OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Even those who have overloaded their shelves with books about the War must, I think, find a place for From Mons to Ypres with French, by Frederic Coleman (Sampson Low). It is a most remarkably vivid and varied record of the writer's experiences, set down in a very simple and direct style, without the least effort at flummery and high-falutin. I can speak for one reader at any rate on whom it made a very deep impression. Mr. Coleman is, by his own account, an American and an automobilist. Those who get his book will judge him, by the unadorned account of what he did, to be a man of great courage and modesty, with an imperturbable shrewdness and a humour proof against all dangers and disappointments. Driving, as he did, a motor-car for the British Headquarters, and in particular for General de Lisle, he saw as much fighting as any man need wish for and had magnificent opportunities of forming a judgment on the effects of German shell-fire. There is a pathetic photograph of his car hit by a shell outside Messines. I have spoken of the simplicity and directness of Mr. Coleman's style; he himself describes his book as a plain tale. It has, indeed, that kind of plainness which in dealing with enterprises of great pith and moment has a peculiar brilliancy of its own. The account, for instance, of the Cambrai—Le Cateau battle, with all its vicissitudes, is extraordinarily graphic and interesting, and the story of the charge of some fifty men of the 9th Lancers against more than twice their number of German Dragoons of the Guard stirs the blood as with the sound of a trumpet. Delightful too is the narrative of how Major Bridges found two hundred completely exhausted stragglers seated despairingly upon the pavement of the square at St. Quentin, and how by means of a penny whistle and a toy drum he got them to move and brought them eventually to Roye and safety. Altogether a capital book.
A Great Success (Smith, Elder) is about a new-risen literary star, Arthur Meadows, his loving, unbrilliant wife, and a coruscating society lion-huntress, Lady Dunstable. Having heard this much, you will hardly need to be told that Lady D. takes up the author violently, that he is dazzled by the glitter of her conversational snares, and that the story resolves itself into a duel between her ladyship and (I quote the publishers) "the wife whom she despises and tries to set down." Nor are you likely to be in any uncertainty about the final victory. This is brought about, with the assistance of the long arm of coincidence, by Doris, the neglected wife, finding herself in a position to prevent her rival's unsatisfactory son from contracting matrimony with a very undesirable alien. Doris indeed, and another female victim of Lady Dunstable (also deposited on the scene by the same obliging arm), get busy unearthing so various a past for the undesirable one that she retires baffled, epigrammatic brilliance bites the dust, and domesticity is left triumphant. It is a jolly little story, very short, refreshingly simple, and constructed throughout on the most approved library lines. If the writer's name were not Mrs. Humphry Ward, I should say that she ought to be encouraged to persevere, and even recommended to try her hand next time at something a little more substantial.
Let me recommend Mr. Rothay Reynolds' My Slav Friends (Mills and Boon) as a corrective to Mr. Stephen Graham's Holy Russia, which I prescribed some while ago with faint reservations. Both writers set out to interpret our mysterious ally to us. Mr. Graham always looks through a rosy-tinted monocle. Mr. Reynolds takes the road of balanced appreciations, candour and kindly humour—unquestionably more effective in the matter of making sincere proselytes. He has produced a fascinating book, discreetly discursive—a book that seems to let you into the real secrets of a people's soul. He believes in the sincerity of Russian promises to Poland, and claims that the Poles share his belief, but he does not pretend that this most unfortunate of nations has no grievances against its suzerain. I wonder whether our perverse Intelligences are capable of making the deduction that, if the progressives in Russia can forget their quarrel with reaction for sake of our great common cause, they themselves might mitigate some of the severity of their anti-tsarism. Mr. Reynolds has much that is to the point to say about the good old British legends of darkest Russia now chiefly kept going by third-rate novelists and unscrupulous journalists. He makes it clear that, though there is much to change, changes are coming as fast as they can be assimilated, indeed even a little faster. Finally I wish that those who control the destinies of our theatre might read what is written here of the traditions of the stage in a country where the drama is an art, not a mere speculation.
Despite its name there is a simple directness about the theme of Mr. Warwick Deeping's Unrest (Cassell) that I found refreshing. Martin Frensham was a dramatist, and the fortunate possessor of an adoring wife, a charming home and a successful reputation. So quite naturally he grew bored with all three. Then there came on the scene one Judith Ruddiger, a widow, with red lips, who drove a great touring-car with abandon, played masculine golf and generally appealed in Frensham to the elemental what-d'you-call-'ems. So these two decided to plunge into the freer life by the process of elopement. I was a little disappointed here. There had been so much chat about the Big Things that I had expected a rather more expansive setting to their adventure than Monte Carlo, followed by a round of first-class hotels. Moreover Judith, had a way of addressing her companion as "partner," which emphasised her wild Western personality to a degree that must have been almost painful at a winter-sports' resort full of schoolmasters. So I was hardly at all astonished when before long Frensham grew more bored than ever. Meanwhile the adoring wife (whom the author has sketched very sympathetically and well) had refused to divorce him; and so in the long run—well, you can see from the start where the long-run is destined to end. But you will probably not like a pleasant tale the less for this. Mr. Deeping certainly has courage. There is a scene or two in which he takes his amazonian Judith to the very edge of bathos. "She could shoot straight with a pistol, and proved it by bringing a revolver to the summer-house, and making Frensham hang his hat on the rail-fence that ran along the wood." Rough wooing for timid dramatists! I couldn't resist picturing how the late Mr. Pélissier would have handled this situation.
Contributor to "Poet's Corner" in country paper. "I'm afraid I'll have to charge something for my poems now that paper has gone up."
I wonder whether Evelyn Braxscombe Petter just decided that her novel could not be up to date without a German spy and so forth, or whether she really set out to do her bit for the War by commenting on the Teutonic idea of honour. Anyhow, one must admit that her Gretchen Meyer is drawn with rather uncommon skill, even if her subterranean mental processes are never exactly elucidated in Miss Velanty's Disclosure (Chapman and Hall). Though educated in England and dependent, to their misfortune, on English friends for maintenance, there always lurked in Gretchen's attitude of impartial selfishness a certain muffled hostility to the ways of this country, and particularly to an objectionable habit she found in us of placing an exaggerated value on straightforward dealing. This culminated in a quite gratuitous, and indeed even insane, demand on the man who for his sins was in love with her that he should surrender either his English ideal or her. That he did as wisely as honestly in letting her go and be d——d to her, I for one had no doubt, nor I think had the authoress, for, although she could never quite forget that Gretchen was her heroine, endowing her with a kind of beauty and even baldly labelling her attractive, it is really, on the whole, a designedly repulsive person she has presented to us. Though an interesting study in Teuton perfidy and certainly better written than the columns of most evening papers, I can hardly recommend the book as a restful change from that class of literature.
Mr. H. B. Marriott Watson has invented a gentleman of the road, Dick Ryder, of whom his publishers, Methuen, confess themselves very proud in that nice way they have. Armed with a bodkin and a barker he rushes and tushes his way through life, slitting weasands and dubbing every cully he meets a muckworm in the pleasant idiom current (so I take it on faith) in the time of our second James. I should have been more impressed with this hero's feats in the first few tales of As it Chanced if they had been in the very faintest degree plausible. Never surely were such preposterous fights, in which the whole action of a score of desperate opponents is completely suspended while the redoubtable one brings off his splendid stunts. I gratefully remember once having been helped through a dull day by The House on the Downs. Unless memory gilds my judgment the author put some reasonable amount of invention into that. But these collected tales are rather indifferent pot-boiling if you are to take any other standard but that of the gallery's formula for yarns of adventure. Perhaps, "as it chanced," my war lunch did not agree with me. But anyway I really cannot quite honestly commend this volume to any but the most stalwart of Mr. Marriott Watson's many loyal friends.