Votive Offering

THE EXILE--Pearl S. Buck--Reynal " Hitchcock ($2.50).

Five years ago Pearl Sydenstricker Buck convinced U. S. readers that there was good earth in China, and that its tillers were sympathetic human beings not unlike themselves. Her masterly translation of another classic truth {All Men Are Brothers; TIME, Oct. 16, 1933) fell on somewhat deafer ears. Last week she attempted an even more difficult reconciliation: exile and patriotism, missions and motherhood. Author Buck wrote this book about a missionary's wife as if it were a novel, but readers soon guessed she was telling the thinly disguised story of her mother's life. Few readers will prefer The Exile to Pearl Buck's better books, but most onetime children will doff their hats before this votive offering to a mother's memory.

Carie had militant Protestantism in her blood. Her grandparents had emigrated to the U. S. from Holland for conscience's sake, settled in West Virginia to bring up their progeny in the fear of the Lord.Carie grew up to be pretty and proper, but she had a profound fire in her that knew the local youth for the chaff they were. At an impressionable age she met and married a zealous young preacher, for the bad reason that they both felt called to be missionaries. Hand in hand they went through the wood--to China. Here Carie began to wake up, when she saw what Christianity meant to Chinese converts. When Chinese women sang hymns, "everyone sang as quickly and as loudly as she could. . . . No one sang the tune, but only his own. . . . The old lady next to her rocked back " forth squeaking in a high falsetto, gabbling at a terrific speed, her long fingernail following the characters down the page. She finished ahead of all the other singers, slapped her book shut, and sat down in triumph. . . ." While her husband, his zeal and his absentmindedness both increasing, preached his way about the country, Carie stayed home, learned how to be a good housewife, a good mother. Four of her children died without ever seeing the U. S. Drought, floods, pestilence, the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese Revolution--she lived through them all. Once every seven years she and her family went "home." Less & less of a Protestant with the years, she drifted away from her husband and his God, lived a woman's religion of her own. Says Author Buck, strongly on Carie's side: "Since those days ... I have hated Saint Paul with all my heart and so must all true women hate him. I think. . . ." With her long job done, her surviving children grown and gone, Carie died as she had lived, in exile.

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