Ladies

WHATEVER WE DO -- Allan Upde-graff--John Day ($2.50). Cloppety-Clop. The little French train rushed through the pines toward Valloire, modest neighbor of Cannes, bearing Peleus Chalfont, young U. S. expatriate in search of health. Cloppety-Clop. The same little train bore the pretty Bobbie Parsons and her too ancient husband George, un- pleasantly far from his native Missouri. The toot of a motor horn. Came drunken old Henry-oh with ribalt Mimi, the Duchess. World-weary pilgrims, they journeyed back through the hills to the Temple of Hercules, there to utter loose prayers. Someone answered.

Author Updegraff has chosen Author William J. Locke's favorite scene and peopled it with an odd, rude, fascinating cast. Carnal, slangy, amusing, the story flows swifty through its pages over a strong undercurrent of sorrow and pain.

Urge

THE WAYWARD MAN -- St. John Ervine -- Macmillan ($2.50).

The Story. Good Mother Dunwoody kept a shop in Belfast, brought up her four children, loved best little Robert, the youngest, born after the death of his father who was lost with his ship at sea. The three older chil dren were all right, but Robert would be something special, a credit to the De Lacy blood which coursed his veins. He would, thought Mother Dunwoody, go to Martin's College. Then to the Presbyterian College. And-- finally the proud day would come when she would sit under Robert in his very own church. Of one thing Mother Dunwoody was mortally sure: her Robert would never, never go to sea like his father. It was a miser able roving life, she said, and people should be content to stay in "their place." Belfast was to be Robert's "place."

But Robert, good child though he was, was possessed with the inde scribable longing for limitless waters under vast skies. And of course he could not withstand the temptation to satisfy it. Seizing upon a family quarrel as a pretext, he rushed from his mother's house one night and entered into his first seven years "at sea."

As a stowaway he reached Glasgow. There, by falsely swearing that he was 21, he managed to sign on with the Ardrossan Castle, a four-master bound for Melbourne. There followed a long apprenticeship and Robert sailed many strange seas be fore his ship brought him back again to Glasgow. The salt was thick in his blood by this time. He signed with the clipper Blue Dragon, New York bound . . . fell from a mast . . . lay in a hospital . . . sailed around the Horn to San Francisco . . . was drugged in a brothel . . . was shanghaied aboard The Firefly . . . spent six weeks in a long boat when the ship burned . . . was rescued . . . returned at last to Belfast.

The memory of the long boat and love for his mother combined to keep Robert ashore--for a year. His mother was delighted. It was too late for him to become a minister but he could settle down and be with her, at least. Indeed, he would marry Brenda. That was the very thing. Brenda was a sensible girl who would keep him in his "place." The sea would never call him again.

So Robert married Brenda and Mother Underwood was glad. But soon the memory of the long boat faded, poor Brenda failed her duty, the old craving overpowered Robert, and away to sea he went.

The Significance. Author Ervine has done a fine thing about people and land and sea. With the imaginative power that seems peculiar to the Irish, he has sung the song of Robert Dunwoody and his good mother and their conflict of wills. He has sung the dullness of the land and the charms of the sea; the charms of the land and the horrors of the sea. His dialect is fascinating without being unintelligible to the foreign ear. And he has successfully resisted the common Irish impulse to become incoherently whimsical, mystical.

The Author. St. John Green Ervine was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1883. In 1915 he became manager of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin. The War took him to France where he fought with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and lost a leg. His first two plays were The Magnanimous Lover and Mixed Marriage, produced at the Abbey Theatre. Two later plays, Jane Clegg and John Ferguson, are better known, having been well received on both the English and U.S. stage. He has written several political studies, two books on the theatre, and a book about celebrities he has known, called Some Impressions of My Elders. The Wayward Man is his fifth novel, preceded by Mrs. Martin's Man, Alice and a Family, Changing Winds and The Foolish Lovers.