MORE ADVENTURES OF A POST-WAR SPORTSMAN.
Mrs. P.-W.S. (to P.-W.S., who has been pulled off at a gate, consolingly). "Never mind, Henry; the hunting season is nearly over, and you have the satisfaction of knowing that you have done your duty in the station to which you have been called."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The publishers of Peter Jackson: Cigar Merchant (Hutchinson) seem in their announcements to be desperately afraid lest anyone should guess it to be a War book. It is, they suggest, the story of the flowering of perfect love between two married folk who had drifted apart. It is really an admirable epitome of the War as seen through one pair of eyes and one particular temperament. I don't recall another War novel that is so convincing. The almost incredible confusions of the early days of the making of K.'s army; the gradual shaping of the great instrument; the comradeship of fine spirits and the intrigues of meaner; leadership good and less good; action with its energy, glory and horror; reaction (with incidentally a most moving analysis of the agonies of shell-shock and protracted neurasthenia) after the long strain of campaigning—all this is brought before you in the most vivid manner. Mr. Gilbert Frankau writes with a fierce sincerity and with perhaps the defects of that sincerity—a bitterness against the non-combatant which was not usual in the fighting-man, at least when he was fighting; or perhaps it was only that they were too kind then to say so. Also as "one of us" he is a little overwhelmed by the sterling qualities of the rank-and-file—qualities which ought, he would be inclined to assume, to be the exclusive product of public-school playing-fields. I haven't said that Peter Jackson gave up cigars and cigarettes for the sword, and beat that into a plough-share for a small-holding when the War was done. A jolly interesting book.
I found the arrangement of The Clintons and Others (Collins) at first a little confusing, because Mr. Archibald Marshall, instead of keeping his Clinton tales consecutive, has mixed them democratically with the Others. Our first sight of the family (and incidentally the most agreeable thing in the volume) is provided by "Kencote," a brightly-coloured and engaging anecdote of Regency times, and of the plucking of an honoured house from the ambiguous patronage of the First Gentleman in Europe. I found this delightful, spirited, picturesque and original. Thence we pass to the Others, to the theme (old, but given here with a pleasant freshness of circumstance) of maternal craft in averting a threatened mésalliance, to a study of architecture in its effect upon character, to a girls' school tale; finally to the portrait of a modern Squire Clinton, struggling to adjust his mind to the complexities of the War. This last, a character-study of very moving and sympathetic realism, suffers a little from a defect inherent in one of Mr. Marshall's best qualities, his gift for absolutely natural dialogue. The danger of this is that, as here in the bedroom chatter of the Squire's daughters, his folk are apt to repeat themselves, as talk does in nature, but should not (I suppose) in art. Still this is a small defect in a book that is sincere in quality and convincingly human in effect. The Clintons and Others is certainly miles away from the collections of reprinted pot-boilers that at one time brought books of short stories into poor repute. Mr. Marshall and Others (a select band) will rapidly correct this by giving us in small compass work equal to their own best.
Shuttered Doors (Lane) is what you might call a third-and-fourth-generation story—one of those books, so rightly devastating to the skipper, in which the accidental turning of two pages together is quite liable to involve you with the great-grandchildren of the couple whose courtship you have been perusing. Observe that I was careful to say the "accidental" turning, though I can picture a type of reader who might soon be fluttering the pages of Shuttered Doors in impatient handfuls. The fact is that Mrs. William Hicks Beach has here written what is less a novel than a treatise, tasteful, informed and sympathetic, on county life and manners and houses. The last of these themes especially has an undisguised fascination for her. When Aletta, the chief heroine, was left pots of money by a Dutch uncle (who was so far from filling his proverbial rôle that he hardly talked at all) she spent it and her enthusiasm, indeed her existence, in restoring two variously dilapidated mansions—Graythorpes, her husband's home, and Doller Place, left her by an appreciative aunt. When not thus employed she would be reading a paper on Homes (given here in extenso), or comparing those of other persons with her own. I don't want you to get the impression that Shuttered Doors is precisely arid; it is too full of ideas and vitalities for that; but it does undoubtedly demand a special kind of reader. Incidentally, Mrs. Hicks Beach should revise her chronology. For Aletta, who was married at twenty-eight and died at sixty-two, to have had at that time a grandson on the staff of the Viceroy of India, he must have received his appointment before the age of fifteen—which even in these experimental days sounds a little premature.