The Old Ladies
by . New York: George H. Doran Company. 1924. 12mo. viii+305pp. $2.00.
My twelve-year-old daughter says that this is a ‘corking story,’ and I am inclined to think that on the whole she is right. Her review is brief, but it is compendious and to the point, for it makes clear exactly wherein Mr. Walpole’s special power lies. He knows how to tell a story. Twelvc-vear-old girls do not, as a rule, grow enthusiastic over stories about old ladies, especially poverty-stricken old ladies, living in attic rooms, a prey to loneliness and fear. For even one such girl to call this a corking story speaks well for the author’s ability to tell a tale. I found it a good story, too. After I had begun it, I kept right on reading until I had finished it; and I was rather glad that the time of the reading was an afternoon and not the dead of night, because it is the kind of story that is likely to keep one awake, not only during the reading, but afterward.
It tells about three old ladies — two widows and a spinster — all over seventy years of age. who live on the top floor of an old ‘windy, creaky, wind-bitten’ house in Pontippy Square, in Polchester. Though the author does not say so, the house seems to be not far from that of the Reverend Mr. Morris — the man who fell in love with Mrs. Brandon, in The Cathedral. Perhaps I am mistaken about this, but one feels that Polchester is a real town. It is one of the great pleasures of the Walpole novels. Pontippy Square is real enough, at any rate, and what takes place on the top floor of the old house is almost too real,
Mr. Walpole long ago — as long ago as The Duchess of Wrexe, in fact — proved that he can portray old gentlewomen. In portraying I hern he seems to work intuitively, as, indeed, he seems always to do when he is at his best. When, in parts of Thirteen Travellers, for example, his invention falters or runs thin, or when, as in almost every novel, there are areas of aridity or of overluxuriousness, he seems to be relying upon his reason instead of his instinct. He can seldom be trusted to be subtle or stern or impassioned, or to portray exotic or erotic characters. In The Old Ladies, he seems to be working intuitively about four fifths of the time, and his writing has then not only its usual surface glow and richness of color, but an inner warmth, even heat, such as one missed in The Captives and even in The Cathedral.
The portrayal of poor, old, stupid, and fearhaunted May Berringer and her alter ego, her dog, seems to me the most successful creation since Mr. Perrin. In her as in him, a hopelessly uninteresting person becomes not only interesting but pathetic. The second old lady, Lucy Amorest, is only less good; and even the third, Agatha Payne, an exotic character, begins superbly. When we first meet her, sitting in her room, slowly growing fat from inaction and the consumption of nougat, with her bass voice and swarthy skin, her doll and her picture of fish, she not only wins credulity but arouses some shivers. But she does not end by carrying complete conviction. She represents the one fifth.
Still it is an absorbing drama that is enacted in those three attic rooms; and the isolation of the scene amid the familiar Polchester surroundings is admirably accomplished. The novel is so short that one must call it, I suppose, a ‘minor work’; but in it the author has shown some new powers and has written a most readable story.
R. M. GAY