Command
by Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1922. 12mo. x + 337 pp. $1.90.
THE hero of Command, Mr. Spokesly, is an ordinary character, a mate, innocent enough to pin his hope of achieving command on the London School of Mnemonics, a Mr.-AddisonSims-of-Seattle method of self-improvement. Spokesly steps away from his commonplace fiancée, and walks into the hands of Archy Bates, a steward. In Archy’s cabin is a picture of his wife, which peeks out from behind a photograph of himself and a lady who, simply’ clad in a wrist watch, poses on his knee. From here on Mr. Spokesly, the ordinary, moves among extraordinary characters and events so that finally he loses his faith in the School of Mnemonics and all that such schools represent. Unlike many modern heroes, however, he does not end in a thorough debauch of disillusionment. Thus, he has the appearance of a reality rather than of a mere projection of an author’s sophistication.
That the characters and events of the story do not seem unnaturally bizarre and startling, but slip into the mind as probabilities, is due to the author’s admirable lack of fever. Very casually, as in the view’ of a god, a boat is blown up by’ a mine; Mr. Spokesly survives as casually, and is thus precipitated with the smooth senselessness of chance into Saloniki, the primeval arms’ of Evanthia Solaris, and the intricate mesh of the business of a Levantine trade-juggler, Mr. Dainopoulos by name. This merchant and his trade are both the mechanics of the plot and a groundwork against which the bombastic futilities of the late war stalk naked. Mr. Dainopoulos aims at an Arabian Night’s villa in which to set his jewel, a sick English wife, and his aim is so simple and sane that he achieves it while the rest of the world achieves nothing but folly.
‘Yet she would sometimes look suddenly out across the waves with smouldering amber eyes and parted lips, as though she expected to behold once more the figure of a man coming up out of the sea, to offer again the unregarded sacrifices of fidelity and love,’If these words were set out before you without any comment or guide, you might say, ’Joseph Conrad’; but they are the last words of Command. And it is true that Mr. McFee’s work must inevitably arouse a rumor of the romantic Pole. Command, however, stands well in the comparison— it has not the unreasonable glamour nor the sweep of Conrad, but it has for recompense a more lightly achieved detachment on the author’s part and a less ponderous irony. Evanthia Solaris is not as overwhelming a characterization of the natural female as is Rita of The Arrow of Gold, but she is less enameled and more convincing, just as the flashing sketch of Fridthiof convinces more than the burnished portrait of Captain Blunt.
Command proves that its author is undoubtedly growing riper and more sure.
H. PHELPS PUTNAM.