OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The latest of our novelists to succumb to the temptations of the school story is Mr. E. F. Benson; and I am pleased to add that in David Blaize (Hodder and Stoughton) he seems to have scored a notable success. It is the record of a not specially distinguished, but entirely charming, lad during his career at his private and public schools. Incidentally, as such records must, it becomes the history of certain other boys, two especially, and of David's relations with them. It is this that is the real motive of the book. The friendship between Maddox and David, its dangers and its rewards, seems to me to have been handled with the rarest delicacy and judgment. The hazards of the theme are obvious. There have been books in plenty before now that, essaying to navigate the uncharted seas of schoolboy friendship, have foundered beneath the waves of sloppiness that are so ready to engulph them. The more credit then to Mr. Benson for bringing his barque triumphantly to harbour. To drop metaphor, the captious or the forgetful may call the whole sentimental—as if one could write about boys and leave out what is the greatest common factor of the race. But the sentiment is never mawkish. There is indeed an atmosphere of clean, fresh-smelling youth about the book that is vastly refreshing. Friendship and games make up the matter of it; there is nothing that I could repeat by way of plot; but if you care for a close and sympathetic study of boyhood at its happiest here is the book for your money. Finally I may mention that, though in sympathetic studies of boyhood the pedagogue receives as a rule scant courtesy, Mr. Benson's masters are (with one unimportant exception) such delightful persons that I can only hope that they are actual and not imaginary portraits.
You will get quite a serviceable impression of what the highlands and highlanders of Serbia and Montenegro were like in war, behind the lines when the lines still held, from The Luck of Thirteen (Smith, Elder), by Jan Gordon (colourist) and Cora his wife, if you are not blinded by the perpetual flashes of brightness—such flashes as "somebody had gnawed a piece from one of the wheels" as an explanation of jolting; "the twistiest stream, which seemed as though it had been designed by a lump of mercury on a wobbling plate;" the trees in the mist "seemed to stand about with their hands in their pockets, like vegetable Charlie——" But no! I am hanged if I will write the accurséd name. This plucky pair of souls had put in some stiff months of typhus-fighting with a medical mission in the early months of the war, and these are impressions of the holiday which they took thereafter among those fateful hills, with a little carrying of despatches, retrieving of stores and a good deal of parasite-hunting thrown in, until they were finally caught up in the tragic Serbian retreat; still remaining, of course, incurably "bright." I think I detect a certain amount of the too-British attitude that contemns what is strange and is more than a little scornful of poverty, official and private. And I suppose the artist's wife will scoff if I tell her that I was shocked that she should have taken some shots at the Austrians with a Montenegrin machine gun, as if war was just a cock-shy for tourists. But I was. If Mr. Jan Gordon found a good deal more colour in his subjects than we other fellows would have been able to see, that's what an artist's for.
SALVE.
Returning Soldier. "'Ullo, Mother!"
His Wife (with stoic self-control). "'Ullo, Fred. Better wipe yer boots before you come in—after them muddy trenches."
In Jitny and the Boys (Smith, Elder) there are those elements of patriotism, humour and pathos which I find so desirable in War-time books. Jitny was neither man nor woman, but a motor-car, and without disparaging those who drove her and rode in her I am bound to say that she was as much alive as any one of them. She certainly talked—or was responsible for—a lot of motor-shop, and I took it all in with the greatest ease and comfort. Jitny indeed is a great car, but she is not exactly the heroine of a novel. She is just the sit-point from which a very human family surveys the world at a time when that world is undergoing a vast upheaval. In the father of this family Mr. Bennet Copplestone has scored an unqualified success, but the boys are perhaps a little old for their years. This, however, is no great matter, for the essential fact is that the book is full of the thoughts which make us proud to-day and help us to face to-morrow. Yes, Jitny has my blessing.
Little Willie goes for more Loot.
"In the Woevre the Germans attempted on three occasions to capture from us an earthquake."—Glasgow Evening News.
A schoolgirl's translation:—"La marquise recommanda son âme à Dieu." "The Marquis wished his donkey good-bye."
"A number of officers in the province of Yunnan, China, hatched a plot to behead the Governor-General at Urumtsi, and proclaim the independence of the province of Sinkiang. The Governor, discovering the plot, invited ten of the conspirators to an official dinner, at which he beheaded them in turn."—Reuter.
"Another glass of wine, Mr. Wung Ti?" "No? Very well, then, if you would kindly stand up a moment and place your neck on the back of your chair—— Thank you. After the savoury I shall have the pleasure of calling upon the next on my list, Mr. Ah Sin," and so on. Quite a jolly dinner-party.