Chapter XI

MY DEAR CHARLES,--When you have witnessed a military inspection, have seen the Great Man going round the companies and have heard his few kind words to the victims of his scrutiny, no doubt you have told yourself that a soldier's life must be very smooth and comfortable and his work as easy as kiss-my-hand. If further you assume, from the clock-like regularity of the parade, that we must all be on very good terms and intimate understanding with each other, I feel bound to disclose the dismal facts.

The information that we were to be inspected by our Great Man on the Friday was handed to me, with the soup, at Thursday's mess. I did not appreciate its horrible significance and, wondering why it should put the older hands off their ration beef, I ate my dinner in the usual manner, cracked a jest or two with the slightly preoccupied Adjutant and C.O., and later on strolled down to my company's billet to inform them that they would be inspected on the morrow. I supposed they would say to each other, "Oh! indeed," and turn in to sleep; but I am credibly informed that they had no bed that night.

On the following morning I was dumbfounded by their dazzling appearance and could not help remarking that here at last was the Perfect Thing. I was just sufficiently soldierlike, however, to examine them with an icy disdain before we set out. _En route_ to the rendezvous, I pictured to myself the Great Man's delight at beholding us, his superlative admiration expressed in a voice choked with affectionate emotion, and his final jocular farewell to myself--"As for _your_ company, my dear Henry, it's marvellous."

I cannot record the actual event in all its details, which were mostly bootlaces and whiskers. The first I knew of the trouble was a face so ominous as to divert attention even from a splendid uniform. Such was the look in the inspecting eye that, had I been my own master, I should have bowed as lowly as to Allah, and said, "Your Highness, I regret that urgent business at the Bank compels the instant departure of myself (with my company)," and we should have been gone at the double before he had gathered the gist of my remark. As it was, I had to stand fast and pretend that we were all very glad to see him and hoped he would make a long stay with us.

At about the third man, he stopped dead, very dead, and called my attention to the fact that this private was all whiskers and no bootlaces. What had I to say to that? I might have said, "So he is, Sir, now I come to look at him. He should, of course, have been all boot-laces and no whisker," or merely, "Well, I never!" or, again, with some truth, "As to his laces, Sir, they were there a minute ago but have just fallen out of his boots; and the hair has all grown on his face while you and I were saluting each other just now." Instead I was mute by the visitation of Heaven and we passed on, to pause at No. 8, whose feet and face also were by now all that they should not be.

Again, I was called upon for a speech--in vain. You will notice, Charles, that Brigadiers and Colonels are poltroons at these times; they push the company-commander into the forefront of the battle and skulk behind his back.

The Great Man interrupted his examination to chat with his A.D.C., mainly, I fancy, about whiskers and bootlaces. Being also interested in the subject, I took the opportunity to look along my company and see (believe me or not, as you please) the whiskers coming into existence and the laces going out.... I gathered later that things were much the same with every company in the brigade. The Brigadier gathered this also, but at once and from the Great Man.

That night the Brigadier sent for our C.O. The next morning our C.O. sent for us. In due sequence we sent for our section-commanders, and what was left of them, when we had finished, went to interview the private. The last-named, having no one to whom to express his contempt, utter loathing and devilish intentions for the future, adopted the only alternative and took the necessary action.

The news of a second inspection reached me a week in advance, during which I took no food because I was left no time and had no appetite. It was a gloomy period, which was relieved only by two small incidents. The one took place at the C.O.'s inspection, and I will call it "The Private and the Toothbrush." Asked why it was so black, he replied that he cleaned his teeth with permanganate of potash, thus defeating the little crowd inspecting him, since none knew whether that chemical could be used for cleaning teeth and, if it could, whether it would turn the brush black. The other I will call "The Memo. of the Transport Officer," who was so upset by what was said to him that he "begged to certify that he had that day purchased 3 new altars for his Transport service." This was officially passed on to me to cheer me up a little, and I am authorised to divulge it to you.

The week elapsed in a hurricane of harsh oaths, and again I paraded my company. Upon examination it now appeared to me to be the most revoltingly untidy and deficient sight I had ever seen, an opinion heartily endorsed by the Adjutant, C.O. and Brigadier. _En route_ to the rendezvous this time I pictured nothing to myself; I merely shifted my service revolver to a position from which I could more easily destroy myself in an emergency.... And when the Great Man approached he smiled at me, and no sooner had he remarked to his A.D.C. that the buttons and bayonets of the brigade did credit to all concerned than those stolidly dull buttons of mine brightened up and bayonets grew where before there had been empty and depressed scabbards.

I don't know exactly what the Great Man said to the Brigadier, but expect it was much the same as the C.O. said to us and we to the section-commanders. I doubt if the section-commanders said anything nice to the private, but no doubt the latter knew by instinct that this was an occasion upon which he might with impunity, but only once in a way, step slightly aside from the straight and narrow path. I guess, my dear Charles, that it is only the _second_ inspection to which you, as representing the ignorant public, are invited.

The forty-eight hours' leave (by way of reward or for convalescence) which ensued I spent with my wife. With feminine perversity she at once started inspecting my moustache, one of the most astonishing productions of these astonishing times. "Say what you please now," said I, quite imperturbable. "At the next inspection you'll find yourself remarking that it is the best disciplined and equipped moustache you have ever seen." And so it is.

Yours ever,
HENRY.

* * * * *

TO A GERMAN GEOGRAPHER.

If mid your foolish change of names
Your ruler takes it ill
That, spoiling all his cherished aims,
Calais is Calais still,

Sir, there's a name supremely pat
Lies ready to your hand;
Call it, and let it rest at that,
The Never Never Land.

* * * * *

"There is a curious discrepancy in the reports of the Kaiser's
New Year message to his forces that have reached London."

_Irish Times._

The KAISER has been misled. They have not reached London.

* * * * *

ACQUIRING POLISH.

, ['S], ['Z], ['N] ---- AS YOU WERE.]

* * * * *

THE CRANK'S COMPLAINT.

(_On seeing Mr. HENRY NEWBOLT'S name in the New Year's Honour List_).

Because his verses always aim,
With one unwearying design,
At adding lustre to the fame
Achieved by Britain on the brine;
Because they fail to satisfy
The sex-besotted catechist--
It very nearly makes me cry
To see him in the Honour List.

Because he holds in high respect
The knightly courtesies of war,
Does not bow down to intellect,
And steeps himself in FROISSART'S lore;
Because he bids us play the game
And not the super-egotist--
I do not care to see his name
Included in the Honour List.

Because he has not eulogized
The operas of RICHARD STRAUSS,
Or liberally recognized
KEIR HARDIE'S courage in the House;
Because he's more an errant knight
Than Pacifist or Chauvinist--
I feel it is not fair or right
To put him in the Honour List.

Because he has not wreathed with bays
The brow of good Sir WILLIAM BYLES
Or lavished undiluted praise
Upon the food of EUSTACE MILES;
Or urged that we should subsidize
The cult of the Theosophist--
It fills me with a sick surprise
To find him in the Honour List.

Because he hasn't written odes
In praise of NORMAN ANGELL'S views,
Or aped the fashionable modes
Which modern versifiers use;
Because he writes with much restraint
And is, in style, a Classicist--
It very nearly makes me faint
To see him in the Honour List.

In fine, while MASTERMAN--O Fi
For ASQUITH'S everlasting shame!--
MACDONALD, CADBURY and I
Have each no handle to his name;
While HANDEL BOOTH'S well-earned O.M.
Is still conspicuously missed--
I can't sufficiently condemn
The framing of the Honour List.

* * * * *

Irony in the Tube.

After all the efforts and good nature sometimes exercised in getting on to the right platform in a Tube station, it is quite nice to be faced by the following bold announcement--

"THE BEST WAY TO SEE LONDON IS FROM THE TOP OF A 'BUS."

Each word that follows is a stab at your heated and gross imbecility:--

"YOU ENJOY FRESH AIR. YOU SEE THE LIFE OF THE TREES. YOU PASS EVERY
PLACE OF INTEREST."

Possibly the Tube will take its revenge and post the following advertisement on the buses:--

"ONLY IDIOTS TRAVEL BY 'BUS. THE TUBE IS FAR, FAR THE BETTER
METHOD OF TRANSIT."

* * *

Private----writes from the Front:--

"Dear Mother, I expected when I come to France to hear the
pheasants shouting the mayonnaise, but you dont."

* * *

"Reinforcements subsequently arrived, and a squadron of dragons
then courageously attacked the enemy."--_Westminster Gazette._

Thus heaping coals of fire on the head of poor ST. GEORGE.

* * * * *

MY EWE LION.

I must confess that I was finding it rather galling to have no friends at all at the Front. Everyone else was so well furnished with these acquaintances, often actually relations. But I had no one I knew, although gradually one by one my clerks joined KITCHENER'S Army and passed to various training grounds, returning (in my opinion far too often) to the office in their uniforms to disturb the routine and waste the time of the others. Some drilling and instruction I am assured go on in these camps, but I see in London every day sufficient English soldiers to drive twice the present number of Germans out of Belgium--if they really meant it.

My point, however, is that for far too long there was no one at the Front, either living, dead or wounded, with whom I could claim any intimacy, and this is the kind of thing which does not do a man any good on his way to and back from the City.

Everyone else in my morning and evening trains has had friends at the Front ever since we sent out our first draft, and to me their talk about them has been extremely galling. Some of them have even had letters from them, and these are either read or paraphrased and have enormously sent up the stock of the recipients. In fact several men whom I know to be very shaky in business, and others who have been rather blown upon on account of their general bounderish demeanour, have established themselves in improved social positions wholly through letters from the Front.

There are people, of course, who, not having a soldier friend, would invent one; but that is not my way. I would not do that. For one thing, I should have great difficulty in keeping it up. It would mean studying the map, reading all the reports and knowing more about the army than I have time to learn.

Imagine then my delight and excitement when I opened the evening paper a day or so ago, and found that the hero of the dashing and perilous feat of which everyone was talking, and which resulted in the capture of many Germans and machine guns, was no other than the son of my old friend Wargrave. I had not seen Wargrave for some years, but we met often once, and on my last visit to him his son had been home from school, and I now remembered how fine a lad I had thought him. He had a fearless eye and a high spirit; he was, in fact, the very stuff of which bold warriors are made. There was no doubt about his identity either, for a personal paragraph in the paper stated who his father was.

I was so pleased about it all that I sat down at once and wrote a congratulatory note to Wargrave senior; and on my way to the station I thought of other things in connection with his brave son which I might never have called to mind but for this deed of prowess: what a good appetite he had had; how he had climbed a tree for cherries; how he had torn his clothes; and how tedious I had found his addiction to what was called a water-pistol. "Good old Clifford!"--that was his name. Lieut. Clifford Wargrave, I said to myself, and my heart beat the faster for having known him.

That evening the only man that I knew in my carriage coming home was Barrington, and naturally I said something to him about the gallant son of my old friend. Barrington is not a man that I ever liked, and my young people say contemptuous things of his family as a whole. One of the daughters, however, is rather pretty, but I should not care to confess this at my own table. It is as dangerous to tell some girls about the prettiness of others as to tell some people that they look well. Anyway, since Barrington was there, I mentioned to him that it was gratifying to me to think that my old friend's son had become such a public hero, and I recollected as I was talking, and mentioned too, certain further incidents in the young fellow's boyhood. We once bathed together in Cornwall, I remembered, and I am not sure that it was not I who taught him to swim. At another time we had been on a picnic and I had made him and his sister laugh a good deal by my jokes--poor simple things, no doubt, but tickling to him. "And no doubt he is the same simple fellow now," I said, "always ready to laugh and be merry." I told Barrington also about the cherries and the torn clothes, and what a good appetite he had; and about the water-pistol.

"Odd to think that that boy should grow into a hero," I said. "How little we can read the future!"

"Yes, indeed," said Barrington.

I don't know why, but talking about this young friend of long ago, now so illustrious, to Barrington, made me quite to like the man, and I even went out of my way to accompany him to his gate.

I am wiser now. I now know that it is a mistake ever to change one's opinion of a man. And the extraordinary pettiness of human nature! the paltry little varieties of it! the straws it will clutch at to support its self-esteem!

The next morning, owing to some delay over breakfast, I was a little late at the station and failed to get my usual seat among my usual set. I managed just to scramble into a carriage and subsided into the far corner with my paper well before my face because I did not want to be sociable in that company. One has to be careful. Just as the train started, in dashed Barrington and took the only seat left--in fact there was not really room for him. He did not see me.

The train had not left the station before one of the men remarked upon the heroism of young Wargrave; when to my astonishment and annoyance Barrington at once took him up.

"Ah! yes," he said. "Such a fine young fellow; I always knew he would do something like that."

"Then you know him?" he was asked.

"Well, I don't say that I exactly know him," he said, "but I used to hear a lot about him from one of the most intimate friends of the family."

And one by one he told all my little anecdotes--trivial enough when in the mouth of a stranger, but, coming from one who knew, interesting and important. Will you believe it, Wargrave lasted Barrington and his idiotic listeners all the way to London--my Wargrave, mind, not his at all! And the way they listened! I personally sat hidden, and fumed but said nothing. How could I suddenly claim Wargrave as my own without being ridiculous? Nor would they have believed me. Besides, to put myself in competition with Barrington....

I managed to elude Barrington's eye at the terminus, and sought my office in a state of fury and contempt. At lunch I was again baulked, for none of my regular companions were there. It was beginning to be ridiculous. I might as well have not known the Wargraves at all.

That evening I was very carefully early for my train, determined that I would score then. My own set should now know first-hand what my association with the young hero was. After all, what did those others matter? But here again I had been forestalled.

"I met that man Barrington at lunch," said one of my neighbours, "and he was most interesting about this young Wargrave. Knew lots of things about his boyhood. Often stayed there. A ripping boy it seems he was. Really, Barrington's not such a bad chap when you get to know him. I think we must have him in our carriage now and then. He was most modest about it."

"Did Barrington say that Lieut. Wargrave was a friend of his?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. No doubt about it; Barrington taught him to swim."

* * * * *

_Sergeant._ "GAWN TAE BE RELEEVIT, ARE WE? WEEL, WE'RE NO GAWN. WE'VE BEEN HERE THE BEST PAIRT O' A WEEK NOO, AND WE'RE UP TAE A' THE DIR-RTY TRICKS O' THAE GERMAN BEGGARS, AND IF THEY PIT NEW YINS IN HERE THEY'LL JUST MAK A RARE MESS O' IT!"]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

Is not _Come Out To Play_ (CONSTABLE) a delightful title for a story? And, believe me, not better than the story itself, which I should call, save for one defect, a perfect masterpiece in miniature. To have done with blame, I will say at once that the defect is the end, which, to my thinking at least, seems both inartistic and cowardly. I can hardly explain my meaning more clearly without spoiling your enjoyment. But I will hint that this tragedy of unfulfilled promise (for the book is a tragedy, though concealed beneath a surface merriment) seemed too delicate for so melodramatic a climax. Miss M. E. F. IRWIN writes with an ease and finish that is amazing. She has form, too, and a quite unusual beauty of style that gives to her work something that is very difficult to analyse. The book is the story of a boy called _Truffles_ (which of course was not his real name), a boy with a long white face and dark eyes under heavy lids that gave him the look of Pierrot. Nothing very special happens in his life. He has a genial spendthrift father, a prig of an elder brother, a rather jolly sister and a host of admiring friends. And the lot of them drift along in the artificial comedy of London existence in peacetime, flirting and idling, working and loving, all a little self-consciously; setting their emotions for the most part to an accompaniment of popular comic songs, those vacuous jingles whose light-heartedness Time so quickly turns to a wistful and poignant melancholy. You will gather that the actual story is no great matter. It is the faintly pathetic grace of the telling that makes this book one of the very few to which the misused adjective "beautiful" can honestly be applied. Perhaps in reading it you may be reminded, as I was, of another modern novel, one that was praised greatly in these pages and has leapt since to fame. I name no names, because I am far indeed from charging Miss IRWIN with imitation. The more present-day writers who can display this same sensitive and compelling charm, the better I shall be pleased.

* * *

The perfect children's-book must be one of the most difficult things in the world to write. The qualities it would demand are so varied and the dangers so many. You must, for example, be just sentimental enough to obtain sympathy, yet never so much as to invite suspicion of being sloppy. There must be adventure for the adventurous, colour for the romantic and magic for everybody. Frankly I cannot say that Mr. H. DE VERE STACPOOLE has achieved the ideal; but in _Poppyland_ (LANE) he has certainly strung together a number of stories that most children are sure to like. I fancy their favourite will be "The Little Prince," a story in which all the right things happen--beggar girls turn out to be Countesses, and handsome Princes suffer a strictly temporary decline into beggary--and all in an agreeable Neapolitan setting, which, as the advertisements say, "will appeal to children of larger growth." With his fairies Mr. STACPOOLE is, to my thinking, a degree less successful. The worst of tales about storks and magic gardens and cripple-boys and the like is that, however freshly you set forth, sooner or later you are sure to find yourself in the foot-prints of the old wizard of Denmark. If I had loved my HANS CHRISTIAN less, I should have better appreciated certain tales in this collection that inevitably recalled him. Still, the whole is pleasant enough. I wish I could say also that I liked the illustrations, but, with exceptions, these seemed to me both ugly and pretentious. The best exception was one of the old stork, a delightful piece of colour for the sake of which I can almost forget some of the others.

* * *

Miss MACNAUGHTAN always writes very charmingly and with plenty of humour, and in dedicating _A Green Englishman_ (SMITH, ELDER) to "My Canadian friends" she must, I think, be too unconscious of her powers, for this collection of stories is far from being a valuable endorsement of the flowery praises of the emigration bureaux. Very little hope is held out to the young man of good family who is a gentleman and something of a sportsman, and proposes to pick up gold on the pavements or the prairies of the West. I do not mean that the writer is ungenerous either to the Dominion or to its people, but she takes no pains to conceal the terror that lives with the beauty of its vast spaces, and she does not represent the struggle to "make good" as altogether a lovely thing. Perhaps the most ambitious of these sketches, certainly the one which conforms most nearly to the "short story" model, describes the fate of a clergyman's daughter who pays a visit to Macredie, "somewhere on the C. P. R. line," and marries a farmer and land-speculator, chiefly because this is her last chance of marrying at all. The horror of the silence and the snow, when her husband leaves her to face a Canadian winter alone, because he has business in England, eventually drives her mad; and though most of the stories are in a lighter vein than this, and there is plenty of the humorous sentiment in which Miss MACNAUGHTAN excels, the moral that I draw from the book as a whole is, "Visit Canada by all means, but, unless you are a Scotchman of the very doggedest type, don't stay there."

* * *

The hiding of lights under bushels may be all very wellin private life, but is misplaced in the book-publishing business. I thoroughly disapprove of the title and the outside cover of the Hon. Mrs. DOWDELL'S latest collection of leisurely essays, _Joking Apart_ (DUCKWORTH). The one suggests a heart-to-heart talk on the things that matter or else an outburst of boisterous farce, while the other is merely dismal. The two together are enough to put the public off a really good thing. Mrs. DOWDELL treats of the domestic and social side of feminine life in that peculiar vein of humour which is neither joking nor yet joking apart; her writing reminds me of those least-to-be-forgotten evenings of my life when I have been lucky enough to listen for hours to a real pucker conversationalist in the best of spirits and at the top of his form. The words that passed are forgotten; it is even difficult to remember what all the talk was about; but the recollection remains of having heard the truth of things for once, neither laughed at nor wept over, but very brightly revealed. Of twenty excellent chapters I much prefer the one about woman's sphere in electioneering; as to the thumb-nail illustrations in the margin, they show bad draughtsmanship, but some are delightfully apt.

* * *

Mr. LINCOLN COLCORD, writer of short stories of the sea, republished under title _The Game of Life and Death_ (MACMILLAN), has taken no pains to conceal his admirable model. There surely never was, outside conscious parody, so conspicuously derivative a method of handling similar types and subjects. It was a bold thing to do. He has not CONRAD'S fastidious sense of words, nor his masterly suggestion of atmosphere, so much more felt than actually expressed, nor his patient sure unravelling of motives; and in "The Voice of the Dead" he commits a piece of shocking bad Wardour Street, of which by no conceivable lapse could his master have been guilty. But there is a whiff of the sea in his work; his types, if cruder, have life, and he often contrives some ingenious turn in the situation which gives the story interest. _The Game of Life and Death_--which ends in a hand of poker played between Chinese merchants and pirates, with two lives and much money and gear for stake--is a good yarn, though it leans on the inartistic unlikelihood of a royal capping a straight flush--which is piling it on too thick. The tale of "The Moths" that haunted a man who took them for the souls of wronged women provides a sufficient thrill. "De Long" is just the kind of story of the crooked cosmopolitan ship-chandler that CONRAD would write, indeed has written. _Nichols_, the narrator of this and others, is made after the model of his reflective skippers. And here the challenge gets too near for Mr. COLCORD'S chances. Still the yarns go well with a seasoned pipe; and that is no mean recommendation.

* * *

_The Honourable Percival_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) may at least claim to have established a record in one respect. I think I never met a full-sized novel with a more slender plot. The _Honourable Percival Hascombe_, on a pleasure tour in the Pacific, met _Miss Roberta Boynton_, and fell in love with her. This, I give you my word, is all there is of it. But, if you think that so slight a thread will be insufficient to hold your interest, you reckon without the cunning of ALICE HEGAN RICE, who has spun it. There are those of us who worship _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_. There are also those who don't. But while regretfully classing myself among the benighted to whom this Best Seller appealed in vain, I hasten to add that I have nothing but gratitude for _The Honourable Percival_. This record of a shipboard romance is done with the daintiest art, delicate, tender, humorous, and not (as is the fault with so many American romances) oversweetened. The development of _Percival_ from a priggish misanthrope to a man and a lover is beautifully told. Also a great part of the charm of the tale lies in its setting, a series of cinemascopic views of the ports touched at by the _S.S. Saluria_, so vividly portrayed that you will close the book with quite the feeling of the returned traveller. One small but poignant surprise the ending has in store, which I will not spoil by anticipation.

* * * * *