OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The title, somewhat puzzling at first, which Miss F.E. Mills Young has given to her latest story, The Almonds of Life (Hodder and Stoughton), turns out to be based upon a Chinese proverb to the effect that "almonds came to those who have no teeth." This rather devastating sample of philosophy (which I have put by for use against the next person who attempts to work off upon me the adage about those who wait) forms the text of a well-told tale of misplaced affections. As you may expect, if you know Miss Young's former work, it is a South African story, not concerned however with Boers and natives and the trackless veld, but with coastwise civilization and suburban garden-parties. As before, the author excellently conveys the place-feeling, so well indeed that I was sorry when the love intrigues of the two protagonists necessitated their quitting Africa for a more conventional Italian setting. I may summarise the plot by telling you that the particular almond that fell too late to the heroine was somebody else's husband. But it wasn't so much that she was unable to eat him as that he proved indigestible when swallowed. The lady was Gerda, young and dazzling bride of the middle-aged Fred Wooten, and the gentleman one of her husband's closest friends, also (before the arrival of Gerda) happily married to a wife whom I found the most attractive person in the book. I need not further detail the crooked course of untrue love, though I may hint at a fault in balance, where your sympathy, previously and rightly enlisted for poor betrayed Fred, is demanded for Gerda in her difficulty with the almond. As usual, Miss Young unfolds her plot with admirable directness, chiefly through a natural and unforced dialogue, so easy that it disguises its own art.
If any reasonable man still possesses a grain of sympathy with Bolshevism I invite him to purge himself by reading With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia (Cassell). In August, 1918, Colonel John Ward, M.P., reached Vladivostok in command of the 25th Battalion Middlesex Regiment, and from the time of his arrival until his departure nearly a year later his position was almost grotesquely difficult. Of our Allies in Siberia and of their policy he writes with justifiable frankness. Our own is not excused, but he lets us clearly see that however ineffectual it may have been there was honesty of purpose underlying it. In the medley of confusion which prevailed we were lucky to have in Colonel Ward as senior British officer a man who was not afraid to shoulder his responsibility. Under conditions so exasperating that anyone might have been excused if he had been overwhelmed with anger and bewilderment he was resolved to uphold our prestige. Upon the Bolshevist horrors in Siberia he does not dwell, but he says enough in passing to make one shudder. Colonel Ward is a true friend of Russia. "This great people are bound to recover, and become all the stronger for their present trials," are the concluding words of his preface. That this prophecy may come true must be the prayer of all of us who remember what we owed to Russia during the earlier part of the War.
It was perhaps my misfortune that, not having read the book in which Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs recorded the earlier adventures of his hero, John Carter, in the red planet Mars, when that gentleman precipitated himself thither (from the banks of the Hudson, of all places), I found myself in more senses than one out of my element. Not that it really matters; since the Martian existence of Mr. Carter was apparently of that wild and whirling character, familiar to patrons of the Continuous Programme, in which one thrill follows upon another so fast that their precise order becomes of small moment. When I tell you that the opening chapters of this remarkable nightmare—The Gods of Mars (Methuen)—contain monsters with one white eye and mouths in their hands, flying pirates, an air-ship that sinks down a volcano, an ageless witch who—but why continue? The publishers call these happenings "bold;" but this is a pitiful understatement. Really they are of a character to make the wildest imaginings of Jules Verne, friend of my youth, or Mr. Wells, companion of my riper years, read like the peaceful annals of a country rectory. To quote again from the publishers, "only the man who created Tarzan could write such stories." If Tarzan were in any way comparable with the present volume, it would perhaps not be unfair to add the corollary that only those readers who appreciated the one could swallow the other. Mercifully, Mr. Burroughs writes so continually at the top of his voice that after a time the clatter comes to have an effect merely soporific.
Since Major-General Sir C.E. Callwell has, in The Dardanelles (Constable), added a volume to a series called Campaigns and Their Lessons, it is clear that he is writing mainly for military students, but none the less at least one man in the street—meaning myself—has been glad, after reading plenty of merely descriptive accounts of the Gallipoli affair, to find a book that frankly and justifiably does lay claim to technical proficiency. The exponents of vivid narrative, modestly disclaiming expert knowledge, have been painfully liable to break off just short of what one wanted most to know. They told us how things happened, or, at any rate, how it seemed they happened, but the reason why of things they had to leave to others. In this book we really do get at the why, and even more the why not, of the magnificent failure. Of actual incident and human interest General Callwell's account, which in a sense is only supplementary to the others, adds little to our previous knowledge. The only point of the sort I picked up is his notice of the characteristic reluctance shown by Anzacs to report themselves as sick when urged to do so with a view to the gradual removal of troops without withdrawal of entire units. It is hardly necessary to add that the author is an old literary hand, with a pleasantly clear and luminous style of his own, though one is free to admit he splits his infinitives almost as much as Sir Ian Hamilton split his forces, and with less justification.
In the very improving books which I had to read long ago the hero or heroine usually had a cross to bear. They bore it with great fortitude, and frequently died young. When therefore I opened Mr. Jerome K. Jerome's All Roads Lead to Calvary (Hutchinson) I fancied I knew what to expect. I read that Joan Allway was possessed of remarkable beauty, a "Stevensonian touch" and suitable introductions to editors and newspaper proprietors, and that from the pulpit of a column in the evening Press, with her photograph at the top, she attempted to reform the world. I don't know how the photograph came out, but there was apparently no martyrdom so far. Afterwards she began to encourage and inspire Robert Phillips, a Labour M.P. and future Cabinet Minister, and at the same time to be kind to and educate Mrs. Phillips, who was good-natured, vulgar and middle-aged. Falling gradually in love with the politician, she withdrew only just in time, nursed in a French hospital, married a journalist friend and settled down happily with him to reform a little bit of the world at a time, and that the part nearest to hand. And now I am left wondering what Joan Allway's cross was. Would avoiding the Divorce Court be counted the roughest path of self-denial in a moral anecdote of to-day?
Running Wild (Simpkin) is the expressive title of a collection of child-memories by the late Mr. Bertram Smith, whom readers of Punch will remember by the pseudonym "Bis." They can here learn from a sympathetic little introduction by Mr. Ward Muir under what conditions of a brave but losing battle with ill-health this delicate and vivacious work was written. When I say that these recollections (which I decline to call by any word implying more artifice) illustrate their author, I give you their measure for honesty and charm combined. Honesty first of all; Mr. Smith's young barbarians running wild and, one conjectures, rapidly reducing their elders to a like condition, have the compelling effect of unsentimental truth. Few clouds of glory, for example, trail about the protagonists of "A Day," a tribute to the joyous intoxication of a day-long orgie of naughtiness deliberate and wholly unrepented. You will find much in these pages to waken half-forgotten and perhaps secret pleasures. Thus there was for me a personal echo in the rejection as a seaside entertainment of castle-building and the ordered sequence of the tides in favour of the infinitely more variable delight of running water and a sufficiency of mud. Perhaps I have said enough to suggest the charm of an engaging volume, itself a memorial of one whose kindly laughter will be missed by many.
