The Turnstile

The Turnstile by A.E.W. Mason (1915)

A.E.W. Mason's *The Turnstile* opens on an Argentine estancia, where Robert and Joan Daventry, prosperous English settlers weighing a return to Warwickshire, watch their dining-room chandelier swing on its own — an earthquake far off in Valparaiso. That earthquake kills the wife of James Challoner, a dismissed clerk of dubious honesty, who saves only himself and his infant daughter Doris. Finding the child a burden he cannot support but a useful "passport" for charity along the way, Challoner treks over the Andes and abandons her through the turnstile of a Buenos Ayres foundling hospital before vanishing into freedom. The Daventrys, childless and restless, adopt this same foundling, raising her in Argentina and later Warwickshire as Cynthia, believing her Robert's niece. She grows into a romantic, sheltered young woman who privately imagines an "enchanted garden" of heroic men, admitted only by her private test of worth — and the turnstile itself recurs in her private mythology as its one ugly, unexplained feature. On her seventeenth birthday at the estancia, a brutal itinerant reaper accosts her in the wheat fields, then forces his way into the house that night, revealing himself as James Challoner and demanding to reclaim his daughter — hinting at a degrading future for her. Cynthia, eavesdropping, overhears everything, including proof via the turnstile detail and a family portrait that she truly is his child. To spare the Daventrys' feelings she conceals her knowledge, and they, thinking to spare her, hide the truth as well — each keeping secrets out of love while the Daventrys flee with her to England, ostensibly over a property dispute. Cynthia lives for years under a private, unspoken terror that Challoner will return. Only when Robert Daventry lies dying does he confess the concealed history to Cynthia, unaware she already knew, and produces a newspaper cutting proving Challoner was killed in a tavern knife-fight shortly after his visit — her years of secret fear had been groundless. Robert leaves her wealthy, urges her to consult his friend Isaac Benoliel, and asks her to keep the estancia and occasionally revisit it. Joan predeceases him; Cynthia is left alone, companioned by a relation, Mrs. Diana Royle. In London society Cynthia meets Captain Harry Rames, a returned Antarctic explorer now seeking a parliamentary seat at Ludsey through Mr. Benoliel's connections, plus the politician Henry Smale and the enigmatic Benoliel himself. Cynthia is drawn to Rames as one of her imagined "heroes," but is repeatedly disillusioned by his frank admission that ambition, not principle or a "dream," drives him — he wants advancement and personal power, treating even his sentimental campaign rhetoric as calculated effect. During the Ludsey election she meets the excitable naturalized Frenchman M. Poizat and the ambitious, memory-proud Colonel Challoner — who, disconcertingly, seems to recognize Cynthia's resemblance to a family portrait, unknowingly confirming her as his own granddaughter, a connection she resolves never to reveal. A tense, mysterious clash also flares between Poizat and Colonel Challoner over a shared, apparently ominous past in Metz in 1871. Rames wins the election in a scene of civic triumph, then telephones Cynthia, sensing her reluctant, resentful gladness at his success. Alone afterward, he calculates his next necessity: since he is poor and ambitious, he must marry advantageously, and reflects that Cynthia — wealthy, distinguished, romantic though disappointed in him, and seemingly still unattached despite a London season's admirers — might suit his purposes, even as he admits he has failed to become the romantic figure she wanted.

By A.E.W. Mason · First published 1915 · Genre: Adventure, Historical Fiction, Mystery · 37 chapters · 129,199 words

First lines

At the first glance it looked as if the midnight chimes of a clock in an old city of the Midlands might most fitly ring in this history. But we live in a very small island, and its inhabitants have for so long been wanderers upon the face of the earth that one can hardly search amongst them for the beginnings of either people or events without slipping unexpectedly over the edge of England. So it is in this instance. For, although it was in England that Captain Rames, Mr. Benoliel, Cynthia, the little naturalized Frenchman, and the rest of them met and struggled more or less inefficiently to express themselves; although, too, Ludsey, the old city, was during a period the pivot of their lives; for the beginnings of their relationship one with another, it is necessary to go further afield, and back by some few years.

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asked · back · benoliel · came · challoner · come · could · cynthia · daventry · day · eyes · face

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