Word: waifness
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When he was himself a small, Ethiopian orphan, the future diplomat attached himself to a marauding band of British troops who in 1868 burst into his country under General Napier on what Queen Victoria called a "punitive expedition." The little waif had an appealing way with him. A Scottish officer took him along to India, gave him the name "Martin," had him educated as a physician in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Dr. Martin retired on a pension after 29 years of duty in the Indian Medical Corps. About this time Ethiopia's great Emperor Menelik heard of Dr. Martin, summoned...
...VOICE OF BUGLE ANN-MacKinlay Kantor-Coward-McCann ($1.25). MacKinlay Kantor has long revealed a preoccupation with native Midwestern themes and legends of the sort that characterize folk literature. The Jaybird, his novel of a wandering Civil War musician who befriended a Kansas waif, was a sentimental tale for which modern small towns provided an incongruous and unromantic background. Author Kantor now returns to the mood and manner of The Jaybird with a slight, short novel in which a Missouri legend of a wonderful foxhound serves as the frail basis for a story involving revenge, murder and a family feud...
...Cinemaddicts who, after Catherine the Great, still have any doubts about the capabilities of Elisabeth Bergner, should find them allayed by this picture. Purposely designed to exhibit her extraordinary versatility, it becomes a sort of steeplechase of the emotions in which, as Gemma, a strangely sophisticated yet completely unworldly waif married to a pompous, self-centred young musical genius, Actress Bergner is called upon to take more spiritual hurdles than occur in any normal lifetime. The hazards of Gemma's career are indicated in the first scene by the fantastic means she uses for walking in on a conventional...
Meantime the neighboring convent of Sant Lazare has taken in a beautiful young waif, Dolores. The saintly prioress soon finds she has got more than she bargained for. Dolores' passionate influence is like a spark among the dry tinder of the convent. The nuns work hard, rise early and sleep in their own coffins, but some of them are overyoung to be the brides of heaven. Among these, Dolores' influence seems sinister if not definitely devilish. The prioress thinks she can make her into a good nun. But then young Pedro comes prowling around the walls, sees Dolores...
Spitfire (RKO), completed before Katharine Hepburn left Hollywood for her Manhattan stage appearance in The Lake, is an unsatisfactory sequel to Little Women. It exhibits her as a West Virginia cabin waif named Trigger, part tomboy and part prophetess. She has a pack of Sunday School cards. Her implicit faith in their texts not only enables her, amid blubbering prayers, to heal her neighbors with hookworm, but also causes her beneficiaries to regard her as a witch. When not engaged in faith-healing, little Trigger throws stones at her acquaintances, abuses an idiot girl friend, steals a sick baby, falls...