Death's Head*

Herr Kellerman Sees Starved Lips in the Gloam

The Story. Frau Dora Von Doenhoff, to relieve the boredom of the fourth winter of the War, was giving a party. Fine was the company: General von ("Bloody") Hecht-Batten-berg; Captain "Steam Roller" Falk, who the day before had used his knife adeptly in a Flemish trench, as he would again day after tomorrow; Otto von Battenberg, the General's dashing son; Excellencies, officers, war millionaires, even--it was whispered--a Royal Personage. Pretty women who had kissed many gallant field-coats good-by at dawn in the Koeniggsatzerstrasse depot kissed again now while music played and guests ate caviar, salmon, goose-legs, roast-beef (God knew where Dora got it all). Outside the reveling house stood a shadow; at the window pressed a face like a wrinkled mask, no bigger than a fist and brilliant blue.

What did he want, the blue-faced shadow? He was waiting for the Herr General. He wanted to ask the Herr General where his son was buried who had fallen nearly four years ago at Quatre Vents ....

One did not speak to the General of Quatre Vents. It displeased him to remember that fiasco. The Hill of Quatre Vents, a cemetery twelve stories high, twice taken by the Germans, twice by the French. Longnecked, greedy birds nested on its top. For six days, the General's soldiers had held it. On the fourth, he had hoped ... on the fifth, he was undecided ... on the sixth, he ordered a final counterattack. All night, from his headquarters, he saw rockets go up, lift clustres of flame--help!-- die hopelessly away. The episode had not helped his prestige.

Light streamed from the merry Dora's; down the street, lanterns shone about a dead horse. Shadows surrounded the carcass, soldiers and women with knives. They carved it up, wrapped the bloody meat in scraps of paper. On the corner stood an automobile with the insignia of the Red Cross. A stretcher glided through the circle of light.

The party ended; cars drew up, hissed away into the sleeping city, their "Mars Whistles" screaming. The General took his leave; the blue-masked shadow, afraid, scrambled off ....

A few months later, it was the ninth of November, 1919. Where was the company that was so gay at Frau Doenhoff's? Gone, overtaken, scattered, disastered. The Army had surrendered. The red flag waved over Berlin. General von Hecht-Battenberg sat in a cold room staring with wide-open eyes at the wall. He saw visions of the intervening months; strikes, corpses, barricades; the sharp wax face of the Royal Personage peering from a railway-carriage as he was about to make his escape, with seven trunks, to the border; women screaming in the Lindenstrasse; Falk, a leering cadaver. Once more there rose before him a blue face, fist-size, pressed to the windowpane; the despairing signals of Quatre Vents. In vain those signals; in vain fire, hardship, terror, death. Bloody Hecht was stiff in his chair; the wide eyes were glazed.

The Significance. This novel, excellently translated from the German by Caroline V. Kerr, wears on its dust-jacket a death's head--the same sardonic presentment that presses at the shoulder of every one of the many persons that hurry through its pages, the same that almost visibly intruded itself, the author implies, in every factory, pothouse, bureau, drawing room of Berlin in the last year of the War. The book is a kind of apocalyptic history as, in a larger way, was Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution. Carlyle put brilliant, scholarly romance into an envelope of History; Herr Kellerman puts compelling and, as far as can be ascertained, accurate history into an envelope of realism. He does not, as Carlyle did, make words crackle and spit like gunpowder under a shoe-sole; he writes, rather, in the shaken utterance of a man who has beheld death in a dream and awakened, sweating, to find that the dream is History.

The Author. Herr Bernhard Kellerman, 45, is a Bavarian who studied in Nuremburg and Munich. His first books, hailed by critics, brought him few marks. Prose poems they were, confessions of a pantheist, romantic, mystic-- Yester and Li, The Sea, The Fool. Every political party in Germany has attacked The Ninth of November. Miss Kerr, able translator, is a U. S. journalist now living in Berlin.

Staged

YOUNG MISCHIEF AND THE PERFECT PAIR.--Hugh de Selincourt--A. & C. Boni ($2.00). Poetry is a man with his heart in a passion; the drama is a man with his head in a buzz; prose is the fellow at his ordinary. This matter of pitch has established a certain convention. Prose is the norm; it has the pattern, the pitch, of life. While it may rise to poetry, as life may, it cannot justly fall into the thinned and brittle pattern that fulfills the demands of the stage. That is the fault of Mr. de Selincourt's novel, which presents, against a gold and white drawing-room, the comedy of a jealous man united to his neurotic wife by the machinations of a mischievous brother. The book is clever as a Chinese box; it is patched with excellent stage dialog; it is bad prose.

Spats

PARADISE--Cosmo Hamilton--Little Brown ($2.00). This book begins with the words "My dear Lumley," goes on to relate how the Hon. Stirling-Fortescue --a sort of St. Martin's summer child, born into the house of Stirling-Fortescue after the process of child-bearing had apparently come to an end, hence regarded as ripe for the gallows before he could speak-- wins respect at last by marrying one Chrissie, music-hall artist. She brings him luck. Chaperoned by that fashionable gentleman, Author Hamilton, the Hon. Stirling-Fortescue parades to success, steps nimbly around such corners as the War, poverty, his father's death, leaps over such puddles as mystery and the South Seas, comes through with clean spats.

Don Marquis

"Rush to Your Book-store"

Stuart Pratt Sherman recently dis- covered Don Marquis. The colyumist of The New York Herald-Tribune, al- ready hailed by Hugh Walpole and many others as one of the great gen- iuses of the U. S., now attains recognition in high quarters. Mr. Marquis is a fine poet, a great short-story writer and a playwright of power. His The Dark Hours-- is one of the few great dramas ever written in the U. S. It transcends Eugene O'Neill and makes the poetic dramas of Percy Mackaye sound like pageants for a Sunday School picnic!

Yet there is undoubtedly dual character in this pleasant, stocky, serene, white-haired, youngish gentleman. He can write equally well of the tragic beauty of the trial and death of Our Lord and the exquisitely mismanaged mind of Hermione. He is jester and poet; and in this dual role lies the struggle of a sensitive mind and a robust body to adapt themselves to the ways of U. S. journalism. Don Marquis is a good Journalist. He is also a fine artist. He stands as a perfect contra- diction to those pedants who insist that journalism makes artistry impossible. Sherwood Anderson insists that it is impossible to be successful as a writer in the U. S. and be honestly respectful of the craft of writing. Mr. Marquis has had his share of success; and he is quite as likely to be recognized by posterity as is Mr. Anderson.

This amiable colyumist who has refused for so many years to take himself seriously and has therefore for so many years escaped touting by the highbrows who are usually slow to recognize the modest artist, was born in Illinois. Coming from the centre of the country, he has never deviated from his allegiance to U. S. soil. His stories, his poems, his plays are racy, poignant, subtle, broad; but they are in the rhythm of America and the U. S., they have the sure intonation of inbred loyalty to a tradition and a philosophy. Don Marquis can be sweet, he can be ironic, he can be vulgar. I suspect him of being a greater writer than Mark Twain, of whom he is fond, and whose influence is apparent in much of his work. If those of you who follow his column daily do not believe that he is a great tragic poet, rush to your bookstore and carry home a copy of The Dark Hours. It is a book that you, as an American, will be proud to own. When you have read it, you will dream of seeing it played; and there is little question that, although it has been read and rejected by most of the commercial managers, it will some day achieve production. J. F.

*THE NINTH OF NOVEMBER--Bernhard Kellerman, translated by C. V. Kerr--MeBride ($2.50).

*THE DARK HOURS--Don Marquis--Doubleday, Page ($1.75).