Chapter 3

And if the play is not quite on the high level of Mr. GALSWORTHY'S _The Eldest Son_, which it faintly recalls, it is much more worthy of Mr. VACHELL'S gifts than the poor thing, _Penn_, which died so young. Also he is very much more fortunate this time in his cast. Miss MARION TERRY, as _Lady Pomfret_, was a pattern of sweet graciousness; and Mr. ALLAN AYNESWORTH was at his happiest as _Sir Geoffrey_. And the two pairs of lovers, Mr. CYRIL RAYMOND and Miss MAUD BELL above stairs, and Mr. REGINALD BACH and Miss DORIS LYTTON below (they were really all of them on the ground floor, the butler's room being the common trysting-place), served as delightful examples of natural selection--both on their own part and that of the management--and were as fresh and healthy as the most eugenical could desire.

O. S.

* * * * *

"Daddy Long-Legs."

_Daddy Long-Legs_ is a pleasant American sentimental comedy made by JEAN WEBSTER out of her very jolly book, and not so sticky as some of our importations of the same general type. The four Acts are phases in the development of _Judy_ (or _Jerusha_) _Abbott_, orphan; and, as normally happens in book-plays, development is extremely abrupt. Act I. shows us _Judy_ as the drudge of the orphanage breaking into flame of rebellion on the day of the visit of the trustees. Naturally the trustees are all trustees _pour rire_, except one real good rich man, _Jervis Pendleton_, who admires the orphan's spirit, and decides that she is to have her chance at his charges; but is on no account to know her benefactor.

In Act II., a year later, _Judy_ is not merely the most popular but the best dressed girl in her college. She still dreams about her unknown benefactor, whom she calls _Daddy Long-Legs_, and assumes to be a hoary old man. _Pendleton_ comes to Commem., or its equivalent, to have a peep at his ward, and loses his heart. In the Third Act, three years later, our heroine is a famous author, and _Pendleton_, coming (still incog.) to propose, is refused by a _Judy_ who has taken to worrying unduly (and not altogether convincingly, if you ask me) about her lack of family. And, of course, in Act IV., wedding bells.

Miss RENÉE KELLY has a charming personality, and a smile which alone is worth going to see. She trounced the matron and the incredible trustees with a fierce fury, and seemed to have easy command of the changes of mood and tense which her fast-moving circumstances required. A pretty twinkling star. Mr. CHARLES WALDRON is a skilful actor. If he, perhaps, grimaced a little too much by way of not letting us miss the obvious points of the little mystery, he made as admirable a proposal of marriage as I have ever heard on the stage (or off it for that matter, with perhaps one exception); but to suppose that so accomplished a lover would accept a mere mournful shake of the head as a final refusal is simply too absurd. Miss FAY DAVIS made quite a little triumph of gentle gracious kindliness out of one of those potentially tiresome explanatory parts without which no mystifications can be contrived. Miss KATE JEPSON is a comédienne of rich grain, and gave a very amusing study of the hero's old nurse. Miss JEAN GADELL, that clever specialist in dour unpleasant stage women, made a properly repulsive thing out of the matron of the orphanage. Mr. HYLTON ALLEN scored his points as a comic lover with droll effect. If the distinctly clever children of the home (_Judy_ excepted) had been effectively put on the contraband list I should not have worried. They were unduly noisy (for art, not for life perhaps), and they overdid their parts, being not only rowdy in the absence, and abject in the presence, of authority, but different kinds of children--not merely the same children in two moods.

Altogether a pleasant play pleasantly and competently performed.

T.

* * * * *

"CABINET LEEKAGE."--Daily Paper.

Now why, we wonder, do they spell it that way?

* * * * *

Alleged Cannibalism in the German Navy.

"The prisoners got the same food as the submarine crew. Here is the bill of fare: Breakfast consisted of coffee, black bread, submarine commander and he pilot."

_Provincial Paper._

* * * * *

"Jimmy Wilde, the fly-weight champion, took part in two contests at Woolwich on Saturday, winning them both with great ease. Darkey Saunders, Camberwell, was beaten in three months."--_Burton Daily Mail._

The reporter also seems to have been knocked out of time.

* * * * *

"If the area of the garden cannot be increased, the quantity and quality of the crops should be improved by the extra hour of daylight."--_The Times._

For this discovery our contemporary is hereby recommended for the famous Chinese Order of the Excellent Crop.

* * * * *

"A letter sent on Friday saying, 'We are starting a central mess for 1,200 men on Monday,' and asking: 'Can you send cooks?' brings as a reply 24 trained women cooks, who roll up their sleeves and cook breakfast for the number stated inside 12 hours!"

_The Times._

What was breakfast to some must have been supper to others.

* * * * *

MUSINGS ON MILK-CANS.

When I travel up to London by an early morning train Or return into the country when the day is on the wane, At the smallest railway station There's a dreadful demonstration Which causes me unmitigated pain.

I'm aware that milk is needed for our infant girls and boys; That it aids adult dyspeptics to regain "digestive poise"; But I've never comprehended Why its transport is attended By the maximum of diabolic noise.

I admit the railway porter who can deftly twirl a can In each hand along the platform is no ordinary man; But what kills me is the banging And the clashing and the clanging As he hurls them in or hauls them from the van.

Now if some new material for these vessels could be found-- Non-metallic and in consequence a silencer of sound-- There would be within our borders Fewer nerve and brain disorders And more of moral uplift to go round.

I know a dashing journalist, a credit to his trade, Who's always in the thick of it whenever there's a raid. Bombs of various sorts and sizes He describes and analyses, But he can't endure a long milk-cannonade.

I've written to our Member, Dr. Philadelphus Snell, To ask a question in the House--I think he'd do it well-- If our cows' nerves should be mangled By the way their milk is jangled; And, if he doesn't play, I'll try GINNELL.

* * * * *

HEART-TO-HEART TALKS.

(_The German Emperor and the Crown Prince._)

_The German Emperor._ Sit down, won't you?

_The Crown Prince._ Oh, thanks, I rather prefer standing. One's legs get so cramped in a motor-car.

_The G. E._ Sit down!

_The C. P._ Really, I----

_The G. E._ SIT DOWN!!

_The C. P._ Oh, if you're going to take it like that, I'll--yes, yes, there I am. Are you happy now?

_The G. E._ I don't know why I tolerate this impertinence from a whipper-snapper like you. If I did my duty----

_The C. P._ I know what you're going to say: if you did your duty you'd have me arrested and packed off to prison. Isn't that it? Yes, I thought so. You want to be like old FREDERICK WILLIAM. He had FREDERICK THE GREAT sentenced to death, and, by Jove, he all but had the sentence carried out too. It was a deuced near thing. FREDERICK WILLIAM was mad, you know--as mad as a hatter, and----

_The G. E._ Stop it. I will not have you add to your other misdeeds the crime of irreverence against one of the greatest and worthiest members of our royal House.

_The C. P._ Well, it's my House as well as yours. I dare say you regret that, but there it is, and you won't alter it by glaring at me and threatening me with your moustache. I'm glare-proof and moustache-proof by this time.

_The G. E._ What have I done to deserve such a son?

_The C. P._ If it comes to that there's another way of putting it. What have _I_ done to deserve such a father?--that's what I might ask; but I'm too respectful, too careful of your feelings. And what's my reward? You're always nag-nag-nagging at me, morning, noon and night. Why can't you give it a rest?

_The G. E._ This is beyond endurance. But it has always been the same from the time you cut your teeth until now--no filial piety, no consideration for your mother and me; only a cross-grained selfishness and bad temper. What happened in India?

_The C. P._ Oh, if you're going over that old story again, I'm off.

_The G. E._ _Donnerwetter noch einmal!_ Sit still, I tell you. I say again, what happened in India? You never thought of ingratiating yourself with the native chiefs. You couldn't even keep your engagements or be punctual. All you thought of was running after some girl whose face happened to take your fancy. I might as well have kept you at home or sent you to London. What a creature to be a Crown Prince!

_The C. P. (wearily)._ There you go again. But I protest against such treatment. I'd far rather be back before Verdun with old VON HÄSELER grandmothering me all over the place.

_The G. E._ I wonder you dare to mention the word Verdun in my presence.

_The C. P._ Why shouldn't I? I didn't appoint myself Commander of the Verdun armies. You did that, and I've done my best to obey your orders and those of the High Command. If the French fight well, and if we lose thousands upon thousands of men, how am I responsible? Do be reasonable, my respected father. It was you who wanted Verdun. You won't be happy till you get it, and if you do get it now it won't be as useful as an old shoe without a sole. Anyhow, I'm bearing the burden, and if we succeed in breaking through it's you that will have the credit of it. If Verdun falls you'll be there in double quick time to take the salute in your shining----

_The G. E._ Silence, jackanapes!

_The C. P._ And if we don't get through poor old VON HÄSELER will have to retire. You'll send him your photograph in a gold frame to console him, just as you consoled BISMARCK. Pity there's no BISMARCK now. However, we can't have everything, can we?

(_Left quarrelling._)

* * * * *

"A damaged Zeppelin was observed to descend in the Thames Estuary, and it surrendered on the approach of patrol goat."

_The Journal (Calcutta)._

This incident is believed to be unique, but German submarines have no doubt before now been accounted for by our naval rams.

* * * * *

"We give these things long words. We talk of the 'triumph of organisation.' Is it not simpler to say--that when a man knows exactly what he wants done, exactly how every part of it should be done, and can pick a man for each task, and apportion his requirements to what is possible; and then, by far the most important thing of all, can so deal with the many under his command that each is most furiously anxious to do what the leader wants--why then, things go right."--_Westminster Gazette._

The answer is in the negative.

* * * * *

"There is much matter for thinking over in the observations of this 'Student' who was at Sandhurst twelve years ago, and at Oxford later on, and seems to have got the best out of both forms of training--the unhasting and unresting labour of 'the Shop,' which aims only at making competent gunners and sappers, and the easy-going round of University life which enlarges one's sympathy and stimulates the imagination."--_Morning Paper._

Judging by his description of Sandhurst we think that the writer of the above extract must also have been at Oxford, where the imagination gets stimulated.

* * * * *

* * * * *

THE GREAT NEUTRAL.

I am the Neutral Journalist who wanders round Europe. I am absolutely impartial. I am absolutely trustworthy. My perfect integrity is vouched for at the head of all my articles. Pleasant it is to come over to London, sell one set of articles to the Boom Press and another to the Gloom Press, and then sit down with smiling face and begin an article for Germany: "I sit in a hovel amongst the ruins of Fleet Street, with the wreck of the armoured fort of St. Paul's in view. I hear a stir outside. A wild mob of conscientious objectors is beating a recruiting officer to death. Such things happen hourly in defeated Albion." My series of London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham--all in ashes--has proved so successful that I propose to cover all the large towns and construct a Baedeker of ruins.

Yet I pride myself more on my work for England's Press. My German articles have all to be in the same vein. Only the Boom Press exists in Germany. But in England one can vary one's view and do artistic work. You must have read my story of the struggle for the last sausage in a Frankfort butcher's shop--how the troops intervened and the crowd attacked them, and how ultimately 1,400 civilians were mown down with machine guns--and the sausage was eaten by the General Officer commanding the Army Corps that suppressed the rising. You must also have seen my description of the KAISER--his white hair, bent shoulders, deathlike look as he passed, protected by his Guards from the wild fury of the Berlin mob. Of course I have another KAISER, the bright smiling man whose youth seems to have been renewed by the War, who waves his hand to the madly enthusiastic crowds waiting round the Palace for a glimpse of their divinity.

You must have read my secret interviews with distinguished Germans, who whispered to me that HINDENBURG had thrown down his sword and declared that if the useless slaughter did not cease he would march on Berlin. I have told you their promises of bloody revolutions and fierce risings. Also I have given you interviews with other distinguished Germans, who confided to me that now Germany could turn out one submarine and one Zeppelin every week-day and two on Sundays, and I have thrilled you with the details of the great trade war which will come directly peace is declared, when Germany will win back all her wealth by selling everything fifty per cent. below cost.

How my dinners vary in that strange Teutonic land! I pay twenty marks for two tiny slices of fish, a thin piece of indigestible potato bread, and a section of rancid sausage. At other times I spend two marks and get a delightful meal which could not be procured in a London restaurant for five shillings. I walk through Berlin and see scarcely a cripple or a wounded man. I let you know that ninety-five per cent. of German wounded, owing to the skill of German doctors, go back to the Front in a week. To other English readers I confide that all the maimed, wounded and blind are sent into the very centre of Germany. There are huge districts without a whole man in them.

Did you ask for the actual facts? I will give you one--and it is this: the only persons in Germany whose waist-measurements have increased in the War are the neutral journalists.

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

In _Hearts of Alsace_ (SMITH, ELDER) your interest will be held less by the actual story than by the profoundly moving and poignant picture that Miss BETHAM-EDWARDS has drawn of life in the Reichsland under the increasing burden of Prussian tyranny. It is a picture that one feels to be absolutely true. The author writes of what she knows. This Alsatian family--old _Jean Barthélemy_, the city father, crushed and embittered by the fate of his loved Mulhouse; his two daughters and the circle of their friends within the town--all live and move and look longingly towards the West, as so many others must have done these forty and odd years past. The plot, what there is of it, concerns the clandestine love of _Claire_, the petted younger daughter of the Gley house, for an officer in the conqueror's host, whom she had met during a visit to Strasburg. _Claire_ marries her _Kurt_, a shady worthless knave, and, as the book ends with the outbreak of war, is left to an unknown fate. Very stirring are the chapters that tell of the tumult of emotion that broke loose when the French guns were heard in Mulhouse; though here--as in all those war stories whose only satisfactory end is the final confusion of Kaiserdom--one feels that there is a chapter yet to be added. Miss BETHAM-EDWARDS writes with all the vigour (I might add all the garrulity) of intense personal feeling. Her book, as a race study, is a real contribution to the literature of the War.

* * * * *

These are days in which some measure of sacrifice is rightly considered the common duty of everyone, so long as it is sacrifice with an object. Perhaps this consideration gives me less patience with the preposterous kind, which, as a motive in fiction, usually consists in the hero inviting all and sundry to trample upon his prospects and reputation. This is what the chief character in _Proud Peter_ (HUTCHINSON) did. He began by allowing it to be supposed that he was the father of his brother's illegitimate child, the bright peculiar fatuousness of which pretence was that thereby the said brother was enabled to marry, and break the heart of, the heroine, whom, of course, Peter himself adored. Also, many years after, when the child, now an objectionable young man, nay more, an actor, was pursuing another heroine with his unwelcome attentions, he very nearly spiked _Peter's_ guns, on being threatened, by exclaiming, "I am thy son"--or words to that effect. Fortunately, however, there existed, as I had somehow known would be the case, a signed photograph that put all that right. Why, I wonder, is Mr. W. E. NORRIS always so sharp with the dramatic profession? Was it not in one of his earlier stories that somebody quite seriously questions whether a good actor can also be a good man? On the whole, as you may have gathered, while I should call Proud Peter a comfortable tale of the eupeptic type, I enjoyed it rather less than other stories from the same facile pen.

* * * * *

ARTHUR GREEN'S _The Story of a Prisoner of War_ (CHATTO AND WINDUS) can be recommended to all who can still digest the uncooked facts. "I can swear," he says, "that all that is written is Gospel truth," but without any such assurance it would be impossible for even the most sceptical to doubt the writer's honesty. Wounded and taken prisoner in August, 1914, he suffered severely at the hands of the Germans, and his account of the camp at Wittenburg does nothing to decrease one's loathing for that pestilential spot. For many reasons it gives that a civilized race can sink to such depths of cruelty and cowardice. Perhaps the only people to whom it will give any comfort are those who have sent food and clothing to our prisoners. But I am glad that this book came my way, because I would choose to read facts of the War baldly written by a soldier rather than any war fiction composed by imaginative civilians. "Of course I'm not an author," he writes, and as far as grammar and spelling go it is not for me to contradict him, but he has seen and suffered, and in these days no one who has handled a bayonet need apologise for taking a turn with a pen.

* * * * *

Encouraged, no doubt, by the reception accorded to that cheery little volume, _Minor Horrors of War_, its author, Dr. A. E. SHIPLEY, has now followed it with an equally entertaining sequel in More Minor Horrors (SMITH, ELDER). This deals more especially with the pests attached to the Senior Service, and familiar to those who go down to the sea in ships--the Cockroach, the Mosquito, the Rat, the Biscuit-Weevil and others. Of each Dr. SHIPLEY has some pleasant word of instruction or comment to say, in his own highly entertaining manner. I like, for example, his remark about the mosquito (whose infinite variety is recognised in no fewer than five chapters), that, if he could talk, the burden of his song would be that of the guests at the dinner-party in _David Copperfield_--"Give us blood!" And I found good omen in the cockroach world on learning that _Periplaneta Orientalis_, or the common English sort, has _P. Germanica_ thoroughly beat in the matter of empire-building. In short, Dr. SHIPLEY'S second volume, like his first, combines instruction with amusement, and is well worth its modest eighteen-pence to those on land who may wish to learn about the intimate associates of their dear ones who are defending them upon the sea.

* * * * *

"In the Midst of Life----"

"Good Greengrocer and Mixed Business, sure living; death cause of leaving."--_Provincial Paper._

* * * * *