Joe Quinney, the curiosity shop man in Mr. Horace Annesley Vachell's Quinneys' (Murray), is undoubtedly a "card," not unrelated, I should say, to Mr. Bennett's Machen. He is an entertaining fellow with his enthusiasms, his truculences, his fluctuating standards of honesty. Mr. Vachell didn't quite get me to believe in Joe's expert knowledge, which indeed seemed to be turned on and off in rather an arbitrary way as the exigencies of the story rather than the development and experience of the character dictated; but he did make me see and like the fellow. Mrs. Quinney, that faithful timid soul, is admirably drawn, both in her courtship and her matronly days. But I found Quinney a little hypocritical in his denunciation of Miggott, the chair-faker, who was not really sailing half so close to the wind or so profitably as Quinney and his bibulous friend of a dealer, Tamlin. There are some interesting side-lights upon the astonishing tricks of the furniture trade, which are reflected by the authentic experience of the bitten wise. An entertaining and clever book; but why, why should H. A. V. drop from his Hill into the discreditable fellowship of those who have misquoted "honoured in the breach"?
Anybody can understand how extremely annoying and inconvenient the complete disappearance of a husband would be to a wife after a mere fortnight or so of married existence, before he had even begun to complain of the—well, anyhow that is what happens in Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's latest novel, The End of Her Honeymoon (Methuen). The Dampiers arrive in Paris, a Paris en féte and crowded beyond all custom because of the state visit of the Tsar, and are obliged to occupy rooms on different floors of the Poulains' hotel. Next morning Mrs. Dampier awakes to find herself in the awkward predicament of Ariadne on the beach of Naxos, with the aggravation (spared to Theseus' bride) that the hotel people absolutely deny that she came with a husband at all. A punctilious if sceptical American senator (refreshingly guiltless of accent) and his enthusiastic son and daughter take pity on her, and the rest of the book resolves itself into a detective story, saved from conventionality by the pleasantly distinguished style in which the author writes and the intimate knowledge which she appears to possess of the Paris préfecture de police. Gerald Burton, the young American, not entirely platonic in his solicitude, is baffled; Salgas, a famous enquiry agent, is baffled; and I am ready to take very long odds against the reader's unravelling the mystery, unless he happens to be familiar with a certain legend of the plague (though no plague comes in here). Indeed, it is only a chance conversation in the last chapter that throws light, my dear Watson, on this particularly bizarre affair. And what then, you ask, had happened to Jack Dampier after all? Ah!
I wonder why it is that so many books about walking tours should be written in much the same style. At least I don't really wonder at all, since it is quite apparent that R. L. S. and Modestine are the models responsible for this state of things. And, since the style in itself is pleasant enough, I don't know that any one need complain. What put me upon this reflection was Vagabonds in Perigord (Constable), which, for the modulation of its prose, might almost have been an unacknowledged work of the Master, but is actually written by Mr. H. H. Bashford. It concerns the wanderings on foot of certain pleasure pilgrims along the course of the river Dordogne; and is, for those that like such things, one of the most attractive volumes I have met this great while. I liked especially the author's happy gift of filling his pages with a holiday atmosphere; there is, indeed, so much fresh air and sunshine in them that the sympathetic reader will emerge feeling mentally bronzed. Nor does Mr. Bashford lack an agreeable humour of phrase. "Those wonderful three-franc dinners that seem to fall like manna upon France at seven o'clock every evening" is an example that lingers in my memory. Moreover, running through the whole is a hidden joke, and very cunningly hidden too, only to be revealed in the last paragraphs. Not for worlds would I reveal it here; I content myself with admitting that I for one was entirely fooled. I am less sure whether as a record of travel the book tempts to emulation. The drawbacks are perhaps too vividly rendered for this—heat and thirst through the flaming June days, and by night not wholly unbroken repose. But I am delighted to read about it all.
Bram Stoker, whose too early cutting off saddened a wide circle of friends, was the Fat Boy of modern writers of fiction. He knew how to provide opportunity in fullest measure for making your flesh creep. A series of stories named after the first, Dracula's Guest (Routledge), is a marvellous collection of weird fancies wrought with ingenuity, related with graphic power, that come as near Edgar Allan Poe as anything I am acquainted with. There are nine, widely varying in subject and plot. I have read them all, and am not ashamed to confess that, finishing one before commencing another of the fascinating series, I found it convenient and agreeable to turn aside for a while and glance over less exciting pages. Not the least marvellous thing about the banquet is that it is provided at the modest charge of a shilling.
(A nervous individual, having been advised by a specialist that he must undergo an operation, calls upon his own doctor to ask him to administer the anæsthetic.)