Here again is a totally different vein of half humor and half seriousness. Mr. Chambers selects a firm of detectives (based, by the way, on fact) who guarantee to find lost persons, missing heirs, etc. In this case the author’s fancy and humor suggest to a young bachelor, who has always had an ideal girl in mind, that he go and describe her as a real person to Mr. Keen, the Tracer of Lost Persons. He gives his description, and, as may be supposed, Mr. Keen finds the girl, but after such a series of episodes, escapes, discoveries and dénouements that it takes a full-grown novel to accomplish the task.
THE TREE OF HEAVEN
Half in fancy, half in fact, the thread of an occult idea runs through this weird theme. You cannot, even at the end, be quite sure whether the author has been making fun of you or not. Perhaps, if the truth were told, he could not quite tell you himself. The tale all hangs about one of a group of friends who lives for years in the Far East and gathers some of the occult knowledge of that far-off land. Into the woof of an Eastern rug is woven the soul of a woman. Into the glisten of a scarab is polished the prophecy of a life. Into the whole charming romance of the book is woven the thread of an intangible, “creepy,” mysterious force. What is it? Is it a joke? Who knows?
SOME LADIES IN HASTE
This novel is as widely different from all the others as if another hand had written it and another mind conceived it. This time, too, it is impossible to say whether the author is quizzing our new thought transference and telepathic friends, or whether he is half inclined to suggest that “there may be something in it.” Here is a character who suddenly discovers that by concentrating his mind on certain ideas he can inject or project them into others. And forthwith he sets half a dozen couples making love to each other in most grotesque surroundings. They climb trees and become engaged. They put on strange Panlike costumes and prance about the woods—always charming, always well bred, always with a touch of romance that makes the reader read on to the end and finally lay the book down with a smile of pleasure and a little sigh that it is over so soon.
One might run on for twenty books more, but there is not space enough even to mention Mr. Chambers’s delightful nature books for children, telling how Geraldine and Peter go wandering through “Outdoor-land,” “Mountain-Land,” “Orchard-Land,” “River-Land,” “Forest-Land,” and “Garden-Land.” They, in turn, are as different from his novels in fancy and conception as each of his novels from the other. No living writer has given to the public so varied a list of books with such extraordinary popularity in all of them as Mr. Robert W. Chambers.