FI CT IO N :

THE ELEMENTS LET LOOSE.

Sard Harker. By John Masefield. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d. net.)

Axe reader of Sir Walter Scott who can't be frightened by the glory of a name and doesn't belong to an Extension Class or Study Circle jumps clean over the forty-page introduction, skips through the preamble, and settles down comfortably in the nearest conversation. When he finds himself about to be involved in a description of the baron's hall, the knight's habiliments, or the beauty of the glen, he heaves a sigh and takes up again five pages further on. He knows that only the plot and the personages matter ; _good Sir Walter's industry among the documents and his pains over the setting pass him by. And he comes away, I imagine, with a much greater respect for the author than more dutiful readers could muster. He has appreciated the set-off of character against character, the quick and vigorous action, the finely imagined types : it is • the pith of the story that he has read. So, too, with the majority of novels.

But in Sard Harker the plot is the padding, and those who adopt the familiar methods of novel-reading will quite miss the magnificence of the book. There is an inset of a hundred and fifty pages where the plot is not Ao mud' tarried on ail kept rocking ; and, if the plot were to have dictated the book, then for form's sake the inset should have been omitted : it has no integral connexion with the beginning and end. But this inset is one of the greatest things that the genius of Mr. Masefield has given us. It is a simple and honest piece of work. Sard Harker, mate of the barque 'Venturer,' in harbour at a

South American port, has had his bicycle stolen when he is a - mile or two from his ship, with only half-an-hour before the ship sails. He tries to make a short cut down to the beach through a forest, but finds himeelf, deep in treacherous and devouring

slime. Rats dash by him, leeches fasten on his skin, the intid is so soft that if he catches the branch of tree the roots give way, and he is overwhelmed with black, semi-solid, and stinking soil. He ploughs and -swims and clambers through, now clutching at grasses, now kneeling on the back of a decaying animal that has been sucked into the slime and choked. He wrenches his way to the shore and runs along the sand : it is quicksand. He wades out into the sea, intending to swim on till he reaches firm ground. But he treads on a sting-ray ; it empties its horn into his leg and doubles him up with intolerable pain. He gets ashore and blunders into a party of smugglers. At first they are for shooting him off-hand, but one of them takes him into his protection, gives him dry but villainous clothing, and helps him into a freight train. He sleeps and wakes up to find himself nowhere near his port, quite unprotected in a bitterly- cold sandstorm, and unable to make any attempt to leave the train, since his poisoned leg is dead. When the train stops at an inland town, he is clapped into jail as a hobo, and can expect no mercy from the inhabitants : he has been riding on a bullion train. He escapes and sets out to walk the hundred miles back to the port through scrub and wilderness, and over the sheer crags and tormenting snowfields of the sierras. He knows that in this savage and vicious country every man he meets is more likely than not to draw on him and shoot him at sight as a spy upon his prospecting. He is caught in a scrub-fire, he is light-headed with hunger and

thirst. He sleeps in the company of tarantulas and snakes, he walks with vultures a few feet over his head. But his fortitude never fails him and he battles his way back. At the port he learns that his ship has been sunk on a reef and his captain is dead.

The sustained brilliance and honesty of this narrative is amazing. Honesty, I call it, for Mr. Masefield never over- stresses the horrors and never delays the culmination of disas- ters by spinning out the incident ; all follows naturally and convincingly as if it were in truth a journal of adventure. And every subsidiary character who so much as pops up his head into the narrative is firmly and energetically drawn, dago, Indian, English, or American :— " One oiethe men, who had taken no part whatever in the court of enquiry, but had been sitting on some pit props drinking from a bottle now came up to Said and shook his hand.

Shake hands,' he said, 'if you're a Protestant. You belong-tot s blurry fine religion if you're a Protestant. I'm not, if you under- stand what I mean, a Protestant myself, if you understand what I mean, but I do believe in crissen berrel, which is as near as the next, if you understand what I mean.'"

All the tact, all the art, all the knowledge that one could demand is here. It is a heroic story.

The more's the pity that it was set in a quite unreal and quite mechanical plot ; that Mr. Masefield took so long to warm up to his best work and so perfunctorily finished the book off. The rest of the tale deals with prophetic dreams, with the abduction of a girl by a satanical black magician, her rescue by Sard, and their romantic love for each other. There are passages here and there which we should be unhappy to lose ; there are struggles which excite the blood and we are often on the razor-edge of alarm. But even the character-drawing is very often weak, and a pseudo-Elizabetlianism and falsity creeps in. At the worst we have the feeble melodrama of the negro idiot :— " ' What is the name of the lady ? '

There is no lady here, sir ; the lady died a hundred years ago.

Oh, say, the lovely yellow candles, and the priest he go Do diddy diddy oh do.'

Then there is no lady ? '

'All put into the grave : ring a bell : Do.' Is any one at the house at all ? ' All in the grave, Do. Ring the bell. Do. ' "

But even when the characters are amusing in themselves, they

are often out of key ; and had the Elizabethans not written it

would have been improbable that Camilla, a Spanish woman, should talk as she is made to talk :—

" ' How far is it to Los Jardinillos ? ' Sard asked.

It cannot take long if taken swiftly,' Camilla said.

My love,' Enobbio said, it is the half of a league, or two kilo- metres. It would take the seller twenty minutes or more, only to the clearing.' It may well be, my earthly consolation,' Camilla said, that if the senor should walk, or indeed trot, to Los Jardinillos, his progress would not be swifter than a walk or trot. But as my remark sug- gested, comrade of my earthly trial, if the senor should proceed swiftly, his arrival would likewise be swift.'"

It would be ungrateful, however, given a jewel of such water, to continue to quarrel with its setting. But I would seriously suggest that Mr. Masefield should, some time in the future, publish by itself, in an edition de luxe, if need be, the episode of Sard Harker's journey. Nothing could add to its lustre.

H. A.