An Exoticist

Blind Alley — By W. L. George

There is a certain large shop in London where one may still enter in and worship at one's will. The aisles are lofty; the lights dim; each little side chapel is a rich mysterious jewel. Here one may linger, stroking the languid velvet; staring at the embroideries that seem to come to ever richer, more intricate flowering the longer one looks; sighing over chiffons, soft as the shadows on sea water; gazing at the fruit-like cushions gathered from some giant's orchard, and fainting by the way at last upon couches made to pillow the golden heads of millionaires…. The sound of the clocks is so sweet, one fancies from their chiming honey is distilled; walking among the huge solemn furniture one expects the air to be shaken by the roaring of a lion; the glass and the china still glitter as though fresh from a reluctant wave.

But it is very strange in the midst of all this to observe the character of one's fellow-worshippers. They are, without exception, solid upper-middle-class English people, well nourished, easy in their behaviour, and indifferent, seeming to ignore, indeed, their fabulous surroundings. They are used to this kind of thing, born and bred in it. Why exclaim? Why give it one's attention?

If we may judge from the latest novel of Mr. W. L. George the whole of England is glassed over, roofed over, page 33 subdivided, as he sees it, into just such another magasin de luxe, through which he tiptoes, touching, tasting, positively gloating over not only the merchandise, but, with his eyes still a little dazzled by the Eastern glare, the upper-middle-class English people wandering through. It is the ensemble which fascinates him; this coolness and heat which he mixes together into a brew which is, to say the least, uncommonly exotic. For, if we are to believe ‘Blind Alley,’ the intactness of the upper-middle-class is all a superficial seeming; they are each and all of them capable of taking up a length of that filmy silk, binding it about their brows in turbans, or shrouding themselves in its veils and going out into the Tottenham Court Road to ride away upon camels. Picture a father, a retired banker, and now a country gentleman, an eminently practical man, hushing a quarrel with a rebellious daughter in this fashion:

Then Sylvia flung down the pen and stamped: ‘You're all against me. You all want to kick me when I'm down. I hate you—I hate you.’

“So do I,” shouted Sir Hugh, and slammed the door behind him.

A few minutes later … he felt remorseful. So he sent by a messenger boy an enormous bunch of Parma violets and a note: ‘Sylvia dear, your father has the pride of age and the temper of youth. He asks pardon of his beautiful daughter, and hopes that, when next she comes to cheer his waning years, she will bring forgiveness in her eyes of amber.’

Does that touch and start quivering, in many an English daughter's bosom, a familiar chord?

And here is a young husband, the owner of an aircraft works, musing in the garden of his country home, with his wife and lovely screaming children near by:

‘There is the truth of life,’ he thought. ‘To enjoy all that is easily graceful. The sight of lovely women, yet not the stress of loving them; pictures and books, page 34 yet not the agony of trying to achieve art; little children that come up as flowers, to get older, to get fat, to get bald, and still to know how to smile.’

It is hard to see his gentleman without a fan and a sash and a little short dagger. And yet but a moment before, thinking over his loves, he had ‘sneered at himself' … ‘Frank, old fellow, you've pitched on a rotten hobby. Why don't you go in for gardening?’ Which is as difficult to reconcile with his Oriental self as the political father's joke with his other daughter who asked him why the spring, my dear, was no longer spring. Sir Hugh laughed. ‘Ah yes, those were the days of spring onions; these are the days of spring offensives.’

Perhaps from these extracts the reader may gather that, whatever else Mr. George's long strong book may be, it is not dull. It opens on January 9, 1916, and it closes with the January of this year. It is, therefore, yet another revue of England in war-time, but produced by an expert and conscientious manager who is determined that no scene, situation, character, phrase, catchword or fashion shall be left without a rôle and a name in the packed souvenir programme. The chief parts are sustained by Sir Hugh Oakley, his wife and three grown-up children, each one, as it were, a specimen of his or her kind, and all of them, grouped together, forming what Mr. George doubtless considers ‘the representative English family.’ The dominating member is Sir Hugh, with his ‘high, boney, beak-like nose which had been set as a brand upon the face of nearly every male Oakley’ [discriminating Providence!] ‘for the last two centuries.’ Next in importance comes Monica, a slim unawakened girl whose experiences in a T.N.T. factory are, we gravely hope, more explosive than was usual. She and the manager of the works are the lovers of the piece. ‘Most exquisite, most adorable, copper-crowned lily … this is the key of the place they call Bull's Field.’ When she let herself in she noticed ‘a small shanty on wheels, on the walls of which was painted: page 35 Foreman's Office…. The window opened and Cotten-ham looked out at her. He did not smile nor sign to her to come, but so remained….’ Cottenham indeed? Does one not expect rather at such a time and place—Mr. Wilkie Bard?

Monica's sister, Sylvia, is the woman floating on the dark swollen flood from the embrace of one man into the arms of another and another. Then there is Stephen, the wounded son, whose nose repeats his father's, and whose arguments repeat his nose, being singularly high, boney and beak-like. And lastly the mother, a very handsome woman with thick dark-red hair and ‘sherry-bright’ eyes who is impelled to decisive assertions….

They are to be found living through this tremendous interval in the Country House Department, which is incredibly complete, down to a butler carving the joint at the ‘tortured marble-topped Louis XV. table,’ and the old, all-too-old collie dozing in front of the logs in the hall. The completeness, however, is but symptomatic of Mr. George's method. It persists in scenes from country life, scenes in a bar parlour, before a military tribunal, at a flag day in the Berkeley Hotel. These are all ‘models’ of their kind, with not a detail missing and only unfamiliar because of that curious strong scent from the Oriental Department, permeating everything.

The prologue and the epilogue are sung by an orange-coloured Persian cat with eyes of watered agate—Kallikrates his name. He enters, on the alert, suspicious, but finding himself alone in the hall with the human beings safely away behind closed doors, he subsides, folds the ‘velvet gauntlets of his paws,’ composes his squat head into the sumptuous silk of his ruff, and begins to purr…. If we may say so without disrespect, we can almost hear the author joining in.