Innocent & Imbecile

THE TRUE HEART--Sylvia Townsend Warner--Viking ($2.50).

The True Heart is delicate fantasy, a charming English idyl, exquisite prose. It is the story of Sukey Bond, orphan, bent on loving Eric, harmless imbecile lad. Eric had been farmed out at New Easter by-the-sea, where Sukey, in service, faithfully scrubbed, cooked, churned, darned, ironed. The darning basket she carried to a forsaken orchard--Eric's discovery beyond the marshes--and there she and Eric played together. Love was something utterly novel and dear to Sukey. At the orphanage she had been commended with prizes for conduct, for needlework and the like, but she had never been loved--except no doubt by God. Eric's love, a more certain thing, seemed worth keeping.

But one day Sukey had to stick Eric's pet cockerel for her master, and at the sight of the arched spurt of blood Eric fell stiff in a fit of madness. His reluctant parents were sent for and he was whisked away.

Before she found him again, Sukey had been befriended by a tramp, she had spent a (quite innocent) night in a bawdyhouse, had been to London to visit the queen. Victoria gave her a Bible, inscribed "For a loyal subject, Victoria, R.," and this treasure Sukey bartered for her love.

There is nothing fantastic about Sukey's love for her gentle idiot--she loved that young lady of quality, Tansy the heifer; she loved the ferrets, and Consort the bull. Her quiet control of Consort verges on the supernatural, as does her intimacy with trees, and rushes of the marsh. But Author Warner, authoress of famed Lolly Willowes, touches things so lightly that the symbolic remains quite as real as the steel-blue eyes in the tail of the bawdy-house peacock.