Many people are interested in millionaires, more people are interested in babies. To combine the two is a happy thought—a thought already productive of happy results. “The Millionaire Baby” is in demand—great demand. Although the book is hardly from the press of The Bobbs-Merrill Company, its leaves being scarcely dry, one may say, bookstores are renewing orders, and libraries say “not in” a hundred times a day to would-be readers.
The title, we are bound to believe, has something to do with book sales—that is with the ordinary every day reader—with the litterateur, almost never.
To something more than its fortunate naming, however, will this latest brain child of Mrs. Anna Katherine Green Rohlfs owe the success of which promise has so soon begun fulfillment. You may begin the book because of its appellation, but you will read it to the end because you cannot well do otherwise.
Do you remember when the days were younger with you how you sat up late at night when all the house was sleeping to read Wilkie Collins’ “Moonstone”? Or, you may have been the sole occupant of the house. You turned the leaves of the gruesome tale, held in the thrall of the author. Suddenly, a blind banged to and you jumped with a start and scream, looking fearsomely into the dark corners where the light cruelly refused to penetrate.
The powerful descriptive revelation of the bungalow’s dark secret, in “The Millionaire Baby” will repeat for you that one-time experience; being older and more immured against sensations, you will only jump less high and your scream will pierce a shorter distance. But you will still glance uncomfortably over your shoulder to the mocking silence of the corner there, and exclaim, “Pshaw!” and vow to send a complaint to the gas company in the morning—”These dim lights are unbearable.” Ten chances to one, you will turn the burners higher before you settle back to the book.
The book is a work of art, but art so deftly concealed as to detract not one whit from the fictional interest of the average reader in the story. The plot is consummate merely as a plot-—an extraordinary problem in which the factors are not only numerous, but indeterminate. The author holds you back sentence by sentence until she is ready for the unfolding. This element of uncertainty leads the mind astray; yet under the manipulation of genius, the factors are capable of being worked out. to definite results. The propounding of such an equation is a work of high genius-—the solution of it, of still higher.
Events crowd each other in the book. They come down like an iron press to force out the sublimated essence of character. The characters are intensely alive in your imagination. You own them—or rather they own you—while you read the story of mystery. The baby-heir to several fortunes interests you, but it is in the drawing of Dr. Poole, and the two beautiful women—friends, but of widely different natures—that the master-touch of the artist is felt. You live in the struggle of the strange old man—physician and miser—in the religious change of heart which so works upon his overwrought mind that he becomes a frenzied fanatic, and thereby alters many destinies.
Mrs. Carew is baffling; she puzzles others beside the gentleman detective who is trying to win the $50,000 reward offered for little Gwendolen Ocumpaugh’s safe return to her distracted parents. She puzzles you and me while we endeavor to analyze her motives, and so skilful is Anna Katherine Green, that Mrs. Carew continues to puzzle us to the very last pages.
You are two thirds through the book before you realize that Mrs. Ocumpaugh is the great delineation—that the author’s tenderest touch and deepest art and finest emotion is woven round this woman, torn with the conflict of impossible conditions; and you, carried along by the writer, are conscious of overwhelming sympathy for that burdened soul, and a wish to alleviate in small measure the inevitable misery of its lot. Surrounded by every luxury, this mother is enveloped in sadness no money can remove—a tortured, storm-tossed child of circumstance, but holding her whole nature in mighty check with iron nerve until the final break comes.
All through the story, one meets evidence of the delicacy and sureness of the author in obscure things, which have the end, a bearing on some vital point. It is here that a distinct advance from some former stories is visible.
In the tale of the family tragedy, where the young wife dies from fright of the savage hound which is about to attack her no commonplace wound or. bloodshed is allowed to mar the weird and awesome impression of the confession.
And how suggestive is the incident of the bringing to Mrs. Carew’s “little Harry” of Baby Gwendolen’s favorite bed-time toy!
The bare room of the petted child. devoid of all ornaments save that of the Madonna with outstretched, protecting arms over the bed, is one little picked up thread of meaning. Later, we understand that it was a sacrifice to Nemesis.
With the exception of the love of Jean Valjean for Cosette in “Les Miserables,” there is scarcely to be found in fiction an equally masterful depiction of that love for a child which is one of the most absorbing passions of the human mind. The book is remarkable for the variety and vividness of the emotions portrayed. In the case of the detective, that of desire for gain honestly acquired. In the case of the doctor, Avarice. In the special instances of Rathbone, Mrs. Ocumpeaugh and the ancestral groom and bride of the story, that of love of man and woman. Nevertheless, the worship of a child is the dominant note of the book, and never for an instant is one permitted to escape from the central, enthralling idea.
The conception of jealousy in “The Millionaire Baby” is Spanish rather than American in its intensity, bringing to mind the poet Calderon.and Victor Hugo’s “Hermani.”
Having written a book of mystery, Anna Katherine Green was not so unwise as to let that mystery entirely escape her. The tale begins in mystery, so it apparently ends, but between the lines you and l find abundant solution and satisfaction.
Buffalo knows Mrs. Charles Rohlfs too well through the gracious personality of the girl, the woman, the author, to need superabundance of details regarding her. Her first story-writing began in early childhood, when as little girl in old No. 8 School, opposite the cemetary, covered now by the City Hall, she wrote fairy tales on the margin of her school books, beginning toward the binding side and ending at the bottom of the page.
“The first story I remember of writing,” said Mrs. Rohlfs, speaking of this period, “was a story translated into my own words, of a little boy lost in the streets of Paris by an uncle who wanted to be rid of him. The little fellow had a Robinson Crusoe experience, with Paris for the ground work instead of Crusoe’s island. It was a pretty story which someone had read to me, and I recollect being intensely interested in its dramatic possibilities even then.”
Through her “criminal romances,” as the German critics of her works are pleased to term them, Anna Katharine Green is known far and wide, but her stories of mystery, which are the outcome of a gift peculiarly her own, have reached a stage of popularity so great that the mass of readers lose sight of the great poetic endowment which Mrs. Rohlfs undeniably possesses. Among her very earliest productions was a little volume of verse—collected wanderers from her facile pen, and compiled under the name of “The Defense of the Bride.” The dramatic instinct which displays Itself in Mrs. Rohlfs’ fiction, and which is so natural to her, has twice found expression in the technical form of the drama. “Risifi’s Daughter” is a powerful tragedy of olden Florence. This play is in blank verse and has the somberness and severity of Alfieri.
The other instance is a dramatization of “The Leavenworth Case,” which was played in Brooklyn by Charles Rohlfs and Joseph Haworth.
Her lyric, ballad ballad and descriptive poetry is wide in range and strikes a varied gamut of emotion. She seems by choice to select difficult subjects and she deals with them with the fearlessness of an adept. Who shall analyze verse of such poignancy and penetration as this?
—”Do some souls,
Like the deep seashell, catch one strain
of the world’s music as it rolls,
And tranced in wonder and delight,
Fold up their bright
Warm walls about it evermore;
Content to whisper day and night,
By land and sea, the echo o’er,
Of that one instant’s joy and power.”
Hers is no swallow flight of song. It is poetry for a thinker. Beneath the pulsation of rhyme and rhythm, sweeps the deep, steadily moving undercurrent of a defined philosophy and an accurate knowledge of life.
It is not impossible that this brilliant and profound writer of fiction, whose stories are so popular as to appeal to the masses, yet afford such food for the thinker, may, in the sifting process of time, be finally estimated by her poetry.
Anna Katherine Green writes from the objective viewpoint. Her books are the direct result of indefatigable toll. The morning hours are devoted every day, in Mrs. Rohlfs Norwood Avenue home, to work, and she combines native genius with almost limitless capacity for work.
Her style is distinctively classic, and its simple art reminds us of the days or a richer and surer language than hurrying Americans fully understand. Mrs. Rohlfs accounts for this delightful uniqueness in modern expression in the following manner:
“There is a song in my brain as I write, and unless the sentence I am framing balances with the cadence of the song; I have to work at it until it does.”
This is undoubtedly why’ there is never any bathos, never any straining for a far-removed fine effect, but always an even quality of sentence-making which is admirable. You don’t have your hopes raised to high Heaven by a flight of fancy, only to see them tumble to the ground in a pitiful drop into the commonplace, when you read Anna Katherine Green.
One thing which especially holds the reader in the later writing of Anna Katherine Green is the charm of unfamiliarity which clothes her most familiar settings. You are aware that her interiors are interiors you know about; that her streets and by-ways are the streets and by-ways of the city or town wherein the plot is laid. They are true to the life. Yet over them all rests a little halo of unreality, and walking with her along the common road you are conscious of a slight mental and spiritual uplift—of a breath of the rarer essence of life. And so you are led along the way of agreeable surprise, realizing a sense of newness in everything, which is an effectual barrier to boredom.
Mrs. Rohlfs said recently, in reply to the query about her work in the near future.
“I anticipate a set of three little volumes of tales—a pocket series. One of them, I think is my strongest prose writing.”
These tales include “The Amethyst Box,” now running through Leslie’s Magazine, and “Without Codicil,” a gruesome story which will tend to keep the reader awake o’nights.
Mrs. Rohlfs is one of those strongly endowed women who have all through life “coveted earnestly the best gifts.” She has set unto her self the task of gaining what she coveted. Her special power of plot-weaving is in itself an unusual one. That it pales before the greater gift of poetic genius does not lessen the power of the other endowment.
What wonder then that the citizens of Buffalo thrill warmly with the pride of possession when the name of Mrs. Anna Katherine Green Rohlfs is voiced among them?