Meanwhile: The Picture of a Lady
by . New York: George H. Doran Co. 1927. 12mo. xii+308 pp. $2.50.
THE first third of Mr. Wells’s new book is as brilliant as anything he has written — the rest is another story. We begin with a garrulous Italian house party given by rich young Philip Rylands and his beautiful young wife Cynthia, who has the cutest way of referring to bores as ‘Stupids’ and who spends a good deal of time wondering how she can make life ’clean and noble’ in a luxurious palace on the Riviera. In deference to her, the book has been subtitled ‘The Picture of a Lady,’ but it might more appropriately have been called ‘A Study in Utopias.’ For Mr. Wells, disguised as Mr. Sempack, soon turns up and puts the Stupids to rout with his talk, talk, talk. A fiery British Tory forgets his egg-ladened moustache in his eagerness to argue with the visiting sage, whom the beautiful Lady Catherine, content to live in the present, prefers to vamp in her quiet way. Rylands suffers a similar fate at the slender hands of Miss ‘Puppy’ Clargues.
Discovered behind a bathhouse, — for in such places, it seems, the aristocrats of Mr. Wells pursue their amours,—the sinning husband writes his wife a priceless letter of apology in which he promises never to misbehave again — ‘if I can possibly help it.’ The exquisite Cynthia resents this piece of Anglo-Saxon chivalry, and all Mr. Sempack’s pamphleteering skill barely suffices to persuade her ever to speak to the brute again. Why poor Sempack should feel it necessary to write his stirring appeal is a mystery; but, though the hand is the hand of Sempack, the voice is the voice of Wells, and it is a voice that will not be stilled or even confine itself to speaking through a single larynx.
No sooner is Philip pardoned than the general strike breaks out in England and the house party breaks up in Italy. The inarticulate host, who owns extensive mining interests, goes home only to assume the elastic mantle of Mr. Wells and to write a brilliant and abusive series of letters describing the trouble. These letters, like Sempack’s more modest effort, amount merely to a very skillful piece of pamphleteering and they probably give as sensible an interpretation of the strike as has yet been written. Two points, however, should be kept in mind. In the first place, England cannot expect as much as Mr. Wells seems to of nice young fellows like Rylands, who see all the flaws of all existing organizations and therefore refuse to have anything to do with any of them. In the second place, Mr. Wells makes the usual bow to the docile common sense of the British laborer, ignoring the possibility that a century and a half of social injustice may well have beaten all the fight out of him.
While England is ruled by maniacs, Italy always has her Fascisti—which explains the uncalled-for appearance of a persecuted professor in Cynthia’s garden. Although Mrs. Rylands is expecting a visit from the stork, she and the nurse smuggle the poor scholar out of the country. And then, for those who prefer religions discussion to straight adventure, there is a pleasant interlude of Roman Catholic philosophizing, At length Mr. Rylands returns, baby comes, and we look forward to a rosy future when there will be no more Mussolinis and Winston Churchills—nothing but the dulcet prophesyings of Mr. Wells to disturb the Utopian air. From this résumé, the hardened Wellsian may perceive that his old friend is still up to his old tricks. Once more this versatile writer has launched a capital novel only to drop his task and disappear in hot pursuit of the various hares his plot or his characters raise. And everything suffers. The hares are never caught, the characters are seldom completed. We make many promising beginnings; but, in spite of all the variety, some of us cannot help feeling that Mr. Wells does n’t quite give us our money’s worth. Perhaps this attitude is too finicky. In any case, most readers will find that Meanwhile is among the fifteen or twenty best books of the year, and real admirers of the author would n’t be paid to miss it.
QUINCY HOWE