OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
MR. COMPTON MACKENZIE gives us in Sylvia and Michael (SECKER) a continuation—I hesitate to say a conclusion—of the adventures of that amazing heroine, Sylvia Scarlett, which, being not a sequel but a second volume, needs some familiarity with the first for its full enjoyment. Not that anyone even meeting Sylvia for the first time in mid-course could fail to be intrigued by the astounding things that are continually happening to her. The variety and piquancy of these events and the general brilliance of Mr. MACKENZIE'S colouring must keep the reader alert, curious, scandalized (perhaps), but always expectant. His scheme starts with an invigorating plunge (as one might say, off the deep end) into the cabaret society of Petrograd in 1914, where Sylvia and the more than queer company at the pension of Mère Gontran are surprised by the outbreak of war. Incidentally, Mère Gontran herself, with her cats, whose tails wave in the gloom "like seaweed," and her tawdry spiritualism—"key-hole peeping at infinity" the heroine (or the author) rather happily calls it—is one of the least forgettable figures in the galaxy. I have no space to indicate what turns of this glittering kaleidoscope eventually bring Sylvia and Michael together during the Serbian retreat, though there are scenes upon which I should like to dwell, notably that of the death of Guy Hazlewood, an incident whose admirable restraint shows Mr. MACKENZIE at his best. One question I have to ask, and that is how has Sylvia learnt to imitate so bewilderingly the mannerisms of Michael? Her soliloquies especially might have come straight from the first volume of Sinister Street, so much more do they suggest the cloistered adolescence of Carlington Road than a development from her own feverish youth. While I cannot pretend that she has for me the compelling vitality of Jenny Pearl, her adventures certainly make (for those who are not too nice about the morals or the conversation of their company) an exhilarating, even intoxicating entertainment, the end of which is, I am glad to think, still remote.
The publishers, in their preface to Mr. HUGH SPENDER'S new novel, The Seekers (COLLINS), led me to believe that it was written with the object of denouncing the dangers and the frauds of spiritualism. This, however, is by no means the case. To be sure the first few chapters do contain an account of a séance, which serves not so much to lay bare the mysteries of spiritualism as to bring together a few of the characters in the novel. From that point onward there is nothing more about spooks, save for an occasional reference. It is when the dramatis personæ have been well collected in and about a Yorkshire vicarage that things really get a move on and begin to hum. No reader is entitled to complain of a lack of excitement; the mortality, indeed, is almost Shakspearean. Rudge, a medium, who must not be confused with our old friend, Mr. Sludge, perishes in a snowstorm. John Havering batters in the head of Hubert Kenyon, and later on commits suicide, while Beaufort, a Labour leader, is wrongfully charged with the murder of Hubert and barely escapes with his life. Everything however ends comparatively well, owing to a strong female interest. Mr. SPENDER is usually a careful workman, but sometimes his sentences get the better of him. Here is one such: "She wondered if Peter, who must have seen Mary as he came into the vicarage disappear into the study, had gone in, hoping to find her there as he left the house." It is not often however that Mr. SPENDER leaves his clauses to fight it out together like that.
In The Golden Rope (LANE) Mr. J.W. BRODIE-INNES has tried to combine a tale of mystery and murder with the love-story of a man of fifty; and, on the whole, it is a fairly successful effort. Alan Maclean, the middle-aged one, who tells the tale, was a celebrated artist, and, when he made his way to Devon to paint Pontylanyon Castle, he little expected to find himself involved in a maze of intrigue and adventure. The castle, however, was owned by a lady of great but unfortunate possessions. In the first place she had a dual personality (and, believe me, it is the very deuce to have a dual personality); and, secondly, she possessed a crowd of relatives (Austrian) who wanted her estate and were ready to remove mountains and men to get it. I know nothing of Mr. Maclean's pictures except that I am assured by the author that they were exquisitely beautiful, but I do know that Mr. INNES'S own canvas suffers from overcrowding, and, although I admire the deft way in which he handles his embarrassment of figures, his task would have been less complicated and my enjoyment more complete if he had managed to do with fewer. Otherwise I can recommend The Golden Hope both for its exciting episodes, lavish of thrills, and for the warning it gives to men of fifty to stick to their pigments, or whatever their stock-in-trade may be.
The Cinderella Man (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), "a romance of youth," by HELEN and EDWARD CARPENTER, is more suited to the ingenuous than the sophisticated reader. Its hero is a poet, Tony Quintard, very poor and deathly proud. The scene is set in New York and largely in Tony's attic verse-laboratory, which Marjorie, the rugged millionaire's daughter, visits by way of the leads in a perfectly proper if unconventional mood. The idiom occasionally soars into realms even higher. Thus when Tony's father dies he is "summoned, by the Great Usher of Eternity." When the gentle Marjorie, reading out one of Tony's efforts—
"Love whose feet are shod with light
Lost this ribbon in her flight;
Rosette of the twilight sky,
Waft to me Love's lullaby!"
(the note of exclamation is Tony's), says, "Anyone who can write songs like that ought to write an opera," you realise that her heart is sounder than her pretty head. Anyway Tony, who needed no encouragement, wrote his opera and landed a ten-thousand dollar prize for same, together with the daughter of the millionaire, who began to see, no doubt, that there might be something in poetry after all.
Indian Studies (HUTCHINSON) one may call a work partly descriptive and historical, partly also polemic. Its author, General Sir O'MOORE CARAGH, V.C. (and so many other letters of honour that there is hardly room for them on the title page), writes with the powerful authority of forty years' Indian service, five of them as Commander-in-Chief. His book is, in compressed form, a survey of the Indian Empire that deserves the epithet "exhaustive"; history, races, religious castes and forms of local government are all intimately surveyed; the chapters on the India Office and (especially) the army in India will command wide attention both among experts and the general public. Naturally the word "experts" brings me to the controversial side of the subject, the much discussed Montagu-Chelmsford Report, concerning which the late C.-in-C. holds views that might fairly be described as pronounced. Where authorities differ the honest reviewer can but record impartially. Really we have here the old antagonism between the upholder of one school of Imperial thought, fortified by many years' experience of it's successful application, and the theories of a newer and more experimental age. Without attempting a judgment on its conclusions, I can safely agree with the publishers that this is a book that "will be read with special interest in military, diplomatic and Government circles"; also—my own postscript—more vociferously debated in certain club smoking-rooms than almost any volume of recent years.
A "Literary Note" thoughtfully inserted in the fly-leaves of The Elstones (HUTCHINSON) informs me that it will "make a strong appeal to all those who have experienced the suffering caused by religious conflict." It is not entirely because it has been my lot to escape the ordeal in question that Miss ISABEL C. CLARKE'S latest book failed to make the promised appeal. She takes two hundred and odd pages of peculiarly eye-racking type to convert the Elstone family to Catholicism without indicating in any way how or why her solemn puppets are inspired to change their beliefs. Now and again a completely nebulous cleric happens along to perform the necessary function of receiving a moribund neophyte into the Church; otherwise the conversion appears to take place as it were by spontaneous combustion and not as the result of any visible proselytising agency. However the Elstones bear no resemblance to real human beings—you can hardly expect it of people called Ierne and Magali and Ivo and Elvidia and names like that—so perhaps it doesn't matter how they came to see the great light. The important thing obviously from the authoress's point of view is to get them into the fold; and good Catholics who look at the end rather than the means may enjoy The Elstones. As a novel it will try them hard.
