OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Really I think that Rhoda Drake (Murray) must be the most preposterously startling story that I have read for this age. It makes you feel as if you had had a squib exploded under your chair at a temperance meeting. After beginning placidly about persons who live in South Kensington (and are so dull that the author has to fill up with minute descriptions of their drawing-rooms), somewhere towards three-quarters through its decorous course it plunges you head over ears into such tearing melodrama as is comparable only to Episode 42 of "The Adventures of the Blinking Eye" at a provincial cinema. I am left asking myself in bewilderment whether Mr. C.H. Dudley Ward, D.S.O., M.C., can have been serious in the affair. As I say, practically all the early characters are of little or no account, including Rhoda herself. Indeed, nobody looks like mattering at all, and the whole tale has, to be frank, taken on a somewhat soporific aspect, when lo! there enters a lady with a Russian name, no back to her gown and green face-powder. If I said of this paragon that she made the story bounce I should still do less than justice to her amazing personality. Really, she was a herald of revolution, whose remarkable method was to invite anyone important and obstructive to her house and make them discontented. It was the work of half-an-hour. Whether the process was hypnotic, or whether she actually put pepper in the ice-pudding, I could not clearly make out. But the dreadful fact remained that, let your patriotism be ever so firm, you had but to accept one of green-powder's little dinners and next morning you were as like as not to hurl a stone into 10, Downing Street. As for the end—! But no, I will stop short of it.
Frankly, what pleased me most about Affinities (Hodder and Stoughton) was its attractive get-up; pleasant, cherry-pie-coloured boards, swathed in a very daintily-drawn pictorial wrapper, the whole, as cataloguers say, forming an ideal birthday present for a young lady, especially one at all apt to discover, however harmlessly, the affinities that give these five tales their title. As for the stories themselves, really all that need be said is to congratulate Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart on the ingenuity with which she can tell what seems an obvious intrigue yet keep a surprise in reserve. I suppose it is because they come to us from America that certain of the episodes turn upon incidents in the Suffrage struggle, tale-fodder that our own militant novelists have long happily discarded. Of the others I think I myself would award the palm to one called "The Family Friend," a genially cynical little comedy of encouraged courtship, of which the end seems to be visible from the beginning, but isn't. Altogether, what I might call a Canute; in other words a book for the deck-chair, not too absorbing to endanger your shoes, however close you read it to the advancing wave.
I think I should best describe the characteristic quality of Four Blind Mice (Lane) as geniality. The scene of it is Burmah—astonishing, when you consider the host of novels about the rest of India, that so few should employ this equally picturesque setting—and it is quickly apparent that what Mr. C.C. Lowis doesn't know at first hand about Rangoon is not likely to be missed. The tale itself is a good-humoured little comedy of European and native intrigue, showing how one section of the populace strove as usual to ease the white man's burden by flirtation and gossip, and the other to get the best for themselves by unlimited roguery and chicane. The whole thing culminates in a trial scene which is at once a delightful entertainment and (I should suppose) a shrewdly observed study of the course of Anglo-Burmese justice. I think I would have chosen that Mr. Lowis should base his fun on something a little less grim than the murder and mutilation of a European, or at least Eurasian, lady, even though the very slight part in the action played by Mrs. Rodrigues, when alive, could hardly be called sympathetic. Still we were all so good-humoured over her taking-off that for a long time I cherished a rather dream-like faith in her reappearance to prove that this attitude had been justified. Not that Mr. Lowis has not every right to retort that he is writing comedy rather than farce; certainly he has made his four blind mice to run in highly diverting fashion, very entertaining to those of us who see how they run; and as they at least save their tails triumphantly it would perhaps be ungenerous to complain about one that doesn't.
Damsel. "Oh, Professor, can you provide me with a love-potion? My Mother says if I wed not soon I must e'en go forth to earn my living."
Alchemist. "That I can, Madam, and of two kinds. First, the slow-working purple sort is verily cheap, but difficult of administration; for in water it is plainly visible and easy of discernment in tea. Whereas my patent potion, bringing love at first sight, closely resembleth the much-desired whisky. This sort is one guinea per tot."
The Story of the Fourth Army in the Battles of the Hundred Days (Hodder and Stoughton) is printed on pages the size of a copy of Punch, and with its accompanying case of maps it costs eighteen-pence to go through the post. It boasts a hundred full-page photographs, also sketches, charts, maps, panoramas and diagrams ad lib., a foreword by General Lord Rawlinson and ten appendices; so really it seems that the much-abused word "sumptuous" may for once be fairly applied. The author, Major-General Sir A. Montgomery, who himself helped to "stage" the battles he writes about, has built up a record which is in some sense unique, for I think it is possible from this book to trace precisely where any unit of the Fourth Army was placed, and what doing, at any given hour during the whole of the victory march from Amiens to the Belgian frontier. Apart from anything else it is pleasant to have a book that deals only with the days of victory; but it must be admitted that, to gain a completeness of detail so entirely satisfactory to those most nearly concerned, the writer has had to sacrifice something of human interest, for many of his pages are little more than a bare chronicle of names and places. Undoubtedly his book should be read with great deliberation, constant reference to the maps and a lively recollection of personal experiences on the spot; but the civilian reader may still be content to skim the text and save himself for the photographs. These, mostly taken from the air and of exquisite technical quality, form an amazing series, in themselves worth the heavy price. And who minds heavy prices when the proceeds are pledged to the service of wounded officers?
"Rather an anti-climax," I thought when I opened The Happy Foreigner (Heinemann) and found that it purported to tell the experiences of an English chauffeuse in France after the Armistice; but I know now that, in any place where Enid Bagnold happened to be, there would not be any anti-climax about. In a style so daring and vivid that it could only have been born, I suppose, of fast driving, the authoress describes a romantic affair with a young French officer; but her real theme is the suffering of France bowed down under the intolerable burden of so many strangers, both enemies and friends. The rich and well-fed Americans who will not trouble to understand, the grotesque Chinamen and Annamites, the starving Russians liberated from the Germans, flash by, with the ruins of villages, the tangle of wire and litter of derelict guns; and even the romance, intensely felt though it is, must be fleeting, like the rest of the nightmare, because the Frenchman's eyes are set on the future and the rebuilding of his fortunes. This book is not "about the War," but all the same it is one of the best books about the War that I have read.
From a Common Room Window (Owen) will be a slight refreshment to those who are weary of realistic studies of schoolmasters and schoolboys. "Orbilius," during what I take to have been a long career as a teacher, has not allowed his sense of humour to wither within him. In a note to his slender volume of sketches he says, "School-life is largely a comedy. When a schoolmaster ceases to recognise this it is time for him to 'bundle and go.'" He has been in the main a keen and sympathetic observer, and though his remarks upon headmasters are a little severe—personally I should hate to be called "a meticulous pedagogue"—I do not think that a little criticism of these potentates will do them the smallest harm. In "The Castigator" "Orbilius" gives a laughable sketch. The inventor of a flogging machine is soundly beaten by his own instrument, and he would be a sombre man indeed who could read it without a desire to witness such a chastening performance. By no means the least merit of this book is that it contains no new theories about education.