OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The publishers of Peter Jackson: Cigar Merchant (Hutchinson) seem in their announcements to be desperately afraid lest anyone should guess it to be a War book. It is, they suggest, the story of the flowering of perfect love between two married folk who had drifted apart. It is really an admirable epitome of the War as seen through one pair of eyes and one particular temperament. I don't recall another War novel that is so convincing. The almost incredible confusions of the early days of the making of K.'s army; the gradual shaping of the great instrument; the comradeship of fine spirits and the intrigues of meaner; leadership good and less good; action with its energy, glory and horror; reaction (with incidentally a most moving analysis of the agonies of shell-shock and protracted neurasthenia) after the long strain of campaigning—all this is brought before you in the most vivid manner. Mr. Gilbert Frankau writes with a fierce sincerity and with perhaps the defects of that sincerity—a bitterness against the non-combatant which was not usual in the fighting-man, at least when he was fighting; or perhaps it was only that they were too kind then to say so. Also as "one of us" he is a little overwhelmed by the sterling qualities of the rank-and-file—qualities which ought, he would be inclined to assume, to be the exclusive product of public-school playing-fields. I haven't said that Peter Jackson gave up cigars and cigarettes for the sword, and beat that into a plough-share for a small-holding when the War was done. A jolly interesting book.
I found the arrangement of The Clintons and Others (Collins) at first a little confusing, because Mr. Archibald Marshall, instead of keeping his Clinton tales consecutive, has mixed them democratically with the Others. Our first sight of the family (and incidentally the most agreeable thing in the volume) is provided by "Kencote," a brightly-coloured and engaging anecdote of Regency times, and of the plucking of an honoured house from the ambiguous patronage of the First Gentleman in Europe. I found this delightful, spirited, picturesque and original. Thence we pass to the Others, to the theme (old, but given here with a pleasant freshness of circumstance) of maternal craft in averting a threatened mésalliance, to a study of architecture in its effect upon character, to a girls' school tale; finally to the portrait of a modern Squire Clinton, struggling to adjust his mind to the complexities of the War. This last, a character-study of very moving and sympathetic realism, suffers a little from a defect inherent in one of Mr. Marshall's best qualities, his gift for absolutely natural dialogue. The danger of this is that, as here in the bedroom chatter of the Squire's daughters, his folk are apt to repeat themselves, as talk does in nature, but should not (I suppose) in art. Still this is a small defect in a book that is sincere in quality and convincingly human in effect. The Clintons and Others is certainly miles away from the collections of reprinted pot-boilers that at one time brought books of short stories into poor repute. Mr. Marshall and Others (a select band) will rapidly correct this by giving us in small compass work equal to their own best.
Shuttered Doors (Lane) is what you might call a third-and-fourth-generation story—one of those books, so rightly devastating to the skipper, in which the accidental turning of two pages together is quite liable to involve you with the great-grandchildren of the couple whose courtship you have been perusing. Observe that I was careful to say the "accidental" turning, though I can picture a type of reader who might soon be fluttering the pages of Shuttered Doors in impatient handfuls. The fact is that Mrs. William Hicks Beach has here written what is less a novel than a treatise, tasteful, informed and sympathetic, on county life and manners and houses. The last of these themes especially has an undisguised fascination for her. When Aletta, the chief heroine, was left pots of money by a Dutch uncle (who was so far from filling his proverbial rôle that he hardly talked at all) she spent it and her enthusiasm, indeed her existence, in restoring two variously dilapidated mansions—Graythorpes, her husband's home, and Doller Place, left her by an appreciative aunt. When not thus employed she would be reading a paper on Homes (given here in extenso), or comparing those of other persons with her own. I don't want you to get the impression that Shuttered Doors is precisely arid; it is too full of ideas and vitalities for that; but it does undoubtedly demand a special kind of reader. Incidentally, Mrs. Hicks Beach should revise her chronology. For Aletta, who was married at twenty-eight and died at sixty-two, to have had at that time a grandson on the staff of the Viceroy of India, he must have received his appointment before the age of fifteen—which even in these experimental days sounds a little premature.
Do not allow yourself to be misled by the fact that the portrait on the paper cover of Maureen (Jenkins) does, I admit, remarkably suggest a lady whose mission in life is the advertisement of complexion soap. You probably know already that the methods of Mr. Patrick Macgill are made of sterner stuff. This "Story of Donegal," which I have no intention of giving in detail, is the history of the course of true love in an Irish village, full of types which, I dare say, are realistically observed; verbose in places to an almost infuriating degree (not till page 61 does the heroine so much as put her nose round the scenery), but working up to a climax of considerable power. Maureen, I need hardly say, was as fair as moonrise, but suffered from the drawback of an irregular origin, which took the poor girl a great deal of living down. Nor need I specify the fact that most of the male characters in the district are soon claimants for her hand. Really this is the plot. Having betrayed so much, however, nothing shall persuade me to expose the bogie scenes on the midnight moor, where the villain combines his illicit whiskey manufacture with his courtship, and where finally the three protagonists come by a startling finish. Maureen is not a story that I should recommend save for readers with abundant leisure; but those whose pluck and endurance carry them to the kill will certainly have their reward.
In Memories of a Marine (Murray) Major-General Sir George Aston records for us, cosily and anecdotally, a life spent in service, not only of the active kind—in Egypt and South Africa—but also as a Staff College Professor, and, more intriguingly, as an expert in Secret Intelligence in the cloisters of Whitehall or up and down the Mediterranean. If his book is not so sensational in the matter of revelations as the current fashion requires, it has a restful interest all its own, varied here and there with some very attractive stories. To give just one example, the author, when setting out to co-ordinate the work of various authorities in a certain harbour, found a signal buoy, a torpedo station, a fixed mine and a boom, each under separate control, all included in the defences. But the torpedo could not be launched unless the buoy were first cleared away, and the mine, if fired, would blow up the boom. One would have welcomed more of this sort of thing, for the truth is that even restfulness may be overdone and discretion become almost too admirable. Occasionally too the writer enlarges a little on—well, he enlarges a little, as anyone would with half his provocation. Still, for all comrades of his service, at any rate, every word he has written will be of interest; and perhaps he does not really mind so much about the general public, though he has had the good sense to crown his work with an apposite quotation from Punch.
The Specials (Heinemann) is the story of the Metropolitan Special Constabulary, and it would have been a thousand pities if it had not been told. Colonel W.T. Reay's book will stand as a record of invaluable service performed by a devoted body of men, service for which the whole nation—and London in particular—has every reason to be grateful. If I understand Colonel Reay rightly he doesn't wish bouquets to be thrown at the Specials, but he would not, I think, discourage me from saying that they performed dangerous and ticklish work with unfailing resource and tact. All of us know that they desire no other reward for their services than the satisfaction of having done their duty; but our gratitude demands to be heard; and I for one take this occasion to trumpet forth the "All clear" signal with feelings of affectionate pride.
If By Way of Bohemia (Skeffington) is a fair sample of Mr. Mark Allerton's work I have been missing a number of very readable stories. His hero, Hugh Kelvin, a journalist (they must be rare) who had no very good conceit of himself, married a barmaid, and she ran his house as if it were a third-class drinking saloon. She was one of those women who for want of a better word we call impossible; but she found Hugh as unsatisfactory as he found her. In the circumstances the union had to be dissolved, and, although I suspect Mr. Allerton's tongue of being very near his cheek when he contrived Hugh's escape from a life of sordid misery, I admit that his solution of the difficulty is cleverly told. And, after all, coincidences do happen in real life, and it would be unfair to Providence to suppose that they were not put there for a useful purpose.
"Come away, Robert. You don't suppose they put cheese in there just for fun at two shillings a pound?"
"Gentleman washes to be received as Paying Guest."—Daily Paper.
A very proper preliminary.