OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Alfred Lyttelton: An Account of his Life, by EDITH LYTTELTON (LONGMANS), is a most fascinating book. Mrs. ALFRED LYTTELTON might perhaps have contented herself with writing a formal biography of her husband. It would have been difficult for her, but she might, as I say, have done it. Instead of this she takes her readers by the hand in the friendliest manner and admits them with her into the heart and soul of the man with whom she was for twenty years associated. She shows him as what he was, a noble and upright English gentleman, straightforward and tender-hearted, and beloved in a quite exceptional measure by all who were privileged to be his friends. I can only be grateful to Mrs. LYTTELTON for having interpreted her duty in this manner, and for having carried it out with so sure a hand. As I read her pages I saw again in my mind's eye the loose-limbed, curly-headed young son of Anak as he swung down Jesus Lane, Cambridge, or as he witched the world with noble cricketing at Fenner's or at Lord's. It is good to be able to remember him. His Eton tutor described him as being "like a running stream with the sun on it," and there was, indeed, a charm about him that was irresistible. Mrs. LYTTELTON devotes a beautiful chapter to the memory of ALFRED'S first wife, LAURA, who died after one short year of happiness. "She was a flame," says Mrs. LYTTELTON, "beautiful, dancing, ardent, leaping up from the earth in joyous rapture, touching everyone with fire as she passed. The wind of life was too fierce for such a spirit—she could not live in it. Surely it was Love that gathered her." I have only one little bone to pick, and that not with Mrs. LYTTELTON, but with Lord MIDLETON, who in a page or two of reminiscences describes as one of ALFRED'S triumphs at the Bar his appearance as counsel for the Warden of Morton, Mr. GEORGE BRODRICK. The Warden, having said something offensive about Mr. DILLON, was hailed before the Parnell Commission for contempt of court. ALFRED put in an affidavit by the Warden, in which the whole thing was said to be a joke, and in his speech he chaffed Mr. REID (now Lord LOREBURN), who was counsel for Mr. DILLON, for being a Scotsman, with a natural incapacity for seeing a joke. So far Lord MIDLETON; but he omits Mr. REID'S crushing retort. "Even a Scotsman," said Mr. REID, "may be pardoned for not seeing a joke which has to be certified by affidavit."
Mr. JEFFERY E. JEFFERY has been playing cheerful tricks on the British public. We must forgive him, because he has for a long time been doing far worse than that to the Huns; but it is undeniable that in following the winding trail of his beloved guns we are in no small danger of losing our sense of direction. This is because along with imaginary tales, some of them written before August, 1914, when of course he could not fix precisely the chronology and locality of his fights, he has mixed almost indiscriminately the record of his own actual experiences during two distinct phases of the War. Not until the last page does he abandon the jest to explain—with something of a school-boy grin—just where fact and fiction meet, and so enable me to recover from my bewilderment and pass on a word of warning. Once on your guard, however, you will find his story of the Servants of the Guns (SMITH, ELDER), and more especially the first half of it (dealing, in diary form, with his recent adventures as an officer of Artillery—he does not state his present rank), as vivid and real as anything of the sort you have seen. Field-gun warfare of to-day—mathematics, telephones and mud—with little more of old-time dash and jingle than the hope that some to-morrow may revive them in the Great Pursuit—this is his theme; and above all the loyalty of the gunner to his guns. Even the story-book part in the middle of the volume speaks of this finely and movingly; but here and there amongst his personal experiences comes a passage less consciously composed that tells it even better in the bareness of a great simplicity.
Mr. J.D. BERESFORD'S new story, House-Mates (CASSELL), might be regarded as an awful warning to young gentlemen seeking bachelor-apartments. Because, if the hero had been a little more careful about his fellow-lodgers at No. 73 Keppel Street, he would not, in the first place, have been defrauded of a large sum of money, or, in the second, have been involved in a peculiarly revolting murder. (The special hatefulness of this murder strikes me as rather superfluous. But this by the way.) On the other hand, of course, he would never have married the heroine, and we should have missed a very agreeable study of expanding adolescence. This, I take it, is the real motive of Mr. BERESFORD'S story, as exemplified by his pleasant introductory metaphor of the chicken and the egg. From the feminine point of view, indeed, the tale might be not inaptly labelled "Treatise on Cub-hunting." Anyhow, what with strange actresses and I.D.B. criminals and painted ladies and reviewers (they were a queer lot at No. 73!) the hero completes his tenancy with enough experience of life, chiefly on its shadowy side, to last him for some time. An original and rather appealing story, told with a good deal of charm.
I was waiting for it, and now, behold, it has come. In The Shining Heights (MILLS AND BOON) the War is over and we have to do with some of the results of it. Unfortunately Miss I.A.R. WYLIE is very chary about dates, and she is not encouraging about the changes which most of us hope will come with peace. "Social conditions indeed," she writes, "had scarcely moved. Universal brotherhood was not ... and, for the vast majority of men and women it had been easiest to go back to the old work, the old pleasure, the old love and the old hate." Well, I don't know much about universal brotherhood, but for the rest I sincerely hope that these gloomy prognostications are wrong. As for the story, laid in the Delectable Duchy, no one needs to be told that Miss WYLIE is a novelist of considerable power and capacity, and here she has chosen a theme of very real interest. It is the rivalry of two men, one of whom had returned from the War with wounds and a V.C., while the other had never taken part in it because he believed (with justification) that he was on the point of making a discovery of value to humanity. The story is well constructed and well told, but I am beginning to think that it is time for Cornwall to be declared a prohibited area for all novelists except Mr. CHARLES MARRIOTT and "Q."