SOME RECENT FICTION.

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 1889, 18 October 1913, Page 9

SOME RECENT FICTION.

"THE WOMAN THOU CAVEST ME."

Let it bo admitted, at the beginning, that Mr. Hall Caine possesses in a markedly high degree, that ono predominant qualification in a novelist, of being a good story-teller—a qualification more rare to-day than most novel readers are apt to imagine. In his latest novel, "The Woman Thou Gavest Me" (William Heinemann; per George Robertson and Co.), the author gives us an admirable exemplification of how valuable this special talent of storytelling really is. For although, from a purely literary point of view, the novel is just about as bad as it could be, although it reeks with improbability, with bad logic, and worse than merely •bad taste; although its dragging in of topicality after topicality is worthy of the ingenuity of a "scare head-line" writer on a Hurst or Harmsworth journal —despite all thefce objectionable features, it remains a wonderfully direct, dramatic, and essentially readable, nay, deeply interesting, story. It is the life story of a gentle innocent girl who is taken away from a convent in Rome and brought back to her native island of Elian te be as callously bartered away by an ambitious and heartless father as if she was a, prize heifer or a blood mare. Married, when not out of her 'teens, to a profligate peer of over thirty a man who has run the whole gamut of unbridled sensuality, she ij! bo horrified by tho satyr-like brutality of her husband oil her wedding night, that she becomes a wife in name oniy. But she is a devout Catholic, and when, as time goes on, and the wicked Lord Raa is almost openly unfaithful to her with a beautiful adventuress, a member of the smart set, over the follie3 and vices of which Mr. Caine, as might be expected, is piously indignant, poor Mary thinks of divorce as the only way out of her misery, she is met by the sterii "No" of the Church. Soon appears on the scone a gallant young Antarctic explorer, the friend and playmate of the heroine's childhood, the handsome Martin Conrad. Sneered at and insulted by her husband and his mistress, the girl wife, who is a wife in name only, finds in Conrad's sympathy her only comfort. Love springs up, deepens, becomes a veritable passion on both sides, and finally, the pair' being left alone by an ingenious ruse of the snake-like adventuress, who wants the wife to compromise liersejf, passion rises superior to all considerations.of conventional morality, and Mary gives herself, body and soul, to her lover. The explorer goes off to the Antarctic, and Mary, finding herself about to become a mother, flees to London, where, after the birth of her child, she sinks into almost abject poverty.. Just when, in despair at having no food for her infant, she to enter, temporarily at least, the dismal army of the "oldest profession in the world," the explorer, who had been reported lost, coijveniently turns up and saves her from the awful step she had contemplated taking. Her husband institutes divorce proceedings and Conrad presses her to go away with'him. But the poor creature refuses and dies of ' consumption before Martin's ship has sailed. This necessarily brief outline of the plot can give but a very inadequate idea of the story, which teems_ with dramatio situations, which contains characters taken from all ranks of society, rich and poor, virtuous and pious, and which has evidently been written throughout in a set design of introducing anything and everything that people are discussing at tho present day. As usual, the author violently ovor-colours his figures. The heartless father is quite an impossible character; the cruel Catholio Bishop, with his admixture of worldly cynicism and oleaginous cant, who, .refuses ..to listen, to the very idea of a divorce, is equally' unconvincing; the good parish priest is altogether too good for this world ; tho wicked Lord Raa and the snake-liko mistress would have their proper environment in transpontine melodrama; the scenes in London, where poor Mary undergoes such misory, evoke memories of G. R. Simswhy, there is even a comic gardener! All these curious characters and incidents are, however, fitted so neatly into the general picture that the story, ,as a story, is a marvel of ingenuity and effective story-telling. As an exposure of the injustice of divorce laws the story is not to be considered seriously, for all the laws which the state could make would riot help a Mary O'Neill. I have alluded to the bad taste displayed in tho description of certain incidents. It is, in the wedding night scone, more than merely bad taste—it is something approaching downright pruriency. Still, with all its faults, its hysteria, its lack of anything like true artistry, its cheap nielodrama, and its portentous length, "The Woman Thou Gavest Me" is, after all, a wonderfully clever and strikingv story—as a story—and I have no doubt that the usual half-million, readers—for exact figures see the customary puffs preliminary of Mr. Caine's next novelwill duly roll up and vote the Lord of Greeba Castle the "greatest living English novelist."