Temperament in a state of almost primordial rawness is given to us abundantly in Beatrice Grimshaws Polynesian story When the Red Gods Call. There is a good deal of grimness and cruelty in this book for it shows quite remorselessly how the inborn savage that still lurks pretty near to the surface veneer of culture under which we have most of us hidden him bursts forth triumphantly in those jumpingoff places of civilization where law and order are unknown and might perforce has to make right. The sum and substance of this rather exceptional novel is the vengeance which one white man takes upon another on a remote and lawless island in the Southern seas after that other man has robbed him of his native wife, burned his home, the making of which represented the pleasant toil of many years, and devastated the plantations which were just beginning to bring him in a rich return. But for this other mans treachery, one cannot help realizing that the hero would have settled down permanently to a semibarbaric life, content in the sole companionship of an ignorant, half savage Papuas girl who in time would have given him children as dark skinned and primitive as herself. Instead, the tragedy drives him back in a measure to civilisation; and on one of the islands which has begun to enjoy a semblance of AngloSaxon colonial rule he meets the daughter of the newlyappointed English Governor, and for the first time in all his wandering years wishes that he had a cleaner record to offer her wishes especially that his past was not stained with the shame of a native marriage and that his hands were clean of the blood of a white man. So large a portion of the spell which this book casts upon the reader is due to its narrative interest that there is no object in spoiling the surprises it contains by telling them in advance. It is sufficient to say that it is a case where a mans dead and buried past unexpectedly rises again to confront him in what ought to have been his happiest hour. But besides the story a cordial word of praise must be said for the setting. You get a sense of strange, exotic regions, luxuriant tropical growth, warm, sunny, languorous days, a pervading impression of a fair corner of the earth where life is so simple, so lazy, so delightfully untrammeled that one feels greatly tempted to look up timetables and ocean routes and discover at once just how soon the next available steamer will be sailing.
The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life, Vol. 34