Part 3

It is the same with rations. None were sent for me this morning. It is tolerably certain that none will be sent to-morrow.

Ah, well, it will be a sad and disappointing end to a promising career, won't it, Mr. Punch? I feel sure if Lord KITCHENER knew the facts of the case he would do something about it. Perhaps you could approach him on the matter. Still, I have read somewhere that life can be supported on four bananas a day. I can get eight bananas for an anna here, and I have Rs. 1, As. 7, P. 2 remaining in my money belt. I leave you to work it out.

I remember now that a wandering Punjabi fortune-teller revealed to me at Christmas that I should live to be 107. That was one of his best points. He also told me that I should be married three times and have eleven children; that I had a kind heart; that a short dark lady was interested in my career; that the KAISER would be dethroned next June; and that fortune-telling was a precarious means of livelihood and its professors were largely dependent upon the generosity of wealthy _sahibs_ such as myself. Wealthy!

But he was a true prophet in one particular. He foretold that I should shortly be unhappy on account of a parting.

Seriously, Mr. Punch, it was hard to say good-bye to all my friends; it is not cheering to reflect now that they are a thousand miles away, amid fresh and fascinating scenes, about to undergo novel and wonderful experiences from which I am debarred. But there is one lesson which the Army teaches very efficiently--that, whatever one's personal feelings, orders have to be obeyed without question.

And I suppose they also serve who only sit and refer correspondents to obscure sub-sections and appendices of Army Regulations, India. Yours ever, ONE OF THE _PUNCH_ BRIGADE.

* * * * *

* * * * *

THE COLLECTOR.

Once upon a time there was an Old Gentleman who lived in a Very Comfortable Way; and some of his Neighbours said he was Rich and others that, at any rate, he was Well Off, and others again that at least he had Considerable Private Means. And when the Great War broke out it was clear that he was much too Old to fight, and he wasn't able to speak at Recruiting Meetings on account of an Impediment in his Speech, and he had no Soldiers billeted upon him, because there were no Soldiers there, and he could not take in Belgian Refugees because he lived on the East Coast--so he just read the Papers and pottered about the Garden as he used to do before.

But after a time it was noticed that he began to "draw in," as his Neighbours said. First he gave up his Motor, and when his Gardener enlisted he didn't get Another; and he never had a Fire in his Bedroom. And his Neighbours, on thinking it over, concluded that he had been Hard Hit by the War. But None of them knew how.

Then he began to travel Third Class and gave up Smoking Cigars. And they thought he was waiting till the Stock Exchange opened.

Then they noticed that he got no new Clothes and his old ones were not so smart as they used to be. And as the Stock Exchange was open by now they began to believe that he must have become a Miser and was getting meaner as he got older. And they all said it was a Pity. But he went on reading the Papers and pottering round the Garden much as before.

And the Tradespeople found that the Books were not so big as they used to be, and they began to say that it was a Pity when people who had Money didn't know how to spend it.

But the Truth is that they were all wrong; he was a Collector. That was how the Money went.

He never told anyone about his Collection, but he kept it in the Top Drawer of his Desk till it got too big and overflowed into the Second Drawer, and then into the Third, and so on.

He was quite determined that his Collection should be complete and should contain Every Sound Specimen--that was partly why he kept reading the Papers. But he didn't mind having Duplicates as long as they had Different Dates. There was one Specimen of which he got a Duplicate every Week.

One of his Rules was never to allow any Specimen into his Collection unless it had a Stamp on it.

It was quite a New Sort of Collection. It was made up of Receipts from the People who were running All The Different War Funds.

* * * * *

THE SOLDIER'S COAT.

After his ample dinner, William sank into the big chair before the fire, and with a book on his knee became lost in thought.

He woke half-an-hour later to observe that Margaret was knitting.

"It's sheer waste of time," he told her, "to make anything of wool that colour."

"Is it?" she asked sweetly.

"If there's no more khaki or brown wool left in the shops, you should make something of flannel. Any self-respecting soldier would rather be frost-bitten to death a dozen times than wear a garment of pink wool."

"Do you think so?" asked Margaret, smiling.

"Besides, you really ought to stick to the beaten track--belts, mufflers and mittens. Nobody wants ear-muffs."

"This is going to be a coat," she said, holding it up and surveying it with satisfaction.

"A coat?--that handful of pink, a coat? That feeble likeness of an egg-cosy, a coat? A pink woollen coat for a British soldier! My poor friend over there in the trenches, whoever you are, may Heaven help you! And may Heaven forgive you, Margaret, for this night's work!"

"I shan't finish it to-night--it'll take days. And he'll be very proud of it, I know."

"Who will?"

"The soldier-boy will. Bless his heart; he's a born fighter--anyone can see it with half an eye. Mabel says----"

"Oh, one of Mabel's pals, is it? Well, what's Donald doing to allow Mabel to take such an interest in this precious soldier-boy who is prepared to be proud of a coat of soft pink wool? Who is the idiot?"

"He's no idiot, and his name's Peter," said Margaret.

"Peter! Peter what?"

"Dear old thing, I wish you'd pull yourself together, and try to realise that you have been an uncle for at least three weeks. Donald and Mabel are going to call him 'Peter'--didn't I tell you?"

* * * * *

"South Wales. Safe Southern shelter from shells and shrapnel."--_Advt. in "The Times."_

Just the place for our shy young sister Susie to sew shirts for soldiers in.

"On the outbreak of war M. F. van Droogenbroeck, an engineer, joined the Belgian Flying Corps, and did most useful work, being complimented by his King for his invention of a new kind of aircomb." _Daily Mirror._

Our own 'air-comb is the old kind with a couple of spikes missing.

* * * * *

THE KEEP-IT-DARK CITY.

[Even the more obscure of the American papers often contain important news of the doings of the British army many days before the Censor allows the information to be published in England.]

I am told that few exploits are finer Than a battle our Blankshires have won, So bring me _The Michigan Miner_, For I'm anxious to read how 'twas done; If _The Miner_'s not easy to hit on, Get _The Maryland Trumpet_; it treats Of a story that's kept, to the Briton, As dark as the Westminster streets!

As our soldiers from north of the Border Some vital positions have stormed, Put _The Oregon Message_ on order To keep me completely informed! One moment! I've just heard a rumour That the Germans' whole front has been cleft-- Quick! Rush for _The Tennessee Boomer_; Heaven grant that a copy is left!

Each day in this keep-it-dark city, Officials, to us, seem unkind To censor such news without pity, But, of course, they've an object in mind; For a man, when his spirits touch zero Through a natural yearning for facts, Will enlist, and _himself_ be a hero Where no one can censor his ACTS!

* * * * *

* * * * *

AN ESSAY IN CRITICISM.

O authors, remember to join your flats!

The novel was going splendidly. I had been revelling in it. I was sitting in one chair, with my feet in another, not far from the fire, plunged in the story, when all of a sudden my pleasure went.

It was in Chapter xvii., where the young doctor takes a taxi and rushes up to the actress's flat so as to be there first, before Lord Burlington. You must understand that the young doctor is newly in practice and has the greatest difficulty in making both ends meet. Well, it says that he sprang from the cab and was half-way up the stairs in a moment. That was all right, but the point is that he stayed two hours hunting for the missing letter. Now this is a very exciting passage, because we know that the detective may be here any minute, and Lord Burlington is coming too, and if either of them--well, the point is that, owing to the author forgetting to make the young doctor pay the taxi-man, all my pleasure went.

I am not unduly economical, but I hate downright waste, and here was the taximeter ticking all through the rest of that chapter and the next, and further still. Had it been Lord Burlington's cab I should have cared less, for he was rich; had it been the detective's I should not have cared at all, because the driver might have gone to Scotland Yard for his money. But the young doctor was so poor, and sooner or later he would have to come out of the flat again, and then he would be caught and faced with an impossible bill; and this got on my nerves.

As I say, the story was frightfully exciting just there, but I found myself, instead of participating in the excitement, saying, "Another twopence"; "Twopence more"; "It must be four shillings by now," "Five shillings," and so on. Not even when the face of the Chinaman appeared at the window--he had climbed up the water-pipe and had a dagger in his teeth--could I really concentrate. "Seven-and-six by now," was all I said.

The result was that the effect of the book was lost on me and I cared nothing for what happened to any one. The taximeter ticked through every subsequent page. Long after we got away from London altogether and the young doctor was on his way to Hong Kong, racing the detective, I still heard the taximeter ticking; just because the man had never been paid. It ticked through the wedding bells; and it ticked through the strangling of Lord Burlington in one of the Adelphi arches, with which the story closes.

And that is why I say, O authors, remember to join your flats.

* * * * *

The Slump in Prussians.

(SORTES VERGILIANÆ.)

"_Procumbit humi Bosch._"

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

"SEARCHLIGHTS."

The title was not, of course, meant to deceive, for Mr. VACHELL is an honest man; and anyhow the critics, for that is their business, would be swift to disillusionize the public; but in our permissible state of suspicion, the audience might easily be led to suppose from the word "Searchlights," combined with the early appearance of an imported Teuton in the person of _Sir Adalbert Schmaltz_, that spy-work was in the air. But the genial domesticity of this naturalized Scot quickly disposed of our unworthy apprehensions, and we soon learned that his _provenance_ had no bearing upon the issue.

That issue was concerned with a question of paternity, whose acuteness happened to be contemporaneous with that of the present European crisis. I say "happened"; for here again I cast no reflection upon Mr. VACHELL'S intent, or suggest that the war-element in his play was introduced as an afterthought into his original scheme. If it was, which I doubt, then the patchwork was cleverly concealed; and my only complaint must be of a certain obscurity in the relation between the two patterns in his design. For if the title implied that the effect of the War was to throw a searchlight into the dark places of the human heart (as distinguished from its influence upon our City streets), I do not think that in the case of _Robert Blaine's_ heart, if he had one, the author has made this operation sufficiently clear.

Mrs. Blaine had a grown-up son, born after five years of barren wedlock, who was the object of her husband's profound detestation. After some twenty years--a little late, perhaps, in the day, but the author wished us to be present when he did it--_Robert Blaine_, at a moment when his wife is trying to get her boy out of a tight corner, declares an inveterate doubt of his fatherhood, and she makes confession of her fault. Subsequently--in a "strong" scene--she recants, alleging that her confession was a work of creative art, produced in a spasm of spite; and everybody except the immovable _Blaine_ is vastly relieved.

But not for long, for she presently recants her recantation. You will guess that, though a little shaken, we were not in despair, but looked hopefully for a re-recantation. But you are in error. Her second confession, though no words passed her lips, was obviously final. And what induced it? What was the piece of conviction? If you will believe me, it was just a photograph with which her husband confronted her--an old photograph of her lover that she mistook for her son's, so close was the likeness. This was surely a flaw in Mr. VACHELL'S scheme, for it is unbelievable that she should have hitherto overlooked this fatal resemblance, even if her attention had not as a fact been called to it by a garrulous friend at quite an early stage in the proceedings of the play.

Another weakness, common enough where an author wants to show a variety of types and excuses himself from the trouble of assorting them, was to be seen in the extreme improbability of the friendship between _Blaine_ and _Sir Adalbert Schmaltz_. These two were always staying in one another's houses yet there never could have been the smallest of tastes in common between the dour and moody financier and the light-hearted consumer of lager beer and _delikatessen_.

But I prefer, if you please, to dwell upon the shining virtues of Mr. VACHELL'S _Searchlights_. With the exception of an interlude or two of needless triviality--_Lady Schmaltz's_ sobbing scene, for instance--the essentials of the tragic theme held us grimly in their grasp. But always we could find relief in the author's humanity, revealed not only in the passionate devotion of the mother's heart, but in the persuasive character of her boy, and the unaffected quality of his relations both to her and to the girl who wanted his love.

Mr. VACHELL would be the first to acknowledge, and generously, how much he owes to the really remarkable performance, as _Mrs. Blaine_, of Miss FAY DAVIS, who can never before have accomplished so high an achievement. But the matter was there for her clever hands to shape, and that was the author's doing.

Mr. HARRY IRVING'S, too, was a fine performance, though, from the moment of his entrance, a figure of sinister portent, he lacked all contrast of light and shade. But, to be just, that was hardly in the part, as made--deliberately, so it seemed--for those particular methods of which he is the master.

As for Mr. HOLMAN CLARK, if all Teutons, naturalized or other, were like his _Sir Adalbert Schmaltz_ (or _Sir Keith Howard_, as he called himself after the War began, on the principle that the best was good enough for him) I should have small ground of quarrel with the race. But how this joyous German ever came to wear a kilt and own a deer-forest I cannot hope to understand, for there was no hint of Semitic origin in his face or composition.

Mr. REGINALD OWEN made a most human soldier-boy, and I shall never want to meet a Guardsman with a better manner or an easier sense of humour. I remark, by the way, that young _Blaine_ is the second stage-hero (the first was in _The Cost_) whom the War has affected in the head.

Miss MARGERY MAUDE, though she had the rather ungrateful part of a girl who is quite ready, thank you, to be loved as soon as you feel like it, played, as always, with a very perfect tact and charm.

Finally, Miss KATE BISHOP was her dear old self, and Mr. TOM REYNOLDS' sketch of a solicitor was as bright as it was brief.

I venture to offer my best compliments both to the cast and to the author, and to hope that his _Searchlights_ may serve well to pierce the shadows of the night through which we are passing. O. S.

* * * * *

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

Miss VIOLA MEYNELL brings to her analysis of character an astonishingly acute observation and insight, an intimate sympathy, a quiet, leavening, sometimes faintly malicious, humour; and to her synthesis a conscientious and dexterous artistry in selection and arrangement which gives a vividly objective reality to her creations. So that you may put down her _Columbine_ (SECKER) with something like the guilty feeling of an eavesdropper. Love in its effect upon three girls is her main theme, and it is difficult to overpraise her skill and restraint in the handling of it. _Lily Peak_, the actress, beautiful, passionless, incompetent, with her irrelevant banality, and her second-hand philosophy of living, is a veritable _tour de force_ of characterisation which cleverly avoids the easy pit of caricature. And between this pretty nonentity and _Jennifer_, the competent, the loyal and the deep, with her occasional flashes of beauty and her innocent provocativeness, _Dixon Parrish_, one of those self-analytic, essentially cool-blooded modern young men, wavers to the tragic hurt of all the three. _Alison_, his sister, full of moodiness and passionate preoccupations, moves unquiet on the well-planned background which holds that genially absurd pseudo-intellectual, her father; the kindly negative _Mrs. Parrish_; _Gilbert_, _Alison's_ lover (the least satisfactory of the portraits); the pleasantly pretentious _Madame Barrett_ of the elocution classes; and "that _Mrs. Smith_," who is only (but adroitly) shown through _Lily's_ artless chatter. Miss MEYNELL chooses to write chiefly of little moments in little lives. But she has adequate reserves of power for bigger work, as passages of warm colour placed with a fine judgment on her low-toned canvas abundantly prove, and meanwhile she has shown herself mistress of a method singularly skilful and restrained. She does not describe or explain or soliloquise. All her points are made through the speech, the actions or the expressed thought of her characters--the manifestly excellent way which so few have the wit or the courage to follow.

* * *

_Mr. Leo Brandish_, so Miss PEGGY WEBLING assures me, intends to write the professional biography of their mutual hero, that notable actor and admirable gentleman, _Edgar Chirrup_ (METHUEN). In the meantime she has told us all about the man himself, at least as far as the last page that he has turned, the one where the dogs and the rocking-horse are included in the family portrait, with his children and the wife whom you and I, and everyone else for that matter, realised was the one for him long before he did. Some of the other pages in his life were less satisfactory, more particularly those on which Fate had inscribed, not in the most convincing fashion (but perhaps the authoress jogged Fate's elbow), the history of his sudden unworthy infatuation. If I could not forget or ever quite understand this episode, neither could "_Chirps_" himself in the years that followed, when the lovableness and loyalty that had already won my affections were pleading for his release, with the ladies (Fate and Miss WEBLING, I mean) collaborating over his destiny. It would indeed be pitiful if any but the happiest of endings had been in store for the hero and his _Ruth_, for sweeter and simpler folk have seldom been persuaded by any writer to smile a genial public into arm-chair content. And the secret of their charm would seem to be just that they have been able to catch the qualities of sympathy and sincerity that belonged in the first case to the manner of the telling of their story; so perhaps, after all, nothing but good was meant them from the start. At any rate from first to last there is not a page in this book that is not sweet, wholesome and entirely readable. Here is tenderness without mawkishness, humour without noise, a sufficiency of action without harshness of outline; most surprising, here is a story, in which many of the characters are of the Stage, presented with an entire absence of limelight or any other vulgarity. All this, indeed, one expects from the title-page; but none the less it is no mean achievement. And so--my congratulations.

* * *

_Through the Ages Beloved_ (HUTCHINSON) might be fairly described as an unusual story. I am bound to say that I both admired and enjoyed it; but at the same time a more tangled tale it was never my task to unravel. For the benefit of future explorers I will say that the motive of the plot--whose scene is laid in Japan--is reincarnation. Consequently, though the hero, _Kanaya_, begins as a modern student who has fought through the Russo-Japanese war, you must be prepared to find him and yourself switched suddenly without any warning into the remote past. I am not quite sure that Mr. H. GRAHAME RICHARDS has been playing the game here. So unheralded is the transference that even the close and careful reader will experience some bewilderment; as, for example, when the heroine, whose own name remains the same in both ages, re-enters with different parents. As for the skipper, his doom will be confusion unmitigated. However, once you have found your bearings again, there is much to admire in the treatment of a time and a place so eminently picturesque. Mr. RICHARDS' pen-pictures of Japanese scenery have all the delicate beauty of paintings upon ivory. The clear, clean air, the colour of sunrise flushing some exquisite landscape, a flight of birds crossing a garden of azaleas--all these are realized with obvious knowledge and enthusiasm, and more than compensate for the intricacy of the plot. But this is certainly there. Once only was I myself near vanquished. This was when the _Kanaya_ of the past, himself the result of the modern _Kanaya_ hitting his head on a stone, began to hint of uneasy visions pointing to a remote Port-Arthurian future. Here I confess that (like _Alice_ and _The Red King_) I longed for some authoritative pronouncement as to who was the genuine dreamer, and who would "go out." Still, an original story, and one to be read, even if with knitting of brows.

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