Avon's Harvest
by . New York: The Macmillan Company. 1921. 8vo, vi+65 pp. $1.50.
Avon’s Harvest is the story of a man who sows hatred and reaps fear. One may suppose that Mr. Robinson has pondered upon the inexplicable aversions we all harbor toward certain persons, — aversions which may be moral or merely physical, but are irrational in any view, — and that he has Imagined a man caught, while still an adolescent boy, in the grip of such an aversion until it deepens into a consuming hatred. The object of his hate, a schoolmate, is described as ‘reptilian,’ ‘ophidian,’ even as diabolical; but it is a part of the interest of the story that the reader is never quite sure how far this characterization is the product of Avon’s hysteria.
One day Avon strikes the other, who retaliates only with a look. But next day the other speaks, and his words and the threat they convey haunt the boy and man ever after.
‘Well, then,’
He said, ‘have you thought yet of anything Worth saying? If so, there’s time. If you are silent,
I shall know where yon are until you die.’
The seed so planted grows into Avon’s harvest of ‘hate, and remorse, and fear.’
The wise have cautioned us that, where there’s hate,
There’s also fear. The wise are right sometimes.
In bare outline the plot is a ‘mystery story,’ clear and absorbingly interesting; but it seems a profanation to use so threadbare a label for a narrative which, upon each new reading, grows in subtlety and beauty and power. Having read once, the reader is assailed by a host of questions; reading again, he finds that every question has been anticipated by the author, who has shown a fine judgment at times in not answering it. An especially admirable quality of the narrative is the reticence shown in certain incidents, as in the hovering of the distraught wife outside the door of the locked room.
The scene by the Maine lake at nightfall, and in the cabin at midnight, is superbly told. A few lines will exhibit better than any comment the plainness and firmness of the style and the masterly handling of the verse.
I sat gazing over there
Across the water, watching the sun’s last fire Above those gloomy and indifferent trees That might have been a wall around the world, When suddenly, like faces over the lake,
Out of the silence of that other shore I was aware of hidden presences That soon, no matter how many of them there were,
Would all be one. . . .
I could not be sure; And as for going over to find out, All I may tell you now is that my fear Was not the fear of dying, though I knew soon That all the gold in all the sunken ships That have gone down since Tyre would not have paid For me the ferriage of myself alone To that infernal shore.
It is throughout a story of the borderland between the natural and the supernatural, told with great skill, constantly deepening in tragic tone, and reaching considerable power at the end. Mr. Robinson has done something quite new in both conception and execution.
ROBERT M. GAY.