Hope Against Hope and other stories by Stella Benson (1931)

This was published as a limited edition of 670 copies, all signed by the author, by Macmillan. It contains six stories, which all have in common either a holiday feel, an island location, or a setting outside the Anglo usual, enmeshed in the natural world. But, of course, being Benson, they deal with a firm contrast to this background: her characters are "characters" in casual parlance. Odd, whimsical, slightly offkey people. Often with obsessed minds, or ludicrous flaws of character, and pushed to an unexpected breaking point by exposure to testing realities. Looking small in their silliness, and yet representing us all in their peculiarity, foregrounded and looming large. Hope Against Hope pits a needy, dithering nurse against a hard-mouthed, unforgiving patient in a coastal nursing home. Her unwanted false jollying of him belies a passionate nature which is grimly revealed in an inept suicide attempt. Submarine has a wealthy couple diving in the Caribbean, where, in a spasm of underwater panic and dislocation, the wife betrays a long-subdued sense of guilt over the sacking of a thieving servant. Her crazed imagining that their guide and oxygen-supplier is the long-gone servant's son intent on cutting off their supply in revenge for his mother's dismissal, is revealed as nonsense, but reveals her perfectly. Hairy Carey's Son has the son of a presumed Caribbean pirate who barely knew his aged father visiting for the first time the scene of his father's supposed outrages, with an idea in the back of his mind that he has the clue to the discovery of a lost treasure. His utterly inept journey through the island on a wild goose chase very nearly costs him his life. An Out-Islander Comes In sketches the story of Rose from Liver Island in the Caribbean who has done the unimaginable in that inbred spot - she's married an outsider, an American no less. On her first foray off the island with her new husband she gets fuzzily lost in the capital of the island group. Everyone looks the same to her; her mind is so untutored in worldliness that even her husband fades into the crowd. On the Contrary is set on a cruise in the Red Sea. Leonard Lumley is a classic example of the winning out of delivery over content. He has the commanding manner. He has an answer and a homily to promote in every situation. The problem is, his actual understanding and capacity draggle on far behind his advertising. He perfunctorily leads an excursion party of the well-to-do passengers to the baking sands of Arabia, with hilarious unintended consequences. Finally, by far the most impressive piece is The Desert Islander. A young Russian Foreign Legionnaire, dirty and flea-infested, with a badly injured leg, turns up at the remote home of a British official deep in warring southern China. He is a 'desert islander' by nature - an extreme individualist, dogmatic and well in need of flattery for his unusual ideas. Mr White is a typical empire Brit of his era: neat, unemotional, effortlessly superior - almost guaranteed to be Constantine's nemesis. He quickly realises that Constantine must be got to hospital as his leg is dangerously gangrenous. Their manic car ride on bullock tracks through pouring monsoon is truncated at the first town as brigands have taken out all the bridges further on. The only way for Constantine to carry on is by river. By now he and White are wrapped in a terrible unspoken fight for supremacy; the tension, the war, Constantine's fear for his life, and, mostly, their ineffable difference of character, approach, everything, taking its toll. As Constantine is pushed off in his hired sampan amid a hail of gunshot from the forest-covered hills, White seems to fall forward in prayer at seeing him off successfully. But then he falls forward a bit more, and finally his neat, tidy body slumps down awkwardly, his hair draggling in the water - he's been hit. Constantine, having seemed, to his own irritation, the loser in their contest, has now 'won', though in this awful context. It's a moving piece. All of these, perhaps with the exception of An Out-Islander Comes In, which is a little sketchy and not so satisfying, are original, striking work in what can be understood to be the later Benson style. This is where her originality is still in play, but the fantasy and wide-eyedness of earlier works have been significantly tamed and replaced with a more worldly cynicism.