The Noon Mark
by . New York: The Macmillan Co. 1920. 12mo, iv+ 336 pp. $2.50.
THE title of Mrs. Watts’s book calls up a picture. The great doors of the barn on a Vermont hillside were swung wide open at both ends. The sweetness of new-stored hay and the occasional whir of a swallow’s wing filled the place with a romance of its own. A broad black strip painted across the barn floor marked the place where the sun was supposed to strike at noon; but the color faded long ago, and to-day most of Mrs. Watts’s readers will have to seek her title in their dictionaries rather than in their memories of the old homestead.
Moreover, she has herself given the ‘Mark’ a new twist of meaning. Here is her introductory parable; ‘A fox looked at his shadow at sunrise and said, “I will have a camel for lunch to-day.” And all the morning he went about looking for camels. But at noon he saw Ins shadow again — and he said, “Oh, well, a mouse will do.”’
The study of the men and women in the midWestern town where the scene of the book is laid shows us youthful ambition shrinking from the camel to the mouse. The process is depicted with pitiless accuracy. We are introduced to the sharp class-distinctions, the slender fringe of ‘ the best people,’ the noisy crowd of those ‘with erroneous ideas about the time and place to use toothpicks, and the way to hold a fork,’ and the pervasive dialect, neatly blended of the newest slang and the oldest bad syntax — a speech that shrieks of ignorance and good-nature. These features, and such as these, make up an all-tootruthful picture.
A German spy anil a priestess of a new religious cult — an amusing satire on some familiar methods of combating ‘error’ - give color to the book. The conventional story of love, marriage, and family life is well told, though with a grim and sordid background. It would be all crass materialism, answering perfectly Mrs. Bell’s definition of realism as ‘ the cold, rancid truth,’ were it not for two splendid women, on whose portraits Mrs. Watts spends her best powers. The fine old gentlewoman, chatelaine of the town, and the hard-working community seamstress, — both wise of head and pure of heart, — are good enough to save even a modern Sodom from destruction.
E. H.
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