Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3821/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I always open a new book by Gertrude Atherton with a pleasant grace-before-meat sensation of being already truly thankful for what I am about to receive. And it is hardly ever that I am disappointed. I do not mean to tell you that her latest story, which bears the attractive title Perch of the Devil (Murray), will eclipse the record of all that has gone before; but it need not do that to be well worth reading. It is a tale of mining life, set against a background of claims and veins and drifts and ores—things that I for one delight to read about because of their infinite possibilities, the romance of the gamble that is in them. There is plenty of this gamble in Perch of the Devil (the mountain township where the miners lived). Gregory Compton, the hero, makes his pile all right, and has some rare moments in doing it. He would have been happier if he could have enjoyed prosperity, when it came, for its own safe and for that of his pretty wife. But, though he bestowed upon her all the luxuries that successful mining commands—frocks and cars and European travel—it was another woman, Ora, who had his heart. And unfortunately she was the wife of his partner. It is with this quartette of characters that Mrs. Atherton works out her tale, an unusually small cast for a story of 373 pages; but you will hardly need to be told with what sympathetic and subtle skill she depicts them. Her art is, as always, extraordinarily minute and close. The two women especially are made to live before us with a great effect of actuality. She has wit, too, of a dry, rather grim, kind. I liked her comparison of Gregory's emotion on finding himself in love with Ora to that of a small boy despising himself for a second attack of measles before he discovers the later complaint to be scarlet fever. You must read this book.
In no industrial survey of the present situation have I seen any reliable estimate of the probably output of patriotic romance. Yet the figures seem likely to be impressive. One of the earliest samples is before me now. It is called The Gate of England (Hodder and Stoughton), with the sub-title, A Romance of the Days of Drake, and is in every way true to its admirable type. What I mean by this is that it contains everything that you expect and are glad to find—a Virgin Queen, imperious and quick of retort, with a generous eye for the claims of gallantry; a hero who simply could not be more heroic; villains (of Spanish name, priests, murderers, all a regular bad lot), and the right proportion of female interest and humorous relief. Need I give you the details? How the hero, Captain of the Queen's body-guard, saves Her Majesty's life (a scene with a genuine thrill in it) and is rewarded by her. How he goes in command of an expedition against Channel freebooters, and finally ends up as an agent of the British Intelligence Department, finding out things about the army of His Grace of Parma, then at Dunkirk awaiting conveyance by the Spanish fleet. He seems, however, to have been something of a failure in the way of intelligence, as by lack of this the hero managed to get himself and his companion imprisoned for spies (which indeed they were), and was only rescued by the intervention of Drake as the god from the machine. A pleasant, if undistinguished, tale that will be enjoyed by the young of all ages. It is a minor point, but when one finds the hero called Christopher Stone, and another character rejoicing in the name of Gabriel Ray, it is hard to acquit the author of some poverty of invention. His own name (I had almost forgotten to mention) is Morice Gerard; and he has done better work.
Pan-Germanism (Constable) is a seasonal cheap reprint of a study of that egregious creed by Roland G. Usher, an American Professor of History. With an almost cynical candour and detachment the author analyses the origins, assumptions, justifications and pretensions, and foreshadows with some insight the miscalculations, of those who have essayed to direct the destines of modern Germany. It is as well that this essay comes from a neutral pen; it would else be discredited as a freak of prejudice. Pan-Germanism, as here seen, is the reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that all is fair in war—and peace. It is no less than blank anarchy, philosophic and practical, and indefinitely less workable as a theory of international life than that of the so long discredited Sermon on the Mount. The honest Briton can find here solid justification of his cause. Perhaps it is not altogether unwholesome that our national withers don't entirely escape wringing. We are a little guilty, but much less guilty than our arch-opponent; so thinks this sober and wide-eyed critic... Certainly, and the more significantly since it is without direction or intention of the writer, one sees behind all the tragedy of these dark weeks and of the long months and years to come the sinister picture of a man of no more than common earthly wisdom saddled with responsibilities that might well break the nerve of a council of the gods. Is it well, if the matches must be kept in the powder-magazine, to let the children in to play with them?