Mr. Carteret and Others — Key Ideas to Explore

(0 User reviews) 601

In Category - Historical Psychological Social Fiction

Authors: Gray, David, 1870-1968 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2022 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: England -- Fiction; Americans -- England -- Fiction; Fox hunting -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 34,828

Reading time 152 min

Text sections 5

Mr. Carteret and Others — Key Ideas to Explore can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 34,828 words, 2 hr 32 min estimated reading time, and 5 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 11.9 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 “England -- Fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #68051

David Gray's linked stories follow American expatriate Mr. Carteret through English fox-hunting society, where clipped dialogue and abrupt shifts in pace reveal unspoken tensions beneath polite banter.

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: pg68051

Read the Text

lized it when he bent over her 97

Evanston and his wife were sitting side by side upon the couch 151

The lawyer’s mouth became grim 175

There was a crash of glass 179

“Did you remove the shoes of the honorable young foreign lady?” 215

MR. CARTERET AND HIS FELLOW AMERICANS ABROAD

“It must have been highly interesting,” observed Mrs. Archie Brawle; “so much pleasanter than a concert.”

“Rather!” replied Lord Frederic. “It was ripping!”

Mrs. Ascott-Smith turned to Mr. Carteret. She had been listening to Lord Frederic Westcote, who had just come down from town where he had seen the Wild West show. “Is it so?” she asked. “Have you ever seen them?” By “them” she meant the Indians.

“It seems so odd,” continued Mrs. Archie Brawle, “that they should ride without saddles. Is it a pose?”

“No, I fancy not,” replied Lord Frederic.

“They must get very tired without stirrups,” insisted Mrs. Archie. “But perhaps they never ride very long at a time.”

“That is possible,” said Lord Frederic doubtfully. “They are only on about twenty minutes in the show.”

Mr. Pringle, the curate, who had happened in to pay his monthly call upon Mrs. Ascott-Smith, took advantage of the pause. “Of course, I am no horseman,” he began apprehensively, “and I have never seen the red Indians, either in their native wilds or in a show, but I have read not a little about them, and I have gathered that they almost live on horseback.”

Major Hammerslea reached toward the tea table for another muffin and hemmed. “It is a very different thing,” he said with heavy impressiveness. “It is a very different thing.”

The curate looked expectant, as if believing that his remarks were going to be noticed. But nothing was farther from the Major’s mind.

“What is so very different?” inquired Mrs. Ascott-Smith, after a pause had made it clear that the Major had ignored Pringle.

“It is one thing, my dear Madame, to ride a stunted, half-starved pony, as you say, ‘bareback,’ and another thing to ride a conditioned British hunter (he pronounced it huntaw) without a saddle. I must say that the latter is an impossibility.” The oracle came to an end and the material Major began on the muffin.

There was an approving murmur of assent. The Major was the author of “Schooling and Riding British Hunters”; however, it was not only his authority which swayed the company, but individual conviction. Of the dozen people in the room, excepting Pringle, all rode to hounds with more or less enthusiasm, and no one had ever seen any one hunting without a saddle and no one had ever experienced any desire to try the experiment. Obviously it was an absurdity.

“Nevertheless,” observed Lord Frederic, “I must say their riding was very creditable--quite as good as one sees on any polo field in England.”

Major Hammerslea looked at him severely, as if his youth were not wholly an excuse. “It is, as I said,” he observed. “It is one thing to ride an American pony and another to ride a British hunter. One requires horsemanship, the other does not. And horsemanship,” he continued, “which properly is the guiding of a horse across country, requires years of study and experience.”

Lord Frederic looked somewhat unconvinced but he said nothing.

“Of course the dear Major (she called it deah Majaw) is unquestionably right,” said Mrs. Ascott-Smith.

“Undoubtedly,” said Mr. Carteret. “I suppose that he has often seen Indians ride?”

“Have you often seen these Indians ride?” inquired Mrs. Ascott-Smith of the Major.

“Do you mean Indians or the Red Men of North America?” replied the Major. “And do you mean upon ponies in a show or upon British hunters?”

“Which do you mean?” asked Mrs. Ascott-Smith.

“I suppose that I mean American Indians,” said Mr. Carteret, “and either upon ponies or upon British hunters.”

“No,” said the Major, “I have not. Have you?”

“Not upon British hunters,” said Mr. Carteret.

“But do you think that they could?” inquired Lord Frederic.

“It would be foolish of me to express an opinion,” replied Mr. Carteret, “because, in the first place, I have never seen them ride British hunters over fences--”

“They would come off at the first obstacle,” observed the Major, more in sorrow than in anger.

“And in the second place,” continued Mr. Carteret, “I am perhaps naturally prejudiced in behalf of my fellow countrymen.”

Mrs. Ascott-Smith looked at him anxiously. His sister had married a British peer. “But you Americans are quite distinct from the red Indians,” she said. “We quite understand that nowadays. To be sure, my dear Aunt--” She stopped.

“Rather!” said Mrs. Archie Brawle. “You don’t even intermarry with them, do you?”

Continue Reading →

David Gray's Mr. Carteret and Others opens with a drawing-room conversation that immediately establishes its method: a cluster of characters talk past one another, their remarks landing with comic imprecision. Mrs. Archie Brawle wonders whether Indians ride without saddles as a pose; Lord Frederic answers doubtfully; the curate ventures a bookish observation that is ignored; Major Hammerslea pronounces heavily on nothing. The scene is a small masterpiece of misdirected speech, each line a little off-target, and it sets the tone for a collection in which what is not said—or said at cross-purposes—matters as much as the action.

The Weight of Unfinished Sentences

Gray's dialogue depends on interruption and trailing-off. Characters rarely complete a thought: the Major's repeated “It is a very different thing” hangs in the air, refusing to explain itself. Later, when Mr. Carteret tells Miss Rivers “Wynford is a good man—a good man,” the repetition and the dash signal discomfort, not conviction. These verbal tics accumulate, creating a texture of evasion. The narrator does not gloss the emotions; the reader infers them from what is left unsaid. In the locket scene, Carteret's “I see” followed by “He did not see at all” is the narrator's only explicit comment—a rare moment of direct insight that underscores how much is ordinarily withheld.

Pace as a Tool of Tension

The stories alternate between leisurely social tableaux and sudden, compressed revelations. The opening tea-party moves at a deliberate, almost static pace—each character taking their turn, the curate's interruption punctually ignored. But the later excerpt from the locket episode accelerates sharply: sentences shorten, dialogue becomes terse, and physical actions—bowing, crossing to the door, hiding the face—replace exposition. Gray uses this gear-shift to signal emotional crisis. The drive home from Crumpelow Hill is described in a single, compressed paragraph; the moment Miss Rivers calls Carteret back is rendered in staccato exchanges. The effect is that of a held breath suddenly released.

Setting as a Mirror for Voice

The fox-hunting world is not mere backdrop; it inflects the way characters speak and judge one another. Major Hammerslea's pronunciation of “hunter” as “hun-ter” is a class marker, and the Americans' foreignness is measured by their relation to English country life. Mrs. Ascott-Smith's question about Indians—"Is it so?"—betrays a polite incomprehension that mirrors the larger cultural gap. Gray does not explain the rituals of the hunt; he lets them emerge through dialogue, so that the reader, like the Americans, must piece together the codes. The setting thus becomes a pressure on the language: characters define themselves by what they know or pretend to know about horses, packs, and saddles.

Because the excerpts are drawn from the first and third stories, the full arc of Mr. Carteret's relationships—and the function of the “others” named in the title—remains partially hidden. Readers should attend to the way Gray uses repeated motifs (the locket, the horse, the interrupted declaration) across stories, and to how the narrative voice shifts between ironic distance and sudden intimacy. The book rewards attention to its silences.

There’s a particular silence in Mr. Carteret’s world—the pause between foxhounds and a lifted eyebrow—that reminds me of another, softer quiet. In The Little French Girl, that same unspoken weight lingers between characters, though the landscape shifts from hunting fields to drawing rooms. I found myself thinking of it long after closing the book, which felt familiar. The Little French Girl — A Reader’s Guide holds that memory gently, like a well-worn photograph.