NOVELS.
THE GRAIN CARRIERS.*
SOME two years ago playgoers in Paris added something new to their experience in seeing a little play called La Barciterie. It was a singular piece of realism, dealing with the crime of barratry, or felonious acquisition of money by sending to eve, unseaworthy ships which foundered. There was a scene in which the relations and friends of the seamen who had been sacrificed burst into the offices of the shippers and set %ion them with a curious mingling of ghoulish zest and appalling but righteous anger. That play may be recalled to some minds in more than one way by Mr. Edward Noble's story, written in a white-heat of indignation at the new Board of Trade regulations which permit ships to be loaded six inches deeper than formerly. And the story is not only directed against the Board of Trade, but against the owners who habitually buy cheap ships and waderman them in order to squeeze profits out of the homicidal competition. Such an owner is Mr. Filcher, the sinister but shadowy figure whose influence broods over this story. "Understand "—says the skipper of one of the grain carriers who has lost his wife through exposure in a small boat after his ship has foundered ha rounding the Horn—" understand my meaning. Filcher killed her in order that he might screw together a few pounds of freight. He knew the risk we ran. He knew we were unfit. He chose to take the risk. AO he has killed her. That is the bare truth. God ! I would that might wept Filcher at this moment. I pray that I may meet him soon.—Amen." This potential curse is pronounced as piously, and by as good a man, as the curse sworn on the Bible in The Mill on the Floss.
The heart of the story is the description of the voyage round the Horn from San Francisco of two sister-shipi belonging to the same owners ; and this description must certainly be counted among the best pieces of sea-writing published in recent years. When one has read page after page of repetitions of the same idea—the misty, dripping ship, covered with flying spume ; the terrible " greybeards " welling up out of the great ocean distances, pursuing her, and dropping their monstrous battering-rams of water upon her decks ; the see-sawing of the ship as she yaws in the pooping seas; and her fatal lifelessness as she drags like a hearse through the tumult, not being able to get tow from • The Grain Carriers. By Edward ttoble. London : W. Blackwood and Sand
the seas because she is too deeply loaded—one shares at last, almost physically, the sensation of having been mauled and crushed and frozen by the Antarctic gales. We cannot
remember to have experienced quite the same thing since reading Mr. Conrad's Typhoon. And now that we have mentioned Mr. Conrad we have a standard by which to judge this book. Mr. Conrad can reiterate an idea with
complete variation of simile and metaphor, and violence of imagery with him never means violence to the finish of his language. That is not true of Mr. Noble, who is now and again even slipshod; and yet nothing can disguise the intense imaginative driving-power at the back of all his writing. His scenes stand out like the spars of a ship seen by lightning. His story is impressive and moving. It ought to be said, however, that there is a mixture of motives that leaves us rather perplexed. The story is dedicated sardonically to the past and present Presidents of the Board of Trade ; it is more expressly, however, an indictment of Filcher and his fellow-shipowners, and it is less expressly an attack upon the whole British people who, with wicked indifference, ask only for "cheap food." We cannot pretend to accept the premiss, so clearly implied, that it is infamous to want cheap food.
The way to protect our mercantile marine from a heartless exploitation is partly by the organisation of the labour it employs, and partly by a firm insistence on adequate shipping laws. Encouragement by bounties, which Mr. Noble seems to suggest, would soon lead us into disastrous economic diffi- culties. If the present load-line is wrong, it must be altered. The British people are not really indifferent to the sufferings
of seamen ; but they are very often ignorant of them,—they do not visibly clap hands on the arrival of every sailing-ship that has come round the Horn, as the charming girl-character in this story with humorous pathos feels that they ought to
do. The Grain Carriers, quite apart from the equivocal motives, will, we hope, give thousands of readers pitiful but wholesome thoughts to accompany the consumption of their daily bread. For the strength of the author is his descriptive power, of which the following passage may be given as an example "The men worked on. A. wild-beast swerve had come to the Padrene, and before they could control her the greybeard rushed foaming to the quarter. It took her beneath the runs and lifted her high, pointing her nose at the trough it had sucked out there in the gloom at her bows. The ship seemed to stand on end—to stand shivering on the edge of a pit. The foresail fell flat, clanging against the mast, becalmed by that giant sea; then as she tilted, bellied with a smash that shook the ship. She lurched a trifle more. The sea broke over her taffrail and filled her. It rolled clear over her, and she hung shuddering on the edge of a plunge. She leaned over to port, and the water kept her there, pressing her down, roaring like a cascade over the rail. The ship seemed to pause in her race. There was no life in her movement, no buoyancy. Like a drowning man, she appeared to reach up with her hands and claw the air. The squall flared brazenly to the zenith, peppering her with bail."
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