Figures of Turf

The Story.* "Someone had asked Mary Viner as a child why she so disliked going to school, and had received the pregnant reply: ' 'Cos one does the same thing every day'; and at the age of 23 Mary was still resenting repetition. Only more so, because life had become more busily full of dreary tidyings and cleanlinesses, of washings up and washings down, of moments that smelt of yellow soap, and tea leaves and paraffin."

Early one morning at the front door of her scrawny house, Mary Viner finds not the red-nosed milk boy but Arnold Furze, her neighbor of Doomsday Farm. Like most of Deeping's figures of earth, Furze achieves that balance between rusticity and refinement which is sometimes considered the ideal embodiment of the English character. To Mary it seems that the rusticity outweighs the refinement. Still, she loves him, agrees to marry him. But as they plan for a new sink at Doomsday and a pump to supply water for Mary's dishwashing, she loses heart. In despair she takes a dawn train away from Cinder Town, going to Weyfleet to her sister Clare.

Clare, who has married well, dresses her, takes her to polo matches, rubs away the dust of Sussex and the bloom of spontaneity. Percival Fream, rich, meticulous, impotent, gives her first a diamond ring, then a marriage which includes all the luxuries save one. Mary gives dances behind the bright windows and in the wide gardens of Hill House but she cannot escape the knowledge that, for a steady diet, potatoes are more satisfying than candied rose leaves.

Furze, meanwhile, marries a waitress whose full bosom heaves with eagerness to scrub the floors he walks on. She, Rose, shares his passion for the practical, his desire to toil and spin and then plough fields to get up a sweat. With her he is happy.

Opportunely, two deaths are recorded. A motorist runs over Rose. Fream, his confidence and his financial ability shaken by the discovery of his physical defect, shoots himself.

The obvious conclusion arrives. Poorer, wiser and more awake to the dignity of washing dishes, Mary returns to Cinder Town. Once more the kinetic nobility of Furze charges her heart with true love. He takes her to be his housekeeper. If she succeeds at her tasks, he will marry her. She succeeds.

The Significance. Hardy first planted the literary flag in the rural turf of England. Since then Sheila Kaye-Smith, T. F. Powys and many another have followed him. Doomsday, in Sussex, most resembles Miss Kaye-Smith's work.

Author Deeping has all the facility which should be his after a decade of writing unpopular novels. He has not, however, added to this facility any of the qualities which make the books remembered. His people are seen through the wide end of the telescope; they are not Individuals through whom a type Is suggested, but rather flat and insignificant figures glimpsed through the blurring lens of gen- erality. A man of little skill with words, he gets his effects with pa- tience and a hammer. To his famed Sorrel and Son he attached a long-burning fuse and its sale now exceeds 100,000. This latest book is interesting if only because it too may contain that element, for critics still undefined, which gives a book enormous popular appeal.

*DOOMSDAY--Warwick Deeping--Knopf ($2.50)