TWO IN A BOAT.

Otago Witness, Issue 3338, 6 March 1918, Page 53

TWO IN A BOAT.

1 By Jessie Mackat. So its never, never, never, Douglas Gordon! My wedding bells will scon ring out, But not for you and me. It is some year's now since "Douglas Gordon" was le dernier cri of the current Scottish balladist, and not even in its pristine freshness did it command a very robust type of hearer by its sentiment. There seemed no earthly reason why the two should not have sailed away with all the mediaeval eclat of the riders in" Young Lochinvar," and set a new peal ringing somewhere else. But at least "Douglas Gordon " seized upon one recurrent situation of unfailing power and pathos —the situation of two lovers drifting out in a boat to deliverance or accepted death. Campbell was not the first to use it, though " Lord Ullin's Daughter" brought it into widest "vogue a century ago, and the broad, simple.lines of many an island tragedy took shape in the sorrow of the fierce old chief when The waters wild went o'er his child, And he was left lamenting.

It was Campbell's ethereal contemporary, Shelley, who gave the same tragedy the iridescence of a new reading in "The Fugitives." In that beautiful, but strangely little known, fragment t&ere is a strange exaltation that carries away the sense of pain or peril; the reader hears only the bounding heart-beat that is one with the spirit of the storm _ and the white rushing- of the surges: it is a moment standing out of Time, ~ and above the things of earth, receded' and forgone. This exaltation is even more powerfully sustained by Rudyard Kipling in "The First Chantey," that triumphant dawn of love and prayer upon the dread world of water. Here there is a capture, here'there is chase, here there is oneness with the Illimitable, grasped by the two who first trust themselves afloat on the terrible, beautiful sea-floor, and _ return, singing and consecrated, to their awestricken people. Very beautifully _ have the>poets treated this theme, each in his fashion; but it is the novel that counts these days, and it is curious to recall how often it appears and reappears in the fiction of the hour.

Grant Allen is already passing to oblivion despite the power of his short stories, of which " The Reverend John M'Greedy " was perhaps the most startling, when it shocked the evangelicals of England some three decades ago. If I mistake not, it was Grant Allen who took a European theme in "The Desire of the Ey'dsV which rivalled in pathos, if not in sensation, that of the black Oxford don who reverted to the Ju-Ju of his native 'forest, and broke the heart, of the pretty English bride, wedded him and the mission-field in one waft of pious sacrifice. "The Desire of the Eyes" tells the oft-told story of* the lovely girl smitten with smallpox and become a pain to, even her lover's eyes. This story takes the usual turn so far as the girl's proffer of freedom to the man who loved her beauty first, and takes the subsequent turn, well known to the seasoned reader" of an honourable man's refusal to be free. But the two, each strong in renunciation, combine at last ■ in a resolve to go hand in hand into the spirit-world, where the broken mask of beauty should again be restored beyond earth's power to mar. So they agree to sail away in a boat, to unship the oars, and meet their fate alone with the sea and the sky. A morbid theme without doubt, and as morbidly treated, as more will remember, in " The Open Question," one of the first, if not the first, novel of Elizabeth Robins to command, public attention. It was years after the " Open Question " that she painted that marvellously faithful picture of wild Alaska, "The Magnetic North," and long after that she thrilled England .with the' horror of present-day tragedv in "Where Are You Going To?" "The Open Question" turned on the then lately-controyerted right of consumptives to marry. The heroine is a strong, wild soul who dominates the man who loves her, and cannot live without her. They are married, and life goes well with them until they have to face the responsibility of passing on arrested disease to a new generation. Then the dominant mothersoul of the heroine compels the keeping of an old pact, and husband and wife embark in a boat, and sail down the broad western river of their childhood into the sunset, , And after that the dark. In that curious collection of Wessex stories Hardy's book of " Life's Little Ironies," there occurs a very characteristic sketch of an unmatched quartet, who engaged themselves right at first, and, swayed by one dreamy dance-night, insisted with one accord on marrying themselves all wrong. Being good and dutiful folk, they hid the awakening from each other, but could not disguise from themselves that they had danced away their happiness: the adventurous and spirited fretted secretly at the calm domesticity of their partners, who in their turn felt as if they were respectively chained to shooting stars. The way out was found one evening when they had gone on a combined visit to the seashore. The adventurous ones decided to go out for an hour in a boat, while the landward pair sat chatting on. the pier. But evening drew to night, and the boat came back no more, nor were the wanderers seen again until a great wave threw them up, clasped in each other's arms, and a great content upon their faces. Perhaps the most modern and not the least pathetic case is that island novel of H. de Vere Stacpoole, "The Blue Lagoon." There that other favourite device of present fiction, the two children of Nature left' in some wild retreat to work out the problems of love and life and* death for themselves, Is brought in with effect. The two who are thus left in a wild Eden of their own had at least known humankind in their infancy, having

drifted apart from their company in some tropic storm while yet children. But their wakening romance comes to them in that wild blue solitude of the tropic seas where thev land. And the tragedy, which is not all a tragedy, finds them not two, but three, when their friends are upon their track at last after years of search. But the searchers come too late: the three children of the woods have lost their oars, and have braced themselves to a swifter, gentler end than a death of sun and thirst and hunger. They have eaten the "sleep-till-you-die" berries that by chance the little child had carried on board, and are forever safe from the disillusions of a life from which Eden' has gone for most. Doubtless the theme can be traced in many a wider field; but enough is gathered from even this brief look back to show what a favourite tragedy is this—two in a boat with love beside them, life behind them, and before them —what?