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Novels and Novelists

A Model Story

A Model Story

The Third Window — By Anne Douglas Sedgwick

It takes but a page or two of Mrs. Sedgwick's new book for the reader to be aware that she has chosen to set herself a delicate, difficult task. The form of ‘The Third Window’ is that of a prolonged short story, and she has page 198 divided it into ten parts—ten stages of a story that begins in pale high silvery light and ends in darkness. In the problem the author has chosen, and in her manner of stating it, there is something essentially modern. Indeed, so strongly does the reader feel this that he can hardly imagine it being written yesterday or to-morrow; it is to-day—Spring, 1920. One might even go so far as to say that it is exquisitely, eminently fashionable. But what is our emotion as we lay the book down—what effect has it produced upon us? Has it quickened our perception, or increased our mysterious response to Life? Do we feel that we have partaken of the author's vision—that something has been revealed that we are the richer for having seen? Is there ever one single moment when it seems to us that she herself, for all her careful control, is borne away so that she is as unconscious of her audience as are we of the stage and the setting? … The door shuts upon us without a sound; we walk on velvet. There is never a jarring note, or one clash of colour that was not intended. What should be polished is revealed and beautifully spaced; yet is our attention never challenged. So discreet, so watchful is the light that we play with the idea that it has been captured by the author and made to do her bidding.

Nothing is missing; there are even real flowers, wind-flowers in glasses showing their rosy stems; there is even a sock with the needles left in and a morsel of embroidery lying on a citron-and-white striped chintz chair in this model story. Even without the people the setting is—is it not?—charming, highly civilized, suggesting in all its appointments and perfections a background for a drama in which high reserves will take the place of simple avowals. But here we pause. Here we begin to wonder whether real people could survive these surroundings. We remember finding ourselves in the boudoir of a model flat, and hearing our companion whisper in the voice that is reserved for those occasions: ‘No, it won't do, it won't do. If he put down his gloves the whole scheme would page 199 come tumbling about their ears. And supposing she took off her hat…. The risk—the risk!’

There are three characters in ‘The Third Window,’ two women and a man. Very carefully Mrs. Sedgwick draws them for us—Antonia, the young war widow, tall, pale and opulent, with the mark on her eyelid that looked like the freaking of some lovely fruit; Bevis, her husband's friend, thin, wasted, one-legged since the war; and Miss Latimer, sister of the dead man, the virgin who will at all costs keep the lamp he treasured so fondly on earth still burning for him and for him alone. The third window is the window that overlooked the flagged paths, the ancient cedar, the white fritillaries planted by Malcolm, and the fountain he loved to stand beside. It was when Antonia confessed her dread of that window and of seeing the ghost of Malcolm there that Bevis asked her to marry him. And the day after she told him fully of her fear that there should be immortality, her fear or her delight—either, both. Bevis ‘believes,’ and their happiness, which is on the point of dawning, clouds over. Miss Latimer is certain, when Antonia questions her. Finally, in a queer, half-desperate, half-defiant mood, Antonia persuades them to play at table-turning, and, naturally with Miss Latimer as the medium, the fatal message is rapped out. Two days later, after a long talk with her lover, after Bevis has had a white, blazing, baring scene with Miss Latimer, Antonia kills herself. She cannot face the difficulty. And we have Miss Latimer, like a priest, very content with the sacrifice, and the twice-broken man…. Here is a plot, you see, which has great possibilities. There are, if one might say so, the bones of a real problem in such a situation. But we do not think Mrs. Sedgwick has faced it. For all her cleverness and brilliance and faintly exotic vocabulary will not help her to make living, breathing, human beings out of these three portraits to fit a scene. They do fit it; indeed, they are so enveloped and enfolded that the scene and the tragedy close over their heads.

page 200

Let us give a small sample of Mrs. Sedgwick's way of writing. Antonia suspects Bevis of seeing in her ‘induced emotions.’

I rather like induced emotions in you…. They suit you. They are like the colour of a pomegranate, or the taste of a mulberry, or the smell of a branch of flowering hawthorn; something rich, thick and pleasingly oppressive.

In our opinion this is ‘model’ conversation as well.

(June 4, 1920.)