Commonplace Book

'"This wasn't an amour," came an indignant interruption. "It was a romance."

"My dear young friend, the difference between a romance and an amour is the difference between a menu and a dinner."'

from Ninety-Six Hours' Leave by Stephen McKenna (Chapter XIV)

Commonplace Book

'The pure happiness of two lovers can never take shelter in rural silence and obscurity without arousing the jealousy and hatred of all who vegetate stupidly in small provincial towns.'

from Valentine by George Sand (Chapter XXXV)

Commonplace Book

'"...If you were a girl, you'd know that girls of seventeen aren't expected to have strange young men hanging about for them in railway stations."

"But every romance starts at a railway station - and they all end at a church. I've knocked about the world a tremendous lot, and I speak with some knowledge."

"Of the churches?"

"No; that's why the romance ends there. I meant the railway stations - Victoria above all. If I were the only man in the world..."

"But you're not. My father always fetches me away when I'm on late duty, and he'd have something to say if he found out..."

"Fathers should be deceived and not heard," answered the Kitten, with an impatient wave of the hand.'

from Ninety-Six Hours' Leave by Stephen McKenna (Chapter VI)

Diogenes' Sandals by Mrs Arthur Kennard (1893)

This one definitely sits in the afterwash of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. Kennard uses instead an old Great Western railway carriage marooned on a woodland property north east of Salisbury in Wiltshire. In it she places two love-lorn young men, who have decided they need to 'rough it' in order to rid themselves not only of their torn hearts, but also the grime of city life. Like Jerome, she's interested in the trials and mishaps of such an experiment, and in a small amount of witty comment on society. I can't remember Three Men in a Boat terribly well, but the difference between the two, I think, is Kennard's love of nature and the countryside. There are some lovely descriptions here of wildlife, the locale, and nature's glory. (Perhaps Jerome did the same, and I've forgotten.) This is set near Winterbourne Gunner, called Summerslow Gunner for these fictional purposes. There is a photograph of just such a railway carriage as a frontispiece. So, the question arises: how much of this is reportage, rather than fiction? I can't imagine Nina Kennard, an 1890s woman, enjoying, or being allowed to enjoy at least, the raw life depicted here. There's so little biographical information about her that one is left to wonder. Was she atypical, and a partaker in more wildness than her fellow women? Was this book prepared on secondhand terms from talk with someone who did these things? I know she had a 'sporting' writer sister-in-law. It would be interesting to find out. Ultimately this lacks a species of unity of purpose and simplicity of incident that Jerome's book has, but equally this one does not deserve its utter oblivion - there is entertainment, wit, colour and comment here which makes for pleasure.

Pierre et Jean / The Heritage and other tales by Guy de Maupassant (1888)

This volume contains the two title pieces which are short novels and a small selection of short stories. Both Pierre et Jean and The Heritage are better than usual Maupassant, because they don't deal exclusively or even terribly strongly with his worst subject - love, or, more accurately, "love". His people are still very much exemplars of the worst of humanity, though. They are selfish, blank, thoughtless creatures, obsessed or stupid. One could hardly call them uplifting. In Pierre et Jean two very dissimilar brothers, always needled a little by one another, come to disunion through one of them being left a substantial legacy by a family friend, and the other being ignored. Suddenly, the 'losing' brother takes a new look at his sibling, thinks about how fundamentally different he is, takes the pointed legacy into consideration, and comes to the conclusion that their father is not actually that for his brother, rather that the fortune was a sign of the leaver's paternity. This causes terrible conflict for the realising brother and his mother, as his view of her is completely changed. How that conflict works its way through them and their family is the meat of this novel. The Heritage is the story of a clerk in a government department who marries his daughter off to an ambitious fellow-scribe. Each of the betrothed is kidding themselves about how interested they are in the other, and their less-than-delightful humanity begins to show through. When a wealthy aunt dies, and leaves them her money, she places a stipulation that it be dependent on their having a child. They try and try mercenarily but it doesn't happen. This delightful pair then play a game of 'avoid the truth' with one another while hating each other and his manhood being called into question by her father and his fellow clerks. She 'befriends' a rival clerk; he ignores it desperately; she gets pregnant. Thus their solution is provided. There are shards of humour in The Heritage which lift it, and tension is rich in both novels, saving them a little from the author's grim vision.

Commonplace Book

'As I crossed St James' Park in the early hours of the morning to Downing Street, on the smut-smirched grass under the umber sky lay rows of wretched figures. One morning I saw a butterfly, with outspread, primrose-coloured wings, flutter above them, almost touching their grimy faces and their hair tangled and matted with sweat. As a benison, it ought to have brought the memory of the clover fields and honeysuckle-lined hedges, amid which, most likely, their boyhood had been passed. Backwards and forwards it fluttered, until, at last, one of the men seeing it, beat it down under his hat with a curse, as he had beaten down, long ago, every pure thought that had ever been his.'

from Diogenes' Sandals by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Chapter XII)