Scratching Queen

MASKS--Queen Marie of Rumania-- Dutton ($2.50).

Rumania's Dowager-Queen has had writer's itch for some time and has not held her hand from scratching it. Many a shopgirl has tingled over Marie's royal reminiscences (The Story of My Life).

Last week the Dowager's literary dermatitis passed into a more acute stage: Queen Marie wrote a novel.

Like her autobiography, Masks was aimed nowhere in particular but hits the shopgirl public right under the fifth rib. Even Publisher Button describes the story as "pure romance." If Masks had been published anonymously, readers could have deduced that its author had led a sheltered life but had not been sufficiently protected from far-fetched fiction of the baser sort. Rewritten into cinemantics, it might be palmed off as Art, but it would need a Garbo to complete the illusion.

Heroine Rachel was a foundling with flame-colored hair, her origin dim. All she knew was that she had been rescued as a little girl by old Baruch. a sniveling Jewish antique-dealer, and brought to the Rumanian town where he set up his curiosity shop. Hidden away in a house behind the shop, her existence unsuspected by the townsfolk, Rachel grew to womanhood.

Old Baruch let her out only occasionally, at night. He wanted to keep her unspotted from the world. Her only companions, besides old Baruch and his maid-of-all-work, were a collection of death masks. Some of these masks she revered (Napoleon, Bismarck, Rameses, Goethe), one she loved.

That one was the face of a beautiful youth. Old Baruch could not supply his name, so Rachel called him Zanko. For Zanko, and sometimes for old Baruch, Rachel danced like Isadora Duncan, sang like Schumann-Heink.

One fine day Professor Michael heard her singing, investigated and discovered Baruch's secret. Thereafter it took all his will power to remind himself that he was a respectable, middle-aged married man.

Rachel grew fond of him, but it was Zanko she loved. And it was to find Zanko that she ran away. In Istanbul, where she danced and sang for her supper in waterfront dives, she found him. Alas, he was not what he seemed. All he wanted was . . . her body. When Rachel discovered that the real Zanko had been his twin brother, whom he had murdered, she drowned herself. Old Baruch, who had been searching for her, found her in time to get her death mask made, sent it to Michael as a souvenir.

In her tears for the nature of things, Queen Marie cannot forbear to drop a timely one on the catafalque of Royalty.

Of herself and her peers she makes one of her characters say: ''Although their rights have been curtailed, they are all the same expected to keep isolated, to live as though they had no human passions, desires, feelings. Much has been taken from them but little has been given them in return, hardly even the belief in their superiority. . . .

I will say in their defence that they must be strong not to be corroded by the doubt we throw at them daily, at the way we allow calumny to tarnish them, and yet expect them to go on giving their time, health, patience, brains, faculties, whilst we, the people, believe ourselves justified in throwing stones at them at all seasons of the year. It really is becoming rather a one-sided game--too much take and too little give--all work and no play."

Post-War Polish Girl

THIS Is MY AFFAIR--Lola Kinel--Lit-tle, Brown ($3).

Anyone who was growing up in Eastern Europe in 1916 could hardly avoid experiences that in peacetime would seem abnormal. Lola Kinel, a Polish girl whose family lived in Petrograd, had no more than her share of Wartime and post-War cyclones, but to U. S. readers the weather she lived through seems stormy indeed. A cut above the usual adventure-autobiography, This Is My Affair should appeal to those who find true stories as readable as novels and often more entertaining.

Lola Kinel returned from a visit to the U. S. just in time to see the first revolution in Petrograd. It was just like a Russian Easter. "It was grand. All one had to do to feel tremendously exhilarated was to go out on the streets." With the Bolshevik Revolution everything got more serious. Lola was an anti-Bolshevik. She turned down a chance to become one of Trotsky's secretaries, got a job instead on the Russian Daily News, only English daily paper in Petrograd, and the last counter-revolutionary paper to be suppressed. She fell in love with a highly proper young English diplomat, kept offending him because she was. not so proper as he was. History was in the making all around her, but she hardly noticed it, was not a bit impressed. "Personally, I shall never feel quite bamboozled by this aura of historical magnificence, nor whisper to my grandchildren about the great and wonderful things I have witnessed." Partly because she got sick of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, Lola was on the verge of being converted to Bolshevism when she had the chance of escaping to Poland on a forged German passport. She took it. Working as a telephone girl in Warsaw, she overheard the first news of Germany's collapse. In the maelstrom that followed the Armistice, her knowledge of languages--she spoke five--was her life-preserver.

She moved on, to Vienna, to Berlin, where she got a job on a music paper.

When that blew up, she landed a job as secretary to Isadora Duncan. With aging Isadora and her young husband Sergei Essenine, Russian poet, she flitted from hotel to resort for temperamental months. Because Isadora could speak only pidgin Russian and Essenine could speak no English, Lola's principal function was to act as interpreter, often in uncomfortably intimate scenes. When one day Essenine got drunk and insisted on going out for a walk by himself to get away from women, there was a fierce quarrel. Lola was made the scapegoat, lost that job.

Meantime her twin sister had gone to the U. S. and married. Lola followed, drifted west to a ranch. There she met a man she liked; it was mildly mutual, so they married. That job lasted four years, left Lola with a daughter and some alimony. In Hollywood where she now lives, she likes to pass the time of day with her neighbors, with the milkman. Talking with them, hearing their wondering comments on her ups & downs, gave her the good idea of putting it all on paper.

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