THE HAUNTED HOUSE. By Hilaire Belloc. With 25 drawings by
G. K. Chesterton. (Arrowsmith. 7s. 6d.)—. A wicked and not altogether well-bred aunt ; a disinherited nephew with a gift for ventriloquism ; an ancestral home basely put into the market ; a vulgar peer about to purchase it ; his still more vulgar wife ; a lovely but shrewd American heiress ; a bulldog ; a detective ; two other peers and a man with a camera ; these are the figures of Mr. Belloc's farce. Had the letterpress been as amiable as Mr. Chesterton's illustrations The Haunted House would have been a rollicking entertainment. But, alas ! Mr. Belloc is not good-humoured ; he writes with scorn. The new and the less-new rich, poli- ticians, the Press, peers, old women, short skirts, dons, psychologists, sham antiquities, faked pedigrees, usurers, Cockney voices and motor-cars, all are equally contemptible. As a result, when he finds a subject positively inviting the Bellocian thunderbolt—a peer supplying personal gossip to the Press—he has lost his power to stun and startle us. The only people who arouse his charity are his Americans (whom he allows even to drive in the right kind of motor-car, not too swift, too expensive or too big) and Corton, the butler, who gives the better wine to Lord Hambourne because he sees him to be a gentleman and poor. This is a change from the Rich Men's Servants of Mr. Belloc's earlier days. Corton is not without a flaw, however : he reads the Spectator.
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