Short Story Review D H Lawrence Second Best

SHORT STORY REVIEW – D. H. LAWRENCE – SECOND BEST 1914 – Various collections.

Two young ladies, sisters, one, the older girl, Frances, visiting the Midlands from Liverpool, discuss boys and wander through the countryside. Anne, the younger girl, just fourteen, is upset that Tom, a farm-boy who had caught her a rabbit to keep as a pet, had then run off to a dance with a serving girl instead of taking her as he had promised. Frances copes well with listening to the story as she too has a crush on Tom, and a more realistic chance of getting to date him, being older.

The girls catch a wild mole, and contemplate killing it for the damage it does to the land, but they are initially unable to deliver the fatal blow until the mole bites Anne while trying to escape and she kills it in a fit of rage.

When the girls meet Tom, Anne tries to impress him by showing him the dead mole, but he treats the incident with cold indifference and cynicism. He uses the situation to help seduce Frances instead, teasing her that she might not kill a mole so easily until she insists that she could, and then he kisses her.

They agree that they must now discuss their relationship with Frances’s parents.

A strangely incomplete fragment, which doesn’t give us Anne’s reaction to the development of the sudden relationship between her sister and the farm-boy. Given that the story built up her crush on Tom, she should be very upset to find Frances getting to date him, but Lawrence fails to record any aspect of this, leaving the story under-developed.

Anne’s impetuous spoilt cruel child like nature is what makes her lose out in the grown up behaviour going on round her, but Frances shows signs of having a similar cold brutal inhuman edge within her too, while Tom seems rather opportunistic. Not one of Lawrence’s better works. I just felt sorry for the mole.

Full text to the story - http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301501h.html#C06

Arthur Chappell