FICTION

"Spang Beauty" CORDELIA CHANTRELL -- Meade Minnigerode--Putnam ($2). Among the quaint mysteries that survived the Civil War was that of The Messenger, or as she was later called, the Woman on Horseback, who rode back and forth through the Union lines apparently without the least difficulty and, according to rumor, often to the delight of gallant Union officers. This tale, a thoroughbred love story, purports to be that strange lady's biography.

She was one of those individuals from whom Charlestonians had learned to expect misery--a "dark" Chantrell, like her twin brother, Stephen. In him their hot strain from a Latin ancestor was provided with a safety outlet; his temper could boil over. Cordelia was mistress of her intensities, to her great misfortune, and it was she who resolved a grave dilemma into happiness for Stephen and tragedy for herself, tragedy punctuated by two pistol shots.

With the dark Chantrells nothing was regarded as insuperable between them and what they wanted. A feud between Chantrells and Penmarches only heightened Stephen's determination to have Sally Penmarch, and the betrothal of Preston Baimbridge, the one man Cordelia had fixed upon, to Sally Penmarch "fazed" Cordelia no whit, even on the wedding morning. As her diary shows, she was calm in desperation and when she saw Sally slip off for a last canter alone, she sent Stephen after her with a mixture of humor and impatience. When Stephen failed to dissuade Sally, who loved him, really, after an argument in the woods that kept the wedding guests on tenterhooks, Cordelia's love for Preston was sufficient to bend her honor into the lie that made Sally say, "I will not," proud and slender at the altar in her royal blue broadcloth riding habit with glass buttons.

It would have been superhuman of red-headed Preston not to lose his temper at Stephen in the Penmarch library right afterwards. The frigid formalities of a "meeting" completed, he drew his pistol and fired. Cordelia, sure in her purpose, was there to knock his arm aside, so Stephen was not hurt, but Preston left Charleston believing in his New England heart that there was blood between him and the Chantrells, his best friends.

Stephen and Sally later eloped, settling in Nassau, whence Stephen sailed over the world in the Chantrell & Chantrell ships, and whither Cordelia went, still a fierce dark beauty in her mid-twenties, as The Messenger, President Jeff Davis's special agent, to discover what Yankee spy was betraying Confederate munitions smugglers. When this spy proved to be Preston Baimbridge, as faithful to his Northern cause as was Cordelia to her love for him, the second pistol shot was the only thing possible, fired by Preston Baimbridge into his own head.

The Style in which these lives and episodes are related and the settings of chivalric South Carolina worked up behind them do vast credit to their author. The dialogue, especially the ejaculations ("By cock and pye!", "Shut your clamtrap!", "A real, spang beauty!") are as racy and robustious as the points of honor are delicately sharpened, polished and thrust home. Author Minnigerode, master of informal biography (The Fabulous Forties, Lives and Times, Aaron Burr, Some American Ladies) has outdone himself in a piece of biographical fiction second to none this season.

The Author. Meade Minnigerode, haunting wraith of the New York Yale Club, was born in London and went to Harrow, but lost no time thereafter in returning to his parents' homeland, where he was graduated by Yale in 1910. He has embraced literature and yachting ever since, is unmarried and free to spend himself upon a third enthusiasm, his society at Alma Mater, the Elihu Club. The secret of writing biographical history, he declares, is a knowledge of the card-index system of any substantial public library. For writing Cordelia Chantrell he evidently added to his historical method a study of fine prose and much thought on the fine temper of his Southern acqaintances.

Remember when . . . ?

TIDES--Ada and Julian Street-- Doubleday, Page ($2). "Do you," the Authors Street virtually ask their reader, "remember when men, and after a while women, first bestrode huge, high wheels with little saddles on them--'bicycles' they were called--and went 'scorching' along past the phaetons and runabouts and sulkies and dogcarts and victorias to the mingled amusement and admiration of the people who confined their sporting activities to parchesi, crokinole, the schottische and 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay'?" Of course the reader remembers, with gusto. The museum trip continues. ". . . And when Michigan Avenue [the book is dedicated to Chicagoans who turned the century] was a dirt road leading south from the greasy river, past brownstone respectability to prairie pioneering in those windblown, grass-grown suburbs, Oakland, Hyde Park, the Midway? And how Chicago sprang up and spread out, so that when the World's Fair opened, with the world's biggest this and the world's finest that, it was a city, with plenty of black smoke and red light neighborhoods and corrupt politicians to prove it?" Yes, gracious yes, the reader remembers--if he is the right reader.

Lake Michigan never had tides but Chicago had the ebb and flow of fire to fortune, prosperity to panic, good blood to bad, old homes to ugly apartments, "joints" to skyscrapers. And human careers either breasted these tides or were swept by them to good or ill. There is nothing superlatively able about the story's hero, Alan Wheelock, but he is swept to wealth, and away to New York, because he happens to learn shorthand at the right time. Contrariwise, the innocence and integrity which he inherits from his oak-hearted grandfather deter him from capturing the heroine, Blanche Holden (whose Democrat father is being swept into profiteering realty) ahead of the artistic cosmopolite, Roy Norcross, who fritters away his talents and makes Blanche miserable on two continents. Hero Alan meantime makes the best of a second fiddle wife, Leta, who goes out of the book chasing a title for their daughter.

No period novel was ever more carefully accoutred and while Mr. Street has long been known for a conscientious property man, the col laborative efforts of his wife are everywhere evident, from "the tip of a pale blue ostrich plume" on p. 2 to some fan-shaped, green New England shutters on p. 408. The collection of cobblestones, sealskin sacques, decalcomanias, bustles, buggies, political platforms and gimcrack customs, all echoing to the tinkle of bicycle bells and chandeliers, is truly remarkable. In fact, it is so remarkable that the exhibitors' enthusiasm made them somewhat forget their narrative obligations. The ingenuous characters are gently regarded as being almost as odd today as were (allegedly) grapefruit and golf to oldtime Chicago.

The Authors. Julian Street was born in Chicago 47 years ago (he always knows what he is writing about). He worked on a Manhattan newspaper, married and soon set out to be his own literary boss. Painstaking and deliberate, he fixed upon Author Booth Tarkington as an object for deep admiration and their subsequent friendship had much to do with the Streets' removal to Princeton when it came time for their son to attend college. There, pensively fingering cigars, graciously suffering undergraduate interruptions, Julian Street produced his famed Rita Coventry and the O. Henry Memorial Prize story for 1925, Mr. Bisbee's Princess.

Mrs. Street, who was Ada Hilt of LaPorte, Ind., charming, kind, quick-witted, lately died.

Gibble Gabble

CREWE TRAIN--Rose Macaulay --Boni & Liveright ($2). The title simply means, from a British catchphrase, "wrong train." Denham Dobie, daughter of a peace-loving British cleric, grows up barefoot in a remote Spanish hamlet with a native stepmother and half-breed half-sisters. Her father dies. Her aunt, the Elinor Glynnish wife of a smart London publisher, "rescues" the reluctant orphan, who makes no head nor tail of her relatives' civilized occupations: incessantly scribbling books or about books, doing things they dislike because others do them, concerning themselves with every one's private affairs, eternally gibbling, gabbling. Give Denham a map, a fishline, a toy boat, a cave, solitude. Tall, brown, indolent, untidy, she goes her own way as best she can, through marriage with her uncle's nice young Catholic partner, Arnold Chapel. She has a purposeful miscarriage, a struggle for a cottage in lonely Cornwall, a temporary separation during which Aunt Evelyn makes every one miserable with maliciously romantic theories. At last convention conquers and Denham is condemned to housekeeping in metroland (suburbs). All of which is told by caustic Miss Macaulay more bluntly than ever, as befits the primitive heroine. Literary Lon don is the prize ox gored, but all nosey, worrying, oversocialized gibble-gabblers everywhere are told off.

Hearth Captain

WILLIAM--E. H. Young--Harcourt, Brace ($2). When crises arise, strange discrepancies of outlook are often uncovered among intimates. So finds William Nesbitt when his daughter Lydia frankly exchanges a lawfully wed Oliver for a Henry. Of all the family, only William himself and plump, generous Dora fully sympathize.

Kate Nesbitt, like a hard wall beneath gracious ivies, considers her best-loved daughter as good as dead. Sister Mabel's agate eyes gleam with righteousness and curiosity. Sister Janet is a golden haired prig, until love storms her own maiden ramparts.

Through the chaos of relationships, strained and tortured, William moves prayerfully, tolerantly, so genially that his good Kate is estranged. He sustains his erring child by letter; providentially he injects the solvent of good nature into the too-feminine atmosphere of his spacious home. With his morning flower in its accustomed place, his quizzical brows alert, his disquieting remarks and bright-eyed scheming, his gait still reminiscent of the sailor's roll, he is the captain of his hearth, steady in domestic storm as in the days when (before magnatehood) he spoked the wheels of tall ships. The family bark reaches harbor battered but safe.

And so does the book reach harbor. The entire Nesbitt family casts anchor in the memory. William should be active on the literary seas for years to come.

"Stainless Sou!"

THE WOMAN WHO DID--Grant Allen--Little, Brown ($2). Victorian tea-tables were violently oscillated by the appearance of this shocking tale 31 years ago. Only the wicked Continental authors had thitherto dared treat openly of females who "did." Author Allen's Herminia Barton not only "did" but gloried in it, and he in her. Daughter of a dean, school mistress of proper young ladies, Herminia positively refused to be made an honest woman, though her sensible lover, Alan Merrick, pleaded, and her would-be father-in-law cabled to them in Perugia with a flourish. Nevertheless, Victorian sympathy surged heavily to Herminia and the school of Elinor Glyn was founded when illegitimate little Dolores turned out a begrudging, bourgeois little Dolly, insensitive to the noble thing her mother had thought she was doing. There was not a dry eye in the kingdom when, not to "atone" but heroic lly to clear the track for Dolly, a vial of suicidal poison was lugged in and "Her minia Barton, stainless soul, had ceased to exist forever."

This stirring history is republished now as a matter of public amusement; yet grave doubts may be held whether all readers can yet withstand Author Allen's affecting periods. The world is now thought to be safe for democracy of the sexes, yet there is more than one reading for the tag in Critic Ernest Boyd's learned introduction: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

On Furnishings

THE HOUSE OF SIMPLICITY-- Ethel Davis Seal--Century ($3). Let the reader ignore just what he might expect to find in such a book, namely a gushing stream of female adjectives like "quaint," "gay," "charming," "piquant," "tiny," "dear," "darling," "lovely," "thrilling," "adorable," --and here is a very good book indeed for discovering a myriad handy ways and inexpensive means of accomplishing effects in interior decoration, to which the overworked adjectives listed above are perhaps irresistibly applicable. There is, of course, a heart-rending chapter on "Antiques for a Song," consisting largely of anecdotes, but there is also a cheerful chapter, highly sanative, on "New American Furniture," which faces squarely the dark facts that the Mayflower had room for only a certain number of knickknacks and that imitations have grown more commendable ever since. Another chapter solves problems for young-marrieds, with a five-year program for feathering the nest. All that is (see adjectives above) in chintzes and cretonnes, flounces and hangings, locks and latches, cupboards and clapboards, rugs and roofs, has passed beneath the avid eye of Decoratrix Seal. She has torn down old houses besides building new ones and adapting odd ones. She has lived thoughtfully enough to know that "simplicity" must never mean discomfort. Aesthetically the book parallels the current literary renaissance of early America. If widely read, it should speed the arrival, in districts beyond New England, Philadelphia and Baltimore, of styles in architecture and decoration which, once indigenous, were successively entombed by the brownstone, red-plush, cupola, stucco, Frank Lloyd Wright and Grand Rapids eras.