Jinny the Carrier
By
Israel Zangwill
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
EPISTLE DEDICATORY
Dear Mistress of Bassetts,
You and Audrey have so often proclaimed the need—inour world of sorrow and care—of a “bland” novel,defining it as one to be read when in bed with a sore throat,that as an adventurer in letters I have frequently felttempted to write one for you. But the spirit blowethwhere it listeth, and seemed perversely to have turnedagainst novels altogether, perhaps because I had beenlabelled “novelist,” as though one had set up a factory.(Two a year is, I believe, the correct output.) However,here is a novel at last—my first this century—and thereis a further reason for presuming to associate you with it,because it is largely from the vantage-point of your Essexhomestead that I have, during the past twenty years,absorbed the landscape, character, and dialect which finallyinsisted on finding expression, first in a little play, and nowin this elaborate canvas. How often have I passed overHigh Field and seen the opulent valley—tilth and pastureand ancient country seats—stretching before me like a greatpoem, with its glint of winding water, and the exquisiteblue of its distances, and Bassetts awaiting me below,snuggling under its mellow moss-stained tiles, a true Englishhome of “plain living and high thinking,” and latterly of therural Muse! I can only hope that some breath of the inspirationwhich has emanated from Bassetts in these latterdays, and which has set its picturesquely clad poetessesturning rhymes as enthusiastically as clods, and weavingrondels as happily as they bound the sheaves, has beenwafted over these more prosaic pages—something of that“wood-magic” which your granddaughter—soul of theidyllic band—has got into her song of your surroundings.
The glint of blue where the estuary flows,
Or a shimmering mist o’er the vale’s green and gold:
A little grey church which ’mid willow-trees shows;
A house on the hillside so good to behold
With its yellow plaster and red tiles old,
The clematis climbing in purple and green,
And down in the garden ’mid hollyhocks bold
Sit Kathleen, Ursula, Helen, and Jean.
And yet it must not be thought that either “Bassetts”or “Little Baddow” figures in the “Little Bradmarsh”of my s