Chapter 3

The _Punch_ man, passing on to the office of _The Times_, craved permission to see the Editor, through smoked glass if necessary. Having complied with a thousand formalities he was at last ushered into the presence. The great man was engaged in selecting the various types in which to-morrow's letters were to be set up--big for the whales and minion for the minnows. "I can give you just two minutes," he said, without looking up. "These are strenuous ti----, I should say days. Self-advertisement we leave to the lower branches of the family."

"All I want to know," said the _Punch_ man, "is what is your idea of God? The feeling is very general that God should be more clearly defined and, if possible, personified. One of your own Republican correspondents, who not only got large type but a nasty leader, has said so. How do you yourself view Him?"

"I have a god of my own," said the Editor, watch in hand, "and I see him very distinctly. Powerfully built, with a boyish face and a wealth of fairish hair over one side of the noble brow. Aloof but vigilant. Restive but determined. Quick to praise but quicker to blame. Adaptive, volcanic, relentless and terribly immanent--terribly. That is my god. A king, no doubt, but"--here he sighed--"by no means invisible. Good day."

Nothing but the absence of Mr. FRANK HARRIS in what is not only his spiritual but his actual home, America, prevents the publication of his definitive and epoch-making views on this suggestive theme.

Meanwhile things go on much as usual.

* * * * *

* * * * *

MORE SUBSTITUTION.

From a Stores circular:--

"Members who like a very delicately Smoked Bacon or Ham will appreciate the valuable new line recently added to our Stock, namely;--

---- MILD CURED SALMON."

* * * * *

"From Switzerland comes a report of a noiseless machine gun, operated by electricity."--_Yorkshire Evening Post_.

Another invention gone wrong.

* * * * *

NEW LIGHTS ON ANCIENT HISTORY.

"Senor Aladro Castriota, the wealthy wine merchant of Xerxes."--_Daily News_.

HERODOTUS omits this detail.

* * * * *

"Mrs. ---- thoroughly recommends her Russian Nursery Governess; speaks fluent French, German; will answer any question."--_Daily Paper_.

There are a lot of questions we should like to ask her about Russia.

* * * * *

"The jury found the prisoner guilty of man-slaughter, and was sentenced to 18 months' hard labour."--_Provincial Paper_.

No wonder there is a scarcity of jurymen.

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

"SHEILA."

_Mark Holdsworth_, a bachelor of middle age, is bored with commercial success and seeks a diversion. He would like to have a son. And his attractive typist, _Sheila_, strikes his fancy as a suitable medium. On her side the girl (obviously recognisable by her innocence as a pre-war flapper) is sick of drudgery, longs very simply for the joys of life, as she imagines them, meaning freedom and pretty dresses and money to spend and piles of invitation cards, and so forth. His proposal of marriage, practically the first word he has ever said to her outside their business relations, seems to her too good to be true. There is no question of a grand passion, not even a question of every-day romance. It is just a fair exchange, though she is too young to appreciate the man's motives and is content with the pride of being his choice and the prospects of the wonderful life that opens before her.

Three months later (they are married and in their different ways have grown to care for one another) we find her discontented. Her social blunders and the attitude of his people have set her on edge, and we are further to understand that she is not very responsive to the strength of his feelings for her. A bad shock comes when she hears, through a jealous woman-friend of his bachelor days, that he has married her for the sake of a son. This poisons for her the memory of their first union and she refuses to be his wife again.

An old obligation, entered into before his marriage, compels him to go abroad on business where she cannot accompany him. He does not know that she is to have a child, and in his absence she keeps the knowledge from him. Her boy is born and dies. The news, reaching _Holdsworth_ through a brother, brings him home, and husband and wife are reconciled. Such is the plot, told crudely enough.

Now, if Miss SOWERBY meant deliberately to create a woman who does not really know what she wants--a creature of moods without assignable motives--then I am not ashamed of failing to understand her _Sheila_, since her _Sheila_ did not understand herself. But if she is designed to illustrate the eternal feminine (always supposing that there is such a thing) then I protest that her chief claim to be representative of her sex is her unreasonableness. Of course I should never pretend to say of a woman in drama or fiction that she has not been drawn true to nature. To know one man is, in most essentials, to know all men; to know fifty women (though this may be a liberal education) does not advance you very far in knowledge of a sex that has never been standardized.

When we first meet _Sheila_ her idea of happiness is to spend an evening (innocent of escort) at the picture-palace; take this from her and her heart threatens to break. Three short months and she has developed to the point of breaking off relations with a husband who has given her all the picture-palaces she wanted, but has also committed the unpardonable indecency of marrying her with the object of getting a son!

Here, if she approves the attitude of her heroine, I am tempted to argue, in my dull way, with the charming author of _Sheila_. You must always remember that there was no love--not even courtship--before this betrothal. The girl was swept off her feet by the honour done to her and by the chance of seeing "life" as she had never hoped to see it. The man, on his side, wanted a son. Was his object so very contemptible in comparison with hers? Women marry by the myriad for the mere sake of having children, and nobody blames them. Indeed, we call it, very reverentially, the maternal instinct. Well, what is the matter with the paternal instinct?

However, I am not going to set my opinion up against Miss SOWERBY'S. Where I can follow her I find so much clear insight and observation that I must needs have faith in her good judgment where I cannot understand. This arrangement still leaves me free to prefer her in her less serious moments. Here she is irresistible with that delicate humour of hers that is always in the picture and never has to resort to the device of manufactured epigram. There is true artistry in her lightest touch. Her people are not galvanised puppets; they simply draw their breath and there they are. And she has the particular quality of charm that makes you yield your heart to her, even when your head remains your own.

How much she owes to Miss FAY COMPTON'S interpretation of _Sheila_ she would be the first to make generous acknowledgment. It was an astonishingly sensitive performance. Miss COMPTON can be eloquent with a single word or none at all. By a turn of her eyes or lips she can make you free of her inarticulate thoughts. I must go again just to hear her say "Yes," and give that sigh of content at the end of the First Act.

Mr. AUBREY SMITH as _Mark Holdsworth_ had a much easier task, and did it with his habitual ease. Mr. WILLIAM FARREN--a very welcome return--was perfect as ever in a good grumpy part. It was strange to see the gentle Miss STELLA CAMPBELL playing the unsympathetic character of a jealous and rather cruel woman; but she took to it quite kindly. Mr. LANCE LISTER, as the boy _Geoffrey_, who kept intervening in the most sportsmanlike way on the weaker side and adjusting some very awkward complications with the gayest and most resolute tact, was extraordinarily good. Admirable, too, were Miss JOYCE CAREY as a shop-girl friend of _Sheila's_ boarding-house period, and Mr. HENRY OSCAR as her "fate," whose line was shirts. The scene in which these two encounter the superior relatives of _Sheila's_ husband abounded in good fun, kept well within the limits of comedy. It was a pure joy to hear _Miss Hooker's_ garrulous efforts to carry off the situation with aggressive gentility; but even more fascinating was the abashed silence of her young man, broken only when he blurted out the word "shirts," and gave the show away.

The whole cast was excellent, and Sir GEORGE ALEXANDER must be felicitated on a very clever production. But it is to author and heroine that I beg to offer the best of my gratitude for a most refreshing evening.

O.S.

* * * * *

"You will find that the men most likely to get off the note are those who never really got on to it."--_Musical Times_.

The real question is how those who never got on to the note contrive to get off it.

* * * * *

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_BY MR. PUNCH'S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS_.)

When I first read the title of _Secret Bread_ (HEINEMANN) my idea was--well, what would anyone naturally think but that here was a romance of food-hoarding, a tale of running the potato blockade and the final discovery of a hidden cellar full of fresh rolls? But of course I was quite wrong. The name has nothing to do with food, other than mental; it stands for the sustaining idea (whatever it is) that each one of us keeps locked in his heart as the motive of his existence. With _Ishmael Ruan_, the hero of Miss F. TENNYSON JESSE'S novel, this hidden motive was love of the old farm-house hall of Cloom, and a wish to hand it on, richer, to his son. _Ishmael_ inherited Cloom himself because, though the youngest of a large family, he was the only one born in wedlock. Hence the second theme of the story, the jealousy between _Ishmael_ and _Archelaus_, the elder illegitimate brother. How, through the long lives of both, this enmity is kept up, and the frightful vengeance that ends it, make an absorbing and powerful story. The pictures of Cornish farm-life also are admirably done--though I feel bound to repeat my conviction that the time is at hand when, for their own interest, our novelists will have to proclaim what one might call a close time for pilchards. Still, Miss JESSE has written an unusually clever book, full of vigour and passion, of which the interest never flags throughout the five-hundred-odd closely-printed pages that carry its protagonists from the early sixties almost to the present day. No small achievement.

* * * * *

Mrs. SKRINE has collected some charming fragrant papers from various distinguished sources concerning the ever-recurring phenomenon of _The Devout Lady_ (CONSTABLE), in order to inspire one JOAN, a V.A.D. heroine of the new order. I guess JOAN, of whom only a faint glimpse is vouchsafed, must be a nice person--the author's affectionate interest in her is sufficient proof of that. I suppose we all know our Little Gidding out of SHORTHOUSE'S _John Inglesant_. Mrs. SKRINE deprecates the Inglesantian view and offers us a stricter portrait of MARY COLLET. "Madam" THORNTON, Yorkshire Royalist dame in the stormy days of the Irish Rebellion and the Second JAMES'S flight to St. Germain, is another portrait in the gallery; then there's PATTY MORE, HANNAH'S less famous practical sister, of Barleywood and the Cheddar Cliff collieries; and a modern great lady of a lowly cottage, in receipt of an old-age pension and still alive in some dear corner of England--the best sketch of the series, because drawn from life and not from documents. If the author has a fault it is her detached allusiveness, her flattering but mystifying assumption that one can follow all her references, and her rather mannered idiom: "He proved a kind husband, but sadly a tiresome." These, however, be trifles. Read this pleasant book, I beg you, and send it on to your own Joan.

* * * * *

I have read with deep interest and appreciation and with a mournful pleasure the _Letters of Arthur George Heath_ (BLACKWELL, Oxford). It is the record, in a series of letters mostly written to his parents, of the short fighting life of a singularly brave and devoted man. There is in addition a beautiful memoir by Professor GILBERT MURRAY, whose privilege it was to be ARTHUR HEATH'S friend. HEATH was not vowed to fighting from his boyhood onward. He was a brilliant scholar and afterwards a fellow of New College, Oxford. The photograph of him shows a very delicate and refined face, and his letters bear out the warrant of his face and prove that it was a true index to his character. Until the great summons came one might have set him down as destined to lead a quiet life amid the congenial surroundings of Oxford, but we know now that the real stuff of him was strong and stern. He joined the army a day or two after the outbreak of war, being assured that our cause was just and one that deserved to be fought for. He had no illusions as to the risk he ran, but that didn't weigh with him for a moment. On July 11th, 1915, he writes to his mother from the Western Front: "Will you at least try, if I am killed, not to let the things I have loved cause you pain, but rather to get increased enjoyment from the Sussex Downs or from Janie (his youngest sister) singing Folk Songs, because I have found such joy in them, and in that way the joy I have found can continue to live?" Beautiful words these, and typical of the man who gave utterance to them. The end came to him on October 8th, his twenty-eighth birthday. His battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment was engaged in making a series of bombing attacks. In one of these ARTHUR HEATH was shot through the neck and fell. "He spoke once," Professor MURRAY tells us, "to say, 'Don't trouble about me,' and died almost immediately." His Platoon Sergeant wrote to his parents, "A braver man never existed," and with that epitaph we may leave him.

* * * * *

The scenes of _A Sheaf of Bluebells_ (HUTCHINSON) are laid in Normandy, where they speak the French language. But the Baroness ORCZY does not take advantage of this local habit, and is careful not to put too heavy a strain upon the intelligence of those who do not enjoy the gift of tongues. "_Ma tante_," "_Mon cousin_," "_Enfin"_--these are well within the range of all of us. Indeed, though I shrink from boasting, I could easily have borne it if she had tried me a little higher. "_Ma tante_," for instance, got rather upon my nerves before the heroine had finished with it. The plot (early nineteenth century) is concerned with one _Ronnay de Maurel_, a soldier and admirer of NAPOLEON, and in consequence anathema to most of his own family. The heroine was betrothed to _Ronnay's_ half-brother, as elegant and royalist as _Ronnay_ was uncouth and Napoleonic. It is a tale of love and intrigue for idle hours, the kind of thing that the Baroness does well; and, though she has done better before in this vein, you will not lack for excitement here; and possibly, as I did, you will sometimes smile when strictly speaking you ought to have been serious.

* * * * *

"Economy, I hate the word!" said a much-harassed housekeeper recently: echoing, I fear, the sentiments of the great majority of the British people. Nevertheless, let no one be deterred by a somewhat forbidding title from reading Mr. HENRY HIGGS'S _National Economy: An Outline of Public Administration_ (MACMILLAN). Although written by a Treasury official--a being who in popular conception is compounded of red-tape and sealing-wax and spends his life in spoiling the Ship of State by saving halfpennyworths of tar--it is not a dry-as-dust treatise on the art of scientific parsimony, but a lively plea for wise expenditure. Mr. HIGGS is no believer in the dictum that the best thing to do with national resources is to leave them to fructify in the pockets of the taxpayers--"doubtful soil," in his opinion; nor is he afraid that heavy taxation will kill the goose with the golden eggs. It may be "one of those depraved birds which eat their own eggs, in which case, if its eggs cannot be trapped, killing is all it is fit for." The author is full of well-thought-out suggestions for saving waste and increasing efficiency in our national administration. The introduction of labour-saving machinery, the elimination of superfluous officials, the reduction of the necessary drudgery which too often blights the initiative and breaks the hearts of our young civil servants--all these and many other reforms are advocated in Mr. HIGGS'S most entertaining pages. I cordially commend them to the attention of everyone who takes an intelligent interest in public affairs, not excluding Cabinet Ministers, Members of Parliament, and political journalists.

* * * * *

Though already we have so portentous an array of books jostling each other upon the warshelf, there must be many people who will gladly find the little space into which they may slip a slender volume called _A General's Letters to His Son on Obtaining His Commission_ (CASSELL). So slender indeed is the book that by the time you have read the disproportionate title you seem to be about halfway through it. But here is certainly a case of infinite riches in a little room. The anonymous writer is deserving of every praise for the mingled restraint and force of his method; you feel that, were the name less outworn, he might well have signed himself "One Who Knows," for practical experience sounds in every line. Greatest merit of all, the letters contrive to handle even the most delicate matters without a hint of preaching. But no words of mine could, in this association, add anything to the tribute paid in a brief preface by so qualified a critic as General Sir H.L. SMITH-DORRIEN: "If young officers will only study these letters carefully, and shape their conduct accordingly, they need have no fear of proving unworthy of His Majesty's Commission." This is high praise, but well deserved. Personally, my chief regret is that so valuable a collection of advice should have delayed its appearance so long: there would have been use and to spare for it these three years past.

* * * * *

* * * * *

"The Admiralty announce that several raids were carried out by naval aircraft from Dunkirk in the course of the night of May 21-June 1, the objectives being Ostend, Zeebrugge and Bruges. Many bombs were dropped on the objectives with good results."--_Cork Constitution_.

The Huns must have found it a very long night.