OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
If Wishes were Horses (HURST AND BLACKETT) is one of the most engaging novels that I have met for some time. The matter of it, perhaps, is nothing very new: a story of expanding fortunes and contracting sympathies. But the writer, Countess BARCYNSKA, has, before all else, the inestimable gift of making you believe in her people. All the characters are vigorously alive. The result is that one follows with quite unusual interest the chequered career of her central figure, Martin Leffley, from his introduction as a frankly unpleasant youth, very red about the ears, "which was where he always blushed," to the final glimpse of him, titled, an M.P., and, incidentally, a bowed and better man, purified by the wonderful devotion of Rose, the wife whom throughout the tale he has bullied and undervalued. Nor is Rose herself, with her unwavering belief in her clay idol, a less memorable figure. Of the others, my chief affection went to Aunt Polly, the kindly dealer in old clothes, who imagined the Savile to be a night club. But, as I say, the whole cast is astonishingly real. Only once did I fear for the story, when it seemed as though the machinations of a super-villainous M.P. were about to lead it astray into the paths of melodrama. But the danger proved to be brief, and the unexpected beauty and dignity of the closing chapter would have redeemed a more serious lapse.
Forced to Fight (HEINEMANN) is the record of a Schleswig Dane set forth by ERICH ERICHSEN and very capably translated from the Danish by INGEBORG LUND. It is a book that with a singular skill and with a passion that never gets out of hand so as to convey the impression of hysterical exaggeration lays bare the heart of a youth who was at the storming of Liége, fought in Flanders, then on the Russian Front and again in the Argonne, whence a shattered elbow sent him home broken and aged—that is what his chronicler emphasises—not by the wound, but by the long horror and fatigue of the successive campaigns. The poignancy of his sufferings lay in the fact that as a Dane he went without any of the great hopes and passions that inspired his German comrades, of whom however he speaks with no ill-will. He took part by order in some of the "punishments" of Belgian villages, loathing the savage cruelties of them and deeply convinced that the rape of Belgium was an inexpiable wrong which the world will remember to the lasting dishonour of the German name. You get an impression of the added horror of this War for the imaginative temperamental, and some pathetic pictures of all the suffering among simple innocent machine-driven people on the other side, who had no will to war and no illusions as to the splendour of world-dominion—a vision of desolate homes and countrysides empty of all but very old men.
The first lines of Still Life (CONSTABLE), which begins in "the night train from the German frontier to Paris," gave me much the same impression of impossibility (was there ever such a train?) that I should have felt about a story that opened in the moon. But the shock of this was nothing to some, different in character, that were to follow. Frankly, I confess that Mr. MIDDLETON MURRY'S book has me baffled. Others perhaps may admire the pains lavished by the author in analysing the emotions of a group of characters whose temperaments certainly give him every opportunity for this exercise. An impressionist, and impressionable, youth, whom I have (reluctantly) to call hero, intrigues his unpleasant way through the plot; first in Paris—where you may make a shrewd guess at his pre-occupations—then in an English village, to which he has eloped with the wife of a friend; in France again, and so on. The emotions to which these amorous adventures expose him are handled by the author with a care that suggests rather the naughtiness of the antique nineties than anything belonging to these more vigorous days. I am far from suggesting that, as a study in super-sensibility, the book lacks skill. There are indeed scenes of almost painful cleverness. My complaint is that it is out of date, or (I should perhaps better say) conspicuously out of harmony with the present time. But if you hanker for these pictures of the past that is another matter. I will merely issue a warning that you should preserve this book on some shelf not too accessible by those who are still young enough to overestimate its importance.
It was an odd experience to turn, as I did, directly from the new Haymarket play, of which the late TOM GALLON was part author, to what I suppose was the last story he ever wrote, The Lady in the Black Mask (MILLS AND BOON), which begins in a theatre with the heroine watching a play. It begins, moreover, very well and excitingly; much better, I regret to add, than it goes on. When the heroine arrived home from the theatre, the girl whose companion she was, pleading fatigue, persuaded her to go out again to a masked ball, wearing the dress and indeed assuming the personality of her mistress. The two girls, Ruth, the heroine, and Damia, lived in a gloomy house with old Mr. Verinder, who was Damia's guardian. But when Ruth returned from the ball she found that this arrangement no longer held good, Verinder having been melodramatically stabbed during her absence. And as no one knew, or would ever believe, that it was Damia and not herself who had remained at home you recognise a very pretty gambit of intrigue. Unfortunately, as I said above, the tension is not quite sustained, partly because the characters all behave in an increasingly foolish and improbable fashion (even for tales of this genre); partly because there is never sufficient uncertainty as to who it was (not, of course, Damia) who really killed Verinder. Still, of its kind, as the sort of shocker that used to be valued at a shilling, but appears, like everything else, to have risen in price, The Lady in the Black Mask is fairly up to the average. I fancy her profits might have been greater before the discouragement of railway travelling. That is precisely the environment for which she is best fitted.
In the series of "Chap" books which is emerging from The Bodley Head I have no doubt that Canada Chaps will be welcome. I hope, however, that Mrs. SIME will not mind my saying that the best of her tales are those which have more to do with Canada than its "chaps." Her stories of fighting and of fighters seem to me to have a note in them that does not ring quite true. It is just the difference between the soldier telling his own artless and rugged tale and someone else telling it for him with a touch of artifice. But when the author merely uses the War as her background she writes with real power. The straining for effect vanishes, and so little do the later stories resemble the earlier that I should not have guessed that they were written by the same hand. "Citoyenne Michelle" and "The King's Gift," for instance, are true gems, and they are offered to you at the price of paste. Nowhere will you find a better bargain for your shilling.
HELEN MACKAY, in A Journal of Small Things (MELROSE), sets before us with, it might seem, almost too deliberate simplicity of idiom little scenes and remembered reflections of her days in France since the July of the terrible year. An American to whom France has come to be her adopted and most tenderly loved foster-country, she tells of little things, chiefly sad little things, seen in the hospitals she served or by the wayside or in the houses of the simple and the great, shadowed alike by the all-embracing desolation of the War. The writer has a singular power of selecting the significant details of an incident, and a delicate sensitiveness to beauty and to suffering which gives distinction to this charming book. Less happy perhaps and much less in the picture are the episodes learnt only at second hand and suggesting the technique and unreality of the imagined short story.
Troubled Householder (writing). "THERE IS A SLIGHT LEAKAGE IN ONE OF OUR WATER-PIPES. KINDLY PUT MY NAME DOWN AS A HUMBLE CANDIDATE FOR YOUR ESTEEMED SERVICES."