FICTION

By FORREST REID The Day Will Come. By John Randolph Richards. (Longman. 7s. 6d.) Port of Refuge. By Signe Toksvig. (Faber and Faber. 75. 6d.) Dead Ned. By John Masefield. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.)

I WONDER if Thackeray would have approved of The Day Will Come. He certainly would not have liked it. He himself wrote the sordid tale of Catherine with the avowed purpose of divesting the criminal of the tinsel glamour that had been wrapped about him by Ainsworth and Bulwer Lytton in such works as Jack Sheppard and Eugene Aram. These romances seemed to Thackeray false and poisonous; therefore, as an antidote, he -produced his own, the object being to paint a faithful portrait of a murderess, and to set her with her associates and accomplices in their true surroundings. But I don't think he enjoyed the task ; it was :Prompted by a sense of duty ; and the result, in its Caieful avoidance of anything sensational, is dull and dismal to the point of being almost unreadable.

Mr. Richards, in The Day Will Come, is even more realistic than Thackeray, because his hero lives, and Catherine, though her story is founded on fact, does not. Nor could anybody describe Mr. Richards' novel as dull ; on the contrary, it has a rather dreadful fascination, the quality of bringing us into immediate contact with a mind coldly and completely evil. Everything is seen through this mind, and so a world is created which, while remaining superficially unaltered,, yet has some- thing abnormal about it. Not insane. Objects, people, are not distorted as they might be in a nightmare. The mind of Randall is clear ; he has no illusions, no obsessions, no superstitions, he is not even excitable. His cleverness and determination are both above the average ; his singularity lies in the fact that he is sub-animal He can achieve no relationship except through lasciviousness. Honesty, affection, pity, gratitude—these are beyond his grasp. He is aware that such qualities exist in others, and exploits them, but their absence from his own nature is a source of vanity. He begins as a school teacher ; then he becomes assistant to a dealer in second-hand books ; and throughout he is successful with women. His first murder is strictly commercial, and since it is committed entirely without risk, is unaccompanied by any other emotion than a faintly ironic amusement. It is amusing, too, to marry the victim's wife, who besides inheriting the bookshop has a fortune of six thousand pounds. He is now definitely launched, has an increasingly prosperous business at his command, a wife who is infatuated with him, and the gratifying sense that these good things -have been obtained entirely by his own cunning and strength of character. The future is bound to be easy ; such dubious episodes as might imperil' it are safely buried in the past.

And then comes the letter, the letter from Nellie, whom he had half forgotten. He experiences a shock, followed by a hatred and rage of a violence rather startling in- one so well balanced. Yet he must do something about it, and at the end of so minutes he knows what. He packs a bag : there will be time enough on the journey to Bournemouth to think out the details. But Nellie has _not only upset his plans, she has also uncovered a secret abyss; out -of which use monstrous images, sexual and savage. On these he gluts his imagination, while his excitement increases, accompanied by " a certain hair-raising curiosity." And it will be so " damned easy " that once or twice in that crowded railway carriage he has to fight back a chuckle. " He threw down women, gutted them like herrings, cut many a bloody-spouting throat. He pressed his thumbs on eyeballs, felt them Squirt and roll."

It is an ugly picture, and I do not propose to follow it further. It is an ugly book, but it is powerfully written and probably comes very close to the real thing. If there be a flaw in the presentation, I think it is that in reality the final hideous orgasm must have been preceded by warnings and symptoms which Mr. Richards withholds for the sake of his climax. The story is told without comment, in a manner completely detached, except that now and then a note of irony enters. A Greek audience would have turned it down on the spot—but perhaps I am too prone to refer everything to the Greeks.

Miss Toksvig's Port of Refuge presents a 'remarkable contrast. It is a pleasant novel, simply written, quiet in tone, about a young, intelligent, and very impressionable Swedish girl,' Naomi Hoist, who has been brought up by her father, a poor and

struggling philosopher, in a small town on the Swedish coast.

The scene, however, is not Sweden (we are given only a back- ward glance at Naomi's childhood), it is the industrial town of Riverville in the State of New York. For in Riverville there is an unknown uncle who had emigrated many years before,

and on her father's death, which has left her at the age of 16 alone and unprovided for, Naomi seeks out this uncle, only to find that he has been a failure and is living in extreme poverty. Her dream of completing her education has to be abandoned. Her uncle and aunt can do no more than offer her a lodging ; she must earn her own keep ; and the sole work that offers itself is in Wainwright's collar factory, where all day long she sits before a machine in the deafening noise and heat and stuffiness. She hates it ; she is far from strong ;

yet she struggles on, though the last two or three hours of each day are a torture, leaving her more and more exhausted.

It is at this point that- the title of the book, Port of Refuge, becomes significant, and w learn why Miss Toksvig chose it. It is on a stifling day in August that the miraculous thing happens.

" The cataracts of noise, instead of madly beating her, seemed suddenly to be pouring protectingly around her—rising, falling, rising, falling . . . sinking smaller and fainter like a far-off murmur- ing surf, but still rising and falling, rising and falling—and then it. was gone ! The noise was gone. The factory was gone. She was gone, whatever that ' she ' was. She found herself on the firm chill white beach of the northern sea."

A grey sky is over her, the grey-green dunes are behind her, the waves are breaking at her feet ; she is really there.

On her first return from this odd voyage in time or space, Naomi feels alarmed.. Yet the mechanical nature of her work has enabled her to carry it on quite efficiently during her absence, and with the stopping of the machines she finds herself immediately back again in the factory. It becotheS a daily experience which she learns to control, and it is her greatest happiness. There is another place too that she visits—equally beautiful, equally happy, but quite different, not lonely, for there are people there. I confess it is the Port of Refuge that interested me most in Miss Toksvig's novel. Inevitably one is reminded of Henry James's The Great Good Place, though it is quite likely that Miss Toksvig has not read that tale, and more than likely that the idea was suggested to her by Dunne's Experiment With Time. But I do not wish to give a false impres- sion of the book. By far the greater part of it is occupied with Naomi's love story in normal life ; the Port of Refuge forms only a brief interlude—and a conclusion when the love story goes wrong. The love story itself is unconventional. It would have been easy to strike a wrong note here, for it is poor Naomi who does all the wooing, but Miss Toksvig treats it sympathetically, -with- delicacy and tact.

'Dead Ned takes us back to the good old days of Victorian romance. Here are all the familiar ingredients—an ancient mariner who tells the hero of a mysterious white race and a cave of emeralds in Africa—a house with a secret room—plotting villains—a murder not at all like the murders 'in The Day Will Come—the arrest of the young hero—his trial and death- sentence. What is distinctly unfamiliar is that the execution takes place. Resuscitation follows, thanki to a cleier old surgeon : then flight in the ship of a sinister sea-captain-engaged in the slave trade—and so the last of England. At this point the novel breaks off, the identity of the true murderer still unrevealed, the villains still plotting and still unpunished, the mysterious white race and the emeralds still a mere legend.

They are the cheese in the mousetrap of a promised sequel, and in the meantime one need only say that Dead Ned provides more entertainment than Mr. Masefield has given us since he wrote The Midnight Folk. He is a novelist who requires plenty. of -plot, plenty of incident ; otherwise, as in Victorious Troy, or The Bird of Dawning, the narrative is

apt to drag.