and it is nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse of “better things” in Alf or Emmy that would at one stroke have converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf and Emmy is that at no point does a “nature’s gentleman” or a “nature’s lady” show through and demand our refined sympathy. It is only by comparison with this supreme conversation that the affair of Keith and Jenny seems to fall short of perfection. But that also is at last perfected, I think, by Jenny’s final, “Keith. … Oh, Keith! …”
Above these four figures again looms the majestic invention of “Pa.” Every reader can appreciate the truth and humour of Pa, but I doubt if any one without technical experience can realise how the atmosphere is made and completed and rounded off by Pa’s beer, Pa’s needs, and Pa’s accident, how he binds the bundle and makes the whole thing one, and what an enviable triumph his achievement is.
But the book is before the reader and I will not enlarge upon its merits further. Mr. Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before this one, but none of them compare with it in quality. His earlier books were strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have something of the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the artistic completeness and intense vision of Nocturne. He has also made two admirable and very shrewd and thorough studies of the work and lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. Like these two, he has had great experience of illness. He is a young man of so slender a health, so frequently ill, that even for the most sedentary purposes of this war, his country will not take him. It was in connection with his Gissing volume, for which I possessed some material he needed, that I first made his acquaintance. He has had something of Gissing’s restricted and grey experiences, but he has nothing of Gissing’s almost perverse gloom and despondency. Indeed he is as gay a companion as he is fragile. He is a twinkling addition to any Christmas party, and the twinkle is here in the style. And having sported with him “in his times of happy infancy,” I add an intimate and personal satisfaction to my pleasant task of saluting this fine work that ends a brilliant apprenticeship and ranks Swinnerton as Master. This is a book that will not die. It is perfect, authentic, and alive. Whether a large and immediate popularity will fall to it I cannot say, but certainly the discriminating will find it and keep it and keep it alive. If Mr. Swinnerton were never to write another word I think he might count on this much of his work living, as much of the work of Mary Austen, W.H. Hudson, and Stephen Crane will live, when many of the more portentous reputations of to-day may have served their purpose in the world and become no more than fading names.
DECEMBER, 1917
PART ONE
EVENING
CHAPTER I: SIX O’CLOCK
i
Six o’clock was striking. The darkness by Westminster Bridge was intense; and as the tramcar turned the corner from the Embankment Jenny craned to look at the thickly running water below. The glistening of reflected lights which spotted the surface of the Thames gave its rapid current an air of such mysterious and especially sinister power that she was for an instant aware of almost uncontrollable terror. She could feel her heart beating, yet she could not withdraw her gaze. It was nothing: no danger threatened Jenny but the danger of uneventful life; and her sense of sudden yielding to unknown force was the merest fancy, to be quickly forgotten when the occasion had passed. None the less, for that instant her dread was breathless. It was the fear of one who walks in a wood, at an inexplicable rustle. The darkness and the sense of moving water continued to fascinate her, and she slightly shuddered, not at a thought, but at the sensation of the moment. At last she closed her eyes, still, however, to see mirrored as in some visual memory the picture she was trying to ignore. In a faint panic, hardly conscious to her fear, she stared at her neighbour’s newspaper, spelling out the headings to some of the paragraphs, until the need of such protection was past.
As the car proceeded over the bridge, grinding its way through the still rolling echoes of the striking hour, it seemed part of an endless succession of such cars, all alike crowded with homeward-bound passengers, and all, to the curious mind, resembling ships that pass very slowly at night from safe harbourage to the unfathomable elements of the open sea. It was such a cold still night that the sliding windows of the car were almost closed, and the atmosphere of the covered upper deck was heavy with tobacco smoke. It was so dark that one could not see beyond the fringes of the lamplight upon the bridge. The moon was in its last quarter, and would not rise for several hours; and while the glitter of the city lay behind, and the sky was greyed with light from below, the surrounding blackness spread creeping fingers of night in every shadow.
The man sitting beside Jenny continued to puff steadfastly at his pipe, lost in the news, holding mechanically in his further hand the return ticket which would presently be snatched by the hurrying tram-conductor. He was a shabby middle-aged clerk with a thin beard, and so he had not the least interest for Jenny, whose eye was caught by other beauties than those of assiduous labour. She had not even to look at him to be quite sure that he did not matter to her. Almost, Jenny did not care whether he had glanced sideways at herself or not. She presently gave a quiet sigh of relief as at length the river was left behind and the curious nervous tension—no more lasting than she might have felt at seeing a man balancing upon a high window-sill—was relaxed. She breathed more deeply, perhaps, for a few instants; and then, quite naturally, she looked at her reflection in the sliding glass. That hat, as she could see in the first sure speedless survey, had got the droops. “See about you!” she