THE CASUARINA TREE. By W. S. Maugham. (Heine- mann. 7s.
6d. net.)—These eight stories by Mr. Somerset Maugham all dwell upon English people living in the Malay Peninsula. Each is at once grimly dramatic and yet packed with clear observation and romance. Perhaps the most striking is "The Yellow Streak," which strips away the disguises of a man like any other Englishman to all appearance dogged by the knowledge of the strain of native blood in hi.4 veins. Stark as a newspaper murder-trial is "The Letter," with its revelation of the passions that are found lurking in the soul of a demure, mousy little woman.
All the tales are well written, far more carefully indeed than some of the author's recent fiction. The compass of a short story suits his talent well, for he can be economical, tersely vivid and yet supply all that the imagination demands. And though the local colour of the East is never obtruded, it
is of the East that his tales are compounded, and of the insoluble problems that it presents to the Westerners who, laying the foundations of Empire there, live by laws that are alien and pay a heavy penalty for their allegiance to the Anglo-Saxon code.
Mr. Maugham's study of Mr. Warburton, an almost mag- nificently immense snob, set down by fate in a position of authority far from civilization in the Malay interior, is brilliant. Stich of Warburton's energy as is not directed towards the rule of the district for which he is responsible is wholly taken up with being a gentleman of the old school, the school to which he—with his merchant blood—knew that he had never quite belonged. Sudden contact with a young and most impudently ungentlemanlike boy from England sets up sinister currents in his desiccated, pathetic soul and a tragedy follows. It is with the greatest possible ease and skill that Mr. Maugham builds up his plot compactly into a short story which is a model of form and economy, and presented with admirable point and vigour.
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