OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Madam Constantia (LONGMANS) is a war story, but of an earlier and more picturesque war. A simple tale, I am bound to call it, revolving entirely round a situation not altogether unknown to fiction, in which the hero and heroine, being of opposite sides, love and fight one another simultaneously. Actually the scene is set during the American struggle for independence, thus providing a sufficiency of pomp and circumstance in the way of fine uniforms and pretty frocks; and the protagonists are Captain Carter, of the British service, and Constantia Wilmer, daughter of the American who had captured him. Perhaps you may recall that the identical campaign has already provided a very similar position (reversed) in Miss Elizabeth's Prisoner. It is only a deserved tribute to the skill with which Mr. JEFFERSON CARTER has told this adventure of his namesake to admit that I am left with an uncertainty, not usual to the reviewing experience, whether it is in fact a true or an imagined affair. In any event its development follows a well-trodden path. We have the captive, jealous in honour, susceptible and exasperatingly Quixotic, doubly enchained by his word and the charms of his fair wardress; the lady's conspicuous ill-treatment of him at the first, a slight mystery, some escapes and counterplots, and on the appointed page the matrimonial finish that hardly the most pessimistic reader can ever have felt as other than assured. Fact or fiction, you may spend an agreeable hour in watching the course of Captain Carter's courtship overcoming its rather obvious obstacles.
Because I have so great an admiration for their beneficent activities, I have always wanted to meet a novel with a lot about dentists in it, and now Miss DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON, in The Tunnel (DUCKWORTH), has satisfied my desire. Dentists—a houseful of them—spittoons, revolving basins; patients going upstairs with sinking feelings; wondering at the pattern on the wallpaper; going down triumphant. Teeth. Appointment books. Dentists everywhere. This is not a quotation, but very like one, for Miss RICHARDSON affects the modern manner. Though one of the dentists is quite the most agreeable person in the book, he isn't the hero, because the author is much too clever to have anything of the sort. Her method, exploited some time ago in that remarkable book, Pointed Roofs, is to get right inside one Miriam Henderson and keep on writing out her thoughts with as little explanation of her circumstances as possible, so that The Tunnel, to anyone who has missed the earlier books, must be very nearly unintelligible. Even the sincere admirer of Miss RICHARDSON'S talent will begin to wonder how many more books at the present rate of progress must be required to bring Miriam to, say, threescore years and ten. My own belief is that if her creator is ever so ill-advised as to put her beneath a 'bus or drop her down a lift-well, she herself will be gone too; and for that I should be sorry, since I agree with almost all the nice things Miss MAY SINCLAIR says of the earlier books in an appreciation here reprinted from The Egoist. Miss RICHARDSON has evolved a way of writing a novel which somehow suggests the Futurist way of painting a picture; but The Tunnel has left me wondering whether she has not carried her method a little too far. It seems to me that some of her heroine's thoughts were not worth recording; but perhaps when another four or five books have been added to Miriam's life-history I may discover what the scheme may be that lies behind them all, and change my mind.
More than once before this I have enjoyed the dexterity of Miss VIOLET HUNT in a certain type of social satire; but I regret to say that the expectation with which I opened The Last Ditch (STANLEY PAUL) was doomed to some disappointment. The idea was promising enough—a study of our British best people confronting the ordeal of world-war; but somehow it failed to capture me. For one reason it is told in a series of letters—a dangerous method at any time. As usual, these are far too long and literary to be genuine; though they keep up a rather irritating pretence of reality by repetitions of the same events in correspondence from different writers. Moreover, letters whose concern is the progress of recruiting or the novelty of war can hardly at this time avoid an effect of having been delayed in the post. But all this would have mattered little if Miss HUNT had chosen her aristocrats from persons in whom it was possible to take more interest. But the plain fact is that you never met so tedious a set. They are not witty; they are not even wicked to any significant extent. They simply produce (at least in my case) no effect whatever. Perhaps this may all be of intention; the author may have meant to harrow us with the spectacle of our old nobility expiring as nonentities. But in that case the picture is manifestly unfair. And it is certainly dull—dull as the last ditch-water.
In America in France (MURRAY) Lieut. Col. FREDERICK PALMER, a member of the Staff Corps of the United States Army, sets out to tell the story of the making of an army. This is the first book by Colonel PALMER that has come my way, but I find that he has written four others, all of which I judge by their titles to be concerned with the War. Be that as it may, I welcome America in France both because it gives a narrative of America's tremendous effort, and because the book is written with a modesty which is very pleasing. America came to the job of fighting as a learner. Her soldiers did not boast of what they were going to do, but sat down solidly to learn, in order that she might be useful in the fighting-line. How she achieved her purpose the world now knows. If any fault is to be found with the author's style, it is that the limpidity and evenness of its flow make great events less easy of distinction than perhaps they might be; but most people will hail this as a merit rather than a fault, and I agree with them. Colonel PALMER records the names of the first three Americans who died fighting. The French General to whose unit they were attached ordered a ceremonial parade and made a speech in which he asked that the mortal remains of these young men be left in France. "We will," he continued, "inscribe on their tombs, 'Here lie the first soldiers of the United States to fall on the soil of France for Justice and Liberty' ... Corporal Gresham, Private Enright, Private Hay, in the name of France I thank you." As another matter of historical interest it may be stated that the first shot of the War on the American side was fired by Battery C of the 6th Field Artillery, "without waiting on going into position at the time set. The men dragged a gun forward in the early morning of October 23rd, and sent a shell at the enemy. There was no particular target. The aim was in the general direction of Berlin. The gun has been sent to West Point as a relic."
I must assume that Such Stuff as Dreams (MURRAY) was written by C.E.W. LAWRENCE with a purpose, but it remains obscure to me. A smart young married clerk in the oil business falls off the top of a bus on to his head and, from a confirmed materialist, becomes something not unlike a confirmed lunatic, with a faculty for seeing flaming emanations which enable him to place the owners of them in the true scale of human and spiritual values. He discovers that his wife's uncle, a whimsical but essentially tedious drunkard, is a better man than the egregious New Religionist pastor—a discovery I made for myself without falling off a bus. I was forced to the conclusion that these and equally dull, or duller, folk must exist or have existed, and that it could not possibly have been necessary to invent them. And if I am right then it obviously needs a greater sympathy than I can command to do justice to this type of narrative, with its presuppositions and inferences. Sir A. CONAN DOYLE has much to answer for.
I do not remember the precise number of murders which occur in Droonin' Watter (ALLEN AND UNWIN), but readers of this sensational story can accept my assurance that Mr. J.S. FLETCHER has a quick and decisive way of meting out justice (or injustice) to his characters. In fact, from the very start, when a man with a black patch over his eye walks into Berwick-upon-Tweed and takes lodgings with Mrs. Moneylaws (the mother of the man who tells the tale), the pace is red-hot. It is easy enough to discover improbabilities in such a yarn as this, but the only important question is whether one wants to discover what happens in the end, and I confess without a blush that I did want to follow Mr. J.S. FLETCHER to the last page. Let me however beg him in his next book to give the word "yon" a rest; four "yons" in eleven lines is a clear case of overcrowding; and I invite the attention of the Limited Labour Party to this scandal.
Young Sub (a very earnest pilgrim). "PLEASE SEND A LARGE BUNCH OF ROSES TO THE ADDRESS ON THAT CARD AND CHARGE IT TO ME."
Florist. "YES, SIR—AND YOUR NAME?"
Sub. "OH, NEVER MIND MY NAME—SHE'LL UNDERSTAND."
"Any owner whose dog shows signs of illness should be chained up securely."—Bradford Daily Argus.
And every other Argus will say the same.