HAPPY ENDINGS

Southland Times, Issue 23308, 18 September 1937, Page 18

HAPPY ENDINGS

The Short Stories Of Elizabeth Goudge

A PEDLAR’S PACK. By Elizabeth Goudge. Duckworth, London, through Whitcombe and Tombs. Price 7s 6d.

Miss Goudge became widely and favourably known for her Island Magic,” a story of Channel Island people etched (no other word quite fits her delicacy of style) against a background of changing scenes which have more than a tinge of poetry. The old farmhouse wherein Rachell du Frocq brought up her wayward brood and learned to love the reflections and echoes of the seasons on the old dark walls, in the orchard and the meadowlands, was one of those interior backgrounds that stay in the mind like the lodging houses and provincial homes of Balzac, or the London scenes of Dickens. “Bon Repos” provided “Island Magic” with a centre, and perhaps with a source of power which seemed to gain a little from the contrast of old beams and thick stone walls, stained with forgotten storms, with the young life springing up there in the midst of family struggle and discontents. It served also to prepare the reader for that talk of fairies and second sight and psychic intimations which otherwise might have sounded strangely to plain persons. Even with this careful building up of the outer scene, however, it is possible to feel that there was too much emphasis on borderline experience: that too many of the du Frocqs felt themselves in touch with the unseen and the unknowable, and that where a mere touch of fantasy could have been an extra strength in the book this increasing reference to faery things becomes forced and artificial. And this in turn leads to sentimentality. The return to the sea of “Ranulph” was arranged a little too deliberately, and with too obvious an attempt to round off the story on a wistful note. To a discriminating reader the wistful note becomes a discord, and everything is unreal—not with that twilight unreality which belongs to certain kinds of poetry, but with another sort that damages the entire structure of the book. The little world falls to pieces; in place of sweetness there is the taste of saccharine. It lacks the sinew of a genuine experience.

In Miss Goudge’s collection of short stories—“A Pedlar’s Pack”—these weaknesses are more clearly to be seen because they no longer receive any help from a strong, and even beautiful, background. It is true that three of the stories deal with the children of Bon Repos; they are pleasant fragments, brimming with a sense of fun. But they are none the less a kind of afterthought, and have been put together without reference to a necessary theme. The other stories show more markedly than in “Island Magic” the author’s ' fondness for a fairy tale, even if it has a setting in the drab workaday world. In “A Shepherd and a Shepherdess” she takes elderly Miss Gillespie into a curio shop in search of a gift for undeserving relatives, and brings her into the presence of a china ornament which leads her straight to a comer of the country where work and comfort await her lonely heart. The same kind of thing happens in “Sweet Herbs”; this time a book in a sixpenny tub outside a bookshop brings an old man to peace, and young hearts to romance. And in “Rabbits in a Hat” the misadventures of Mr Higgins are really the links in a magic chain leading him towards that stay and prop for declining years which he has been unconsciously seeking. Almost always there is that whisper of the margins; the psychic influence cuts across the darker segments of daily life, and miraculously somebody’s troubles are smoothed away, and there is a glimpse of sudden peace and sunlight. It is the kind of thing that so many people would like to believe can happen: sometimes, perhaps, in the remoter places of human experience, it really does happen. But it can never be anything more than rare and fleeting. If it becomes a constant theme in fiction it moves down to the level of a trick in the trade, a formula that has been found profitable, and .can bear repetition. And this is a pity. For Miss Goudge has insight into young minds, and her writing is sincere and capable. A little more of the earth and a little less of the skies would make her a novelist of distinction.