Books: Happy Locke

• Share

PERELLA — William J. Locke —Dodd, Mead ($2). In Florence the most eminent art critic is, of course, king. So when lost-in-thought Professor Sylvester Gayton trips into the Pitti or Uffizi, guards jump to attention, bow low, chatter thereafter of the lucky copyist whose work he has chanced to inform with the perfect suggestion.

Unknown to the guards, this Professor himself has but lately been informed by perfection. He has married the littlest, tenderest of sprites who ever sat long hours at an easel before "the souls of old painters who saw God and proclaimed him in terms of Immortal Beauty." The many-crowned Professor has become young, eager, full of pretty and silly courtesies. The stool for her feet, the bunch of far-brought snow-drops Like the lover of Hans Andersen's princess he will not have Perella inconvenienced by the dried pea beneath the seventh mattress. And she adores him. May she not serve? "Socks, my dear?" he answers with puckery brow. "I've not worn darned socks for years—I buy the very cheapest and whenever I see a hole in the toe, I throw them into the wastepaper basket." "You'll never do that again as long as you live," says Perella. Whereupon, the Fiat with royal purple flying whisks them off to Paris.

Thus Romancer Locke, were he merely the happiest of romancers, might leave Perella most adequately compensated for the loss of a heartily passionate youth whom fate had originally cast for her, but whom Beatrice Ellison, a magnificent young U. S. grandmother, usurped. Mr. Locke, however, preserves a vein of worldliness beneath his whimsy. He brings his four characters together again, suddenly, one sweet night in the Bois de Boulogne, with a result more than ever demonstrative of his power to finish a story off soundly. Mr. Locke is 63 now. With his novels listing more than 30, his plays half a dozen, he is perennial proof that in writing, if not in all the arts, skilled age can give raw whippersnappers a heavy handicap and win.