Aches and Acres

IRON AND SMOKE--Sheila Kaye-Smith --Dutton ($2.50). The emotion which Author Kaye-Smith understands most fully, hence describes better than any other, is the emotion which men feel for their land; the humble, genuine, particular patriotism of farmers, squires, men of the soil. In most of her previous books, she has studied this feeling as it colors the loves, hatreds, hungers of poor people. In Iron and Smoke, Humphrey Mallard, heir to a baronetcy, loves his houses better than Isabel Halnaker, the mistress he relinquishes so that, to save his estates, he may marry Jenny Bastow whose father owns coal mines. After her husband's death, Jenny becomes the intimate friend of Isabel, whom, she realizes, her husband had loved more than herself but less than his lands. Then she watches her son grow up, go to war, come back to marry a frivolous pretty girl and tear up his father's fields to find the coal that lies under them. The story is perhaps less powerful than some of Author Kaye-Smith's previous charts of hard acres and dialectic heart aches--but it rings clearly and audibly, avoiding the tinkle of artificiality and the blatant jangle of exaggerated sentiment.