a faint smell of beeswax
“Isn’t drama just what you don’t want in a dining-room? Drama doesn’t go with digestion.”
“That’s true. How wise you are. Still. . . .”
“Still what?”
Betty looked round her again.
“Yes, there’s certainly something to be said for a dull dining-room. But the day before yesterday. The day before the day before yesterday. Need one? Oh, Jane Weston, need one? A room that is a sort of gentle — but very impertinent protest! After all, why should one? Why should one? I ask you.”
“Put up with it, do you mean?”
Betty nodded.
“No, if you put it like that, I don’t see why one should,” Jane said.
“Then why are you smiling?”
“I was thinking about how you would hate my little house.”
“But that’s in the country, where one wants to stand still. One can’t here. I don’t see a bit why I shouldn’t like your house. I can imagine it. I can imagine its relation to you. Oak. A faint smell of beeswax.”
“There is a smell of beeswax.”
ex Richard Pryce, Romance and Jane Weston (1924) : 133
U California copy/scan (via google books) : link
same (via hathitrust) : link
reviewed in the Westminster Gazette (31 December 1924) via wikipedia, at the British Newspapers Archive
link (paywall, free trial...)... and here, its entirety —
Realism and Romance.
Mr. Richard Pryce’s sensitive art is not without a certain kinship with that of Miss Austen. His personages usually live in comfortable circumstances; their love affairs and marriages are of the first importance. He excels in describing a charming drawing-room. Yet Miss Austen would have written “Romance and Jane Weston” (Collins, 7s. 6d. net) entirely from the point of view of sentiment and satire, and would have been startled at Mr. Pryce’s modern insistence on the physical side of the “grand passion.” The eighteen-twenties were decidedly coarser in tone than the nineteen-twenties, yet women, if young and agreeable, were always surrounded with a fictitious glamour; they were modest to a degree which we consider ridiculous. Ignorance was a virtue, and innocence was worn like a diadem.
Now what happens to modern Jane Weston, an attractive girl in the twenties, firmly attached to a widowed mother, and living mostly “in apartments or furnished houses in such places as Bath or Leamington or Cheltenham”? Miss Weston was eminently well-bred and well-born, and yet she “picked up” (to her horror), like any housemaid, the lover of her life in no less public a spot than the West Pier at Brighton. While ostensibly occupied with reading a novel by Thomas Hardy, “Two on a Tower,” to be exact, she was attracted by the firm brown hand, holding a newspaper, of a man in the next deck-chair. Twelve years afterwards she could recall to a nicety the extreme emotion which possessed her at the sight of that hand. There was no rushing forward by two kindred souls to meet; tout bonnement Miss Weston was obsessed by that firm brown hand, which belonged, on further discreet investigation, to a type she did not admire: he was dark, middle-sized, and thick-set, and she thought admirers should be fair and slender. . . . Yet Miss Weston — with “all the generations of circumspect, self-respecting Westons behind her”] — returned to gaze at those dangerously attractive hands with “a painful and wholly unexpected clutch at her heart.” And in this wise was Young Love born.
Her neighbor on the pier, after the manner of men, looked at the lady’s feet and found that they were fair. Also, impeccably shod. This moved him to look at her face and to start a conversation on the novel the chanced to be both of them reading. “Two on a Tower,” and a pair of manly brown hands run like a Leitmotif through the book. The meeting lasted but half an hour, for Miss Weston — true to all the deceased Westons — gave her anonymous lover the slip as they came off the pier, and she never saw him again till 12 years later.
How Miss Jane escaped marriage with a worthy but unattractive Welsh parson and how she found her Peter again, at the age of 35 or so, and after many vicissitudes, is told beguilingly by Mr. Richard Pryce. But though the theme is sentiment, there are no concessions to sentimentality, and we are conscious of an immense relief when that pair of brown hands, after years of longing, become the legal property of Jane Weston
E. H. D.
Richard Pryce (1864-1942)
wikipedia : link
His liberally referenced and footnoted wikipedia page provides interesting background on Richard Pryce, e.g.,
“Disappointed with his cold reception by the public in Britain, despite glowing reviews, he wrote very little after the outbreak of the First World War” and
“He lived in one of the most quaint and miniature houses in London, fashioned out of a garage and two rooms which had been converted into five rooms and a bathroom.”
on that house, this, from “The Round of the Day” column in the Westminster Gazette (31 July 1926), at the British Newspapers Archive
link (paywall, free trial...) —
Living in a Garage.
Mr. Pryce, by the way, has one of the most quaint and miniature houses in London, fashioned out of a garage and two rooms which are turned into five rooms and a bathroom, in a mews off Belgrave-square.
It is filled with finds from the Caledonian Market, where he makes a pilgrimage every Friday morning. Golden cherubs take their place as electric light holders, candlesticks, chests of drawers, china, pictures, one of them a possible Salvator Rosa, have all been rescued.
Second Thoughts.
Mr. Pryce staggers home under the weight of small tables, and the other day a boy on a bicycle arrived with a gilt bracket wedged on the carrier and its marble frame hanging on behind.
As the author of “David Penstephen,” “Christopher,” “The Statue in the Wood,” and many other books, Mr. Pryce has a big following in America. He tells me that he gets many letters from American readers. One of them began, “Though I know I shall regret this in the morning, I must write and say how much I like your book”!
—
Pryce’s books were favorably reviewed in the American press —
- Clever English Novel
review of The Successor in The New York Times (September 7, 1907) : link (paywall) - Pryce with a ‘Y’ is as elusive as style of well imagined book
review of The Successor in The Rocky Mountain News 48:280 (October 7, 1907) : linkentirety —
The style of this volume is as elusive as the spelling of the author’s name. Sometimes we think of Dickens and then again we — do not. But the author has a style. It is sprightly, it is fresh, sometimes a little labored, but never strained. There is little fun and less wit, but there is humor. But the humor is the writer’s; his characters are as staid as Puritans, yet they are not Puritans. A secret, rather than a mystery, pervades the story. And the secret is revealed, but it is not told. The secret is not a nice one, to be sure, and we wonder how it could have been in the first place, and then why it should have amounted to so much to the parties at interest. It is not a story of adventure, but of very easy-going incident, vet it quietly and clearly sets betore the reader the ordinary individuality of the characters. Yet these charactérs are well imagined and well imaged. The story comes out well; why it should not would be hard to tell. It is a clever story; it is also interesting. There is nothing startling about it; there is something better than that. There is real literature. - A Simple-Minded Heroine
review of Elementary Jane in The New York Times (March 30, 1913) : link (paywall) - A New Novel by Richard Pryce
“David Penstephen” an admirable example of its author’s skill in character drawing — Latest works of fiction, in The New York Times (November 28, 1915) : link (paywall) - Richard Price Well Within the Novel Tradition
review of Romance and Jane Weston, in The New York Times (November 9, 1924) : link (paywall)
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