Precious Bane

by Mary Webb. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1926. 12mo. xii —|—tt.iti pp. $2.00.

GIDEON SARN, receiving the ceremonial crust and wine of the Sin Eater across his father’s coffin, received therewith the mastery of the Sarn land and of whatever wealth its marshy acres might produce. Generations of relentless, domineering Sarns had been satisfied with the fields around the dark mere; Gideon felt the accumulated obstinacy in his lightning-fired blood pushing him on to be, not Sarn of Sarn Mere, but chief among ten thousand. The outward and visible sign of that coveted power was Lullingford New House, with all its equipage and consequence of maids and men, coaches and carriages, tickets to Hunt Balls and prestige at election tide; and to achieve this crystallization of his desire he sacrificed all transient happiness for himself, for birdlike, simple old Mrs. Sarn, for Prue his sister, and for yellow-headed Jancis Beguildy — whom he included in his world halfunwillingly until her father’s opposition roused deeper fires of battle to supplement the faint flicker of love. For all the promise of Gideon’s acres of wheat, ploughed and planted in shrewd anticipation of the Corn-law, Wizard Beguildy stubbornly refused a son-in-law who, born under the threepenny planet, was doomed not to thrive.

The story of Gideon’s struggle against the stars in their courses, of the Wizard’s curse and the subsequent steps taken by that practical necromancer to ensure its efficacy, is told by Prue Sarn; it is the sombre background to her record of a life of passionately intense feelings. Set apart from her contemporaries by the ‘hareshotten lip’ that implied whispered allusions to broomsticks and Sabbath-dancings, she found compensation first in a mystical apprehension of reality that gave her — as to another lonely Englishwoman some three centuries before — ‘the world in the bigness of a hazel-nut,’ and later in romantic union with Kester Woodseaves, in whom she sees the Master whose banner over her is love.

Mrs. Webb’s book is marked by a sense of the past that does not disdain careful documentation, and by a continuous delicate insistence on the transient loveliness of the external world 7emdash; early ice among the lily leaves, greeneyed Felena s secret smile, western sun slanting on the damp dairy tiles, satisfying straight red furrows where the rooks walk, scented bergamots and jargonelles heaped beneath the garret rushlight, or the sweet quick lilt of ’Barky Bridge’: —

It is essentially a poet’s novel, rather than a novelist’s, though not for that any less vivid a representation of Shropshire at the opening of the last century. Mrs. Webb’s own commentary stands in the foreword: —

’We are to-morrow’s past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks — a ship, a cottage, sun and moon, a nosegay. The dial turns, the ship rides up and sinks again, the yellow painted sun has set, and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go.'

MARIAN VAILUANT

The books selected for review in the Atlantic are chosen from lists furnished through the courteous coöperation of such trained judges as the following: American Library Association Booklist, Wisconsin Free Library Commission, and the public-library staffs of Boston, Springfield (Massachusetts), Newark, Cleveland, Kansas City, St. Louis, and the Pratt Institute Free Library of Brooklyn. The following books have received definite commendation from members of the Board: —