Lonliness

WINTERSMOON--Hugh Walpole--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

"The Duchess of Wrexe" was dead, but London's aristocracy remained, despite postwar cocktail sets and dole-fed Lower Classes. There were still the flower women at the fountain in Piccadilly Circus, still the lions and Nelson, still the fireplace sanctum under the stairs in St. James's Club, still Big Ben and Curzon Street, still the higgledy piggledy of Shepherds Market. There was still Mrs. Beddoes, charwoman these many years to that kind Miss Janet and her beautiful sister Miss Rosalind, poor and snobbish. And today, being the wedding, was a holiday, for Mrs. Beddoes was going inside, inside St. Margaret's, and not to watch as usual from outside the railings. No, "The Duke and Duchess of Romney request the pleasure of the company of Mrs. Beddoes on the occasion of the marriage of their son Wildherne Francis Poole to Janet, daughter of the late. . . ." Thus Janet was plunged irrevocably into the Victorian tradition, and all to provide comfort and stability for her adored sister. Unfortunately Rosalind had no use for such stability. She found Janet's reception rather a dowdy party; the room was very fine with its white walls, shining background to the family pictures, ". . . but nobody was very smartly dressed. Very few young people. No naked people at all. A great many old men with ribbons and orders. The Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Of course there would be lots of clergy. . . ."

Janet had married not only this house in Halkin Street, but also Wintersmoon with its Minstrel's Gallery, and Queen Elizabeth's bed, its three ghosts, its Spanish walk. But to Rosalind, Wintersmoon was merely the depths of Wiltshire: old house half shut up, woods, ponds, peacocks, Salisbury Plain in the distance. So Janet lost Rosalind; and all that remained was a great emptiness. She could indeed have filled it with the traditional affairs of her mother-in-law the duchess--soup kitchens, canons, Agatha Bazaar--but much as she loved tradition, she was too modern for that kind of thing. So she fell miserably in love with her husband, although all he had asked, and still asked, of her was that she bear him companionship--and an heir. This she did.

But she found therein the more loneliness because her husband, passionately devoted to their small son, needed her less than ever. There was still Zanti, of the little curiosity shop, who dispensed philosophy to Janet much as he did, volumes ago (Fortitude, published 1913), to Peter Wescott. There was Peter himself, young and successful novelist. There was old John Beamister--Zoffany Club at a quarter to one precisely--who approved Janet's quiet dignity. More important, there was the Duke, benevolently white-haired, who knew the bitterness of Janet's love for his son. But none of these were enough--none of them needed her. Then suddenly the death of her child pitched Wildherne into depths of morbidity from which only Janet could save him. And at the moment of his crisis, Rosalind, also in trouble, summoned her sister. At last Janet was needed; had, indeed, to choose between the two needs.

For years it has been said, and will be said again, that Hugh Walpole, the great humanitarian, can be sympathetic without being sentimental. For years he has written (and will no doubt write again) that spiritual loneliness is inevitably one of life's tragedies. Sensitive, he hears "the still sad music of humanity," then broadcasts its pure melody to motherly men and women, to callow adolescents. Others, tuning in, could almost wish a bit of static.

"God is Good"

SHAKEN BY THE WIND--Ray Strachey --Macmillan ($2.50). Religion as the staff, the song and the big stick of life; the sense of guilt as an inescapable companion; the need of prayer for guidance in every big or little action--these were the sum of small town American thought in the early 19th century. Sarah and Thomas Sonning started married life in Delaville, Pa., intent on proving that "it was possible to combine happiness on earth with full submission to the will of God. . . . They had no doubt of success." But salvation via the Congregational church was slow, dull. They tried Methodism, abandoned it; harbored a young "Perfectionist" preacher until they discovered him one midnight expounding the doctrine of spiritual bridals to two young girls; rejoiced at last to find so saintly a man as Rufus Hollins, so comforting a hope as that of personal intercourse with God. When it developed that this intercourse was most often (and effectively) achieved by close communion between two humans, Sarah indulged a doubt. When her husband, preaching the new creed, caused a public scandal, and two of her children joined Rufus Hollins' colony to await the Second Coming, she sinned knowingly, trying to match her will against God's, seeking to save them by her own means. Evidently God was very angry. Her adopted daughter died giving birth to a still born Messiah; her son drooped, heavy with disillusion; her husband sat all day writing venomous tracts against religion.

Working with material which suggests numberless jibes, distortions, sophisticated analyses, Author Strachey has chosen instead to give it compassionate treatment.

Tinker's Book

TINKER'S LEAVE--Maurice Baring--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Miles Consterdine, timid 27 year old nephew to a domineering aunt, goes to Paris. Here he is soon persuaded, by a menage of erratic Russians, that his proper mission in life is to be, not a business man, but a photographer in Manchuria, where the Russians and Japanese are having a war. In Manchuria he leads a highly social existence, chatting at great length with Aloysha, who is his constant companion, with Haslam, U. S. magazine correspondent, with Elena Nikolayevna, a nurse with whom he falls in love. After a time Miles Consterdine gets dysentery and returns to Moscow where he holds more conversations. Author Baring in this novel ties fluttering ideas, like streamers, to the rapid, unsteady bicycle of his plot, so loosely that they frequently get tangled in the spokes.