Suddenly the driver came over to us. Whatever the reason of his manœuvre, he had obeyed his proprietor's orders, and, complacently conscientious, came now to take ours. He had evidently come to the conclusion that we were the only people there likely to give him any coherent instructions and take responsibility for them. Assuredly we were the only passengers from whom a tip might be expected. Obeying orders was his German fetish. He started up his engine, rang a bell, and announced immediate departure. For the remainder of that nightmare of a journey he behaved like a Trojan. pose, if he disregard these, one or other will flout him before long. Witness the tragic failure of Mr Wilson's admirable ideal of self-determination of peoples. For a couple of hours all was smooth except the roads, which steadily became rougher. We devoured chocolate and drank cognac from our travelling-flasks. The Polish-Jew commercial travellers kept up their interminable conversation, interspersed now with sidelong abuse of everything British and American. To this we paid no heed. Plunging through the mud, skidding, grunting, clanking, the motor 'bus was at least making headway. We stopped at scattered Amid screams and volleys villages to cool down the engine, of abuse the motor omnibus and the pudding-faced young filled up again. Laughable man took the opportunity to as the whole discussion had devour further quantities of been, I had yet noticed in raw spirit. It grew dark. its course the appearance as The country became more desoheads of evil and slimy adders late, and the forest closed dart out suddenly from some down upon the narrow road. malodorous hiding place of Rain thundered through the all manner of furtive racial jealousies and hatreds, acting against us or amongst each other, horrid, ancient as history, ineradicable as love. The incident emphasised once more for me how immensely more difficult does government become when, as in these troubled regions, a score of racial traditions and hatreds intervene, and must at every step be reckoned with. Race and religion are the two elements in human life that the administrator must conciliate, or he will fail. However deft his touch, however honest his pur leaves. Out of the dusk sprang a young Lett officer in uniform, begging for a lift. Although we were packed almost to suffocation in the vehicle, the Polish-Jew commercial travellers, with an immediate cringing servility that was extraordinarily repellent, cried out : "Plenty of room. Make place for the officer! Make place for the officer ! " It is possible that they may have welcomed his presence as a safeguard against highwaymen, but I think that more probably theirs was the eager servility inherent in the hybrid Jew of the Continent towards authority in any shape or form. I was glad that the young officer took no notice of their effusiveness, but modestly and with courteous apologies found his seat. Disaster speedily overtook us. Breakdown followed breakdown, and each lasted longer than its predecessor. More and more biting became the sidelong allusions of our fellowtravellers. For periods we plunged forward through the mud at a speed of only a few metres to the hour. Finally the ultimatum arrived. The petrol connection had broken, and could not be overhauled by naked light. We must stay where we were until daylight. It was a peculiarly forbidding belt of forest, and the rain was pelting down with increasing energy, but there was nothing else to be done. could not blame the driver, who had really been doing his utmost. There, in an atmosphere so solid and venomous that one could almost pick it up by the handful and throw it about like blue snowballs, we must wait for day. Come wolf, come highwayman, here were we! We unearthed an ancient tarpaulin from a locker and tied it over the baggage. We To our surprise, when it came to a domestic matter like settling down twenty-one persons in a motor omnibus to spend the night, the women up and took charge. I had expected a consolidated attack of abuse when the final breakdown occurred, but the women put the tin hat on that. They adjusted us as best they could to a cheery interlude of talk in several languages. The Scots nurse, with one child in her lap and two using her as a pillow, looked cheerily at us through the dim light, as if to say: Don't worry. We're all right. Packed tight as sardines we sat there, dinnerless, patient. And the American from the Middle West, with his quietly humorous smile, looked as dapper as if he had just left the Casino at Monte Carlo, and was motoring back in his Rolls-Royce to Cannes for dinner! We might, perhaps, have slept through that astonishing night had it not been for the pudding-faced young man. He was now in a condition of untrammelled alcoholic ecstasy, and ranged the forest emitting animal roars and gurglings, and shouting at intervals in raucous tones: "I am a young African tiger! Later on he hauled out the young Lett officer, and the two of them sat cheerfully in a flooded ditch drinking champagne in the rain. At intervals he flung open our door, asked loudly and offensively after our welfare, invited us to drink champagne with him in his ditch, and finally banged the door with a noise that woke everybody except the driver, who slept on his damp seat the sleep of one who has obeyed orders, and is therefore at peace. Slowly passed the hours. vaguely recall the Lett officer stumbling amongst us to fetch children except the Polish-Jew commercial travellers, who munched cheerfully their sausage and apples, probably regarding the rest of us with contempt for not having apples and sausage too. Warm sunshine glowed over the pretty pastoral landscape, which had widened out enchantingly from the forest thraldom to free green fields, gay to a distant purple horizon, water-meadows gracious and so friendly that one forgot the misery of the night at the mere sight of them in their sunny morning beauty. his sword, and saying politely nants of chocolate for the in English, "Excuse me, I am a little drunk." He vanished into the night. At last dawn came. There were we, dishevelled, hungry, utterly tired out. Daylight slid round us through heavy mist. The forest looked utterly disconsolate. The driver awoke, stretched himself wearily, and stepped out into the mud to start work on his engine. Cramped and miserable, we waited. Eventually the thrill of contact came. We began to struggle forward. Pale rays of sunshine shone on the muddy road. The mist shivered, formed strange glistening pillars, a fantastic and enchanting architecture, and fled upwards with quite incredible suppleness and delicacy. The Polish-Jew commercial travellers recommenced their interminable shrill conversation. The children awoke, and whimpered in their unfamiliar surroundings. We cleared the forest, and in a pale brisk sunrise trundled down into a village just awake. Here we Here we broke down utterly, but need not despair. The driver telephoned from a large manorhouse, of which one corner was inhabited by peasants. Relief would arrive from Libau in an hour or two. We foraged for milk, and found plenty. Everybody pooled their rem I wandered ahead between a pleasant avenue of trees, and came to the stream which gave their richness to these meadows. A cluster of cottages nestled amid willows on the bank at a little distance from the road. It was Sunday morning, and the women were putting on their bright church finery. A low bridge spanned the river. I crossed it, and a little farther on leant against a white gate between tall and slender poplars, just to drink in the fresh crisp beauty of the scene. A fellow - traveller, a little plump Lett merchant, joined me. For a while we were silent. Then suddenly he said. rather shyly "Well, you're in Lettland. What do you make of it? ' (To be continued.) A QUEEN OF TRAGEDY. BY VALENTINE WILLIAMS (VEDETTE), THIS year the French stage is celebrating the centenary of the birth of Rachel, the greatest tragédienne which the theatre in France has ever known. From the darkness of a squalid childhood, this frail Jewish girlchild sprang in a night to the pinnacle of brilliance, flashed with meteor-like effulgence across the sky, and as quickly sank back into le néant long before her course was run. In the vestibule of of the Théâtre Français, scene of her greatest triumphs, you may see Rachel, sculpted in the cold majesty of marble, severely classical in chlamys, sandals, and diadem, enthroned as Phèdre, her most celebrated rôle. Cold and lifeless as marble she found the classic drama of Racine and Corneille, thrust into the background by the hotblooded magnificence of Victor Hugo and the Romanticists. With warm flesh and blood she clothed the skeleton, this child, "small, rather ugly, with a narrow chest, a vulgar air and a trivial voice," as Jules Janin, the great critic, wrote of her in the notice which established her fame on her début at the Comédie Française. Rachel was a realist. From some unknown strain in her ancestry she derived the faculty of infusing hot, pulsating passion into the inanimate queens and princesses of Corneille and Racine, bane of the French classes in our British schools. The fine tradition of simplicity which she learnt from Samson, her devoted teacher and friend, taught her to be natural. The critics accused her of "breaking up" the polished verse of her tragic rôles instead of declaiming in that beautifully modulated sing-song still held in high honour at the French National Theatre. But the ardent flame which burnt behind the noble brow of this frail child made her live her parts, and live them so absorbingly that it consumed her before her time. She made these lay figures of the staid French drama vibrate with human passion. The intense fire of her hatred kindled the blood of her audiences, as the cold realism of her terror froze it, and the overwhelming force of her grief melted them to tears. "When in 'Horace," " writes Mademoiselle Valentine Thomson,1 "the rôle of her début, she reached the famous imprecation passage, instead of declaiming it, as had always been done up till then, she began on 1 'La Vie sentimentale de Rachel.' a low note in a muttering voice to exhale her hatred 'Rome, l'unique objet de mon ressentiment . . .' Then she raised her voice until she reached the paroxysm of her mad grief, and uttered the closing blasphemy with an outburst of savage despair that seemed superhuman in a young girl of seventeen." For eighteen years Rachel held the centre of the stage in France, not only on the boards, but off as well. Her lovers, her children, her earnings, her frequent imbroglios with the Comédie Française, her ludicrous and grasping family, her diners intimes and her repartees-all these make up a chronique scandaleuse extending from the prim reign of Louis Philippe through the roaring days of the March Revolution into the frivolous era of the Second Empire. And through the yellowing pages of her letters, scattered in collections all over France to-day, run names great in letters, art, and society, from the lion-hunting Countesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain down to the mountebank adventurers hanging then, as now, on the fringes of French theatrical life. The life-stories of self-made men and women are supposed to be typical of the twentieth century. But this century has produced no more thrilling tale of the triumph of the will-tosucceed over unimaginable obstacles than the romance of Rachel's career. She must be judged as woman and artiste, for she was human through and through. With the aid of the abundant material which patient French hands have gleaned, Mrs Grundy would find it easy to indict poor dead Rachel as a monster of immorality. But her innumerable liaisons, in which she seldom lost her strong business sense, her fickleness, and her ruthless selfishness, are set off by an unaffected simplicity of character and a touching attachment to her worthless family; while above all her human qualities, good or bad, rises supreme her whole-hearted devotion to her art. Rachel was a Jewess. She had all the persevering tenacity of her race. Heaven knows at what stage in the misery of her early years she made up her mind to succeed; but the fact remains that the outstanding feature of her career is the way in which her will dominated her character. One by one she set herself to correct with indomitable energy her natural blemishes and the defects of her upbringing. Her brain, fired by an unconquerable ambition, worked ceaselessly towards her self-appointed goal. self-appointed goal. And thus it came about that the slight, rather gawky girl, whose spoken French was uncouth and written French hopelessly ungrammatical, amazed even her teachers by the masterly use she made of her opportunity when her hour of triumph struck. It was on 28th February 1821, but a few months before |