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[Illustration:  Exhausted Shopman.  “WELL, SIR, YOU’VE HAD ON EVERY HAT IN THE PLACE.  I’M SURE I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SUGGEST.”

Fastidious Warrior (hopelessly).  “NO, I SEE NOTHING FOR IT BUT TO REMAIN IN THE ARMY.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(BY MR. PUNCH’S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS.)

MR. ARNOLD BENNETT’S new novel, The Roll Call (HUTCHINSON), is a continuation of the Clayhanger series to the extent that its hero, George Cannon, is the stepson of Edwin, who himself makes a perfunctory appearance at the close of the tale.  The scene is, however, now London, where we watch George winning fame and fortune, quite in the masterful Five-Towns manner, as an architect.  The change is, I think, beneficial.  That quality of unstalable astonishment, native to Mr. BENNETT’s folk, accords better with the complexities of the wonderful city than to places where it had at times only indifferent matter upon which to work.  But it is noticeable that Mr. BENNETT can communicate this surprise not only to his characters but to his readers.  There is an enthusiasm, real or apparent, in his art which, like the beam celestial, “evermore makes all things new,” so that when he tells us, as here, that there are studios in Chelsea or that the lamps in the Queen’s Hall have red shades, these facts acquire the thrill of sudden and almost startling discovery.  I suppose this to be one reason for the pleasure that I always have in his books; another is certainly the intense, even passionate sympathy that he lavishes upon the central character.  In the present example the affairs of George Cannon are shown developing largely under the stimulus of four women, of whom the least seen is certainly the most interesting, while Lois, the masterful young female whom George marries, promises as a personality more than she fulfils.  We conduct George’s fortunes as far as the crisis produced in them by the War, and leave him contemplating a changed life as a subaltern in the R.F.A.  It is therefore permissible to hope that in a year or two we may expect the story of his reconstruction.  I shall read it with delight.

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Iron Times with the Guards (MURRAY), by an O.E., is emphatically one of the books which one won’t turn out from one’s war-book shelf.  It fills in blanks which appear in more ambitious and more orderly narratives.  This particular old Etonian, entering the new Army by way of the Territorials in the first days of the War, was transferred, in the March of 1915, to the Coldstreams and was in the fighting line in April of the same year.  A way they had in the Army of those great days.  Details of the routine of training, reported barrack-square jests and dug-out conversations, vignettes of trench