Chapter 4

There were moments in _The Headland_ (HEINEMANN) when, with _Roma Lennox_, the "companion" and heroine, I "shivered, feeling that London, compared with the old house on the Headland and the family inhabiting it, was a clean place with a clear atmosphere and inhabited by robust, sane, straightforward persons. You felt homesick." Cornwall is notoriously inhabited by queer people, and the _Pendragon_ family was not merely queer but hereditarily rotten and decadent: the old father, who burns a valuable old book of his own to appease his violent temper; the granddaughter a kleptomaniac; the son of forty addicted to hideous cruelties. Unpleasant but well drawn, all of them. Mrs. C. A. DAWSON SCOTT has powerfully suggested the atmosphere of the strange and tragic household, mourning its dead mistress; and she understands the peculiar quality of the Cornish people and the Cornish seas. I have not read her other novels, but, if she will promise to wrestle with one or two rather irritating mannerisms, I will promise to look out for her next one. I have no prejudice against the Wellsian triplet of dots, but really Mrs. Scott does overdo it. And a good deal of her quite penetrating psycho-thingummy was spoiled for me by her trick of conveying nearly every impression and reflection of her characters through an impersonal "you" or "one." This means an economy of words and for a short time a certain vividness, but it soon becomes tedious. One knows what a tangle you get into if one starts using "one's" and "you's" in your letters; and you find that the author has been caught once or twice. However, the story is good enough to survive that.

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The title of _The Lady of The Lawn_ (JENKINS) has "the ornament of alliteration," but beyond that there doesn't seem to be any particular reason why Mr. W. RILEY should have chosen it. Certainly in his story there is an old lady who spends more of the winter on a lawn than any old lady of my acquaintance could be induced to, even with rugs and a summer-house to make up for the comforts of the fireside; but _Miss Barbara_ and her site really have not so much to do with the tale as its title seems to imply. The love affairs of a young officer who, while blind from wounds, fell in love with his nurse to the extent of becoming engaged to her and didn't recognise her when they met again, are Mr. RILEY'S real concern. _Eric_, who is quite as priggish as his name suggests, falls in love with his sweetheart, as a lady of leisure, all over again, and goes through agonies of remorse on account of his own faithlessness to her as a nurse. _Marion_ or _Constance_, for she uses two names to help the confusion, lets him suffer a while for the good of his soul, but the happy ending, the promise of which is breathed from every line of the book, is duly brought about. His publisher asserts that "there is no living author who writes about Yorkshire as does Mr. RILEY." I daresay he is quite right, but at least as far as the present book is concerned I don't think that I should have bothered to mention it.

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Those--and I suspect they are many--whose first real enthusiasm for ABRAHAM LINCOLN was kindled by Mr. JOHN DRINKWATER'S romantic morality play can profitably take up Mr. IRVING BACHELLER'S _A Man for the Ages_ (CONSTABLE) for an engaging account of the early days of the great Democrat. They will forgive a certain flamboyance about the author's preliminaries. Hero-worship, if the hero be worthy, is a very pardonable weakness, and they should certainly admire the skill and humour with which he has patched together, or invented where seemly, the story of lanky ABE, with his axeman's skill, his immense physical strength, his poor head for shopkeeping, his passion for books, his lean purse and "shrinking pants," his wit, courage and resource. A romance of reasonable interest and plausibility is woven round young Lincoln's story. Perhaps Mr. BACHELLER makes his hero speak a little too sententiously at times, and certainly some of his other folk say queer things, such as, "What so vile as a cheap aristocracy, growing up in idleness, too noble to be restrained, with every brutal passion broad-blown as flush as May?" What indeed! The picture of pioneering America in the thirties is a fresh and interesting one.

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To few of those who visit Switzerland, with its incomparable mountains, can it have occurred that, once a man is kept there against his will, it can be a prison as damnable as any other; possibly even more damnable by reason of those same inevitable mountains. British prisoners of war interned there knew that. Mr. R. O. PROWSE, in _A Gift of the Dusk_ (COLLINS), speaks with subtle penetration for those other prisoners, interned victims of the dreadful malady. Of necessity he writes sadly; but yet he writes as a very genial philosopher, permitting himself candidly "just that little cynicism which helps to keep one tolerant." He is of the old and entertaining school of sentimental travellers, but he is far from being old-fashioned. The story running through his observations and modern instances is so frail and delicate a thing that I hesitate to touch it and to risk disturbing its bloom. All readers, save the very young and the very old, will do well to travel with him, from Charing Cross ("I have a childlike fondness for trains. I like to be in them, I like to see them go by") to the peaceful, almost happy end, at the mountain refuge by the valley of the Rhone. They will not regret an inch of the way; and they will derive some very positive enjoyment from the picture of that most melancholy hotel where the story is set.

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A New Safety Model.

"Lady's strong cycle, 23-in. frame, 28 wheels."--_Cycling._

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From an account of the M.C.C. team's match at Colombo:

"When the unlucky thirteen was reached, Hobbs, who was sleeping finely, fell to a great catch at mid-on by Gunasekera."--_Ceylon Paper._

Happily HOBBS appears to have waked up when he got to Australia.

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