(_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 made _Olivia's_ plunges
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, when _Geoffrey_,
returning from a race that he has visited alone, but upon which
_Olivia_, 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 Richards
could persuade himself to publish.
To write, as Mr. R.W. Chambers has 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 of _The King in
Yellow_, the humour of _In Search of the Unknown_, nor the adventurous
tang of _Ashes of Empire_, but it is a good live story that will carry
the reader's interest to the last page. Mr. Chambers is 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 Way_ deals 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 of _The 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 Father Ronald Knox has put together,
mostly from diaries and letters, about _Patrick 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 of Shaw-Stewart's
war-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--the _Hood_ Battalion 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 Lister and others, all of
whom figure in these vivid and most attractive letters; from which also
one gathers an engaging picture of Shaw-Stewart himself, 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."
* * * * *
[Illustration: 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."]
* * * * *
Miss Ella 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 title _Through Deserts and Oases
of Central Asia_ (Macmillan), their travels in lands still almost
unknown. Sir Percy Sykes himself has added some chapters on the history
and customs of the district in order to allow himself the pleasure of
referring affectionately to his hunting of the giant sheep--the _Ovis
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 Sir Percy. But
even Paradise may be a matter of taste.
* * * * *
If _War 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. Captain Kermit Roosevelt made 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 Captain Roosevelt
naturally 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's _From 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. Bennett
was 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_.
Canning must have had a premonition of the modern fashions when
he wrote in _The New Morality_, "Black's not so black, nor white so
_very_ white."
* * * * *