n Reuben's desire; Boarzell shall be his. He buys some acres and his
struggle is frightful; you see his muscles bulging in his blue shirt,
you smell his sweat, you hear the ploughshare gripped with the stones,
teeth biting teeth. For Boarzell Common is old, crafty, and savage, and
would foil man. Reuben is not foiled; he can bear all things, so can
dare all things. He buys more land; there shall be on his farm no
pleasure so that he may have money to crush Boarzell. His brother,
Harry, is struck while Reuben blows up the enemy trees, and haunts his
life, a horrible, idiot figure; his wife, Naomi, ground down by forced
child-bearing (for Boarzell needs men and Reuben sons) dies. His six
sons, devoid of the money Boarzell takes, leave him; one becomes a
thief, another a sailor, another a sot in London, another a success; all
leave him, even his daughters; one to marry a hated rival farmer, one to
love because Reuben forbade love, and to end on the streets. He loses
all, he loses his pretty second wife, he loses Alice Jury whom alone he
loved, he loses the sons that Rose gave him. He gives all to Boarzell,
to fighting it for seventy years, sometimes victor, sometimes crushed,
for Boarzell is evil and fierce:

'It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power
and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a
love forsaken. There it lay: Boarzell--strong, beautiful, desired,
untamed, still his hope, still his battle.'

There are faults, here and there, degraded cliches; Sheila Kaye-Smith
loves the stars too well, and often indulges in horrid astronomic
orgies; there is not enough actual combat with the earth; the author
intervenes, points to the combat instead of leaving at grips the two
beasts, Reuben and Boarzell. She has not quite touched the epic, yet
makes us want to resemble the hero, fierce, cruel, but great when old
and alone, still indomitable. And one wonders what she will do, what she
will be. There are lines in her poems, _Willow's Forge_, that prophesy;
the moment may be enough:--

'When the last constellations faint and fall,
When the last planets burst in fiery foam,
When all the winds have sunk asleep, when all
The worn way-weary comets have come home--
When past and present and the future flee,
My moment lives!'

She may strive no more, as she proposes to the seeker in _The Counsel of
Gilgamesh_:--

'Why wander round Gilgamesh?
Why