Elsie*

Mr. Bennett Collaborates with Curiosity in a Book of Short Stories

Elsie and the Child were friends. Elsie was Mrs. Raste's cook. The Child, Eva, was Mrs. Raste's daughter. Mrs. Raste wanted to send Eva away to boarding school. She wouldn't go. She and Elsie were friends. She loved Elsie better than her mother. That was the way of it; no explanation. Upstairs there were scenes; downstairs there were bubblings; in my lady's chamber there was bitterness of heart, all because a spoiled and lonely child was untowardly fond of a buman being who made the bread. Little Eva went to bed with a temperature. Elsie, ashamed somehow, offered to give notice. Then said Mrs. Raste, that admirable woman, knowing herself beaten, conceding that love is power: "Then you want to make it still more difficult for me. Do you want to kill my Eva?"

The Paper Cap was stuck on the head of a fastidious Matthew Park by a singularly beautiful woman whom, until the moment when she so clownishly crowned him, he had taken for a civilized person. It was a cap of disenchantment. It symbolized for him all the crassness, the barbarity of a planet which he had long despised, which he thenceforward renounced. Months later, the beautiful woman forced herself upon him where he, scornful recluse, sojourned on his yacht, spied the symbol pinned to his cabin wall, called him "baffling--but a dear" for keeping it, kissed him. He thereupon ceased to despise the planet.

Outside and Inside were two sides of that startling event--the collapse of Miss Aida Jenkinson, actress, on the night on which she was to have realized her life's ambition by appearing as Viola in Twelfth Night. Instead of being page to Duke Orsino, she put on an air signifying that Duke Orsino was page to her; she cut all other parts with mighty shears; she threw out her lines like strings of sausage out of a sausage machine. But on the great night itself, after splitting her green jacket up the back, Actress Jenkinson collapsed in a heap. The heap was a forlorn old woman.

Last Love was also first love for Miss Osyth, music teacher. She was regarded as an angel by her pupil, Minnie (Minnie's universe was peopled with angels and fiends); but when, one night, a handsome, dark apostate came wounded to her door, she hailed her lord, she washed his wound, fell from her starched Paradise into heavenly, purgatory. In short, she let him kiss her. Called away by the death of one of her uncles, she came back to find him kissing Minnie.

Nine O'Clock Tomorrow was the time she said. Mysteriously she came to Raphael Field, fared artist, when he was a young man. Now Raphael Field is old. His unfinished portrait of her will bring a couple of thousand pounds at Christie's. He lives alone; each night he dines forlornly at his club. She said she'd come back, at "nine o'clock tomorrow" for her second and last sitting. She never came.

The Yacht is the scene of certain things that occur for the reason that, on a small yacht, everybody can hear everything.

The Perfect Creature loved by great artists, famed composers, married a young and stupid chemical engineer.

The Fish was an actor who, despite the enthusiasm of thousands who paid to see him disport himself in a drawing room with only three sides to it, could not make much of a figure in one with the usual number of walls.

The Significance. Mr. Bennett once wrote a book called Things That Have Interested Me. That title was a quip, for everything interests Mr. Bennett. He sees a shining saucepan, a sleek yacht, a sorry little woman ; he thinks : "Who scrubbed it? Where is it going? Has anyone ever loved her?" So, doubtless, think others, but Mr. Bennett goes to the trouble of finding out. He knows how servants think, how yachts run, how music teadiers meet their fate. He wears a duster on his helmet; he is the knight of Curiosity. More than that he is one of those simple ones who remember that we are all Heaven's creatures.

The Author. Enoch Arnold Bennett grew up among the potteries of Staffordshire. He has a most amiable disposition, a French wife, a steam yacht.

Pocket Amenities

THE WEEK END BOOK--Edited by Vera Mendel, Francis Meynell, Davia Garnett and John Goss--Dial Press ($2.00). An affable little hydra of the amenities lifts nine heads among common books of the day. Of "pocketable" bulk, it is a creature to fend for its weekending master or mistress against all skulking shapes of boredom, unsociability, indisposedness and even of palatal lassitude and the "thin rheum." Or it is a nine-bladed instrument for amiability, with the stabbing blade--a section of Great Poems--whetted to impale dark toads of the spirit; and the accessories--Hate Poems, State Poems, The Zoo, Songs, Play!, Food, First Aid in Divers Crises--for whittling and tinkering the disposition under circumstances various. Of the Great Poems, that old and unthanked friend of man, Anonymous, wrote many. Ben Jotison, Marvell, Donne, Leigh Hunt, Coventry Patmore, Suckling, Herrick, Vaughan and some men and women of our time are given the merited prominence denied them in more portentous anthologies. Likewise in culling Hate Poems did the editors exhibit a sharp and free taste, with this same predilection for the 17th and 20th Centuries. Rare justice is exhibited in the juxtaposition of Deborah's song from Judges V, with Mr. W. N. Ewer's octosyllabic insolence:

How odd

Of God

To choose

The Jews.

The Zoo might well be enlarged in an-other edition--Lindsay's Little Turtle and much else are missing--but the Songs are all those chantels whereof someone on a houseparty is sure to know a second. There are blank pages inside the back cover for one's own additions to this or any other section. One good British page is left for Train Times.

The games in Play!, though many are new, sound a mite dull, like a governess, as do most games before you begin them. Under Food are some amazing confections, and a note on mice-in-honey. For their homicidal notes on mushrooms and kindred fungi, the editors should at once be prosecuted.

First Aid in Divers Crises gives best this small book's delicate flavor. Here are "cachets," "minims," "possets," "epithems;" here advice against "the popular indulgence of biting off blood blisters" and a course of action "on becoming indifferent to the fate of your ship."

Sherwood Anderson

He is the American Balzac

Sherwood Anderson is not an old man, but he has found life full enough to spill into an autobiography and he has recently written a great book--A Story Teller's Story*; He was born in Ohio, was Sherwood Anderson, of simple people, part Italian. He had a father who delighted in romantic lies and a mother who cared in a detached but positive way for her three sons. Of these early days Sherwood Anderson tells with simplicity and understanding. He draws great characters in his slow, involved, rhythmical way. Yet the greatest character is himself, the artist struggling against the philosopher, the doer struggling with the dreamer. This is a book everyone should read. It is, in my humble opinion, a great piece of autobiographical writing. This was his conflict; this was his problem from the earliest days. He essayed heroism in the Spanish War, being of the stuff of his father, who dreamed dreams of heroism in the Civil War and spun tales of visualized if not actual valor. Then Anderson became a manufacturer. He owned a factory. In a factory, the soul is destroyed, but before destruction sets in, the soul is puzzled. Mr. Anderson asked his soul a few questions and received clear answers. He put on his hat and coat one morning and left office, town, personality, responsibilities. His soul, artistic, forced him to forego the more bitter obligations of life. Fetters fell from him and he strode out to be the great story teller he is.

It has often been said that Mr. Anderson has no sense of humor. This is only partially true. Wit is present in his autobiography, though seldom in his novels. Many Marriages (TIME, Mar. 10, 1923) with its fun unintended, becomes understandable in tIe light of the autobiography. One can almost forgive him for that odd book after reading this fine one.

What an amazing man he is. Simple, stalwart, with his waving hair, his clinging eyes, his dreamy voice-- yet for all this shyness, this modesty, both in personality and in print, a furious and insistent egotist. His future, it seems to me, depends largely on his ability or inability to come to some conclusion about himself. He should go a step farther in his egocentric career. He should come out boldly to himself with the statement that he undoubtedly believes what many of his critics announce. Why not say it out loud, Mr. Anderson: "I am the American Balzac!" J.F.

*ELSIE AND THE CHILD--Arnold Bennett-- Doran ($2.50).

*A Story Teller's Story--Sherwood Anderson--Huebsch ($3.00)