Chapter II: Part 2

"And what is the ship you're sailin' in?" "Oh, she's a bit of a
terror--
She ain't no bloomin' levvyathan, an' that's no fatal error!
She scoops the seas like a gravy-spoon when the gales are up an'
blowin',
But Fritz 'e loves 'er above a bit when 'er fightin' fangs are
showin'.
The liners go their stately way an' the cruisers take their ease,
But where would they be if it wasn't for us, with the water up to our
knees?
We're wadin' when their soles are wet, we're swimmin' when they wade,
For I tell you small craft gets it a treat in the North Atlantic
trade!"

"And what is the port you're plying to?" "When the last long trick is
done
There'll some come back to the old 'ome port--'ere's 'opin' I'll be
one;
But some 'ave made a new landfall, an' sighted another shore,
An' it ain't no use to watch for them, for they won't come 'ome no
more.
There ain't no 'arbour dues to pay when once they're over the bar,
Moored bow an' stern in a quiet berth where the lost three-deckers
are,
An' there's NELSON 'oldin' 'is one 'and out an' welcomin' them that's
made
The roads o' Glory an' the port of Death in the North Atlantic trade!"

C. F. S.

* * * * *

SELF-DENIAL.

"And what," I said, "did you do during the Great War, Francesca?"

"In the first place I fine you a sum not exceeding one hundred pounds for asking me such a question. In the second place I retort upon you by telling you that one of the things you're going to do during the Great War is to give up marmalade."

"What! Give up the thing which lends to breakfast its one and only distinction? Never."

"That," she said, "sounds very brave; but what are you going to do if there isn't any marmalade to be obtained for love or money?"

"Mine," I said, "has always been the sort you get for money. I have not hitherto met the amatory variety; but if it's really marmalade I'm prepared to have a go at it."

"And that," she said, "is very kind of you, but it's quite useless. For the moment there's no marmalade of any kind to be had."

"None of the dark-brown variety?"

"No."

"Or the sort that looks like golden jelly?"

"Not a scrap."

"Or the old-fashioned but admirable kind? The excellent substitute for butter at breakfast?"

"That must go like the rest. It has been a substitute for the last time."

"Impossible," I said. "Everything is now a substitute for something else. Marmalade started being a substitute long ago, and it isn't fair to stop it and let the other things go on."

"Well," she said, "what are you going to do about it? If you can't get Seville oranges how are you going to get Seville orange marmalade?"

"Oh, that's it, is it?"

"Yes, that's it, more or less. And now let's have your remedy."

"You needn't think," I said, "that I'm going to take it lying down. I shall go up to London and defy Lord RHONDDA to his face. I shall write pro-marmalade letters to various newspapers. I shall form a Marmalade League, with branches in all the constituencies so as to bring political pressure to bear. I shall head a deputation to the PRIME MINISTER. I shall get Mr. KING or Mr. HOGGE or Mr. PRINGLE, or all three of them, to ask questions in the House of Commons. In short I shall exhaust all the usual devices for giving the Government a thoroughly uncomfortable time."

"In short you will do your patriotic best to help your country through its difficulties and to put the interest of the nation above your own convenience."

"Francesca," I said, "you must not be too serious. I was but attempting a jest."

"This is no time for jests. I can't bear even to think of your joining the Brigade of Grousers who are always girding at the Government. I won't stand your being a girder. So make up your mind to that."

"Very well," I said, "I will endeavour not to be a girder; but you simply _must_ get me a pot or two of marmalade."

"And allow the KAISER to win the War? Not if I know it. Besides, I don't like marmalade."

"There you are," I said. "You don't like marmalade--few women do--and so you're going to make a virtue for yourself by forcing _me_ to give it up. My dear, you've given the whole show away."

"Don't juggle with words," she said, speaking with a dreadful calm. "I may be able to get a pot or two--say at the outside a dozen pots. Well, if I manage it I will inform you--"

"Yes," I said eagerly.

"If I manage it," she repeated, "you shall know of it, and you shall make your self-denial complete and efficacious."

"I don't like the way in which this sentence is turning out."

"You shall have a pot in front of you at breakfast, and you shan't touch a shred of it."

"Francesca," I said, "you're a tyrant. But no, you wouldn't be mean enough to do it--before the children too."

"Perhaps, as a concession, I would allow you a little marmalade in a pudding at luncheon."

"But I don't like marmalade in a pudding at luncheon. I like it on toast at breakfast."

"But you're not going to have it on toast at breakfast."

"Well," I said, "I shall conduct reprisals. For every time you don't allow me to have any I shall destroy something you like--a blouse or a hat. If I'm to give up the essence of Dundee or Paisley you shall at least give up hats."

"But the marmalade will remain."

"Yes, and the hats will all perish. That's where I come in."

"Don't buoy yourself up with that notion," she said. "You'll have to pay for the new ones--or owe."

R. C. L

* * * * *

"I CAN'T SAY, MISS. IF YOU WAS ON THE SPOT YOU _MIGHT_ BE ABLE TO CATCH ONE AFORE THEIR TEA-HOUR BEGINS."]

* * * * *

Commercial Candour.

From a tailor's advertisement:--

"HAVE YOU ANY BLUE SERGES? YES! WE HAVE -- (REGD.) IN STOCK. THE
SUIT TO ORDER .. 63/- Will last about another month."

_Southern Daily Echo._

* * * * *

Quotation from an article in the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ in praise of sandals:--

"When people saunter through the town without hats--who still
wears a hat?--why should they not go without stockings?"

_Times_.

Well, the explanation may be that while the German head is hot the German feet are cold.

* * * * *

MR. PUNCH'S "SPORPOT."

Two Summers ago Mr. Punch gave an account of the Sporpot (or Spaerpot, meaning a savings-box), a familiar institution which our little guests from Belgium brought over with them to England. The idea was taken up by certain schools in South Africa, and a competition was started to see which of them could fill the biggest Sporpot to make a fund for helping to restore the homes of Belgian exiles. This year the Eunice High School for Girls at Bloemfontein comes out first, and the second honours fall to the St. Andrew's Preparatory School for Boys at Grahamstown. The total sum of thirty-two pounds collected by the competing schools has been forwarded to and received by the author of the _Punch_ article and will be used by him for the purpose desired.

Mr. Punch begs to offer his congratulations to the winners and his best thanks to all who have contributed so generously from their personal savings to the needs of the children of our Ally.

* * * * *

A Tough Proposition.

"Ducks (15) For Sale, 7 years old; 4s. each."--_Staffordshire
Sentinel_.

* * * * *

WHISPER, AND I SHALL HEAR.

There's nothing like a newspaper for spreading disease. You wake up in the morning, feeling fit to do a day's digging on your allotment; you come down to your breakfast singing a Rhonddalay and eat more than your allowance. Then you open the newspaper, glance at the latest accession to the ranks of the Allied Powers, and suddenly, "Plop!" you find there is a new disease raging, and before you know where you are you discover that you have got it badly.

That is how I discovered that I was the possessor of a heart murmur. By putting my hand on the spot under which I had been taught, and still believed, my heart to be, I felt rather than heard a distinct burbling.

I went to the telephone and fixed up an appointment with a specialist.

"It's only a murmur now," I said when I reached the consulting-room, "only a mere whisper, but----"

The doctor tapped me vigorously. Being very absent-minded I said, "Come in," the first time.

"You were rejected for this, I suppose?" he said.

"No, cow-hocked or spavined, I forget which," I said. "This hadn't started then."

The rite was quite a lengthy one, and at the conclusion the heartsmith said, "M--yes, there is a slight murmuring, certainly."

He wrote me out a prescription, and I felt the murmur myself distinctly when parting with three of the greater Bradburys and three shillings.

On the way home I ran into Beatrice.

"Well, old thing," she said, "what's the matter? I saw you coming out of Dr. Cox's."

"Yes," I said. "I've got a heart murmur. I don't know what the poor things been trying to say, but it's been murmuring like anything all the morning."

"Perhaps you're in love," she suggested.

"By Jove, I never thought of that. I wonder," I said, "if it's anything to do with you. If this were not such a public place you might like to put your head against my top left-hand waistcoat pocket and listen. Perhaps it's saying something about you."

"Have you taken to writing poetry about me?" she said. "That's always a sign."

"Now I come to think of it," I said, "I did feel a bit broody the other day, and hatched a line or two, but I can't say for certain that I had you in my mind. The lines ran like this:--

"Oh, glorious female, like a goddess decked,
No wonder that we crawl on bended knee--"

"Rotten," said Beatrice. "You couldn't have been thinking of me. I'm not a female."

"You have the right plumage for the hen-bird," I said. "However, what did me was 'decked.' I could only think of three rhymes, 'wrecked,' 'flecked' and 'stiff-necked.' You're not any of those by any chance?"

"There's 'circumspect', suggested Beatrice.

"Ah! Come and have lunch," I said, "and we'll talk it over. Some place where I can hold your hand and really find out if you are the cause of it all."

"Do you think I ought to?" she said.

"Good heavens! Of course you ought," I said. "It's most important. My heart's only murmuring now, but it may start shouting soon, and a silly ass I shall look walking about in the street with a heart yelling 'Beatrice' at the top of its voice."

As regards meat and drink I consider that Beatrice overdid it for a war-time lunch. She didn't give me any time to hold her hand, she was so busy.

"It's curious," I said, as I watched the amount of food that was going her way, "but my heart seems to have stopped murmuring altogether."

"Has it?" she said. "Oddly enough, mine's begun."

"Your luncheon has overstrained you," I said.

I had a letter from Beatrice the next morning.

DEAR JIMMY (she wrote),--You were wrong. Mine was a real murmur.
It's been coming on for some time, but not on your account. It's
murmuring for Basil Fludger. He's on leave, and we fixed things
up last Tuesday. I didn't tell you when I met you, because I was
afraid you wouldn't want to take me to lunch, and I _did_ enjoy
it.

Yours ever, BEATRICE.

If my heart gets really noisy I do hope it won't shout for Beatrice. It would be so useless.

"Let us go hence, my heart;
she will not hear" (_Swinburne_).
* * * * *

"HO. WELL, I HOPE IT DON'T UPSET MY GOING ON LEAVE NEXT TUESDAY."]

* * * * *

CIGARISTICS

["According to an enterprising American scientist a man's
character can be told from the way he smokes a cigar."--_Weekly
Paper_.]

For, instance, a man who snatches a cigar from somebody else's mouth and smokes it himself may be assumed to be of a grasping disposition.

The man who while smoking a cigar burns his finger is a man of few words and quick of action. Plumbers never burn their fingers like that.

The man who smokes his cigar right through without removing it from his mouth is a deep thinker. Lord NORTHCLIFFE always smokes one cigar right through before deciding what England really wants, and two when he has to decide which Cabinet Minister must go.

The man who accepts a cigar from a friend, lights it, sniffs and drops it behind his chair has no character worth mentioning.

* * * * *

Mem. for Agriculturists.

Protect the birds and the insects will be in their crops. Destroy the birds and the crops will be in the insects.

* * * * *

"S.P. (Lincoln).--Humming-birds don't hum with their mouths. The
humming is the vibration of their wings while flying--for the
same reason that a blue-bottle or an aeroplane
hums."--_Pearson's Weekly_.

So it is not the pilot rubbing his feet together, as we had been taught to believe.

* * * * *

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

_The Safety Candle_ (CASSELL) might have been called, but for the fact that the title has been used already, A Comedy of Age. For this is what it is--only perhaps less a comedy than a tragedy. _Agnes Tempest_ was called the Safety Candle, for the ingenious reason that, though attractive, she burnt nobody's wings. Returning as a middle-aging widow, after an unhappy wifehood in Africa, she meets on the boat two persons, _Captain Brangwyn_, a young man, and a girl-mother calling herself _Antonina Pisa_. Hence the tears. _Brangwyn_ she marries, doubtfully, half-defiantly, despite the difference in years between them; _Antonina_ is taken as a companion and very soon developes into a sick-nurse. For in the space between the ship-board engagement and the wedding a railway accident changes poor _Agnes_ from a still beautiful and active woman to a nerve-ridden invalid. But in spite of this she and _Brangwyn_ marry; and (with the much too attractive _Antonina_ always in evidence) you can guess the result. One odd point; you will hardly get any distance into Miss E.S. STEVENS' exceedingly well-written story without being struck by its resemblance to one of Mr. HICHENS' romances. The relative positions of the members of the triangle, middle-aged wife, young husband, and girl are exactly those of _The Call of the Blood_; while the Sicilian setting is identical. But this of course is by no means to accuse Miss STEVENS of plagiarism; her development of the situation, and especially the tragedy that resolves it, is both original and convincing. The end indeed took me wholly unawares, since as a hardened novel-reader I had naturally been expecting--but read it, and see if you also are not startled by a refreshing departure from the conventional.

* * * * *

If there still linger in the remoter parts of Cromarty or the Balls Pond Road certain unsophisticated persons who believe that the stage is one long glad symposium of wine, woman and song they will be interested to know that Mr. KEBLE HOWARD has written his latest novel, _The Gay Life_ (JOHN LANE), with the express object--or so he says--of disillusioning them. He has no use for the cynic who declared that there are three sexes, men, women and actors. His Thespians are gay because they are happy, and happy because (though poor) they are virtuous. The crowning ambition of their lives of honest toil is not unlimited silk-stockings and champagne suppers, but the combined and unqualified approval of Mr. GRANVILLE BARKER and Miss HORNIMAN. I fear the Philistines will not be much impressed with Mr. KEBLE HOWARD'S championship. In the first place he selects for his heroine a girl of what used to be known as the "lower orders." Yet it is more than doubtful if the lower orders have ever done anything for Mr. KEBLE HOWARD except open his cab-doors and bring his washing home on Saturday night. Otherwise he would not make his East End of London heroine talk an argot of which fifty per cent, is pure East Side Noo York. True, "the curtain" finds her in New York in the arms of a faithful and acrobatic American, so perhaps it doesn't matter much. Meanwhile she has become the idol of the Manchester School, enjoyed an unsuccessful season in partnership with the late Sir HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE, and signed a contract with the SCHUBERTS to tour the States, and all without any apparent diminution of the guileless flow of "Whitechapel" with which she won the hearts of her first employers. It is courageous of Mr. HOWARD to place on record his apparent belief that a total absence of the three "R's" and any number of "h's" cannot debar a strong-minded daughter of the slums from the higher rungs of the histrionic ladder.

* * * * *

When a warm-hearted and law-abiding gentleman, who has kept open-house for many guests, suddenly discovers that these guests have plotted against him, have read his private correspondence, have caused explosions in his garden, have attacked his neighbours from the vantage-ground of his house, and altogether have behaved as if he didn't exist, he is not unlikely to be both shocked and angry, and to denounce to the world the crew of traitors and assassins who have imposed on his kindness and hospitality. This is what happened to Uncle Sam at the hands of the German conspirators for whom he had unconsciously provided a base of operations. A full account of the doings of this poisonous gang is given in _The German Spy in America_ (HUTCHINSON), by JOHN PRICE JONES, a member of the staff of the New York _Sun_. It is not easy for anyone, least of all for a good American, to refrain from indignation at the baseness of the rogues who thus battened for many months on the United States and their people. The book is soberly and clearly written, and is commended by Mr. ROOSEVELT in a Foreword, to which are added another Foreword by the Author, and an Introduction by Mr. ROGER B. WOOD, formerly U.S. Assistant-Attorney in New York.

* * * * *

With whatever sharpness of criticism I had approached _Ma'am_ (HUTCHINSON), the edge of it would have been turned by the statement upon the fly-leaf that the author, M. BERESFORD RYLEY, died while the novel was still in manuscript, and that it has been revised for the press by her friend, Mr. E.V. LUCAS. As things are, having before me only the pleasant task of praise, I am the more sorry that I cannot increase that pleasure by telling the writer how much I have enjoyed a wholly admirable story. She had above everything the rare art of writing about homely and familiar matters unboringly. _Ma'am_ (a not too happy title) begins in a dull parish, where its heroine is the newly-wedded wife of the curate. You will have read no more than the opening pages (descriptive of the terrible Sunday evening supper which the pair took at the Vicarage--a supper of cold meat and a ground-rice mould, whereat four jaded and parish-worn persons lacerated one another's nerves) before you will have realised gratefully that the story and its characters are going to be alive with a very refreshing and unpuppetlike vitality. Eventually, of course, more happens than Vicarage suppers. An old lover of _Griselda_ (Mrs. Curate) turns up, and many most unparochial events follow upon his arrival. The scene shifts to Naples, and we meet a villaful of men and women, all of them admirably original and human. Not for a great while have I read a story so unforced and appealing. It is indeed a sad thought that this graceful pen will give us nothing more of its quality.

* * * * *

When you hear the title or see the cover of _The Heel of the Hun_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) your blood may begin to curdle and your flesh to creep. Be assured. When I think of some of the war-books vouchsafed to us Mr. J.P. WHITAKER'S is almost tame, and I venture to say that it might be read out loud at a party of sock-knitters without a stitch being dropped. Mr. WHITAKER was in Roubaix and, presumably because he was believed to be an American, was allowed considerable freedom. So, before he escaped into Holland, he saw some things which were not for British eyes, and he tells us about them with a staidness altogether unusual in this kind of book. Although he forgets to mention the fact, his articles have already appeared in _The Times_, and I can see no particular reason why they should have been gathered together in this brief volume. Anyhow, I must believe that the Hun's heel fell less heavily on Mr. WHITAKER than upon most people who have had the misfortune to be introduced to it.

* * * * *

An author who can choose so fascinating a title as _The Way of the Air_ (HEINEMANN) certainly has much in his favour, and this not only because of the more or less temporary connection between aeronautics and victory, but because just lately we have all been talking large and free about peace-time developments of the craft in the near future. Personally I have already arranged to take my wife's mother for a short week-end in the Holy Land in the Spring of 1920; and a forty-eight hours' mail service to Bombay is an event of to-morrow. Thus, if Mr. EDGAR C. MIDDLETON'S book fails to secure general appreciation, he must place the blame elsewhere than with his subject, and it is a fact that by some repetitions and contradictions, as well as by a tendency to let one down at what should be the critical point of his yarns, he has done something to alienate a public--such as myself--entirely predisposed in his favour. It remains to say, all the same, that this little volume is in the main a sincere and obviously well-informed account of the doings of the men of our air services, full of incident and achievement utterly beyond belief an unbelievably short time ago. In the pages he devotes to prophecy--an irresistible temptation--he is on controversial ground, and his apparent preference for the "gas-bag" as the principal craft of the future will certainly not find general acceptance. Much more to my liking is his suggestion that duck chasing and shooting from an aeroplane--it has already been done at least once--may become a recognised sport.

* * * * *