The Life Line

PHYLLIS BOTTOME was born in England, spent, six of her childhood years in America, and since her marriage in 1017 has lived much of the time in the Austrian Tyrol, which is the background of her new novel. To all who know it. the Tyrol is a special place and the Tyrolese are a special people, highly individual, like all mountain peoples. It is hard to think of regimentation of any kind invading their high, thin air and incredible mountains, to imagine “Heil Hitler!” replacing their sturdy, gentle “Grüss Gott.” But the Nazis came to Innsbruck, to Kitzbuehl, to all the stations familiar to generations of climbers and skiers. Miss Bottome has written of these people at war, and of an English schoolmaster who chose to join them.

In the summer of 1938 Mark Chalmers was in his middle thirties and exactly where and what he wanted to be — an untroubled, successful master at Eton. In 1938 he might have given up his usual summer climbing in the Dolomites except that a friend at the Foreign Office was urgent about his taking a message to a Jesuit monk in an ancient monastery. He had no idea, when he asked the Father to assist a valuable agent to remain in Austria, that he himself was the agent.

High on a mountain meadow, sitting in the warm sun on a tapestry of flowers, a British schoolmaster joined a Jesuit monk, a Herman painter, and a woman doctor in their dangerous and secret war against the Nazis. Ida Eichorn ran a sanitarium for the insane in her beloved mountains, and it was here that Mark would stay, provided with papers which proved him insane, and coached by Ida in the technique of appearing a lunatic. Before his mission was accomplished Mark Chalmers would know much about life and danger, about courage and love.

It is too bad that the book wasn’t written two years ago. One is troubled by the author’s hindsight, and by the fact that many such novels have already been forgotten. However, the characters are fresh, especially Ida, and the set is handsome, its most novel feature her Nervenheilanstalt. This reviewer seems to recognize the figure of Alfred Adler at Miss Bottome’s elbow.

DOROTHY HILLYER