THE RECLUSE
“Profiles,” the first, is much the longest of the set. It is not, as Mr. Muddiman infers, entirely unsuccessful. Lilly, the heroine, finely manipulated in the transition from her innocent girlishnes to the horror of prostitution, burns violently if with some crudity. The story of the girl whose temperament takes her from average domesticity to a ghastly life in the streets has a force that still drives home. “What had become of her, no one knew and no one cared,” says Crackanthorpe simply at the end. The second, “A Conflict of Egoisms,” really an annihilation of two discordant individualities by marriage, ends first in the spiritual then physical suicide of the hero as an idolatrous offering to his sickeningly sentimental wife. One may find passages that are obviously autobiographical. “As time went on the thought of death began to haunt him till it became a constant obsession,” we read of the hero who is a novelist. “In the daytime, fascinated by it, he would lay down his pen and sit brooding on it; at night, he would lie tossing feverishly from side to side, with the blackness that was awaiting ever before him. And with the sickly light of the early morning, there met him the early relief of having dragged on one day nearer the end.”
“The Struggle for Life” and “Dissolving View,” the first merely ordinary but the second magnificent in its concentrated pathos, are followed by “A Dead Woman,” the story of a volcanic upheaval among the ordinary types of an English countryside. This is Crackanthorpe’s masterpiece. The austere and heroic suffering of a reticent peasant who by chance discovers the betrayer of his dead wife in the person of a life-long friend, a neighboring inn-keeper, is the very essence of tragedy. Rushout, the husband, lifts her photograph from the wall. “He watched the whole scene as it was played before him; she, giving herself with all the gestures and caresses with which he was familiar, till its vividness became almost unbearable. He lifted up the photograph once more. But underneath the faint smile lurked a wealth of smothered corruption; on the half-parted lips he detected the imprint of Jonathan’s kisses.”
“When Greek Meets Greek,” the tale of a faithless wife of a card-sharp at Nice, is melodrama, quick and poignant, but with a method and consideration for the sordid malefaction of the principals that sears in the telling. Duncan Ralston, the lover, is passive but vehement. The woman Pearl is best described in the flickering light “which played about her face” as fragile and “little more than a child.” Simon, her gambler-husband, the peak of the triangle, plays more than an average game of cards. His is a compelling soul, hard and reckless in effrontery, but with something of unusual largess for the possessor of so despicable a vocation. “Embers,” the last story, directs two intensely parallel temperaments that pause, give each their sign of divergent recognition, but in the tragic depository of the writer’s brain never meet.
Crackanthorpe’s second book, “Sentimental Studies,” with the subtitle of an additional “Set of Village Tales,” was published in 1895. The “Village Tales,” which take up only a small portion of the volume, may be briefly dismissed. They contribute, with a gesture of plot and denouement, some slight elaboration to the “Vignettes” of a year later. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon studies in “Wreckage” and totally dissimilar from the “Sentimental Studies,” these miseries of the poverty-stricken peasantry in the hazy, French villages, with their long roads and slim poplars, their peaked roofs and “noisy battering rains,” are inextricably woven to make distinct the overwhelming misfortunes of the inhabitants. “The White Maize,” not more than the hint of a sketch, contains probably the best descriptive writing in the book:
“For eight days and eight nights the ceaseless hiss of rain. During the day-time, neither sky nor sun, nor breath of wind—only the grey veil of mist enshrouding all things. The nights were dark as pitch, and full of the hiss of rain; and from sunset to sunrise the frogs chanted their long, dismal mass.
“On the eighth day of the rain, about six o’clock in the afternoon, I went out. A sickly glimmer of muddy light flickered from the west; a breeze was shaking drops
