various contributors

“ The last especially is a continuous joy—a man who in his journey through life had taken instinctively the manner and aspect of a class to which he did not belong; a decayed gentleman without ever having been gentle except in mind; a needy adventurer without the spirit for adventure. Dragged up at the slip-shod heels of such a parent, supporting herself with romantic dreams when other nourishment failed, Bridget grew to young womanhood the very type, one would say, of the Cinderella to be rescued from poverty by a suitable Prince Charming. ”

“ Not a dound could be heard; not a leaf fluttered. No sign of life. We were alone, save for the stubble and the ricks and the wooden crosses and the little flags. How near the dead seemed: nearer than in any cemetery.
Suddenly a distant booming sounded; then another and another. It was the guns at either Soissons or Rheims—the first thunder of man's hatred of man I had ever heard.
So I, too, non-combatant, as Anno-Domini forces me to be, know something of war—a very little, it is true, but enough to make a difference when I read the letters from the trenches or meet a Belgian village refugee. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A man who is only a year or so too old for active service, but feels as fit and keen as a boy, has so many opportunities for regretting his enforced civilism and absence from the arena that it is hard when additional ones are thrust upon him.
He may do his best at home. He may guard gasworks, or organise funds, or campaign as an enlister, or visit the hospitals; but all the time he is conscious that being here is so different from being there. It galls him day and night, and the only thing that can help him at all is the society of lovely women, and now he has lost that! ”

“ May the time soon arrive, when every prison shall be a palace of the mind—when we shall seek to instruct and cease to punish. Punch has already advocated education by example. Look at his dog Toby! The instinct of the
brute has almost germinated into reason. Man has reason, why not give him intelligence?
We now come to the last great lesson of our motley teacher—the gallows! that accursed tree which has its root in injuries. How clearly Punch exposes the fallacy of that dreadful law which authorises the destruction of life! Punch sometimes destroys the hangman: and why not? ”

“ Aderhold, the kindly free-thinking mystic, and Joan Heron, the simple village maid, found their ultimate and, for the times, merciful release by halter in place of fire, readers who have nerves to spare for horror will read with eagerness. It is indeed a dreadful story. Miss Johnston is not one of your novelists who lets herself off the contemporary document, and on her reputation you may take it she is not far out. The grim tale serves to show to what lengths the force of suggestion will, in times of excitement, carry folk otherwise sober and truthful. ”

“ Some years ago I was offered by an English dealer a wax bust of Flora, which I saw in a moment was by Leonardo da Vinci. No trained eye could have mistaken it for anything else. I therefore bought it and made it the very jewel of this superb collection. England, however, always envious and acquisitive, in matters of connoisseurship dense, and now mad with rage to think that I alone had sufficient culture to discern the true and beautiful, at once set up the cry that the bust was the work not of Leonardo in the fifteenth century, but of an Englishman named Lucas in the nineteenth. ”

“ Lady Margaret Tamerton, leaning idly against the barnacle of her brother's yacht, the Seamaid, drank in the beauty of the night with deep inhalations.
The voice of young Lord Tamerton at her side at last broke the spell of silence.
"Madge," he said softly, "Wonderson has not yet arrived. If he doesn't come, our chances of winning the Island Cup to-morrow are practically hopeless."
"Don't worry, Fred," replied Lady Margaret. "Ralph never fails... Listen, he is coming now." ”

“ There are at this moment thousands of men in the Army who have no rifles. Whole battalions of new recruits are unarmed. Our battalion is not unarmed; it has a rifle. We have all seen it; those of us who have been on guard through the cold dark hours of Saturday-Sunday have even carried it—respectfully, as becomes a man who thanks Heaven that it is not loaded. Our pride in it is enormous. Were a sudden night attack by Zeppelins made upon our camp, the battalion would rally as one man round the old rifle, and fling boots at the invader until the last pair of ammunition gave out. ”

“ But even while we pursue these simple pleasures our thoughts are with the great warships in their ceaseless vigil in the North Sea or with the gallant fellows who slipped away under cover of the night and are now taking their place in the fighting line with our French and Belgian friends. England, too, it seems, can perform a great operation of war on sea and land, and can do it with a swiftness, a precision and a silence that no other nation could surpass. ”

“ Every day scores of women and children are leaving the Isle of Wight for the mainland. Gunboats and cruisers are passing and repassing before its shores, by order of the Admiralty; strong, silent men are doggedly pursuing the business they have in hand. In the very heart of the island some of the flower of the youth of our country is being trained in the art of naval warfare, while the thunders of gun-practice are heard every hour around the coast. Yet, search where you will in the Ginger-beer Press during the last few weeks, you will find practically no reference to these things. ”

“ The main theme, sensitively felt and developed, is a delicate one—the love of a middle-aged woman for a man who is rapt in worship at a distance of a younger woman, the other's friend. The manoeuvring of the elder, which might easily have been vulgarised on the one hand or devitalised on the other, just remains refreshingly and believably human. Mr. Marriott's story is not a yarn, but a brocade of intricate design and exquisite colouring. Let justice be done and The Unpetitioned Heavens fall to a wide circle of perceptive readers. ”

“ Golden circlets, with their adornments of coloured and lustrous gems, have bound the brow of infamy as well as that of honour—a mockery to both; as though virtue required a reward beyond the fulfilment of its own high purposes, or that infamy could be cheated into the forgetfulness of its vileness by the weight around its temples! Gilded coaches have glided before us, in which sat men who thought the buzz and shouts of crowds a guerdon for the toils, the anxieties, and, too often, the peculations of a life. ”

“ Fair play, we all know, is a jewel; but many of us may have secreted an uneasy suspicion that the side that practises it suffers from a certain handicap. All those unpleasant persons whose names have become so uncomfortably familiar lately—Clausewitz, Bernhardi, and their professional crew—have so vociferously preached the gospel of Might as Right, that it is refreshing to read here such maxims as "It is an advantage in war to show moderation and justice," and "A scrupulous adherence to the law of nations is the only sound policy." ”

“ All the way from Archangel, was it—threading your way through mines and submarines, and not a keg broken, not a cranberry exploded? Thank you, Jellicoe.
Or are you a Southern Slav, a Crim-Tartar? And did you dare the Dardanelles, give the Goeben the slip, and disappoint the German ganders of their sauce? Artful ally!
Where is your home, bright berry? What are your habits? Do you push through the snow on the steppes? Do you flower in the first thaw of spring, set in full summer and ripen when the snow falls again? I think so; you have the savour of snow. ”

“ Having distributed myself quite satisfactorily within a hammock, I had just decided that nothing short of invasion or the luncheon bell should disturb me, when my flapper niece shot forth in my direction from the French windows of the morning-room.
In one hand she flourished an empty birdcage and in the other what proved to be a tin of enormous hemp seeds.
"Wake up!" she cried as she approached rapidly through the near distance. "The precious Balaam has escaped! The brute must have got out while I was fetching his clean water, and the windows were wide open!" ”

“ The tune serves to recall the distant past, when we used to wear silk socks and shining pumps, to glide hither and thither on hard floors, and talk in the intervals, talk, talk, talk with all the desperate resource of exhausted heroes who know that they have only to hang on five more minutes and they are saved. Suppose we had by now been in those trenches and had been listening to this obstinate old box slowly but confidently assuring and reassuring us that there is and was and always will be our one-two-three home in the one-two-three, one-two-three West! ”

“ Andrew Bellingham was dozing in his office. Suddenly he awoke to find a strange man standing over him.
"Who are you?" asked Mr. Bellingham. "What do you want?"
"My name is Jasper," was the answer, "and I have some information to give you." He bent down and hissed. "Your first wife is still alive!"
Andrew started up in obvious horror. "My daughter," he gasped, "my little Hyacinth! She must never know." ”

“ Some people have all the luck! Fancy preparing for publication this summer a novel whose scene is laid in Belgium. The picture of Bruges Tower on the cover of The Belfry (Hodder and Stoughton) should alone be enough to sell it like the hottest of hot cakes. Of course it would be rather too much to expect the story to treat of the Belgium we all love and admire to-day. Indeed, Margaret Baillie Saunders, writing in the old times of six weeks ago, permits herself some good-natured humour at the expense of the little red-trousered army. ”

“ It is quite refreshing to step, over a hundred strong, into a village with no pre-arranged scheme of board and lodging. Like every other wanderer in a strange part, we turn first to the policeman. We march towards him at attention; we call a halt at the base of his feet, and then, with the courtesy of the gentleman and the brevity of the soldier, we inform him that we have arrived. The next development is up to him.
It is not to him, however, that we owe our temporary rest. It is to that irrepressible and indefatigable unit, the Boy Scout. ”

“ We are going to Cherbourg to stand by as a reserve force; to Paris to act as a protection against surprise attacks; to Ostend to relieve the Casino; to Antwerp to resist Zeppelins; to the French frontier to guard lines of communication; to Leicester to supervise German prisoners; to Africa to conduct a show of our own; to India, Malta, Gibraltar and Egypt for garrison duty; to the North of Scotland to protect coast towns (which abound in that part) ; and to the right of the Allies' first, the centre of the Allies' second, and the left of the Allies' third fighting line. ”

“ Warre Cornish has elected to arrange his views on religion, art, literature, politics and the questions of the day, sometimes putting them into the mouths of his characters and sometimes into the note-book of the afore-mentioned Henry Savile, a leisured cripple whose disquisitions on letters and on people are, if a trifle rambling, at any rate delightfully critical and much more interesting and profound than certain others which flow periodically from the windows of cloistered retreats. ”

“ 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 the rubber-man in the play was never a hero. There in his Gold Coast shanty we see his lover's young brother dying of fever under his eyes. Yet from the moment when he himself gets a touch of the same complaint he takes to brandy, and practically loses all further interest—at any rate of a coherent kind—in the fate of his protégé. And at the end—though he seems to take a good deal of personal pride in the prospect—the only heroism that lies before him is the living-down of a sordid scandal in the divorce-court. ”

“ The most exacting connoisseur of vintage ports will in his expansive moments admit the merits of a light wine from the wood, offered him as such in due season; even so the most fastidious novel-reader may in a holiday mood allow himself to be merely entertained and diverted by these lighthearted but breathless adventures in the Court of Louis XV. It is the greatest fun throughout; events are rapid and the dialogue is crisp; moreover there is from the beginning the comfortable certainty that, threaten what may, the unhappy end is impossible. ”

“ MY TROUSSEAU.
Having been a bachelor from my earliest youth I suppose I ought to be accustomed to the condition; but the fact remains that I miss something—something which only a wedding supplies.
Curiously enough this want is not a wife. I have been without one so long that I should not know what to do with her if I had one. I should probably overlook her, and she would become atrophied or die of neglect or thirst. Neither do I crave a home of my own; nor golden-haired children to climb up my knee. ”

“ When you in words of matchless eloquence spoke of the mailed fist and bade your recruits shoot their parents rather than disobey their Kaiser, a humble General like myself could not go far wrong if he supposed that the thought of war was constantly in your Imperial mind. No other nation, I knew, had the purpose of attacking us, and I assumed therefore that if we were to gain the world-power at which we aimed we must be ready to attack other nations. ”

“ IF I do so it is in order that I may tell you that for an Emperor (or any other man) to be honourable it is not enough that he should have great possessions, glittering silver armour, and armies obedient to their War Lords's commands. It is not enough that he should make resounding speeches and call God to witness that he is His friend. It is not even enough that he should succeed in carrying through his plans, and earn the applause of those flatterers who, agreeing with you, believe that an Emperor crowned with success and capable of bestowing favours can do no wrong. ”

“ I looked around, and gathered that I was not alone in the realisation of that fact; for one by one my fellow-diners struggled hesitatingly to their feet, and stood in awkward reverence while the National Anthem of our brave Belgian Allies was in course of execution. I looked at Helen, and Helen looked at me, and we both tried not to look too regretfully at our plates as we also adopted the prevailing pose. Not one note of that light-hearted anthem did the orchestra miss, and when it was over the warmth in our hearts almost compensated for the coldness of our fish. ”

“ Such scattered flowers of speech abound in a book whose very want of construction is perhaps symbolical and a reflection of the charming incoherence of the Irish mind.
It is my painful experience that, when a novelist sets out to write a tale of English country life, the better he is at the job the more sombre is the finished product. Mr. George Stevenson is very good indeed at his job; he has sincerity and power, and a certain austere aloofness that will take him far ”

“ A novelist creating a novelist-hero is on dangerous ground. If he be a little less than perfectly sincere he runs risk of being pretentious, fatuous even. But sincerity is just Mr. Charles Marriott's conspicuous quality, and here in The Unpetitioned Heavens (Hutchinson) it commands a dexterous and fastidious workmanship. You'll find, if you read a scene over again, that there's more, not less, in it than you thought. Mr. Marriott makes his characters alive by realisation of their subtleties rather than of their obviousnesses, and that's a feat to which I doff my beaver. ”

“ Twice a week Celia ties up parcels for the Fleet. Ordinary people provide the blankets, sea-boots, chocolate, periscopes and so forth; Celia looks after the brown paper and string, which always seems to me the most tricky part. There are a dozen of them, all working together; and you can imagine (or, anyhow, I can) Vera or Kitty or Isobel, her mouth full of knot, gossiping away about her highly-placed relations, while Beryl or Evelyn or Lorna looks up from the parcel she is kneeling on and interrupts, "Well, my brother heard——— I say, where did you put my scissors?" ”

“ There is no longer any doubt that golf is threatening the supremacy of our national game. Judged by the only true standard—the amount of space allotted to it in the daily press—it is manifest that the encroachments of this insidious pastime have now reached a point where the cricket reformer must bestir himself before it too late. We are convinced that so far we have been taking much too narrow a view. The time has come to look for light and leading outside the confines of our own Book of Rules. There are other games besides cricket. ”

“ To have captured the whole French army; to have driven the English army into the sea and drowned them in what they call their own element (by the way, when are you going to make your triumphal entry into London?) ; to have brought the ungrateful Belgians to recognise you not merely as their conqueror but also as their benefactor—all this is really almost enough of honour for one man. But in addition you have made the plans which have kept so many of the disgraceful Russians cooped up in their own country, and you will soon, I am sure, lead your troops to Moscow and on to Petersburg. ”

“ But as we never look for perfection in human nature, it is too much to expect it in wood. We wish it to be understood that we repudiate such principles and conduct. We have a Judy of our own, and a little Punchininny that commits innumerable improprieties; but we fearlessly aver that we never threw him out of window, nor belaboured the lady with a stick—even of the size allowed by law.
There is one portion of the drama we wish was omitted, for it always saddens us—we allude to the prison scene. Punch, it is true, sings in durance, but we hear the ring of the bars mingling with the song. ”

“ You've been prancing about and making speeches and showing yourself on balconies and congratulating God on being such a good German. Do for Heaven's sake give us all a rest. We are in for a frightful war, and untold miseries are sure to fall upon us. Do you suppose that we shall be helped to bear them if you continue to act like an inebriated madman in the sight of the whole world?
Of course shall have to bear the responsibility. I know that well enough. So, while I still have the liberty to use my pen, I mean to make my protest and throw back the burden you want to put upon me. ”

“ Behind the line of red earth lay the British, each man with his rifle cuddled lovingly to his shoulder, a useless weapon that yet conveyed a sense of comfort. The shells were bursting with hideous accuracy—sharp flashes of white light, a loud report and then a murderous rain of shrapnel. ”

“ But why are all novelists of today so merciless to the provincial town? There must be some pleasant people in Cathedral cities. I am weary of retired colonels with port-stained faces, and vinegary old maids, and unctuous canons. Mrs. Penrose has shown in her earlier books so real a sense of beauty and so touching a spirit of kindliness that I am bound to confess that, with the exception of her treatment of her hero, this rather acid and ironical piece of nonsense is a disappointment. ”

“ Suddenly a newspaper boy, reckless of his life, dashed on to the ground with a placard stating that a whole regiment of British soldiers had been trapped by a German ruse an annihilated. In an instant the game was broken up and every player and every spectator who was of age ran like hares to the nearest recruiting office and enrolled themselves as soldiers. They had seen in a flash that the only chance for England to get rid of this German menace was for every eligible man to do his share. ”

“ Treitschke, Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Frobenius and a hundred others, from whose writings it can be most easily shown that Germany alone among nations has the power and the will to expand and to rule; that expansion and rule must be accomplished by war, which, far from being a misfortune, is a noble object to be aimed at and not avoided by statesmen; that all other nations are degenerate and must for their own good be crushed by Germany; and that any nation which resists Germany is through that very act an enemy of the human race. ”

“ It is not permitted, highly honoured Emperor, that in my sermon I say anything displeasing to your Imperial self. I must not remind you that you are a man like other men, a man liable to weakness and error, swayed by temper, capable, since your position gives you power, of trampling on the on the rights of others in a moment of passion, of confounding justice with your own desires and for an inspiration from Heaven itself. ”

“ The conversation had turned, as it always does in the smoking-rooms of golf clubs, to the state of poor old England, and Porkins had summed the matter up. He had marched round in ninety-seven that morning, followed by a small child with an umbrella and an arsenal of weapons, and he felt in form with himself.
"What England wants," he said, leaning back and puffing at his cigar,—"what England wants is a war. (Another whisky and soda, waiter.) We're getting flabby. All this pampering of the poor is playing the very deuce with the country. ”