Sunday School Teacher. "Dear me, Maggie, you're not going away before the service is begun?"
Little Girl. "It's our Freddie, Miss. 'E's swallowed the collection."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Inevitably you will find a sad significance in the title of Harvest (Collins), the last story, I suppose, that we shall have from the pen of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. It is a quite simple tale, very simply told, and of worth less for its inherent drama than for the admirable picture it gives of rural England in the last greatest days of the Great War. How quick was the writer's sympathy with every phase of the national ordeal is proved again by a score of vivid passages in which the fortunes of her characters are dated by the tremendous events that form their background. The story itself is of two women in partnership on a Midland farm, one of whom, the senior, has in her past certain secret episodes which, as is the way of such things, return to find her out and bring her happiness to ruin. The character of this Janet is well and vigorously drawn, though there is perhaps little in her personality as shown here to make understandable the passion of her past. All the details of life on the land in the autumn of 1918 are given with a skill that brings into the book not only the scent of the wheat-field but the stress, emotional and economic, of those unforgettable months. Because it is all so typically English one may call it a true consummation of the work of one who loved England well. In Mrs. Ward's death the world of letters mourns the loss of a writer whose talent was ever ungrudgingly at the service of her country. She leaves a gap that it will be hard to fill.
In some ways I think that they will be fortunate who do not read A Remedy Against Sin (Hutchinson) till the vicissitudes of book-life have deprived it of its pictorial wrapper, because, though highly attractive as a drawing, the very charmingly-clad minx of the illustration is hardly a figure to increase one's sympathy with her as an injured heroine. And of course it is precisely this sympathy that Mr. W. B. Maxwell is playing for—first, last and all the time. His title and the puff's preliminary will doubtless have given you the aim of the story, "to influence the public mind on one of the most vital questions of the day," the injustice of our divorce laws. For this end Mr. Maxwell has exercised all his ability on the picture of a foolish young wife, chained to a lout who is shown passing swiftly from worse to unbearable, and herself broken at last by the ordeal of the witness-box in a "defended action." Inevitably such a book, a record of disillusion and increasing misery, can hardly be cheerful; tales with a purpose seldom are. But the poignant humanity of it will hold your sympathy throughout. You may think that Mr. Maxwell too obviously loads his dice, and be aware also that (like others of its kind) the story suffers from over-concentration on a single theme. It moves in a world of incompatibles. The heroine's kindly friend is tied to a dipsomaniac wife; her coachman has no remedy for a ruined home because of the expense of divorce, and so on. To a great extent, however, Mr. Maxwell's craft has enabled him to overcome even these obstacles; his characters, though you may suspect manipulation, remain true types of their rather tiresome kind, and the result is a book that, though depressing, refuses to be put down. But as a wedding-present—no!