Hard Socker*

Mr. Masefield's Hero Crosses Rights and Lefts

The Story. Between forest and sea, high over Las Palomas harbor, was the mansion known as Los Xicales, where the descendant of one who came with Cortez had lived to his end in faith, poverty and style. Sard Harker, sailor, lay on the barque Venturer in Las Palomas harbor, dreaming of a girl he loved. In his dream, the vision of that proud and now empty house stood up clear and portentious, while a voice rang in his ears : "You will meet her again in that house for the second of three times. It will be very, very important, so be ready." Ten years after his dream, he found himself again in Las Palomas, this time as mate of the Pathfinder. "Now," he thought, "it will come true as appointed." He went ashore to see a prizefight, at the ringside heard one Sagrado plotting to kidnap an English girl named Kingsborough who was stay ng at Xicales ; he borrowed a bicycle, rode out to warn her. Kingsborough was not the name he had known her by when he had seen her for the first of the "three times."

His warning went unheeded, his bicycle was stolen, his ship left without him, his girl was kidnapped. Searching for a short cut to town, he wandered into a swamp, was bitten by a deadly stingray; into a smugglers' camp, was befriended ; into a native train guard, was jailed, far inland. He escaped from jail, hatless, bootless, penniless; cleaned up a barroom with his good right fist (the jacket design), set out to walk to Los Agostino, 110 miles away across the Sierras, to get news of his ship, of his lady. Fierce and famishing he s journed to the wilderness. Over the hazardous ice-fields of the Sierras, where only a single man in 100 years had passed before him, he went in safety, came to Los Agostino.

There he learned that the Pathfinder had gone down, that Miss Kingsborough was still in the clutches of Sagrado. By chance, he encountered her brother in the street; while the two stood in talk, the stolen lady screamed from a neighboring house. Sard entered; soon he and Sagrado were swapping punches. Sard's right for once failed him ; so did his left. Sagrado, who had the muscle of a baboon, was about to sacrifice the intrepid sailor at the very shrine of his unswerving attachment when-- the door burst down, in pelted Brother Kingsborough with reinforcements, Sagrado was led off in chains ; and the happy couple whose separation had given rise to so much narrative on the part of Mr. Masefield were--for the time being--united.

Significance. Since it is a graceless business to cast aspersion at the work of one so justly honored as the author of this novel, it may be said that the book teems with action. Like a disorderly street seen from a window, cobbled with yellow faces, it teems; adventures shoulder and jostle; events prod each other's ribs; Sentimentality picks the pocket of Romance. One is forcibly reminded that nothing is quite so dull as unvaried liveliness. It is a book that achieves a forthright swagger that the fiction of this latter day has largely lost. Beauty in distress is white; villainy is black indeed. It relinquishes, at the same time, whatever graces of subtlety and invention the fiction of this latter day has gained.

The Author. John Masefield was born in Shropshire, England, in what year few know. He disdained school, tramped around the country till his parents indentured him to the captain of a merchant ship for the sum of a shilling a month. He sailed over a great part of the world. In 1902, derelict in Manhattan, he got a job in a saloon serving beer, washing glasses, taking care of the bartender's baby. The poet Yeats encouraged him to write. His works include: The Everlasting Mercy, The Widow in the Bye-Street, Dauber, The Daffodil Fields, Reynard the Fox, Gallipoli (prose), Enslaved.

Life of Conrad

JOSEPH CONRAD--Ford Madox Ford --Little, Brown (|2.50). Ford Madox Ford collaborated with Conrad in the writing of Romance, The Inheritors, The Nature of a Crime. In this monograph, which is built up like a house of blocks out of pointed anecdotes, snatches of conversation, brief and vivid scenes recollected, the personality of Joseph Conrad is projected as he revealed it to a human being during many years of close intimacy. You have Conrad hypnotizing a country grocer into giving him three years unlimited credit, throwing teacups into the fire when heated by argument with a lady, sailing up the Thames in a steam launch with cigars, champagne, plovers' eggs in aspic. Mortared with the egotism of Mr. Ford, who jauntily refers to himself as "the finest stylist in England," the blocks fall into place; and slowly there looms up the spirit of Joseph Conrad, who in all the world would have loved nothing better than to have singed the king of Spain's beard; who once outwitted the Dutch Navy; and who wrote "the finest books in the world."

Short Stories

THREE FLIGHTS UP--Sidney Howard--Scribner ($2.00). Here are four of the most notable short stories of the season. None of them is very short.

A Likeness of Elizabeth deals with the forgery of a painting by Holbein. The sham is detected by one of the forger's best friends.

Transatlantic is a study of the passengers of a great liner on a voyage to the U. S., their problems and their interrelationship. There are, notably, Harry, young American with a continental veneer of snobbery; Burleigh, placid Britisher; Jennie, "good sport," life of the party.

Mrs. Vietch is the story of a woman deserted by her husband and her family, of her trials and how she conquered them.

The God They Left Behind Them is the weird tale of a house haunted by the vengeful God of Jonathan Edwards and his Puritan contemporaries to whom the chiefest of sins is Folly,

Pleasant Poet

A HARP IN THE WINDS--Daniel Henderson--Appleton ($1.25). This is the book of a U. S. poet who finds his country pleasant, the world not wholly bad. Delicately, temperately, he writes of "Springtime along the Pennsylvania Railroad," "Tenement Children," "Keats," "Friendship," "The Lackawanna Ferry." A flowery hedge, a regiment of roses, the filagrees of a frozen brook--these lift his heart; and his eye is quick to value those exquisite banalities of everyday life that the gross cannot see, and the great have not time to write about. When he sings of the "Pony Express," "The First Steamboat on the Mississippi," "The Coming of the Railroad," he strains his note; these themes call for a larger voice than his.

* Sard Harker--John Maaefield--Macmillan ($2.50).