Adventurous Lives
• and Grayson. 18s.)
HERE arc two personalities of different countries, education, talents, sex, yet making a common claim on the reader by virtue of their integrity and vitality. Colonel Thwaites may interest those of us who took part in the Great War more than Mrs. Rinehart, but the latter must certainly take the precedence due to her international fame.
Mary Roberts Rinehart came from a home of fierce
righteousness. Sin was sin. Unbaptised children were damned. Hell was real." At the age of sixteen she wits " saved " and graduated from High School ; at seventeen she was entered as a probationer in the Pittsburg Training School for Nurses, " a world so new, so strange, so terrible, that even now it haunts me to remember it." At her first operation she was " told to carry out a pail and there was a human foot in it." She was shocked, but not sick. " I came back and went to work in that shambles." With the directness and vividness which we have come to expect from her, she takes us through her adolescence to the day when—still in her early youth—she married the house surgeon, Dr. Rinehart. Thereafter the story is more scattered and impressionistic, but through the looser texture flashes of intuition are discernible which light up not only her own mind, but in a sense the mind of the United States. Her story is a moving one, and aspiring authors might learn from it how much of discipline, of passion, of self-sacrifice and of sheer drudgery are required for success in letters.
Colonel Thwaites, on the other hand, affects to disbelieve in drudgery. True to type, he writes that to have been bored with life is to be guilty of failure. The careful admixture of velvet with the vinegar is the combination to be arrived at by life's philosopher."
As a boy fighting against the Boers, as a senior Cavalry Officer in Flanders and as a Secret Service agent in many cities of the Old and New Worlds he has seen half a century of danger and excitement ; but he also possesses literary and histrionic abilities which have led his path across that of most of the writers and actors of his time. He is a friend of Sir Frank Benson, he met Oscar Wilde, shared a flat with Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, was a leader-writer on the New York World, and later private secretary to Joseph Pulitzer. As Director of the Military Mission in New York he tracked down endless hotel beats," fake heroes, cheque-manipulators, and confidence men ; and was responsible for the safety of the Prince of Wales and Lord Reading during their visits. He has walked with kings, nor lost the common touch.
We read of the outwitting of Trebitsch Lincoln in Prague ; of managing Captain Carpenter's Zeebrugge lecture ; of spiritualism ; of international spies ; of aeroplanes and air- ships ; of the Kapp Putsch of 1920 ; of General Hoffmann's scheme for reorganizing Russia ; and of a hundred other contacts with the great, the near-great and the underworlds of London, Berlin, New York as reflected in the mirror of a versatile and radiant mind. There is a thrill or a joke in every paragraph of this book and many a shrewd comment on events which Colonel Thwaites saw from the inside. It is typical of the author's modesty that, although he tells us much of the heroism of others, he makes practically no mention of the exploits which must have won Itini the decorations appended to his name on the title-page.
F. YEATS-BROWN.
Previous page
