Talk:The Rain-Girl
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[edit]- The Bookman, January 1920.
- Richard Beresford, tired of the Foreign Office and of his relations, and irking the ordinary routine of life, sets out along the “road to nowhere” in a south-westerly gale as a vagabond. Then suddenly he stopped... and stood staring with astonishment at a gate that lay a few yards back from the roadside.” For then and there he meets his rain-girl, and he is certainly not inclined (like Borrow with Isopel) to teach her—Armenian!” Ah yes,” says the experienced novel reader,” we know those amateur (and susceptible) vagabonds!... those lonely roads! ... those accidental girls!... those implacable relations!” But it is here that the experienced novel reader will err. For Richard is not the ordinary vagrant hero of sentimental fiction, nor Lola, his rain-girl, the usual heroine. Even the relations are refreshingly unlike the haughty aristocrats we know so well. The theme of the story if told baldly might have a familiar ring; but this only shows that the author knows the allure of an old romantic formula and is clever enough to endow it with a fresh vitality. So in place of the conventional sentimental comedy we have, what is rarer and more welcome, a genuine comedy of sentiment. The distinction is a real one; for we do not get humour and passion given to us in separate layers; but intermingled (chemically as the scientist would say) and treated from a single point of view—the point of view of a sensitive and observant intelligence. Slight as the story is in texture, it is worked out with an artistic thoroughness as welcome as it is rare. Both the Scylla of sloppiness and the Charybdis of melodrama are skilfully avoided. A word of praise must be accorded the publisher also for the artistic beauty of the cover design. The characterisation on the whole is excellent. The most successful piece of drawing is that of Lord Drewitt with his amusing affectations and genuine kindliness. He is never out of the picture—a genuine high comedy figure, who enliven the story whenever he appears. As is natural in stories of this genre the action of the tale is expressed mainly in dialogue. Occasionally, as in the first colloquy between Richard and the Rain-girl, there are touches of unreality (as in the references to Thoreau and Jefferies). And why, by the way, does Richard seem to see something comic in the Rain-girl’s predilection for the concertina? Surely it is a very beautiful instrument when well played? Occasionally, some of the jests (as on p. 313) are distinctly unworthy of the setting, and once or twice Richard’s method of speech is insufficiently differentiated from that of Lord Drewitt. But on the whole the dialogue flashes along easily, aptly and wittily, and when necessary with agreeable touches of fantasy.