Ever After

READINGEver After is like catching glimpses of two feature pictures from the crowded lobby of a movie house. Somewhere beyond the plush ropes and beyond the dim sea of hats and heads, a ponderous story is moving, remote and half seen. But that story does not touch the lobby audience, no matter how fiercely necks are craned or how calves are racked by standing on tiptoe. It may be that this effect will be less apparent to those who have read the preceding volumes of this Williamsburg saga. This reviewer, however, never got beyond the lobby.

The story of the Virginia Spragues and their New York cousins, the Murrays, is sliced into three neat pie-wedges — Williamsburg, New York, and huntin’ England. Of the filling of the wedges, only Williamsburg’s seems homemade. The rest are out of cans and boxes. As the story trundles along, one hopes again and again for more glimpses of the surface-quiet yet vivid life of the old Southern town.

As to the two-feature plot, one is asked to accept a great deal. In the opening film of Bracken Murray, one is asked to believe that this near-thirty-yearling falls in love, literally at first sight, with a non-nubile English girl and decides to marry her when, as, and if she reaches the age of consent. In the last pages he does just this with the aid of a contrived murder of his first wife and the author’s say-so.

In the second film, we are told that Cousin Fitzhugh Sprague, a musical epicene idler of Williamsburg, goes to New York to work on his uncle’s paper; that, despite earlier traits, he is at home with tough reporters in the goonhaunted Tenderloin and Haymarket; that he rescues a tentwent’-thirt’ Irish singer in a gang war and finally marries her. to three well-bred nods of New York and Williamsburg.

So the two main love stories run. There are hearts of gold on every hand. Even Bracken’s first wife, the Autrichienne, furnishes little, if any, louse interest. And every flicker of love interest for Bracken, Fitz, or minor characters is telegraphed as baldly as a green halfback giving away a spinner. Other figures share the screen, often disproportionately, as in the case of Sister Virginia, who is presented at Court in a scene that is tremendously vivid, interesting, and utterly unimportant to the story.

The two cousins, Bracken and Fitz, cover the Spanish War for the family paper. The cousins arc there, all right, but the reader gets little through them. The best part of this action — and it would stand out in any book — is the author’s use of the anthropophagous land-crabs that rustle about the helpless wounded. The crabs are used with superb effect and restraint. Horror of the first, order.

Ponderous and vague as most of this is, Elswyth Thane has enough narrative skill and sheer, bursting vitality to carry the reader along. For the moment, you even accept the inextinguishably jolly and Ngaio Marsh-ish Scotland Yarders. You forget that words like “cushy” and “sweating it out” have an odd ring in the late nineties. And, in ease it matters, you meet no Briton, barring bobbies and butlers, who isn’t at least an Honorable. And this you accept too.

Many people will wish that more of the narrative concerned Williamsburg. The author has achieved a fine piece of work here in making the Tidewater people admirable, refreshingly real and human, in contrast, for example, to the gang of murderous illiterate goons of Margaret Mitchell’s North Georgia “chivalry.” In any event, whatever the shortcomings of this book, it filled this reviewer with a distinct desire to go back and read the earlier volumes of the saga.

BRUCE LANCASTER