BOOKS OF THE DAY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3774, 13 July 1926, Page 74

BOOKS OF THE DAY.

THE CANKER OF COLD. “Jacob Ussher.” By Naomi Jacob. (Cloth.) Sydney: Cornstalk Publishing Company. (Per Angus and Robertson.) This is a story of unusual originality and power, rather ineptly characterised on tho cover as “the love story of a rich man’s daughter and his secretary.” It is that certainly, but it is more essentially the story ot Jacob Ussher himself, who, beginning life as the son of a poor Jewish tailor in Whitechapel, the London Ghetto, became through his own business ability and concentration on success a millionaire and an accredited philanthropist. The daughter, Leah, is interesting, but it is Jacob who is the dominating personality in the story, as the authoress indicates by her title. The emotional interest consists more in the relations between father and daughter, and particularly in the conflict between Jacob’s love for his daughter and his love of power than in the love affair of daughter and secretary. The first chapter traces the history of the Ussher family, who came from Poland and persecution to the kindlier soil of England. Young Jacob, only son of his father, was brought up in strict Jewish practices. He had brains, and pursued knowledge avidly, but while still it school began to concentrate on moneygetting, trading with his schoolfellows, collecting odd marketable lines and selling for himself. He de&rmined to trade for himself rather than work for wages, and beginning in a poor way, by constant shrewdness and profitable speculations rapidly becomes a capitalist and a financier. But he is no mere moneygrabber; he has imagination, and desires wealth for the power and command of the beautiful things of the world it brings. Finding that feasts and fasts and Jewish observances in general interfere with business, he abandons religious practices. He delays marriage till he can make a marriage of ambition, and then further shocks his old parents by marrying a “goy” or Christian, the beautiful daughter of an impecunious aristocrat, and begins his married life in a grand house in Berkeley Square. But after a few years his wife abandons him and her two-year-old daughter, and by the time Leah is grown up her mother is a foremost figure in society as Duchess of Rockingham.

The main story begins when Jacob is about 60 years old. Leah has grown up without love. Her father's sister, who keeps his house, is a woman of cold, malignant nature, who systematically robs her brother to indulge her passion for diamonds. Jacob really idolises his daughter, but he has lost the power of manifesting love; and Leah grows up cold and self-contained. She has brains as well as beauty; has inherited her father’s business talent and assists

him with his work, but not to the exclusion of a paid secretary. ' Rupert Herrington, younger son of an impecunious earl, who has a creditable war record and is of agreeable presence and manners, is selected at a handsome salary to fill the position. He and Leah are soon mutually in love, but recognise that Jacob will not consent to his daughter’s marriage with an aristocratic pauper.” Leah is “modern” and quite undeterred by religious scruples. She recognises Rupert’s weakness of character and desires to hold him to her. Hoping eventually to make her lover a figure in the financial world, she has no inclination to begin married life on Rupert’s private income of £4OO a year, supplemented by what the pair of them might be able to earn. But when she finds herself in a situation that makes immediate marriage essential she forges her father’s signature to a cheque for £IOOO to provide the basis for a transaction in shares which results very profitably. The poignant part of the story comes when Jacob discovers hie daughter’s fraud, and when Rupert, terrified by the conditions the old man (ignorant of how far matters have gone) attaches to his consent to the marriage, fails Leah in her need. She attempts suicide, and it seems as if the story were to end in unmitigated tragedy. But the authoress finds a way .of escape. The better natures of all Jhree awaken under stress of suffering; Yliere is mutual reconciliation, and father and daughter come to know one another as never before, and to realise that, as the old Irish priest, Father O’Gorman, had told Leah, unselfish love is the great need in human life. The authorese avoids both sensationalism and sentimentality, and gives us a life-like story of real human interest. WELSH PEASANT LIFE. “ Tillage of the Poor.” By Gertrude Painter. (Cloth, 7s Gd net.) London: John Murray. “ Much food is in the tillage of the poor; but there is that which is destroyed for want of judgment ” —this text from the Book of Proverbs serves as a motto for this interesting but painful story of a Welsh peasant family. Though the period of the story is apparently in Victorian days the coloured jacket presents the heroine visiting her family (after attaining sinister prosperity) in fashionable outdoor dress of to-day. Designers seldom concern themselves with the consistency of their illustrations. Nathaniel Price, better knowm to his neighbours as “ Nathaniel the Prophet,” is shepherd to a thriving peasant farmer in a mountain district. Deeply religious in the narrow way of Welsh Methodism, he. concerns himself little about worldly things, and is unmoved by the sufferings of his family, who live in a tumbledown cottage, and are chronically half-starved. The desolation of the hill country in the winter season, and the hardships of the poor, like Nathaniel's family, are depicted with realistic vividness. We are shown the heroine Hagar, in her childhood tramping over the hills w r ith her father to get the sheep out of the gullies before snow falls. She has intelligence and determination, and learning from her own experience and what she knows of the gentry and the well-to-do farmers of the district that “ money answeretli all things,” she determines to become rich herself. Her brother dies from exposure when helping his father with the sheep; her elder sister “gets into trouble,” is treated harshly by her father, and dies, and Hagar determines that she will have nothing to do with love. At 16 she gets a place as servant to the wife of a jeweller in the nearest market town, a woman of lax morals. The pair move to London, taking Hagar With them. JTagar has resolved to rise by honest and respectable courses, but things are against her; she is accused of theft, loses her place, fails to get work, and so enters on a life of shame, becoming before long a profiteer in the shame of weaker women. Her two younger sisters, weak, characterless girls, join her against her wishes and warnings. There is pathos in the delight of father and mother at the “ success ” of the daughter, who sends them money and presents, though one doubts whether even their simplicity could have accepted Hagar’s speedy wealth as the proceeds of respectable business. In contrast with the aims and fate of the other sisters is the pure love of the youngest sister, Mary, and young lanto Morgan, though Mary is too angelic a figure to be quite natural. Seeing them Hagar realises what love means, and what she has lost. KIDNAPPING AND RESCUE. “The Secret Terror.” By Frank Hird. (Cloth, 7s 6d net.) London: Eveleigh, Nash, and Grayson. Per Dy* i’uh:*. a Book Arcade, Sydney. This clory, leginning hriglilly with the efforts of the heroine, Cynthia Hat her ton, to place a play she has written, soon develops into very ordinary melodrama. Cynthia disappears from a village in Surrey, and her distracted mother can find no clue to assist in finding her, till a dead carrier pigoon is picked up at Lake Como with a message attached stating that Snthia is imprisoned in Venice. As no dress is given Cynthia’s friends, among whom Anthony Tredalla, who was assisting Cynthia with her play, is foremost, have naturally a hard task set before them to discover the place of her imprisonment. Enlightenment oomes through a letter from the yoong English wife of an Italian prince, stating that she has escaped to England from imprisonment by her husband, who had tried to force her to make

all her money over to him and had got her certified as a lunatic when she had refused. Cynthia has been seized in mistake for the escapee princess. But when her friends go to demand her release, they find themselves up against the difficulty of convincing the Venetian police that it js net the Princess Monfalcone who is immured. However, of course, Cynthia is rescued, and the story closes appropriately with her engagement to her champion, Tredalla. A ROMANCE OF MOROCCO. “A Riff Bride.” By L. Noel. (Paper, 2s net.) London: Stanley Paul and Co. This is a story of the same quality as its predecessor, “The Caid,” and will probably be as popular. Pauline Langley a spoiled coquette, goes to Morocco with her father, who is financially interested in the Iberia mine near Melilla. Philip Derrington, the engineer in charge of the mine, has the reputation of being a womanhater, and, hearing this, Pauline is at once bent on his subjugation. And Abd-el-Kaar, a Moorish chief on friendly terms with Derrington, plays up to her, though in rather a disconcerting way. He has discussed women with Derrington, and determines to put his immunity to love weakness to the test. Suddenly "mustering his tribesmen in support of Atd-el-Krim, he takes Pauline, her father, and Derting. ton prisoners, and arranges a marriage according to Moorish form between Pauline and Derrington. As in other recent popular desert romances, much is made of “crushing embraces,” “diaphanous garments,” “supple sinuous bodies,” “attitudes of complete surrender,” “invitation frank and unashamed,” and so on. One might say that this sort of stuff is served ad nauseam, but presumably it is to the taste of a large portion of the reading public. There is a good deal more in the story —the lovers’ attempted escape, Derrington’s arrest by the Spanish forces, and further love complications for Pauline. But the story closes on English ground witn the announcement of the prospective marriage of Pauline and Derrington. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. “The glass of fashion and the mould of form” is not too high praise to bestow on the July issue of Everylady’s Journal, where the very latest modes in what is being worn are described minutely and illustrated with attractive sketches. Free patterns of some of the more practical—a child’s frock and a lady’s coat —are given with the issue. Besides articles dealing with every kind of activity of interest to women, there is some very fine reading matter, the articles, “Facts About Royalty and Others” and “Two Artists of Note — Mme. Toti dal Monte and Percy Grainjger” being of special worth. The Strand Magazine for June contains more “Days of My Life” by Rider Haggard, this month's topics covering the writing of the novels “King Solomon’s Mines” and “She.” “The T’ang Mirror,” by Edward Knoblock, is a mystery story of gripping intensity, and for a good laugh inspired by sheer humour, P. G. Wodehouse’s “Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best,” will be hard to better. “The City of Courage,” by Gilbert Frankau, is another fine tale dealing with the aftermath of the war. Among the many articles in the issue, “What Shall I be? The Choice of a Career,” by a barrister, a banker, and a member of the Metropolitan Police, is extremely interesting, while “The Lighter Side of Test Matches” gives Cecil Parkin’s ever refreshing views on the subject of cricket. * * * Art in Australia is again to hand, a first-class publication which appeals to the lover of art in every capacity. It is full of beautiful pictures and clever reading matter, which give a comprehensive idea of the latest in Australian art and the opinions regarding the same. Sir Bertram MacKennal, R.A., whose return to Australia after a long absence was most welcome, is interviewed, and some illustrations of his work which have hitherto not appeared in Australia are reproduced. His ideas, “those of a man w'ho looks at a city as he would at a single group of statuary demanding that it shall not be a meaningless jumble even of individually excellent details, but a composition with a central unity and inspiration drawn from the soil beneath it, the sky above it, and the character of the race that inhabits it” are novel and full of good for thoughtful minds. The visit of Anna Pavlova makes another fruitful topic, and, in addition to some charming photographic studies of her, there is an article describing some of the lessons learnt from the Russian Ballet in Australia. The views —which are given with an original turn cf mind—are of great interest. In addition to other articles touching the work of Arthur Streeton, Roi de Mcstre, and Will Dyson, and verse of a high standard, there are some extraordinarily fine pictures. The coloured ones are all by prominent artists, “The White Feathers,” by Sir John Lavery, R.A., being of prime importance; while among those in black and white some late etchings by Norman Lindsay will hold the attention.