FICTION

Feast of St. Sinus

THE DARK GENTLEMAN--G. B. Stern--Knopf ($2.50). Setting her eye about at the level of the kennel doors at the Casa Lucceola, which is near San Remo on the Riviera, Author Stern relates with considerable finesse certain events that took place there in March, a fortnight or so before the feast of St. Sirius, the Dogstar. . . -. Pekoe and Baloo, the haughty chows from down the hill, were oddly enough the first to wind anything. They told Golden Toes that his mother, Rennie, was looking beautiful and young Toes, sociable no end, repeated the remark at home. Kim, the lean Irish rake, who had often enough growled that Rennie had "neither chic nor chien" and who despised the chows as stupid foreigners, bristled at the news, but not in anger. A tremor passed down the lupine spine off big Boris, too, and that very afternoon he was so sentimental about Rennie's glossy brown coat and hang-down ears that Tessa, his Russian-temperamental fiancee, bit him on all four legs. Golden Toes had no idea what it was all about and disported himself as usual, taunting his sister, Poppit--"Runt-o! Runt you are!" he would bark--and tumbling over his own ears. But the others were subtly changed--Tessa into a jealous fury; Boris and Kim into love-sick school-puppies. The Legs noticed, and shut Rennie in the goat house, thrashing Kim when he nearly gnawed in to her with his sharp terrier teeth. Then the Legs-in-Authority brought the romantic black stranger up from San Remo on a leash and put him--oh, outrage!--into the goat house.

Tessa fell in love at her one brief glimpse of the sleek visitor. During the two nights and a day that he was closeted with Rennie, Tessa the Seductive, the Disdainful, was even reduced to writing him poetry and in her abandon asked Toes, who rolled with mirth, what rhymed with "spaniel." That was why Kim sarcastically called him the Dark Gentleman of the Sonnets and part of the reason that Boris nearly ripped out his silky black throat; would have, too, but for the Savory Legs (Italian gardener). The Dark Gentleman flaunted his scars to the French poodle next door when he got home, imagining in his afterglow that he had slain Boris. Rennie's afterglow was somewhat marred by the bath to which she was subjected her first day out of confinement. And the changed attitude of the others, back to their normal indulgence towards a dowdy little bitch, cast a dream-like veil over the whole episode. Not until May, when her kennel rolled with black puppy-shapes, was she sure that she had really heard the Dark Gentleman's lyric blandishments. Author Stern, social chronicler, (The Matriarch, A Deputy Was King, Thunderstorm), now deserves a niche no whit below Christopher Morley's (Where the Blue Begins), from dog-lovers. If he could read it, Toes would ejaculate: "Great Spratt! I say, you chaps, that is a book! My copy is all dog-eared." It would impress Kim, too, but being reticent and profane, he would doubtless growl: "My Dog, cut your row, Toes. Every Legs, you know, has his day."

This Freedom

BLACK BUTTERFLIES--Elizabeth Jordan--Century ($2.00). When Dorinda Maxwell's father died, she wanted the freedom that he had refused her. At first she thought she had found it in the unconventionality of some drunken esthetes who called themselves the Black Butterflies. Later, when she fell in love with a model young man, she knew she had really got what she wanted. The story of a war of independence is marred by the inability of Author Jordan to raise a real issue between the behavior of eccentric people and that of normal ones. While the normal ones are not brilliantly depicted, the eccentrics are so clumsily drawn that Dorinda, had she been a reader of the book instead of a character in it, would have been sure that they were not real. Yet Elizabeth Jordan is far from inept. Occasionally there are breezy paragraphs, her minor figures live, Bumper Product

BLACK APRIL--Julia Peterkin-- Bobbs Merrill ($2.50). A small book of sketches called Green Thursday, published three years ago, revealed Mrs. Peterkin as an interpreter of Negro peasants whose equal had not been seen since Joel Chandler Harris. Now Mrs. Peterkin has fulfilled the implication of her sketch book with a tremendous painting, a mural in sharp tempera, upon which appears the entire population of an isolated plantation--all the huts, with the doors open, all the hearths, pots, newspapered walls and floor chinks; all the hound dogs, sow pens, butchered hogs, wood piles; all the murmurous lanes and sweaty cotton acres; the giggling creek, Blue Brook, and the threatening, dreamy big river with a sandy island and soaring fish hawks. The figures moving everywhere are dominated by a blue-black giant, April, the foreman and patriarch of the settlement. Such story as there is culminates in the tribulation visited upon him by a God in whom he took small stock. Gangrene eats away the feet upon which he so confidently stood all his life. His toes drop right off in a basin. Some say it was the conjure wrought by one of his many women when she laid his wife's death sheet over his bed. Some say it was his curse for biting a hole in a preacher's cheek. Most likely it was the poison with which he defied God and nature, the boll-weevil killer that none would help him spray in the fields. He comes back from the hospital only the shriveled trunk of the towering black pine he was, to die of despair. Other prominent figures are ripe young Joy, April's last duchess; mountainous Big Sue, who slapped jealous Leah dead; amiable Uncle Bill, the plantation saint; malicious Brudge and sensitive Breeze, two of April's older boys; intelligent, defiant Sherry, his strongest boy, whose skull was hard enough to shock blood out the tyrant's nose in a murderous butting match they had; mumbling Maum Hannah, midwife, with her jumbled accumulation of animal sense and primitive witchcraft. The tragic quality of racial backwardness and superstition is developed with all possible force by treating it in natural minutiae instead of as a theme. To cut a girl's birth pains, a granny lays a whetted axe beside a plowshare under the bed. The moon's phases are watched and calculated for everything from corn-planting to paring finger nails. Good manners are the highest plantation criterion: it is bad manners to dislike soap and water, to have lice or warts, to horselaugh right in somebody's face, to have sooty feet. Never was a book more bubbling with conversation. Joy and sorrow, large matters and small are discussed with that vast volubility of people whose social life is instinctive, unintellectual. On and on the voices flow, never tiresome, liquid, direct, humorous, full of "yunnuh" (you), "enty" (isn't that so?), 'sho'," "Jedus." A three-dimensional talking cinema could reproduce folk-life no more fully nor could any director efface himself as completely as Mrs. Peterkin to let a rich stream of life take its own way through playful eddies and deep pools. Black April is a full size product, as authentic as a bumper cotton crop. The Author. Her birthday was Halloween, 1880. Her mother died and she was reared by an oldtime Negro "mauma." Her name, Julia Mood, was near the top of the class of 1896 at Converse College (Spartanburg, S. C.) where she took a master's degree at 17. She taught school until she met and married William G. Peterkin, prosperous planter. She put by her plans for a musical and perhaps theatrical career to manage the Peterkin plantation, "Lang Syne," 40 miles from Columbia, S. C., and bring up a son who is now 22. She became "a superb horsewoman, a keen huntswoman and an excellent shot." Not until the 1920's did she start writing and her first things won instant recognition, including an O. Henry Memorial mention. A professor-friend describes her: "Well above medium height of her sex; up standing, virile and vivacious. Hair plentiful, rather riotous and red. Eyes greenish-grey. Features large and full of character. The entire woman is instinct with indescribable charm."

Idle Moralist

CHILDREN OF DIVORCE--Owen JOHNSON--Little, Brown ($2.00). Jean Waddington, with tea-brown hair, a meditative conscience and divorced parents, resolves upon the rock of an unhappy childhood that marriage, unless eternal, is a sin. Forthwith, she arouses a consuming love in Ted Larrabee, another child of divorce. She hesitates at marriage because she has millions and she wants Ted to have a career. Her cousin and childhood friend, Kitty Flanders, an effervescent little animal, also a child of divorce, sees an opening and captures Ted. The scene shifts from Long Island to Paris to the Riviera. Jean and a Prince de Sfax, without illusion and without love for each other, enter into a business transaction solemnized by holy Catholic wedlock. Kitty arrives to tinker with the affections of the Prince, is divorced by Ted. At last, it seems that Ted and Jean will be able to rush off together into boundless happiness. But no--the moral ending requires that Jean and the Prince shall build anew. . . . It is entertaining fiction to read on an idle evening, despite the author's constant sermonizing on the evils of divorce. If Owen Johnson, storyteller, would oust Owen Johnson, moralist, from his works, he might resurrect the fame that was his for The Varmint, The Tennessee Shad, Stover at Yale.