Proud Rogues*

Mr. Marquand Gives the

Slave Trade a Fastidious

Renaissance

The Story. Old even then, a man of fire whose life was dying away, Eliphalet Greer sat in his counting house. All the ships he could see from his window, spreading their intricate rigging against the New England sky, belonged to him. Eliphalet Greer was a lean and pious man; he had an ivory-headed stick and a great gold watch-chain; he wore a suit of black with lace at the wrist and collar; once a week he walked, Bible in hand, through the streets to church. In the graveyard above the town was a tombstone which he had erected to the memory of one Richard Parton, Esq., his FORMER ASSOCIATE IN VENTURE OF TRADING, LOST AT SEA, 1817.

Why, wondered young George Jervaile. one of Eliphalet's men, did the old man sit always alone, drumming on the table? Why had he given him, Jervaile, $3,000 to go ashore on a certain southern isle with a loaded pistol and report what he saw? There was only an empty hut on that island, Jervaile told Eliphalet when he came back.

One night, in a Northeaster, a strange ship blew into Portsmouth. Next day, a man who walked like a cat was seen going up the hill to the graveyard. He surveyed the monument with a puckered face, took a chisel from his pocket, added a postscript: RETURNED TO THIS LIFE, APRIL 18TH, 1832.

A wild story rose, like a drowned cadaver, to the air. . . . How this man Parton had tried to kill Eliphalet ... how Eliphalet had marooned him on an island, sailed away in a ship whose cargo was a load of black, bewildered, suffering flesh from Africa . . . how hate had kept alive the man who walked like a cat and kept Eliphalet drumming with long yellow fingers on the counting-house table.

Strange events conspired in sea-sleepy Portsmouth. Eliphalet sent the boy Jervaile to kill Parton in a tavern; Parton bested him, went back with him to kill Eliphalet. They came upon the old merchant in his library at dawn; his ink had upset and a slow blot was spreading through the figures. "Look out of the window, Eliphalet," said Parton. Pushing back the shutters, Greer saw a tall ship treading in and out of the wind at the harbor's mouth--a clipper with raked masts and a forefoot like a seabird's beak, waiting there with all sails set, delicate and trim. "Niggers," said Parton; and he told how he had brought his ship full of black men to show the people o!' Portsmouth that Merchant Greer was a "Nigger-trader." Eliphalet Greer put on his beaver hat. He turned from the ledger where the black blot was spreading; down to the harbor he went, took ship, sailed off in the dawn, Partner Parton with him. That was long ago; nobody knows what became of him; only Jervaile was left to tell the story.

The Significance. Elegant roguery on the high seas; brigs putting in from Guinea at midnight with no riding-lights; blackamoors wailing in gyves under iron hatches; these things -- no more than sinister rumors to the orderly citizen of 1825 -- are familiar enough to all modern worthies who do any reading. They undergo, in this volume, a fastidious renaissance. Unlike many writers of "period" fiction, whose attitude to ward their material is merely that of a theatrical customer toward sale able properties, Mr. Marquand is workmanlike; he has made an at tempt to catch the temper of the proud and hazardous times of bad Eliphalet. His novel is too neat in pattern, too nervous in action, to find a place in the three-masted, damn-your-eyes tradition of sea-fiction which Captain Marryat, Cooper, Melville and, later, R. L. Stevenson adorned; but it affects, with latter-day sprightliness, the manner of that tradition. It is meritorious for being a good story, and one more addition to the increasing amount of literal which seeks to convince the skept sons of Colonial Dames that the U. S. has a past.

The Author. John P. Marqu has followed the usual formula becoming a U. S. novelist. Graduated by Harvard in 1915, he tried jour ism with the Boston Transcript The New York Tribune. After a War career, he tried advertising. He found ''copy" easy to write but difficult take seriously, so he fled Manhattan, turned to writing novels.

Wild?

By chance, two vistas of Han University opened before the public gaze within one fortnight.

WILD MARRIAGE--B. H. Lehrm Harper ($2.00). Mr. Lehman, a ture Harvard graduate, sketches easily. He exhibits a venerable insitution as background for a gently satirical study in motives. Professors, if musty, are mellow. Undergraduates, if callow, are traditionally precocious. College evils; however undesireable are not tragic. anbridge conventions if stifling, are sincere. The story itself, slightly artificial but cleverly told, is a product of older Harvard : Elam Dunster, great-great-grandsired by a Harvard president returns to his professor-father from a sophisticated childhood in Europe with his runaway mother and her lover. He discovers a quixotic passion for an absent professor's young wife. No Brahmin ban, but his mother's wisdom, restrains him from "rescuing" the girl, eloping with her, in the name of Individualism. The mother points out that such revolts, to be satisfactory, must be purely selfish.

WILD ASSES--James G. Dunton-- Small, Maynard ($2.00). Mr Dunton an immature Harvard graduate, smudges painfully. He has a turgid mind, a high-school style, scant humor, literary myopia. Concentrating on an underground foreground, he dimly depicts crass youths guzzling bad gin, shooting craps, reading cinema magazines, swapping low stories, frequenting dives and brothels, being obscurely restless and messing up their young lives generally. One logy character plays football, stays respectable, is a college success. Another (the author) achieves a half-baked perception of his contemporaries as Wild Asses and Blunderbrats, laboriously adduces the law of compensation to flappers and ginhounds, becomes a fastuous champion of the education "system."

The Crimson Bookshelf (monthlu literary supplement of The Harvard Crimson): (Wild Marriage)--"The Harvard world is likely to remain complacent in the face of the terrible revelations. . ."

(Wild Asses)--"It is just about time for these money-making attacks on the younger generation to cease."

*BLACK CARGO--John P. Marquand--Scribner ($2.00).