FICTION

"Listen, Moon!"

The Story.* It was after spending a molten July day on his slanting cellar door, contemplating pipe-smoke, hollyhocks and a vista of the Marvellous Vale, that Dr. Higbie Chaffinch, 64, professor of the Latin language and literature at Johns Hopkins University and for some weeks a widower, journeyed to Baltimore's business section to advertise for a housekeeper, and, adventurously, to dine in an oyster-bar. It was in the oyster-bar that a rubicund, ejaculatory stranger tendered him a card:

HILTONSHURLEY MOGGS The Moggs Foundation For the purveying of useless things to worthy people.

And it was there, too, that Mr. Moggs gave Higbie Chaffinch a copy of Treasure Island, whose author, one Stevenson, Higbie could not recall among the illustrious company--Cicero, Seneca, Theocritus, Tibullus, sweet Petronius--in whose service his years had been passed. Disrobing that night, with Treasure Island open on the dresser, Higbie had difficulty disentangling his feet from his pant-legs without taking his eye from the page. He ceased trying and the snarl lay about his bony ankles, his shirttails waving free, until the book was finished. Kendrick Glasby, star reporter of the local daily, upon whose stalwart young person was concealed a sere little volume in calf called Histoire des Pirates Anglois, with a marker at the tale of fearless Mary Read, entered the gathering whirl of events through another card of Hiltonshurley Moggs, thrown away by a thirsty rumdum to whom Mr. Moggs had given a pint of whiskey instead of a dole. It looked to Kendrick like a good little story. It became an epic. Ruth Pudley's bright-haired presence is even simpler to explain. She was "busted" out of Bryn Mawr for "deplorable contumacy of conduct." She was ready to divorce or annul, her clerical father, "the meanest man in the world." "He practises slurping his soup," she said, "so he can do it louder and louder. He dunks his toast in his coffee and his bread in his tea. He wears out two Bibles a year just clutching at them when he thinks of me. . . ." She simply adopted Higbie Chaffinch, went to live with him, proposed that they become bootleggers. And they did become something equally disturbing to quiet Waiworth; to the respectable Joneses, the Murchthaws, the Quoggses, Inchlings and Updegroves. But not before Mrs. Amy Potter joined them--the new housekeeper, a comely, cheery body from Maryland's Eastern Shore. And not before--with many a "Macte!", "Eheu!", "Hercle!" and "Conclamatum est!" from the emancipated Higbie Chaffinch -- a late and vinous banquet had been served in the latter's homestead with Moggs and Kendrick Glasby present, a banquet that incited a dastardly attack by the Ku Klux Klan ("a boy scout movement for children of 40 ... footpads and submorons, Sir!") which was repelled and its leader, the Rev. Pudley, captured in his white skirts. Nor before Ruth and young Kendrick, within a few hours of meeting, walked in a panic summer midnight to a mad prothalamium of crickets; lay together in cool damp grass and took counsel of a Debussy moon . . . "List, sweet Moon," Ruth said, "where I learned my loving . . ." Ruth was an amateur of the living moment; she could quote poetry, swear tenderly. The eventualities aboard their pirate-schooner, the Mary Read, on Chesapeake bay; their chicken-stealing, arrest, abduction of a judge, capture of a ferryboat, and highly improbable treasure hunt, are matters for the thrice-fortunate reader to follow alone. The Significance being, simply, that the commonplace has suddenly, with sublime and innocent vulgarity, comic pedantry, unflagging ebullience, gone stark, raving romantic. Here is one book, at least, for which Autumn, 1926, is destined to be memorable. The Author, born in Bay City, Mich., 33 years ago, has been a newspaperman ever since he grew up. Detroit, St. Louis, and more lately Baltimore and Manhattan have read his daily stint, most of which has been criticism of art, music, books. The more literate magazines have welcomed his contributions in verse and prose. Last year he published Godhead, a powerful story of a "superman" whose original he discovered while covering a strike on the Gogebic iron range, northern Michigan. The contrasting humor and whimsy of his new novel is as astonishing as it is joyous.

--LISTEN, MOON !--Leonard Cline--Viking ($2).