Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/917

Rh bonds are loosed. Now comes the third book to present the cultured woman's side of the game. Deliverance will startle you by its beauty, set you to hard thinking by its depth, and hold your interest from first to last in a heroine who is easily recognized as Mr. Watson's ideal woman.

He has given Susan Zalesky the ancestry possible to her: her father is Russian and her mother English. Susan has, therefore, warmth, a sensitive, beauty-loving nature, a strong human instinct, and charm—so much for the Russian. She has also restraint, a deep-rooted feeling for nature, and a breadth of understanding that can meet a man on his own level without embarrassment and without becoming at all masculine thereby. Neither in Susan nor in any other woman in the three books is sex ignored. Rather it is included without shame in the new expression and vitality which Mr. Watson predicates.

Susan's testing in the fire of life begins early. Her irresponsible father, bored by his wife's illness, deserts his family in a dusty bungalow in India, and Susan, watching death come, is frightened. Then her mother tells her, "To fear Death unduly is always a sign that life has ceased to be beautiful. And life can be beautiful in spite of all adversity if you can remember your duty: your duty which is your love unto yourself."

There are more lessons to follow in the little English village to which her aunt takes the children. Susan loves the downs and the glimpse of the sea from them, the strength and beauty of the beeches, and all the peopled solitude of the forest. Then, for a time, when her childish fancies about nature fall away, the unsentient indifference of all that surrounds human life appals her. Love for the beauty and quiet of her hills comes back, but she asks nothing in return from them.

It is in this very respect that Grant Watson marks his stride ahead of the poetic animalists who came to the fore several years ago. W. H. Hudson could always handle a nature theme without losing his way, but in Algernon Blackwood's sinister tales, nature "took dislikes" as readily as any village gossip, forests were menacing and seas malevolent. This influence shows a little in Mr. Watson's short story Man and Brute which is included in Edward O'Brien's collection of the best short stories, but in his novels he has worked his way out of the nets which Blackwood is not strong