In Sao Maharo

THE ANSWERING GLORY -- R. C. Hutchinson--Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

"I shall come back/' said Miss Thompson, straining at her fever-born helplessness as they took her away from her African island. "I shall come back!"

Miss Thompson did not go back. She had lived 40 years in a simmering green hell where, even the encyclopedias said, a European could not survive a year's visit. She had built tight houses for her black charges. She had tended the sick, cracked an occasional black male pate for wife-beating, tried to teach the Tulasus tidiness and something about her God. In return, the Tulasus called barren Miss Thompson "Mother."

After she left the English rest farm the pain and "giddy spells" intensified. That would be all right, she told herself, when she got out of the strange northern climate and back to the jungle. To show that she was quite capable of being returned to Sao Maharo, she undertook a lecture at a girls' school near Bristol. She told her story haltingly, miserably. Most of the girls sat back and drowsed at the ''mish's" speech; some ate candy; one, a hockey player named Barbara Gastell, paid attention. She knew the thin little old lady had "guts."

Barbara Gastell had guts, too. She quit school, went up to Miss Thompson's boarding house in London to request that she be taken back to Sao Maharo with the missionary. As Barbara entered the cheap little room she saw that Miss Thompson's things were all packed. Miss Thompson was sitting there in an attitude of patient waiting. She had just died.

Barbara learned what she could about medicine in a year, knocked difficulty after difficulty flat. The small boat that was taking her ashore at Sao Maharo nearly foundered. The sailors threw overboard her two truckloads of supplies and her bag of clothes, then turned and rowed back for their ship. But Barbara was going in the other direction. She dived from the teetering gunwale and began swimming for the dark beach.

"Miss! Miss! Are you all right?" cried one of the sailors.

From the pitching black waters Barbara's voice came: "All right."

The Author-Rare for a first or 21st novel are Author Hutchinson's simple clarity, obvious sincerity, tenderness and understanding. Previous to this well-told tale of two gritty women he contributed to Oxford's his (he went to Oriel), the Manchester Guardian, Punch, the English Review. No missionary, he is 25, married, has a daughter, works in the advertising department of a London wholesale grocery.

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