The New York herald., 1922-10-01
N EW' FICTION
-IN-
VARIED FORMS
THE JUST STEWARD. BY Richard Dehan.
George H. Doran Company.

Thieves" will deny that Richard
Dehan is writer of uncommon power,
who can describe the grewsome actualities
of war with trenchant verify that
jUstifies her choice of masculine pseudo
nym. She sees life on a scale of epic
magnitude. Had she been a painter, she
would have given us huge, grim canvases
of the Verestschagen school, carnivals of
human butchery, Gnfathomed viSas of the
dead and dying. At her best she gives us
pages that stand out in high relief, haunt
ing in their tragic tensty. Her one great
weakness is that she does not know her
own limitations; her vision is always
broader than her power to achieve.
One feels this defect especially in THE
Just Steward" Taken in it's entirety it
is so big, so many angled, so full of dim,
remote vistas stretching backward through
the vanished centuries that one finds it
a story almost impossible to visualize as
symmetrical whole, and even more diff
cult to sum up with the brevity of single
purpose, as stories of epic scope should
be summed up. In it's narrowest sense
this is a story of the world war, and more
specifically with the fighting in Asia Minor,
and the atrocities of the prison camp at
Schechom, near Smyrna. The central
story involves two men and a woman.
Colonel Edward Yaill had long been en-
gagged to Katharine Forbis; but he was
gassed and shell shocked somewhere north
of Loos," and with all the memory of the
past wiped from his mind, he was cajoled
into marriage by scheming, f1ighty, doll
faced nurse-and when we first meet him
he is on the way home to break the news
of his folly to "the finest woman God ever
made" The other man, John Hazel, is
a Jew who, curiously enough, has grown
up in the business swirl Of London with
out ever even guessing his Hebrew an
cestry until, on the eve of his enlistment,
his mother tells him that his father was a
Syrian Jew and her own father was one
Simonoff, from Moscow. Presently. as the
war rolls on, word comes that one by one
the Syrian brethren of Johns father have
been blotted out; that he is heir under his
grandfather's will to vast possessions in
Asia Minor contingent only upon his open
ly accepting the Jewish faith. Moreover,
there is a curious stewardship passed down
from generation to generation, by which
his family has been pledged to guard GER
tain lands and vineyards in Palestine In
trust for certain Scotch family of which
Katharine Forbis is now the direct de-
scencant and heir. John Hazel and Colonel
Yaill arrive simultaneously at Katharine's
home. the one to make accounting of his
stewardship, the other to confess his
fol 1fu nd iDfi n
heartbreak. upon the girl whose father
lies dead, awaiting burial on the morrow.
T. add to her desolation her brother Ju-
liam, Catholic priest serving with troops
In the East. is either dead or a prisoner
of the Turks.
John Hazel, having once looked upon
Katharine. does not tell himself that he
loves her. There are CULTS between them,
of race, of religion, of social caste, that
make such hopes unthinkable. But he
does know that then and there he dedi-
Gates himself to her service for life. Since
there is nothing either of these men can
do for Katharine personally, they each de-
eide independently to make their way to
the East. seek for the missing brother, and,
if he is living, effect his rescue.
The two independent quests of these men,
each in native disguise after his own
choosing, read like chapters from the Ara
bian Nights There are some scenes of
an almost uncanny realism. where you feel
that the very soul of the Orient has been
olucked out and laid bare before you. And
then again the effect is that of seeing
through a glass darkly; of watching dim
dissolving views in which you can only
vaguely guess the full hideousness that is