Evil Demons

SHINING SCABBARD--R. C. Hutchinson --Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

Ghost stories are rare in contemporary fiction. But their traditional stage properties--creepy old houses, strange cries at night, creaking witches who mumble obscurely--are still standbys for romantic novelists who exclude the supernatural from their tales. Last week the Book-of-the-Month Club offered its members a weird, wild-eyed novel that has all the elements of a good ghost story except a ghost. To compensate for this deficiency, most of the large cast of characters who figure in Shining Scabbard are a shadowy and illusive folk, bearing so little resemblance to ordinary humans they might easily be mistaken for apparitions, and engaged in actions that seem far better suited to the nether regions than to solid earth.

The boiling and bubbling of Author Hutchinson's cauldron never ceases. It begins when lovely little Renee Severin, wife of a French officer, leaves the tropics to take her two children to the ancestral home of the Severins in northern France. The most sensible character in the story, Renee nevertheless has more than a little of the mysterious in her makeup: an undisclosed past, a touch of African blood in her veins, strange intuitions, dark, puzzling eyes. She is a rock of common sense compared to her dreamy husband, Captain Pierre Severin, who mutters ominously that she must pay no attention to what his parents say against him, dreads her leaving, but seems so helpless in doing anything about it that he gives the impression of being a little feebleminded. Still stranger are their two children--round-faced, mindless, cheerful little Sophie; contemplative, mature, intuitive little Armand, who occasionally gives voice to gnomic philosophy, sees visions, hopes to be a monk. Enduring insults because of her dark skin, money troubles and sickness with the children, Renee gets this pair across France while her husband is transferred to a post still deeper in the tropics.

All dire forebodings are promptly fulfilled. In the dark abode of the Severins, where no sunlight ever penetrates, the exiles are tormented by a hideous assortment of demons. The worst of their enemies is old Colonel Severin, whose history is so involved that most of the 483 pages of Shining Scabbard are required to get it elucidated. During the Franco-Prussian War, it appears, the gallant officer was cashiered for contemptible cowardice. Now, in 1914, he is still trying to get the judgment reversed, meanwhile spending most of his time in bed, appearing mysteriously in good health after being reported dying, creeping through the halls at night, torturing Armand, until the boy faints, in an effort to free him of cowardice. His wife protects his delusions, nurses him, lies to her children about him. His sister Therese, once a great tragic actress, crippled with rheumatism, hobbles about on crutches. In a remote section there is a fiery great-grandmother. Nadya Severin, a Russian princess waited on by an idiot boy but occasionally escaping downstairs under the delusion that she is flogging some serfs--a character so bewilderingly obscure that it would not be surprising if she should mount a moon-bound broomstick.

Difficult as it is for Renee to understand these monomaniacs, her trials are increased when her husband deserts in an effort to rejoin her. Just why Captain Pierre chooses this difficult way of getting back to France. Author Hutchinson does not make clear, but the trip involves disguising himself as a monk, a corpse, a laborer. By the time Pierre reaches France the Germans are advancing. He joins the army, deserts again when near his home, is arrested, recognized by a brother officer, released, swept up in the retreat, reaches Renee just ahead of the German troops. He finds Armand mad, his wife an old woman. Piling his family into a passing wagonload of corpses, he carts them to safety, only to have Renee and Armand killed by a chance shell far behind the lines. Pierre goes as crazy as the rest of his family, babbling that he is a deserter while his daughter tags along after him unrecognized.

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