P.-W. S. (otter-hunting for the first time). “Tired? Cooked to a turn! I wouldn’t ’ave come so far but one of your chaps told me you ’ad a strong drag up the river and I thought we might all go ’ome in it. And now ’e says it’s only a smell ’e meant.”
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I should certainly call Mr. Compton Mackenzie our first living expositor of London in fiction. Indeed the precision with which, from his Italian home, he can recapture the aspect and atmosphere of London neighbourhoods is itself an astonishing feat. In The Vanity Girl (Cassell) he has happily abandoned the rather breathless manner induced by the migratious Sylvia Scarlett, and returns to the West Kensington of Sinister Street, blended subsequently with that theatrical Bohemia in which Jenny Pearl danced her little tragedy. There is something (though by no means all) of the interest of Carnival in the new stage story; that the adventures of Dorothy lack the compelling charm of her predecessor is inevitable from the difference in temperament of the two heroines and the fact that Mr. Mackenzie with all his art has been unable to rouse more than dispassionate interest in what is really a study of successful egotism. From the moment when, in the first chapter, we encounter Dorothy (whose real name was Norah) washing her hair at a window in Lonsdale Road, an eligible cul-de-sac ending in a railway line, beyond which a high rampart marked the reverse of the Earl’s Court Exhibition panorama, to that final page on which we take leave of her as a widowed countess, sacrificing her future for the sake of an Earl’s Court of a different genre, her career, sentimental, financial and matrimonial, is told with amazing vivacity but a rather conspicuous lack of emotional appeal. It is perhaps an unequal book; in parts as good as the author’s best, in others hurried and perfunctory. One of our more superior Reviews was lately debating Mr. Mackenzie’s command of the “memorable phrase.” There are a score here that I should delight to quote, even if the setting is not always entirely worthy of them.
So long as “Berta Ruck” will write for us such pretty books as Sweethearts Unmet (Hodder and Stoughton), we need never feel ourselves dependent on America for our supply of sugary novels. This home-grown variety is just as sweet, and really, I think, may be guaranteed not only harmless but positively beneficial. The authoress has evidently a tender pity for the young men and women whom our social conditions doom either to have no companions among their contemporaries or only the wrong ones. Her heroine represents the too-much-sheltered girl alone in an elderly circle, her hero the lonely young man who has no means of getting to know people of his own sort (I can’t say class, because the authoress seems rather uncertain about that herself). Her story is written in alternate instalments by “the boy” and “the girl,” a method which encourages intimacy in the telling as well as a sort of gushing attention to the reader not so pleasant. Miss Nora Schlegel has drawn a pretty picture of Julia and Jack to adorn the wrapper, and I can assure everyone who cares to know it that they are just as nice as they look; Jack’s passion for abbreviation (“rhodos” for rhododendrons) being the only ground of quarrel I have with them or their creator.
In Passion (Duckworth) Mr. Shaw Desmond desperately wants to say something terrific about love, money and power. His violence makes one feel that one is reading under a shower of brickbats, and it is the effort of dodging these which perhaps distracts the mind from his message. (Is he a Marinettist, I wonder?) There are not enough words in the language for him, so he invents fresh ones at will; while as for grammar and syntax he passionately throttled them in Chapter I.; nor did they recover. I will own that notwithstanding all this the author has a way of making you read on to find out what it is all about. You don’t find out; but there, life’s like that, isn’t it? The author’s ideas of the operations of high finance are ingenuous. The Mandrill (do I rightly guess this to be a portrait distorted from the life?), who is out to corner copper and “do down” the Squid (head of the opposing copper group), is, if you are to judge by his passionate exuberance at board meetings, about as likely to corner the green cheese in the moon. I imagine the author saying, “Mandrills mayn’t be like that, but that’s how I see ’em. It’s my vision and mood that matter. Take it or leave it.” Well, on the whole I should advise you to take it, first putting on a sort of mental tin hat. You’ll at least have gathered that Mr. Desmond is a lively writer.