Wooden Indians

THE ALLINGHAMS--May Sinclair --Macmillan ($2.50). To Author Sinclair the most engrossing of all the phenomena of human behavior are those of growth. She writes about children as they get older, watches their instincts and emotions stiffen in the mold, closely observes tendencies hardening into characters. In another book, Arnold Waterlow, she riveted her attention to the slow shaping of a single personality. Now she brings six children into the world of her mind.

Margaret, Wilfrid, Stephen, Mollie, Robin, Angela live in an English country house. In the beginning of the book they have tea in the nursery, go to school, behave like English children. The close and careful breeding that feeds the playing fields of Eton is theirs. Later the restraint of this upbringing makes differing marks on their characters. Mollie foregoes her music and submits to fate and a father who tends his children without tenderness. Margaret's nerves, sharpened by inhibitions, end by shattering her mind. Wilfrid, a normal eldest son, inherits peace and his father's lands. Robin, who gets drunk too often, marries a country wench and offers succor to Angela when her family find that she has loved not wisely and entirely too well. Stephen becomes a poet, whose small success is not justified by the execrable outpourings of his muse so unfortunately quoted by Prose-Writer Sinclair.

Of the writing of the book it may be said that May Sinclair handles her story well, although at times the feeling is inevitable that six brain children are too large a brood for any author to handle. The plot usually well-sustained, at points of maximum action strays, wobbles, stumbles. Of the characters, categorical differentiations are employed to help the reader tell one from the other, but the net effect is of a houseful of wooden Indians worked by wires. Not since Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) has May Sinclair been herself.