Books: Poor Tom

THE WIND AND THE RAIN—Thomas Burke—Doran ($2.00).

Tho men once sat in the Ivy Restaurant in London. One was a young composer who, after a long, long pull, was on the topside of his hour; the other was Thomas Burke, onetime Hardcress Kid, now famed author of Limehouse Nights. While they ate, they telegraphed to each other in a code made up of the names of street corners, taverns, dives, the memories of tattered times. In this book, Mr. Burke writes, for those whom good luck has left happily unfamiliar with that code, the record of his life from the day when he, a waif as woebegone as Poor Tom on Lear’s heath, was befriended by Quong Lee, Chinese storekeeper, to the day when his first short story was published. Calm faces of Canton and Malaya move through mist down a narrow London street; in bad doorways, sailors’ knives flash; the rain beats a tattoo of talons on the windows of the house of Quong Lee; the wind sniffs under the door. Tom, the Hardcress Kid, is safe now, warm, dry, nor does he try to cast over the shiverings of his penury any glamour other than that which properly belongs to peril overpast. His book will interest some because it is a fine piece of prose, some because it is the story of a man who knew too well that dingy code of the Ivy Restaurant, some because it is the life of Thomas Burke.