OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I SHALL begin by saying straight out that Miss CICELY HAMILTON'S new book, William—an Englishman (SKEFFINGTON), is one of the finest war-stories that anyone has yet given us. You know already what qualities the author brings to her writing; you may believe me that she has done nothing more real, more nobly conceived, and by consequence more moving than this short tale. It opens, in a style of half-humorous irony, with an account of the youth, early life and courtship of William, who, with the girl whom he married, belonged to the vehement circles of the Labour-Suffragist group, spending a cheerfully ignorant life in a round of meetings, in hunger-striking and whole-hearted support of the pacifism that "seeks peace and ensues it by insisting firmly, and even to blood, that it is the other side's duty to give way." One small concession you must make to Miss HAMILTON'S plot. It is improbable that, when such a couple as William and Griselda left England in July 1914 to take their honeymoon in a remote valley of the Belgian Ardennes, their friends, knowing them to be without news and ignorant of all speech save English, should have made no effort to warn them. But, this granted, the tragedy that follows becomes inevitable. It is so finely told and so horrible (the more so for the deliberate restraint of the telling) that I will say nothing to weaken its effect. From one scene, however, I cannot withhold my tribute of admiration—that in which William, alone, brokenhearted, and almost crazed with the ruin of everything that made up his life, creeps home to find his old associates still glibly echoing the platitudes in which he once believed. A hint here of insincerity or conscious arrangement would have ruined all; as it is, the scene holds and haunts one with an impression of absolute truth, For the end, marked like all by an almost grim avoidance of sentimentality, I shall only refer you to the book itself. After reading it you will, I hope, not think me guilty of exaggeration when I call it, slight though it is, one for which its author has deserved well of the State.
The dominant impression left upon me by Miss MERIEL BUCHANAN'S Petrograd the City of Trouble (COLLINS) is that its author is a sportswoman of the first order. You see her pressing to the windows to observe the shooting in the streets, going out to shop, to dine, to dance, during the stormy months of the various phases of the various Russian Revolutions. And I hasten to add, for fear of misunderstanding, that there is no suggestion of pose as the heroic Englishwoman. It was not till the end of 1918 that Sir GEORGE BUCHANAN withdrew from a country in which ambassadorial functions had obviously no reasonable scope. But he and his family, including our chronicler, his spirited daughter, remained long after there was any plausible reason to hope for the restoration of order and very long after considerations of personal safety might well have dictated and justified retreat. Mr. HUGH WALPOLE in his preface points out that Miss BUCHANAN is the first English writer to give a sense of the atmosphere of Russia during the New Terror. It is curious, but the impression she conveys is of something far less formidable than we have imagined. That may well be due to her high courage which minimised the ever-present dangers. Another odd impression is that her accounts of current events, e.g. of the death of RASPUTIN, seem to be as unplausible as those which have been patched from various reports and guesses by writers far from the actual scene. It is perhaps the very nearness of the author to the source of the host of wild rumours and speculations concerning this strange tragedy that conveys this sense of the impossible. Have I thereby suggested that the book lacks interest? On the contrary, it hasn't a dull or insincere page.
Little Houses (METHUEN) is not, as you might excusably suppose, a treatise upon the problem of the hour, but a novel. I confess that, when I read in the puff preliminary that it was "minutely observed" and "drab" in setting, my heart sank. But Mr. WODEN'S book is not made after that sufficiently-exploited fashion. He has a definite scheme, and (but for the fault of creating more characters than he can conveniently manage) tells his simple tale with a mature ease remarkable in a first novel. The plan of it is the life-story of a group of persons in a provincial factory town in those Victorian days when trade-unions were first starting, when the caricaturists lived upon Mr. GLADSTONE'S collars and the Irish Question was very much in the same state as it is to-day. We watch the hero, John Allday, developing from a Sunday-school urchin to flourishing owner of his own business and prospective alderman. Of course I admit that this synopsis does not sound peculiarly thrilling; also that as a tale it is by now considerably more than twice told. But I can only repeat that, for those with a taste for such stories, here is one excellent of its kind. Whether Mr. WODEN has been drawing upon personal memories for it, writing in fact that one novel of which every man is said to be capable, time and the publishing lists will show. I shall certainly be interested to see. Meanwhile the fact that despite his name GEORGE—always an object of the gravest suspicion—I accept his masculinity without question is my tribute both to the balance of his style and to the admirable drawing of his hero.