The Man Who Missed the 'Bus by Stella Benson (1928)

There is no question about it - this story is a classic and deserves a place it does not currently occupy. It should be in any respectable anthology of the best of the twentieth century. Herbert Robinson is a typical Benson creation - enormously fallible, cranky and sweet by turns, full of contrasting confidence and squashedness. His experience at an hotel in Provence, in a little white hilltop village, unfolds magnificently under Benson's startlingly able control. It begins with his frustrations with others, his virginity and fascination with things rather than people. It develops with a lovely trope of never being able to see, through too much shadow or too much blinding light in every situation, the faces of anyone around him, analogising his groping search for the meaning of humanity, which he sees as metaphorically and literally always having its back to him. It runs to a point of diversion, where he sits in a wood above the hotel, communing in the half light with a mouse family between some tree-roots. It ends in a calamity. All these elements are fused with prose which is tender, personal and delicate, and then eerie, dramatic and poetic by turns. There are wonderful observations hidden in these relatively plain sentences, filaments of gold woven through a narrative which is masterly.