(from the diary)
Just started reading Ethel Dell's The Top of the World now. It's different from the others. The heroine, Sylvia, has a rich country gentleman father and a coarse, bossy stepmother she's trying to deal with. She's the outdoors, hard-working type, but definitely has a bunch of things against her, which makes her sympathetic. She hopes she's not silly, you know? But then, once the hero shows up, she becomes very silly indeed, and reacts as all Dell heroines react, weak and overpowered, and wilting in the heat of the alpha male's very existence.
... Top of the World is set in South Africa, and the hero's an English farmer. He's acquainted with Boers and can speak Dutch. It's one of those classic romance novel plots, the in-name-only convenience marriage, but more plausible than most given the era and the carefully-constructed setup. Sylvia broke away from her oppressive stepmother and fled to South Africa to rejoin her childhood sweetheart, who had been sent out there to work on a farm and prove himself worthy of marrying her. He proves the opposite, doesn't even show up to meet her, but his cousin Burke, who owned the farm, meets her instead. He looks very like Guy only older and tougher. He explains the painful truth to her, and offers to marry her as a solution to her problems. She's an emotionally stable, contented kind of girl who only wants a home and some people, and she likes Africa so far. She thinks they're really going to be great pals, or business partners, and doesn't understand a thing about men. The way she behaves makes sense. The way he behaves makes sense too. Having had a white female in need of rescue dropped onto his doorstep, and having pretended to be non-threatening in order to convince her, now he's trapped into continuing to pretend to be non-threatening. He agrees to all sorts of chivalry with hope of some nookie at a later date. They go to his home and set up happy housekeeping. Every little thing she does is terribly interesting to him, of course. There's a couple of shockingly violent kisses; they can't be usual ones, because he's still trying to pretend he isn't a blond beast, "smile-on-the-face-of-the-tiger" as someone puts it. After each one Sylvia, being the sturdy and honest type, laughingly protests that she doesn't mind, she had said it was all right if he kissed her, didn't she? It's civilization strained to the snapping point. Who could not devour every word of this in breathless anticipation?
Eeeekk, this story is amazing! Sylvia persuades Burke to follow the worthless Guy to his current post as a bartender of some seedy joint, and bring him home so that she can save him. Burke drags his cousin back by emotional force and reinstalls him at the farm again, but Guy, in depression, shoots himself in the chest. Burke has to ride for a doctor, and can only locate a villainous surgeon of no repute whom nobody likes. Sylvia's reaction: "Somehow he made her think of a raven, unscrupulous, probably wholly without pity, possibly wicked, and overwhelmingly intelligent. She avoided his eyes instinctively. They seemed to know too much."
This doctor removes the bullet and oversees Guy's recovery for a couple weeks. He presents the case to Sylvia that she has to give Guy a motivation to live, or he'll die and it'll be Sylvia's fault, and thus trapped, she devotes herself to Guy's care, while Burke moves out of the house into a shed, and stays there in full-time sulking aside from occasional pounces to make innuendo-laden threats to his name-only wife. Guy begins to recover; Sylvia as his constant caregiver wears herself out; the doctor takes her into her bedroom and shoots her full of morphine. The "Top of the World" title refers to her state of drugged euphoria! Burke was previously trying to prevent him from giving it to Guy because the suffering may be terrible but "the morphia habit is worse." Sylvia comes down from the clouds to find Burke inspecting her needle tracks. He asks if this was against her will and she admits "not entirely". The doctor's already been sent packing while she was asleep, Guy's deemed to be able to take care of himself from now on, and Burke's back in the master bedroom. "The big baas has set his house in order," as Guy puts it.
Besides the rest, it's also fascinating just to read a novel like this written in the 1910s. I was never that interested in the period but it's growing on me. It's amazing how much differently people acted and thought! A modern author writing historical fiction could never do it like this. A modern author would include important dates and landmarks to provide setting and proof of having done research. Ethel Dell doesn't bother to, but she includes manners and assumptions that a modern writer would totally miss. It's the things she takes for granted that are most startling to us. For instance, when Sylvia first arrives at Burke's house she hurts her knee and has to lie down, and when she wakes up, the Kaffir servant, Mary Ann, "seemed to have forsaken her, and she was in some uncertainty as to how to proceed when she was at length ready to leave her room." Little Missie can't even walk around an unfamiliar house without a servant to escort her? When Sylvia first begins her career as a housewife, she needs wool and needles right away to knit Burke "proper" socks so he won't have to make do with the store-bought kind any longer!
... OMG this book just keeps getting juicier! The surgeon, Kieff, entices Guy into stealing money from Burke's strongbox, then sets up Sylvia to go after Guy to confront him about it, so that it will look to Burke like a lovers' runaway! It turns out he only saved Guy's life because it suited his amusement. At a glance he understood the richly provocative setup going on and saw possibilities of ruining people for his own amusement. He's always fancied Guy because he's an otherwise-nice English boy on a downward spiral, which he finds irresistible.
Sylvia's pursuit of Guy is ill-fated. She took the train rather than ride forty miles, but the train had problems and had to sit in the sun for a few hours, and she "thought that the smell of Kaffirs would haunt her all her life."
When Burke catches her and confronts her, she pulls the romance-novel trick of failing to explain things clearly right up front, putting on lots of drama about betrayed trust instead. Blah. But it's overshadowed by such lines as: "He uttered a scoffing sound too bitter to be called a laugh. 'Have I ever been as near to you as this devil who has made himself notorious with Kaffir women for as long as he has been out here?' She flinched momentarily from the stark cruelty of his words."
Ha! That's the worst possible disgrace, too bad for Burke even to have mentioned to a lady before now! Worse than his previous offenses which Sylvia already knew about such as drunkenness and thievery.
In the hotel lobby, Kieff makes a joke about Sylvia's marriage status in front of a crowd of laughing Boers. Sylvia suddenly grows a spine and demands an explanation. Kieff explains in such a manner as to insinuate even more, and Burke comes in at just the right moment to overhear him, and beats him half to death with a horse-whip. Afterwards Kieff's given rum and made to apologize, and later overdoses himself on opium and dies and is missed by nobody.
Sylvia asks a friend "somewhat nervously if the death of Kieff were likely to hinder their return, but he laughed at the notion. Why, of course not! Burke hadn't killed the man. Such affairs as the one she had witnessed the night before were by no means unusual in Brennerstadt. Besides, it was a clear case of opium poisoning, and everyone had known that he would die of it sooner or later. It was the greatest mercy he had gone, and so she wasn't to worry about that! No one would have any regrets for Kieff except the people he had ruined."
Whoa.
From Top of the World:
"She'll manage all right. She's very capable. She is helping me with the farm. The life seems to suit her all right, only I shall have to see she doesn't work too hard."
"That you will, my son. This climate's hard on women. Look at poor Bill Merston's wife! When she came out, she was as pretty and as sweet as a little wild rose. And now--well, it gives you the heartache to look at her."
"Does it?" said Burke grimly. "She doesn't affect me that way. If I were in Merston's place,--well, she wouldn't look like that for long."
"Wouldn't she though?" Kelly looked at him with interest. "You always were a goer, old man. And what would your treatment consist of?"
"Discipline," said Burke briefly. "No woman is happy if she despises her husband. If I were in Merston's place, I would see to it that she did not despise me. That's the secret of her trouble. It's poison to a woman to look down on her husband."
"Egad!" laughed Kelly. "But you've studied the subject? Well, here's to the fair lady of your choice! May she fulfil all expectations and be a comfort to you all the days of your life!"
