Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/330

Summer holidays and find that your brother has gambled away the ancestral home and drowned himself, leaving you penniless: but it is even worse when, having gone on the stage and got your chance as an understudy owing to the sudden illness of a principal, you bungle that chance and are then accused of having murdered the principal in question with arsenic. The only thing that kept Nora cheerful in the latter crisis was the fact that, flying to France on the morning after her dramatic failure and not having access to the London papers, she had no notion that she was a suspect. On the solid rock of this really novel idea, Mr. David Whitelaw has built up The Mystery of Enid Bellairs (Hodder and Stoughton), a melodrama which, if not full of thrills, is quite exciting enough to make a not too sophisticated reader finish it at a sitting. Stories of this kind are best expressed in terms of corpses. The Mystery of Enid Bellairs is a four-corpse melodrama, one drowning, two poisons, and a cliff-fall. The survivors of the massacre are the hero, the heroine, and the old lawyer. There is a novel feature in chapter one, where the hero strikes the villain on the chin instead of between the eyes; and later on in the book an invaluable hint for married men. If they have trouble in the home, all they have to do is to substitute arsenic for their helpmeet's morphia. If you doubt efficacy, try it first on yourself.

A Freelance in Kashmir (Smith, Elder) is an Indian historical romance of the later days of that time known as "the great Anarchy." Its author, Lieut.-Colonel G. F. MacMunn, D.S.O., has already shown, in The Armies of India, that if anyone knows the military history of the Eastern Empire he is that man. Of his qualities as a writer of romance I will not speak, lest I mislead you; for though the book is a good piece of work its interest is the jingle of spur and sabre, hard riding and fighting in battles long ago. The hero is one David Fraser, son of an Englishman and an Afghan woman, one of the gentlemen adventurers who controlled the armies of the Indian princes during the days before the coming of the Pax Britannica. This David had all kinds of adventures; at one time impersonating an absent ruler, after the right Zenda fashion; making love to, and naturally winning, a Princess; and generally thwarting the machinations of a dusky villain who, in the end, turns out to be none other than our old friend the Wandering Jew. A volume crowded, as you see, with incident. Some there will be in whom the atmosphere of it, the dust and heat and heroism, will awaken queer memories of the tales they read in childhood (With Clive in India was what I was recalling throughout). These will delight in it. Also of course Anglo-Indians, and all to whom the scenes of the book are already known. But, frankly, I would call it perhaps a little arid for the general; for those who require that Mars shall be properly subordinate to Venus in their romances. Still one never knows, in these days especially. I only throw out the hint as a warning to the light-minded.

I am a little perplexed as to the exact meaning of the title of Lady Charnwood's novel, The Full Price (Smith, Elder). Who paid the price, and for what? The theme of the story―a penniless girl taken up and educated by an elderly widower with a view to making her his second wife―is, if not strikingly new, at least handled in an original manner. And the central character, Lord Shelford, the widower, is as well observed as he is objectionable. A most unpleasant person in every way; so much so that it is a little hard to believe that even so persuasible a heroine as Margaret would have permitted herself to fall in with his views, especially with an obvious hero like Roger before her eyes as a contrast. Perhaps what snared Margaret's young imagination was the fact that Shelford was a Cabinet Minister and moved in every kind of exalted circle. If so, I can only hope that she was less disappointed than I was by the conversation that went on there. You see, the publishers had been at superfluous pains to tell me that the author's position made the political and social atmosphere of the book above suspicion. It says much for the interest of Lady Charnwood's tale that such a preliminary did not goad me into wholesale condemnation. As a matter of fact, while the atmosphere is entirely undistinguished, the character-drawing seems to me to be remarkably good. Eventually his lordship falls and breaks his neck; for which I could not but be sorry, since he was the most interesting person in the story. If he is a first creation the author of him will be well advised to go on and give us some more.

Very different inheritances fell to the heroine and hero of The Lady of the Reef (Hutchinson). To Bertha Crawford was bequeathed the solitary charge of a bibulous father, while Walter Massaroon found himself possessed of an estate in County Down, and journeyed from Paris, where he was a painter, to become a man of property in Ulster. Whether this sudden change of air and fortune affected Walter's head, or whether he was always as lacking in determination as he is here represented, is not mine to say, because I had no opportunity of making his acquaintance before the gods and a second cousin once removed had poured wealth into his lap. My feeling, however, is that he was born with at least one weak knee, and I feel aggrieved that he married Bertha, when the just reward for his mismanagement of his love-campaign should have been the heaviest of iron crosses. On the other hand, Bertha, in spite of Mr. Frankfort Moore's efforts to make her a super-angel, retains my most sympathetic admiration. Mr. Moore seems to find it as easy to write novels as I do to read them, but I am beginning to wonder whether this facility of his is not becoming dangerous. At any rate I think that he is showing symptoms of trying to promote rather cheap laughter, and it will be a thousand pities if so pleasant a writer allows his sense of humour fall from the high standard which hitherto it has so consistently maintained.

Member of Anarchist Society. "Gentlemen, I vish to resign!"

President. "Buy vy, brozzer? Vy vould you leave us?"

Member. "Ach! der iss no more glory in dis bomb business; eet iss becoming vulgar; everypody is doin' it!"