After the Vestris
S.S. SAN PEDRO--James Gould Cozzens --Harcourt, Brace ($1.50).
On Friday morning, June 7, the 17,000-ton turbine liner San Pedro lay at her Hoboken pier. Within her steel fatness lay a million dollars in gold for the Argentine, automobiles for Montevideo, shirts, toys, plows and a consignment of machine guns for Paraguay. She also carried passengers and crew to the number of 400 souls. One of the last to leave the ship before she sailed was a horrid looking man with a skinless skull and grey cotton gloves, Captain Clendening's physician. He was the one who first noticed the ship was listing.
The list grew from a thing of no importance to an inexplicable, spiteful terror as the San Pedro pounded into a blow off the Virginia coast. Thereafter the San Pedro became not a machine of wood and metal but a personification, headstrong and invincible, created to kill 400 people. She bucked and danced and cracked. She reduced her passengers to impotent lumps of frightened flesh. She crushed from the firm officers who commanded her all energy and initiative, leaving behind the hulls of men who only knew that they must obey Captain Clendening. She made of able Captain Clendening a man sick and puzzled and afraid. She foundered.
A Cunarder turned south from her North Atlantic lane; the Japanese freighter Toledo Maru came heavily about to go to the rescue; just over the horizon a Cuban sugar tramp crawled patiently on, having no wireless.
The men in the, San Pedro's wireless room joked at each other with wistful gallantry. Morris offered the first operator a ham sandwich, salvaged from the flooded kitchens. "Do take some more caviar, count. It will only be thrown out. . . . All together now; American Marconi Company, I love you!"
Paralyzed, Captain Clendening held on to the rail of his bridge, thought not of getting his passengers off, thought only of death by drowning. With a final rattle and hiss the San Pedro slid to a fathomless resting place.
Author James Gould Cozzens undoubtedly had in mind the end of Lamport & Holt Line's Vestris which, commanded by a seaman whose brain had been replaced by a fearful vacillation which caused him to delay some six hours before sending out an SOS, dragged 110 people to death three years ago (TIME, Nov. 26 et seq.).
It is not surprising that Author Cozzens should be able to do a good job of writing. He is 28, has been scrivening since he published an article in the Atlantic Monthly on student government at Kent School while he was a student there. His first novel was Confusion published in his Sophomore year at Harvard. Saturday Evening Post, Pictorial Review, Woman's Home Companion buy his short stories. Other books: Michael Scarlett, Cockpit, Son of Perdition. Last year S.S. San Pedro appeared in Scribner's Magazine, has been selected as one of two books by the Book-of-the-Month Club for September.*
* Other Book-of-the-Month: SUSAN SPRAY--Sheila Kaye-Smith--Harper ($2.50). It is the story of a woman evangelist, born of poor farmer tenants in rural England. At the age of four she sees God in a fiery bush, runs home screaming to her mother; for the rest of her life she continues to embroider on the tale, sincerely coming to believe it herself. Through the course of her life she marries three times, manages to combine the flesh & the spirit so charmingly, so successfully that she becomes famed.
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