Books: Pish Pie

TWILIGHT ON THE FLOODS (782 pp.) —MorguenYe Steen — Steen-Doubleday ($3.95).

The stars quivered like notes shaken from the thin white tambourine of the moon … A nightjar chirred. A rabbit made a minute crackle . . .

“Emily.” She turned her head . . . towards him helplessly . . . Dorset said in his sultry voice, his voice of a purring tiger: “I am going to kiss you, Emily. Do you mind?” She felt herself dissolving . . . His eyes, clear and ice-grey between their long lashes, were full of moonlight . . .

Marguerite Steen’s 1941 best selling nov el, The Sun Is My Undoing, was all about the hot-blooded Flood family of Bristol and how they made their 18th Century fortunes slave-trading on the sultry Gold Coast. Twilight takes over where Sun set, and sweeps the swelling Floods up to the brink of the 20th Century — leaving no doubt that at least one more huge tome is going to have to be purred over by Author Steen before the moonlight dissolves.

Twilight contains just about everything that an adolescent mind could want, in cluding characters such as Lady Orabella Sax, Arethusa Lever, Captain Elias Wild-blood and Alden Galahad Paget. What’s more, Author Steen lays bare the very sur face of their natures: “Superbly nude, [Dorset Flood] lounged elegantly on the window sill”; “Plump and glossy as a young calf, there was something in [Polly Bowling] that vibrated.”

A major portion of Author Steen’s book concerns Hero Johnny Flood’s tussles with witch doctors and rebellious Negroes on the Gold Coast—a he-man’s world which supplies the crunchier passages of Twilight’s prevailing nougat. It also provides Author Steen with one of her most stunning sentences: “On the poop of the Rembwe, Macpherson’s beard burnt like an oriflamme.”

Author Steen is more in her element when Johnny comes marching home to break his heart in late-Victorian England —a world of hansom cabs and monocled cads, where every girl is in danger of losing something called her “reputation” and every man’s favorite cuss word is a sibilant “Pish!” Still Author Steen does not fuss too much about period accuracy: her male characters speak fluent, up-to-date

U.S. slang, and there is an Omo chief in the book who suffers from “a slight guilt complex.” But, by and large, this is hot, strong stuff, and not since Elinor Glyn and Ethel M. Dell has a writer put in her thumb and pulled out the sort of plum this pie is full of (e.g., “He had cut her open with a sword, but she was too proud to let him see the bleeding”).