FICTION.
OLIVLA. IN INDIA:f THE record of a cold-weather visit to India does not Bound very promising to the novel-reader with a thirst for novelty,
• Hunting in the Olden Days. By William Scarth Dixon. London : Constable and Co. [21s. net.]
t Olivia in India the Adve-ntures of a Chola Miss Sahib. By O. London ; Hodder and Stoughton. [61.]
but the unexpected has happened,,and no one who takes up this book is likely to lay it down without feeling a great kindness to the writer of this vivacious chronicle. Olivia engages the goodwill of the gentle reader from the outset.
She is a Scots girl with a hereditary knack of making friends. The Douglas family, as she tells us, had no difficulty in this respect, because they were always ready to laugh at the feeblest joke, and invariably spoke to people in trains. She was singularly fortunate in her parents, and not less so in her brothers ; the book is not merely a record ef experiences, it is animated throughout by the most charming filial, fraternal, and sisterly affection. Olivia went out to India not to hunt for a husband, but to see her brother, a promising member of the I.C.S. Her second motive was to see the great mountains, for Olivia had been inoculated with the passion for mountaineering by another brother, and when she looked on the barren rocks above Aden she was reminded of the Skye Coolin, and wondered whether they were climbable. Indeed, her account, in one of the numerous digressions which lend the narrative its chief charm, of her mingled feelings on first seeing the Matterhorn and of the joys and discomforts of the novice, will commend her to all the mountaineering fraternity. But Olivia was not merely a good daughter, a good sister, and a keen climber. She had been brought up in an atmosphere which was bookish without being pedantic : she knew great pieces of fine poetry by heart, and she had a very pretty sense of humour. When a pompous lady observed that her father was four times removed from a peer, Olivia had great difficulty in refraining from asking who had removed him. She was conscious of her limitations, but had no grudge against the fairies, though "at the moment I can't think of anything they did give me except a heart that keeps on the windy side of care, as Beatrice puts it ; and hair that curls naturally." Her splendid candour is another endearing trait, as when she admits that the only music she really liked was Scots song played on the pianola r Another good point about Olivia is her appreciation of her own sex. "Men have an absurd notion," she observes, "that we can't admire another woman or admit her good points. It isn't so. We admire a pretty woman just as much as you do.
The only difference is, you men think that if a woman has a lovely face it follows, as the night the day, that she must have a lovely disposition. We know better ; that's all." Small' wonder, then, was it that Olivia was a favourite abroad as well as at home, and that an American matron, wearily globe- trotting with her daughter, should have paid her this resounding compliment on the strength of a few hours' conversation in the train. " ' Child,' said the Mommer ' to me,' are you married ? No,' I said, surprised, why ? " I was just thinking what a good time your husband must have !' " When we said that Olivia did not go out to India to hunt for a husband, the statement, though accurate, required some expansion. There was already, virtually at least, an eligible applicant for the post at home, to whom these letters are addressed. Thus Olivia's visit to India served another purpose besides those already mentioned—that of testing her attach- ment to this young man, whose name we do not learn, but about whom we glean sundry particulars, as, for example, that he was.
an Oxford friend of her Anglo-Indian brother, that be wore an eyeglass and the Oxford manner, and that he went to. Germany to write a book of a serious and instructive character. We suspect him of a slight taint of priggishness, but these letters must have knocked a lot of it out of him, and his- jealousy of possible rivals at least shows an acute appreciation of Olivia's attractions. As a child she and her brothers earned the hostile verdict of the village: "They're a' bad, but the- lassie is the verra deil," and Olivia admits it with an important, qualification, "We were bad, but we were also extraordinarily happy." As we see her on board the liner—after the pre- liminary miseries of the Bay—in Calcutta, in the train, or in, the jungle, or camping in the Mofussil, she atones for her early wickedness by bestowing the gift of happiness on others. Not that she carries her altruism to the point of insipidity or self- effacement. Olivia has many eminently human traits ; she likes good food as well as good poetry and fine scenery, and there is a pleasantly sub-acid flavour in the expression of her dislikes. The portraits of the "Candle "—as she calls the artificial and flirtatious lady to whom all the men on board Douglas' played the part of moth—of little Mrs. Murray with her " greew
complexion and sleek black hair," who gave the impression of "having a great many more teeth than is usual" ; of the selfish sportsman who made her late for lunch—all these are etched with an unsparing fidelity. But her motto is "Let the good prevail," and she is a mistress of the art of felicitous eulogy. She makes us want to meet the people she praises—her cabin companion, Geraldine Hilton, who was like a "great rosy apple" ; Mr. Boyle, who reminded her of Colonel Neweorne ; Dr. Russel, the devoted medical missionary ; and, above all, her father and mother and brothers. These letters lend themselves to quotation, and we should like to reproduce Olivia's reminiscences of her "covenanting childhood" and strenuous Sabbath days. On looking back Olivia loved every minute of them :—
" Father could make any day delightful ; and what a through- the-week father he was! Sometimes he came to tea with us in the nursery and made believe there was a fairy called Annabel Lee in the tea-pot, carrying on conversations with her that sent eerie thrills down our several spines. Afterwards he would read out of a little green and gold book that contained for us all the romance of the ages between its elegant covers. From Father we heard of Angus the Subtle, Morag of the Misty Way, and the King of Errin, who rides and rides and whose road is to the End of Days. Sometimes, laying books aside, he told us old tales that he had heard from his mother, who in turn had heard them from hers, of the Red Etain of Ireland who lived in Belligand, and who stole the King's daughter, the King of fair Scotland: and the pathetic tale of the bannock that went to see the world, with its cynical and ‘Ah well! We'll all be in the tod's hole in less than a hutmer years.' It was Father who gave us first a love for books, and taught us the magic of lovely words. And it was Father who tried to place our stumbling little childish feet in the Narrow Way, and to turn our eyes ever towards a better country= that is an heavenly !' I suppose it was the dimly understood talk of the better country that gave John and me the idea of our Kingdom. It was a great secret once, but now I may tell without breaking faith. Boggley and tho Bird were prosaic people, caring more for bird-nesting and Red Indian hunting than games of make-believe, so they never knew. It was part of the sunny old garden, our Kingdom, and was called Nontland because it was ruled by one Nont. He had once been a common ninepin, but having had a hole bored through his middle with a red-hot wire he became possessed of a mystic power and personality. Even we—his creators, so to speak —stood somewhat in awe of him. The River Beulah flowed through Nontland, and it was bounded on the north by the Celestial Mountains; on the south by the red brick wall, where the big pears grew; on the west by the Rose of Sharon tree ; and on the east by the pig-sty. That last sounds something of a descent, but it wasn't really a pig-sty, and I can't think why it WRS called so, for, to my knowledge, it had never harboured any- thing but two innocent white Russian rabbits with pink eyes. It was situated at the foot of the kitchen garden, next door to the hen-houses : the roof, made of pavement flags, was easy to climb, and, sloping as it did to the top of the wall overlooking the high- road, was greatly prized by us as a watch-tower from which we could see the world go by. To get into our kingdom we knocked at the Wicket Gate, murmuring as we did so—
El Dorado Yo he trovado.'
and it opened—with a push. We hadn't an idea then, nor have I now, what tho words meant. We got them out of a book called The Spanish Brothers and thought them splendidly mysterious. Besides ourselves, and Neat, and the Russian rabbits, there was only one other denizen of our kingdom—a turkey with a broken leg, a lonely, lovable fowl which John, out of pity, raised to the peerage and the office of Prime Minister. I have a vivid recollec- tion of riding in hot haste on a rake to tell the king—not in proper fairy fashion that the skies were fallen—but that Lord Turkey of Henhouse was dead. John, I remember, always carried some fern seed in his trouser-pocket. He said it made him invisible—a delusion I loyally supported. It seems to me the sun always shone in those days, the time was ever three o'clock in the after- noon, and faery lay just adown the road !"
There are many other wise and tender pages in this volume, but perhaps enough has been written to show its excellent
quality and to persuade our readers to accompany Olivia on her tour. They cannot do so without gratitude, or fail to sympathize with her in the loss recorded in the simple but touching words of the dedication.
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