Father-Love

THE WATERS UNDER THE EARTH--Martha Ostenso -- Dodd, Mead ($2.50).

Matt Welland had a wife and seven children. With the best will in the world he ruined the lives of all except the youngest. His instruments: hypocrisy, religion, love. But so cunningly does Martha Ostenso lay on her colors that in the completed portrait of this family there is not one figure you can hate wholeheartedly.

Matt was a printer by trade, a preacher by nature, a puritan by training. While he read the Bible, went to prayer meeting, wrote tracts, shut his eyes to facts, the family printing shop drifted toward the rocks. It was saved only by the dogged efforts of his eldest son Dave. Little Carlotta, the youngest, saw her father's hand laid restrainingly on one after another of her brothers and sisters who wanted to break away to a life of their own. First it was Paget, whose girl was not only penniless but not good enough. Matt considered, for a Welland. Then it was Tom, who twice got away but whose gutlessness drove him back finally to stay. Jenny ran off one rainy night to be married, but her conscience drew her home and into the wreck that left her a spiteful cripple. The ghost of Sophie's lover, forbidden her because he was an agnostic, haunted her at last into suicide. Ruth's disastrous first marriage was used as a club to break her spirit. Only Carlotta came through unhurt, unstunted by the blight of her father's love.

The story skirts the abysses of tragedy, but is never mired in gloom nor ditched in bathos, often runs pleasantly through patches of sunlit landscape.

The Author. Blonde, bobbed-haired, born in Bergen (Norway), Martha Ostenso arrived early in the U. S. She had been writing only two years when her Wild Geese won (1925) a $13,500 Dodd-Mead-Famous-Players-Pictorial Review Prize. She is 30, unmarried. Other books: The Dark Dawn, The Mad Carews, The Young May Moon.

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