Evening star., 1933-05-28
10y SARAH @. BOWERMAN
Il Mee0 Volume ON This Initiation Problem.
Norman Douglas Looks Backyard.
Fiction for Early Summer.

is romantic material and Mr.. Mackenzie has
made good use of it in his small volume of the
Appleton biography SERIES
I CAN WAIT. BY the author of Miss Tiver-
ton Goes Out" Indianapolis: The Bobbs-
Merrill Co.
COME of the older Shakespearean critics
- spent much time and many pages or VOL
umes in arguing the question of Hamlet's san
ity-was he insane or only pretending to be?
The ultimate answer given by side of the
debate was that he must have been pretending
because Shakespeare would never have COM
mitted such an artistic faux pas as to devote
a whole play to madman, a case for doc
tors, not for a dramatist. Such discussion
might well be broached over the sanity of Adela
Mainwaring in "I Can Wait" The reader
looking for story and understandable char
acters will quickly pronounce her insane and
wonder why some one did not call psychi-
artist. Readers who have perception of the
mystic the intangible, will perhaps feel that
she had super-sanity in fourth -dimensional
world of her own. When her husband
mitted suicide in the dock, after his sentence
of penal servitude, she felt sorrow, not even
shock-only that she now free from all
rksome ties and all painful associations To
be sure, she had married him only because she
was the daughter of a poor country clergy
man and he a rich city man. But that
was when she young and had not yet dis
covered that the thing that mattered TO
her was to dscovef some one, somewhere, who
could teach her the glory of life
AS the funeral was over she horri-
fed all her husbands relatives and business
friends by leaving his house vaguely refusing
to tell her plans, partly at least because she
had none. Only one of them had sufficient
understanding of her to say in response to
the storm of criticism: "Adela's kind (of ad-
ventures) is more than anything, spiritual"
To the monotonous refrain in her mind,
which became almost subconscious, "Adela
where are you going?" she wandered from
place to place, vainly trying to find real love
and the meaning of life for her. Her first
stopping place was in the village of Ruislip,
with her old governess, and there she learned
something that helped her to shrink to a
smaller size than her own large conception
of herself at the center of the universe. There
she also found key to her quest, small one
which grew larger she went on Her expe-
rence on her restless way, the people she met
and came to understand, the suspicious she
aroused in many good people, and her own
spiritual growth are related suggested by
the author with the subtety of style familiar
to readers of Miss Tiverton." II Can Wait
requires imagination for its appreciation, and
at points when Adela is writing in her soul
journal of her imaginary mate Dion, imagina-
ton becomes a trif1e over-tasked.
THE JUDAS TREE. BY Neil H. Swanson.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
THE years of the 1930s with us in fact
and we find it hard to get away from them
in fiction. Contemporary life. whether its
problems its follies, its sordidness, its
achievements is the most popular material of
the present day novelist. This is natural and
probably desirable for thus through imagina-
tive literature, or sometimes what only passes
for literature, is constructed a picture of the
time But in the literary form of the historical
novel has been created some of the finest fiction
of the past and it is to be regretted that the
form has been somewhat neglected of late. We
need historical novels, if only for occasional
relief from the modern tendency novels and
in the historical novel many readers have
found and still find their greatest fiction
pleasure. Neil Swanson demonstrates that
historical novel may be at the same time
accurate and eXcitingly interesting. He has
chosen for his period the years of Pontiac's
conspiracy, 1763-65, when Fort Pitt afterward
Pittsburgh was besieged by the Indians for 81
days and was relieved by the two famous Scot
tish regiments the Gordon Highanders and the
Black Watch. Capt. Ecuyer fought the In
dians with hand grenades and beaver traps
and saved the two hundred women and children
in the stockade from death by starvation or
torture. But the hero of the tale is Arnett
Leslie, .major of militia in my Lord Baltimore's
colony of Maryland" and the heroine is
Diantha Gail, whom Leslie purchases on the
Of his wedding to Evelyn Gentle of Gentle
Hundred, from the master of the New AdFen-
ture, who has brought over to Maryland a
number of indented women, to be sold for
five years to pay their passage. So begins the
story. The end is all that the end of a ro-
nance should be- Between the first and last
chapters, the movement is rapid and
tumultuous.
The purchase of the red haired Diantha is
followed by duel, in which a leaf is shot
from an elm tree AS Arnett Leslie comes
home to Leslie Manor, on the Patuxent, he finds
the Judas tee in bloom and all the smells of
the place @as they should be: just at the
odn clri Of