Chapter 3

"Supposing a man has porridge and bacon for breakfast and a cut from the point or a shop or steak for luncheon he may find that he has consumed his meat allowance for the day."

_Daily Mail_ (_Manchester Edition_).

Is not the food problem sufficiently difficult already without these additional complications? The man who wants a whole shop for his luncheon will get no sympathy from us.

* * * * *

From a list of Canon MASTERMAN'S lectures on "The War and the Smaller Nations of Europe":--

"April 2nd (possibly), 'The Reconstruction of Europe.'"--_Western Morning News._

We commend the lecturer's caution, but hope it will prove to have been superfluous.

* * * * *

* * * * *

A FORWARD MINX.

The garden wall was high, yet not so high but that any young lady bent on attracting the notice of her neighbours could look over it. Miss Dot indeed regarded an outside flight of steps which led to an upper storey as an appointed amelioration to the hours which she was expected to spend in the garden, for it was an easy scramble from the stairs to the top of the wall, whence she could survey the world. To be sure the wall was narrow as well as high, but a timorous gait shows off a pretty figure, and slight nervousness adds a pathetic expression to a pretty face; to both of which advantages Dot was not, it is to be believed, altogether indifferent when khaki coats dwelt the other side of that wall.

On this particular day she was trying to attract notice in so unrestrained a manner that her mother remarked it from an upper window. But mothers, we are told in these latter days, are not always the wisest guardians of their "flapper" daughters. This mother had a decided _penchant_ for a khaki coat herself; only she demanded braid on the cuff and a smartly cut collar, and these she would greet in the street with a tender act of homage which rarely failed to win admiring attention. But for a daughter who would dash down the road after a Tommy she had contempt rather than disapproval. So she watched with interest, but, alas! with no idea of interference.

At first there were only "civvies" about, and though the admiration of any youthful male was dear to Dot's heart, and though chaff and blandishments were not wanting, still the wall _was_ high, and she lacked the resolve to descend. But presently two khaki coats appeared and the matter grew more serious. It was evident that it was not principle or modesty that held her back, but just timidity, for she responded eagerly to the advances of her admirers, but could not quite pluck up courage for that long jump down. Affairs grew shameless, for the khaki coats fetched a ladder to assist the elopement; but Dot made it clear that there were difficulties in that method of flight, though she wished there were not. At last she was enticed to a lower portion of the wall, and there, half screened by shrubs, she was lifted off by the shoulders, deliciously reluctant, and received into the cordial embrace of an enthusiastic soldiery.

And her mother retired to the sofa!

Shortly afterwards musketry instruction was proceeding in a public place; and behind the little group of learners sat Dot, in the seventh heaven of joy, drinking it all in with eager attention. And the instructing officer did not seem to mind.

"How sad and mad and bad it was," a theme for the moralist, the conscientious objector, the Army reformer, the social reformer, the statistician. Yet perhaps even their solemn faces might relax to-day at the sight of a long-legged Airedale puppy marching at the head of the battalion to which she has appointed herself mascot.

* * * * *

QUIS CUSTODIET?

"Engineer desires position as Manager of Works Manager."--_The Aeroplane_.

* * * * *

"---- and Sons will sell by Auction four Shorthand and Jersey Cows."

_Morning Paper_.

As the FOOD CONTROLLER'S Department is said to be still short of clerks, he may like to bid for these accomplished creatures.

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

"FELIX GETS A MONTH."

This "whimsical comedy," made by Mr. LEON M. LION out of a novel by the late TOM GALLON, began in a distinctly intriguing mood. _Felix_ had an uncle, a sport, on whom he had once played a scurvy practical joke. This highly tolerant victim eventually cut up for a round million, which he left to nephew _Felix_ on condition that he should enter Umberminster as naked as the day he was born and earn his living therein for a full calendar month--a palpable posthumous hit to the old man. _Felix_ accordingly, equipped as laid down in the will, is left by the family solicitor in a wood, and, after a night and a day in hiding, appears shivering at the Mayor's parlour window, abstracts a rug for temporary relief, and prevails upon the maid, a romantic little orphan (who had been reading about river-gods and mistakes _Felix_ for one), to borrow a suit of the Mayor's clothes--into which he gets in time to interview that worthy when he returns with his grim lady. "You'll get a month," says she with damnable iteration; and the resourceful _Felix_, with an eye to the whimsical will, whimsically suggests that justice would be better fulfilled by his putting in the month at the Mayor's house as odd-job man than by his being conveyed to the county jail. And the Mayor whimsically agrees.

After that, I regret to say, honest whimsicality took wing, and the show became merely--shall we say?--eupeptic. And certainly a much more elaborate meal than my lord DEVONPORT allowed me would be required to induce a mood sufficiently tolerant to face without impatience the welter which followed. The three incredible people--mercenary virgin, heavy father and aimless smiling villain--that walked straight out of the Elephant and Castle into the Second Act were not, I suspect, any elaborate (and quite irrelevant) joke of the actor-author's at the expense of the transpontine method, but just queer puppets brought on to disentangle the complications, though I confess I half thought that the villain, Mr. LAWRENCE LEYTON, was pulling our legs with a quite deliberate burlesque. On the whole I am afraid this play is but another wreck on that old snag of the dramatised novel.

But there were plenty of isolated good things, such as Mr. O.B. CLARENCE'S really excellent Mayor, puzzled, pompous, eagle-pecked. Miss FLORENCE IVOR, the eagle in question, gave a shrewd and shrewish portrait of a wife gey ill to live with. Mr. REGINALD BACH'S very entertaining imaginary portrait of a faithful boy scout was a stroke of genius, his "call of the wild" being by far the best whim of the evening. Miss EVA LEONARD-BOYNE as _Ninetta_, the orphan, did her little job tenderly and prettily, but I couldn't believe in _Ninetta_ in that galley, and I doubt if she did. Mr. GORDON ASH was the debonair hero. I do most solemnly entreat him to consider the example of some of the elders in his profession who have adopted a laugh as their principal bit of business. It may turn into a millstone. Was he not laughing the same laugh on this very stage in a very different part three days ago? He was. If he got a month, laugh-barred, he would profit by the sentence. For he has jolly good stuff in him.

T.

* * * * *

MORE COMMANDEERING.

From a report of the PRIME MINISTER'S speech at Carnarvon:--

"There are eight million houses in this country. Let us have VICTORY GUM FACTORY, Nelson, Lancs."--_Daily Dispatch._

But surely he does not want to be known as "The Stickit Minister."

* * * * *

"A grocer in a London suburb complains that on Saturday he and his staff were 'run o ffthei rlegs by the extraordinary demands of customers.'"--_Westminster Gazette._

We congratulate the printer on his gallant effort to depict the situation.

* * * * *

"Wanted, Cook Generals, House Parlourmaids; fiends might suit."--_Irish Paper._

Discussion of the eternal servant problem is apt to be one-sided; it was quite time that we heard from the _advocatus diaboli_.

* * * * *

TO STEPHEN LEACOCK

(_Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal, and author of "Further Foolishness" and other notable works of humour_).

The life that is flagrantly double, Conflicting in conduct and aim, Is seldom untainted by trouble And commonly closes in shame; But no such anxieties pester Your dual existence, which links The functions of don and of jester-- High thought and high jinks.

Your earliest venture perhaps is Unique in the rapture intense Displayed in these riotous Lapses From all that could savour of sense, Recalling the "goaks" and the gladness Of one whom we elders adored-- The methodical midsummer madness Of ARTEMUS WARD.

With you, O enchanting Canadian, We laughed till you gave us a stitch In our sides at the wondrous Arcadian Exploits of the indolent rich; We loved your satirical sniping, And followed, far over "the pond," The lure of your whimsical piping Behind the Beyond.

In place of the squalor that stretches Unchanged o'er the realist's page, The sunshine that glows in your Sketches Is potent our griefs to assuage; And when, on your mettlesome charger, Full tilt against reason you go, Your Lunacy's finer and Larger Than any I know.

The faults of ephemeral fiction, Exotic, erotic or smart, The vice of delirious diction, The latest excesses of Art-- You flay in felicitous fashion, With dexterous choice of your tools, A scourge for unsavoury passion, A hammer for fools.

And yet, though so freakish and dashing, You are not the slave of your fun, For there's nobody better at lashing The crimes and the cant of the Hun; Anyhow, I'd be proud as a peacock To have it inscribed on my tomb: "He followed the footsteps of LEACOCK In banishing gloom."

* * * * *

From an Indian clerk's letter to his employer:--

"I am glad that the War is progressing very favourably for the Allies. We long for the day when, according to Lord Curzon's saying, 'The Bengal Lancers will petrol the streets of Berlin.'"

Quite the right spirit.

* * * * *

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

It may be as well for me to confess at once the humiliating fact that I am not, and never have been, an Etonian. If that be a serious disqualification for life in general, how much more serious must it be for the particular task of reviewing a book which is of Eton all compact, a book, for example, like _Memories of Eton Sixty Years Ago_, by A.C. AINGER, with contributions from N.G. LYTTELTON and JOHN MURRAY (MURRAY). For I have never been "up to" anybody; I have never been present at "absence"; I have no real understanding of the difference between a "tutor" and a "dame"; I call a "_p[oe]na_" by the plebeian name of "imposition"; and, until I had read Mr. AINGERS'S book, I had never heard of the verb "to brosier" or the noun substantive "bever." Altogether my condition is most deplorable. Yet there are some alleviations in my lot, and one of them has been the reading of this delightful book. I found it most interesting, and can easily imagine how Etonians will be absorbed in it, for it will revive for them many an old and joyful memory of the days that are gone. Mr. AINGER discourses, with a _mitis sapientia_ that is very attractive, on the fashions and manners of the past and the gradual process of their development into the Eton of the present. He is proud, as every good Etonian must be, of Eton as it exists, but now and again he hints that the Eton of an older time was in some respects a simpler and a better place. The mood, however, never lasts long, and no one can quarrel with the way in which it is expressed. General LYTTELTON, too, in one of his contributions, relates how on his return from a long stay in India he visited Eton, expecting to be modestly welcomed by shy and ingenuous youths, and how, instead, he was received and patronised by young but sophisticated men of the world. The GENERAL, I gather, was somewhat chilled by his experience. Altogether this book is emphatically one without which no Etonian's library can be considered complete.

* * * * *

Perhaps of all our War correspondents Mr. PHILIP GIBBS contrives to give in his despatches the liveliest sense of the movement, the pageantry and the abominable horror of war. Pageantry there is, for all the evil boredom and weariness of this pit-and-ditch business, and Mr. GIBBS sees finely and has an honest pen that avoids the easy _cliché_. You might truthfully describe his book, _The Battles of the Somme_ (HEINEMANN), as an epic of the New Armies. He never seems to lose his wonder at their courage and their spirit, and always with an undercurrent of sincerely modest apology for his own presence there with his notebook, a mere chronicler of others' gallantry. This chronicle begins at the glorious 1st of July and ends just before Beaumont-Hamel, which the author miserably missed, being sent home on sick leave. It is a book that may well be one of those preserved and read a generation hence by men who want to know what the great War was really like. God knows it ought to help them to do something to prevent another. Yet there is nothing morbid in it. As the sergeant thigh-deep in a flooded trench said, "You know, Sir, it doesn't do to take this war seriously." The armies of a nation that takes its pleasures sadly take their bitter pains with a grin; and that grin is what has made them such an unexpectedly tough proposition to the All-Seriousest.

* * * * *

An old adage warns us never to buy a "pig in a poke." Equally good advice for the heroines of fiction or drama would be never under any circumstances to marry a bridegroom in a mask. In more cases than I can recall, neglect of this simple precaution has led to a peck of trouble. I am thinking now of _Yvonne_, leading lady in _The Mark of Vraye_ (HUTCHINSON). I admit that poor _Yvonne_ had more excuse than most. Hers was what you might call a hard case. On the one hand there was the villain _Philippe_, a most naughty man, swearing that she was in his power, and calling for instant marriage at the hands of _Father Simon_, who happened to be present. On the other hand, the gentleman in the mask revealed a pair of eyes that poor _Yvonne_ rashly supposed to belong to someone for whom she had more than a partiality. So when he suggested that the proposed ceremony should take place during _Philippe's_ temporary absence from the stage, with himself as substitute, _Yvonne_ (astonished perhaps at her own luck so early in the plot) simply jumped at the idea. Then, of course, the deed being done, off comes the mask, and behold the triumphant countenance of her bitterest foe, _Charles de Montbrison_, whom she herself had disfigured as the (supposed) murderer of her brother. Act drop and ten minutes' interval. Need I detail for you the subsequent course of this marriage of inconvenience? The courage and magnanimity of one side, the feminine cruelty melting at last to love, and finally the inevitable duologue of reconciliation, through which I can never help hearing the rustle of opera-cloaks and the distant cab-whistles. Charming, charming. Mr. H.B. SOMERVILLE has furnished a pleasant entertainment, and one that (like all good readers or spectators) you will enjoy none the less because of its entire familiarity.

* * * * *

_The Flight of Mariette_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL) is a slender volume, whose simplicity gives it a poignancy both incongruous and grim. Much of it you might compare to the diary of a butterfly before and whilst being broken on the wheel. _Mariette_, the jolly little maid of Antwerp, was so tender and harmless a butterfly; and the machine that broke her life and drove her to the martyrdom of exile was so huge and cruel a thing. How cruel in its effects it is well for us just now to be again reminded, lest, in these days of hurrying horrors, remembrance should be weakened. To that extent therefore Miss GERTRUDE E.M. VAUGHAN has done good service in compiling this human document of accusation. In a preface Mr. JOHN GALSWORTHY pleads the cause of our refugee guests, not so much for charity as for comprehension. Certainly, _The Flight of Mariette_ will do much to further such understanding. I think I need only add that half the proceeds of its sale will go to feed the seven million Belgians still in Belgium (prey to the twin wolves of Prussia and starvation) for you to see that three shillings and sixpence could hardly be better used than in the purchase of a copy.

* * * * *

I was beginning to wonder whether Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS was suffering from writer's cramp, so much longer than usual does it seem since I heard from him. Now, however, my anxiety is relieved by _My Devon Year_ (SCOTT), a delightful book which could have come from no other pen than his. It is a marvel how many fragrant things he still finds to say, and with what inexhaustible freshness, about his beloved county. I hesitate to give these sketches an indiscriminate recommendation, because to those who walk through the country with closed eyes they will have little or no meaning; but if you are in love with beauty and can appreciate its translation into exquisite language you will draw from them a real and lasting joy. Let me confess now that I once asked Mr. PHILLPOTTS to give Devonshire a rest, and that I accept _My Devon Year_ as a convincing proof that this request was ill-considered.

* * * * *

I wish Mr. DOUGLAS SLADEN would not throw so many bouquets at his characters. _Roger Wynyard_, the hero of _Grace Lorraine_ (HUTCHINSON), was really just a very ordinary youth, but when I discovered that he was "the fine flower of our Public-School system," "as chivalrous as a Bayard," and so forth, I began--unfairly, perhaps, but quite irresistibly--to entertain a considerable prejudice against him. Let me hasten, however, to add that Mr. SLADEN has packed his novel with the kind of incident which appeals to the popular mind, though his conclusion may cause a shock to those who think that our divorce-laws are in need of reform. In the matter of style Mr. SLADEN is content with something short of perfection. "It was easier for her to forgive a man, with his happy-go-lucky nature, for getting into trouble, than to forgive his getting out again by not being sufficiently careful not to add to the other person's misfortune." For myself, I do not find it so easy to forgive these happy-go-lucky methods in a writer who ought to know better by now.

* * * * *

* * * * *

THE WAR LOAN; A LAST APPEAL.

Now, by the memory of our gallant dead, And by our hopes of peace through victory won, Lend of your substance; let it not be said You left your part undone.

Lend all and gladly. If this bitter strife May so by one brief hour be sooner stayed, Then is your offering, spent to ransom life, A thousand times repaid.

* * * * *