iv - Cargoes for Crusoes - 181

iv

Slow turns the water by the green marshes,

In Virginia.

Overhead the sea fowl

Make silver flashes, cry harsh as peacocks.

Capes and islands stand,

Ocean thunders,

The light houses burn red and gold stars.

In Virginia

Run a hundred rivers.[102]

The fine opening of Miss Johnston’s poem might serve as an evocation, except in the detail of the lighthouses, for her novel, Croatan (1923). The mere fact of her return to the Virginia of colonial days must have served to entice many readers to this book—who were held, I think, by the tale itself, once they had begun it. The legend of Raleigh’s lost colony of Roanoke and of a first white child born in Virginia, “Virginia Dare,” is skilfully utilized for a romance quite the most perfect Miss Johnston had imagined. The story of the three young people who grew up together in the forest—English girl, Spanish boy and Indian youth—is one of many overtones deftly sounded. Is Miss Johnston proclaiming a creed of racial tolerance and interracial understanding? Then the proclamation is made pianissimo and with muted strings, not with brass instruments. And the forest scenes—what delicious notes from oboes!

It is very natural to contrast Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow, both Virginians and both novelists of distinction as well as contemporaries. Their very agreeable personalities are, however, markedly different. Miss Glasgow is a product of her background and her time, as much so, for example, as Edith Wharton; Miss Johnston has a great deal more likeness to, let us say, Miss May Sinclair. Where Miss Glasgow tends to concern herself with Virginia of the last half century, Miss Johnston, from going back to the beginnings of her State, is quite as likely to plunge effortlessly forward into the farthest imaginable future. For a witness of what she can do in that direction one does well to read such a short story as “There Were No More People,”[103] dealing with the extinction of man and the slow emergence of “a creature who must be classed among aves. He was small, two-footed, feathered and winged.... Slowly, taking aeons to do it, he put out, in addition to his wings, rudimentary arms that grew, taking a vast number of generations to accomplish it, into true arm and hand. At the same time he began, very, very slowly, to heighten and broaden his skull. Man would have thought him—as he would have thought man—a strange looking creature.... It took time, but at last there dawned self-consciousness. The old vehicle for sensation, emotion, memory and thought that had been called man was gone. But sensation, emotion, memory and thought are eternals, and a new vehicle has been wrought. It is not a perfect vehicle. In much it betters man, but it is not perfect. The new Thinker resembles the old in that he knows selfishness and greed and uses violence.... It remains to be seen if he can outwear and lay aside all that and remain—as man could not remain.”

MARY JOHNSTON