by Katharine Fullerton Gerould. New York: Harper & Bros. 1922. 12vo, 452 pp. $2.00.
WHEN Mrs. Gerould’s first novel was announced, many readers of her grim short stories must have wondered what its idyllic title might portend. Almost on the first page the sinister double meaning of that title is revealed, as the powerful picture begins to grow — Lost Valley, in its outward beauty and its inner degeneracy and decay. The little green hollow in the hills is truly ‘a cup that holds corruption to the lips.'
With an austere but spirited heroine of nineteen years, mounting guard, in her horrible environment, over her imbecile sister; with her half-crippled, ugly tempered uncle, who combines an iron sense of duty with a power of making intolerable and noisome scenes; her grandmother, sometimes an idiot and sometimes a maniac; her hovering, bestial neighbor, Bert Breen; and, suddenly dropped into her spiritual dearth, the mysterious, luring outside world, in the person of a young landscape painter, an artist deeply devoted to his art, but a man emotionally shallow and sterile — the stage is apparently set for such a danse macabre of the puppets as Mrs. Gerould’s relentless art is peculiarly fitted to weave.
As a matter of fact, the healthy-mindedness of the heroine moves like a clean current through the uglinesses and horrors of the story. In Madge Lockerby, Mrs. Gerould has shown a thing without precedent in fiction: the traditional New England conscience pure of its traditional morbidity. Madge’s sure sense of justice is the very centre of her being; and she is equally just to others and to herself. When the man whom she has idealized demolishes her dream of him, she recognizes, almost in the first bitter agony, that he has done her a service; and just as clearly she sees, in the face of her uncle’s passionate accusations, that she is wholly innocent of responsibility for her grandmother’s death.
Perhaps Madge, emerged from Lost Valley, rather strains the imagination. Perhaps one may grant certain inherited virtues and prides — the influence of Sarah Martin’s admirable common sense and of Jee Gam’s spacious philosophy; the dignity born of concentration on a single high purpose — and yet feel that the poise which achieves something very like social dexterity is not quite explained. But the obstinate questionings of skepticism are smothered again and again by sheer absorption in the vivid tale. For it is unfolded with swift and concentrated power; with humor now sardonic and now simply mirthful; and, even at its most fantastic, with the sense of reality given by the sudden illumination of hidden corners of hearts.
The crisp wholesomeness of the last pages may deceive one into fancying, with astonishment, that Mrs. Gerould has produced a ‘happy ending.”But the passing of an hour will reveal one’s unwariness; for the image that lingers is not valiant Madge Lockerby, but Lost Valley, beautiful and corrupt, circled by the eternal peace of its hills and eaten at the heart by its ‘human bitterness and decay.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS.