24 SEPTEMBER 1932, Page 6

The supposed abduction of Raymond Robins-is in one respect - almost

without parallel. Three weeks ago Colonel Robins, in the course of a journey from Maine to Washington, where he was to lunch with . President Hoover, stops a night at the City Club in New York (many readers of this column- must have enjoyed its hospitality), and after leaving-the club is never heard of again. Yet the papers, after headlining the affair for a day or two, relapse into complete silence. . But Col. Robins is still missing. His sister, Miss Elizabeth Robins, most famous of Ibsen actresses, whose triumphs on the London stage have been recalled by the volume of Henry James's letters she has just edited, is waiting in her Kensington flat without a word of news. There is, as she points out,. not even any actual evidence that her brother has been kidnapped at all, though in view of the enemies his almost passionate social crusading, particularly in the interests of Prohibition, has made him, and the sheaves of threatening letters he is known to have received, no other explanation seems worth considering. As for. Robins himself, whom I have known ever since his return from Russia twelve years ago (a visit to Russia was an adventure in those days), while under perpetual threats from the gangsters of Florida he has been writing to his friends letters marked by a complete and serene indiffer, ence to all menace.