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synopsis
Believe it or Knot, ‘happily ever after’ doesn’t exist. Not for me, anyway.
Bleeding and broken, I’m on the run from Alphas who want to use me as a punching bag and a breeding machine. An Omega on her own? It’s unheard of. But I’d rather die than let them catch me.
Taking a bus to the end of the line, I plan to become invisible in a small town in Vermont. But what’s that saying about ‘the best-laid plans’? They all turn to ash as an unplanned heat hits me like a raging wildfire.
I don’t need a pack… except my body is screaming for an Alpha, and I know I’ll never survive my heat without one. Or maybe six.
I run into Salvation on the sidewalk literally. All six-foot-five dark, imposing inches of him.
His scent makes me forget all the reasons I’ve sworn off Alphas, and the rest of his pack smell just as sinful. They want to help me. Save me. Make me theirs.
Fate may have brought us together, but the past has taught me that dreams are just illusions. My old pack will never let me go, and they’re dangerous. So dangerous I should keep on running to keep these new, tempting men safe.
Except they want me to stay, and they’re very, veryconvincing.
content warning
This story contains references to past physical and sexual assault. Demi has suffered a traumatic past, and freeing herself from that abuse and finding her way to healing is a large part of her story. Furthermore, this series also contains cursing, knotting, and mild violence. While I have tried to handle the sensitive content in a way I hope will not be triggering, please take care of yourself. If you believe you’ll find the content unsettling, this may not be the story for you. No work of fiction is worth your mental health.
xoxoHarper
welcome to omegaverse!
This book is set in an alternate, modern day world where the people are designated as either Alpha, Beta, or Omega. While the characters in this book don’t shift, they do share some of the hierarchical structure of wolves.
Alphas are at the top of the hierarchy and are generally bigger, have a more dominant nature, and are possessive—especially over their mate. They are usually male, although occasionally there will be a rare female Alpha. All Alpha males have fancy *equipment* with a knot at the base that locks into place during sex with an Omega—and onlyan Omega.
Betas can be either male or female. Often more mild-natured in temperament, they’re not as dominant as an Alpha or as submissive as an Omega. They have a calming effect on both, and often bring balance to a pack.
Omegas, on the other hand, are usually female, calmer, smaller, and less aggressive. They have a heat cycle starting when they reach the age of twenty-two. When it hits, their scent increases and they begin to nest—creating a safe, comfortable space to mate. During her heat, an Omega will crave intimacy and need to be mated by an Alpha and knotted.
Alphas (and some Betas) will often band together and create a pack. Once a pack is formed, the group is able to seek their mate— their Omega—based on scent compatibility. If they’re chosen by an
Omega, they will begin the process of courting her to ensure she’s a fit for their pack before making their bond official with mate bites.
Most of the pairings in this world are Reverse Harems, because why choose one when you can have them all?
Lastly, this universe does include fated mates based on full scent matches, which makes everything a little more interesting!
DEMI
I DIDN'T TRUST Anton Aster as far as I could throw him. The tall Alpha strode through the door looking like he'd just walked off the set of the latest James Bond movie. By appearance alone, he looked absolutely fuckable with his dark hair, striking blue eyes, and tailored business suit, but the moment he opened his mouth and let his true colors show, the effect shattered into a million little pieces. Beneath the rich millionaire look he’d perfected was a vile, twisted person.
My hands froze in the sudsy water as the door slammed shut behind him, my knuckles going white thanks to the death grip I had on the dirty plate I was washing, a remnant of the pack’s breakfast a few hours earlier.
I barely breathed as he sauntered into the kitchen, his dress shoes clicking ominously on the expensive hardwood that stretched the length of the open-concept penthouse. My lungs screamed at me until I finally sucked in a small, shallow breath.
His scent assaulted me, making my nose wrinkle instinctively. If his personality hadn’t already ruined his good looks, his scent would’ve done the trick. To me, he smelled like burnt marshmallows, the kind that’d been charred to within an inch of being recognizable as anything other than a pile of gooey ash.
“Shouldn't that have been done by now?” He sneered, eyeing the small stack of dirty dishes sitting on the counter.
“I didn't expect you home so soon.” I hated how small and mousey my voice sounded, hated that I had to account for every minute of my day, that I had no freedom. But I hated more how I had to walk on eggshells whenever Anton was around. Which was pretty much always, except for when he was in the office.
That’s where he was supposed to be right now.
“All the more reason it should've been done. You never know when to expect us home, and thus, the house should be kept clean at all times. Or don't you want to pleaseyour Alphas?” There was a
cruel lilt to his voice, unable or unwilling to hide the note of pure resentment.
Striding into the kitchen, he moved toward the cabinet where we kept the alcohol and poured himself a glass.
“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered, not sure what else to say. I’d learned it was better to stay silent as much as possible when the pack was around.
I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and heard him draw closer. A moment later, his heat warmed my back. His breath smelled of whisky. Thanks to my sensitivity to scents—an Omega trait—I knew from the notes of dried fruit, spices, and dark chocolate with a hint of orange that he’d poured himself a drink from the most expensive bottle in his collection: a Macallan single-malt whisky from The Red Collection, which retailed for over eighty-five thousand dollars. The only reason I could name the brand and the price was because of how readily he bragged about owning bottles of the stuff.
I’d never tasted it myself. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but I also wasn’t allowed. Not because of my age—I was twenty-three years old and perfectly legal—but because it was one of Anton’s many rules.
His Omega wasn’t allowed to drink, speak, or think for herself. I may have added that last one, but it might as well have been carved in stone.
Anton wanted a compliantOmega.
I wanted to roll my eyes, but I didn’t dare. Bruises still marred my skin from the last time I’d displeased him. Instead, I shrank into myself, trying to make myself as small as possible while still standing.
So much for having a backbone,Demi, I scolded myself, but I’d learned long ago that displeasing Anton, Reed, or Huck wasn’t worth the pain they’d put me through. After nearly a year of physical and verbal abuse, my spirit was as bruised as my body.
Anton’s hand wrapped around my brown hair, tugging painfully as he used it to wrench my head backward, pulling it into his shoulder and tipping it sideways so he had access to my throat. His nose skimmed up my neck, and he inhaled deeply to scent me.
I tried to pull away, but his hold only tightened.
“You're not being very cooperative,” he growled against the shell of my ear. His harsh whispers never failed to send a chill of revulsion down my spine. It was a conditioned response to the barely leashed violence in his voice.
“Anton,” I whimpered, trying to pull away, but he’d anticipated my move and responded faster. His grip turned punishing.
“Don’t speak unless I give you permission,” he hissed, darting his tongue out to trace the length of my neck, right over the spot he'd yet to sink his teeth into to mark me as his Omega. “Not unless you want me to force my cock into that pretty little mouth and give it a better occupation.”
Anger and fear boiled up inside me, making me lightheaded. Schooling my features into a blank mask, I looked out into the living room, trying to pretend his words didn’t bother me, even though they were tearing me apart inside.
Revulsion turned my stomach, fueled by his touch and the stench of his scent. I couldn't do this for much longer. It’d been eleven months since my father had essentially sold me to Pack Silver, and in that time, I’d become a shell of the person I’d once been. Past friends and acquaintances wouldn’t recognize me if they saw me on the street. Hell, I barely recognized the reflection in the mirror staring back at me every morning.
“Speaking of being cooperative,” Anton tugged me so hard the plate dropped from my hands, catching the edge of the counter before it smashed to the ground and shattered at my feet. My hands flew out from my sudden imbalance, flailing and knocking a pan off the counter to clatter among the ceramic shards.
Sharp pieces cut my feet as he forced me through the mess, and my head ached everywhere, my hair threatening to rip out of my skull as he manhandled me, steering me out of the kitchen and down the hallway. Tears flowed freely down my cheeks, making the entrance to my room swim as he shoved me inside.
My stomach churned at the thought of him pushing me onto the bed, ripping my clothes off, and taking me the way he, by law, had every right to do.
Being designated as an Omega meant I had very few rights. I was basically nothing without a pack, and while Anton and the others hadn’t bitten me yet to bind me to them, making me their official Omega, they had registered our official courtship with the Omega Matching Agency.
Technically, I should have gone through the OMA like all the other Omegas and been matched according to a strict set of rules, but money talks. It hadn’t taken much persuasion for them to turn a blind eye to my father’s unconventional dealing. A big fat check will do that to a person—or in this case, an agency.
On paper, I belonged to Pack Silver for another month, in which time they could either bond me or reject me.
Rejection was the ultimate disgrace for an Omega, a small mercy I prayed for daily. It would make it much harder to be matched in the future, especially to a good pack, but shouldering the shame of being rejected had to be better than this hell. Even if it meant spending my life alone, suffering through painful heats that would tear me apart and leave me an aching, whiney mess.
Anton guided me to the bed, then pushed me to my knees before the mattress.
Hiking one pant leg of his expensive tailored slacks, he squatted down behind me, growling in my ear. “It’s strange, isn’t it, that in the eleven months you’ve been with us, you haven't gone into heat for your pack.”
We’d had this fight before, but this time, in my room, before my mattress.…
My face paled, my pulse stuttering to a stop. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He couldn’t know.… It wasn’t possible. Was it? I’d been so careful.…
“Here I thought you were just broken,” he taunted. “A pitiful excuse for an Omega.”
The blood in my veins turned to ice as he reached around me and shoved his hand beneath the mattress and procured the tiny foil packet. Half the little bubbles had been popped, the pills already used, while the rest remained intact.
Hefoundmyheatsuppressants.
The next growl he unleashed was furious and vindictive, and I couldn’t contain the whine that escaped my throat. It was a plea for mercy. For leniency. Maybe even for my life.
Anton wouldn’t kill me. He had a violent streak and a wicked temper, but he wouldn’t kill me. Right?
Ohgods.What had I done?
“Do you want to explain yourself, Demi Leigh?” The anger in his voice was barely leashed. He held it back just enough to form words instead of growls.
The sudden dryness in my throat made it hard to speak. What the hell was I supposed to say—‘Sorry, I don’t want to be stuck with you on top of me for a week’? ‘Sorry, I don’t want to carry your offspring’? ‘Sorry, but I’m terrified to be in a mating haze around you and the pack’?
Not being in control meant not being able to save myself from their abuse, which truly frightened me. Especially because when an Omega went into heat, their heightened scent could drive an Alpha wild. My pheromones would trigger my Alphas, and I didn’t trust that they would be able to keep their heads given how they lost their tempers with me regularly.
Anton, Reed, and Huck may be Alphas, but if their violence had taught me anything, it was that they were driven by their baser nature. None of them were as in control as they believed themselves to be, and the frenzied urges the heat brought would heighten their rage as well as their libido.
It didn’t happen often, but Omegas had died during their heats because of Alphas being overtaken by the need to rut and claim. It was the whole reason the OMA existed. Being an unbonded Omega was dangerous, but the chances of something going wrong were significantly reduced if a true connection existed between an Omega and the Alphas they were matched with and subsequently courted by.
In my case, that connection to Anton, Reed, and Huck was nonexistent. Their scents didn’t call to me, and the bond that should’ve been forming over the past several months wasn’t there.
“Now, you decide to be a good, silent little Omega?” he spat. “You’ve been lying to us. Suppressing your heats. You thought I wouldn’t find out? You can’t keep secrets from me, Demi. I own you.”
Those words were punctuated by another tug of my hair, and I cried out as he wrenched my head sideways. A sharp prick pierced my neck, and I grabbed for his hand, wrapping my fingers around his fist. But I was too late. He depressed the plunger on the syringe.
DEMI
“WH-WHAT THE FUCK?” I gasped, my head already spinning as an unusual warmth spread from the place he’d injected me.
Yanking the needle from my flesh, he tossed the syringe on the floor along with the glass bottle. It rolled and I scrambled for it. He chuckled darkly as my hand closed around the vial, my gaze instantly drawn to the name.
Anoravel.
“Get ready to present for your Alphas, my little pet, you’re about to have the most potent heat of your life.” Anton stood swiftly, pocketing my heat suppressants, and staring down at where I collapsed to sit with my back against the bed. His eyes were devoid of any human emotion other than victory and a sick kind of avarice.
He unbuttoned the top button of his shirt as he left my room and strode down the hall, phone in his hand, already dialing the others. His voice echoed as he disappeared, ordering Reed and Huck to come home, promising that I was finally going into heat. I didn’t breathe, didn’t dare move, until I heard the click of his bedroom door.
“No,” I sobbed quietly, staring down at the empty syringe in my hands.
Scrambling to my feet, I ran to the living room and ripped open the laptop they allowed me to use on occasion. It took my four tries to get the password correct thanks to my fumbling, shaking fingers. The white browser window was nearly blinding. Typing in the name of the drug, my heart sank to my feet.
A drug mainly used to help Omegas with the rare problem of infertility. A drug meant to heighten their heat cycle and promote ovulation.
My stomach clenched and roiled.
“Oh gods.” I ran back to my room, shoved the door closed, and beelined it for my bathroom. I barely made it to my knees before the
meager contents of my breakfast came back up. I wretched over and over again until there was nothing left.
“This can’t be happening,” I whined, swiping my hand across the back of my mouth when I was finally finished. Pushing myself off the tiled floor, I stared in the mirror.
Brown hair hung limp around my shoulders, and there were dark circles under my eyes. I used to glow with happiness and youth. Now, my green eyes looked devoid of anything other than panic. A rosy hue stained my cheeks, and that… that worried me.
I pressed my cold hands against my face. The meds couldn’t work that fast… could they?
“Dammit.” Fresh tears sprang free, but crying would get me nothing but a pity party for one. No. No, no, no. I wasn’t going to roll over and willingly spread my thighs for Anton and the others. Fuck that. I’d rather die than go into heat and let them knock me up. I would neverbring a child into such a shitty, hostile situation.
Thank the gods for birth control, but I had no idea if the drug would override the effectiveness of my implant another secret I’d been hiding from the pack.
Steely resolve shot through me as an ill-formed plan began to take shape.
I had to run.
It was dangerous, so damn dangerous I’d never attempted it before. An unbonded Omega on the streets? It was unheard of. But now the danger of staying here outweighed the risk of leaving.
My injured feet were moving before the idea had even settled into my mind. Grabbing an old duffle that’d been buried in my closet, one I’d stolen when Reed had tossed it in the trash, I shoved in a few essentials: clothing, the few dollars I’d scraped together and hidden between the pages of my romance novels for just such an occasion, my scent-blocking body wash, and the only earthly possessions I still had that meant anything to me—my sketchbook and my late mother’s necklace. The latter I fastened around my neck, then I zipped the bag and tossed the frayed strap over my shoulder.
Cracking my bedroom door open, I surveyed the hallway. I didn’t see Anton, and Reed and Huck thankfully hadn’t made it home yet. Three against one weren’t odds I liked. I stood a chance of escaping if I only had to make it past Anton.
The Alpha’s door was still shut. Sucking in a breath, I made my move. Slipping into the hallway, I crept soundlessly toward the living room. My eyes were glued to the front door. I only had to make it thirty feet, then into the corridor, down the elevator, and out any side door I could find, since I had a feeling the doorman who guarded the main entrance of the building would let me—an unbonded Omega—leave unchaperoned, especially without alerting my pack.
I swallowed down the mirthless laugh threatening to escape. Making it that far felt nearly impossible, but so did staying here and riding out my heat cycle. I’d take the agony of an unfulfilled heat over being used, knotted, and abused by my pack.
A low chuckle stole all my hope the second I stepped foot in the main room. Anton leaned against the wall just around the corner, lying in wait. As though he knew I would try and leave him.
“Where do you think you’re going, pet?” He sneered, eyeing the duffle resting against my hip.
Blood turned to ice in my veins.
This was all a game to him, but this was my life.
I didn’t give him an answer. I ran.
Dodging around the kitchen island to avoid him, I gunned for the front door. Broken ceramic crunched under my tennis shoes, but no matter how fast I tried to move, Anton was faster. With a growl, he skidded around the island, a second behind me. As if the gods above were looking out for me, his dress shoes slid on the slick tile. Cursing, he skidded, lost his balance, and fell. My heart leapt.
I’mgoingtomakeit!
Large fingers closed around my ankle, and my heart crashed and burned. He yanked me to the ground. Broken ceramic cut into my palms and stomach. I kicked and screamed, fighting with everything I had. My heel caught the edge of his mouth, and he grunted.
“You stupid bitch!” He dragged me backward with more strength than I knew he possessed, and I screamed.
Adrenaline pumped through my veins, making my heart feel like it was on the verge of exploding. In a blur of fight-or-flight response, my palm closed around the handle of the frying pan I’d knocked to the ground earlier, and I reacted on instinct.
My arms ached as I reared back and swung.
The thudding clang made bile rise up my throat. Anton’s grip on my ankle relaxed, and I sobbed as I scrambled away. Clutching the frying pan to my chest, I stared at the prone man who haunted my waking nightmares.
He was so damn still.
Blood slowly crept from the fresh wound on his head, spilling morbidly across the light tile, and I choked back a scream.
“Oh.My.Gods.”
I’d seen enough crime documentaries to know my fingerprints were all over the frying pan, so I hastily grabbed a dish towel and tried to wipe it clean before setting the pan gently to the side.
All the while, my eyes stayed glued to Anton.
Was he breathing? I couldn’t tell through the tears that obscured my vision.
I was going to be sick all over again, but my body was sluggish, probably going into shock, as I crawled to my feet.
Run.Run.Run.
The word echoed through my mind like the steady beat of a drum.
And now following through with my plans was more important than ever because…
I was pretty sure I’d just killedan Alpha.
DEMI
THE PAIN WAS ALMOST UNBEARABLE. Tears streamed down my cheeks as another low cramp made me double over, causing me to nearly tumble down the steps of the old Greyhound bus. My vision doubled, swimming in and out of focus, and I stumbled onto the lighted sidewalk like I’d had too much to drink.
Ifonly.…
I nearly jumped out of my skin as the bus depressed a loud, high-pitched squeak of air before it rolled away, leaving me in the dark outside the bus depot. Glancing around, I tried to find a sign with any identifying information. Anything to tell me where in the world I was.
I’d boarded the bus in Silver City, New York, then switched buses hoping to cover my tracks, riding the last one as far as my meager savings would take me. Which was apparently… I squinted, trying to force the swimming letters on the beige sign into alignment.
Maverick Falls, Vermont.
Truthfully, I hadn’t so much as glanced at the ticket I’d purchased. I was too focused on putting as much distance between me and the life I was trying to escape as possible. Didn’t matter where I was, as long as it was away.
Away from New York. Away from the pack. Away from danger and the sins I’d committed.
The chill of the northern air cooled the wet tracks I hadn’t noticed on my cheeks, and I shivered. It had been hours since I’d escaped, but my hands still shook. Adjusting the black hoodie I wore, making sure it obscured as much of my face as possible, I clutched the strap of the ratty duffle bag and started on my way… somewhere.
Lights from the station warmed the sidewalk, inviting me inside, but the cameras I spotted mounted onto the corners of the brick building kept me moving farther into the night.
It wouldn’t be smart to enter, anyway. Attention was the last thing I needed, and my scent-blocking body wash wasn’t going to last much longer without a refresh.
Honestly, hoping it would continue to work was wishful thinking. Staring down a heightened heat meant my scent would increase exponentially. Would I even be able to hide it with blockers? The thought sent dread trickling through me. If it didn’t… I’d bring every unbonded Alpha within a mile radius sniffing after me, ready to rut and claim.
I had to hide. I had to—
Fuck. I didn’t know. I just knew I had to keep moving if I had any chance of figuring this out.
Step by step, I forced myself to walk, but it was hard to see straight, and my legs shook with the effort to stay upright. The pressure building in my head would make a migraine seem tame in comparison.
Another low cramp had me grunting and slumping against the storefront I was passing. My hand met the brick, holding me up while I rode out the wave of agony that felt like my ovaries were dying a slow, torturous death. Sweat dotted my forehead and I gnashed my teeth together before pressing my lips into a thin line to hold back the whimper that wanted to break free.
How much medicine did that asshat inject me with? I couldn’t imagine these symptoms were a normal reaction to a regular dose of Anoravel. Worse, I wouldn’t put it past he-who-shall-not-be-named to be reckless with the dosage. As long as he got results, he didn’t give a flying fuck about what was safe or healthy.
Finally, the wave passed. Feeling a bit steadier, I pushed off the wall and kept going, trying to find my bearings in this unfamiliar town and figure out what the hell I was supposed to do now.
There was no way I could go to an Omega Crisis Center—if Maverick Falls even had one. I wouldn’t chance being returned to Huck and Reed or, worse, being taken into police custody.
If Anton was dead, that made me a murderer. It wouldn’t matter that it was self-defense. I was a lowly Omega, and no one would take my word for it.
It dawned on me then. Truly dawned on me. I’mafugitive.
Tears leaked down my face, but I didn’t have the energy or the care to swipe at them. Both my hands were tight around the duffle strap that crossed my body, clutching all my worldly belongings to my chest like someone was going to run up and try to steal the worn bag from me.
Keeprunning.Keepmoving.It was a mantra in my head, but my body was exhausted despite the hours I’d spent riding on buses today, and I knew I didn’t have much longer before my heat started with the force of a tsunami. Already my breathing was shallow, my face feverish, my cheeks so warm I was sure they were a bright shade of tomato red, and with every damn step, I felt the unwelcome wetness between my thighs—a purely biological reaction I couldn’t stop if I tried. A wave of my scent tickled my nose, and I knew I was out of time.
So lost in my head, I hadn’t realized I’d made my way downtown until the music that had barely begun to register grew louder in an instant. The door to a bar flew open, nearly knocking me in the face. People spilled out the door around me, startling me so badly, I cried out and jumped backward… right into a wall of hardened muscle.
JAMISON
The teenage boy who’d been loitering outside my bar slammed into my chest, trying to avoid the crush of drunk college students I’d just kicked out for causing too much damn noise. My hands went to his shoulders to steady him and also get him the fuck off me. Most of the time, I didn’t like to be touched. I was in a piss-poor mood, so tonight was no exception.
“If you’re looking to score some alcohol, you should know I don’t serve anyone underage, and you won’t find any lying around here,” I warned. “I suggest you move on.”
The teen stiffened and shrugged out from under my touch. I growled as he whipped around, but the sound died instantly at the sight of him.
Except it wasn’t a himat all.
Fuckme.I’d just manhandled a woman.
Wide, glass-green eyes stared up at me in a mixture of fear and shock. Her hands clutched the strap of her bag so tightly the pink had bled right out of them, leaving her fingers ghostly white. A large black hoodie hung on her frame, covering her hips and ass, hitting her mid-thigh. It was so baggy, it was no wonder I thought she was a boy from the back. Under the hood, however, was a heart-shaped face that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than feminine, framed by brown hair that hugged her cheeks.
Guilt rose hot and fast at having scared her. Damn, but she looked like a frightened kitten, her lips parted, her breath coming in quick, shallow pants. I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender, hoping she’d realize I wasn’t as scary as I looked.
At six foot five, I towered over her by at least a foot, and lanky wasn’t a word anyone would use to describe me. My shoulders were broad, my arms muscular. I’d been mistaken for the bouncer rather than the owner of the bar more times than I could count.
“Fuck. I’m sorry. I had no idea you were a girl-er, uh, woman. I wouldn’t’ve laid hands on you if I’d realized. Just trying to keep you from getting trampled,” I finished lamely while she just blinked at me slowly.
A rosy flush stained her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, just visible under the warm glow from the streetlamps.
Under the smell of fried food and alcohol wafting from the bar, beneath the stench of the dumpsters in the alley just around the corner, I caught the sweetest hint of sugared berries, black honey, and something deeper, smokier, sexier. The scent bowled me over, making me feel unsteady while also somehow grounding me more than I’d ever been before. Her signature wrapped around me, hardening my cock in a second flat.
Omega.
My instincts were screaming at me to scoop her up, haul her inside, and protect her before anyone else got a whiff of that intoxicating scent. They were also demanding I rut, bite, and claim her for myself.
Bloodyfuckin’hell.
My brows drew down as I leaned closer, trying to keep my voice low enough not to draw attention. “What are you doing out here alone, little Omega? Do you have a pack somewhere?” I glanced around, expecting another Alpha to come at me any second for sniffing around his mate. Another surreptitious glance at what I could see past the hood, and I realized I couldn’t get a good enough look at her neck to tell if she’d been marked—bitten and claimed.
The way the color drained from her face at the mention of her Alphas, however, spoke fucking volumes.
I scowled harder and stepped closer, noting too late that it only made her shrink backward. “Are you in trouble? Do you need help?”
Her tennis shoes scraped along the concrete as she took two small steps back with a squeak of a response I couldn’t decipher.
Shaking her head, she tried again. “I-I’m sorry for running into you,” she pleaded in the smallest little voice. “I should get go—”
Before she could finish her sentence, it melted into a groan. She doubled over as she stumbled back, putting more distance between
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share in, and contribute to, a spiritual commonwealth. He strongly opposes attacks on the permanency of marriage, and for marriage itself he insists on a loftier standard. The problem of labor seems to him one of perfecting personal relations in industry, though it be necessary to reshape industry to achieve it. And though provisional solutions of the problem of a society of nations seem to Dr. Adler inadequate and futile, he is at pains to establish the principle on which such a society can, he thinks, be founded.
Religion and the Mind of Today, by Joseph A. Leighton, asks for careful definition. The author is a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He is now professor of philosophy in the Ohio State University, the author of Man and the Cosmos and of an introductory book on philosophy used in many colleges. Dr. Leighton, in a sense, offers himself as living evidence that acceptance of modern science is not inconsistent with a deep and satisfying religion expressed in a formal creed. His book consists of three parts. The first studies the indispensable rôle of religion in a civilization, and aims to show the relation of religion to culture and its function in human society. The second part is a study of Christianity; it argues the superior ethics of Jesus to other systems of ethics; and endeavors to apply Christian ethics to problems of modern life. The third part of the book is on the validity of religion. Dr. Leighton finds religious belief entirely compatible with scientific discovery. He also, in special chapters, does his best to clear such religious problems as the nature of faith, the origin of the universe, the incarnation of Christ, the efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of the soul.
His work, which is general, leads me directly to the new book by Shailer Mathews and others, which is specific. If there is one thing which can be said about Contributions of Science to Religion, it is that the book gets down to bed rock. Dr. Mathews, dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, one of the best known educators and editors in America, conceived the idea of getting representative scientists to tell compactly of those portions of the world, or life, which were their special provinces: He wanted to see what the resulting picture would be like. He asked bluntly: “After the scientists have explained the construction of the universe, the earth
and man, is there any room left for God?” He felt, as he says in the opening sentence of this book, that “a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives.” And he also felt, as he says in his introduction, that “if scientific knowledge could really destroy faith in God it would do so—and it should do so.”
He got thirteen chapters by some very distinguished men, to which he prefixed a chapter of his own, then writing a final summarizing chapter; and this is the book. Among the scientist contributors are W. E. Ritter, director of the Scripps Marine Biological Laboratory of the University of California, who writes on the scientific method of reaching truth; Robert A. Millikan, the physicist who was the first to succeed in isolating an electron; and Edwin S. Frost, director of the Yerkes Observatory. The arrangement of chapters is ingenious and even dramatic. For example, one goes from the contemplation of invisible atoms made up of electrons to that of a universe, made up of electrons infinitesimally small but containing bodies many million times the size of our sun.
There is neither religion nor theology in these thirteen scientific chapters, which may be read, and can most profitably be read, by anyone who seeks simply a bird’s-eye view of what science has found out. Dr. Mathews sums up ably; yet his case is practically stated in Professor Ritter’s remark that “seeing God in the Universe is no more difficult than seeing electrons there.”
But in praising this striking and admirable volume, I fully recognize that its very sharpness and definiteness make it extremely provocative—though therefore all the more interesting. To the mind purely mystical, Contributions of Science to Religion must remain all beside the point; and to Dr. Mathews’s assertion that “a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives,” the mystic will reply that that, precisely, is what his religion is for And with many the question does not take the form in which Dr. Mathews puts it, but rather the form in which Dr. E. Y. Mullins, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, puts it in his Christianity at the Crossroads: “Will Christianity continue its redemptive work in the world, or will it cool into a reform movement, without redemptive power?” So asked, the answer may well be different. Dr. Mullins
argues—and without appeal to authority of any kind—that the Christian religion is free and autonomous, and that efforts to transform it have failed. And if it is to be Christianity against a new religion, he has no doubt as to where the victory will lie.
iiSir Oliver Lodge’s Making of Man has something in common with the books I have discussed and some relation to the books I am coming to; but first I wish to ward off a misconception. Sir Oliver’s views of an after life, his experiments and speculations are wellknown; but Making of Man is not in any sense a spiritualist volume. It is a study in evolution; a short, simple account of physical science which the author then relates, so far as our knowledge permits, to the history of the soul. His own special beliefs are kept out of the way; his point is that what we know from physics and other branches of science makes immortality of the soul an irresistible conclusion. As he says: “It is beginning to seem possible that the conservation of matter and energy may have to be supplemented by the conservation of life and mind.... I feel sure of this: that the Universe is a much completer whole than we had imagined. Every kind of real existence is permanent; and our activities do not cease when we change our instrument.” The book is brief, very sincere, and of interest to readers of every class and shade of opinion.
In Evolution: the Way of Life, Vernon Kellogg, the zoölogist, has written a book designed for the general reader who wants exact but simply expressed knowledge concerning the theory The author has been at pains to tie up his discussion to the evolution we all can see in ourselves and in the Nature about us. This is decidedly a book to clear up and make definite the reader’s conception of what evolution is and is not, and of its significance to mankind.
The two remaining impersonal books I have to present are both purely scientific, though almost startlingly diverse; and then I shall go on to speak of books distinctly personal to the reader.
And first I offer a work of science keenly interesting to the general reader. George Grant MacCurdy of Yale is known wherever anthropology is known. For many years he has been gathering the materials for a history of man before recorded history begins. The interest of pre-history, as the subject is called, needs no emphasis. Its appeal has been shown by the success of such books as Henry Fairfield Osborne’s Men of the Old Stone Age and by the fascination most readers confess to feeling for the earlier chapters of H. G. Wells’s An Outline of History. But pre-history, sketched by Wells, dealt with partially by Osborne, had never been fully written in a single, up-to-date work. Dr. MacCurdy has done it in the two volumes of his Human Origins: A Manual of Pre-History.
Human Origins is a great book. It must be remembered that all we know about prehistoric man is the discovery of the last hundred years, discovery that has come thick and fast, but which has remained scattered. I shall say nothing about the work involved in writing Human Origins; its immensity is apparent. But it is sheer luck that we have in Dr. MacCurdy a writer whose imagination and sense of the dramatic turn the whole affair into a superlative story.
Man, emerging as a distinct species, entered upon the Old Stone age, testified to by flint implements which we can just begin to see bear evidences of human shaping. The Old Stone Age lasted a long while. During it, in intervals of thousands of years, ice swept down over Europe and North America in four successive glaciations. The three warm intervals between these four ice epochs are the lower, middle, and upper paleolithic periods. In each, prehistoric man made some rude advance toward better tools and weapons. He even progressed in art to the extent of painting on cave walls. Then the ice came down again, and for thousands of years man lost nearly all the gain he had made.
He reappears in the New Stone Age using chipped and polished flints, mining the flints in certain places, working them in certain places. Pottery-making began, and some idea of weaving was gained. Religious ideas were first entertained. Fire was conquered and put to man’s use, the wheel was invented, animals were domesticated. Then came the Bronze Age, with its discovery of how
to smelt copper, tin, gold, silver The Iron Age arrived when man had acquired sufficient skill in smelting this more durable metal and could use it to replace all others in things of hard use.
Approximately 400 illustrations, of a fascination at least equal to the text, appear in the two volumes of Human Origins.
If the new book on Haunted Houses did not bear the name of so distinguished a scientist as M. Camille Flammarion, it would find no place, I am afraid, in this chapter. M. Flammarion is fully aware of the skepticism he must encounter, and is at pains to refute it as fully as possible in his book. But great as the interest of this controversy is, I think most readers will find the mere subject irresistible, and I am certain that everyone, even he who pooh-poohs all the evidence, will be captivated by the strange stories to be read in Haunted Houses. Dwellings that are variously authenticated for their troublesome character are discussed in chapter after chapter—a chateau at Calvados, a habitation in Auvergne, the house of La Constantine, a parsonage, a teacher’s house, the fantastic villa of Comedada at Coimbra in Portugal, the maleficent ceiling at Oxford, Pierre Loti’s mosque at Rochefort. And after so much, a chapter providing “A General Excursion Among Haunted Houses”! Flammarion then classes the phenomena as of two kinds—those associated with the dead and those not so attributable. But he is no mere credulous believer in haunting. He devotes a chapter to houses spuriously haunted. His book concludes with a search for causes and an assertion, or reassertion, of belief in certain evidence; “the unknown of yesterday is the truth of tomorrow.” It is interesting to note that there has been legal recognition of haunted houses.
iii
Two of the personal books before me are by Dr. James J. Walsh, medical director of Fordham University’s School of Sociology, professor of physiological psychology at Cathedral College, and author of that remarkable history of fakes and faith-wrought miracles, Cures. In Health Through Will Power, Dr. Walsh is dealing with a subject which, more than any other one thing, has been made the
foundation of new and powerful religious sects. But Dr Walsh’s interest is in the application and the uses of will power in the individual.
He therefore shows the preventive and curative power of the will in such universal ailments as coughs and colds, intestinal disorders, rheumatism, and the like. But most importantly he shows the rôle of the will in dealing with mental disturbances and in a therapeutic application to bad habits as diverse as self-pity, yielding to pain or succumbing to sentimentalism in sympathy, and irregular and insufficient exercise.
Health Through Will Power is untechnical. Anyone can read and understand it.
Success in a New Era, Dr. Walsh’s other book, shows that the application of the will is the most important factor in achieving success of any kind. Is education important? Yes, but “it is not for lack of knowledge but for lack of will power that men fail to accomplish what they want to. Men have powers or energies far beyond what they usually think, and the men who use them up to something like their capacity make a success of life.”
Next to will power comes work; and work must be offset by recreation, though proper recreation calls for the expenditure of mental or physical energy as great as work.
I am not sure that Dr. Walsh’s warning about reading is needed in America. “Reading,” he says, “requires the least mental labor of almost any pursuit, and hardly a person but sooner or later finds himself putting off something that ought to be done by pretending that he is accomplishing more by his reading. Reading in itself is excellent, but it is vastly overused to excuse the inaction of weak and lazy people.” No doubt; but of 961 people I personally know well, 857 spend every evening listening to the radio, attending a moving picture, or playing cards and dancing. Of the remaining 104, only eighty-one read.
Yet Dr. Walsh is dead right when he says that “the best good habit in the world is the proper use of time”—though the acquisition of
more hours in a day would be helpful—and his Success in a New Era is a singularly honest and helpful book, free from even one patent formula for attaining “success.”
The Foundations of Personality, by Abraham Myerson, M.D., though on more general lines, is of no less value. Dr. Myerson analyzes the elements of character—which is not, of course, the same thing as mind. Character is intimately related to mind, as the brain and body are intimately related. Character may be affected by both the mind and the body; it is not dependent on either. Dr. Myerson describes the general types of character, the tradition of each and its social heredity; and he follows the energies of men as they expend themselves in instinct and emotion and intelligence. Although a physician and a psychologist, he writes from the standpoint of one who deeply shares the everyday aspirations and conflicts of his fellows. His comments on the influences exerted upon character, and on the expression of character in work, play, humor, sex and religion are of acute interest. His book’s great practical value is dual: it helps toward self-understanding and it gives a good deal of help toward insight into the characters of others—a matter which usually has an important part in determining our own success or failure in life.
Simpler than The Foundations of Personality because of a much narrower scope is Arthur Holmes’s Controlled Power: A Study of Laziness and Achievement. This popularly-written book by a professor of psychology is almost a handbook on the subject of laziness, its causes and cure. For not all laziness comes from the same cause, and not all apparent laziness is laziness in fact. There is such a thing as the indolence of genius, well-illustrated by Professor Holmes in the cases of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and the naturalist, John Muir. There is the languor of youth, when the rapid growth of the body may produce a kind of inertia either physical or mental. The aversion of the normal boy to study is easily explained, Professor Holmes holds. What people have done much they like much to do; and what they have done little they like little to do. What the human race has not done very long is hard for individuals of the race to do. The human race has hunted
and fished for thousands of years; it has studied for a very few centuries, and studied in the mass for only about one century. Of course the boy will prefer to hunt or fish!
Controlled Power is so entirely readable that one feels as if it should be put in the hands of every parent and school teacher. Its wisdom could do much for them, as well as for the child.
Teachers and many parents could read advantageously also The Normal Mind, by William H. Burnham, professor of pedagogy and school hygiene in Clark University. If our knowledge of what we call mental hygiene shows us anything, it shows us that most people do not utilize the brains they have. The whole purpose of mental hygiene is to teach how to make the most of one’s inborn ability. The power to think with clearness means usually the throwing off of bad mental habits.
Professor Burnham, teaching at G. Stanley Hall’s institution and with a background of many years’ experience and observation, has produced a book which most satisfactorily compends what we know about mental hygiene to date. His presentation of the school task, of mental attitudes, of suggestion and mental hygiene, of success and failure and discipline, offers in practical form the wisdom we have regarding mental health and how to attain it.
Twelve Tests of Character, by the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D., has amply proven its popularity; indeed, it has for months been among the ten best-selling books of non-fiction throughout America. Dr. Fosdick’s tests are tests of character in action, not conventional qualities nor abstract traits. Written with reference to Christian teaching, the book is nevertheless one of extreme popular appeal. Nothing of the sort has more “rush” of style and pointedness, more irresistibility in brushing aside objections and obstacles. Undoubtedly the wealth of illustrative instances and anecdotes has greatly enhanced its popularity.
But my chapter runs too long. I have saved for the end, and will not quit leaving unmentioned, Albert Payson Terhune’s Now That I’m Fifty. Is Mr. Terhune’s outspokenness a bit brutal? I do not think so. He is fifty and knows whereof he writes; why should he not tell what he knows? Is it cruel to say that one should have money, such money as he can acquire, with which to meet fifty? No, it is common sense. Is it bitter to point out, with unmistakable instances, that fifty cannot do the things that twenty does? Most decidedly not; for Mr. Terhune points out those other things that twenty cannot do, and that fifty can Fifty cannot run five miles; twenty can. Very well; when Mr Terhune was in his twenties and tried to work a few hours at night after the work of the day, he went all to pieces. But now, at fifty, he can work better than ever before in his life; longer hours, harder work; and come out of it smiling. In fact, in Now That I’m Fifty he practically says: “Look at the things I used to be able to do and can do no longer; and thank the Lord I can’t!” This little book of Terhune’s, not much more than an extended essay, is so honest, so merry, so frank and so mellow that I think fifty can safely put it in the hands of those who aspire to be fifty.
23. J. C. Snaith and George Gibbs i
Certain novelists there are who, if they chance upon worthy material, need ask odds of no writer of fiction now living. I think at once of two Englishmen in this class, and one of them is John Collis Snaith. In such books as The Coming and The Undefeated he has had material of the first order and has wrought greatly with it. And at all times he is a novelist and entertainer of much more than ordinary competence.
The outstanding matters about J. C. Snaith are several. The first is his steady productivity through twenty years; for the number of novelists who sustain their work so long is not large. The second, and a more important matter, is Snaith’s striking variety. As Henry Sydnor Harrison, the author of Queed, has said, Snaith “is absolutely his own man, always doing his own things in his own way and refusing to be deterred; and this quality gives to his published works a remarkable range.” I wonder how many realize what courage, and even what sacrifice, such a course entails? Not many, probably. But the simple fact is that we all insist on putting a storyteller in a particular compartment in our minds. Let a man please us with a tale of a certain kind and we reject a tale from him of any other kind. This is very discouraging to the novelist, who, after all, is not producing Ford cars. As readers of fiction we should select a good chassis and give our novelist complete rope on the custom-built body.
J. C. Snaith was born of Yorkshire folk in Nottinghamshire, 1876. As a youth he played for his county in cricket, football and hockey. His health became impaired and he had to give up athletics. He lives down on the North Shore at Skegness but spends some time in London (where he may be found in a goodly company of novelists at the Garrick Club). But whether in the country or in town, as he says:
“Outside of my work, I have no story to tell. I am always submerged in a novel. My life has been singularly uneventful. It seems to begin and end in the writing of novels. I study them continually and each one I write is in the nature of an experiment. In my humble opinion, the art of novel writing is in a state of continual development. To me a good novel is a mental tonic, exhilarating, educative, humanizing.”
It will be to the point, then, with this modest man to give, chiefly, some sketch of his work. His first novel, Broke of Covenden (1904) is such a portrait of the English squire as no one else, I think, has given us. Those who were delighted by Sheila Kaye-Smith’s The End of the House of Alard, and those who count as a great experience Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga should lose no time in reading Broke of Covenden. Richard Mansfield longed for a play from Snaith’s novel so that he might act as Broke. Well, it is not too late to fashion the play for some one like Lionel Barrymore.
William Jordan, Junior (1907) shares with The Coming (1907) first place in Snaith’s own estimate of the comparative merit of his novels. The two have a certain remarkable likeness. Jordan is a poet of “universal power given to no other person in the modern or the ancient world”; an utterly unworldly youth and man; a symbol of the artist or prophet or poet who comes with a message for all mankind and who finds mankind unready to listen—who is, besides, caught in the coil of a life he does not understand and to which he has no real relation. The Coming, exquisite and powerful, suggests in its principal figure the reappearance of Jesus Christ in England during the World War. These novels are therefore really expressions of the human spirit done with extraordinary force and unusual directness. They are, however, unsentimental, reticent, quiet in tone and they do accomplish in terms of the novel with many accents of realistic detail what men have generally been driven to express in fable, allegory, legend or poem—in other words, with a pretty complete divorce from everyday actuality. Snaith never quite sacrifices that. It is his distinction (unique, I think) to have been able in these two books to take a lofty and sublime subject and bring it to earth without shearing its wings.
The same effect is partly realized in The Sailor (1916), supposed to have been suggested by the career of John Masefield; but here the whole treatment is more markedly realistic and perhaps more open to a charge of sentimentality. Yet The Sailor by virtue of its extreme realism (except the short period on shipboard, which bears only the most fantastic relation to such an actual experience) is richer than either William Jordan, Junior or The Coming in the elements of popular interest and appeal. If it at moments approaches hysteria, so did A. S. M. Hutchinson’s If Winter Comes; if Henry Harper’s rise taxes ready belief, the drama of his upward struggle from dirt and obscurity to freedom and success and power is a drama on which the reader’s interest hangs breathlessly throughout.
Many, and with justice, consider The Undefeated (1919) the best novel Snaith has written. Certainly this can be said for it: Appearing at a time when the public utterly refused to read “war books,” this simple story of a little English greengrocer and his family in time of war became a best seller without any perceptible delay. Even today, perhaps, The Undefeated is most abidingly in demand of all the Snaith novels. “The kind of person Snaith writes about is the kind of person that fascinates me and that I try to write about. How I wish I could do it with his big simplicity!” exclaimed Edna Ferber, when she had finished the book. “A thing of finest spirit. It is one of the few works of fiction I have been able to read through since August, 1914,” was Tarkington’s comment, and other authors were not silent. Among an hundred novels and would-be novels and fact-books about the war, all loud as so many shrieks, this quiet voice could make itself heard. For among many merits in The Undefeated the greatest was the restraint with which Snaith wrote; and he contrived both by tone and by speech to say what H. G. Wells and others, alike in pulpits and on soapboxes, could never seem to utter.
There is another Snaith, the man of amusement who entertains himself and the reader with light fiction. Sometimes it is an engaging romance on the order of his Araminta; again it is a divertissement of youth, like The Principal Girl; most recently it is the friendly fun, by no means unalloyed with admiration, of There Is a Tide. The title is taken, of course, from the familiar, “There is a tide in the affairs of
men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” Mame Durrance, of Cowbarn, Iowa, aided by an aunt’s legacy, and weaponed with her own pluck, seeks her fortune first in New York and then in London. As Miss Amethyst Du Rance, European correspondent of the hometown newspaper, she seems destined to fail in her object. But when her affairs are most discouraging she finds friendship with Lady Violet Trehem, and the gayest pages in Snaith’s novel record Mame’s adventures in English society. Mr. Snaith obviously likes his heroine. He avoids burlesque and his comedy is a laugh with, and not a laugh at. The impossible type of ending is dexterously avoided; and if there is any fault to find it is with the author’s prodigious and incredible assimilation of American slang. He really knows it, though perhaps he doesn’t discriminate with nicety between last year’s and this; but the result is a little like a cook unfamiliar with garlic and using it for the first time.
The main delight in Snaith’s work is unchanging—it is the delight of adventurousness. One may not know in what precise field his new novel will take one, but one goes with him in the certain and satisfactory knowledge that the exploration will be a finished job. “To me a good novel is exhilarating, educative, humanizing.” All three qualities mark his own work.
ii
Like J. C. Snaith, George Gibbs became a novelist for the love of writing novels, and like Robert W. Chambers he is both novelist and painter-illustrator I say “for love of writing novels” when perhaps I ought to say for love of telling stories; and then the likeness with Mr. Chambers could be extended. The love of telling stories may seem to lie at the base of any novelist’s career; but there are certainly differences. But what one has in mind in the case of Mr. Gibbs is a certain natural activity rather than a studied, deliberate and conscious choice.
He began to write very young, doing newspaper articles of a popular cast on scientific and naval topics. Then his work as an illustrator became more important. For a long while he illustrated his
own stories and novels, as well as those of other men. As his skill in fiction developed and a really large audience grew up for the novels, Mr. Gibbs let illustration drop into the background. However, in recent years he has turned again after a ten-year interval to painting in oils. Now that his footing as a writer is secure, he says that to turn from a novel to painting rests him. But at first he wrote only in late afternoon and evenings when the light was too bad for work at the easel.
George Gibbs was born 8 March 1870 at New Orleans, the son of Benjamin Franklin Gibbs and Elizabeth Beatrice (Kellogg) Gibbs. The father was an officer in the United States Navy and died at Trieste while serving as fleet surgeon of the European squadron. Part of the son’s schooling was got near Geneva, Switzerland, and afterward he was entered at the United States Naval Academy where he generally neglected trigonometry in favor of a sketch book and the writing of verses. On leaving Annapolis he entered the night classes of the Corcoran School of Art and the Art Students’ League, Washington, D. C. “My days,” he says, “were devoted to writing very poor short stories which steadily went the rounds of all the magazines of the country, only to be returned. I got in debt and began to write special articles for New York newspapers with sufficient luck to finish my art courses.” He came to Philadelphia before he was 30. Cyrus H. K. Curtis had just bought the Saturday Evening Post and Gibbs got work as an illustrator. In 1901 he married Maud Stovell Harrison of Philadelphia and he has been a Philadelphian ever since, living in Rosemont and having an office on Chestnut Street and appearing now and then in the agreeable company gathered at the Franklin Inn Club.
His first book was a collection of boys’ stories on great naval heroes. Then he wrote a long, leisurely French historical novel, In Search of Mademoiselle. After another of the same sort he struck his metier with The Medusa Emerald. With his next novel but one, The Bolted Door, he became an author whose work goes to press early and often. The book went through a dozen editions and Mr. Gibbs, like Robert W. Chambers, decided that illustration was not the better part of valor.
He was frankly glad. “Inventing plots, people and situations is a thousand times more interesting than drawing scenes,” he says. He had long since discovered that when one does both writing and painting different personalities are exercised. And he had in his own case an amusing experience which should greatly console those authors who have suffered from what seem to them the vagaries of the illustrators of their work. Mr. Gibbs soon found that he could not illustrate his own stories perfectly!
“When I approached my stories to illustrate them it always seemed as though they had been written by another person. I got the trained illustrator’s idea from a situation. It never worked out exactly like the picture I had in mind when I wrote the passage. Before I begin a story, I can see every character’s face and how he will move and what he will be doing at various climaxes. But when I come to paint him, I don’t give it.”
A George Gibbs novel is characterized by a certain substance and power which make a comparison with the most successful work of Robert W. Chambers rather too natural and too easy to be trusted. Mr Chambers, by his own admission, has always written the story which, at the moment, it amused him to write. Mr. Gibbs, with an equal equipment, has become steadily more intent on his work, both in the choice of subjects and in the treatment. He has never been without an interest in and a respect for character; and even in novels which are essentially novels of intrigue and suspense, like The Yellow Dove, the characterization is far from superficial. When he has a descriptive passage to write he takes his time to find the words, and his work shows the painstaking. Perhaps Mr. Chambers of some years ago and Mr Gibbs of today are most alike in their distinct flair for the absorbing, even the fashionable, subject. Mr. Gibbs, perhaps owing to his painter’s side, is unrestricted by place or social stratification. The Yellow Dove opens with excellent Cockney talk; The Secret Witness moves with assurance in central Europe; The Golden Bough details an American soldier’s adventures in Germany; The Black Stone has scenes in Arabia; The Splendid Outcast is vivid with bits of the Paris underworld; The House of Mohun chronicles the rise and fall of an American family stranded
between its town house and its Long Island estate; and the heroine of Fires of Ambition is a red-haired Irish girl, an obscure employee of an obscure cloak and suit concern.
A change in Mr. Gibbs’s work, the result of a definite intention which he avowed at the time, can be seen beginning with Youth Triumphant (1921). It resulted from a wish to do novels more truly representative of American life than any he had done. He had come to feel, as Swinnerton expresses it, that romance should spring from a personal vision of life and not merely from that kind of romantic material which has been so much used and which has only the makeshift value of stage properties. The deepening treatment is noticeable in The House of Mohun. It is continued in Fires of Ambition, where Mary Ryan, having conquered life, asks herself: “What are these things I have fought for? What are they in comparison with the love I might have had?” Most observable is the maturer study of character and destinies in George Gibbs’s latest and most competent novel, Sackcloth and Scarlet.
This is the history of two sisters of whom the older, Joan, is a responsible person and the younger, Polly, begins in weakness and progresses toward destruction. The development is smooth and unhurried and the characterization has a certain skill and a gradual intensity which is scarcely to be found in Mr. Gibbs’s earlier books. The scene moves to Brittany, to Washington and to Atlantic City as the story proceeds; and in each case the novelist establishes his people firmly in the new setting. There is very little artifice and what there is works quite simply and directly to show the interrelation of just the three most important people. And yet, in an ordered fashion, the book does bring up very momentous questions—such a question as the difference between motherliness and motherhood, and the graver question of accident and destiny in the existence of a child.
In his fiction George Gibbs has now come to have more points of resemblance and contact, perhaps, with Arthur Train and Rupert Hughes than with other contemporary American novelists. He can, at any rate, be depended upon for sincere and ambitious work, executed by a practiced hand.
BOOKS BY J. C. SNAITH
1904 Broke of Covenden
1906 Henry Northcote
1907 William Jordan, Junior
1909 Araminta [republished 1923]
1910 Fortune
1910 Mrs. Fitz
Lady Barbarity
Anne Feversham
1912 The Principal Girl
1914 An Affair of State
1915 The Great Age
1916 The Sailor
1917 The Coming
1918 Mary Plantagenet
The Time Spirit
1919 The Undefeated
In England: Love Lane
1920 The Adventurous Lady
1922 The Council of Seven
1923 The Van Roon
1924 There Is a Tide
SOURCES ON J. C. SNAITH
Excellent descriptive notes on many of Mr. Snaith’s novels will be found on page 155 et seq. of R. Brimley Johnson’s Some Contemporary Novelists (Men), published by Leonard Parsons, London.
An appreciative review of The Sailor forms a short chapter in S. P. B. Mais’s Some Modern Authors (Dodd, Mead & Company). See page 133 et seq.
“J. C. Snaith,” by W M. Parker, in The Bookman (London) for April, 1922.
BOOKS BY GEORGE GIBBS
1900 Pike and Cutlass: Hero Tales of Our Navy
1901 In Search of Mademoiselle
1903 American Sea Fights. Portfolio of colored drawings
1905 The Love of Monsieur
1907 The Medusa Emerald
1909 Tony’s Wife
1911 The Bolted Door
1911 The Forbidden Way
1912 The Maker of Opportunities
1913 The Silent Battle
1913 Madcap
1914 The Flaming Sword
1915 The Yellow Dove
1916 Paradise Garden
1917 The Secret Witness
1918 The Golden Bough
1919 The Black Stone
1920 The Splendid Outcast
1921 The Vagrant Duke
1921 Youth Triumphant
1922 The House of Mohun
1923 Fires of Ambition
1924 Sackcloth and Scarlet
SOURCES ON GEORGE GIBBS
“Illustrates His Own Books” (article and interview), The Sun, New York, 18 February 1911.
“George Gibbs on His Work.” Interview by Francis Hill in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Date uncertain: 1912 or 1913.
“George Gibbs, a Novelist, and His Ideas.” Interview by Theodocia F. Walton in the Philadelphia Press, 21 March 1920.
Who’s Who in America.
N : George Gibbs’s prowess as a painter in oils deserves a special note. He has painted some splendid nudes which have been widely exhibited, in particular one called “The Gold Screen” which has been at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts, the St. Louis Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and other exhibitions. He has done some striking marines which have been shown at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Corcoran Gallery and are now (April, 1924) on view in Baltimore. He has become a portrait painter much in demand with more commissions offered him than he cares to accept.
In painting as in fiction his effort has been to achieve a steady progression into more serious and more ambitious work; and the difference between some early illustration of his and “The Gold Screen” is scarcely greater than between his first few novels and such work as The House of Mohun or Sackcloth and Scarlet.
24. Mary Johnston’s Adventure
iThere lives in the city of New York a large, blond man who knows many authors and editors and publishers and who goes between them. That is his business, and yet, in spite of this dreadful occupation he is a merry man with a childlike countenance and a cheerful and carefree manner. Insouciant words bubble from his lips while his head rolls round on his shoulders; his invariable air is one of entire helplessness even in propitious circumstances; his tone is a tone of gay despair. His attitude toward all authors is fatherly and tender, and so is his attitude toward editors and publishers; he as much as admits that literature is a deplorable affair all around, and his expressive eye and accent say: “Courage! We shall yet make the best of this situation. You, who are about to buy, salute us.” At times a strange gleam comes into his face and on more than one such occasion I have heard him murmur that some day he will turn publisher and bring out two books which were published, indeed, but not read. And one of those books is Michael Forth, by Mary Johnston.
Miss Johnston was read before the publication of Michael Forth and she has been read since. Her best work of one kind lies before it; her best work of another and more significant kind has followed it. Michael Forth is simply a chrysalis, escaping notice, from which was to come, in place of the writer of superb historical romances like To Have and To Hold and historical novels like The Long Roll and Cease Firing, an author as strange as William Blake, a woman whose proper company in American literature is Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Margaret Fuller and Melville.
“She is a mystic bent upon the expressive embodiment of what eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard until she saw and heard
