Innocent at Sea

THE ANNOINTED--Clyde Brion Davis-- Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

The ancient, exciting Christian belief in God's solicitude for the individual soul was something Harry Patterson worked out for himself. It was a limited achievement because Harry never got much farther than the knowledge that God was looking out expressly for Harry Patterson. Of this, however, there was abundant proof. He was six feet tall and able to do a man's work when he ran away from his grandpa's farm at 14, his mother having married a mail clerk and gone to live in St. Louis. Thereafter seamen on the world's oceans knew him variously as Curly, Blondy, Highpockets, Spar, Slim and Horseshoes. He got the name Horseshoes from being a scientist with the dice, and he learned to be a scientist from his pal Limo, the Liverpool sailor who jumped ship with him the first time in Vera Cruz. "This Limo wasn't very tall, but he was quite active and strong and full of hell when ashore. One of his front teeth was gone and there was something like a little brad nail came down from the upper gum where the tooth ought to be. He'd had what they call a pivot tooth put in where his own tooth had been broken off with a bottle and then the pivot tooth had come off its anchor and he carried it around in his pocket."

In Vera Cruz Harry and Limo hid out with Limo's girl, Alicia, in her dirty cantina, but one day they got gav on tequila and were dumped in jail by the Spig soldiers. While Limo waited for the British Navy to come and chastise the Mexicans he taught Harry how to click dice in his palm without turning them over, how to roll them out just hard enough to turn over five times after hitting the blanket. "Being greedy," he advised, "has probably ruined more good scientists than anything else. And after all, what in hell difference does it make if it takes you a week or so to get the money instead of a day or two?"

At this point in Harry Patterson's tale of himself most readers will be settling down for a good time. The transparent simplicity of the Patterson narrative style rarely overreaches itself in such cuteness as "The wind . . . was still as still," generally flows with something like Huckleberry Finn's blank, wide-awake homeliness. Harry always noticed a lot of things that other people never thought about. It came to him that his experience in Vera Cruz was specially planned by God as part of his training. In lonely sea-watches he figured it out. God had given him his common sense and uncommon luck to enable him some day to sail out across the Black Ocean where no living man has been and bring back the truth. When he got stuck in the fo'c's'le hatch of a foundering old tub Harry knew his drowning was not in the cards. Sure enough, the boilers burst and blew him back to the surface. In an episode which comes near to being pure Mark Twain he almost got tied down to a pretty French girl, but he left her because if he stayed "it meant that God would have to start all over with some baby and train him up to manhood and see if he would have enough guts to carry the job through." But God's plan for Harry Patterson turned out to be more inscrutable than he had thought.

The Author. Like his aspiring hero Harry Patterson, Clyde Brion Davis "has all his life been trying to unscrew the in-scrutable." Described as having "a vaccination scar on the left arm, a hand grenade scar on the back of the neck, a horse kick on the right shin, a mole on the left cheek," 42-year-old Author Davis has been a steamfitter's helper, chimney sweep, furnace repair man, electrician, detective, a knockabout journalist from Buffalo to Seattle. His hobbies include "spinning members of the W. C. T. U. and D. A. R. in revolving doors," giving fellow newshawks such Indian-style nicknames as Captain-in-Case-of-War Perkins. He is "a Protestant in politics and a Democrat in religion," lives in Hamburg, N. Y., is descended from a onetime heavyweight champion of the Erie Canal.

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