by Nathalie Sedgwick Colby. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1927. 12mo. vi+310 pp. $2.50.
IN Mrs. Colby’s new novel, Black Stream, one misses the glitter of sunshine and sea that colors Green Forest, but the second book is strikingly like the first. It uses the same psychological method, and chooses the same sharp limitations of time and space — for two days cover the events of the story, and the stage on which the action takes place is almost as restricted a one as the Atlantic liner. Emotionally, the second novel is pitched in a still higher key than the first, but with less success. The swift succession of crashes at the end makes one feel a little like a child at a performance of the fifth act of Hamlet; and though there is nothing unplausible about it—when one considers the tendency of disasters to come in carrion flocks — it misses the effect of the single blow that falls at the end of Green Forest.
The conflict in the book is between the ideal and the material. This motive is developed in the situation of Dr. John Farraday, whose profession is medicine but whose passion is research; who is driven on and up by his ardor for science, pulled back and down by the rapacity of his family; who is helped and encouraged only by his eager young acolyte, a girl ’too noticeable to be at all respectable,’ in the opinion of his women patients. The same motive is echoed in the situation of Jim Brazee, the millionaire stockbroker, once a high-minded boy full of dreams, now the cynical keeper of that greedy, beautiful animal, his wife.
Black Stream is a bitter book, but it is also a very amusing one — both in the continuous swift flick of its style and in its episodes. One must turn back to Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train, to that admirable chapter called ‘The Fisherman’s Child,’ for an equal to Mrs. Colby’s picture of the spontaneous generation and the lightning growth of a scandal. There is fine comedy in the drawing of some of Dr. Farraday’s rather more than mature women patients, and their rivalry over the young assistant doctor who is so skillful at getting up flirtations with their souls. There is comedy of a more obvious sort, as in the comment of the caterer’s kitchen boys, on the day of Agatha Farraday’s début: ‘Them swell guys will punish the chickens good.’ And if it were not that one would rather go to the stake than add an iota to the discussion of that fluidly defined class, the younger generation, one might say much of Mrs. Colby’s treatment of her minors — which, except for her portrait of that excellent little boy, Mary Ellen, with her spectacles, and the expensive gold brace on her teeth, is pungent.
As the Green Forest stands for the enchanted world into which two fine spirits perfectly attuned may pass together, so the Black Stream stands for the pain that must wash through and through a heart before it is really alive. Contempt for the terror of pain is the core of this book. Mrs. Colby is somewhat like Mrs. Wharton in her hatred of greed and earthy-mindedness and stupidity, but above all of cowardice; and in her sense of the high and cold reward, enduring beyond catastrophe, of courage and an unrelinquished ideal.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS