First Mother

Into the inky waters at Cape Gris-Nez plunged a daughter of the Vikings, a man from Egypt, an Englishman. It was 11:32 p. m. Three hours later the Egyptian collapsed. The next afternoon the Englishman gave up one mile from the Shakespeare Cliffs at Dover. At 3:10 p. m. the daughter of the Vikings stumbled on the sands of Dover beach, collapsed. She was the first mother to swim the English Channel. Her time was an hour slower than Gertrude Ederle's. Mrs. Corson (nee Amelia Gade) revived, told the crowd around her: "I was determined to make it or go down. I have to make some money for my kids.

But I would not do it again for a million dollars."

This 'was the chunky little girl, born 27 years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark, whose father wanted her to be a great musician or a prima donna. Vocal lessons bored Amelia. At six she took to the water; at

16 she was a professional swim ming instructor. She saved lives, was decorated three times by King Christian of Denmark. In 1919 she came to the U. S., saved another life, was awarded a Carnegie medal for heroism. Once she swam around the island of Manhattan (42 miles) in 15 hours, 57 seconds. In the same year, she trudgeon-crawled from Albany to New York (153 miles) in 66 swimming hours, stopping, of course, for sleep at night. On this excursion Clemington Corson, assistant superintendent of the U. S. S. Illinois, handled the oars of her rowboat. Later they were married, and now have two children. Last week it was Clemington Corson who rowed a dory across the English Channel in the van of his wife, who chatted with her in grey hours of the early morn ing, who fed her two pints of hot chocolate, four lumps of sugar, six crackers. He heard cheerleader Louis Timson's booming bass notes canter over the waves: "Oh, Millie! Oh, Millie! How you can swim!" He saw his wife almost go under in the backwash of the Amsterdam steamer Ulysses; he saw a gleam ing porpoise turn over, 20 yards from the mother of his two chil dren. But on the sands of Dover he kissed her, revived her, said: "She's the finest girl in the world, and the best swimmer in the world." Meanwhile, one C. Walter Lissberger, a Manhattan tire merchant, who financed Mrs. Corson, collected $100,000 from Lloyd's, London, on comb, the grandfather, a splendid man, a dead lover.

Rearing the healthy little animal is comparatively easy. Destroying Lottie, the handsome, ignorant grown animal, is difficult indeed. The ruse of giving Lottie rein in a cheap flirtation fails through Ralph's weak forgiveness. Mrs. Bascomb lives away for some years, torn free. When she returns things are worse than before. Small Dids is "on the town," getting tough while Lottie joyrides; Ralph is still grubbing.

Lottie's vanity in wearing tight shoes, and the presence in town of a "Westopractor," suave quack, supply Mrs. Bascomb with tools for a Lady Macbethian coup. She engineers the perfectly healthy, stupid girl into bed with "spine trouble." Hypochondria sets in. Lottie is bedridden.

Under her grandmother's guidance, Dids grows into the best all-around youngster at the high school. Ralph bucks up, with peace at home and a renewed interest in athletics. In a fierce whisper one night, Mrs. Bascomb tells him to cut and run; she will cover his tracks and he shall have his life.

But he has waked up as well as bucked up. He stays to take his medicine. And when Dids goes off to college, Mrs. Bascomb finally focuses on the now pitiful, bedridden Lottie as a new object for the domineering energy and mother-love that was as much the cause as it is the cure of so much sorrow. The Significance. Dorothy Canfield has here achieved a magnificent demonstration of the literary maxim: "An author must be God to his characters." She has first caused, then seen, understood and clearly presented, everything these Bascombs think and feel and do and are. Good and bad characteristics, actions of strength and weakness, conflicting motives, are balanced upon each of them like saddlebags on pack-mules--firmly, evenly, impartially. And not even the less pleasant Mr. Dreiser has more faithfully or thoroughly described an everyday U. S. scene. It is powerful, compelling reading, a book for a high place in U. S. literature. It is particularly welcome in that Dorothy Canfield is not among those realists who feel obliged to abandon sound prose to get an "effect." The Author. In Europe they regard Dorothea Frances Canfield Fisher as a ranking U. S. writer, one broadened by a cosmopolitan life but never apologetic for her Kansas origin. When she was a high school girl in Lawrence, Kan., a dashing young Army officer taught her to ride horseback and do higher mathematics. This officer has since been known as Gen. John J. Pershing and while he was helping to conduct the War, Dorothy Canfield did "the steady, quiet work of holding life together" in relief stations behind the lines. She is a Ph. D., having studied at Ohio State University (during the presidency of her father, Dr. James Hulme Canfield) and at Columbia University. She married John Redwood Fisher, a Columbia football captain. With her artist mother, she has spent years abroad. In Rome she knew Mme. Montessori and wrote A Montessori Mother which was widely translated. Her two grown daughters--Mrs. Fisher is now 47--bear witness to an intelligent upbringing. Her study is on a Vermont farm. Other books that have come from it: The Squirrel Cage, The Bent Twig, Home Fires in France, The Brimming Cup, the U. S. translation of Papini's Life of Christ.