OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The Golden Barrier (Methuen) was an affair of sovereigns, and the way of it was this. Magdalen Tempest, the heroine, had been left by her late father the mistress of many fine houses, and stacks and stacks of money. She had inherited also a disagreeable but honest butler, an aunt who was even more disagreeable but not honest, and an agent who was—well, who was the hero of the book. She had further gathered to herself a crowd of hangers-on more or less artistic, and all given to requiring small temporary loans. One of them, however, was a professed social reformer, a bold bad man of doubtful extraction, who was leagued with the aunt in a plan to marry Magdalen to himself and secure control of the cash. So Magdalen gave a Venetian Carnival in her great house, and it came on to thunder, and she found herself alone in a gondola with the painter (favourite hanger-on), who attempted, too vigorously, to improve the shining hour, and it was all rather awkward, when—romantically opportune arrival of the hero (name of Denvers), who flung the painter into the lake, clasped the heroine in his manly arms, married her and lived happy——No. That is where you are too hasty. There remained still the Golden Barrier. For, after an interlude of bliss, back came the intriguing aunt, the social reformer and all the crowd (save the submerged artist) and began to accuse Denvers of living on his wife's cheque-book. How it ends you must find out. If you object that there is very little in all this to suggest the spirit of fine romance which you have learnt to associate with the names of Agnes and Egerton Castle, I can only say that (while my rough synopsis does no justice to some pleasant characterization) I myself greatly prefer these two writers in their earlier and brocaded mood.
It seems to me that Mr. Francis Brett-Young has done quite a distinguished piece of work in Deep Sea (Secker). I have not cared to miss a paragraph of it and have certainly carried away an unusually vivid memory of that unnamed West-country fishing-town which he has so cleverly peopled with his creatures—with poor, simple, introspective Jeffrey Kenar, fisherman that was, looking at life through the oddly refracting medium of his window of old glass, and all but seeing visions; comely, bitter Nesta, his wife; simple, loyal Reuben, Jeffrey's friend, whose rejection of Nesta Kenar's overmastering passion turns her love to hate; Reuben's gentle wife, Ruth; and that sleek mortgagee, Silley, for whom men like Reuben toil that he may grow fat, nominally owning their vessels, actually in heavy bondage to their shrewd exacting masters. There are dark and deep waters of passion swirling in and out of these simple lives, and the author, whose method is broadly impressionist rather than meticulously realistic, contrives cleverly to suggest that what he imagines has in fact been closely observed. He can make and tell a story and he can marshal words with a certain magic. The tragedy ends peacefully with the resolution of the too bitter discord of Nesta's hate in love of the child of the man she had wrongfully and vainly desired. A book to be read.
Amongst the makers of what might be called, without in this case any disparagement, the commercial short story, I think I should place Mr. P. G. Wodehouse as easily my favourite. The comfortable anticipation that is always mine on observing his name on the contents page of a popular magazine has been renewed by the sight of it attached to a collection of tales in volume form and called, after the first of them, The Man Upstairs (Methuen). You must not expect a detailed criticism. All I can promise you is that, if you are a Wodehouseite, you will find here the author at his delightful best. He is winged and doth range. The heroes of these tales include (I quote from the cover) "a barber, a gardener, a play-writer, a tramp, a waiter, a golfer, a stockbroker, a butler, a bank clerk, an assistant master at a private school, a Peer's son and a Knight of the Round Table." So there you are; and, if you don't see what you want in the window, you must be hard to please. Personally, I fancy I would give my vote for the play-writing stories. "Experientia," as Mrs. Micawber's late father used to observe, "does it"; and here I have the feeling that the author is upon tried ground. But not one of the collection will bore you; there is about them all too nice a deftness, too happy a gift of phrase. I am told by the publishers that the American public fully shares my approval of this engaging craftsman. It shows their sense. But, if there is any threat of removing Mr. Wodehouse permanently to the other side of the Atlantic, where already he goes far too much, my guinea shall head any public subscription to retain him.
Punctilious Burglar. "Sorry to disturb you, Guv'nor, but would you mind letting me have the thrippence for your share of the insurance stamp? This is the first job I've had this week."
In an extremely able but peculiarly unpleasant book, The Questing Beast (Secker), I think that Miss Ivy Low makes two serious mistakes. "Tell her," writes the heroine to a friend after the first of two irregular love affairs, "that I thought, 'I am not that kind of girl,' and tell her that there is no 'sort of girl,' and that life is a sea and human beings must catch hold of life-buoys to keep them afloat." To this it may be answered, however, that there is "that kind of girl," and that Rachel Cohen was "that kind of girl," and that it is a kind which deliberately rejects life-buoys when flung out to them. The second mistake, as it seems to me, in a novel which is in many ways a very clever piece of realism, is a strong feminist or, at any rate, anti-masculine bias. Against the cunning dissection of the character of Charles Giddey, a worthless and conceited egotist, I have no complaint to make. It is one of the best things of its kind that I have read for a long time. But it seems unlikely, to say the least, that the heroine, after being deserted by the man she really loves, should, considering her very erotic and unprincipled temperament, find complete happiness in the publication of a successful novel and in devotion to her child. I feel that on a nature like that of Rachel Cohen even Royalties and Press notices would eventually pall. And in pausing I may remark that the beast Glatisant cuts a very episodic and unsatisfactory figure in the Morte D'Arthur. Pursued for a short while by Sir Palamides in his Paynim days, it scarcely comes into the cognisance of King Arthur's Court and the Table Round. And I fancy that the circulating libraries will feel the same about "The Questing Beast."
I do not think that I can recall any novel that makes such insistent demands upon the weather as does Miss Joan Sutherland's Cophetua's Son (Mills and Boon). The sun, the rain, the wind, the snow—these are from the first page to the last at their intensest, wildest, brightest, most furious, and as I closed the book and looked out upon a day of monotonous drizzle I thanked Heaven for the English climate. But I imagine that Miss Sutherland was aware that nothing but the most vigorous of climatic conditions would afford a true background for her hero's tempestuous soul. Lucien de Guise was unfortunate enough to be the son of a flower-girl, and I had no idea, until Miss Sutherland made it plain to me, how terrible his friends and the members of the smartest of London's clubs—"Will's, a place of great historic interest and brilliant reputation, developing gradually into one of the most exclusive clubs in London, and very strictly limited in numbers"—held so ignominious an origin. There is a scene in Will's where Colonel Maclean, "a handsome man and a famous soldier," expels M. de Guise "with a perceptible degree of asperity" in his voice—a scene that does the greatest credit to Miss Sutherland's imagination. Indeed, I am afraid that Miss Sutherland's ambition to write a really dramatic story has driven her into incredibilities of atmosphere, of incident, and of character. M. de Guise, with his flashing, gleaming eyes, his love of liqueurs, his passion for smashing the most priceless of Nankin vases whenever he sees them, is, surveyed under these grey English skies, an unreal figure, and his world, I am afraid, too brightly coloured to be convincing.
"Ruler wanted for Ireland (N.S.); good wages, permanency to competent, reliable man.—Full particulars to Box 167, Daily News, Manchester."—Daily News.
Don't reply to it, Mr. Redmond. It is not in your line. It is a printer's advertisement, merely.
"The accident caused great excitement in the neighbourhood. A large crowd quickly gathered, and several medical men were hurried to the sport."—Manchester Guardian.
Those well-known surgeons, Mr. Robert Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen, enjoyed it most.
"A new French revue, entitled 'C'est Bon' (literally, 'It's Top-hole') is to be produced on Monday week."—Evening News.
Or, more roughly, "That's good."
In a catalogue of characters assumed at a Mayoral Fancy Dress Ball we are informed by The Birmingham Daily Mail that Professor and Mrs. Sonnenschein figured as "Socrates and Christian Thippe." Poor old pagan Xanthippe! Socrates is well avenged.