Perils of crossing the road
Country Cousin(who suffers from his wife's elbow at each crossing)."Oo! lawks, Maria! Next time we've to cross lemme be roon ower!"
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Double Life(Grant Richards) is a story that unblushingly bases its appeal on the love of almost everyone for a fairy-tale of good fortune. The matter of it is to show how a lady amateur, wife of a novelist, herself hardly knowing one end of a horse from the other, might make forty thousand pounds in a year on the Turf, without even her own husband so much as suspecting her activities. The thing isn't likely, is indeed a fantasy of the wildest improbability; but, told with the zest imparted to it here by Mr.Grant Richards, it provides first-rate fun. Some danger of monotony there was bound to be in what is really a variation upon a single theme. Though the author cunningly avoids this, I think it might justly be observed that he has madeOlivia'splunges almost too uniformly successful. But perhaps not; after all, while you are handling fairy-gold, why be niggardly of it? The heroine's introduction to horse-racing comes about through the unconscious agency of her husband, who takes her with him on a visit to Newmarket in search of local colour for a "sporting" novel. The resulting situation reaches its climax in what is the best scene of the book, whenGeoffrey, returning from a race that he has visited alone, but upon whichOlivia, unknown to him, has risked thousands, recounts its progress in the best manner of realistic fiction, wholly ignorant of the true cause of what seems such flattering agitation in the listener. Altogether a happy if not very subtle story which I am glad that Mr.Grant Richardscould persuade himself to publish.
To write, as Mr.R.W. Chambershas written, fifty-two novels, many of them excellent and all readable, while still on the right side of sixty, is an achievement of intelligent industry that entitles any novelist, at the latter end, to take matters a little easily.The Moonlit Way(Appleton) has neither the imaginative qualities ofThe King in Yellow, the humour ofIn Search of the Unknown, nor the adventurous tang ofAshes of Empire, but it is a good live story that will carry the reader's interest to the last page. Mr.Chambersis at his best when dealing with spies and secret service agents and scheming chancellors and the other subterranean apparatus of war and diplomacy; at his least interesting when depicting affluent young America on its native heath of New York bricks and mortar.The Moonlit Waydeals with all these things and more. We are whisked from the Bosphorus to the Welland Canal on the heels of Germany's "War in the United States," and French Secret Service officers, German saloon keepers and Sinn Fein revolutionaries jostle one another for a place in our interest. The novel-reading public knows that it is quite safe in buying any story by Mr.Chambers, and, if it does not expect too much ofThe Moonlit Way, it will not be disappointed.
Lately, volumes of individual memorial to dead youth seem to have become less frequent. Perhaps there was a suggestion that the making of them, or rather their publication for the eyes of strangers, was in danger of being overdone. However this may be, I think that, quite apart from the appeal of circumstance, there would always have been a welcome for such a bright-natured book as one that FatherRonald Knoxhas put together, mostly from diaries and letters, aboutPatrick Shaw-Stewart(Collins). Eton and Balliol will agree that there could be no biographer better fitted to record the life, as happy seemingly as it was fated to be short, of one who combined success with popularity at both these places, was caught by the War on the threshold of a wider career, served his country with very notable distinction and was killed in the winter of 1917. Though he met death in France, the most ofShaw-Stewart'swar-service was on the Eastern front; in particular he saw more than most soldiers of the whole Gallipoli adventure, to which he went as a member of that amazing company—surely the very flower of this country's war contribution—theHoodBattalion of the R.N.V.R. Here he was the comrade of many of those whom England has especially delighted to honour:Rupert Brooke,Denis-Browne,Charles Listerand others, all of whom figure in these vivid and most attractive letters; from which also one gathers an engaging picture ofShaw-Stewarthimself, a generously admiring, humorous and entirely independent young Tory in a band of brilliant revolutionaries. In fine a book (despite its theme of promise sacrificed) full of laughter and a singularly charming character-study of one who, in his biographer's phrase, was assuredly "not one of the passengers of his generation."
The Specialist
Eminent Botanist on scientific expedition. "Dear me! Why didn't I take up Zoology instead of Botany? This seems such an interesting specimen."
MissElla Sykes, after going with her brother and a camera on his special mission to Kashgar during the earlier days of the War, has detailed in charming fashion, under the titleThrough Deserts and Oases of Central Asia(Macmillan), their travels in lands still almost unknown. SirPercy Sykeshimself has added some chapters on the history and customs of the district in order to allow himself thepleasure of referring affectionately to his hunting of the giant sheep—theOvis poli—of the Pamirs. Between them they have given me a good deal of information, with a lot of really capital photographs, about a country—Chinese Turkestan—that one may have just heard of before, though it is impossible to be sure. Resisting a burning desire to pass on newly-acquired learning to the first listener, I will be content to say that a more readable volume of its kind has not come my way for a long time, and incidentally the country itself seems surprisingly desirable. For one thing it is free from the mosquitoes that spoil so many books of travel, while the people are peaceful, reasonably contented and not liable to jar on the reader's nerves, in the time-honoured fashion, with spears and poisoned arrows. Even the yaks, that one had supposed to be fearsome beasts, are mild benevolent pacifists. The authors do not suggest that it is all Paradise, of course, though for the Moslem there may be something of that sort in it. "Praise be to Allah! I have four obedient wives, who spend all their days in trying to please me," said a Kirghiz farmer to SirPercy. But even Paradise may be a matter of taste.
IfWar in the Garden of Eden(Murray) cannot be numbered among the books which must be read by a serious war-student it is in its unassuming way very attractive. CaptainKermit Rooseveltmade many friends while serving as a Captain with the Motor Machine-Gun Corps in Mesopotamia, and here he reveals himself as a keen soldier and a pleasant companion. In style he is perhaps a shade too jerky; his frequent failure to make his connections gives one a sense of being in the hands of a rather rambling guide. But the important points are that he is an engaging rambler, and that he can describe his experiences both of war and peace with so clear a simplicity that they can be easily visualized. When the American Army arrived in France CaptainRooseveltnaturally wished to join it, and his last chapter is called "With the First Division in France and Germany." But for us the main interest of his book lies in the work he did with the British in Mesopotamia, and to thank him for this would seem to be an impertinence.
Mr.Arnold Bennett'sFrom the Log of the Velsa(Chatto) deals with some vague period before the War (dates are most carefully concealed), when the versatile author undertook certain cruises up and down Dutch canals, the Baltic, French, Flemish and Danish coasts and East Anglian estuaries with companions about whom he preserves an equally mysterious silence. (Was it secret service, I wonder?) A delightful book, produced with something like pre-war attention to æsthetic appearance—a pleasant quarto with roomy pages faithfully printed in a fair type. You ought to enjoy the owner's evident enjoyment (he was never bored and therefore never boring), his charmingly ingenuous pride of possession, his shrewd, humorous and excessively didactic utterances about painters, pictures, architecture and female beauty, his zeal for water-colour sketching and his apparently profound contempt of other exponents of the craft. Nothing could be less like (I thank Heaven) the ordinary yachtsman's recollections of his travels, and I get an impression that Mr.Bennettwas not ill-pleased to leave most of the work and the technical knowledge to his skipper.
"Crêpe de Chine in oyster white will show the top of the dress embroidered to the knees in some unconventional design of black and a deeper shade of white."—Daily Paper."The bridesmaid's dress was of heavy white crêpe-de-chine, of pale apricot shade."—Provincial Paper.
Canningmust have had a premonition of the modern fashions when he wrote inThe New Morality, "Black's not so black, nor white soverywhite."
From a bookseller's advertisement:—
"Mr.—— has the way of when you finish one of his most interesting books that you really cannot help yourself by reading all."Newfoundland Paper.
Not being quite sure whether this is a compliment or not we have suppressed the distinguished author's name.