FICTION.
WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS.* This is a first book consisting of a series of exceedingly vigorous short stories concerning adventures in the South Sea Islands. " Doubloon Gold," as a matter of fact, is a story of Madeira, and is the only story in which the interest is not purely one of violence. The personages of Mr. Russell's little dramas are escaped convicts, beach-combers, and the jetsam and flotsam of the Islands; and although the separate adventures are of so exciting a nature that it is impossible not to finish any story once begun, the effect of reading a whole series of what can only
be called " shockers " becomes monotonous from their very brutality. The author, however, displays considerable skill in depicting the sensuous charm of the tropics, especially by night.
" The Passion-Vine," the heroine, a missionary's daughter, through sheer boredom, conceives a capricious passion for a native, and, seeing the hopelessness of her love, goes to keep a last tryst with him :—
" Her own room opened directly on the veranda. She paused only long enough to snatch up a shawl, as she passed through to the far side of the house. Here she could be safe from hostile ears where the mountain torrent ran thundering ; safe from prying oyes in the velvet shadows of the passion-vine. She parted the leaves and hearkened. A soft, thin trilling came up to her from the edge of the guava jungle in the ravine, a mere silver thread of melody against the stream's broad clamour. And then as she leaned farther out, so that her face showed for a moment like a pale blossom in the trellis, Motauri came. He came drifting through the moonlight with a wreath of green about his head, a flower chain over his broad, bare shoulders, clad only in a kilted white pareu—the very spirit of youth and strength and joyous, untrammelled freedom, stepped down from the days when Faunus himself walked abroad.'
But Mr. Russell does not usually indulge his readers with descriptions so alluring, nor, it may be said, is his writing generally so free from echoes of the mannerisms though not the matter of Mr. Kipling, and the matter though not the manner of Mr. Conrad. His main business is with sudden angry struggles, intrigues, and passions. In " The Red Mark," a sinister ven- geance lurks in the background for the most guilty among the villainous dramatis personae ; " East of Eastward," too, which concerns a horrible punishment inflicted on an Englishman- who has killed a favourite orang-outang, will afflict many readers with a sickening shudder. Again, " The Wicks of Macassar," which tells how a lonely man in a lighthouse used the hair of certain marauding natives to make wicks for the lamps which it was his duty to keep alight, is hardly to be beaten for ghastliness. The first and in some ways the finest of the stories,
The Fourth Man," tells of the becalming of three escaped convicts on a raft sailed by a native in tropical waters :-
"They looked and saw the far, round horizon and the empty desert of the sea and their own long shadows that slipped slowly before them over its smooth, slow heaving, and nothing else. The land had sunk away from them in the night—some one of t he chance currents that sweep among the islands had drawn them none could say where or how far. The trap had been sprung. ' Good God, how lonely it is ! ' breathed Fenayrou in a hush. No more was said. They dropped their quarrel. Silently they shared their rations as before, made shift to eat something with their few drops of water, and sat down to pit themselves one against another in the vital struggle that each could feel was coming—a sort of tacit test of endurance. A calm had fallen, as it does between trades in this flawed belt, an absolute calm. The air hung weighted. The sea showed no faintest crinkle, only the maddening, unresting heave and fall in polished undulations on which the lances of the sun broke and drove in under their eyelids as white, hot splinters ; a savage sun that kindled upon them with the power of a burning glass, that sucked the moisture from poor human bits of jelly and sent them crawling to the shelter of their mats and brought them out again, gasping, to shrivel anew. The water, the world of • Where the Pavement Ends. By Sohn Russell. London : Thornton Butter- worth. Os. net.l water, seemed sleek and thick as oil. They came to loathe it and the rotting smell of it, and when the doctor made them dip themselves overside they found little comfort. It was warm, sluggish, slimed."
The native, a Canaque of New Caledonia, appears to feel neither heat nor thirst, and calmly watches the torments and the struggles which end in the death of all three. Then :--
" Feeling somewhat dry after his exertion, he [the despised Canaque] plucked at random from the platform a hollow reed with a sharp end, and, stretching himself at full length in his accustomed place, at the stern, he thrust the reed down into one of the bladders underneath and drank his fill of sweet water. . . . He had a dozen such storage bladders remaining, built into the floats at intervals above the water line—quite enough to last him safely home again."
There is another story, " The Price of the Head," in which Mr. Russell displays the same detached cynicism ; and it is just these sardonic touches which are of most hopeful augury for his literary future. If he will forget the models on which he too obviously relies, and, abandoning Stevenson's picture of the sunny and childlike nature of the South Sea Islanders, will give his readers the true psychology of the native, he may avoid the danger which at present threatens him of his stories becoming a series of literary reverberations.
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