Octans and Orena

THE SUNKEN GARDEN--Nathalia Crane--Seltzer ($2). With a poet's precision it is told how, on Nov. 23, 1924, the 16-year-old Duchess of Kendal, later to be known as Orena, was cast upon an Afric isle when her yacht was riven with electric bolts from an oxeye tornado. There she found another "bantling of fate," whose Nordic features suggested that he was an atavism, or at least a primeval anachronism; in any case, a monad. Soon he was able to convince her, however, that he was descended from the Child Crusaders of the 13th century, of noble birth--in fact, a Duke of Lorraine. His ancestors, she recalled, had sailed out of Marseilles in gulafres and dromons. Orena thought of a thousand centuries budding and withering, and called him Octans. It was extraordinary that they should be sharing this "tazza" thus. "The absence of conventionality sent the blood to her cheeks." But "she was cognizant of the crises that impend in all human breasts" and considered that "innocent intimacy was preferable to unacknowledged proximity." She grew deeply attached to him; he of course worshiped her abjectly; they lived together through months of celestial bliss, gorging on succulent, ambrosial fruits, observing luxuriant inhabitants of the air where "giant ferns grew rank by fetid fens." Octans neatly despatched a ghost leopard that infested their paradise and all was serene until she asked him to pick a certain blue lotus. Then an "odious ophidian," a python regius of "lethal length," "leprous luster" and "fetid folds," embraced and kissed him so strenuously that he died, shattering her "cordon of dreams." She hated to leave when the battleship came to rescue her.

I have told Natalia that if she writes another novel before she is 18 years old, I don't know what I shall do." Thus the mother of Brooklyn's prodigious 12-year-old. whose poetic flights since the age of nine (The Janitor's Boy, Lava Lane)) have floored the pundits, made good Poet Erwin Markham grumble into his beard (TIME, Nov. 23, MISCELLANY) and won her an invitation to join the Society of Authors, Playwrights and Composers (Poet Thomas Hardy, President), the first invitation to any American since that other, rubicund Brooklynite, Walt Whitman.

Mrs. Crane is, of course, only joking. She will not "do" anything. Didn't she let Mr. Crane give Nathalia a typewriter for Christmas? Didn't she keep rushing to the encyclopedia at Nathalia's command to look up African flora and fauna for this prose opus? Mrs. Crane knows quite well she can "do" nothing about it if Nathalia breaks out again in the next six years. She is perfectly aware that in the girl flows blood, not only from John and Priscilla Alden, but from "the grand old Spanish family, Abarbanel, who counted among their number poets, musicians and a minister of state to Ferdinand and Isabella." Author Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage) was "a not distant relative." A grand-uncle edited the American Register (Paris) and knew Empress Eugenie. Genius, the Cranes must recognize, will out.*

* No relationship has been traced between Nathalia and Dr. Frank (Helpful Hints) Crane.