Officer (to trooper, whom he has recently had occasion to reprimand severely). "Why did you not salute?"
Trooper. "I thocht me an' you wisna' on speakin' ter-rms the noo."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I confess that I was at first a little alarmed by the title of Friendly Russia (Fisher Unwin). A book with a name like that, with, moreover, an "introduction"—and one by no less a person than Mr. H. G. Wells—seemed to threaten ponderous things, maps probably, and statistics and unpronounceable towns. Never was there a greater mistake. What Mr. Denis Garstin has put into his entertaining pages is simply the effect produced by a previously unknown country upon the keen and receptive mind of a young man who is fortunately able to translate his impressions into vigorous and picturesque language. I have met few travel books so unpretentious, none that gives more vividly the feeling of "going there oneself" that must be the final test of success. The last few years have made a happy change in the popular English conception of Russia. Even before the War, our old melodramatic idea, that jumble of bombs and spies and sledge-hunting wolves, had begun to give place to a slightly apologetic admiration. Now, of course, we are all Russophil; but for the understanding proper to that love there can be no better introduction than Mr. Garstin's pleasant book. Spend with him a happy summer by the waters of the Black Sea; share, along with his humour, his appreciation of that life of contented simplicity, where easy-going and hospitable families are ruled by the benevolent despotism of equally easy-going domestics (O knouts, O servitude!), where the casual caller "drops in" for a month or more, and where everyone knows everything about everybody and nobody minds. By way of contrast to this, the latter part of the book contains, in "Russia at War," some chapters of an even closer appeal. You will read here, not unmoved, of how that terrible week of suspense came upon the soul of a people, of the fusion of all discordant factions into one army intent only upon the Holy War. There is encouragement and a heartening certainty of triumph in this that should be an unfailing remedy for pessimism.
None of your confounded subtleties and last cries in Mrs. Latham's Extravagance (Chapman and Hall). An unvarnished tale, rather, fashioned according to the naïve method of simple enumeration and bald assertion, with such subsidiary trifles as characterisation left to the discretion and imaginative capacity of the reader. Christopher Sheffield, an artist, post-cubist brand, married his model, a dipsomaniac as it happened. Whereupon he implored Katherine to share his life, which, to keep him from going down-hill, she very generously did, it being explicitly understood that she was to have the reversion of Mrs. Sheffield's marriage lines. Christopher, however, becomes infatuated with the widow Latham—who had married a rich old gentleman for his money, while in love with Lord Ronald Eckington, then the penniless fourth son of a marquis, now the celebrated and well-paid photographer, "Mr. Lestocq"—so that when Sheffield's model wife dies, he, instead of doing the right thing by Katherine, suggests settling the matter on a basis of five-hundred or (at a push) five-fifty a year. Naturally she draws herself up very cold and proud and refuses the compensation. And then, with a hardihood and success which nothing in this ingenuous narrative sufficiently explains, the Honourable Lavinia Elliston, Lord Ronald and the extravagant Mrs. Latham rush in to patch up the Christopher-Katherine alliance. I don't suspect Mr. Thomas Cobb of thinking that people really do things quite like this, but probably he found that his characters took the bits between their teeth—as they well might. Lord Ronald's share in the transaction seemed particularly gratuitous. I can only think that since moving in photographic circles he had discarded his high patrician polish in favour of a distinctly mat surface. He didn't marry the widow Latham because he hated the thought of touching old man Latham's money. She, discovering this, disposed of the whole of it in a few months of gloriously expensive living and giving. This, by the way, was her "Extravagance," which of course brought the happy ending. O, Mr. Cobb!
The king of curmudgeons could not complain when Mrs. Conyers is described as "one of the most entertaining hunting novelists of the day," but when Messrs. Methuen call her book (A Mixed Pack) "a collection of Irish sporting stories" I may at least be allowed to wonder at the inadequacy of their description. For the fact of the matter is that a third part of this volume, and by no means the worst part, is concerned with little Mr. Jones, a traveller in the firm of Amos and Samuel Mosenthal, who were dealers in precious stones and about as Irish and as sporting as their names suggest. Mr. Jones, in the opinion of the Mosenthals, was the simplest soul that they had ever entrusted with jewels of great value. Although the tales of apparent simpletons who outwit crafty villains are becoming tedious in their frequency, I can still congratulate Mrs. Conyers upon the thrills and shudders that she gets into these stories of robbery and torture. Not for a moment do I believe in Mr. Jones, but for all that I take the little man to my heart. As for the tales of sport, it is enough to say that they are written with so much wit and verve that even I, who am commonly suffocated with boredom when I have to listen to a hunting story, found them quite pleasant to read.