Farmer's Wife (to visitor). "Now, Johnny, will you go and collect the eggs, and don't take the china ones. I suppose you know what they're for?"
Johnny. "Oh, yes; they're for a pattern to show 'em how to make the others."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.}
Mr. Beresford is most warmly to be congratulated upon his new book, The House in Demetrius Road (Heinemann). Mr. Beresford's work has had from the first remarkable qualities that place him beyond question amongst the first half-dozen of the younger English novelists; but never before, I think, have his talents had a subject so exactly suited to their best display. It would be difficult to praise too highly the grim and relentless effect of the author's treatment of his subject. Robin Gregg is a drunkard, and everyone about him—his secretary, his sister-in-law, his little girl—is caught into the dingy cloud of his vice. The house also is caught; and very fine indeed is the way in which Mr. Beresford has presented his atmosphere—the rooms, the dirty strip of garden, the shabby suburb, the London rain—but beyond all these things is the central figure of Gregg himself. Here is a character entirely new to English fiction—a man who in spite of his degradation has his brilliance, his humour and, above all, his mystery. It is in this implication that, at the very heart of the man, there are fine things too degraded and degraded things too fine for any human record of them to be possible that the exceptional merit of Mr. Beresford's work lies. In his desire to avoid any possible cheapness or weak indulgence he misses, perhaps, some effects of colour and pathos that might, a little, have heightened the contrasts of his study; and I do not feel that the woman is as vivid as she should be. These things, however, affect very slightly a story that its author may indeed be proud to have written.
Penelope was the heroine. She was in what are called reduced circumstances, and was moreover encumbered by sisters who were not quite all that could have been wished in the way of niceness. One day Penelope, looking through an iron gate, saw a beautiful garden, full of flowers; and the master of the garden, himself unseen, saw Penelope, and loved her. So she accepted the invitation of his voice and went into the garden and found that the master was a young man so disfigured by a recent accident that he had to wear blue spectacles and a shade. However, he loved her and she didn't mind him, so that after a time they became engaged, which was pleasant enough for Penelope, who had henceforth the run of the garden and leave to take home roses and things to the not-nice sisters. Do you want to be told how presently these began to tempt Penelope, urging her to insist that her lover should unmask, and what happened when she yielded? Or have you seen already that the story here called A Garden of the Gods (Alston Rivers) is just a modern version of one that we all used to be told in the nursery? Moreover, Beauty and the Beast had been used once at least in this fashion before Miss Edith M. Keate happened on the idea. But that does not make the present any the less an amiable, quietly entertaining story, if a little obvious. The characters have never anything but a very distant resemblance to life; and their speech is for the most part that of a lady novelist's creations rather than of human beings. But those who demand "a good tale," with beauty properly distressed till the last page, and there beatified with the knowledge that "the darkness that surrounded her was scattered for ever," will find some highly agreeable pasturage in A Garden of the Gods.