OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I should certainly call Mr. Compton Mackenzie our first living expositor of London in fiction. Indeed the precision with which, from his Italian home, he can recapture the aspect and atmosphere of London neighbourhoods is itself an astonishing feat. In The Vanity Girl (Cassell) he has happily abandoned the rather breathless manner induced by the migratious Sylvia Scarlett, and returns to the West Kensington of Sinister Street, blended subsequently with that theatrical Bohemia in which Jenny Pearl danced her little tragedy. There is something (though by no means all) of the interest of Carnival in the new stage story; that the adventures of Dorothy lack the compelling charm of her predecessor is inevitable from the difference in temperament of the two heroines and the fact that Mr. Mackenzie with all his art has been unable to rouse more than dispassionate interest in what is really a study of successful egotism. From the moment when, in the first chapter, we encounter Dorothy (whose real name was Norah) washing her hair at a window in Lonsdale Road, an eligible cul-de-sac ending in a railway line, beyond which a high rampart marked the reverse of the Earl’s Court Exhibition panorama, to that final page on which we take leave of her as a widowed countess, sacrificing her future for the sake of an Earl’s Court of a different genre, her career, sentimental, financial and matrimonial, is told with amazing vivacity but a rather conspicuous lack of emotional appeal. It is perhaps an unequal book; in parts as good as the author’s best, in others hurried and perfunctory. One of our more superior Reviews was lately debating Mr. Mackenzie’s command of the “memorable phrase.” There are a score here that I should delight to quote, even if the setting is not always entirely worthy of them.
So long as “Berta Ruck” will write for us such pretty books as Sweethearts Unmet (Hodder and Stoughton), we need never feel ourselves dependent on America for our supply of sugary novels. This home-grown variety is just as sweet, and really, I think, may be guaranteed not only harmless but positively beneficial. The authoress has evidently a tender pity for the young men and women whom our social conditions doom either to have no companions among their contemporaries or only the wrong ones. Her heroine represents the too-much-sheltered girl alone in an elderly circle, her hero the lonely young man who has no means of getting to know people of his own sort (I can’t say class, because the authoress seems rather uncertain about that herself). Her story is written in alternate instalments by “the boy” and “the girl,” a method which encourages intimacy in the telling as well as a sort of gushing attention to the reader not so pleasant. Miss Nora Schlegel has drawn a pretty picture of Julia and Jack to adorn the wrapper, and I can assure everyone who cares to know it that they are just as nice as they look; Jack’s passion for abbreviation (“rhodos” for rhododendrons) being the only ground of quarrel I have with them or their creator.
In Passion (Duckworth) Mr. Shaw Desmond desperately wants to say something terrific about love, money and power. His violence makes one feel that one is reading under a shower of brickbats, and it is the effort of dodging these which perhaps distracts the mind from his message. (Is he a Marinettist, I wonder?) There are not enough words in the language for him, so he invents fresh ones at will; while as for grammar and syntax he passionately throttled them in Chapter I.; nor did they recover. I will own that notwithstanding all this the author has a way of making you read on to find out what it is all about. You don’t find out; but there, life’s like that, isn’t it? The author’s ideas of the operations of high finance are ingenuous. The Mandrill (do I rightly guess this to be a portrait distorted from the life?), who is out to corner copper and “do down” the Squid (head of the opposing copper group), is, if you are to judge by his passionate exuberance at board meetings, about as likely to corner the green cheese in the moon. I imagine the author saying, “Mandrills mayn’t be like that, but that’s how I see ’em. It’s my vision and mood that matter. Take it or leave it.” Well, on the whole I should advise you to take it, first putting on a sort of mental tin hat. You’ll at least have gathered that Mr. Desmond is a lively writer.
Of a war-story reviewed in these pages some months ago I remember taking occasion to say that the author had damaged his effect by a too obvious wish to injure the reputation of a certain cavalry brigade (or words to that effect). Well, a book that I have just been reading, The Squadroon (Lane), might in some sense be regarded as a counterblast to the former volume, since its writer, Major Ardern Beaman, D.S.O., has admittedly intended it as a vindication of the work of the cavalry in the Great War. I can say at once that the defence could scarcely have found a better advocate. Major Beaman (who, I think superfluously, figures in his own pages in the fictional character of Padre) has written one of the most interesting records that I have read of personal experience on the Western Front. Partly this is explained by his fortunate possession of a style at once sincere, sanely balanced and always engaging. Also his story, apart from the matter of it, reveals in the men of whom he writes (and incidentally in the writer himself) a combination of just those qualities that we like to call essentially British. Cavalrymen of course will read it with a special fervour; but I am mistaken if its genial temper does not disarm even so difficult a critic as the ex-infantry Lieutenant—than which I could hardly say more. In short, The Squadroon is a belated war book in which the most weary of such matters may well recapture their interest.
Written in the last great ebb and flow of the War, when the censorship still prevented anything like carping criticism of matters near the battle-front, The Glory of the Coming (Hodder and Stoughton) naturally resolves itself into a pæan of praise of the French and British armies in general and the American troops in particular, both white and black. Mr. Irvin S. Cobb brings good credentials to his task, for he saw the advance of the German army through Belgium in 1914, and in this book he describes the combined resistance to their last great effort before defeat. The accident, if we may so call it, to the Fifth Army has had nowhere a more eloquent apologist. “They were like ants; they were like flies,” he says of the Germans; “they left their dead lying so thickly behind that finally the ground seemed as though it were covered with a grey carpet.” There are interesting strictures in the later chapters on some of the quaint semi-official delegations and personages who persuaded the United States Government to let them come over and visit the War; and there are a number of quite good yarns of the Yankee private, related in the Yankee style. But better than all the American stories I think I like that of the Bedfordshire soldier who, when asked by the writer to direct him to Blérincourt during the chaos of the great retreat, replied, “I am rather a stranger in these parts myself.” Perhaps by the way I ought to make it quite clear that the title refers to the coming of the American troops, and that, although the line, “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,” is also quoted in the prefatory stanza, there is nothing in the book about Mr. “Pussyfoot” Johnson.
I suppose the War did throw up a great number of worthy pomposities genuinely eager to serve their country in some conspicuous and applauded way, and old Mr. Thompson, the principal figure in Young Hearts (Hodder and Stoughton), may be taken, on the authority of J. E. Buckrose, as an East Riding variant of the type. He had always some patent scheme for winning the War or improving the Peace, and no doubt deserved all the ragging he got, though I lost my zest in the matter before the author did. Mr. Thompson had two daughters: a minx (almost too minx-like for belief) and a never-told-her-love maiden of sterling worth. The latter marries the good-young-man-under-a-cloud (the cloud was, of course, a misapprehension or, alternatively, had a silver lining), though the minx shamelessly tried to “bag him,” as she did every eligible male, the good sister tamely submitting under the impression apparently that the other was a perfect darling. I indeed seemed to be the only person who really understood what a little beast she was—and possibly the author, who finally allotted to her the beautiful unsatisfactory young man with the emotional tenor. Commended for easy seaside reading.
To Recalcitrant House-owners: Let and let live.
[“I hear of a seaside hotel whose proprietors have instructed their staff never to correct the pronunciation or use of a word by a guest. If it is necessary to use the same term in the conversation the guest’s form of it is the one to be used; it saves a lot of irritation, if not actual humiliation.”—Daily News.]
Waiter (with anticipative tact) to holiday customer. “Any horse doovers, Sir?”