Lilo in Her Looking-Glass
Tale Without End. By Lilo Linke. Illustrated. (Constable. 7s. ad.)
THROUGHOUT Fraulein Linke's record of her travels there iv evidence of qualities that one respects—yet its whole effect i trivial and subtly irritating. In search of experience she starts off with five young men ; visits the Verdun battlefields
and Paris ; then, disappointed in love, branches off on her own ; stays with a fisher family on the Ile de Batz ; visits the silk- weavers of Lyons ; and leaves Marseilles for a cruise on an
uncomfortable steam-trawler. Thus she seeks hardship and meets it with fortitude, evidently enjoying to the full this proof of weakness and strength in herself. Her Teutonic perse- verance and industry enable her everywhere to gather in fresh and exciting sensations—and to gain an astonishing mastery of the language in which she wrote this book. As a happy and fluent description, in English, of life as a tramp, Tale Without End is a lour de force. But that is all : a brilliant schoolgirl's exercise-book. One which, moreover, with its virtues and defects, no English schoolgirl could be expected to have written.
The authoress is youthful and frank, athirst for experience. But her doubts are too few as to the quality of this thirst ; and none seem to have assailed Miss Storm Jameson, who
sponsors her with an enthusiastic introduction. Finally, however, she sits down on the steps of a mairie, and
wonders . . .
" Why did I wear myself out like this ? What was it that I was running after, asking all these strangers for assistance ? Life. The life of the simple. Did I really believe in it ? And did not this oon- scious searching spoil the only attitude with which one should approach it—innocence ? Was I merely attempting to run away from myself ? And how ridiculous to do it in such a pedantic and methodical, in such a Prussian way ! When I had reached that point, I suddenly got up. I did not like to find myself moving along these lines."
This being so, her attitude is more often one of calm
assurance. During Mass in a Breton church she reflects : " What a wonderful experience is life. Short, so short. It moves quickly, and the world is great, and I want to see it,
hear it, taste it, smell and feel it. How I like you all, you funny people. And thank You, God, that I am only here on holiday and shall soon see another place. Amen." Or, when rough weather at sea alarms a Catholic priest, her fellow- traveller, she can be impertinent : " Smiling I bend down to him. ' What are you afraid of, your Reverence ? Are we not all safe in God's hand ? ' " As a keen Socialist, at a workers' college in Frankfort : "nine months of studies seemed short enough to understand. And afterwards to lead and rule." But very soon, in France, she had misunderstood her fellow Wandervogel, Fred—or
allowed him to misunderstand her, though the reader cannot ; and, seeking hardship and heroism, with an odd mixture of high spirits, simplicity, immodesty and idealism, she seems, On her travels and in compiling this book, to have mistaken a dalliance with trivialities for a search for wisdom.
JOHN MARKS.
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