OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Do you remember a clever, gloomy story that Mr. HUGH WALPOLE wrote, some years ago, about a pack of schoolmasters who got so monstrously upon one another's nerves that the result was attempted murder? I have just been reading a new story that may be regarded as the female counterpart of the same tragedy. Regiment of Women (HEINEMANN) is described as a first novel; and there are indeed signs of this in a certain verbosity and diffuseness of attack. But it is at least equally clear that the writer, CLEMENCE DANE, has the root of the matter in her. As in the book with which I have compared it, the setting of this is scholastic—a girls' school here, with all its restricted outlook, its small intrigues, and exaggerated friendships, mercilessly exposed. You will be willing to admit that it is at least aptly named when I tell you that not till page 135 does so much as the shadow of a man appear, and then but fleetingly as the father of the poor child, Louise, the tragedy of whose death is the central incident of the book. Naturally it can be nothing else than a painful story; in particular the figure of Clare, the adored teacher, whose cruel egoistical friendship, with its alternations of encouragement and brutality, first drives Louise to suicide, and all but wrecks the life of the young assistant-mistress, Alwynne, has in it something coldly sinister that haunts the memory. But of its power there can be no question. On one small point of psychology I am at issue with the writer. I doubt whether the child Louise could have played Arthur in the school theatricals so marvellously as we are asked to believe without cheering herself, by such an artistic success, out of the temptation to suicide. But the ways of morbidity are unsearchable, and this is no more than an expression of individual opinion. It is not meant to qualify my admiration for the skill of this remarkable and arresting story.
If the long postponement of the appearance of another novel—Vesprie Towers (SMITH, ELDER)—by the late Mr. THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON, means (I am careful not to say it does) that the author never intended it to see the light of day, honesty obliges one to admit that there may have been wisdom in that decision, for the story of Violet Vesprie, though touched with a certain charm and distinction, sadly lacks the imaginative intensity of Aylwin. The plot is commonplace, being the familiar record of how the country seat of a once illustrious family nearly, but of course not quite, passed into the hands of strangers when the last of the race came to poverty. Even the inevitable flight to London is not spared us or the heroine, and it is really only when the writer tires of his attempted conventionality that he comes more nearly to his own. The return of Violet to her old home, for instance, is most fortunate in its failure to follow the rules, that attractive young lady being quite content to be whisked back in the turning of a page from destitution in Lambeth to the place she loves, without knowing or caring at all how the miracle has been wrought; while we, reader and author alike, equally in the dark, are too happy to have her home to worry about it either, preferring to wander with her through the dear old rooms and let explanations go hang. Anyhow, perhaps one can forgive a certain amount of looseness in a story that holds such pleasant things as a family rainbow, an "osier ait" and a sailor-poet worshipping from afar. And indeed, though far from brilliant, the book is really rather lovable.
In The Leatherwood God (JENKINS) Mr. W.D. HOWELLS has written a powerful and very interesting study of an unusual theme. Religious mania, and those queer manifestations of it that hover uncertainly between fraud and hysteria, have always provided a subject of attraction for the curious. Mr. HOWELLS sets his romance in the early days of the last century, at the backwoods settlement of Leatherwood, where the community of the faithful are perturbed by the arrival amongst them of a stranger, one Dylks, who claims divine origin and the power to work miracles. Actually, this Dylks was about as bad a hat as any made. He had deserted his legal wife, Nancy, and allowed her, in supposed widowhood, to marry a de facto husband whom she adored. So you will see that the turning up again of Number One, unrecognised and surrounded by the trappings of god-head and the adoration of the Elect, creates for Nancy a very pretty and absorbing problem in social ethics. But Mr. HOWELLS has done more than this. Having shown Dylks as the arch-villain and impostor that he is, he proceeds to the subtler task of enlisting our sympathy for him. It is this that gives the story its higher quality. The horror of the poor wretch's position, driven on by his own words, almost, in time, coming himself to a kind of belief in them, haunted always by the increasing demands of his dupes, is most powerfully portrayed. So much so that in the end we hear of his death (by suicide or accident) with an emotion of relief and pity that is a real tribute to his creator. The Leatherwood God is not a long story, but for concentrated power it deserves to be classed amongst the outstanding work of the season.
I should call Mrs. VICTOR RICKARD a bold plotter—of course in a strictly literary sense. It must at this moment have required some courage to make your hero an agent of the British Secret Service. And having done this she certainly shirks none of the unpleasant possibilities of the situation so created. In the interest of his profession, and for no reward save the service of his country, Marcus Janover is called upon to sacrifice love, friendship, even his personal honour. Just how all this comes about I leave you to discover by The Light above the Cross Roads (DUCKWORTH). It is a powerful and highly original story that has the distinction of breaking entirely new ground in war-novels. The scenes of it, laid partly in Ireland, partly in Berlin, or behind the German lines, are themselves guarantees of the unusual. One slight criticism that I have to make rises from the question whether so expert an "agent" as Marcus would really employ blot-producing ink for his map tracery when, on his own confession, he might have used pencil. But if the blots had not been there the Prussians (oddly obtuse as to the real meaning of Marcus's presence amongst them) would never have arrested Ursule, and thus provided a dramatic and unhackneyed situation. There is a gravity and distinction, moreover, about the tale that somehow reminds me of the late Monsignor BENSON. It is undoubtedly a story that should be read.
I am rather puzzled what to say about the The Grey Shepherd (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), because it is essentially a story that will appeal very differently to readers of different temperaments. Some people will say, "How beautiful!" Others perhaps, "How precious!" and both with a certain truth. For my own part, I should select a middle course, and say that Mrs. J.E. BUCKROSE has had a wholly admirable idea for a short story, which she has done her best to spoil by enlarging it to book dimensions, and a little over-sweetening it. There is real delicacy and beauty in her theme. The youth forced by partial blindness to give up all the hopes for which he had been educated, who becomes a shepherd, solacing himself with his pipe (musical) and the simplicities of country lore for the loss of love and ambition; and eventually, after his death, is deified by rustic tradition into a supernatural helper of "all things that are kind"—here is an idea for the tenderest handling. My feeling is, while giving Mrs. BUCKROSE every credit for such an inspiration, that she should have been a little sterner with herself over the treatment, and thus avoided a certain stickiness that may irritate those who prefer the simplicity of nature to a not quite sufficiently concealed art. But, as I began by saying, it all depends on the individual palate; and, anyhow, the book has the historic excuse of being a very little one, which you can read, with pleasure or irritation, within the hour.
If you should chance to hanker for a change from novels in which the hero and heroine dally over-long in falling in love you will get it by reading The Fur-Bringers (HODDER AND STOUGHTON). No time is wasted upon preliminaries, not a minute; and as soon as Ambrose Deane and Colina Gaviller have met and discovered at sight that they are just made for each other the really exciting part of the story begins. I forget how many times Ambrose is arrested during the course of the tale, but I do know that things keep on happening all the time, and that the rescue of the hero by the Indian girl Nesis is delightfully told. Altogether Mr. HULBERT FOOTNER'S picture of the life of a trader in Athabasca is particularly attractive. I like it all, including the cover.
