One day, Brian meets Mr. Wellesley, a partner of the firm of Wellesley and Milligan, Eastern merchants and shippers. He takes a fancy to Brian and gives him a job with his firm out East.
Brian arrives in Rangoon where he is met by Mr. Dupont, a future colleague, who takes him to have a drink at the Silver Grill. There, Mr. Dupont points out a half-caste girl, Norah.
Brian then goes on to the Chummery, where he meets Mr. Royard, Mr. Mountjoy and Mr. Milligan and his daughter, Mary.
Royard falls ill and Brian takes over the books; he discovers that Dupont is, in secret, owing the firm hundreds of rupees. He is dismissed and, after he has gone, Brian goes to break the news to Norah, who is heart-broken.
The same evening, he is introduced by Major Healdingham to Helen O’Connor, Lord Kildare’s only daughter. He goes to dinner with her and her father the next day and, on his return to the Chummery, finds a police inspector waiting for him. The inspector tells him that Norah has committed suicide and, as a letter from him was found at her home, suggests that he may know something about it. Brian denies this and Lord Kildare backs him up at the inquest next day, having overheard Brian break the news of Dupont’s sudden departure to Norah at the Thursday Club.
Brian meets Helen again that night. He offers her a cigarette as they sit waiting for her father. And as he flicks the case open, a snapshot of Felicity falls out.
‘What a pretty kid,’ Helen remarks casually. ‘Is it your sister?’
Brian said: ‘I never had any sisters. That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’
Leaning back beside Helen, he told her about Felicity. He did not find it easy to talk of her.
Helen held the snapshot in her hand, and smiled at it, her eyebrows raised.
‘What a child. And how pretty. Like a sprig of apple blossom. So this is your first love?’
‘My first and only love,’ he said.
She gave him back the picture without comment. All that evening she was so gentle and dignified, and behaved so beautifully, although amongst the guests there were at least two people she disliked cordially, that her father wondered anxiously whether she was quite well. Brian went home that night in the best of spirits, feeling he had made a wonderful friend.
And he sat up late, writing with the greatest lightheartedness to Felicity, and told her the whole story of Norah, with certain omissions, because one longed to spare Felicity all the worst bits of life.
-----
Well, I thought, turning the page of my mother’s Miss Modern magazine of February 1931 (Special Fiction Number, price 6d), this is a tale of estimable brevity ... and what a bitterly sarcastic sting to its tale.
Then I noticed the shift from present tense to past tense, and the significant gap in the text across which the time travelling reader must leap.
Then it dawned on me! How foolish I’d been. That first column was really just a NOW READ ON style of résumé to assist readers to catch up with the beginning of the tale published in the previous issue!
Oh! I was disappointed. I truly thought I had stumbled across the earliest specimen of women’s flash fiction. Of course, on the next page the tale continued for a further nine columns, ending with ...
(To be continued)
My thoughts turned to the authoress. Was she a recognised authority on the Far East? From the context, it would seem so. And so it proved.
Dorothy Black (1890-1977) turns out to be Dorothy MacLeish, a British writer of over 100 romance novels and several short stories from 1916 to 1974 under her maiden name Dorothy Black and as Peter Delius. Because of her husband’s job, she moved to Rangoon, Burma, where she started to publish fiction. In Burma she raised her children, using this setting and India as inspiration for many of her novels.
In 1934 she published anonymously Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman, a significant account of British colonial racism, still being reprinted into the late twentieth century.
So the fates of outsider Norah and the disgraced Dupont gain deeper resonances when we consider that this serialised romance, billed as the ‘glamour of the East’, was actually an offshoot of a serious anthropo-sociological study (albeit dressed up as fiction) from a writer clearly warranting more critical notice than that she commanded as vice-president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
However, I am certain that Dorothy must have been supremely content to write at last an anti-romance, without omissions, designed calculatedly not to spare readers of the exotic, such as her Felicity, the worst bits of life.
