FICTION

The Blood of the Martyrs. By Naomi Mitchison. (Constable. 8s. 6d.) Supercargo. By Ear] Whitehorne. (Harrap. 8s. 6d.)

MRS. MITCHISON has re-written The Sign of the Cross, with all the old properties, the noble Christian slaves and the Stoic Roman and the lions and the cads, unsuccessfully. That popular play—if I can judge it by the film version—had a great deal more merit than The Blood of the Martyrs: it was written with a Victorian fervour for good works and good words: it had a genuine, if disagreeable, Christianity: at the end of it one knew at least how a broad church bishop might have behaved in the arena. But Mrs. Mitchison, who has very little historical imagination, is handicapped by a more unfavourable mental background—she seems to exist in the atmosphere of a rather broad-minded and rather expensive co-educational school run on left-wing lines. She adopts to- wards her reader a kind of locus parentis: her over-simple prose is warm with maternity, and we feel as too-matron- mothered children might feel waiting impatiently for the night-light to be put out—waiting in this case for five hundred pages.

The Rome of The Blood of the Martyrs consists mainly of sexies and sissies: a sensitive slave is driven nearly to tears when a brutal overseer throws away his poetry book, and the sexies indulge in the kind of coarse masculine conversa- tion that only a lady could invent—they are like schoolgirls acting Falstaff and his friends: too boon for words: how the tankards ring!

The sissies all make the sign of the Cross to each other (it's a sort of clenched fist), and they meet in a comradely Tovarish way for love feasts—which are a cross between a Buchmanite house party and a Left Book Club rally. An exiled British prince joins them, and it is as if a really nice, distinguished intellectual had joined the party. Everybody is excited and a little shy. " It's all right, Eunice, it is really! I only didn't tell you because I wasn't sure .

`Oh, but he must sit in front—take my chair—bring him round, Argus! "Oh no! ' said Beric —he's the new c,m_

rade —' and Phaon giggled. 'But who is he?' Sot.on whispered eagerly. Manasses answered, with a funny n..5.- ture of pride and casualness: He's our young mast; •" Beric is very modest, he realises everybody is just as good as

he is—better really when you come to think. As he put.. it just before he dies, "'You just did the day-to-day, ordinary things that are so damned difficult. . . . But I—I had too. bloody much education and I thought I knew better than all of you.'" He's a real Briton too, educated at a good-class school. He says, "Rotten luck—brother," hesitating a little ; he talks about "Clever chaps" and takes a dressing-down from a slave very much as a nice, sensitive master might let

a schoolboy give him his point of view over tea and buns.

" As soon as you get frightened, you start sir-ing me again. Idiot! ' said Eerie amicably. 'You'd better call me by my name. I suppose you've got a nickname for me too? '

We didn't have any nasty name for you—truly—only the Briton.'" Mrs. Mitchison's avowed theme is the protest against the totalitarian State by Christians who believe in the rights of the individual—a curious subject for the author of that gorgeously silly book We Have Been Warned. That protest is still being made by Christians today in Mexico and Russia.

One would like to feel that Mrs. Mitchison had changed her mind, but the complete absence of any dogmas among these early Christians (they talk vaguely about the Way of Life, and there is a wonderful passage in which St. Paul says, "There will be no need of questions on doctrine, nor of prayer and fasting, for any of you. Come, Beric, and be part of the Will "), and a sly reference to the future when priests may stand between men and God, forbid one to believe that Mrs. Mitchison has any real sympathy for those who lost their lives last year in Tabasco, and those who today still have to attend secret Masses in Chiapas because of the opposition between their faith and the totalitarian ideal.

Religion enters, too, into Miss Bridge's inoffensive—but to me tedious—story of five people on a sort of Peking picnic, all scenery and conversations. There is a womaniser called Captain Hargreaves, a young woman called Rose, who has left an unfaithful husband in Egypt to stay with friends in China, a brother and sister—Anthony (known as Ant), and Anastasia (known as Asta)—and a young intellectual who begins by being thoroughly disliked by the healthy middle- brows because he doesn't " fit in," but later changes his spots and wins Astor Rose starts by sleeping with Captain Hargreaves, but discovers a deeper emotional attachment to

Ant. Ant loves her too ; in an unintentionally funny love scene he offers to sacrifice his High Church principles, quoting the Imitation of Christ. " Oh,' she breathed at the great words—and bowed her head onto their joined hands." lie sends her away to think it over, and she begs for a kiss—"' not a big kiss—but just a little one,'" but Ant won't : " It would be bad for you as well as for me.'" Later he faces his sister and argues: " You hold by St. Matthew ; I hold by St. Mark. You know what Westcott and Hon say about the orthodox Jewish glosses and interpolations in St. Matthew's Gospel." Like Beric, he would be a superb comic character, but their

authoresses do not feel this. Miss Bridge shares with Mrs. Mitchison a complete inability to "dramatise " ; there arc a great many descriptions, rather flat and guide-booky, and it all ends in Sacrifice.

It is a relief to turn from these high matters to a straight sea story, full of halyards and top-gallants, braces and royal yards. Mr. Whitehome has never, I imagine, written a novel before, but he has the dramatic ability which should come naturally to a novelist. Founded on an episode in which the author's father played a part, Supercargo tells the story of a mutiny of Chinese coolies in a cargo ship from Callao under a Spanish master. A young American business man, booked as a supercargo, is the only white man left alive, and he has to sail the ship across the Pacific to China. The atmosphere of violence and childishness—the little twittering voices, the politenesses, the cruelty, the elaborate precautions to prevent even a prisoner "losing face "—and the growth of a kind of affection and tolerance between victim and murderers—are admirably established-

GRATIAM GREENE.