* * * * *
[Illustration: _Richard Petafor_ (Mr. HUBERT HARBEN), the apostle of
Materialism and Physical Exercise, trying to convert _Antony Grimshaw_
(Mr. HERBERT MARSHALL), the believer in Mysticism and Armchairs.]
* * * * *
"THE CROSSING."
Mr. ALGERNON BLACKWOOD and Mr. BERTRAM FORSYTH (assisted by Mr. DONALD
CALTHROP) present to us in _The Crossing_ a certain _Mr. Anthony
Grimshaw_, a princely egotist of the poetic-idealist type who gets up on
the hearth-rug and says to his family, "I am a humanitarian before
everything," and things like that, and then wonders why his wife is
estranged from him. He has a daughter, _Nixie_, who is not old enough to
know how bad all this is, and together they hear the wind singing glees
without words (or in Volapuk, but anyway not intelligible to us poor
normals), a thing Mr. ALGERNON BLACKWOOD has been doing or pretending to
do for years without once taking me in.
_Anthony_ is run over and (as we say) dies. After an extraordinarily
tiresome conversation in the morning-room with his friend and his son
and his mother (who are also what people call dead) it dawns upon him
that something odd has happened to himself also. His wife and two
children, after his (so-called) death, become blissfully happy and set
to work to finish his book, that being, as they think, his wish. Well, I
wonder. At any rate in death (as we say) he was not divided--from his
egotisms.
One knows well enough, alas, how the temptation to spiritual drug-taking
has grown as the result of the accumulated sorrows of these past years,
but it is not well that such a treatment of the eternal question should
be taken seriously. Is this sort of thing really better than the
harp-and-cloud theory? It is not. One looked in vain for any trace of
real vision, any true sense of the height and depth of the problem.
Mr. MARSHALL struggled quite manfully with the part of _Anthony_, and of
course he had his moments. I hope so good a player is not developing the
"actor's pause," of which I detected signs. Miss IRENE ROOKE had nothing
in particular to do and did it very well. Mr. HUBERT HARBEN as the
impenitent profiteer from Lancashire, _Anthony's_ brother-in-law, was
better suited than I have seen him for some time, and provided the very
necessary relief. The precocious children infuriated me, but that is
purely temperamental. The actors who played the parts of those who had
"crossed" were wrapped in such an atmosphere of gloom, to the strains of
such meretricious music that (on the evidence) I can only advise people
to defer their crossing as long as possible; a thing they will doubtless
do, even if they have a friendlier feeling to the new religion than I
can command.... I am afraid I proved a bad sailor.