OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The Safety Candle (CASSELL) might have been called, but for the fact that the title has been used already, A Comedy of Age. For this is what it is—only perhaps less a comedy than a tragedy. Agnes Tempest was called the Safety Candle, for the ingenious reason that, though attractive, she burnt nobody's wings. Returning as a middle-aging widow, after an unhappy wifehood in Africa, she meets on the boat two persons, Captain Brangwyn, a young man, and a girl-mother calling herself Antonina Pisa. Hence the tears. Brangwyn she marries, doubtfully, half-defiantly, despite the difference in years between them; Antonina is taken as a companion and very soon developes into a sick-nurse. For in the space between the ship-board engagement and the wedding a railway accident changes poor Agnes from a still beautiful and active woman to a nerve-ridden invalid. But in spite of this she and Brangwyn marry; and (with the much too attractive Antonina always in evidence) you can guess the result. One odd point; you will hardly get any distance into Miss E.S. STEVENS' exceedingly well-written story without being struck by its resemblance to one of Mr. HICHENS' romances. The relative positions of the members of the triangle, middle-aged wife, young husband, and girl are exactly those of The Call of the Blood; while the Sicilian setting is identical. But this of course is by no means to accuse Miss STEVENS of plagiarism; her development of the situation, and especially the tragedy that resolves it, is both original and convincing. The end indeed took me wholly unawares, since as a hardened novel-reader I had naturally been expecting—but read it, and see if you also are not startled by a refreshing departure from the conventional.
If there still linger in the remoter parts of Cromarty or the Balls Pond Road certain unsophisticated persons who believe that the stage is one long glad symposium of wine, woman and song they will be interested to know that Mr. KEBLE HOWARD has written his latest novel, The Gay Life (JOHN LANE), with the express object—or so he says—of disillusioning them. He has no use for the cynic who declared that there are three sexes, men, women and actors. His Thespians are gay because they are happy, and happy because (though poor) they are virtuous. The crowning ambition of their lives of honest toil is not unlimited silk-stockings and champagne suppers, but the combined and unqualified approval of Mr. GRANVILLE BARKER and Miss HORNIMAN. I fear the Philistines will not be much impressed with Mr. KEBLE HOWARD'S championship. In the first place he selects for his heroine a girl of what used to be known as the "lower orders." Yet it is more than doubtful if the lower orders have ever done anything for Mr. KEBLE HOWARD except open his cab-doors and bring his washing home on Saturday night. Otherwise he would not make his East End of London heroine talk an argot of which fifty per cent, is pure East Side Noo York. True, "the curtain" finds her in New York in the arms of a faithful and acrobatic American, so perhaps it doesn't matter much. Meanwhile she has become the idol of the Manchester School, enjoyed an unsuccessful season in partnership with the late Sir HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE, and signed a contract with the SCHUBERTS to tour the States, and all without any apparent diminution of the guileless flow of "Whitechapel" with which she won the hearts of her first employers. It is courageous of Mr. HOWARD to place on record his apparent belief that a total absence of the three "R's" and any number of "h's" cannot debar a strong-minded daughter of the slums from the higher rungs of the histrionic ladder.
When a warm-hearted and law-abiding gentleman, who has kept open-house for many guests, suddenly discovers that these guests have plotted against him, have read his private correspondence, have caused explosions in his garden, have attacked his neighbours from the vantage-ground of his house, and altogether have behaved as if he didn't exist, he is not unlikely to be both shocked and angry, and to denounce to the world the crew of traitors and assassins who have imposed on his kindness and hospitality. This is what happened to Uncle Sam at the hands of the German conspirators for whom he had unconsciously provided a base of operations. A full account of the doings of this poisonous gang is given in The German Spy in America (HUTCHINSON), by JOHN PRICE JONES, a member of the staff of the New York Sun. It is not easy for anyone, least of all for a good American, to refrain from indignation at the baseness of the rogues who thus battened for many months on the United States and their people. The book is soberly and clearly written, and is commended by Mr. ROOSEVELT in a Foreword, to which are added another Foreword by the Author, and an Introduction by Mr. ROGER B. WOOD, formerly U.S. Assistant-Attorney in New York.
With whatever sharpness of criticism I had approached Ma'am (HUTCHINSON), the edge of it would have been turned by the statement upon the fly-leaf that the author, M. BERESFORD RYLEY, died while the novel was still in manuscript, and that it has been revised for the press by her friend, Mr. E.V. LUCAS. As things are, having before me only the pleasant task of praise, I am the more sorry that I cannot increase that pleasure by telling the writer how much I have enjoyed a wholly admirable story. She had above everything the rare art of writing about homely and familiar matters unboringly. Ma'am (a not too happy title) begins in a dull parish, where its heroine is the newly-wedded wife of the curate. You will have read no more than the opening pages (descriptive of the terrible Sunday evening supper which the pair took at the Vicarage—a supper of cold meat and a ground-rice mould, whereat four jaded and parish-worn persons lacerated one another's nerves) before you will have realised gratefully that the story and its characters are going to be alive with a very refreshing and unpuppetlike vitality. Eventually, of course, more happens than Vicarage suppers. An old lover of Griselda (Mrs. Curate) turns up, and many most unparochial events follow upon his arrival. The scene shifts to Naples, and we meet a villaful of men and women, all of them admirably original and human. Not for a great while have I read a story so unforced and appealing. It is indeed a sad thought that this graceful pen will give us nothing more of its quality.
When you hear the title or see the cover of The Heel of the Hun (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) your blood may begin to curdle and your flesh to creep. Be assured. When I think of some of the war-books vouchsafed to us Mr. J.P. WHITAKER'S is almost tame, and I venture to say that it might be read out loud at a party of sock-knitters without a stitch being dropped. Mr. WHITAKER was in Roubaix and, presumably because he was believed to be an American, was allowed considerable freedom. So, before he escaped into Holland, he saw some things which were not for British eyes, and he tells us about them with a staidness altogether unusual in this kind of book. Although he forgets to mention the fact, his articles have already appeared in The Times, and I can see no particular reason why they should have been gathered together in this brief volume. Anyhow, I must believe that the Hun's heel fell less heavily on Mr. WHITAKER than upon most people who have had the misfortune to be introduced to it.
An author who can choose so fascinating a title as The Way of the Air (HEINEMANN) certainly has much in his favour, and this not only because of the more or less temporary connection between aeronautics and victory, but because just lately we have all been talking large and free about peace-time developments of the craft in the near future. Personally I have already arranged to take my wife's mother for a short week-end in the Holy Land in the Spring of 1920; and a forty-eight hours' mail service to Bombay is an event of to-morrow. Thus, if Mr. EDGAR C. MIDDLETON'S book fails to secure general appreciation, he must place the blame elsewhere than with his subject, and it is a fact that by some repetitions and contradictions, as well as by a tendency to let one down at what should be the critical point of his yarns, he has done something to alienate a public—such as myself—entirely predisposed in his favour. It remains to say, all the same, that this little volume is in the main a sincere and obviously well-informed account of the doings of the men of our air services, full of incident and achievement utterly beyond belief an unbelievably short time ago. In the pages he devotes to prophecy—an irresistible temptation—he is on controversial ground, and his apparent preference for the "gas-bag" as the principal craft of the future will certainly not find general acceptance. Much more to my liking is his suggestion that duck chasing and shooting from an aeroplane—it has already been done at least once—may become a recognised sport.
Barber. "MY TONIC 'AIR-RESTORER IS TO THE BALD 'EAD WHAT THE BENEFICENT SPRAY IS TO THE BLIGHTED TOOBER."