Wunderkind

"NATIONAL VELVET"--Enid Bagnold-- Morrow ($2.50).

World-weary old gentlemen about to blow out their brains do not as a rule leave their horses to little girls who are delivering a steak. Champion racehorses are not apt to be raffled off for a shilling ticket.

And girls, however gallant, do not ride in the Grand National at Aintree. Each of these unlikely happenings occurs in Author Bagnold's "National Velvet," but so compelling is the wave of her magic wand that the surliest realist will nod and grin approval. Nor should hippophobes shrink away; though the story reeks of horses it is not horsy. Humorous, charming, "National Velvet" is a little masterpiece of English sentiment. Velvet was 14, going on 15, and looked "like Dante when he was a little girl." She was skinny, and wore a painful plate for her buck teeth. Her three older sisters were beauties; her little brother was a caution (his most prized possession was a bottle in which he collected his spit). Her father was a butcher, a sensible sort of man; her immense mother had swum the English Channel at 19, had now relapsed into a mountainous and silent character. Velvet was not much to look at but she had her mother's spirit. And Velvet worshiped horses. All she had to ride was Miss Ada, the family's unpleasantly decrepit old pony. When a neighboring farmer's piebald gelding was raffled off because he kept jumping fences and running away, Velvet won him and acquired the start of her stable. And when the old gentleman committed suicide, leaving all his horses to her because she was the last person he saw, Velvet knew that her star was due to rise. How it rose, and to what heights, Au thor Bagnold should be left alone to tell. The Author. Many a Manhattan playgoer remembers the delightfully improbable Serena Blandish (1929) ; it was taken from the novel of the same name written (but not acknowledged) by Enid Bagnold. Author of only four acknowledged books (a war diary, poems, a child's book, a novel), Author Bagnold has an English reputation that might surprise those who have never read her. A beauty of the approved English type, she is the wife of Sir Roderick Jones, Chairman of Reuters, No. 1 European news service, has four children, a good stable and a pleasant income. The wonder is that she should have written as much as she has. Before the War she was one of a small artistic set which included Painter Lovat Fraser, Poet Ralph Hodgson, Sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. She met her husband in France, where she drove a car for the French Army and was the first woman in Verdun's fortress after the Armistice. Now she lives with her family in Sussex, is at present on a trip to South Africa with her husband.

"National Velvet" is the May choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club (with Road to War, by Walter Millis--to be reviewed next week).

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