The Cassowary; What Chanced in the Cleft MountainsWaterloo, Stanley
General
The Cassowary; What Chanced in the Cleft Mountains
Waterloo, Stanley
Love stories; Railroad travel -- Fiction; Storytelling -- Fiction
"I can at least tell you about the 'Lowry-Turck Entanglement,' for I was
familiar with the circumstances." Then she continued:
THE LOWRY-TURCK ENTANGLEMENT
Apropos of the affair of Harvey Lowry and Angeline Turck, as also
apropos of many other affairs of similar nature, it is very much to be
feared that one of the proverbs is unreliable. "Necessity is the mother
of invention" comes off the tongue glibly enough, but why "mother"? What
rules the camp, the court, the grove, and what makes the world go
around? What but love, and is not Love, when personified, a male? And
has he not been the cause of more inventions than have all others
combined? Certainly it was he who suggested an invention of the
Lowry-Turck love affair. He is Necessity disguised; and he is not a
mother.
Of course Love need not grumble. He is no worse off than are other
fathers. If a boy becomes famous in the world the fact is attributed to
his noble mother; if he becomes infamous, the community says, "Like
father, like son"--which is hardly fair. Fathers are useful. Not only
did every person who ever invented anything have a father, but without
the father romance would be robbed of one of its most useful and
steadfast figures. These remarks, prefacing a love story, may be
didactic and ponderous and prosy, but they are true.
It is true, as well, that, though this is a love story pure and simple,
Mr. Turck, the father in the case, may, in a sense, be looked upon as
among the characters who belong to the world of romance, for he was the
very personification of one accepted type of parent in love stories,
being perverse, tyrannical and hard-hearted, looking upon lovers as the
ranchman does on wolves, and resolved to keep his daughter to himself
indefinitely. He had a red face, tufts of side whiskers which grew out
nearly at right angles, and a bellowing voice which would have made his
fortune as skipper of a sailing craft in noisy seas. It was, perhaps,
such men as Mr. Turck who brought the father into disrepute before the
first romance was written, and there is little doubt, too, that it has
been such daughters as Angeline Turck who have innocently aggravated the
father's already uncertain temper and thus made his name the byword it
has become--in fiction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account