OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
My War Experiences in Two Continents (MURRAY) is made up of the diary and letters of Miss MACNAUGHTAN, written during her search for work that might help in the great Task. The book, it is sad to say, must serve as her memorial to those many whom she has amused by her bright and wholesome stories. Worn out by labours and quests beyond her strength she fell sick at Teheran in 1916 and returned to England to die. In 1914 she had done fine service with her soup-kitchen in Flanders, where her energy and almost too tender sympathy had full scope and the reward of good work accomplished. She seemed also to be happy in her lecture tour on her return to England, trying to arouse the sluggish-minded to a sense of the gravity of the business. But in her Russian and Persian adventure it is clear that she was deeply disappointed at feeling herself unwanted and useless in a region of waste and muddle. It is probable that for all her courage and unselfish devotion she was too sensitive to the suffering she encountered ever to attain the routine indifference which makes work among such horrors possible. Her deep religious convictions aggravated rather than eased that suffering. She was honestly old-fashioned and never took quite kindly to the khaki-breeched free-spoken young women of the subsidiary war services, had a hatred of muddle and was a little severe on men, though acknowledging that "young men are the kindest members of the human race." True this, I should say, who am no longer young. "The war is fine, fine, FINE, though I don't get near the fineness except in the pages of Punch." Charming of her to say that.
The heroine of Miss Fingal (BLACKWOOD) is called by her publishers "a woman whose distinguishing trait is femininity," to which they add, with obvious truth, "a refreshing creation in these days." Really, in this one phrase Messrs. BLACKWOOD have covered the ground so comprehensively that I have little more to do than subscribe my signature. To fill in details, Mrs. W.K. CLIFFORD'S latest is a quietly sympathetic tale about a lonely gentlewoman (this you can take either as one or two words) rescued from a life of penury by the will of a rich uncle, transferred from her tiny flat in Battersea to Bedford Square and a country cottage, expanding in prosperity, and generally proving the old adage that where there's a will there's a way, indeed several ways, of spending the result agreeably. As I have said, it is all the gentlest little comedy of happiness, not specially exciting perhaps. I find it characteristic of Mrs. CLIFFORD'S method that the only at all violent incident, a railway smash, happens discreetly out of sight, and does no more than provide its victim with an enjoyable convalescence, and the attentive reader with the suggestion of a psychological problem that is both unnecessary and unconvincing. The best of the tale is its picture of Miss Fingal herself, rescued from premature decay and gradually recovering her youth under the stimulus of new interests and opportunities. Whether the now rather too familiar Kaiser-ex-machina solution was needed in order to rid the stage of a superfluous character is open to question; but at all events it leaves Miss Fingal happy in companionship and assured of the success that waits upon a satisfactory finish.
"How can I"—I seem to hear the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden communing with herself—"how can I write a story, with all my necessary Teutonic ingredients in it, which shall be popular even during the War?" And then I seem to see the satisfaction with which she hit upon the solution of inventing pretty twin girls of seventeen, an age which permits remarks with a sting in them to be uttered apparently in innocence and yet is marriageable or, at any rate, engageable; making them orphans; giving them a German father and an English mother, and very mixed sympathies, in which England predominates; and sending them to America to pass its novelty under their candid European eyes. Much of the satisfaction which her scheme must have given to the authoress of Christopher and Columbus (MACMILLAN) is shared by its readers, although the feeling that it has been made to order to fit a difficult market is never absent. For much of the dialogue, and often when most amusing, does not ring true, and we are occasionally asked to believe that the twins could be far slower in the uptake than at other, and less inconvenient, times they show themselves to be. But the book is another sufficing proof that the male sex has no monopoly of humour.
Mr. CHRISTOPHER CULLEY, in his rather superfluous and petulant preface to Billy McCoy (CASSELL), observes that such reviewers as "may find time to skip through its pages" will probably call it a Romance. Well, skipping or not, here is one reviewer who will not disappoint him. A story of a hero who adventures into sinister places, disregards repeated warnings to "go back ere it is too late" (or the American for that entrancing formula), meets there a Distressed Damsel and kisses her as introduction, and finally, after an infinity of perils, is left with the D.D. as his B.B., or blushing bride—this I state emphatically to be not only Romance, but a most excellent brand of that article. What however Mr. CULLEY seems most to fear is that we shall think that McCoy himself and the whole setting (New Mexican scenes) are all make-believe. He need have had no such alarm in my case. I have, I remember, already commented on the admirable reality of his cowboys, as exemplified in the hero of a previous story. Billy, if just a little less convincing, is in many ways a worthy companion. But Mr. CULLEY'S heroines always strike me as inferior to his men. They have the air of hanging about in corners of the tale, and generally of being rather a nuisance than a delight to their creator. But the heroine of Billy McCoy makes hardly a pretence of being other than a lay figure; without her it would be just as entertaining and exciting, if perhaps less completely furnished for Romance.