We Are Not Alone
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.00]
IF I should give an outline of the plot of We Are Not Alone, it would read like a sketch of a mystery story, but would convey a completely false impression. Or it would seem like a story of mastering passion, involving two innocent persons in ruin; and that would be equally false. For the plot is hardly more than a pretext, and passion, if there is any, is submerged. It is hard, in fact, to give a fair idea of just what sort of novel it is, this tale of a country surgeon who befriends a music-hall dancer, and is caught himself and involves her in a mesh of circumstance, though both are innocent of wrongdoing. The situation and the conclusion might easily be tragic, but they are not. David Newcome, the doctor, is conveyed as a bewildered man, rather than as a suffering one; Leni, the dancer, as hardly more than a mute figure. And the tone of the whole is that of poetic sentiment, mingled with irony and a hint of mysticism, so far from harrowing that one ends the story feeling very much as David does, when he says in the last scene that we should no more fear death than regret birth.
If you can accept the character of David, you can accept all the rest of the story as plausible. The irony which makes the plot is at the very heart of the man himself, a man who can be completely efficient in the operating room and yet be utterly inefficient in practical affairs.
I admit I find it hard to accept David, although his creator is at some pains to explain him: ‘After fifteen years of married life he had acquired an intense reluctance to make decisions of any kind outside his own immediate professional territory. . . . A profound reluctance, an inertia of the spirit fell on him whenever he faced a conflict outside the territory in which he could struggle with joy.’ But it may be that my doubt is due merely to the fact that I have never known a practising scientist like him.
It is evident that for David his science is a kind of religion. It may keep him from sharing the beliefs of formally religious people, but it helps him to keep from fearing either life or death. He is a genuinely simple, loving soul, — something like what once was called a ‘fool in God,’ — who is so absorbed in the heights and depths of experience that daily happenings go by almost unnoticed. Men like him are always looked upon by practical folk with a mixture of scorn and love; their directness is always puzzling to the prudent and cautious; their simplicity of motive is so unusual that it seems like subtlety. David is like that. The opacity of his wife’s mind, the unconventionality of his relations with Leni, the dastardly trick fate plays him in having Jessica die on the night of his ride with Leni — while he vaguely sees the irony of all this, he does not see anything to do about it. The author never makes the suggestion, but the fact is obvious, that David is a saint in a world in which saints can go unrecognized if they have not the conventional marks. He and Leni are ‘not alone,’because there are plenty of other people who have the harmlessness of doves without the wisdom of serpents.
The manner of telling the story is very interesting, because the entire book has some of the vagueness of David’s mind. Mr. Hilton cares nothing about the matter-of-fact and statistical reader, who aches to know more about the trial for murder — the evidence, the testimony, the grounds of the verdict, all of which seem tenuous enough. The characters are shadowed forth, rather than presented. The temperature of the narrative is moderate and the feelings are kept on the level of sentiment. The writing is, of course, prevailingly beautiful. The gravest question that rises in the mind is whether the sentiments are sound and true to experience.
R. M. GAY