When I got to the end of Chapter 19, I said “Ohhhhhh shit” because my friends? The idyll (??) portion of Elinor Glyn’s masterpiece, Three Weeks, has finally ended. The drama has begun.
Because after yet another (argh) night of floral scents and uncontained passion, the Lady blows this popsicle stand. Paul is so distraught about her sudden departure that he falls into a desperate illness–brain fever! This sounds like a very real thing that real humans suffer from, and not a nonsense invented by Elinor Glyn as a convenient plot device for her extremely silly novel.
Have any of you who read crept back to life from nearly beyond the grave? Crept back to find it shorn of all that made it fair? After hours of delirium to awaken in great weakness to a sense of hideous anguish and loss—to the prospect of days of aching void and hopeless longing, to the hourly, momentary sting of remembrance of things vaster than death, more dear than life itself?
NO I HAVE NOT AND NEITHER HAS PAUL. His father comes out to England to care for him and gets the whole story out of Paul’s valet Tompkins, who I THOUGHT we were going to learn was extremely discreet, but who in fact is like “oh yeah she was real hot, she had these foreign servants, her husband’s maybe a King, idk.”
The one thing that actually really worked for me is that Paul has this little dog back in England named Pike that he’s very fond of? And he’s shown a picture of Pike to the Lady and she thought Pike was real cute? So when she leaves, she sends back a letter expressing her affection and the gift of a beautiful, fancy dog collar for Pike. That is legitimately nice. Paul’s father is not the only one who felt emotional about it.
So Paul and his father and the blabbermouth valet take a ship around the coast of Italy. The captain of it hears that Paul is grieving a failed love affair and says, quite rightly, “Damned kittle cattle!” This is my verdict of the entire book, in fact. Presented without comment in this description of how Paul occupies his days aboard ship:
For the last evenings, as the moon had grown larger, Paul had been strangely restless. It seemed as if he preferred to tire himself out with unnecessary rope-pulling.
After a long trip around the coast of Italy in which Paul does nothing but mope and mope and pull his rope, they get home for his birthday party, about which he is an absolute wet week. Allegedly, however, his time with the fascinating (debatable) Lady has turned him into a true man of the world, deeply refined and eloquent, the sort of person on whose word everyone hangs. Of course, we don’t get any evidence of this. Elinor Glyn just tells us that he gave an incredible speech to his father’s tenants, but she doesn’t quote it at all. This is a great call, because she is in no way capable of writing an inspiring holiday speech. Just, how are we supposed to believe in this? HOW CAN I TRUST YOU, ELINOR GLYN???
Okay, friends, there is one more week of Glynalonging. So far nobody has been stabbed. I await the stabbings that I SWEAR TO GOD HAD BETTER ARRIVE in the final portion of this book.
(Thanks to Alice for hosting!!)