OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I seem to remember that, in the old days of peace, when a friend was run down or in want of thorough rest, it was a commonplace of advice to suggest a long voyage in a sailing ship. Somehow I do not think that, even when mines and traffic raiders are no more, I shall be quite so ready with this counsel after reading The Mutiny of the Elsinore (Mills and Boon). Of course I know that a voyage in nautical fiction can never be wholly uneventful, also that one is justified in looking to Mr. Jack London for something rather strenuous. But really the Elsinore appears to touch the limit in this kind. I wish I could tell you properly about her crew. (Mr. London takes chapters and chapters in which to do it). I suppose that every possible variety of undesirable was represented among them, from dangerous maniacs downwards. And their behaviour was what you might expect. The disquieting thing about the book is that the author gives to its most horrific episodes a cold and calculated air of truth. "Experto crede," he seems to say; "thus and thus is the real life of ships." So I had to believe him. There was only one passenger on board the Elsinore, and he finished the voyage in command of her. This was after the Captain had gone wrong in the head, and the First Officer had discovered the Second to be the murderer of one whom he had sworn to avenge. By this time also the voyage (which might be called one of attrition) had considerably reduced the Elsinore's company; while the survivors were mostly engaged in hurling bombs and vitriol at each other. What one might call an active, open-air book. But, though I am far from denying its grim strength, it will not be my favourite among its author's always interesting romances.
Mr. Gilbert Cannan offers us in Young Earnest (Secker) an extremely conscientious and plausible study of a talented, sensitive and, I am afraid, rather "superior" youth whose love affairs preoccupy him too exclusively and whose demands on life are so exacting that nothing can ever bring him content. I feel so sure from the good deal which I now know of young Fourmy and his behaviour to his wife, Linda, that brilliant suburban, and to Ann, the factory girl, that he never found with Cathleen the perfect peace which his creator alleges; or perhaps, more justly, that he never could have found it without a struggle and self-discipline, of which there are few signs. It is surely one of the fallacies of a common philosophy of romance—a fallacy much too crude for Mr. Cannan's unusually careful method—that while this, that and the other relation, opening delightfully, becomes sordid or impossible some final selection is to prove automatically and permanently blissful, even if there be no legal ties to chafe against on principle. The fact is your Fourmys are in this difficult matter of the affections doomed to trouble as the sparks fly upward, and of course the perceptive author knows this perfectly well and his happy ending is only a "let's pretend." I have been fascinated by the skill of a series of uncannily clear-cut portraits; I know no other writer who has the power in so singular a degree of getting right down below surface traits to depths of mood and character. Analyse it and you will find that Mr. Cannan gives you no descriptions but merely lets his characters unfold themselves in their talk. There's much in that "merely."
Oliver, the hero of The Woman who Looked Back (Stanley Paul), seems to have been a person of exceptional credulity. Having as a boy married a quite undesirable foreigner, he subsequently went to India, and on his return accepted without question his mother's statement that he was a widower. So he married Sara, the heroine of the tale, and lived in great placidity for some eight years with her, till the expected happened, and the discovery of an old letter proved that wife No. 1 was very much alive. It is at this dramatic crisis that M. Hamilton raises the curtain upon his (or her) story. If I treat it with flippancy it is not from any dislike of it; on the contrary it seems to me both interesting and human, especially human. The dialogue is profoundly and movingly natural; in every chapter I have felt that, given the postulated situation, the characters would talk exactly thus, which simply means that M. Hamilton is an adept in her (or his) art. The situation is complicated by the fact that, though Oliver had accepted his second marriage as an ideally happy one, Sara in her secret heart was becoming monstrously bored. Indeed in a soft, play-with-fire fashion she believed herself in love with Oliver's friend George, who himself adored her passionately. Naturally, therefore, when the bomb burst and Sara was no longer the wife of anybody, George thought his moment had come. I shall not carry the story of their three-cornered fight further. It remains three-cornered. Contrary to every accepted custom, the original and only genuine wife never once appears upon the stage. This strikes me as constituting a record in the avoidance of the scène-à-faire. Incidentally also it confirms me in my opinion of M. Hamilton as an author of originality and honesty, whose picture of Sara in particular shows that she understands a great deal about her own sex.
My enjoyment of a book that is frankly a study on a special subject is always limited by the interest of the subject itself, however prettily the theme be embroidered. The most eloquent disquisition on postage stamps, for example, would leave me unmoved. Margaret Peterson needs no introduction as a most eloquent writer on things Indian; yet "Eurasia," her set study in Tony Bellew (Melrose)—I am not likening it to philately, and should be sorry to be disrespectful to either—so swamps her story, and is in itself so little agreeable, that I cannot feel much enthusiasm for her latest work. That it is dry and barren cannot be said of a single page; indeed, I could even wish that such adjectives might be applicable here and there as a relief from the—shall I say?—clammy fungoid atmosphere that permeates, and is intended to permeate, the world that lies between the covers of this volume. The central figure—certainly not hero, and wanting something to be man—exhales in his fickle violences just this miasma; and rightly so, if the general conception of the book be just, for he is born of a Bengali mother. Even his final sacrifice to save Joan, herself about the only character one would care to meet, is hysterical and unnecessary, and does little to redeem him. I would gladly believe that the picture of her unpleasant experiences is as false as, I think you will agree, it is on the whole ugly and unsympathetic; though I admit that a lack of sympathy is as much against the intention of the writer as a certain unpleasantness is the deliberate object of her able craftsmanship. I must place it in your hands at that, with the advice to read or pass by according to your interest in the subject.
The Wise Virgins (Arnold) is one of those quaint old-world stories of the day when there were artists and individualists who despised convention and the stiffness of ordinary morality and wanted to realise themselves and occupied quite a lot of our attention. To read it is to plunge back through the mists of time into the early summer of 1914 a.d. And even then I have my doubts as to whether I should have been persuaded to share the sympathy which L. F. Woolf appears to feel for Harry Davis, the young Richstead painter. The two types of people among whom his lot is cast are cleverly if much too bitterly and unkindly contrasted—the Garlands, pre-eminently suburban, unable and (all except Gwen) unwilling to leave their monotonous groove, and the Lawrences, too cultured and full of æsthetic sensibilities to do anything but sit still and talk. Harry combines the æsthetic sense with a restless vitality which he attributes to his Jewish origin, and is desirous of action and enterprise. And so, rejected by Camilla Lawrence, he talks to Gwen until she almost compels him to compromise her, and the book closes with the mockery of a forced marriage in deference to the sentiments of Philistia. In spite of some skilful and penetrating satire, I fancy that 1915 will consider The Wise Virgins neither a very nice nor a very necessary book.
Teashop Waitress (feeling the pinch of War). "Just look at that lot, Edna! Not five minutes' chat in the whole crowd."