"Quick, Mummie! Come and help Bobbie—he's fallen into the Lucky Dip."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
So charged is it with liable-to-go-off controversy that I should hardly have been astonished to see Mr. H. G. Wells's latest volume, Russia in the Shadows (Hodder and Stoughton), embellished with the red label of "Explosives." Probably everyone knows by now the circumstances of its origin, and how Mr. Wells and his son are (for the moment) the rearguard in that long procession of unprejudiced and undeceivable observers who have essayed to pluck the truth about Russia from the bottom of the Bolshevist pit. What Mr. Wells found is much what was to be expected: red ruin, want and misery unspeakable. The difference between his report and those of most of his forerunners is that, being (as one is apt to forget) a highly-trained writer, he is able to present it with a technical skill that enormously helps the effect. Our author having been unable to deny the shadow, like everyone else save perhaps the preposterous Mr. Lansbury, the only outstanding question is who casts it. The ordinary man would probably have little hesitation about his answer to that. Mr. Wells has even less. He unhesitatingly names you and me and the French investors and several editors. Well, I have no space for more than an indication of what you will find in this undeniably vigorous and vehement little volume. But I must not forget the photographs. Some of these, of devastated streets and the like, have rather lost their novelty. Unfortunately, however, for Mr. Wells as propagandist he has also included a number of the most revealing portraits yet available of the men who are hag-riding a once great nation to the abyss. I can only say that for me those portraits put the finishing touch to Mr. Wells's argument. They extinguish it.
The pictorial wrapper of A Man of the Islands (Hutchinson) is embellished with a drawing of a coffee-coloured lady in a costume that it would be an under-statement to call curtailed, also (inset, as the picture-papers say) the portrait of a respectable-looking gentleman in a beard. In the printed synopsis that occupies the little tuck-in part of the same wrapper you are promised "an entrancing picture of breaking seas on lonely islands and tropical nights beneath the palms." In other words Mr. H. de Vere Stacpoole as before. Lest however you should suppose the insularity of this attractive pen-artist to be in danger of becoming overdone, I will say at once that the six tales from which the book takes its name occupy not much more than a third of it, the rest being filled with stories of varied setting bearing such titles as "The Queen's Necklace," "The Box of Bonbons," and the like—all frankly to be grouped under the head of "Financial Measures." This said, it is only fair to add that the half-dozen Sigurdson adventures—he was the Man of the Islands, a bearded trader, murderer, pearl thief and what not—seem to me a group of as rattling good yarns as of their kind one need wish to meet, every one with some original and thrilling situation that lifts it far above pot-boiling status. I could wish (despite anything above having a contrary sound) that Mr. Stacpoole had given us a whole volume with that South Sea setting that so happily stimulates his fancy.