OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
A volume called Curious Happenings (Mills and Boon) can boast at least a highly attractive, open-and-see title; to which is added, in the present instance, a wrapper-picture of the most intriguing brand. Perhaps not quite all the contents of Miss Marjorie Bowen's book of short stories fully live up to the promise of its outside (what stories could?), but they have amongst them one, from which both title and picture are taken, of very unusual and haunting quality. So, if you should only be able to snatch so much time from work of National importance as suffices to read a single tale, begin at the start, and be assured of having the best. Not that the others are without their attractions, though one is rather gratuitously revolting. Laid in the picturesque eighteenth century, they all exhibit Miss Bowen's very pretty gift for costume-drama at its happiest. The trouble is that, with a volume of such short tales, stories of situation, one gets too familiar with the method—as, for example, in "The Folding Doors," where a lady's husband and lover had played out their scene before the closed doors (with an alleged cut finger for the husband), and I knew only too well in what state the flinging open of the doors would reveal the lady herself. But perhaps I am exceptionally cursed in this matter; and, anyhow, a volume that contains even one story so good as "The Pond" is a thing for gratitude and rejoicing.
I may have been wrong in turning to a novel for mental relief; anyhow, I have just come through one of the toughest bouts of relaxation I can remember, and my only solace for the slight weariness of such repose is the thought how much more tired the author, Mr. Basil Creighton, must be. With such a hail-storm of metaphor and epigram constantly dissolving in impalpable mist of mere words has he assaulted The History of an Attraction (Chatto and Windus) that the poor thing, atomised, vaporised and analysed to the bone, lies limp and lifeless between the covers, with hardly a decent rag of incident or story to cover it. And there one might perhaps be content to let it rest, but for the fact that Anita, the lady of the "Attraction," is worthy of a better fate. The principal man of the book, who, after much wobbling consideration, and in spite of his quite fortuitous marriage with some one else in the meantime, discovers at last that he does love Anita, is the merest peg on which to hang endless philosophisings; and so is his impossible wife Janet herself, the lady who, after having accepted his dubious courtship for no particular reason, fortunately deserts him without any better excuse, thus clearing the way for a most decorous divorce and readjustment. Neither is the writer's inner thesis—the immoralness of ordinary morality, so far as I can make out—particularly agreeable; but Anita, though far from being the sort of person one would look to meet in real life, is intriguing after a fashion, and just possibly repays the hard work needed for the making of her acquaintance.
Miss M.E.F. Irwin, whose previous books I remember to have greatly enjoyed, has produced for her third a story of much originality and power, called Out of the House (Constable). The title may perplex you at first. It comes from the struggles of the heroine to wrench herself free from encompassing family ties and the tradition of intermarriage, in order to join her life to the outside lover who calls to her. You might therefore consider it, in some sense, a story of eugenics, but that its outlook is emotional rather than scientific. Yet the Pomfrets, as a result of family pride and over-specialization, had become a sufficiently queer lot to warrant a normal girl in any violence of house-breaking to be free of them. Therein of course lies the cleverness of the book; it is full of atmosphere, and the atmosphere is full of dust, Pomfret dust. You can feel how heavy to rebellious lungs must have been the air of the Pomfret houses, where lived Philip, the intriguing father, and his sons Anthony (a little mad) and Charles (much more mad, but with at least the instincts of a lunatic gentleman). It is not, you will guess, precisely a lively tale, but the force of it is undeniable. Miss Irwin has now more than ever proved herself a fastidious and careful artist, with a touch of austerity that gives weight to a tale so frankly one of sentiment, and she will, I hope, continue to keep her work above the ordinary level.
The Wane of Uxenden (Arnold) seems to be one of those novels which may be classed as worthy in intention without being exactly happy in execution. Miss Legge has a desire to warn us all against the perils of monkeying with spiritism, and she has chosen the method of making it tiresome even to read about. Well, it is a method certainly. Uxenden was a nice old family, which had come down to cutting its timber while a rich Jewish soap-and-scent-manufacturer sat rubbing his hands on a slice of the property, waiting for the rest of it to come his way. Uxenden eventually waned entirely, and without tears so far as I was concerned. I feel sure Mr. La Haye (né Levinstein) would make a better landlord than the old squire, in spite of the prejudices of the countryside.... No, I am afraid it would be stretching a point to promise you any great entertainment from this well-intentioned but rather woolly book. Brother Jenkins, the fraud, of the Society of Seven, is about the most entertaining of the marionettes.
Lady Customer. "But are you sure that this chair is genuine Charles II.? It looks rather new."
Fake Antique Dealer (off his guard). "I'm sorry, Madam, we have no real antiques in stock. You see we can't get the labour."
Our Kindly Critics.
"It is Mr. Wells's great advantage as a preacher that he has a prose style instinct with life and beauty. Somewhere he speaks of a cathedral as a 'Great, still place, urgent with beauty'; somewhere else he says, 'The necessary elements of religion can be written on a postcard.'"—Daily Chronicle.
"Callisthenes" must look to his laurels.
Extract from the letter of a lady who helps in parish work and is full of agricultural enthusiasm:—
"Next week I am going to start digging for the vicar."
Assuming that the reverend gentleman was inadvertently buried alive, we deprecate this delay.