Fiction
New and Old Crescendo. By Ethel Mannin. (Jarrold's. 7s. 6d.) Cement comes carrying a singular and startling prestige. For in this novel a post-revolution author describes a recent phase of post-revolutionary Russia, with a clear-eyed and far from despairing acceptance. The result is unnerving, fascin-
ating, and, in its unflinching way, magnificent. The book is strident and scarlet enough, yet there are silences when the tears fall over the dead fingers of sacrificed children. It seems to mark a pause in time, during which these significant, determined figures with red-bound heads, so different in many ways from those who once wore the cap of liberty around the guillotine, take their place in the masque of history. With serene honesty it includes the blood, the filth, the casual lusts, the revenges, inseparable from a Revolution ; but it breathes an immense energy, a kind of hopeful exultation new to Russian literature. Here are none of Tchehov's charming languid fools who cannot stir a finger to save their sacred Cherry Orchard. The worker, Gleb, by the mere force of his heart, and the heroic passion of his will, lifts his huge derelict factory into full power again.
After three years' warfare, Gleb Cluunalov returns to his factory town by the sea, the Red Star blazing on his green helmet and the Order of the Red Flag on his breast. He finds that his wife, Dasha, is now a valued member of the Women's Section, who calls him " Comrade," and .disappears for days at a time, that his only child, Nurka, is in the Children's Home, and that the great cement factory, where he once worked, is closell and plundered, though its mighty engines wait inviolate as idols, cherished by their secret acolyte Bryza. Gleb is a creature of glowing vitality, devoted to the principles for which he has fought. Dismayed by the distress of the town, the degeneration of its workers into keepers of pigs and goats, Gleb sees in the revivification of the factory an economic and symbolic salvation. After a thousand frustrations and defeats, he is triumphant. That is only the main theme of this fierce modern epic, which cleaves its way through poignant and electric episodes, stinging colloquies, violent committee scenes, dark dream-like contacts between people so exhausted by the Soviet's necessities that they have no time for the old Russian business of " making their souls." The types of the committee members areamazingly varied, and burningly al&e. Indeed, there are too many strange and stabbing pages in this book to be easily numbered. The picture of the Return of the Penitents is heart-shaking ; the peculiar ming-
ling of cruelty and mystic sweetness belongs to an ancient and 'a deathless tradition. While; in the final chapter, when Gleb speaks to, the people from the factory tower, the attentive
reader will become conscious of a new kind of ecstasy, even if it be alien for him. Candour and faith and a serene pity for those who must suffer great losses in a time of transition
are the qualities- that bind these lightning-like scenes into a unity.
Miss Ethel Mannin's Crescendo has for sub-title " The Dark Odyssey of Gilbert Stroud " ; but that lofty image merely rebukes Gilbert's trivial and melodramatic adventures. In a fit of excusable hysteria, his stepmother wounded his wrist when he was a child, so he never could really love a woman. This is a good enough theme, and might be persuaded into
sequels of beauty, sorrow, and tenderness. But Gilbert, being a Stroud, is a horrid child before the accident ; and the author is more determined on sensational than on delicate psychology. The War adds to. Gilbert's sense of grievance,
so after it he travels expensively about, seeking " a supremely exquisite orchid of a woman " to satisfy his sense of possession. The Lady Isabel Stroud meets his orchidaceous specification ; but, cold as ice, freezes his nerves. At last, finding she has deceived him with a cousin, he strangles her, and then steps out of her high window. There are crowds of characters about, like Mary, who can " love Latinly," and Stemway, whoge conversations are intended to be brilliant. Also there are expensive scenes at St. Moritz and the Lido, extra- vagant clothes, jewels, and so on. But nobody in the book has any value at all ; and we are pleased when it concludes in sheer melodrama. Alas ! Miss Mannin has this time chanced on a set of puppets without a tragic gesture in them.
Neither is Miss Faith Baldwin at her best in Alimony, readable and lively story as it is. American divorce law seems to provide well for the vampire, the creature of pleasure who _wearies of her husband in a few years, then plagues him into letting her go with more than half his income. Such was Charlotte Dane ; therefore the unfortunate Stephen Dane, having found a perfect mate in Eve Harkness, could hardly do justice to his new wife, still less to her child. So there were indignant words and bitter deeds ; but all came right in the end. Other cases of unjust alimony are woven in, and the subject becomes too oppressive. Besides, one gets thoroughly sick of Stephen for his limp and unreasonable ways, and is not much attracted by anybody else. Miss Baldwin might have made a really good portrait of Thorpe Bedford, the cynical, corrupt, but generous capitalist. However, she shirked him, and he remains sketchy.
- Miss Phoebe Fenwick Gaye's Vivandiere is described as the initial work of an author in her early twenties. There is a kind of sprint perfume about this beautiful novel which possibly lingers only in books written by the young. But of crudity or immaturity in achievement there is no trace.
It has an easy mastery of Napoleon's terrible Russian cam- paign ; it is inimediate and original in its impressions of the desperate Retreat, when the dazed soldiers died in the snow, still clutching the silk and gems ravished from Moscow.
The lilac-sweet idyll in the old Russian house is a lovely thing ; the history of the Siriac brothers is a finely woven tissue of irony, gaiety, and pathos. But Julie the Vivandiere, so simply evoked without one touch of sentimentality, especially remains in the memory as a creature of such rare -courage, unwearying fidelity, and sincerity of vision that we do not wonder that both Paul and Gervais remembered Jeanne d'Arc in thinking of her. Vivandiire is a book of spirited grace and distinguished manner.
RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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