Fiction

By L. A. G. STRONG.

There and Back. By Ada Harrison. (Dent. 7s. 6d.)

They Winter Abroad. By James Aston. (Chatto and Windus.

75. 6d.)

There and Back is one of the most unassuming and delightful books I have ever read. It is frankly, but not at all self- consciously, a feminine book ; and this absence of self-con- sciousness is one of its Many attractions. So many feminine books are deliberately, offensively or defensively, feminine : which is another way of saying that they are all the time conscious of masculine standards. The real (collective) achievement of women in fiction dates from the time when they began to use and enjoy their own standards, forgetting Dr. Johnson, and bringing to the practice of their art the qualities which have, in so short a time, extended its compass and deepened its variety. Women have now no need to prove that they can do this, that or the other thing as well as a man, and can therefore go about their proper business in their proper way. There and Back is a book no man could have written. It is a novel, in the sense that it deals with emotions and ideas. In form, it is a travel book. Two married women of thirty go to Venice together for a holiday. They like one another, and they talk freely. The book is a sort of informal diary kept by one of them. Its quality can only be indicated by quotation. The friends are in the train, settling for the night : " Her idiotic femininity and her presence with its long legs and red slippers are a delight to me. Moat likely the source of my delight is the excitement of talking, of probing through the new Soil, and the excitement of finding that on this little trip scheduled to be thrilled and free, I feel already thrilled and free. In my mind, stored up for happy reference, is a picture of my children, a little pyramid of farewell piled up inside the ground-floor window. I have not begun to miss them yet, so am simply charmed, not moved, by the picture. Intrinsically partial as I am, I doubtless see the qualities in them that I wish to see, but they do seem to possess m a high degree the touching, elfish, robin-like essence of childhood. They have little tight round heads. Their gaze is unutterably deep and clear. They are not sad at the parting. They have been rushed indoors out of the rain, and through the panes do not watch their mother leaving them but pore impersonally upon the spectacle of a woman departing in a taxi with para- phernalia.'

A little later :

"Now B. and I, lying along our carriage-seats, open our hearts, and from each a little stream flows forth, twin streams, which do not meet and generate, but simply run together into one. It is not that we are identical, but this is the common denominator of essentials. The name of the twin projections, the mingled stream, is Woman of Thirty. It is for once a no-nonsense stream, unin- fluenced by externals."

The stream flows happily throughout the book, to our great profit and pleasure :

" If we are to be in Venice by dinner-time, we should be getting to Milan soon. Our companion takes out a time-table. We are all wrong, she. says. She cannot understand it, but we have lost a lot of time at Basle. It is as if we had taken a few hours and made a paper parcel of them and dropped them out of the window at Basle.'

The reflections are not all humorous.

" I find that I have grown no hardier about the beggars. They affect ins in the same way as drunken people in the street. I take up no moral attitude about begging or drinking, but the abandonment by humans of the human status always strikes below the belt."

One more quotation :

" This is a struggle common among women, each of whom believes that she loves flowers most and handles them best. In loving animals I yield .to everybody. It is the line of least resistance. Loving animals, loving them over-pointedly and over-lavishly that is, is a mania or mental state of people undeveloped, baulked or arrested on some human side."

Miss Harrison has put us all deeply in her debt. There and Back is a royal and permanent addition to the small company of bedside books ; and it has the additional advantage of a number of drawings by Mr. Robert Austin, Which most cunningly harmonize with its apparent informality and complement its charm.

Mrs. Haldane's novel is exceedingly intelligent, and a little overloaded with talk. The MU: is of high quality, but it is out of proportion to the action of the book. I do not necessarily mean that there is too much of it, but that it is not as well spaced as it might be. Michal, an Anglo-French journalist, dislikes her calling, and loves Jean :

" Jean adored simplicity. Simple people, simple situations, simple plans. He would smilingly maintain, when challenged to deny his own extreme sophistication, that he was himself essentially simple at heart."

James Dowd, cabaret singer who has also been a sailor and a boxer, comes drunk to her flat, and falls in love with her. He drinks from ulterior motives, as does Dennis, a young man who has been sent down from Cambridge :

" ' We're all degenerates. Bad blood on Mamma's side. Black and blue, Stephen's ink instead of blood. Religion or drink, it

takes us one way or the other.'." .

It took Dennis a third way, and he finally kills himself. The masculine invert is difficult in fiction, especially to women writers, and Mrs. Haldane has not altogether escaped the mistake of sentimentalizing him. In other respects her story is most level-headed, and holds our interest firmly :

" If you're not tight, Dermal,' James went on, ' and I honestly hope you are, your present frame of mind is not only phantasma- gorical but also sinister.' " James' diagnosis admirably fits the atmosphere which Mrs. Haldane has so skilfully conveyed. I Bring Not Peace has personality, and is alive.

All the Daughters of Music -is something of a disappoint. ment after Bitter Tea, although it gives evidence of the same qualities in the writer. May, Susan and Leda were sisters, living calm moneyed lives in Washington. May was single, Susan divorced, and Leda inconsolably widowed. Leda's daughter Marise, aged seventeen, had been educated at a school at Antibes, and was studying interior decoration. Leda had a delicate heart, and might not be excited. The tale goes • leisurely forward, and ends with a surprise which is very well contrived. The scene in which Leda announces her love for young Zach Westeott, whom Marise also loves, is most excellently told. Zach and Leda are married, to the family's great embarrassment, and finally Leda has ,a heart attack.

They Winter Abroad is the second really good funny book I have read this month. The other was Public Affaires. A vernal saturnalia, as the professor put it, came upon the English residents at the Hotel Santo Biagio in Positano. They all fell in love. Young Mr. Papillary fell in love with Costanza, who was carting stones in the hotel garden. Mr. Mclnvert, who kept a wingless bluebottle in a matchbox, also fell in love with Costanza. Anne Menzies fell in love with Mr. Papillary. Dr. Arnold-Browne fell in love with Miss Prune, who was nineteen and had protruding teeth. Among the less affected residents were two comfortably married couples, many maiden ladies, Mrs. Skimlit, and the professor. Finally, the professor sums up : " Consider love as it has been devastating this hotel. It will give you mental exercise. Has it occurred to you that yoins is not the only raging heart ? We have been experiencing some- thing like the plague in Boccaccio. Love in all its forms, lustful, romantic, strange, sublimated, or transferred, has been ravaging our whole society. It has been an impressive spectacle. Mrs. Skimlit at one pole, and I myself at the other, we have raised our heads above the flood. Why has Mrs. Skimlit escaped, and why have I ? I leave you to consider. In the middle, at the via media, the Menzieses and the Joneses have stood unshaken : normal, happy, and consummated. The rest have been swept away. You Might have observed, if you had not been struggling to keep your own head above the torrent, requited love and unrequited love understood and love misunderstood, perverted and. diverted : comical, situational, in one case tragic, or merely moony."

They Winter Abroad is witty, wicked, and a little too long. " Mr. Aston " is a real find. His analysis (as of the four kinds of love) is as devastating as his sympathy (as in the

tour of the hotel bedrooms and their inhabitants). He demonstrates that it is possible to have read Peacock and

Mr. Norman Douglas and yet write an original story.