OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
In looking at the title-page of John Seneschal's Margaret (Hodder and Stoughton) no lover of good stories but will be saddened by the reflection that the superscription, "by Agnes and Egerton Castle," is there seen for the last time. The double signature, herald of how much pleasure in the past, is here attached to a cheerfully improbable but well-told tale of the after-war about a returned soldier who was mistaken for his dead fellow-prisoner and hailed as son, heir and fiancé by the different members of the welcoming group in the home that wasn't his. The descriptions of this home, by the way—a house whose identification will be easy enough for those who know the beautiful North-Dorset country—are as good as any part of the book. If you protest that the resulting situation is not only wildly improbable but becoming a stock-in-trade of our novelists, I must admit the first charge, but point out that the authors here secure originality by making the deception an unintended one. John Tempest, who in the hardships of his escape has lost memory of his own identity, never ceases to protest that he is at least not the other John for whom the members of the Seneschal family persist in taking him—a twist that makes for piquancy if hardly for added probability. However, the inevitable solution of the problem provides a story entertaining enough, though not, I think, one that will obliterate your memory of others, incomparable, from hands to which we all owe a debt of long enjoyment.
I read Inisheeny (Methuen), as I believe I have read every story by the same hand, at one sitting. Whose was the hand I will ask you to guess. Characters: one Church of Ireland parson, drily humorous, as narrator; one lively heroine with archæological father, hunting for relics; one schoolboy; one young and over-zealous R.I.C. officer on the look-out for concealed arms; poachers, innkeepers, peasants, etc. Action, mostly amphibious, passes between the mainland of Western Ireland and a small islet off the coast. Will the gentleman who said "George A. Birmingham" kindly consider himself entitled to ten nuts? I suppose it was the mention of an islet that finally gave away my simple secret. Mr. "Birmingham" is one of the too few authors who understand what emotion an island of the proper size and right distance from the coast can raise in the human breast. Inisheeny delightfully fulfilled every condition in this respect; not to mention sheltering an illicit still and being the home of Keltic treasure. Precisely in fact the right kind of place, and the sort of story that hardly anyone can put down unfinished. I am bound to add that, perhaps a hundred pages from the actual end, the humour of the affair seems to lose spontaneity and become forced. But till the real climax of the tale, the triumphant return of the various hunters from Inisheeny, I can promise that you will find never a dull page.
There were moments in The Headland (Heinemann) when, with Roma Lennox, the "companion" and heroine, I "shivered, feeling that London, compared with the old house on the Headland and the family inhabiting it, was a clean place with a clear atmosphere and inhabited by robust, sane, straightforward persons. You felt homesick." Cornwall is notoriously inhabited by queer people, and the Pendragon family was not merely queer but hereditarily rotten and decadent: the old father, who burns a valuable old book of his own to appease his violent temper; the granddaughter a kleptomaniac; the son of forty addicted to hideous cruelties. Unpleasant but well drawn, all of them. Mrs. C. A. Dawson Scott has powerfully suggested the atmosphere of the strange and tragic household, mourning its dead mistress; and she understands the peculiar quality of the Cornish people and the Cornish seas. I have not read her other novels, but, if she will promise to wrestle with one or two rather irritating mannerisms, I will promise to look out for her next one. I have no prejudice against the Wellsian triplet of dots, but really Mrs. Scott does overdo it. And a good deal of her quite penetrating psycho-thingummy was spoiled for me by her trick of conveying nearly every impression and reflection of her characters through an impersonal "you" or "one." This means an economy of words and for a short time a certain vividness, but it soon becomes tedious. One knows what a tangle you get into if one starts using "one's" and "you's" in your letters; and you find that the author has been caught once or twice. However, the story is good enough to survive that.
The title of The Lady of The Lawn (Jenkins) has "the ornament of alliteration," but beyond that there doesn't seem to be any particular reason why Mr. W. Riley should have chosen it. Certainly in his story there is an old lady who spends more of the winter on a lawn than any old lady of my acquaintance could be induced to, even with rugs and a summer-house to make up for the comforts of the fireside; but Miss Barbara and her site really have not so much to do with the tale as its title seems to imply. The love affairs of a young officer who, while blind from wounds, fell in love with his nurse to the extent of becoming engaged to her and didn't recognise her when they met again, are Mr. Riley's real concern. Eric, who is quite as priggish as his name suggests, falls in love with his sweetheart, as a lady of leisure, all over again, and goes through agonies of remorse on account of his own faithlessness to her as a nurse. Marion or Constance, for she uses two names to help the confusion, lets him suffer a while for the good of his soul, but the happy ending, the promise of which is breathed from every line of the book, is duly brought about. His publisher asserts that "there is no living author who writes about Yorkshire as does Mr. Riley." I daresay he is quite right, but at least as far as the present book is concerned I don't think that I should have bothered to mention it.
Those—and I suspect they are many—whose first real enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln was kindled by Mr. John Drinkwater's romantic morality play can profitably take up Mr. Irving Bacheller's A Man for the Ages (Constable) for an engaging account of the early days of the great Democrat. They will forgive a certain flamboyance about the author's preliminaries. Hero-worship, if the hero be worthy, is a very pardonable weakness, and they should certainly admire the skill and humour with which he has patched together, or invented where seemly, the story of lanky Abe, with his axeman's skill, his immense physical strength, his poor head for shopkeeping, his passion for books, his lean purse and "shrinking pants," his wit, courage and resource. A romance of reasonable interest and plausibility is woven round young Lincoln's story. Perhaps Mr. Bacheller makes his hero speak a little too sententiously at times, and certainly some of his other folk say queer things, such as, "What so vile as a cheap aristocracy, growing up in idleness, too noble to be restrained, with every brutal passion broad-blown as flush as May?" What indeed! The picture of pioneering America in the thirties is a fresh and interesting one.
To few of those who visit Switzerland, with its incomparable mountains, can it have occurred that, once a man is kept there against his will, it can be a prison as damnable as any other; possibly even more damnable by reason of those same inevitable mountains. British prisoners of war interned there knew that. Mr. R. O. Prowse, in A Gift of the Dusk (Collins), speaks with subtle penetration for those other prisoners, interned victims of the dreadful malady. Of necessity he writes sadly; but yet he writes as a very genial philosopher, permitting himself candidly "just that little cynicism which helps to keep one tolerant." He is of the old and entertaining school of sentimental travellers, but he is far from being old-fashioned. The story running through his observations and modern instances is so frail and delicate a thing that I hesitate to touch it and to risk disturbing its bloom. All readers, save the very young and the very old, will do well to travel with him, from Charing Cross ("I have a childlike fondness for trains. I like to be in them, I like to see them go by") to the peaceful, almost happy end, at the mountain refuge by the valley of the Rhone. They will not regret an inch of the way; and they will derive some very positive enjoyment from the picture of that most melancholy hotel where the story is set.
WORRIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
Mounted Gentleman (who has come to grief in a morass). "If I escape this peril I suppose I shall have to build a church here as a thank-offering. An ill site, I fear."
A New Safety Model.
"Lady's strong cycle, 23-in. frame, 28 wheels."
—Cycling.
From an account of the M.C.C. team's match at Colombo:
"When the unlucky thirteen was reached, Hobbs, who was sleeping finely, fell to a great catch at mid-on by Gunasekera."
—Ceylon Paper.
Happily Hobbs appears to have waked up when he got to Australia.