Mrs. George Wemyss has for some time past specialised in spinster-aunts, bachelor-uncles and charming nieces. In Oranges and Lemons (Constable) she introduces us pleasantly to some more. The plot, in fact, is chiefly concerned with the violent squabbles of an uncle and aunt, who belong to different sides of the family, for the good graces of Diana (who is nineteen, or thereabouts, and radiant), and Shant, (who says so—just like that—and is five). There are also several young men. To test his abilities in the Admirable Crichton line Diana maroons the most favoured of these, together with three other aspirants to her hand, and her bachelor uncle, on an island in a Scottish loch, hamperless, on a soft day. As the affections of all the lovers remain undimmed, you can guess what kind of a girl Diana must have been. Shant's even more responsible job is to tumble off a pony and allay the temporary tartness which existed between her two elderly admirers, so that nothing but oranges and orange-blossoms remain. Really, of course, none of the story much matters. But if you want the sensation of having stayed with delightful people in delightful places, where rising prices are not even mentioned or thought of, Mrs. Wemyss can give it you all the time.
Night and Day (Duckworth) is the title of Virginia Woolf's last book; but there is no night for the author's clarity of vision, or her cleverness in describing every detail she has seen, or her delicate precision of style; there is only daylight, temperate, pervading, but at times, I am afraid, almost irritatingly calm. "Give me one indiscretion of sympathy or emotion on behalf of your characters," the reader is tempted to implore her; "let me feel that you are a little bit excited about them and I shall feel excited too." The story, after all, is the simple one (to put it in the shudderingly crude language of former days) of a girl's change of heart from an unreal love to one of whose sincerity she eventually convinces herself. Katharine Hilbery, the granddaughter of a great poet, brought up by a father whose only interest is in literature, and a charming mother who wanders in fields of Victorian romance, breaks off her engagement with a civil servant who has more taste than talent for letters, and chooses instead a man slightly below her in social position, but with firmness and decision of character and genuine skill in—what? Ironmongery? No, literature. All through the book I found myself wondering whether a mind so finely tempered as Katharine's, a perception so acute, was really fitted for anything so commonplace as, after all, love is. And I longed for the authoress, who explained every mood so amazingly well, to explain this too.
Mrs. Norris is evidently a specialist in unconventional situations. In her last novel her theme was the intrigue between a man and his step-mother. In Sisters (Murray) it is the passion of a man for his living wife's married sister, and in neither case does the author seem to be conscious of anything out of the ordinary. Not that there is any air of naughtiness about the business. Peter, a rich cripple, loved Cherry, the youngest and prettiest of the three Strickland girls. But Martin, a casual impecunious stranger, stepped in and took her in one bite before Peter could quite realise she was no longer a child. So in default he married Alix, who was, incidentally, worth six of her. Meeting his Cherry, disillusioned about an unsatisfactory and unsuccessful Martin, he reaches out his hand for this forbidden fruit. Whereupon Alix, the selfless, drives herself and Martin over a cliff by way of making things smooth for Peter and Cherry, which was inconsiderate, if resourceful; for, while Alix is happily killed, poor Martin only breaks his back, so that all may end with the balance on the credit side of the Recording Angel's ledger with Cherry nursing her hopeless invalid. An unlikely story, pleasantly and competently told.
My appreciation of The Ancient Allan (Cassell) may be measured by my keen disappointment on finding that the concluding pages of the book were absent in the copy vouchsafed to me, and that (apparently) in their place a double dose of pages 279-294 was offered. Nevertheless I can safely assert that you will find this a yarn worth reading, for here Sir Rider Haggard is in as good form as ever he was, when both he and Allan Quatermain were younger. Lady Ragnall, who is an old friend to readers of The Ivory Child, reappears here, having in her possession a mysterious and potent herb, which she persuades Allan to inhale. Then the fun takes on a great liveliness. Allan is wafted back to the days when Egypt was under the domination of the Persians, and he in his ancient existence performed some of the very doughtiest of deeds. No one living can tell such a tale with a greater dexterity and zest than Sir Rider. And at that I will leave it, with one more regret that I was not allowed to be present when Allan recovered from the effects of Taduki (the herb that did it).
I find that when the medicine of thought is wrapped up in the jam of fiction I generally take both more willingly than either alone. But if my author, holding out the spoonful, protests that the jam isn't jam at all but part of the dose, then my mouth does not open with quite its usual happy confidence. Miss W.M. Letts has said something of the sort about her great little book, Corporal's Corner (Wells, Gardner, Darton), and I wish she hadn't. It is cast in the form of letters written by a soldier in hospital to a nurse who has been good to him and whose lover has been killed at the Front. Miss Letts introduces it with a foreword which conveys the impression that a real Corporal Jack wrote these letters to a real nurse; but the letters themselves convince—or very nearly convince—me that the foreword itself is a mere device of authorship, and one which defeats its own intention of adding weight to the wise and tender and often humorous things the writer has to say. From his own death-bed Corporal Jack, together with his own love-story and that of his chum Mac, writes what he can of comfort to his friend, and whether his hand or Miss Letts's held the pen the book is the work of someone who knows all about sorrow, and only the initiated—who must be many for a decade to come—will know quite how well it is done.