The Disturbing Charm

Betra Ruck

Description

The Disturbing Charm (1919) is a romance novel by Berta Ruck. After a decade of publishing stories in literary magazines, Ruck began releasing romance novels to popular acclaim. The Disturbing Charm is a satirical tale of love, fantasy, and modern life that continues to entertain over a century after it was written. “Half the trouble in that world arises from the fact that human beings are continually falling in Love ... with the wrong people.” While cleaning her uncle’s office, Olwen Howel-Jones, a young Welsh beauty, discovers this message written on a mysterious note. Investigating further, she finds instructions for the use of a powerful charm, which must remain hidden in order to work. When used, it renders the wearer irresistibly attractive, allowing them to bend the will of whomever they wish to romance. Unable to resist such a promise, Olwen secretly removes the charm from her uncle’s desk. As she goes about her daily life, she soon discovers that although the charm truly works, to be the constant object of anyone and everyone’s affections is a tiresome way to live. The Disturbing Charm is a comedy of social life and romance from one of the twentieth century’s most prolific authors. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Berta Ruck’s The Disturbing Charm is a classic of British romance literature reimagined for modern readers.

Sujets

• Romance historique
• London
• Fiction
• Romance
• Historical
• 20th Century

Informations

• Publié par: Mint Editions
• Date de parution: 21 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781513287881
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Disturbing Charm
Berta Ruck
 
The Disturbing Charm was first published in 1919.
This edition published by Mint Editions 2021.
ISBN 9781513282862 | E-ISBN 9781513287881
Published by Mint Editions®
minteditionbooks.com
Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens
Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger
Project Manager: Micaela Clark
Typesetting: Westchester Publishing Services
 
C ONTENTS P ART I I . T HE C OMING OF THE C HARM II . T HE A CCEPTING OF THE C HARM III . T HE L AUNCHING OF THE C HARM IV . T HE C HARM BEGINS TO W ORK V . F URTHER P LANS FOR THE C HARM VI . T HE C LUTCHING OF THE C HARM VII . T HE S PREADING OF THE C HARM VIII . T HE F IRST E NGAGEMENT BY THE C HARM IX . U NFORESEEN E FFECT OF THE C HARM X . D IVAGATIONS OF THE C HARM XI . T HE F EASTING OF THE C HARM XII . M OONLIGHT AND THE C HARM XIII . W ILD- F IRE AND THE C HARM XIV . C LOUDS U PON THE C HARM XV . T HE L OSING OF THE C HARM XVI . T HE C OUNTER- C HARM XVII . D ROP- S CENE P ART II I . T HE C HARM N EGLECTED II . T HE L AST A LLIES III . R ECOVERY OF THE C HARM IV . T HE V OICE OF THE C HARMER V . T HE B EST G IRL- F RIEND VI . T HE C HARM R EMEMBERED VII . P ETROL AND THE C HARM VIII . R ATIONS AND THE C HARM IX . C HAMPAGNE AND THE C HARM X . H ER B RIDAL N IGHT XI . H IS B RIDAL N IGHT XII . S HRAPNEL AND THE C HARM XIII . V IGIL XIV . H OME AND THE C HARM XV . T HE C HARM A CKNOWLEDGED P OSTSCRIPT. T HE C HARM C ONFESSED
 
PART I
 
I
T HE C OMING OF THE C HARM
“Yet I am bewitched with the rogue’s company; if the rascal had not given me medicines to make me love him, I’ll be hanged; it could not be else; I have drunk medicines.”
—Shakespeare
The letter said:
“ … And this discovery, sent herewith, will mark an Epoch in the affairs of the world!
“ Half the trouble in that world arises from the fact that human beings are continually falling in Love … with the wrong people. Sir, have you ever wondered why this should be? ”
The old Professor of Botany stood looking at this mysterious typewritten letter, addressed to him, with the rest of his large mail, at the hotel in Western France where he was staying in the fourth autumn of the War with his young niece and secretary. He smiled as he came to the last words. “Had he ever wondered!” How many nights of his youth had been wasted in stormily “wondering—?” Strangers who write to celebrities do stumble on intimate matters sometimes.
He read on:
“ Why should one girl set her affections upon the man who of all others will make her the worst possible husband? All her friends foresee, and warn her. She herself realizes it vaguely. But to her own destruction she loves him. What has caused this catastrophe? Some small and secret Force; one microbe can achieve a pestilence. ”
“Yes, indeed,” murmured Professor Howel-Jones, nodding his massive old white head. He had been on the point of tossing the letter into the waste-paper basket, but something made him read on.
“ Another young man, why must he desire the one pretty woman who can never give him happiness? She is ‘pure as ice, chaste as snow’… dull as ditch-water; he, full of fire and dreams. He swears he’ll teach her to respond to Passion; marries her. Another tragedy! ”
How like himself again, the Professor mused, going back to the days when he had worn his Rugby International cap with more pride than he now wore his foreign degrees. That memory set him staring out of the big balconied window of his room, over the wide French lagoon, past the barrier of sandhills with their pointing phare, to where, miles away, the irregular white line of the Atlantic rollers crashed and spouted on the reefs. They had been crashing out those thunderous questions to the sands on his football days, they would be tossing their appeals to the sky long after his learning and his Nobel Prize were forgotten. Why, then, should an anonymous correspondent remind him of old unrest?
For all that, he went on reading:
“ Each of us knows a list of these stories. How avert them? By seeking out and planting only in the right soil the root of good or evil, the Love-germ. All through the ages Man has recognized its existence; the ancients with their philtres and amulets. Shakespeare embodies it in an herb. We moderns accept it as an enigma; have you never heard it said of a woman , ‘She is not actually pretty, but she has the Disturbing Charm, whatever it is’?”
“The Disturbing Charm!”… Ah, he knew it! She had possessed it, the girl he had never married, the girl who had passed him over for his brother the sea-captain, and who had become the mother of Olwen, his niece. Olwen would be coming in a few minutes to straighten and sort all those drifts of paper on the roomy work-table which no hand but hers, in the whole of the hotel, was allowed to touch. He thought, half-amusedly: “Better not let that little Olwen get hold of this letter.”
The letter ended:
“ Sir, you shall not be worried with technicalities. Believe only this, that the life study of the writer of this letter has at last been crowned with success. In the small packet enclosed there is sealed up the result of years of Research, with directions for its use. The inventor lacks courage for experimenting. But you, learned Sir, you, the gifted author of ‘The Loves of the Ferns,’ will not shrink from responsibility in the cause of Science.
“ Should you wish to procure more of the invention, there is enclosed the address of a box at a newspaper office where you may apply.
“ With all good wishes from
Your obedient servant ,
The Inventor
A deep genial laugh broke from the old man’s wide chest.
He threw the letter and its enclosure on to the table, on the top of his notes for the chapter on “Edible Fungi.”
“Mad—sentimental mad!” he commented. “Most lunatics think themselves inventors, that’s why most inventors are considered lunatics.” He drew up a chair and began making hay of the papers before him, in search of the other file of notes.
The large room which the Professor had had cleared of the bed and most of the other furniture was full of air and sunshine and of that polished cleanliness which few English rooms achieve. White walls and parquet floor shone like mirrors, mirrors like diamonds; the glass of the open windows was clear as the morning air that lay between the hotel and the pine-forest on the one side, the lagoon on the other. The resinous sigh of the pines mingled with the warm, lung-lifting breath of the sea. It was a glorious morning—too glorious for work indoors…
Professor Howel-Jones looked hard at his notes, but for once he scarcely saw them. He knew that the letter he had just read was the work of a sentimental lunatic, but for all that it had set a string vibrating. As the old man sat there, his brown eyes abstracted under the thatch of hair as white as seeding clematis, he looked like some clean-shaven modern Druid seeing visions. He did, at that moment, see a vision.
H E SAW AN ENDLESS PROCESSION of those people who have loved or married (or both) the wrong person.
He saw the lads who have chosen out of their class; barmaids, “bits of fluff.”
He saw the girls who have married out of their generation.
He saw the flirts, who wear an attachment as they wear a hat, tied for life to the affection that is true as steel. (Dreadful for both of them!)
Also the young men who treat Love as a cross between a meal and a music-hall joke, plighted to the shy idealists.
He saw the Bohemian married to the curate.
Likewise the attractive young rake, fettered to the frump.
He saw the women born for motherhood, left lonely spinsters for want of charm to attract.
He saw the mothers who sighed for freedom, resenting the nursery.
He saw the Anything, wedded to the Anything But .
Yes; he saw for that moment nothing but the wholesale gigantic Blunder of the mis-mating of the world.
N O DOUBT IT WAS ALL crystallized for him in one tender image; Olwen’s dead mother, the girl he should have married. He sighed and smiled.
“Pity there’s no putting things right, as that lunatic suggests,” he thought. “There would be an invention worth boasting about! Wireless wouldn’t be in it, or X-rays. Pity it isn’t all true…”
A tap at the door interrupted his musings. The softest of girl’s voices asked, “Are you ready for me, Uncle?”
“Yes!” he called out, jerking himself back into the world of realities. “Come in, Olwen.”
Olwen Howel-Jones came in.
A small, but daintily made girl of nineteen. Just a handful of softness in a skimpy one-piece frock. A pale, three-cornered morsel of a face set off by sleek hair as black as her little French boots. Large eyes that seemed sometimes brown, sometimes grey; a mouth tremulous, but vivid as a red carnation—such was Olwen. She brought a ripple of Youth into that bare temple of Science that was her uncle’s study. Something else she brought—a breath of tension, of impatience. A man would have passed it over; not so a woman. Already one woman in the hotel had said to herself, “I wonder who it is that child’s so desperately in love with?”
Had she been in the room at the moment, that woman might have seen the answer to her question flame suddenly into the young girl’s face as she stepped up to the table by the window. Under the balcony there was a sound of footsteps. Olwen pushed aside a great jar full of arbutus that stood at the further edge of the table.
“That’s in your light, Uncle,” she said.
The Professor’s back was to her as the figures passed quickly out from below the balcony. He caught a glimpse of the two wounded British officers swinging off towards the plage . He caught the gleam of scarlet on khaki; heard a snatch of the rather husky boyish laughter of one of them; a scrap talk of the other. In a resonant voice with that particularly dominant form of accent, Scots with a dash of Canadian, there floated up through the clear morning air this somewhat arrested announcement:
“I’m the finest judge of women in Europe.”
This t