OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
"I remember, I remember...." Still on every side echoes the poet's cry, while scarce a publisher but can prove that the thoughts of age make long, long books. Certainly not the shortest of these, but among the most readable, is A Medley of Memories (Arnold), in which the Right Rev. Sir David Hunter-Blair has embodied the recollections of his very active career as Benedictine monk and a leading figure in the world of British Catholicism. Eton, Oxford, Rome, and (of course) his own famous monastery at Fort Augustus, are the chief scenes of it; and about them all Sir David talks vividly, even brilliantly. I am not saying that all this pleasant garrulity would not have been the better for the blue pencil, especially in those chapters in which the writer's memory dwells almost to excess upon the births, marriages, deaths and dinner-parties of the orthodox Peerage. Elsewhere, however, Sir David finds occasion in plenty for the exercise of a wit so dextrously handled that often his thrust is delivered before you have realized that the rapier has left its sheath. I had marked a score of examples for quotation (and now have space for none) and twice as many good stories. In the Oxford recollections it was pleasant to renew my own lively memories of a certain notorious lecture by Mr. Walter Walsh on Ritualistic Societies, when violence was narrowly averted by the tactful chairmanship of the present Lord Chancellor—a lecture from which (as Mr. Belloc observed at the time) "each member of the large audience departed confirmed and strengthened in whatever convictions he might previously have entertained." I sincerely hope that Sir David has yet in store for us those latter-day gleanings which he has been compelled to dismiss for the present as being too recent for print.
Mr. G. B. Stern has set himself to study with sympathy and a candour which extenuates nothing the Jew in England in the circumstances of war, and in particular the Jew of German origin completely loyal to the country of his adoption, but suspected and persecuted by such simple folk (and journals) as are content to put their faith in equally simple proverbs about leopards and spots. I suppose if Children of No Man's Land (Duckworth) has a hero and heroine you will find them in Richard Marcus and his sister Deborah. Young Richard, passionately English, with all the simple unquestioning loyalty of the public-school boy, counts the months to the day when he can testify to this by bearing arms in his country's defence, but finds nothing open but internment or (by much wangling) a possible niche in a Labour battalion. Deborah's adventures are chiefly of the heart, or what passes for the heart with a common type of modern girl anxious to wring every sensation out of life that playing with fire can give. It does not do to betray one's age by expressing too confidently the idea that much of all the goings-on of Deborah and her friends Gillian and Antonia seems impossible. Mr. Stern certainly writes as if he knew what he was writing about, and there is so rich an exuberance in the way he crowds his canvas, and so much humour expressed and repressed in his point of view, that I found this a distinctly entertaining and instructive book.
Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push (Lane) is a fourth of the enthusiastic and fiery war-books of that eminently enthusiastic and inextinguishably fiery warrior-author, Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson, of the Canadian Field Artillery. If he evinces, blatantly at times, the motives and perspective of the propagandist, he is justified by the fact that he most ardently practised the Hun hatred which he preaches. He states that he enjoyed the dangers and discomforts of so doing, and his assertion is proved to be a true one by his having returned again and again to the fray, notwithstanding every excuse and temptation to leave it. The book follows on after his Khaki Courage, and is also in the form of letters to his people at home. It takes up the narrative at April 14th, 1917, and carries it to the triumphant end. When, by reason of his wounds, he had to leave the Front and work in London and elsewhere, he naturally lost touch with the real business of the battle; even after his return to the Front in April, 1918, his letters lack their original sense of actuality, and I, reading them, began to wonder if he was ever going to recover his former style. Happily he does so, and with his letter of July 11th he gives a striking picture of a terrible incident of war, of which I don't remember to have read before, but, as I read it now, I seem to be witnessing it myself. From this point on he steadily develops his best, so that he ends on a fitting climax to all his writings of the War in his long final letter of October 6th—propaganda unashamed. The book should be thrust under the noses of those pacifists who now labour to minimise the past and to magnify the virtue and the value of their personal loving-kindness.
It has ever been my misfortune that the presence in a story of two characters confusably alike, or a setting within drowning distance of a tide-race, will produce in me an almost insuperable sense of its having been "made on purpose." I had therefore a double stroke of bad luck in finding both these elements present in The Splendid Fairing (Mills and Boon). But the more credit to Miss Constance Holme that, despite my increasing conviction that the wrong prodigal would return, and that the powers of nature were throughout almost visibly preparing to engulf him, the gentle and unforced power of her story did hold my attention till the final wave. Distinction shown in apparent absence of effort would, I think, be my verdict on her writing; she clearly knows her Northern farmer-folk with the sympathy of intimate experience. I hope I have not already suggested too much of the plot, a little tragedy of the commonplace dealing with the relations between two farming brothers, of whom the younger prospers while the elder fails, and the life-long jealousies of their women. Miss Holme works, one may say, on a minute scale; the short but simple annals of the poor interest her to the extent of providing an entire volume of three hundred odd pages from the events of a single day. But though now and then the old Northern counsel to "get eendways wi' it" does hover in the background of one's mind I repeat that sincerity carries the thing through. For all that, however, The Splendid Fairing did but confirm me in a previous impression that these Mary-call-the-cattle-home localities must remain more convenient to the local colourist than attractive to the inhabitants.
The publication, as a foreword, of a "Glossary of Native Words" used in the text made me wonder whether I should be bored or instructed, or both, by The Death Drum (Hurst and Blackett). Most happily I was neither. Miss Margaret Peterson has built her novel, perhaps a trifle hastily, about a quite uncommon theme and given it, in Uganda, a quite uncommon setting. It is the story of a half-caste who marries a white girl in order to avenge, in her degradation, his sister whom the English girl's brother had betrayed. I must not say that Tom Davis, the half-caste, is too much a white man—for Miss Peterson, to do her justice, has distributed goodness and badness among her blacks and whites with a quite impartial hand—but he is too fine a fellow to carry out his own plan, and, before he has done any lasting harm to the girl he has come to love, he takes himself, by way of a native rising, to a lotus-covered lake, and so out of her life. It seems a pity that the happiness of the story's end couldn't include Tom, but his ancestry effectually barred the way, and Miss Peterson has had to rely upon a very strong and not quite silent Englishman of the best type for her satisfactory finish.
Few authors have a shrewder idea than Mr. P. G. Wodehouse of what the British and American public want in the way of humour, and I do not know anyone more determined to supply their requirements. He would be a dull fellow indeed who did not appreciate the high spirits and humorous situations to be found in A Damsel in Distress (Jenkins). It is no small feat to maintain a riot of irresponsible fun for more than three hundred pages, but Mr. Wodehouse gets going at once, and keeps up the pace to the end without even a pause to get his second wind. If some of the characters—a ridiculous peer, his more ridiculous sister and his most ridiculous butler—are of the "stock" variety, Mr. Wodehouse's way of treating them is always fresh and amusing. But in his next frolic I beseech him to give golf and its tiresome lingo a complete rest.
Customer. "May I look at that twelve-guinea suit in the window? (Catching sight of ticket) Good gracious! It's twelve pounds thirteen now."
Tailor. "Yessir—a bright little notion of ours, if I may say so. A ticker attached, like those things in the taxicabs, to keep the price up-to-date."
"Straying.—Wm. ——, for allowing three houses to stray on the highway, was fined 20s."—Local Paper.
In these days landlords cannot be too careful.
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