Drops from a Rusty Spigot

ACTIONS AND REACTIONS (280 pp.)--Doubleday ($3).

A good way to read Actions and Reactions, a book of short stories published last week, is to begin without looking to see who wrote them. That way, most readers should have many pleasures of discovery, and be spared some disappointments of high expectation. It's a lively little book, but the author has long since accustomed his readers to something much better than lively.

Right in the first sentence of the first story, An Habitation Enforced, a leggy prose takes the reader in stride: "It came without warning, at the very hour his hand was outstretched to crumple the Holz and Gunsberg Combine." The third and fourth stories, a political allegory and a science fiction (which predicts that in 2000 A.D. the dirigible will replace the airplane), are empty shows of the author's variety. He seems to do everything easily, and nothing really well. But in the fifth story, A Deal in Cotton (a wild yarn, all fever and cannibals, about an attempt to raise cotton in Africa), the author for the first time shows signs that he can create vivid characteristics, if not characters. And he follows a trail of action that would stump a bloodhound, yet does not waste a step.

The seventh story is worth the rest of the book together. Little Foxes recounts how a few enlightened Englishmen nobly shouldered the white man's burden in an Ethiopian province, and introduced civilization in its highest form--the fox hunt. With an efficiency extraordinary in the colonies, they soon had organized the whole province around the hunt, so that it became an indispensable function of government.

Only one man could give the final pat to this neat little colonial comedy, and any schoolboy could guess who he was after three sentences--Rudyard Kipling. This one story, written when Kipling was 44, is the only pure drop of storytelling in the bucket; the literary spigot, which by Kipling's 24th year had already spouted seven fine volumes, began to go rusty when he was still a young man. But one good story by Rudyard Kipling is quite enough to make a book worth having.

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