10 
LAND & WATER 
September 6, 1917 
Mr. Galsworthy Gives Them Gyp 
By J. C. Squire 
PERHAPS it woiild be as well to begin with a fairly 
long quotation : 
Some say there is no such thing as an affinity, no 
case— of'a man at least— made bankrupt of passion 
by a single love. In theory, it may be so ; in fact, there 
are such men — neck-or-nothing men,"quiet and self-contained : 
the last to expect that nature will play them such a trick ; 
the last to desire such surrender of themselves ; the last to 
'vnow when their fate is on them. Who could have seemed 
to himself, and indeed to others, less likely than Charles 
flare Winton to fall over head and ears in love when he stepped 
into the Belvoir Hunt ballroom at Grantham that December 
evening twenty-four years ago ? 
You think you know the style ? It is Mrs. Barclay ? It is 
the l-amih' Herald Supplement- No: It is Mr. John Gals- 
worthy. Mr. Galsworthy tints opens the story of his new 
novel (Heinemann, 6s.) which, for reasons which are certainly 
Beyond me, is called Beyond. 
***** 
Charles Clare Winton was the soul of honour. The lady 
he fell in love with at tirst sight, a beautiful " soft-hearted 
creature," had been married for three years to " an amiable 
good fellow of a husband." As she did not w'ant to break 
her hx'isband's heart, she would not elope, and the liaison was 
kept dark. Then she bore Winton a daughter and died in 
childbirth. The husband- brought the child up under the 
impression that she wfis his own daughter, and died, \\inton 
was named as Gyp's guardian, and gave her, for convenience, 
his own surname. For a long time he had hated the very 
thought of his child — his child, in giving birth to whom the 
woman he loved had died. But it was impossible to resist 
" Gyp." " Being seven, her little brown velvet frock barely 
reached the knees of her thin brown-stockinged legs," — 
which is, perhaps not surprising in a frock seven years old. 
But " her eyebrows were thin and dark and perfectly arched ; 
her little nose was perfectly straight, her little chin in perfect 
balance between round and point." So, barring the frock, 
she was perfectly perfect. 
***** 
As she grew up, so little did Gyp think of sex that she 
felt " a secret yearning for companions of her own gender." 
Then the change came. Her father took her to Wiesbaden 
to drink the waters. They went to a concert. The star 
j)erformer was Gustav Fiorsen, a Swede, who had " had to 
play his violin for a living in the streets of Stockholm " (a 
topical touch) but had been rescued by a man with an eye 
for genius. 
Unlike most violinists, he was tall and thin, with great 
pliancy of body and swift sway of movement. Hii face was 
pale, and went strangely with hair and moustache of a sort 
of dirt-gold colour, and his thin cheeks with very broad high 
cheek-bones had little narrow scraps of whisker. 
His eyes were green, like a fierce cat's. The pair caught each 
other's glances : he seemed to play an encore for her alone- 
Someone tells her that he is a great rake and wants saving. 
W hen she gets an anonymous bunch of roses it does not occur 
to her that they are from him, so she wears them. The 
result is that the first time they meet he says : " I admire you 
terribly. . . . You are just Woman, made to be adored," 
and the second time he kisSes her hand and declares that he is 
not going to leave her. She is not in love with him ; but his 
playing is superb, and she knows that he will " never accept 
refusal." When, therefore, he follows lier to her country 
home and says : " Major Winton, your daughter is the most 
beautiful thing on earth," she accepts his proposal. W inton 
naturally loathes the idea, and " when slie came up to say 
good-night, both their faces were as though coated with wax." 
Buying furniture, etc., makes the engagement period tolerable. 
(" if it were not for that," asks Mr. Galsworthy brightly, 
"who knows how many engagement knots would slip|?") 
But nothing could make the marriage tolerable. In 'the 
train after the ceremony, " ever>- now and then he glanced at 
the corridor and muttered," while she " was tremulously 
glad of that corridor." This was a rather inauspicious be- 
ginning. Nevertheless, in " the early days she gave him 
everything— except her heart," partly compensated by her 
" elation of being identified with his success." Biit his 
habits were Beyond. He mimicked her relatives to their 
faces, and as for his jealousy :^^ 
" I am jealous even of those puppies." 
" And shall ^-ou try to hurt them ? " 
" If 1 see them too much near you, perhaps I shall." 
Besides he would implore her to love him, which " seemed 
to her mere ill-bred stupidity, 
know where to stop. 
Husbands really ought to 
" Disillasionment," remarks Mr. Galsworthy, showing a 
keen grasp of the peculiarity of the sex " is not welcome to a 
woman's heart." Gyp discovers that her husband's music 
comes from his brain and fingers, not from his soul. On the 
very day that she discovers she is going to have a child, he 
comes home drunk. Tliere |is [also his sinister friend Count 
Rosek, who makes love to her : 
" Ah God ! I am tortured by you ; I am possessed ! " 
He had gone white through and through like a flame, save 
for his smouldering eyes. 
The phraseolog\' is what one exj^ects from foreign Counts ; 
the physical symptoms were, one hopes, merely an idiosyn- 
crasy of this one. Ai all events Gyp flies to her father. 
* * * * * 
When she returns she looks through the window and sees 
her husband caressing Daphne \\ ing, a young dancer whom 
Rosek had thrown in his way in order to promote his own 
designs upon Gyp. Then Fiorsen comes upon Gyp at the 
moment when her old mtisic-master is kissing her hand, 
G\'p goes to her father again, bears a daughter (little Gyp) 
and, standing on the seashore, 
watching the sunlight on the bracken, Gyji thought : " Love I 
Keep far from me. I don't want you. I shall never want 
you." 
One more return to Fiorsen (who now jealously digs " his 
claws " into the baby) and Gyp leaves him again. She now 
meets Love for the first time. Brian Summerhay, a sporting 
barrister (with a face like Botticelli's or Masaccio's young 
man in the National Gallery), whom she had met once, gets 
into a railway carriage with her. They grow like old friends : 
"Is it the isolation or the continued vibration that carries 
friendship faster and furtlier than will a spasmodic acquaint- 
anceship of weeks ? " The isolation and the vibration, aided 
by a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets opened at a passage about 
"Ha! Ha! Ha! He! He! He4 
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