Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/269

Mistress. "Well, cook, if you and the other maids are at all nervous of the Zeppelins, you can have your beds removed into the basement."

Cook. "No, thank you, Ma'am. We have every confidence in the policeman at the gate."

I have seldom met a volume of more pronounced "heart interest" than Paris Waits (Smith, Elder). Partly, of course, this is due to the skill with which Mrs. M. E. Clarke has written it; partly to outside causes. For in reading these thrilling pages one finds oneself oddly affected by an old idea, deep-rooted in all our minds, that when once a thing is in print it is over and done with, put away and no longer personal, like bones in a museum. And then, with the queerest shock, one realises suddenly that this story of Paris in her suspense goes no further back than a time whose distance can be measured by days. Perhaps Mrs. Clarke's method of telling helps this effect a little. As special correspondent of The Times and as herself long an intimate friend of Paris and the Parisians, she was well able to appreciate every phase of the critical weeks when the invaders threatened to storm its very walls. Not only are her pen-pictures remarkably vivid and realistic, but the camera has also helped, and included in the book are many most interesting photographs of Paris in war—a snapshot of the Avenue de l'Opéra, for example, empty of traffic but for a solitary cyclist, or a group of R.A.M.C. men lounging in the doorway of an hotel whose name suggests the coupons of economy and peace. It is all breathlessly interesting, and, as I say, there is that added stranger thrill. Of the close of a certain historic day you may read that it was tilled with wonderful autumn sunshine, and suddenly you will say, "Of course it was!" and recall everything that you yourself were doing that afternoon. That I suppose is one of the minor compensations of living in history. It certainly adds profoundly to the effect of such a record of tragedy nobly faced as we may find here in Paris Waits, a record that even our descendants, without these advantages, will never read unmoved.

In the bald précis which Messrs. Methuen supply with The Family, by Elinor Mordaunt, they do her, it and themselves much less than justice. I had been prepared for boredom; I was in fact consistently entertained, and it is certainly no inconsiderable feat on the part of the author to make that truculent Spartan, Squire Hebberton, his faint wife, his seven sons and four daughters, separately and plausibly alive. We first see them on their own acres of Cranbourne very much of the county in blood but a little out of it in the matter of money, haunted by impending financial catastrophe, all the more inevitable because no Hebberton can really bring himself to face the possibility of such a paltry destiny. The blow falls and tosses them into situations which would have profoundly shocked their minor acquaintances and their tenantry. And I suspect some sort of indictment of their order is intended by the suggestion that they did not make much of their new life. It was rotten of the rather inhuman vicar to fall so desperately in love with Pauline, the nice, horsey, romantic tomboy, and spiritually mesmerise her into matrimony.