For Tolerance*

Author Beresford's Explicit Blue-Print for Society

The Story. As Tristram Wing passed the vicarage window he was distinctly nauseated. Mrs. Orpin and the two females he could hear buzzing with her were like three fat blow-flies scavenging in the middle of a road. Their morsel was the subject of the Rev. Mr. Orpin's note, which Wing had come to answer. It was his wife, Brenda, upon one of whose actions a skulking poacher had chanced to spy. During the interview, Wing mentioned his nausea and damned the whole gabbling village.

Brenda had told him at once about kissing Mattocks, in the drive by moonlight. It had given him a twinge but he had understood. Mattocks was a scrawny painter, his fingers jaundiced with cigarettes, his character by egoistic indulgence. Brenda, the sensitive, the humanitarian, had seen he had genius and got one of her "moments". The kiss was to exalt him above drugs and drink to set him to work. It was in no way a betrayal of her husband and children.

They had Mattocks down from town again at once. Tristram's reason: to rebuke village prurience. Brenda's reason: Mattocks still needed her. Result: Mattocks improved and the prurience intensified. He began a canvas of great promise and a village gossip sent Wing an anonymous note, worded in newspaper clippings, that mentioned "adultery", "abominable lover", "disgusting wickedness". Mattocks finished his canvas--Brenda translated into landscape, unquestionably a masterpiece; and village roughs smashed it, flinging him into a creek as revenge for a fictitious attempt upon a girl of 13.

Brenda was going to have another child. She could no longer bolster Mattocks with her spiritual strength. He must shift for himself. He did: shifted to town, curled up in despair and died. Brenda and her husband go out of the story drawn closer than ever through having had to examine their philosophies--Tristram's easy-going "all's-well-with-the-world," Brenda's aloof "live-and-let-live". In village and vicarage, where intolerant stupidity sprouts as prickly and impenetrable as a monkey-puzzle (cactus) tree, the blow-flies scavenge as of yore.

The Significance. Editor Ellery Sedgwick of The Atlantic Monthly lately assured the English that they were a most unprejudiced people who regarded toleration as a cardinal virtue. Here is further evidence for that contention, so far as English authors are concerned. The Monkey Puzzle, slightly awkward, a bit thin-blooded, is still visibly related to Shaw's Candida. Powy's Mr. Trasker's Gods.

Author Beresford gave up being an architect 20 years ago, to write psychological novels. His characters are structurally correct, the perspective of their situations perfect to a fault. Unfortunately, they remain largely in the blue-print stage, explicit social diagrams which their creator lacks either the wit or power to bring to life.

Avuncular* Antics

THE RED LAMP--Mary Roberts Rinehart--Doran $2.00). Able Mrs. Rinehart places herself at the center of consciousness of a scholarly professor who is deeply agitated by what seem to be the posthumous performances of his late asthmatic, or strangled, uncle. Between seances, telepathic messages, furniture upheavals and the receipt of "quaint ciphers, he (she) writes a diary. Hounds bay, doors crash, mysterious lights shine on headlands and creep under beds. Uncle's ghost marches in the alumni parade, sheep are slaughtered, four people die quite violently. A very devil of an uncle, yet you and the professor can never be sure it is he who is responsible, let alone how to make him listen to reason. Do not read this book tonight if you must catch an early train in the morning. It makes The Bat (famed play by Mrs. Rinehart) seem a very domestic young chiropter.

From a Steeple

AT THE GOAT AND COMPASSES-- Martin Armstrong--Harper ($2.00) You gaze down at people from the church steeple of Crome one sea-windy day: thin Susan Furly marching from door to door with the parish magazine; buxom Bella Jorden, preening her black silk on the porch of the Goat and Compasses; Rose Jorden talking furtively with some man through a hedge; old Mrs. Dunk, the charwoman, pottering about the graveyard; plump-breasted Sally Dunk, flirting boldly in the lane. Of an evening you hear the local males talking at the inn, Crome's moral centre. By night, the sleeping selves of the villagers come drifting, roaming, crying about the gusty square. In that ghostly company, the public fronts are removed from secret hopes and hungers. Old mortality scoffs and the Crome-dwellers compromise with their morrows as they may.

An extraordinarily vivid little procession of human existence, beautifully written by an ironist who is above bitterness.

Dragons

PERSEUS OR OF DRAGONS--H. P. Scott Stokes--Button ($1.00). This latest volume in the Today and Tomorrow Series is perhaps the lightest, but not the least pleasing. It could hardly be called an exhaustive discourse on all dragons, taking up only the early Greek, early Christian, mediaeval and ancient Egyptian species and their variants. But it does succeed in classifying these so that they may be readily recognized if met. Draconist Stokes does not really believe there ever were any dragons. He does not even agree with some scientists that tales of them arose from our forefathers' reminiscences of brontosauri and kindred fauna. But he is very polite and does not press his own ingenious theory until the very end. There he also says a word about four modern dragons-- Respectability, Bigotry, Cant and Mah Jongg.

Evolution Hymn

THE BOOK OF THE EARTH No. 2 of The Torchbearers)--Alfred Noyes--Stokes ($2.50). Poet Noyes of England has set himself the task, impressive in these days of composing these hymns to the torchbearers of Science. The first was Watchers of the Sky, to astronomers. Now are sung the naturalists, geologists, polentologists, evolutionists.

At the brink of the Grand Canyon, the poet looks

Down from abyss to abyss

Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming

Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings;

The inhuman ages, alien as the moon,

Aeons unborn, and the unimagined end,

A spirit fetches him back through time to such scenes as the burning of Pythagoras and his Golden Brotherhood, Leonardo picking up fossils on the Florentine hills, Darwin bareheaded before an ant in Kent, Huxley impaling bland Bishop Wilberforce before the British Association. The latter episode, vividly reconstructed, is the high point of the narrative and is brought into sharp relief by a humorous glimpses of Miss Eliza Pym of Woodstock, blushing furiously but consumed with curiosity to hear that the wild flowers she draws in delicate, virginal water-colors have sex.

What? Even the flowers? How startling was the sound

Of pistil!

*THE MONKEY PUZZLE--J.D. Beresford-- Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50).

*Of or pertaining to an uncle.