The Crimson Bookshelf

EPHRAIM Brown was back in Chog's Cove. Four-five years ago, he had shipped aboard the privateer Glimpse, he had taken leave of Sue. He recalls; "Wall, I got to go aboard now, got to be going. Take care o' yourself, Eph. I will; don't forget me Sue. I won't. Wanting to kiss her and afraid to do it." Four-five years was a long time: three had been spent on the Glimpse, and then Eph, and Roger, and Sam had wrecked the sloop Marie Elise. The Nahuas had been hospitable. The English, said the old men, help one fight and leave the seed of warriors. The witch-doctors had been unable to save poor Sam, but Eph and Roger became chieftains and left the seed. Life was pleasant: Nahuan wine was tasty, honors were plentiful, women were silent and prolific. Roger, however, found everything in this Carribean land maddening to his touch, lukewarm; and Eph yearned for Susannah, for pumpkin pie, for quoyhaugs. They had left, had spent a year in New Orleans, and had shipped for Boston.

Now, Ephraim Brown was home, Chog's Cove soaking in through his pores. And here, before him was Susannah, with a small basket of apples on her arm, "a solid simple woman in an old dress and a soiled apron, a woman two thousand miles from a dark girl at Pamilco, a woman all infinity from Celestine" at New Orleans. "You could no more compare Celestine to her than you could a glass of absinthe to a good field." Her large red mouth was slightly open. He said, "It's me." She said, "Aiyes."

Even if this be a minor, almost an insignificant, incident in the tangled affairs of this Privateer's crew, it is typical and therefore worthy of attention. It is an illustration of the sort of thing which marks out Oliver LaFarge as a great novelist. It is an illustration not only of his dramatic restraint, but of his intellectual honesty and of his deep understanding as well. For, to anyone who knows New England, Eph and Sue are honest 'pictures, they embody all the characteristics and habits, all the simplicity, all the uncouth, rum-drinking, ruddy cheeked vigor which is the badge of your New England fisherman.

There are, of course, others. There is Roger Hall, red-headed giant, able seaman; spawn, according to his rival, of smugglers and godless renegades; a man to stir the thin blood of Hope Langdon; canny even in his cups. There is Mate John Disney, widower, envious of Roger's virility, husband-to-be of Hope Langdon; a man weakened by the fringes of a Puritanical conscience. There are Jonas Dodge, Master, Zeke Nyas, Indian Quartermaster, and a dozen others. Mr. LaFarge has portayed all these swiftly and surely. But towering above them all is Jeremiah Disney, nephew of the mate, son of the Chog's Cove pastor. The story of Jeremiah Disney's moral disintegration, the picture of his unbalanced mind with its varnish of biblical Puritanism, is, in this reviewer's opinion, Mr. LaFarge's finest piece of work. It is marred only by a melodramatic and unnecessary close.

As in "Laughing Boy," Mr. LaFarge has searched out and found an elemental people. And again, he has caught, in his peculiarly vivid language, not only rudimentary characters but their lodestone environment. It is high tribute to say of him that he gives a New Englander clear, renewed insight into his surroundings and forebears.

To be reviewed next week:--

The Menace of Fascism, by John Strachey.

The Great Tradition, by Granville Ricks.