OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Zella Sees Herself (HEINEMANN) is an unusual and very subtle analysis of a single character. The author, E.M. DELAFIELD, has made an almost uncannily penetrating study of the development of a poseuse. Zella posed instinctively, from the days when as a child she alienated her father by attitudinising (with the best intentions) about her mother's funeral. It became a habit with her. In Rome, before the Arch of Titus, she thought more of what she might acceptably say about it than of any wonder or beauty in the thing itself. She fooled the honest man who imagined he was in love with her by making herself, for the time, just what her fatal facility for such perception told her he would most like her to be. The skill of the book is proved by the increasing anxiety, and even agitation, with which one awaits the moment that shall fulfil the title. It comes, bringing with it that almost intolerable tragedy of the soul, the black loneliness that waits upon insincerity. Then poor deluded Zella, seeing herself, sees also the fate that eventually befalls those who have deliberately falsified the signals by which alone one human heart can speak to and assist another. That is all the plot of the story, told with remarkable insight and a care that is both sympathetic and wholly unsparing. I am mistaken if you will not find it one of the most absorbing within recent experience. But I am not saying that it may not leave you just a little uncomfortable.
BOYD CABLE is already one of the prose Laureates of the War, having earned his wreath by Between the Lines and Action Front. He now proves that he is still entitled to it by Grapes of Wrath (SMITH, ELDER). The two former books gave us detached articles all relating to the one great subject. The present book is a continuous story, the episodes of which are held together by the deeds and characters of a quartette of friends, Larry Arundel, Billy Simson, Pug Sneath, and the noble and adventurous American, Kentucky Lee, who had enlisted in our Army to prove that "too proud to fight" was a phrase which did not agree with the traditions of an old Kentucky family. These four and the rest of the regiment, the Stonewalls, are plunged into one of the big "pushes" of the British Army, and their achievements in one form or another are thick on every page of the book. The author has reduced the description of a modern battle to a fine art. No one can describe more vividly the noise, the squalor, the terror, the high courage, the self-sacrifice and again the nerve-shattering noise, that go to make up the fierce confusion of trench-fighting. How anyone succeeds in surviving when so many instruments are used for his destruction is a mystery. The book is very certainly one to be read and re-read.
Separation (CASSELL) is another of those intimate studies of Anglo-Indian life that ALICE PERRIN has made specially her own. The tragedy of it is sufficiently conveyed by the title. Separation, of husband from wife or parent from child, is of course the spectre that haunts the Anglo-Indian home. It was, chiefly at least, for the health of their child Winnie that Guy Bassett was forced to let her and his wife abide permanently in Kensington while he himself continued his Eastern career as a grass-widower. Very naturally, the result was all sorts of trouble. This first took the form of a flirtation, only half serious, with an artful young woman of the type with which Mr. KIPLING has made us familiar. Unfortunately poor Bassett escapes from this emotional frying-pan only to plunge into the fire of a much more scorching attachment. But I will not spoil for you an ingenious plot. For one thing at least the book is worth reading, and that is the picture, admirably drawn, of the half-caste Orchard family, whose ways and speech and general outlook you will find an abiding joy. Mrs. PERRIN has nothing better in her whole gallery, which is saying much.
You probably know Mr. BLACKWOOD'S elusive method of mystery-mongering by now. None of his characters can ever quite make out whether the latest noise is a mewing cat, the wind in the trees or the Great God Pan flirting with the Hamadryads. He meets in Egypt a Russian, consumptive with a hooked nose and a rotten bad temper, and persists in seeing him as a hawk-man dedicated to the wingéd god, Horus. "No one could say exactly what happened." (They never can.) But it was something very solemn and important, and in the end the Russian, in a fancy dress of feathers, was found dead at the foot of the cliff, whither he had flown (or was it danced?—well, no one quite knew). He all but carried with him little golden-haired Vera, who was all but a dove. This is a quite characteristic sample out of Day and Night Stories (CASSELL). And the conclusion I came to was that Mr. BLACKWOOD must get a lot of fun out of staying in "cosmopolitan hotels." You need a special attitude for the proper enjoyment of these mystical yarns. I read them all conscientiously through, and I got far the best thrill out of "The Occupant of the Room," which, attempting less, was much more successful. "H.S.H.," His Satanic Majesty, of course, who was climbing the Devil's Saddle and turned in to the Club hut for desultory conversation about his lost kingdom with a stranded mountaineer, left me inappropriately cold. I suppose I am immune, a bad subject: but I feel as sure as I've felt about anything in the realm of light letters that a charming writer is overworking an unprofitable vein.
Mrs. Vernon's Daughter (METHUEN) is what one might call a story of situation. That is to say, it leads up to, and declines from, one big scène à faire. The scene, in this instance, is that in which Demaris, who has always previously imagined her mother to be an undervalued heroine, finds that on the contrary she is really no better (indeed a good deal worse) than she should be. And as if this disillusion were not enough the poor girl gets almost simultaneously the further shock of learning that the same adored parent, supposed by her to be a tragédienne of the first water, is in fact no more than a handsome stick, and unable (as they say) to act for nuts. Jesting apart, I am bound to admit that Lady TROUBRIDGE has risen admirably to the demands of her theme, and written a story both direct and appealing. Perhaps (dare I say?) its emotion is rather more secure than its grammar. The fact that she makes a duchess allude to "these kind of things" struck me at first as a subtlety of characterization, till I discovered that, some pages later, the author fell herself into the identical pit. But I suppose there is hardly any one of us wholly innocent of this offence; anyhow, it is only a small blemish upon a pleasant and (in its mild way) interesting story.
Lady of rather uncertain age (filling in application form for employment). "COULD YOU TELL ME WHAT YEAR I SHOULD HAVE TO BE BORN IN TO MAKE ME TWENTY-EIGHT?"
"A large assortment of real fur soft felt cats (Clerical)."—Advt. in "Glasgow Herald."
The tame kind, we suppose, so popular at tea-parties.