OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
It was a special duty of the late JOHN F. MACDONALD, who was cut off in his prime after incautiously adding to his journalistic labours in Paris the voluntary and too exacting duties of entertaining the wounded, to emphasize the Entente Cordiale. Ever since KING EDWARD laid the foundation of that understanding between England and France, it was Mr. MACDONALD'S delight as well as his livelihood to study every facet of it, both in Paris and in London, and with unfailing humour and spirit, fortified by swift insight, to present each in turn to his readers. The two best papers in the first volume of the posthumous collection of his writings are those which describe in vivid kindly strokes the triumphant impact of the late KING on the Parisians some fourteen years ago, and the visit, not long after, of five hundred London school-children to the French capital. Had Mr. MACDONALD been spared to prepare this book himself, there is no doubt that he would have subjected his essays to revision and brought them into a more harmonious whole; but as they stand, gathered together in this volume, Two Towns—One City (GRANT RICHARDS), by the proud hands of his mother, they have charm and vitality and the authenticity of first-hand knowledge and lively sympathy. The War, as we have just been reminded by an impressive memorial service, has made deep gaps in the ranks of English journalists, and the loss of JOHN F. MACDONALD'S quick eyes, happy choice of words, and intensely human apprehensions was far from being the least.
Whether you enjoy The House in Marylebone (DUCKWORTH) will depend entirely upon your taste for the society of a number of hardworking but sentimental "business girls." For this is the whole matter of Mrs. W.K. CLIFFORD'S book. I call her girls sentimental, because (for all that they are supposed to be chiefly concerned with living their own lives) you will be struck at once with the extent to which they contrive to mix themselves up with the lives of any male creatures who venture over the horizon. "Our little republic," says one of its inmates towards the end of the book, "is firmly feminine and hasn't done much falling in love." Well, well—I suppose this is a question that turns upon your definition of the word "much;" to me personally they seldom seemed to be doing, or thinking about, anything else. Nor could I help reflecting how much fuller and more vigorous all Mrs. CLIFFORD'S cast would have found their existence to-day. Perhaps this feeling explains a slight impatience which the society of so much struggling femininity eventually produced in me. Young women still live in houses in the Marylebone Road; they still proclaim republics of hardworking celibacy, and fall briskly in love with the first eligible bachelor; but their vocations and their citizenship have both (Hoch der KAISER!) grown out of all knowledge. So that charming writer, Mrs. CLIFFORD, must forgive me if I could find only an historical interest, and no very robust one at that, in her amiable retrospect.
AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE have certainly been well advised about their sub-title to The Black Office and other Chapters of Romance (MURRAY). For that is precisely what the tales are; and excellently romantic and thrilling chapters too, for the most part dated in the decade following the great Anglo-French peace of a century ago. Probably you couldn't say off-hand what the Black Office was. Let me whisper. It was, amongst other things, a postal censorship that opened and perused all letters intended to cross the Channel. With what natural indignation would you, in July three years ago, have read of such monstrous activities! Truly, as the authors say, there is some interest in the comparison of then and now. Of the other stories, my own favourites would he "The Resurrectionist" and "The Smile on the Portrait." The first of these is a haunting affair of body-snatching, or rather of an early escapade of the notorious BURKE, who was asked to supply a red-haired corpse, and not finding one produced instead a gentleman who had yet to fulfil the condition precedent to body-snatching, i.e. who had to be killed first and snatched afterwards. This is certainly as grim as anything I have met over the Castellated signature. Beside it, "The Smile on the Portrait," the tale of a jealous husband who becomes a maniac, is almost soothing. They had clearly their little worries even a century ago. The CASTLES, as everybody knows, have always had the trick of adventurous fiction; The Black Office, etc., proves that their hands have lost nothing of their cunning.
One has heard so often of works of "absorbing interest" that appeared at "the psychological moment" that one feels a bit squeamish about applying these phrases even to such a book as Mr. HARRY DE WINDT'S Russia as I Know It (CHAPMAN AND HALL); but honestly their appropriateness cannot be denied in view of the author's peculiar knowledge of the too mysterious country on which interest just now is so poignantly concentrated. He has not only traversed Siberia as few, even Russians, have done—that is an old though still thrilling story—but he has ranged at large over the whole country from Finland to the Crimea (the only two parts, by the way, which he has made me thirst to visit), and has gone with his eyes open. In the present volume, touching only incidentally on his journeyings and still less on politics, he has tried to satisfy the thousand-and-one questioners who, one imagines, have been plaguing him not a little lately as to those intimate details that really count in the life of a nation. He tells us for instance how the Russians do business and keep out the cold; how many of the women you could call pretty, and how much mutton a Kirghiz can eat. Though some of this is not new, yet the book has, as a whole, a most vivid freshness, and, if in the end the main effect is to make one content to live out of Russia, that is a tribute to the writer's frankness. At the least one is able to rejoice in his final verdict of unqualified enthusiasm for his hosts, since he found not merely acquaintances ready to welcome the popular English, but true and trustworthy friends in all classes of the community.
MRS. OLIVER ONIONS has a light puckish humour and a smooth if over-hasty pen, and I don't think she quite does her own intelligence (or ours) full justice in The Bridge of Kisses (HUTCHINSON). I liked her flapper heroine, Joey, and the naughty nephews, the O.U.2's, and her sapper lover, The Bridge Builder, who was a confoundedly long time over his work, by the way, but ultimately came into his own over his own bridge of kisses, built under a heavy barrage of needless misunderstandings. But Joey's pipsqueak shirker fiancé, Hilary, was altogether too foolish a travesty of a man ever to have gained her hand or, having gained it, to have held it against any real male in or out of khaki. The fact is that "BERTHA RUCK" can achieve something better than these meandering methods and this spinelessness of characterisation; and it is distinctly disappointing to see her content with the curate's egg standard.
It is time that some of our novelists put up a statue to NAPOLEON for services rendered to the cause of fiction. In Miss MAY WYNNE'S A Spy for Napoleon (JARROLD) his misdeeds and those of his minions are made to serve the purpose of emphasizing the loyalty of the heroine to her lover. This lover was an Englishman of a type sufficiently familiar in novels—cold and masterful, but, for some reason not apparent to me, extremely attractive. As he seemed to be roaming about France with the object of getting NAPOLEON out of the way by any means available, I am not certain that he was playing the game, even when we remember that the rules of it were lax enough at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But we are not asked to weigh carefully the merits of character. It is just a romance of incident, in which a hot pace is set at the start and kept up to the finish. In short you get a good run for your money, and that is all about it.
From a review of a novel:—
"Joan is pretty, and Stewart Austen ... asks her to marry him. Joan refuses indignantly on the ground that his views and conduct are opposed to those which as a member of a Suffrage Society she is pledged to eradicate."—The Saturday Westminster.
Why the lady should resent her lover's endorsement of her own opinions is just one of those things that no fellah (unless he is a reviewer) can understand.
"Besides being Paul Von Hindenburg's second self, Ludendorff is the transportation expert of the Central Powers. He was ordered to go to the industrial cities along the Rhine and the Rhone rivers."—Evening Paper.
It is a pity that the second part of this enterprise had for geographical reasons to be abandoned, for we understand that Lyons would have given him a particularly warm reception.
"The Canadian Club gave a luncheon to-day in honour of the Canadian Highlanders, who have been a picturesque feature of the British recruiting week in New York....
"An exciting incident occurred during the luncheon, when two German waiters were ejected from the room. The Highlanders now go to Chicago to make a similar demonstration."—Morning Paper.
As nothing more has been heard of the matter, it is supposed that the Germans in Chicago prudently refused to wait for them.