OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
After the Day: Germany Unconquered and Unrepentant (Jenkins) is the kind of thesis-book which it is wise to read in a deliberately incredulous mood. Mr. Hayden Talbot is an American newspaper man of immense resourcefulness but, I should judge, of a not conspicuously judicial habit of mind. That, perhaps, is hardly a newspaper man's business. He is after copy, and certainly there's good enough copy in his interviews with Count Bernstorff and Dr. Rathenau, and one must admire his feat of getting out of these and seven other German publicists, including Maximilian Harden, the draft of a manifesto to the people of America, composed in the hope, vain as it happened, that the Kaiser would break his long silence and sign it. It is the author's theory that it is the inner camarilla, working for a speedy restoration of the monarchy, that is responsible for the certainly uncharacteristic reticence of Amerongen. Mr. Talbot also interviewed Hindenberg, whom he found a "broken-down, inconsequential, garrulous example of senility" Ludendorff, who was very stiff and proud and rude; and the fiancée of the man who sank the Lusitania. His general idea of Germany is summed up in the remark of Mr. Mandelbaum, of New York: "All this talk about Fritz being down and out is all bunk!" Germany is full of energy and hate; she will soon be a monarchy again; will undersell the world; is assiduously preparing for air supremacy as the way to revanche. I take it that this is not so much a book as a réchauffé of newspaper articles, which alone will account for its formlessness and frequent changes of plane. Mr. Talbot, confessing to a total ignorance of the German tongue, seems quite unconscious that this imposes certain limitations on his capacity to make an adequate survey of a difficult problem.
I may confess at once that I finished the first chapter of The Woman of the Picture (Hodder and Stoughton) in a mood of slight derision, induced by Mr. G.F. Turner's allowing one hero to say of the other that he had "the interminable limbs" of an aristocrat. To the end of the book indeed I was uncertain whether such occasional lapses were meant to illumine the character of the supposed speaker or were unintentional. But again to quote, this time a phrase in which Mr. Turner clearly shares my own delight, "before we were through with the affair" such details had ceased to be of moment. The plain fact is that The Woman of the Picture is the most breathless, irresistible piece of convincing impossibility you have read for ages. I decline to struggle with any transcription of the plot. On the wrapper you will observe the woman stepping bodily out of the picture, like the ancestors in the whisky advertisement; this, however, is a symbolic rather than an actual presentment. But there is plenty without it: a rightful heir, mountain castles amid the eternal snows, a villain (with sorceries), half-a-dozen attempted murders and the most hair-lifting duel imaginable. Soberly considered the whole business is a riot of delirium, belonging flagrantly to that realm where all the world's a screen, and all the men and women merely movies. But the unexpected charm of the book is that with the possible exceptions noticed above) it is told with a touch of distinction, even of subtlety, that invests its wildest audacities with an atmosphere of fantastic truth. In short, if Mr. G.F. Turner has done nothing else he has at least enabled the fastidious to enjoy the thrills of a shocker while retaining their self-respect.
In the first of the three stories, each about a hundred pages in length, which make up Gold and Iron (Heinemann), it is hard to escape the conviction that Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer between the lines, "So you thought that Conrad was the only Joseph who could throw a man and woman together on a mysterious coast in the most strangely romantic circumstances, and provide a thoroughly groolly scrap into the bargain. Well, here's another little Victory for you." He seems definitely to challenge that air of the extraordinary and the inevitable combined which Mr. Conrad so subtly conveys. It is a big effort, and I don't feel that the author quite brings it off, yet I cannot think of anyone but Mr. Conrad who would have come nearer to doing so, and the fight in the dark in this story is one that even after the War will make a reader catch his breath for half-a-dozen pages at least. In the second and third stories, which actually deal with gold and iron (the first of the three is called "Wild Oranges," though perhaps "Blood Oranges" would have been a better title), the writer returns to a happier métier, and deals with an America remarkably interesting and wholly novel to me, an America where foundries and railways are in their infancy and crinolines are worn. Saloons, bowie knives and bags of gold-dust are all too familiar to us, but who, on this side of the Atlantic at any rate, ever remembers the quiet towns with Victorian manners to which the diggers belonged and returned? Both "Tubal Cain" and "The Dark Fleece" are excellent yarns and wonderful pieces of pictorial reconstruction as well.
After reading The Searchers (Hodder and Stoughton), I seriously think of myself joining His Britannic Majesty's Secret Service. All the fun and firearms, and ever, at the conclusion, a startling surprise for your friends and admirers, among whom you stand cool, calm and collected. Anthony Keene-Leslie did not deceive me when, upon his first introduction as a secret servant, he modestly disclaimed the thrills and excitements commonly attributed to his trade. I knew that many pages would not be turned before he would land us in the middle of some crimson intrigue; mysterious strangers, disguises, cryptic and invaluable manuscripts, urgent telegrams, codes, Italian hidden hands, Scotland Yard, pseudo-taxicabs, clues and things. But let others beware of Mr. John Foster, a most ingenious manipulator of the old stock-in-trade and possessing a rare sense of humour. For the reader to pit his wits against the author's is, in this instance, to be completely "had" and to become under the necessity (about page 265) of taking off his hat, not only to the secret servant but to a mere minion of the "Yard" also. Two minor points emerge from a close study of the book. The first is that the author is undoubtedly a barrister himself; if I am wrong on this point I finally withdraw my threat to join the Service. The second point is that he knows his Scotland even as well as he loves it. In the result you have two merits, which together amply discount the element of cheap sensationalism: one merit is the logical development of the story, and the other is its beautiful setting. I don't know whether it is due to the Scottish climate or to the legal atmosphere that the author omits all reference to the feminine sex or affairs of the heart; but anyhow it seemed right and meet that women should be left at home when men were engaged upon such violent and dastardly business.
From certain internal evidences, mainly orthographical, I am led to suppose The Branding Iron (Constable) to be of Transatlantic origin. This, no doubt, explains my unfamiliarity with the name of Miss Katharine Newlin Burt, also certain minor points, notably the fact that the story, though by no means badly told, suffers from what I can only call a plethora of plot. As I followed the developments of its intrigue and tracked the heroine from untutored savage, wife of the wild Westerner whose excusable suspicions caused him to brand her as private property, to the moment of her triumph as the bejewelled idol of theatrical New York, the conviction grew upon me that here was a tale surely predestined to be the screen that covers a multitude of melodramatics. Presently indeed the suggestion became so insistent that I went further and began to wonder whether I was not in fact reading a "story-form" of some already triumphant film. Certainly the resemblance is almost too pronounced to be fortuitous; from the sensational branding scene, through cowboy stunts, to the up-town playhouse, where a repentant and wife-seeking hero recognises his mark upon the shoulder of the leading lady—and so to reconciliation, slow fade-out, and the announcement of Next Week's Pictures. But though it is impossible not to suspect Miss Burt of having an eye to what poetic journalism calls the Shadow Stage, this is by no means to belittle her mastery of the colder medium of print; and I hasten to acknowledge that, upon me at least, The Branding Iron has left a distinct though possibly fleeting impression of good entertainment.
Cane or Birch?
"House Porter wanted, to live in or out, able to manage beating apparatus.—Apply, Stating wages required, to Headmaster, ——- school."—Local Paper.
"The total cost of the British delegation to the Peace Conference at Paris from December, 1918, to 31st September was £503,368."—Liverpool Paper.
But it is only fair to say that in the last month they seem to have put in a bit of overtime.