NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21258, 1 September 1934, Page 15

NEW NOVELS

THE PENGARTH CHILDREN Dew on the Grass. By Eiluned Lewis. Lovat Dickson, Ltd. 222 pp. This book deserves the praise which Mr Charles Morgan expresses in a prefatory letter to the author, and lifts to its highest (and most truthful) point when he says: "By this time, daylight had returned; the mist of early Spring had rolled away, my candle was wanted no more; and so far from the device of cities had your story carried me that, forgetful of the switch, I leaned up from my place to blow my candle out." Miss Lewis describes Pengarth. a house in the, quiet border country by the upper Severn, and the life of its four children: the steady, wise Delia, Lucy the dreamer and dramatist, Fancy's child, Maurice, the strong, silent, inscrutable type of smallboy, and Miriam, at three and a-half barely as high as the stable-door keyhole and almost as wide as high, a slow, equable infant. Miss Lewis never behaves as so many writers about children behave, like a sentimental or humorous eavesdropper, or like the owner of a pretty pup-pet-show. One sample will show how truly and beautifully she writes, much better than any amount of description. Lucy did not like playing hide-and-seek. Bad enough to be in hiding, "fearing that a groping hand might suddenly touch you, a triumphant voice shriek, 'Here she is!'" But the flight and pursuit were worse; "feet running behind, drawing nearer every minute." Useless to say that this was only Maurice or Delia after you, worse than useless, because at bottom you ! knew that it was something really dreadful, something infinitely disastrous that would catch you m the end, however fast you ran. It was the same when she and. Maurice played trains together with flacs made from pieces of stun: nailed to pea-sticks. The red flag meant "Stop!" and the green one "Go on! but there was also a yellow one made from a scrap of yellow print left over from one of Delia's summer frocks. With this they had invented for themselves the signal "Come to me! which gave a pleasant variety to the game until one day Lucy, who was the guard, with Maurice as engine, lost the red flag. (They found it later m the asparagus bed.) "Stop.' she shouted, when Maurice came whistling and puffing up the garden path, engaging his toes into the ground so that the pebbles were scattered in small showers. "Can't." he said laconically. "Not till you wave the rec. "But I can't find it." >-he cried, wildly waving the,yellow, one. "Then I shall go on coming to you and he went on doggedly, puffing and whistling and drawing nearer every minute, even when the guard took to her heels in panic. They ran round and round the walled kitchen garden; only when she was finally cornered in the potting shed and had flung the yellow flag from her did the inexorable engine apply its brakes. I "What did you think would really happen to vou?" he asked, roused for once from his own imaginings by her white face and obvious distress. She could not explain; but nothing would ever induce her to play that game again.

There arc perhaps a dozen books which as certainly and effortlessly as this trace the way back to childhood and disclose it freshly to sigh*, in its own morning air. Miss Lewis's takes a rightful place at once on this short but richly laden shelf. I'OO LONE This Animal Is Dangerous. By Reginald Campbell. Hoddcr an I Stoughton. 320 pp. From W. fe. Smart. The jungle of Siam and its elephants are Mr Campbell's literary properties, and he continues to use them with extraordinary, dramatic effect. Here it is his achievement to have made the character of an elephant the centre of a problem and the riddle of a story. The superb but terrible creature, Poo Lone, would obey none but the elephant rider Kha'rn, whose son, Teen, dreamed of the day when Poo Lone would submit to him also and so raise him to greatness among riders. But with his ambition, when at last he mounted and controlled Poo Lone, came the knowledge that the elephant was stronger and subtler than he; that Poo Lone obeyed because he chose, not because he was 'ruled, and that now, to-morrow, a f ianv time, he might choose otherIwise and trample his rider instead of suffering him. Teen had become Pnn Lone's victim, already while he still rode, because fear of Poo Lone had mastered him. But Mr Campbell as convincingly evolves a relieving escape from this situation as he describes the situation itself. FINISH OF A YOUNG MAN Sea Change. By Charles LloydJcnes. Lovat Dickson Ltd. 315 pp. A curious book, in which events seem improbable even while the actors in them seem real. Among them is young Morton Ashe, son of an old man who has loaded his back I to establish himself as the owner of a landed estate, and as such had rather keep Morton loafing at home than let him make his way in business. Morton's one effort has ended in failure in the slump, and he is thrown much into association with Antony Mendip, a charming, fantastic fellow, with a genius for framing schemes to right the world and embarrassing himself in them. Antony and his beautiful wife—whose gifts of frankness and penetration supply some of the sharpest commentary in the book—plan to help Morton by employing him in their brilliant, foolish scheme to supply the sleepy town of Ambleton with a perfect hotel; and they succeed only in offending and alienating old Ashe and everybody else. This might be farce, if it did not so truthfully show Morton drifting into the despair of a young man frustrated and made to feel futile at every turn; and it is natural that he should join Antony in a new mad venture, smuggling by fast motor-boat. Mr Lloyd-Jones gets rid of them and ends his book by having their motor-boat run down at night in the Baltic. As well that way as another, because the irony of these rather jerky but flashing pages is independent of any final curtain. ALTERNATIVE HISTORY No Popples in Flanders. By George C. Foster. Ivor Nicholson and Watson Ltd. 351 pp. Mr Foster has had a big idea. His Jennifer McQueen has the Highlander's second sight, which works upon her so that she can see events, at any crisis or choice, develop along the line in fact rejected —and live them. And so she lives a life in which the World War is only something outside, unreal, rapping

sometimes on the doors of her sense like a dream or a'ghost. She lives for the most part an ordinary domestic routine, in which there is nothing more remarkable than a few journeys, a mild love affair, a general election, and the elevation I of Lord Carson to the Prime Minis- j tership. As an essay in "how it might have been," if Lenin and Trotsky had been extinguished and the assassin of Serajevo with them, this book is smoothly but unadventurously plausible. 31YSTEKY Why Didn't They Ask Evans? By Agatha Christie. W. Collins Sons and Co. Ltd. 252 pp. Dangerous Cargo. By Hulbert Footner. W. Collins Sons and Co. Ltd. 252 pp. The Man from Whitehall. By J. M. Walsh. W. Collins Sons and Co. ' Ltd. 254 pp. "Why didn't they ask Evans?" was the question, was the only utterance, of the man whom Bobby Jones found with his back broken, over the cliff by the seventeenth tee It is Mrs Christie's little joke to mix in this great honoured name in a round of golf, in chapter one of a detective story, and to attach it to the slicing, forcing, foozling, workless son of a dyspeptic • country vicar. There are other signs that Mrs Christie is light of heart. She associates with the amiable Bobby his childhood friend, the smart little monkey-faced Frankie, Lady Frances Derwent, and pushes them on to make a real hunt of it after the murderer of the man who died asking why they (who were they?) hadn't asked Evans (who was Evans? And asked Evans what?). And when Bobby and Frankie have fallen helplessly into the murderer's trap, it is the greatest buffoon of the (party who falls through the skylight after them, to save and bless. It is not a light heart, of course, but a nodding memory that makes Frankie propound the theory of a dope-gang on p. 57, Bobby demurring, and ascribe it 1o Bobbie, herself now won over, on p. 114. But Mrs Christie is as ingenious in a cheerful mood as in an earnest one. This is not a complex puzzle, but it is a tight one; and the logical fit of the Evans clue is exquisite. As exquisite as the joke that brings the hunters home to the vicarage porch. . . . "Dangerous Cargo" records another exploit of Madame Rosika Story, Mr Foofner's impressive heroine. Taking heed of warnings that he will not return alive, a millionaire invites Rosika to travel with him on a pleasure cruise, to spv out the danger and guard him against it. Since the yacht's company includes his contemptuously treated and dependent brother, a discarded Jover and her jealous husband, his liancee, who does not love him, and her lover, who liat.es him. and traitors among the officers and crew, Rosika has her work cut out. It. compels her to have the disaffected officers put in irons and brother Adrian, who has behaved suspiciously, out of harm's way; and she over-persuades the crew, raging against the owner because he has thrown the jealous husband overboard, after being murderously attacked. But she has failed; for the millionaire is found dead in the swimming bath, not drowned, but poisoned with a hypodermic injection. The wind-up of the story is as full of thrills as it is rational, m its explanations. Mr Walsh reintroduces, in a story of secret service in Egypt, his wellknown pair of agents. Colonel Ormiston and his wife; but they play a less prominent and even less important part than Garth, who covers himself with glory, at last, by rescuing the Ormistons from their relentless enemy, Princess Sharane. In this sinister person's plots is innocently involved an English girl called Mary Cranston, whom Garth has befriended; and since her perilous adventures close by his side m this rescue, it is very proper that the happiness to which Mr Walsh has inevitably destined them should there and then begin. It is not a very brainy story, but quite a brisk one.

KESCUE HOME Strange Salvation. By Kathleen Hewitt. LTkin Mathews and Marrot Ltd. old PP. Mrs Hewitt has considerable talent in revealing the ache and fret and pathos of the lives of poor and distressed people—and especially the wrongs which, "patient merit of the unworthy takes." Her heroine is a girl whose gracious but povertystricken mother moves through a wretched servitude to a wretched end. The girl herself, Audrey, though well educated, lias no choice taut to accept hard domestic service. and her gentleness, rather than weakness, brings upon her the disgrace for which she suffers in a rescue home, distressingly pictured. Mrs Hewitt relieves the reader as well as Audrey in an ending not too fortuitously happy to seem artificial. TWO GENERATIONS Under Proof. By Joanna Caiman. Hodder and From \V. S. Smart. Miss Caiman's is a clever study in contrasts, more clover, though, than profound. She gives an account of the lives of two men who rose to success before the war; the sensitive idealist. Lance Sheridan, who put a grief behind him and rose in the law; Bruce Abinger, who had "less in him," but rose to high rank in the Army. Both were killed in the Great War. Their children represent the wild, drifting, cynical post-war types, measured and condemned by the strength and stability of their fathers. This is well done: but nobody will be persuaded that it sets forth the whole truth. ASTRONOMY FOR BEGINNERS Starry Pages. By W. A. Amiet, M.A. Angus and Robertson Ltd., Sydney. IT6 pp. (5/- net.) A delightfully written introduction to the wonders of astronomy, in which each chapter has been appetised with topical references. Mr Amiet writes of the origin and structure of the solar and stellar worlds; of planets and meteors and asteroids; of Einstein and relativity; of past ages of the earth; and of life, and man, and immortality. His touch is skilfully light. He pretends to no originality; but the manner in which he has condensed and proportioned his subject matter justifies the publication of this book. At the request of Stella Benson's husband, Mr J. O'Gorman Anderson. R. Ellis Roberts iius undertaken to write her memoirs.