If we are to have a sensational yarn, it may as well be in the grand manner. Having invented for popular entertainment The Great Prince Shan" (Hodder and Stoughton, "7s. 6d. net), Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim does well to make him large and tall. It is a dozen years hence, 1934 to be precise, that this potentate, virtual Emperor of Asia, lands from his airship, the "Black Dragon," in England, the fate of which he holds in the hollow of his fountain-pen. Should he sign the agreement prepared for - him by Oscar Immelan, then it is all up with the British Empire. The stealthily nurtured forces of Germany and Russia, backed by those of a resuscitated China, will be let loose. Three cities, one in each of these countries, have secretly manufactured the parts of armoured airships, which on land can fight as invulnerable fortresses; these parts, now assembled in the city in the East, will be launched at the Oriental's signal against an Empire that could not stand against them for a week. ortunately—though we must leave Mr. Oppenheim to tell how and why—Prince Shan stays his hand. We will only lift the curtain so far as to say that when the "Black Dragon," its speed incredible, its the hours of two or three days only, of what happens inside the consciousnesses of two women—Mrs. Jessen, plain, no longer young, indeed more than middle-aged; and Dido, a woman of seven or eight and twenty, but, in her experience, younger than her years; having known no more passionate experience than her very lovely attachment to her friend Hilda, who is with her throughout the story. Through them, Marie Jessen is shown, and Marie Jessen is a remarkable study, which has both distinctness and distinction.
The best thing in the whole book is the way in which, gradually, the reader finds himself reacting to a sort of unwilling sympathy with Marie, with her cruel rebuffs to her mother's awful unselfishness, awful desire to be "near" her. The only thing Marie wants of her mother is to be left alone by her. That really, is the theme of the whole; embroidered and revealed through the young man whom Marie brings down to sea and become engaged to her, and who, in horror of some aspects of the life and point of view of Mavrie's friends, as well as in the simple attracttion of youth for youth, turns from Marie to Dido; as through the rather horrible older man whom Marie to her mother's dismay, ultimately accepts.
The men are very slightly given there is, in addition to the main characters, a collection of rather appalling women, one of them definitely "queer" who fill the background, and give it an unnecessary confusion and a rather too thickened horror. But the main outline is clear enough, and it is good. There are times when Miss Beaumont strikes one as being rather overweighted. by her method; but on the whole, "Secreé Drama" is an interesting and promising work.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.