Against the Tide — Reading Notes

(2 User reviews) 573

In Category - Historical Psychological Social Fiction

Authors: Bedford-Jones, H. (Henry), 1887-1949 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2022 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction; Businessmen -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 75,662

Reading time 329 min

Text sections 7

This digital edition of Against the Tide — Reading Notes is described by source-level measurements including 75,662 words, 5 hr 29 min estimated reading time, and 7 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 12.2 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #67269

An editorial note examining H. Bedford-Jones's use of contrasting speech patterns, symbolic light, and withheld knowledge in the opening chapters of a 1924 novel about marriage, business, and suspicion in Evansville and New York.

Editorial Edition Score 4.7/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg67269

Read the Text

Macgowan was impressive. More impressive than J. Fortescue Deming, in whose features the Deming Food Products Company had seared deep lines; more impressive than Deming's business directors and social friends here gathered; more impressive by far than young Armstrong, whose financial genius was making its mark so rapidly.

Despite the gray at his temples, Lawrence Macgowan possessed a charm of personality, a steely keenness of intellect, a direct force of character, which dominated all who came in contact with him. Being quite used to making this impression, he made it the more readily. Men said of Macgowan that he disdained politics, had refused a supreme court appointment, and preferred corporation law to marriage as a means of advancement. True,--perhaps. Among the doctors of the law, among those upright ones who lived rigorously by legal ethics and by ethical illegality, Macgowan moved as a very Gamaliel, honored in the Sanhedrim and respected by all those whose fortunes his brain had made.

Men said, too, that some day he would set that brain to making his own fortune.

"Then," Dorothy was inquiring, "you and Reese are looking this very minute for some new business to take hold of? And you haven't found one?"

Macgowan evaded, smilingly. His whole person seemed to radiate that smile as some rich crystal radiates and warms the sunlight, and when he thus smiled all the strong lines of his face were softened; his level gaze lost its almost harsh intensity and became winning, genial, intimate.

"We're not looking, exactly," he said. "You see, we're more sought after than seeking--though I should not include myself. Reese is the whole thing. It's his genius that is the very breath of life in Consolidated. Do you know that he's put nearly sixteen thousand investors on our books by his sheer selling ability? He has actually sold himself to them. All small ones, people who can invest only a few hundred dollars each year. That is more than an accomplishment; it is a triumph!"

The girl's cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes shone like stars.

"But it's your help, your faith and backing, which made such big things possible for him. To think that he's been in New York only a year or two! To think where he will be after ten years--" Dorothy broke off, caught her breath sharply, and laughed at her own enthusiasm. "Oh, I'm intoxicated with the very thought of what he's accomplished and what he will accomplish! Now tell me about the companies you-all handle. Do you buy them and then sell them later for more money?"

Macgowan shook his head. "No. A manufacturing concern, let us say, is poorly managed yet essentially sound. We buy it. We reorganize it. Consolidated Securities owns it and continues to own it. A minority of the stock is sold to our investors, to the people who own Consolidated stock. It is their privilege to buy stock in this subsidiary company--"

"The preferred stock?" cut in Dorothy. Macgowan chuckled at her sapient air.

"Yes. Two shares and no more to each investor, but with these two shares goes one share of common at a nominal valuation. Suppose we start or reorganize two or three such companies in the course of a year--and we hope to do better than that--the chances are very good for our investors. Consolidated sells the stock, owns the subsidiary company, runs it! Thus, Consolidated must make sure that the company will not fail but succeed. The investor shares the profit with Consolidated; also, he shares Consolidated's profit from the whole group of companies. You see the idea?"

Dorothy nodded quickly, then was checked by Macgowan's air.

"There's just one thing." His tone was hesitant, embarrassed. Her eyes leaped to his face; his voice seemed to bring a swift apprehension into her mind.

"Yes?" she urged him with an eager word.

"There is one thing--" Macgowan was unaccountably at a loss for speech; to any who knew him well, an astounding thing. "You understand, the success of Reese Armstrong means everything to me; I may call myself his closest friend, at least in New York. And I know, my dear, that with you at his elbow, with your faith and help behind him, he is invincible."

Suspense flashed into the girl's eyes. This prelude, this slightly frowning air of embarrassment, hinted at some portentous secret.

"Yes?" she prompted again.

The lawyer regarded her a long moment, his eyes gravely steady.

"Well, there is one thing I want to say to you; that's why I dragged you away for a few moments. Yet I don't want to offend you, my dear."

"You won't--it's a promise! What is it?"

Continue Reading →

From its first sentence, Against the Tide establishes a world where surfaces are deliberately misleading. The Deming mansion is “ablaze with light from cellar to attic,” yet the morning is “deeply gloomy and ominous”—a juxtaposition that recurs throughout the excerpts. Bedford-Jones (writing as John Wycliffe) uses weather and illumination not as mere atmosphere but as a structural device: the thunderclouds over the Ohio mirror the hidden tensions within the wedding party, while the electric clusters and crystal prisms suggest a brittle, artificial brightness that cannot dispel the coming storm.

Dialect as Social Cartography

The author’s ear for speech is immediately evident in the wedding scene. He contrasts “crisply concise northern speech” with “the softer slur of southern accents,” positioning Evansville as a border city that “drinks of its best from either section.” This is not idle description; it establishes a linguistic fault line that will later fracture along class and moral lines. When Dorothy’s mother, Mrs. Deming, speaks of her husband’s loss of the company, her tone is “perfectly casual,” yet her words carry a weight that Dorothy finds “terrible because so innocent.” Bedford-Jones trusts the reader to hear the difference between what is said and what is meant—a technique he sustains through Slosson’s evasive “let the dead bury their dead” and Armstrong’s buoyant, businesslike chatter.

The Architecture of Suspicion

Dorothy’s internal state is rendered through a series of physical and spatial cues. She is led to a “window-nook” to hear Macgowan’s praise of Armstrong, a semi-private space that foreshadows the half-truths she will later inhabit. The narrative voice shifts fluidly between external observation and Dorothy’s mounting unease: “Upon her spirit settled the old haunting terror, with the clear-cut vividness of some horrible dream.” Bedford-Jones avoids direct psychological exposition, instead letting the reader infer her turmoil from her searching glances and her inability to speak. The repeated phrase “suspicion—of her husband!” is set off by dashes, mimicking the staccato rhythm of a mind recoiling from its own conclusions.

Objects That Betray

Material details carry narrative weight. The “scarlet coats of tapestried huntsmen, pursuing stags through indefinite forests of Gobelin weave” are not decorative; they evoke a world of pursuit and hidden violence. The Deming mansion itself, with its “twelve-foot ceilings” and “tinkling prisms,” becomes a character—a relic of past prosperity that now houses a wedding shadowed by financial loss. When Mrs. Deming mentions the house will be “in dreadful shape” during their European trip, the remark seems trivial, but it echoes the larger decay of the family’s fortunes. Bedford-Jones uses these objects to ground abstract anxieties in tangible, often domestic, settings.

Withheld Knowledge and Narrative Gaps

The excerpts are structured around what is not said. Macgowan’s earlier words to Dorothy are never fully quoted; we only learn that they were “malicious” and that she seized on them “with an avid, fierce exultancy.” The exact nature of the “change of management” at Food Products remains opaque, filtered through Dorothy’s incomplete understanding. Bedford-Jones withholds the full backstory, forcing the reader to share Dorothy’s uncertainty. This technique creates a tension that is never fully resolved in the provided text—a deliberate choice that mirrors the novel’s title: the tide of suspicion rises even as the characters struggle against it.

Readers approaching Against the Tide should attend to the spaces between lines—the half-finished sentences, the glances exchanged, the objects that seem to carry more meaning than their owners admit. Bedford-Jones builds his drama not through action but through the slow accumulation of doubt, and the excerpts suggest a novel that rewards careful attention to voice and setting. The full work may clarify or complicate the suspicions planted here; the evidence alone points to a writer in firm control of his craft.

There’s something about how Bedford-Jones lets suspicion creep in slowly, through silence and small gestures. It reminded me of another story where what isn’t said carries the weight. The coming — Inside the Classic stayed with me the same way, that quiet unease lingering long after the pages close.