Sergeant (looking for likely talent). "Does your horse jump at all?"
Recruit. "Oh no, Sir, thank you. He's a very nice horse!"
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Some part of the fascination that I found in Tributaries (Constable) was perhaps due to the interest of a problem. On the cover I am told that the author "chooses to be anonymous in order that his story should not suffer from the least suggestion of a party bias." And of course, after reading this, I simply had to discover who it was. By the time I reached the last page I had formed a tolerably confident guess. But I will not commit myself further than to say that no one, however "well-known in Great Britain and America" (the publisher again is my authority), need be ashamed to own up to Tributaries, which is quite one of the best written novels of the year. It is the story of a modern demagogue, a young apostle of political nonconformity, part charlatan, part zealot, who comes to town from a provincial chapel, and ends up a glorious failure as a soured and unpopular Cabinet Minister. There is an unusual quality in the characterisation and humour of this story of Maurice Sangster. Page after page abounds with touches of observation which betray the practised hand. The end, in its dry, unemotional justice, approaches real tragedy. One small point. Maurice's father-in-law, who hates and wishes to humiliate him, finds his opportunity when a turn of the party wheel throws the Minister out of office and into poverty. Her father thereupon allows Mrs. Sangster fifteen hundred a year for household expenses on condition that Maurice, who is scraping a bare hundred by his pen, shall not learn of this help till the old man's selected moment for abasing him. An intelligent woman who read the tale objected that no man, even a journalist, could long remain ignorant that he was spending fifteen hundred pounds more than he earned. I think she had a case. But the book remains a remarkable one.
My own feeling about A Soldier of the Legion (Methuen) is that it suffers from some excess of plot. That clever couple, C. N. and A. M. Williamson, can handle a complicated intrigue better than most; but here their battle-front, so to speak, is of such extent that even they seem to have found it impossible to sustain the attack at every point. We began splendidly. When Max Doran, rich, popular and just betrothed to a star of musical comedy, hears suddenly that he isn't Max Doran at all, but a pauper changeling, and that the real child of his parents (if I make myself clear) is a dull-witted girl who has been spirited away to Africa—I said to myself, now there is an exciting time ahead. So there was, but not in the way I had expected. For when Max goes out to Africa to find the missing one he finds her all right, but himself gets involved in a totally different and not so promising complication. The consequence is that the career of the enriched Josephine and her union with the wicked lawyer (all things about which I greatly wanted to hear) have to be dismissed in a few lines. As compensation we get some good desert pictures and a moving description of life in the Foreign Legion, of which Max becomes a member. But his other African adventures, and the sub-sub-plot of the abduction of a Moorish maiden by her Spanish lover, left me disappointed and detached. Of course Max embraces the heroine on the last page; and I could not but admire the resource with which, having dropped the curtain upon this climax, the authors ring it up again for an added paragraph (my metaphor is getting somewhat uncertain, but no matter), which brings the story to the warlike present. On the whole a readable book, but not quite equal to the best from the same firm.
Since the short prefatory note to Raymond Poincaré (Duckworth) tells me that the book was not hastily mobilised and sent into the firing line earlier than its
