Why Girls Leave Delft

MASQUERADE--Jo van Ammers-Kueller--Dutton.*

A competent portrayer of Dutch domestic scenes (The Rebel Generation, The House of Joy), Authoress van Ammers-Kueller in her latest novel gives an account of life in her native Delft early in the 20th Century. Beginning her tale with something of the ordered, crystalline detail of Dutch interior paintings, she ends it in cloudy emotional confusion and disillusionment.

Social life in Delft is symbolized by the "Lustrum" celebrations, a masquerade carnival held every five years. Everybody takes this pageant very seriously. The actors try to follow orders "to give the impression that we really are what we want to represent." On stage and off this is what the younger generation is taught to do. Tina van Ravensberg would rather try to represent what she really is, but there is no room for that sort of thing in her society.

Her professional father, with his apple-red cheeks and absent-minded ways and her mother, whose sole concern is marrying her daughters well, are of no help. Hanny, her elder sister, is infatuated with a handsome rascal, Warmelo. Tina watches Hanny's miseries, her mother's maneuvers with widening, saddening eyes. Suddenly she is in love herself. When Alf Ten Berge takes her out on the dunes, tries to consummate their love, she is terrified, runs home. Alf marries another girl for spite.

She takes up with Heloma, a middle-aged professor who loves her well but bookishly. She tries her best to love him back, they are engaged; but a chance conversation with a married man shows her that it was Alf, for all his terrifying lovemaking, whom she really loved. Alf was too wild, Heloma is too tame: she takes up spinsterhood.

A little of that is enough for her. She wants children, marries a wealthy cousin Ben Terwogt. The children come, but not happiness. On a summer holiday she runs into Alf. He declares that she had been his only love. Once more she has a chance, but, though it breaks her heart, she turns it down. In the masquerade of Delft society she has chosen her own false face, and now must live in it.

Uninjured Innocence

THE RUEFUL MATING--G. B. Stern--Knopf.

Generally, when innocence becomes bliss, farewell innocence. Not so with Authoress Stern's delightful hero and heroine. Both infant prodigies, sophisticated apparently from the cradle up, they blissfully defend their childlike birthrights through 567 pages of close novel-writing, through five or six years of their harum-scarum careers.

The most prodigious prodigy is the heroine, Halcyon Day, so named by her esthetically-minded mother, who on her death left her daughter with relatives in New York. Little Halcyon, under the guidance of her governess, a spiritual Mrs. Rosenfeld, soon blossoms into an infant poetess, has her own little sacrosanct blue chair in which she composes "Us on Tip-Toe by the Freckled Beach," and the even more famous "Lines to My Lover in Hell." When Halcyon's father, a hearty retired sea-captain, comes after her he is forced to wait with a delegation of Halcyon's admirers in the anteroom. He determines by hook or crook to get her out of that, takes her off with him to England.

As a sanatorium in which 12-year-old Halcyon can recover from her fantastic poethood, Capt. Day chooses his sister Madge's strictly common-or-garden English home. Here everybody tries to help her "find her own level," "cut her corners off" by making her "knock about" with other children. But Halcyon refuses to be either comforted or tamed. Her sophistication is more than a pose. Her tweedy, game-crazy playmates she finds hopelessly dull. Then suddenly, while moping one day in the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, she meets Eden Herring.

He is a boy-actor, a little older than she, who can toss back the conversational ball faster than she can throw. The children are mutually entranced, and the rest of their story follows their odd vagaries in that trance. In spite of all their elders' iron efforts to separate them they, like bits of quicksilver, run together again. After a bevy of tender, and to their elders, scandalous escapades, during one of which they even manage to spend an innocent night together in an empty house; after Halcyon turns her hand to the drama, and Eden makes a name acting in her hopeless play, the two children, for all their frequent scrapping, come to marriageable terms. Wringing a grudging consent from their parents they set off on their honeymoon. Their trials and tribulations on their wedding night, their subsequent reconciliation in a hall-bedroom not included in the bridal suite, must have their hotel-proprietor smiling yet.

The Author. An English Jewess, Gladys Bronwyn Stern Holdsworth was born in London in 1890, seven years later wrote a play mostly because the billiard room in her home made a good stage. She studied drama, soon decided on a literary career. In 1919 Geoffrey Lisle Holdsworth, English journalist, lying wounded in a hospital, read her Twos and Threes, objected so strongly to its hero that he wrote her a bitter complaint. Replying in her defense Authoress Stern asked him to come and see her; three months later they married. Now she lives in a lofty villa at Diano Marina, Italy, surrounded by wolf dogs and olive trees. There she and her friends go about in shorts, blouse and sandals; at night she retires up a ladder into a bunk-bed. Voluminous, witty, her many books are full of sophisticated sweetmeats. Among them: Debatable Ground, The Matriarch, A Deputy Was a King, The Room, Modesta.

Alice in Hindooland

HINDOO HOLIDAY--J. R. Ackerley--Viking.

Wearing the aura of perfect, slightly homosexual manhood often given by the English universities, along with their diplomas, to their handsomer graduates, Author Ackerley takes a trip to India to tutor a native Maharajah's son, aged two years. In Chhokrapur (a fictitious name for the Maharajah's State) he finds much that Alice found in Wonderland, a topsy-turvy world with a peculiar logic all its own. Out of jottings in the journal kept during his stay he produces an effervescent book that will aerate many a reader's slough of midsummer despond.

Though ostensibly a tutor himself, Author Ackerley's chief duties were to be tutored in Hindi himself, and to converse with the Maharajah from time to time. That strange potentate, with his Pekingese face and nasturtium-colored tongue, was a fantastic hodge-podge of East and West. Once while out motoring to catch sight of a mongoose which would bring good luck, Tutor Ackerley admired a particular stretch of scenery. Unfortunately that particular land was not a part of Chhokrapur, belonged to the Maharajah of Deori, with whom the Prince was not on speaking terms. "Well, he's got a beautiful State," said Tutor Ackerley. "Very beautiful," His Highness agreed irritably. "I should like to grab it--like the Roman Emperors." The party came home without seeing a mongoose.

Besides his favorite dancing-boys the Maharajah took particular delight in religious speculation. An English missionary, Miss Potter, once camped near his palace, and he went straight out to call on her. While she hustled out chairs, prepared to welcome him he sounded off point blank, "'Miss Potter--where is God?' 'He is everywhere,' replied Miss Potter with dignity. 'But, my dear Maiden,' exclaimed His Highness, planting himself firmly in one of the chairs, 'what good is that to me?'"

From the Dewan, or Prime Minister, and from Babaji Rao, the Maharajah's secretary, Tutor Ackerley learned much native common sense, much native lore that he scatters rather indiscriminately throughout his book. His own pupil he saw apparently only once, but he was pestered nearly to death by his tutor Abdul who, despite profuse apologies, was always "boring upon" his time. When the day of departure came, however, he was half sad to leave these queer Hindus. They, with their queer illogic, hit the nail of his experience on the head: "Four days of moonlight--then darkness," say they, sadly contemplating life.

The Author. Born at Rossall, Lancashire in 1896, Author Ackerley served throughout the War, ended it a Captain. After taking a degree at Cambridge University, he took up with the stage, played in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, produced in 1925 a play of his own, The Prisoners of War, since published in book form. Hindoo Holiday is his second book.

Analgesic Baum

SECRET SENTENCE--Vicki Baum--Doubleday, Doran.

In her latest novel Authoress Baum, a literary midwife adept at helping her characters give birth to what she intimates are their souls, turns in a good job of soul-saving midwifery. Only after her hero has gone through highly sensational throes does she ease him with a dose of religio-romantic twilight sleep. The tale of his agonizings, told with a dramatic flair, will make a better movie than it does a book, as was probably intended.

Young Hero Joachim Burthe, scion of an upper-crust family poverty-stricken in Republican Germany, yearns to do something to save his suffering post-War world. Member of a revolutionary society, he connives at plots to assassinate the Minister to whom Germany's great depression is attributed. When the plots fail Joachim determines to commit the murder himself.

His fevered passion for Maikowa, a luxuriously beautiful opera singer, almost debilitates his purpose. But though he makes a fool of himself with her, thoughts of nobler things give him pain.

Succumbing to his better self he finally shoots the Minister, returns afterward to Maikowa to be comforted. She advises him to run for it: "They will hunt you like a wolf. I love you, I love you, poor slave of God--."

Thereafter the poor wolvish slave of God wanders far and wide, accursed by his conscience and the police. He begs on the road, works in coal mines, always on the run. At last he ends up as a gardener in Psychiatrist Lenzburg's sanatorium. After a hair-raising escape from the police Lenzburg befriends him, gives him good psychiatric counsel to help him expiate his guilt.

Expiation and consolation come when, after years spent in America, Joachim returns to Germany, settles down to be a fisherman. His first true love comes to him, for Stine, a simple country lass. (Its arrival Authoress Baum hails in cornucopian Germanic style: "The days approached like a train of laughing girls, each one with a basket full of joy.") But it is not to last--Stine is married to another, while Joachim is wedded only to his simple expiatory life. A storm at sea in which he saves a fellow-fisherman's life gives him his quietus. With some hard pedaling on the greater-love-hath-no-man theme Authoress Baum passes her hero on, presumably to heaven.

* Published June 24.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.