Long Baby

MERMAID AND CENTAUR--Rupert Hughes--Harpers ($2).

"Jason had been a long baby, and had grown to six feet before he was eighteen. He was beyond that now, and so ashamed of it that he would never let himself be measured. ... But Rita [his sister] . . was all head. Her head had grown in and on to such bulk as only a giant could uphold, yet her body and her members were hardly larger than an infant's." Rita had a soul of "spiritual perfectness." To amuse Rita, Jason brings a trained seal from the nearby carnival. The seal's owner comes, too--Zarna, Diving Venus of the show. Zarna would like to live at Jason's farm, not only for her own sake but for the seal's. That is why she accepts Jason when he proposes marriage. Later she refuses to bear a baby, and saves Jason from drowning. Both these things tend to alienate Jason. They make him think she is not a womanly woman. He is further perturbed when, during the winter, she prefers sleeping with two sick seals. But go he will not let her. Finally it is Rita who changes Jason's mind about Zarna, thus: 'Can't you see, Jason? It's our dooty. The more we love Zarna, the more we got to let her go, even if we have to drive her back to where she belongs . . . a carnival." Returns then to the carnival and her former lover. Zarna, happy.

Such is the latest story of unpredictable Novelist Hughes. None too well told, it seems like a true story he heard somewhere and wrote out to prove the axiom about Truth & Fiction.