Evolution in Parvo

JEHOVAH'S DAY -- Mary Borden -- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50) A competent novelist, Mary Borden has set in frameworks of nice prose such swift tumultuous stories as Jane, Our Stranger and Flamingo. But none of her past work presaged the ambitious conception, the flights of rhetoric displayed in her present work, which is the story of Evolution reduced to the limits of the popular novel. Jehovah's "day," a million years in human reckoning, dawns with Eryops, fat and repulsive Mud Puppy who dragged himself from primordial slime; ends with Peregrine, fat and lovable scientist who rose to planes of pure intellect, and his wife Ann who reached for realms of pure spirit only to be dragged back to the slough of human passions. The human types chosen to epitomize extant evolutionary types are the horse-faced woman of London society; the young aviator who just misses loving his machine more than his woman; Martha, earthy female; Patrick, vivid sensualist in restless search of the meaning of life. By ordinary standards, their story is howling melodrama, but in a setting of cosmic proportions it fades to the decent outlines of engrossing human narrative. Lost in the eerie privacy of a London fog, Ann and Patrick recognize that their life-long friendship is love, the real thing. Lest they shatter the life of Ann's gentle husband, Peregrine, Patrick escapes to the Midlands there to conduct relief among striking miners--and seduce their handsomest daughter, Martha. In a feverish vision Ann realizes what has happened, pines for Patrick. The horse-faced woman snaps at the situation, meat for malicious machinations, invites Patrick and Ann arid Martha to her Mediterranean castle. For seven days the mistral blows them all madly sane. Martha pitches herself over a cliff into a raging forest-fire; Ann returns wanly to Peregrine.