THE MIDNIGHT BELL—Patrick Hamil-ton—Little, Brown ($2.50).
Bob is the waiter at the Midnight Bell, a small pub in the East End of London. He likes his job, he is efficient and cheerful, well set up and handsome. The barmaid loves him, the Master and Missus consider him a find. He is popular with the customers and makes five shillings a night in tips, with any luck. On his nights off he very seldom encourages the bar-maid’s hopeless passion by taking her to the cinema; he spends his holidays alone, cheaply, and has saved up £80. For Bob is ambitious far beyond his station: he has literary leanings, is reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, buying each volume as he can, in a paperbacked edition.
One evening the regular clientele of the Midnight Bell is somewhat put out by the entrance of two quite obvious prostitutes. One of them is very pretty, and looks ill. Bob takes their order. He is sympathetic. They talk. The upshot of it is that he lends her ten shillings. Now begins the decline and fall of Bob. First bit by bit and then wad by wad he withdraws his savings, to “lend” to Jennie, the pretty little harlot, with whom Bob will not admit for a long time that he is in love. When he does, she promises to marry him—and then forgets to show up for their next meeting. Bob is too idealistic and too much in love to take what he has paid for ten times over. Up to the very last he hopes that she is not the wrong one she more and more evidently shows herself. With all his money gone (the last of it stolen), Bob wakes one morning to the truth, and goes off to sea.
Author Hamilton’s subject does not sound particularly humorous, but he is sufficiently Dickensian to treat it with both humor and humanity. No realist, he has taken what looked like a drab setting, a depressing situation, dreary people, and made of them an exceedingly readable tale, in which the comic and the pathetic are neatly balanced.
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