FICTION
THE HOOKER 4PENELOPE'
The Second Mate. By R. F. W. Rees. (Philip Allan. 7s. 6d. net.)
Ma. Ruas tells his story very fittingly : there is physical vigour in it, a certain amount of coarseness, and above all a close and familiar contact with the powers of the elements. Sea stories often have in them this epic quality : men who are forced to outbrave storms and the misery of extreme discomfort have need to call up in -themselves all the reserve of human will, and become heroes by mere force of circum- stance. The crew of the ' Penelope,' half dead with fatigue, conscious of an evil fate attached to their ship, three-quarters on the way to open mutiny, with nothing to eat but their short rations of salt and sodden biscuits, are yet magnificent as human beings in all their squalor and brutality. The tale of their voyage round the Cape will bear comparison with Mr. Masefield's Dauber.
The chief -character is the master of a clipper ship who has lost his ticket through piling his ship on Lundy Island during a fog. The evidence that he was drunk was perfectly clear ; and there could be no evidence to rebut it. But the fact is that the brandy he had swallowed to nerve himself and hold himself together after days of hard work intoxicated him after the shock of disaster ; and he could not have been more sober at the actual moment of crisis. That was no tale to tell the Court, however. No shipping firm had a berth for him after the verdict.
We meet him, then, when he has genuinely gone to pieces, bestially. drunk in a low and disgusting public house. He is taken as second mate in the ' Penelope' in a dire emer- gency. And the rest of the story is, in effect, the account of the restitution of his self-respect and growth of strength and character in him.
There is a villain, and a good villain. The ship sails with the skipper's daughter on board. She is engaged to be married to the mate, a great bulk of a man, with a strong will and an almost unlimited courage. The mate is the villain ; and he is one to engage the best steel : whatever his weaknesses or his wickedness, he is always at his best
when The .is demanded of him.
The skipper is killed by accident during the voyage. Mr. Rees describes vividly what happens, and makes us see it as inevitable and feel it as undoubtedly true. What is likely to happen in a ship which the crew believes to be under ti curse. when the mate is jealous of the second mate, when there is a cunning and self-opinionated malcontent on board„ when stamina and loyalty have been worn down by the hardest of weather, when, moreover, there is a young woman amongst them in a rather undefined and seemingly defenceless position ?
The book melodramatic—which is no fault. The char- acters in it are complex and living : there is no mere black. and-white work, but each is made to seem. organic. But the best parts of all are those which give us the sense of the strange circumstances that may occur at sea. Particularly memorable is the picture we take away with us of a sailing vessel twelve days from port, with her cargo of coal invisibly on -fire beneath the feet of her crew—the temperature rising continually, the haste against doom, and the heroism which forbids the second mate to abandon the ship- in 'face of such odds.
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