Shining Scabbard
by
[Farrar and Rinehart, $2.75]
I HAVE heard it said that no English novelist ever created a good heroine and that no Frenchman ever created a good hero. It is one of those loose generalities to which one can readily take exception but in which there is a core of truth. By and large, 1 think we best remember the men in English fiction, the women in French. But if it is hard for an English writer to draw a woman, how much harder is it for him to draw a French woman or a French man. Few novelists can get through that racial barrier. We have, for instance, seen Galsworthy squeeze through with his portrait of Fleur, and R. H. Mottram with his war narrative. The Spanish Farm; we have seen Anne Douglas Sedgwick typify The Little French Girl and a recent Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen, go part way with her characterization in The House in Paris. In The American, Henry James really penetrated the French circle. Now comes a young Englishman, R. C. Hutchinson, — watch that name! — who has the skill to centre his novel, Shining Scabbard, in a madcap French household and to transpose (I do not mean translate) into his supple English a story as Gallic as garlic.
It would be a disservice to tell you much more than the time and place of this captivating story. The time: 1913-1914, with retrospect carrying back to the war of 1870. The place: the Séverins’ huge, down-at-the-heel house in Baulon, a citadel occupied and visited by as rich and varied an assortment of French individuals as you will ever meet. The Séverins are proud, talented, impoverished, fierce-tempered, and tainted enough to make their future dubious. In this house, where ‘the third floor was as separate from the second as another country,’ lived Colonel Eugène Séverin, who was courtmartialed for cowardice in the campaign of 1870, and who lives to regain his honor; his sister Therese, once famous on the Paris stage, who voluntarily shares in his exile; bis vague, distraught wife, Madeleine; Marianne, the drab, school-teacher daughter; his gaudy old mother, Mme. Nayda, a fantastic relic of Ukrainian aristocracy; and last but not least, Renée, his daughter-in-law, a pretty Eurasian who has brought her two children back from an army post in Africa. There is enough idiosyncrasy here for any amount of family warfare, but it is not Mr. Hutchinson’s purpose to confine his story to oddity or squabble. Through the family connections, — the rug merchant, Louis Severin (who pays the bills), the army son, Pierre, the shopworn journalist, Raymond, — through the family doctor, lawyer, and priest, the life of France is swept into the unventilated corridors of the old house; the scandals and fashions of Paris, the increasing undertones of war, stir the dead air.
The French atmosphere is admirably sustained: although the conversations xire in English and wholly free from those typical French phrases “which clutter up so many books, the reader will instantly recognize the French manner of speaking — the flexibility, the cool irony, the marvelous insults without cause for offense. I admit that there are times when the action comes elose to the border line of farce or melodrama. But to give you a fair picture of the movement, the color and suspense, in this story I must resort to a mixed figure. Throw together in a shaker the prose of Rudyard Kipling, the painting of Meissonier, and an evening’s entertainment at the Grand-Guignol — and the result would be something like Shining Scabbard.
EDWARD WEEKS