The Thirteen Travellers

by Hugh Walpole. New York: George H. Doran Co. 1921. 12mo, 279 pp. $2.00.

AFTER joining the Thirteen Travellers and sharing with them the chaotic conditions immediately following the World War, any reader of Mr. Walpole’s latest book must feel that he has himself been an invisible lodger among the miscellaneous group assembled at ‘Hortons’ in Duke Street.

Very vividly and truthfully, more as a biographer than as a novelist, Mr. Walpole makes us know each one of the thirteen human units linked together by the external circumstance of being inhabitants of the same apartment house. Most of this unlucky number of flat-dwellers are definitely real people, who either gallantly overcame, or were ignominiously crushed by, the almost insuperable difficulties that beset the paths of bewildered travelers starting on the perilous journey into a new world on November 11, 1918.

The author shows us, with unexaggerated sincerity, how infinitely more revealing of character — whether for better or for worse — are the days of readjustment to a changed world than was the period of the actual war, when an abnormal crisis in human affairs demanded supernormal qualities in mankind. Many of the persons to whom he introduces us with his characteristic off-hand manner, which is at times a mannerism, as if he were talking rather than writing, are commonplace individuals of the usual sort, even as you and I; but he proves that an uninteresting type can become an appealing personality when vitalized by a sympathetic interpreter. Mr. Walpole has something of the large sanity and fundamental optimism of a wise physician, who, though surrounded by disease and distress, never forgets that health is the normal state of man. Although many of the ‘cases’ he dissects for us are trivial or contemptible, pathological or morbid, we feel that this wise student of human nature never loses hope in the eventual evolution of man into something less disheartening than the moral and nervous war-wreckage that has been cast up on the shores of our modern world.

Perhaps among the thirteen whom we come so intimately to know, Miss Morganhurst is the most strikingly analyzed. The terrible autopsy performed by Mr. Walpole on her subconscious mind reveals with ghastly truth the horrors that occur when incarnate selfishness seeks to ignore realities that cannot be shut out of one’s inner consciousness. Mrs. Porter and Mrs. Allen remind us that Mr. Walpole is a great admirer of Henry James, though he turns the screw of the supernatural with a more material implement.

Various old friends out of Mr. Walpole’s earlier books swim into the ken of the Hortonians, and the reader — the fourteenth traveler, who so poignantly feels himself to be the only shadow in a world of human substances — is moved to extend an ethereal hand, not only to welcome the newcomers introduced by Mr. Walpole, but to greet old acquaintances whose past fortunes he has already shared.

A. L. GRANT.