Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/594

the skill with which a foreign railway station at night had been caught, with "the whistle of the pneumatic breaks as the express comes to halt above the low platforms; one of the sounds that seem to echo now out of the happy unrecoverable years." Occasionally the detail is simply superfluous. "Philip left his hat and stick in the white panelled hall, denied the necessity of washing his hands immediately, and followed Laddie ... into the garden." That is what I mean by hinting that when Mr. Sadler discovers what to leave out we shall all be the better for it.

In these days of massive trilogies, when your novelist demands at least four hundred pages in which to bring his hero's career up to the point where he is informed by his private-school master that he has passed the entrance examination for Harrow, it is a refreshing change to come across a book like The Captive (Chapman and Hall), opening in the middle of the story with an almost cinema-like abruptness. Miss Phyllis Bottome is no believer in the leisurely type of novel. The story snatches you up and whirls you along, and you have no more chance of getting out of it than if you were in Niagara Rapids. Miss Bottome has hit on an ultra-modern problem as the basis of her latest story: what is to be done with the woman who is sufficiently advanced to be bored with the sheltered life yet too conventional to fit comfortably into the life that is broader and more vivid? This is the fate of Rosamund Beaumont, who flies from the conventional, as represented by Philip Strangeways, to the unconventional, in the person of Pat O'Malley, the impecunious artist of Rome. There was that in her which prevented her settling down "in endless English comfort, by county folks caressed"; but, on the other hand, she did wish Pat would dress for dinner, and, while she made no real objection to his friends, she "only wanted to know who people were, and if they must have them running in and out at all hours, as if they kept a station waiting room." In the end Pat very naturally seeks consolation with a fellow-artist and friend of ten years' standing, while Rosamund, after the divorce proceedings, returns to England and marries Philip, and is now being thoroughly bored by that excellent but limited young man. Miss Bottome has all the talents. She draws characters that step out of the pages and walk before one; she establishes atmosphere with an economy of words almost miraculous in these long-winded days; and she contrives, without straining for epigram, to insert in every chapter phrase after phrase worthy of the reviewer's best compliment—the pencil-mark in the margin.

When I found myself confronted with a volume of very short stories over the signature of "George A. Birmingham" I was at first inclined to suspect that the limitations of such a medium would not allow scope for the exercise of that delightful author's special and peculiar gift. You know what I mean. That involving of the reader in a maze of absurd but severely logical intrigue that keeps him breathlessly pursuing laughter through chapter after chapter. In a sense I was both right and wrong, chiefly the latter. Though there are some stories in Minnie's Bishop (Hodder and Stoughton) that practically anybody else could have written, there are also others that show Mr. "Birmingham at his best. Especially would I wish to record my delight in three quite exquisite little sketches of character—"Onnie Dever," the story of a barefoot fisher-girl who became the leading lady in an American dress emporium; "Bedclothes," which tells how a curate, smothered in conventionalities, obtained relief; and one other, a thing of the tenderest and most delicate art, which I will leave you to identify for yourself. A word of warning: do not be put off by the fact that for some obscure reason the author has chosen to name his volume after a story that, though it comes first, is a long way the feeblest in the collection. There are others that for wit and wisdom in a little room will make ample amends.

In these days a treaty, being only written on paper, is easily dealt with.
But it was a more troublesome matter in the times of bronze tablets.