Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/514

"Kindly 'elp a poor Beljin soldier, Sir, severely wounded in the 'ed at Noove Chapel."

"Get out, you fraud! Why, I don't believe you can speak French or Flemish."

"I admit it, Sir. It's a case of lost memory—brain injured—I've forgot every word of me native langwidge."

There are few themes so full of horrible and creepy fascination as that of witch-finding. The historic and notorious epidemic of it in New England has been taken by those clever sisters who combine as "K. L. Montgomery" for the subject of their latest novel, Maids of Salem (Long). You can hardly expect it to be a cheerful tale, but the interest is undeniable. This same interest, however, and the effect of the book generally, would be much increased if the authors would prune a little the luxuriance of their style. If ever there was a case of the wood being hidden by the trees, it is here. Every character in the book garnishes his or her talk with such a wealth of metaphor and archaic ornament that I have felt tempted to quote the exhortation of the Lancashire man, and beg "K. L. Montgomery" to "get eendways wi' the tale." In one kind, however, the authors do exercise a commendable restraint; we have little insistence upon the merely physical horrors of the persecution. Without this there is enough of dread in the pictures of a time when the lives of the most innocent were at the mercy of the random accusations of hysterical children. The other phases of the story, the love-making of Favour Gray and young Constant Grenvil, and the somewhat conventional missing-heir motive, are less striking. But it is the witchcraft that makes the book; and I wish "K. L. Montgomery" would publish a translation of it into simple English.

The poor dear young Duke of Cheshire was in the deuce of a dilemma. On the one hand, inclination urged him to run away with another man's wife; on the other, all the deeply rooted traditions of his proud race told him that he ought to marry for money. ("Playing the game" was the way he described the latter course). If he ran away with the other man's wife, he would not get the money; if he concentrated on the money, he would not get the other man's wife. It was a trying situation for a fine, thoroughbred young Englishman, and I was not surprised that Mr. Cosmo Hamilton grew almost tearful over it in the course of the three hundred and sixty-three pages of The Miracle of Love (Hurst and Blackett). These are the real tragedies of life. I think the poignancy of the thing was a little too much for Mr. Hamilton. It obsessed him. Most of the first hundred or so pages are occupied with the Duke's narration of his troubles, first to one minor character, then to another. And as it is a peculiarity of Mr. Hamilton's literary style that he never uses ten words where a thousand will produce the same effect this tends to become tedious. And—but I was forgetting that all this time you are on tenterhooks to know if it all ended happily. It did. The other man died, and the Duke's aunt married a man with money and gave the Duke some some of it, and never have the wedding-bells rung out more blithely than in the dear old church where so many generations of the Cheshire family had espoused middle-class heiresses from the highest commercial motives. So that's all right. It is a thin little story, but Mr. Hamilton pads it out to a marketable size with the aid of his amazing gift of language. Words flutter from him like bats out of a barn. He can say the same thing over and over again in a different way oftener than any other novelist of my acquaintance. And in these days when the public chooses its books from the library almost entirely for their chunkiness an author can have no more useful gift.

Perhaps you would not think that the making of quarry-waste into vitrified slate would be the most satisfactory background for a love story, but Miss Una L. Silberrad, in Co-Directors (Hodder and Stoughton), has chosen it deliberately, and done very well with it. True, there is more slate than love, but the struggles with technical and other difficulties are made interesting beyond all likely conjecture. Elizabeth Thain, a business spinster of considerable capacity, and Marlcroft, absent and single-minded man and clever chemist, absorbed in his laboratory explorations and only incidentally, as it were, happening upon the great treasure embedded in vitrified slate—these are hero and heroine, of a type unusual enough in fiction to give a special interest to this rather pleasant book. Characterisation is adequate, sentiment well handled, sentimentality eschewed, and workmanship competent, even though Miss Silberrad contrives to split her infinitives and foozle her pluperfects with the best.

Mr. Douglas Sladen in Twenty Years of My Life (Constable) has poured forth a stream of reminiscence and anecdote. An index of the "well-known people" to whom he refers is appended, and as this list contains between four and five hundred names I feel constrained to offer my respectful sympathy to anyone who happens to have been omitted. But I am not so intrigued by what he has to say of these people as by the delightfully ingenuous details he gives of himself. True, he suggests that those who are likely to be more interested in his reminiscences than in his life should begin at Chapter VIII., but this advice I am thankful not to have followed. For had I neglected those opening chapters I should not have known where Mr. Sladen was baptized, and I should also have missed this magnificent statement:—"At Cheltenham I was the most prominent boy of my time, and the prestige with which I came up from school gave me a certain momentum at Oxford." In justice, however, I must add that Mr. Sladen is as frankly generous to most of his "leading people" as he is to himself, and that, whatever the faults of his book may be, it is, and will be, valuable as a work of reference and appreciation. Mr. Yoshio Markino has contributed some colour pictures of various parts of the house in which Mr. Sladen lived, and some portraits.