Fiction

By L. A. G. STRONG.

Snow in Harvest. BY Joanna Carman. (Hodder and Stoughton.

7s. (h.)

The Seraphim Room. By Edith Olivier. (Faber and Faber.-

BEFORE the War, Geoffrey Quarrier was in the ,Embassy at St. Petersburg. An unfortunate incident of which he was made the scapegoat resulted in his dismissal. He minded

the homecoming in disgrace badly, but even more badly he minded leaving the little dancer Tanis, whom he loved

with all the fervour of his soul, and who had done little but tantalize him. This is the prologue. Years later, Geoffrey occupies a newly-founded Chair of. Russian at Oxford. He

meets a beautiful, managing little highbrow named. Alicia, and is so imprudent as to 'fall in love with and to marry her.

Over Alicia Miss :Carman lets herself go to some effect : Alicia lived soberly, but read With bravado : from Shaw and ,lovce and Lawrenee she lied learned all about men and life ; -and her reading had made her what in the confusion of the twentieth ,-critury we call broadminded--sbe. sympathized . intensely . with thieves, perverts, regicides, black men and fallen women,- and was -nibborrily, even violently prejudiced against clergymen, colonels, .aldetes, Empire-builders and suburban -wives:" -

The marriage, though moderately successful, is hardly a

marriage Of true na. : " Alicia was deeply interested in architecture; usually a chureli ,T a castle would give theni a, motive for 'a drive ; and, as the ,venings lengthened, they .wbuld step at country -inns for tea. Alicia was an admirable companion, ready for, anything, interested in everything, not minding if it rained or you ran out of petrol or the castle was closed; and it didn't occur to Geoffrey that from a visit to the same church his mind andhers brought home vastly ,lifferent-imprassions—hers, an architectural drawing, accurate, dear and cold ; his, a Warm, blurred oil painting, which wouldn't teach you anything, but „would give you pleasure if you liked richness of colour and a reassuring subject it didn't occur to him that while, he liked tea in country inns because the butter-was hard and the tta strong andthe-place smelled of -grass and beer, she like it because she.-wail being- like Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, and not like Lord " Rethschild or the -Aga Khan : and to the end he believed that he and Allele: had had many tastes III common."

All goes more or less well, however, till chance brings to Oxford no less unlikely a person than Tania. For the results, disconcerting to Geoffrey and to Alicia, and satisfactory only to Maimie, I refer. you to Miss Cannan's well-salted

pages. Snow in Harvest finds her in excellent form. Its opening chapters exhibit one or two mannerisms which I personally found irritating, but Miss Cannan seems soon to

forget them. The paragraphs quoted above will give a taste of her quality : and she knows her Oxford uncommonly well. A witty and pleasant book, full of sound good sense that is never allowed to become solemnity.

Miss Edith Olivier has written a remarkable novel. It is not completely successful, for, as we shall see in a moment, she is guilty of strange lapses in dialogue which pull one up and destroy One's belief in the scenes where they occur ; and these lapses are the more surprising in view of the extra- ordinary conviction with which the story is told. There is an almost daemonic quality in Miss Olivier's writing, which here makes credible a tale of such a kind that, con- sidering it afterwards in cold blood, one feels it should not he credible at all. The characters live apart, in a world of their own—almost in a dimension of their own ; but they do live, and that is the point. Chilvester House, _built

by a pupil of Wren in the Cathedral Close, is inhabited by the fanatical antiquarian Mr. Chilvester and his two daughters,

One of whoni, Lilian; is-an inYalid. Chilvester's only interest is in his house: -Emily-has no interest : and Lilian lives a strange life- of her own; painting beautiful pictires in the

attic she never letives. - Trouble comes through a young architect; Christopher lionythorne, who is to design a new

schoolroom in the Close: He flirts with Emily, . till she imagines that.they are engaged, goes against Mr. Chilvester in the matter- of the. school, and, crowning misdeed, draws Municipal attention' to. tbe, fact that Chilvester House lacks drains. .ThiS kick' has killed Mr. Chilvester's two wives And is killing hig-datighters,"but he does not care. He goes to law;- and the cOmplication.s which arise develop into

what_ Might easily have been sheer melodrama, but ha Miss, Olivier's hands is something more. . Finally, Mr. Chilvester goes mad and dies.

• The modern characters, such as Christopher and the widowed.Clodia, are less convincing than the others, but with the regular. inhabitants of. the Close Miss Olivier cannot go-

wrong. She draws houses and their inhabitants with . the precision of an etching, and with the queer foreshortening. of Lilian's drawings from her attic. So strong is her control,.

that the lapses in dialogue are hard to account for. When Lilian, moved by her .sister's suffering, struggles downstairs for the first time in her life, Mr. Chilvester says, ".I-las your.. supposed inability to walk been all this time a sham ? Do

you, too, know how to deceive me ? " And later, when he is mad, the following lamentable passage occurs :

" ' The dressing gong has gone some time ag,o,' she said.

"'and where has it gone ? ' asked Mr. Chilvester.'Are you informing me that they have already buried my gong in this hole t. " Oh no, sir. It went for dinner.'

"Mr. Chilvester smiled. .

" TheriI will go for dinner, too,' he said placidly."

Such infelicities, however, do little to spoil a remarkable book.

Mr. Philip Lindsay began with an exciting novel called Panama is Burning, and follows it with a second even more exciting in promise and performance. One Dagger for Two is a tale about Christopher Marlowe. It begins on New Year's Eve, 1593, and ends with Marlowe's death in the tavern. Mr. Lindsay makes his hero love Awdrey, the' wife of his patron Thomas Walsingham ; and the story is the history of his struggle between this love and his love for Alice, a lady whose pendant he had restored to her at a gambling house. Her nature is the opposite of Awdrey's. She is his good angel, but he loses her, and it is a taunt con- cerning her from the rascally Frizer that brings him to his death. The story is told against a background of theatre and tavern, with Nashe, Peele, and Kyd appearing often, and Chapman and Shakespeare seldom. The plague rages, Elizabeth pasEei in the streets, the Golden Hind is in port ; the poets arc wenching and drinking ; there is plot and counter-plot.

Mr. Lindsay loves his Marlowe and knows his period. He

also can write ; and out of .these assets he has written a novel that has in it the promise of great things. It is im- mature, but its virtues and its faults are of the right kind. The virtues spring from a vigorous imagination and the power to write vivid, living scenes. The faults come from

over-enthusiasm, carelessness, and overmuch desire to work in some of the aforementioned vivid scenes, whether they- have anything to do with the story or not. In places Mr; Lindsay is too antiquarian, as when he annotates his descripe lions With phrases of the "for so it was then called" variety in other places, too.modern. It is legitimate enough to spice the dialogue with " Aw hell," "You are a one," "Shut up," and "Jolly pleased to see you," but not at the same time

to preserve such expressions as "Anon," " Yarely," and the like. I raise this somewhat pettifogging objection

because Mr. Lindsay's book is so good that one resents any such trivial and easily removed blemishes. Prophecy iS always dangerous, but I will .venture to predict that Mr.

Lindsay will one day be a considerable writer. • Mary Dalton, though admirable in its unassuming kind, is hardly the novel one would expect from the author of Roon. Mary's 'father is a retired sailor, whom she accom- panies in his peregrinations with a performing bear. Money is short, and so Mary leaves him and goes into service. She meets George, who is in Gents' Hosiery, and she also meets John. After a series of mild adventures she goes to town.

Ultimately, she does not marry the Worthy George. The one dramatic incident in the story, the trial of her fathet

for murder, but serves to accentuate the even tenor of the rest : just as the one occasion on which Mary shows initiative accentuates her passivity on others.- The writing is tasteful and scholarly—it could be no less. The characters arc as amiable as Ruff the bear, and all ends happily.