Green-Apple Harvest
by . New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1921. 12mo, viii+312 pp. $2.00.
SHEILA KAYE-SMTTH has made Sussex her own. The beauty of its fields by day or night, the turrets of the oasts rising out of them, the thatched houses, their drooping eaves like lowered eyelids, the black woods, and the gorse the color of fire, the mystery of solemn stars and clear, flooding sunrises—all these are in the pages of GreenApple Harrest. Miss Kaye-Smith has also facility in the use of the quaint dialect, and she is highly sensitive to the peasants’ brooding desire for religious experience.
Bob Fuller, the hero of Green-Apple Harvest, was the son of a Primitive Methodist, and was converted by a minister of the sect called Peculiar Baptists — both Calvinists of the Sternest type. Bob’s stormy career is the theme of the novel — a career described by his sister in vigorous phrase. ‘Wotsumdever’ull Bob do next? fust it’s a woman, and then it’s drink, and then it’s the devil, and then it ’s God! Reckon he’s tried every way to disgrace us as he knows!’
It is set forth more gently by the wife of his brother: ‘Sims to me as Bob’s life’s like a greenapple tree — he’s picked his fruit like other men, but it’s bin hard and sour instead of sweet. Love and religion — they’re both sweet things, folks say; but with Bob they’ve bin as the hard, green apples.’
An early passion for a high-spirited gypsy girl makes a stormy background for his tragic struggle. His marriage to a cool-hearted, town-bred maiden, the constant friction between them, the village judgment on his ‘queer’ behavior, his moods of self-disgust, followed by a flaming zeal for converting his neighbors, are woven into a thrilling human drama.
Miss Kaye-Smith holds the key to the mystic temperament, and in spite of Bob’s fatal blunders, and his days of anguish, she makes us see that his is the better part — the treasure that can never be taken away from him. ‘The only thing I wanted wur God, he cried in his blackest hour. ‘All I cud think on wur God! Then a shining silver light seemed to come over me, and my heart wur full wud peace, and summat in me seemed to say “I have loved thee wud an everlasting love” — and I mun go and tell everyone as God is love and as all things lovely are a part of his love. I döant like dying — it scares me. But I‘ve a feeling as if I go to the Lord God, I’ll only be going into the middle of all that’s alive. If I’m wud Him, I can’t never lose the month of May!’
Green-Apple Harvest is one more testimony, rendered by an artist, that man is unconquerably religious, and that no conflict is so glorious and so thrilling as the spiritual battle between man and God. HELOISE E. HERSEY.