A Touch of the Sun

A Touch of the Son

THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE--Radclyffe Hall--Cape &; Ballon ($2.50). By means of a simple but elaborated style Authoress Hall diffuses throughout her book a balmy neo-Biblical atmosphere, like that of George Moore's The Brook Kerith. Like that book, The Master of the House treats of the Christ story; but Authoress Hall, longtime a Council member of the Society for Psychical Research, has ideas about Christ that would wilt Materialist Moore. She leaves the historic Christ alone, merely shows, how, in one of his characters, a boy chances to reincarnate the psychic Christ. In the little Provengal town of Saint Loup, steeped in sunshine and the Catholic faith, lives Jouse Benedit, a woodworker, and his wife Marie. Their first child they name Christophe, and he grows up to be a simple boy after the whole town's heart. Goundran, his fisherman godfather, shows him how to sail, to fish. Eusebe, the lecherous old drunken cobbler, tells him fairy tales. Especially does half-witted Anfos, his father's apprentice, worship him, seem to recognize some mystery about the boy. But to his little brother Loup and his cousin Jan he is just a playmate and friend. Now & then something happens to change their minds. At the sight of suffering, Christophe is occasionally overwhelmed with an agony of pity. Once, when Jan strikes at a snake, a welt mysteriously appears across Christophe's back. At such moments of agony it seems to Christophe that he is seeing things already experienced by him long ago. He longs to speak the half-remembered words spoken by him then, but the words do not come, and the Galilean light dies away from the little town of Saint Loup.

The town folk lead their quiet Provengal lives, disturbed only by weddings, births, funerals. Jan studies for the Church, but Christophe stays in his father's shop along with Anfos. His father has been almost crowded out of business by a shopkeeper from Paris, who opens a furniture store in Saint Loup, tries to modernize the town. Jouse fights these developments until a stroke of apoplexy lays him low. It seems that the Benedit family will be ruined, but the War intervenes. Modernization in Saint Loup comes to an end. and the bankrupt shopkeeper has to work for Jouse now. Christophe and Jan go off to be officers' orderlies at Toulon. After a time their colonel is transferred to Palestine, and in that Holy Land, now cursed with war, Christophe's agonizing pity, half-realized intimations, grow too intense. Tenderly, as if she were unfolding clouds behind which glory shines, Authoress Hall recounts how Christophe goes out one night with a patrol; how he wanders from the others, possessed with his vision; how, holding his silver rood before him, he walks up to an enemy patrol, is taken, stripped, spat on, and crucified against a door. The Author. Authoress Radclyffe Hall's maiden poetic effort was dictated at the age of three. By 1915 she had published five volumes of verse. Novel-writing, suggested by Publisher William Heinemann, followed: The Unlit Lamp, The Forge, A Saturday Life, Adam's Breed, The Well of Loneliness. The last, sympathetically telling the story of a girl born sexually inverted, created a stir because of its literary merits, a scandal because of its theme. The scandal was not lessened by the fact that Authoress Hall wears mannish shirts and ties, a monocle on a cord, is called "John" by her friends. Suppressed in England, the book was vindicated in the U. S. by a Victory Edition. Asked if its story was autobiographical, Authoress Hall told all the world No.

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