Pompless Circumstance

ILL WIND -- James Hilton -- Morrow ($2.50).

Though not a popular theory nowadays, it is still held by some that, in Orator Edmund Burke's words: "A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature." That is the thesis of Author Hilton's circumstantial Ill Wind: without ever obtruding himself or appearing to state a case, he makes it brilliantly clear how far a single action can fling its consequences.

Charles Gathergood, British Agent in the Malaysian island of Cuava, in trying to do his duty caused the death of an English planter and' his own trial and disgrace. As a far-off but linked result Soviet Deputy Tribourov was shot by a woman in Geneva. Missing links: an intelligent but unattractive English spinster, who had followed the Gathergood case in the papers with indignant sympathy, was vacationing in Switzerland, spied a lonely-seeming Britisher she was sure was Gathergood in disguise. Sympathy turned to love; she proffered herself; he left her and Switzerland in haste. On the train he met an attractive young Rumanian, Nicholas Palescu, with a crazy invention for sale. The Britisher's firm later bought the rights to the invention, gave Palescu the money to go to the .U. S., become social secretary to world-famed Hollywood Star Sylvia Seydel. Nick became a star too; sickened of it, ran away to South America, was killed in an earthquake far in the interior. Leon Mirsky, Russian refugee turned journalist, sent to Maramba to write up the earthquake, recognized Nick's dead body as live news. In his fever to get to a telegraph office, send the news, he started off through the jungle by himself, got hopelessly lost. Explorer Max Oetzler was sent to find him, discovered him reverted to savagery, insane, living with a native woman. He had to write what he found to Mirsky's only relative, a sister employed as a chambermaid in a Geneva hotel. Just before the letter came she had let herself fall in love with child-like Soviet Deputy Tribourov, though she hated Bolsheviks worse than poison, had even spent the night with him. When the letter came, her revulsion of feeling was so great she went to the League of Nations Conference Hall, shot Tribourov, then killed herself. In England Henry Elliott, one of Britain's biggest experts on foreign affairs, on his 60th birthday was campaigning for a necessary but unimportant seat in Parliament; the news sent him scooting to London, ready to fly to Geneva. Luckily Tribourov recovered; Elliott could go on with his campaign. A colleague mentioned Gather-good s name at the club that evening; both soundly agreed that "even a first-rate civil service has to hare its occasional scapegoats--Pontius Pilate, for instance." adjourned upstairs for a glass of Napoleon brandy.

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