Chapter 4

Miss SHEILA KAYE-SMITH continues to be the chronicler and brief abstractor of Sussex country life. Her latest story, _Green Apple Harvest_ (CASSELL), may lack the brilliant focus of _Tamarisk Town_, but it is more genuine and of the soil. There indeed you have the dominant quality of this tale of three farming brothers. Never was a book more redolent of earth; hardly (and I mean this as a compliment) will you close it without an instinctive impulse to wipe your boots. The brothers are _Jim_, the eldest, hereditary master of the great farm of Bodingmares; _Clem_, the youngest, living contentedly in the position of his brother's labourer; and _Bob_, the central character, whose dark and changing fortunes make the matter of the book, as his final crop of tragedy gives to it the at first puzzling title. There is too much variety of incident in _Bob's_ uneasy life for me to follow it in detail. The tale is sad--such a harvesting of green apples gives little excuse for festival--but at each turn, in his devouring and fatal love for the gipsy, _Hannah_, in his abandonment by her, and most of all in his breaking adventures of the soul, now saved, now damned, he remains a tragically moving figure. Miss KAYE-SMITH, in short, has written a novel that lacks the sunshine of its predecessors, but shows a notable gathering of strength.

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Would you not have thought that at this date motor-cars had definitely joined umbrellas and mothers-in-law as themes in which no further humour was to be found? Yet here is Miss JESSIE CHAMPION writing a whole book, _The Ramshackle Adventure_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), all about the comical vagaries of a cheap car--a history that, while it has inevitably its dull moments, has many more that are both amusing and full of a kind of charm that the funny-book too often conspicuously lacks. I think this must be because almost all the characters are such human and kindly folk, not the lay figures of galvanic farce that one had only too much reason to expect. For example, the owner of the car is a curate, whose wife is supposed to relate the story, and _George_ has to drive the Bishop in his unreliable machine. Naturally one anticipates (a little drearily) upsets and ditches and episcopal fury, instead of which--well, I think I won't tell you what happens instead, but it is something at once far more probable and pleasant. I must not forget to mention that the cast also includes a pair of engaging lovers whom eventually the agency of the car unites. Indeed, to pass over the lady would display on my part the blackest ingratitude, since among her many attractive peculiarities it is expressly mentioned that she (be still, O leaping heart!) reads the letter-press in _Punch_.

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Mrs. EDITH MARY MOORE has devoted her great abilities to proving in _The Blind Marksman_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) how shockingly bad the little god's shooting became towards the end of last century. She proves it by the frustrated hopes of _Jane_, her heroine, who in utter ignorance of life marries a man whose pedestrian attitude of mind is quite unfitted to keep pace with her own passionate and eager hurry of idealism. She becomes household drudge to a master who cannot even talk the language which she speaks naturally, and discovers in a man she has known all her life the lover she should have married, only to lose him in the European War. Here you have both _Jane_ and the ineffective husband--for whom I was sincerely sorry, because he asked so very little of life and didn't even get that--badly left, and the case against Cupid looks black. Mrs. MOORE does what she can for him by blaming our Victorian ancestors and their habits of mind; but I think it is only fair to add that, delightful as _Jane_ is, she was not made for happiness any more than the people who enjoy poor health have it in them to be robust, and that, true as much of the author's criticism is, she has not been able to give _The Blind Marksman_, for his future improvement, any very helpful ideas as to how he is to shoot.

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The Devil, in so far as I have met him in fiction, has usually been a highly successful intriguer on behalf of anyone prepared to make the necessary bargain. Sir RONALD ROSS, however, to judge from the rather confused mediæval happenings in the Alps which are faithfully described in _The Revels of Orsera_ (MURRAY), has rather a low opinion of the intelligence of Mephistopheles. Anyhow, a certain _Zozimo_, deformed in body but of great romantic sensibility, appears to have exchanged his outward presence for that of a rich and handsome young Count, and in this guise wooed the _Lady Lelita,_ for whose sake her father had devised a magnificent contest of suitors at Andermatt in the year 1495. After a great deal of preliminary bungling the supposititious Count, with the Devil in _Zozimo's_ shape as his body-servant, was just about to secure the object of his affections when _Zozimo_ was stabbed by his mother, with the result that the double identity was fused and the _Lady Lelita_ was left with a dying dwarf as her knight. If the plot of _The Revels of Orsera_ is a little unsatisfying the elaboration of scenic description and mediæval pageantry is conscientious in the extreme, and the laughter which followed the malicious pranks of _Gangogo_, the professional jester of the tourney, must, if _I_ am to take the author's word for it, have made the glaciers ring. There is a great deal in the way of philosophy and psychology that is very baffling in this book, but of one thing I feel certain, and that is that the Elemental Spirits of the Heights, to whom frequent allusion is made, must find the winter sports of a later age a sorry substitute for the rare old frolics of the fifteenth century.

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It can at least be claimed for Mrs. MARGARET BAILLIE SAUNDERS that she has provided an original setting and "chorus" for her new novel, _Becky & Co_. (HUTCHINSON). Tales of City courtship have been written often enough, but the combination here of a millinery establishment and a community of Little Sisters of St. Francis under one roof in the Minories, gives a stimulating atmosphere to a story otherwise not specially distinguished. _Becky_ was, as perhaps you may have guessed, head of the millinery business, next door to which was housed the firm of _Ray, St. Cloud & Stiggany_, leather- dressers, the three partners in which all presently become suitors for the hand of _Becky._ This in effect is the story--under which thimble will the heart of the heroine be eventually found?--a problem that, in view of the obviously superior claims of young _St. Cloud_ over his two elderly rivals, will not leave you long guessing. An element of novel complication is however furnished by the device of making _St. Cloud_ at first engaged to _Ray's_ daughter, who, subsequently retiring into the Franciscan sisterhood, left her _fiancé_ free to become the rival of her widowed father. (As the late DAN LENO used to observe, this is a little intricate!) For the rest, as I have said, an agreeable, very feminine story of mingled sentiment, commerce and ecclesiastical interest, the last predominating.

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It is possible that _The Sea Bride_ (MILLS AND BOON) may be too violent to suit all tastes, for Mr. BEN AMES WILLIAMS writes of men primitive in their loves and hates, and he describes them graphically. The scenes of this story are set on the whaler _Sally_, commanded by a man of mighty renown in the whaling world. When we meet him he has passed his prime and has just taken unto himself a young wife. She goes with him in the _Sally_, and the way in which Mr. WILLIAMS shows how her courage increases as her husband's character weakens wins my most sincere admiration. His tale would be nothing out of the common but for his skill in giving individuality to his characters. Things happen on the _Sally_, bloodthirsty, sinister, terrible things, which the author neither glosses nor gloats over, being content to make them appear essential to the development of the story. I am going to keep my eye on Mr. WILLIAMS, chiefly because he can write enthrallingly, but partly to see if he will accept a word of advice and be a little more sparing in his use of those little dots ... which are the first and last infirmity of writers who have no sense of punctuation.

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When a young man sets out to London to make money for his relations he usually (in a novel) writes a book which sells prodigiously--quite an easy thing to do in a novel. Mr. John Wilberforce, however, avoids the beaten track in _The Champion of the Family_ (FISHER UNWIN). _Jack Brockhurst_, the champion in question, became a member of the Stock Exchange, and, if you will accept my invitation and follow his fortunes, I can promise you a fluttering time. Mr. WILBERFORCE'S name is unknown to me, and I judge him more experienced in the mysteries of the Stock Exchange than in the art of fiction; but I like his constructive ability and I like his courage. He does not hesitate to make his champion a prig, which is exactly what a youth so idolised by his family would be likely to become. But, though a prig by training, _Jack_ was not by nature a bore, and his relations (especially his father and sister) are delightful people. Altogether I find this a most promising performance.

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