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."