The World of Dornford Yates
Cost Price. By Dornford rates. (Ward Lock. 10s. 6d.)
THE whole heaven and the whole -earth were created in six days. Mr. Dornford Yates, .working more -slowly and on a less ambition' scale, has succeeded in treating and peopling a rather smaller universe in the course of twenty-nine works of fiction. It is quite a different world from the one to which most of us are accustomed ; but probably. none the worse for that. Cost Price belongs to his "Chandos series ; that is to say .it recounts a rousing adventure set in Austrii and told in the first person by Richard William Chandos, of Maintenance, in the county of Wiltshire. Chandos, it will be recalled, entered the Dornford Yates world through a chance encounter with Captain Jonathan (" Jonah ") Mansel, D.S.O., in Brooks's Club in the year 1926, an encounter which enriched this fortunate young orphan (destined for a stool in his uncle's counting house, having been sent down from Oxford "for using some avowed Communists as many thought they deserved ") to the tune of £200,000; put hug in the way of two marriages' the first to the Grand Duchess Leonk and the second to jenny, daughter of Vanity Fair ; and led to his participation in a series of hair-raising and hair-whitening adventures in Austria, Carinthia and Riechtenburg, always under the wing a "tall, grave-faced Jonah Mansel " who in his turn, was brother o Jill, Duchess of Padua, first cousin to Boy and Daphne Pleydell, aid second cousin to the immortal Major Bertram
Confirmed Dornford Yates readers will hardly require a detaileJ summary of the plot of Cost Price, for the prescription is essential'? as before, with a disputed treasure of one hundred and twenty (" Berry ") Pleydell.
sculptured jewels (" ten times as precious a thing as the world his, ever seen ") hidden in the Castle of Hohenems •' with Jonah al Chandos (complete with Bell and Carson, surely the most mow"' nen-servants in all fiction) ranged on the side of justice and Great 3ritain against a consortium of villains ; with Chandos, as usual, Joing the hard slogging and with Jonah—" those who knew him best ;ould no more read his heart than they could look through a plate ;f armour proof "—remaining enigmatically in the background, only 3ccasionally knocking a villain insensible for four or five hours ; with he Rolls working overtime, its secret lockers stuffed with weapons ; Nith Jasper and Colette, members of a chance-encountered troupe
strolling players, filling the roles of home-spun philosopher and he artless child of nature whom it is impossible not to love ; with 3oler the Bochc dealt with in the good old way ; with Colette falling n love with the incredulous Chandos (" Do you wonder that I love iou ? " "Yes," I said, "I find it remarkable.") ; with Chandos returning her love in a very gentlemanly fashion ; and with a really .errific night crossing of a water barrier near the Austro-Italian *rontier in the course of which Chandos is left hanging by his arms in a rope half-way across the gorge, Colette, complete with bag of civets, perched on his shoulders and Orris, the last of the villains, ;tinging to his legs.
Yes, it's the Dornford Yates world all right, a world whose nhabitants, thanks to a cunning manipulation of the time track, never ;et much older ; in which it is impossible to stir abroad without :tumbling on some exciting adventure ; in which right always -riumphs modestly but decisively over wrong ; in which all the men lave muscles of steel and large private incomes and all the women 'ovely faces and capacious, understanding hearts ; in which, if a car sn't a Rolls it's a Lowland ; in which foreign place-names have a 3Ieasantly English sound (Robin, Doris, Jade, Gala, Eglantine) ; in .vhich the sun is always shining ; and in which, round the next :orner, you may catch your first glimpse of the Castle of Hohenerns.
Sunk in the woods, it hung on a mountainside, commanding a smiling valley, laced by a joyous stream: the gracious curve of its -amparts swelled out of a quilt of foliage, as I have seen a tiara swell rut of a woman's hair. .. ." I do not find it in the least remarkable :hat, in the last thirty-five years, between two and three million 3ook-buyers have preferred Mr. Dornford Yates's world to the more 3rosaic place in which most of them, presumably, live their ordinary
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