“In the year that the Colonel died he took little Rupert to see the swallows fly away. I can find no better beginning than that.
“When there devolved upon me as a labour of love the editing of Rupert Ray’s book, Tell England, I carried the manuscript to my room one bright autumn afternoon and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark. I could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas. Nor, perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness. There are times when one prefers the twilight. Doubtless the tale held me fascinated because it revealed the schooldays of those boys whom I met in their young manhood and told afresh that wild old Gallipoli adventure which I shared with them. Though, sadly enough, I take Heaven to witness that I was not the idealised creature whom Rupert portrays. God bless them, how these boys will idealise us!
“Then again, as Rupert tells you, it was I who suggested to him the writing of his story. And well I recall how he demurred, asking:
“‘But what am I to write about?’ For he was always diffident and unconscious of his power.
“‘Is Gallipoli nothing to write about?’ I retorted. ‘And you can’t have spent five years at a great public school like Kensington without one or two sensational things. Pick them out and let us have them. For whatever the modern theorists say, the main duty of a story-teller is certainly to tell stories.’”
This prologue is followed by the novel which begins with English public school life in the fashion of Sonia and other novels American readers are familiar with. The main theme of the book is Gallipoli.
The new novel by J. E. Buckrose is A Knight Among Ladies. Mrs. Buckrose says that the character of Sid Dummeris in this book is modelled upon an actual person. “He did actually live in a remote country place where I used to stay a great deal when I was a child and as he has been gone twenty years, I thought I might employ my exact memories of him without hurting anyone.” This was in answer to questions asked by The Bookman (London) of a number of English writers. The London Bookman wanted to find out if novelists generally drew their characters from actual people. The replies showed that this proceeding was very rare. Mrs. Buckrose recalled only one other instance in which she had used an actual person in her fiction. Mrs. Buckrose is Mrs. Falconer Jameson. She lives at Hornsea, East Yorkshire, and says:
“My real hobby is my writing—as it was my secret pleasure from the age of nine until I was over thirty when I first attempted to publish. I look after my chickens, my house and a rather delicate husband; write my books and try to do my duty to my neighbour!”
iv
Back of the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning, Spellbinders, is the question: Has the vote and its consequent widening of the mental horizon introduced a brand new element of discord or a factor for mutual support into modern marriage? The household of the George Flandons was almost wrecked by it. That his wife should accept the opportunity to play her part in State and National affairs seemed to George Flandon a desertion of her real duty.