# Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3809/Our Booking-Office

Punch's regular book review column.
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I think I should have detected what was the primary trouble with A Lad of Kent (Macmillan) if Mr. Herbert Harrison had given me any opportunity of studying Lord Haresfield at closer quarters. Upon the material vouchsafed it was impossible to spot in him the villain of the piece; I was only allowed to meet him at two brief interviews, throughout which he was consistently courteous and kind, with nothing of the murderer about him. There was, in this connection, not only suppressio veri, but even some suggestio falsi; at any rate I still have great difficulty in believing that a man so obviously intelligent and diplomatic could have initiated schemes so unnecessarily elaborate and entirely incompetent for the mere removal of an unknown and fatherless village youth. I make these observations only as in duty bound; for myself, I didn't care twopence who was trying to get rid of Phillip, or why. Provided they didn't succeed, I was content to leave them at it and enjoy the fascinating picture of life in a sea-coast village in the good old days when everybody was busy either in preventing or assisting the "free trade;" when a press-gang might come along at any moment and steal a man or two without so much as by your leave, and, generally speaking, things moved. Mr. Harrison has a delightful style, a perfect sympathy with the times of which he writes, and no small gift of characterization. Frankly, I don't believe he attaches any more importance to his plot than I do, for he is quite content to leave it to itself for several chapters on end.
The Double House (Stanley Paul) began attractively with a retired Indian colonel who had a mysterious sorrow and wished to betake himself to some quiet English hamlet "where echoes from his past might never penetrate." Of course this could hardly be called wise of the Colonel; the slightest knowledge of quiet English neighbourhoods in fiction or the drama might have assured him that towards the end of Act I. somebody was simply bound to turn up who knew all. However, he rented one half of a divided old manor house, and, even when informed that the other half was inhabited by a widow of quiet habits, he apparently did not share my own instant certainty that there were coincidences ahead. As a matter of fact E. Everett-Green, the author, had so arranged matters that this lady was the sister-in-law of a wicked murderer, for whose crime the gallant Colonel had himself been tried. So much for his past; but as a matter of fact that of the lady was ever so much more sinister. She had, it appeared, married a gentleman called Paul Enderby, only to learn after the ceremony that her husband had a twin-brother Saul, who must have been the twinniest twin that ever breathed, since at no moment could any living soul tell the two apart. I won't harrow you with details, but the confusion was such that, even after the unlamented decease of Paul, poor bewildered Mrs. Enderby was by no means sure that she wasn't only a bereaved sister-in-law. Her sad plight reminded me of nothing so much as that of the lady in Engaged who entreated to have three questions answered: "Am I a widow, and if so how came I to be a widow, and whose widow came I to be?" The great difference between the two cases is that this of Mrs. Enderby is meant to be taken with solemnity—a task that I regret to add was too heavy for me. I am only sorry that so charming a title as The Double House has been so sadly wasted.
If a wicked male novelist had dared to write Jacynth ​(Constable) I tremble to imagine the things that certain fair critics would have said about him. But since a woman is the creator, and one, moreover, with the well-won reputation of Miss Stella Callaghan, what is there to say? After all she must know. As a portrait of futility, Jacynth is the most mercilessly realistic thing that I have met for some time. Pretty, brainless, egotistical, utterly unable ever to understand even the least of the men who loved her—this was Jacynth. The picture is so unsparing that (though I am not calling the book a masterpiece or free from dull moments) the very completeness of the dreadful thing fascinates you unwillingly. Jacynth was the typical product of a seaside town, where she was adored by two men—a young squire and a famous novelist. I was just a little bored by her beginnings, especially when she sprained her ankle—a gambit I had imagined démodé even with the most provincial of heroines. However, Jacynth married the novelist, and after the honeymoon settled down to a steady course of fatuousness and general interference with his work which presently reduced the poor man to exasperation, and finally constrained him to pack her off on a prolonged visit to the seaside home of her maidenhood. After that Jacynth went from worse to worst; too preposterous a fool even to be greatly moved when she brought tragedy into the lives of those who came under her malign influence. I will not follow her vicissitudes in detail. Throughout the book the most sinister thing in her story was to me the fact that a woman had written it. Moreover I have a lurking suspicioun that the portrait is no imaginary one. Perhaps this is a high tribute to Miss Callaghan's skill; it certainly is meant to be a compliment to her courage.
I've often longed to come upon
Some giant spoor and dog the track till
I ran to earth a mastodon,
A dinosaur, a pterodactyl;
But I supposed my natal date— However distantly I view it— Was several thousand years too late
To give me any chance to do it.
And yet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Has found a man who's penetrated
Through bush and swamp on virgin soil
And seen the things I've indicated,
Creatures with names that clog your pen— Dimorphodon and plesiosaurus— And carried home a specimen
To silence any doubting chorus.
In The Lost World the tale is told
(Smith, Elder do it cheap) in diction
So circumstantial that its hold
Is more than that of common fiction;
If you can run the story through,
By aid of portraits when you need it,
And not be half convinced it's true,
You simply don't deserve to read it.
There is nothing wrong with Mr. Eden Phillpotts' latest collection of short stories, The Judge's Chair (Murray), but there is something vigorously to protest aginst upon the wrapper that covers them. For there I found an uncompromising statement to the effect that these stories "bring to a conclusion the author's Dartmoor work," and no sooner had I read it than my heart sank into my heels. Solemnly I plead with him to reconsider this decision, for if he does not his innumerable admirers will be deprived of something almost as annual and quite as enjoyable as Christmas. If he wants a holiday let him have one by all means, though personally I was not pleased when he left Dartmoor for Italy. But let it be only a holiday, a break in his real business. As for the book, I advise everyone who can appreciate dry humour and quaint philosophy to sit behind The Judge's Chair. "The Two Farmers" is in its way a masterpiece, grim and very real, and there is not the ghost of a sign in the whole collection that Mr. Phillpotts has written of Dartmoor until he is tired of it or it of him. He has made a niche for himself in that old temple of Nature, and we must all try to persuade him to stay there.
I have been reading a book, written by the Rev. H. S. Pelham, and published by Macmillan, which is at least twenty times as absorbing and moving as any novel. It is called The Training of a Working Boy. I daresay you may have met with other volumes on something like the same theme before, and may suppose you know all about camps and evening schools and blind-alley employment and the rest of it. But I am pretty well sure that you have read nothing more practical and human on the questions of boydom. It is, indeed, the humanity, sympathetic and more than half humorous, of Mr. Pelham's attitude that gives his book its appeal and incidentally, I fancy, explains his success with the object of it. His little volume is a plea for personal rather than pecuniary help, and is directed more especially to Midlanders, since its chief concern is with the boy population of Birmingham. I can only wish for it the largest possible number of readers in the shires and elsewhere, since to read it is inevitably to be moved to active sympathy.