Flourisheth in Strange Places

Love Lane — By J. C. Snaith

The coloured wrapper to ‘Love Lane’ depicts an elderly fat man in a yellow suit and a swollen white waistcoat. His felt hat is to one side, he wears white spats, a large bow-tie, and in the corner of his mouth, at an angle, flourishes a cigar. Thumbs in his armholes, away he swaggers from pretty Miss, who stands, blue-eyed, pale and golden-crowned, one lily hand raised, one lily hand clenched, looking after him with eyes of longing. And above them the title of the book, well-spaced and bold, hangs for a signboard.

Which of us, except in those last dread three minutes before the bookstall, when a man feels his mind dissolve as a wisp of smoke under the station roof and is as a little child in the hands of the braggart youth with a pencil behind his ear, would dream of inquiring any further? Which of us would not decide at a glance that ‘Love Lane’ was one of those half-sentimental, half-humorous mixtures—the refreshing non-alcoholic summer novel enfin, and pass it by? A superficial examination of the plot would not tend to alter that opinion. Here is the self-made vulgar old man, half hero, half bully, who aspires to be mayor of Blackhampton, and his timid wife, weeping for the old simple times. They have three daughters: one a successfully married snob; the second, a poor creature who has quarrelled with her parents, having married beneath her; and Sally, the baby, struck out of the old man's will for joining the suffragettes and getting six weeks' hard. The husband of the second girl is that familiar figure in our recent fiction—a pathetic tradesman—a little self-effacing greengrocer, a failure. He can't page 44 get hold of business, somehow, but he can grow a rose to beat any man, and the sunset reminds him of the ‘Inferno by Dant with Lustrations by Door.’

One can hardly imagine characters less promising, less original. Nevertheless they are the material that the artist has chosen and his success is the final justification of his choice. At the beginning we are shown these people, their interests and their lives, as all separate, scattered, and uncontrolled. They are puffed up or cast down, greedy, self-centred and vain—all except Amelia's husband, who is merely a shadow of a man with a vague suspicion that things might be different, and therefore a vague grudge against things as they are.

Then, quite suddenly, we are conscious of an immense, inconceivable ring of fire closing in upon them; they are bathed in one terrible light, and William Hollis marches off towards it—out of his little misery in the shop in Love Lane into the anguish of his first experience.

In our youth we were taught that pain was not only a kind of necessary gymnastic exercise set us by the Lord—an immensely heavy dumb-bell to be lifted in His sight as a proof of what we could still stagger but not fall under—we were assured that we could not possibly appreciate the value of anything unless it had been first all but taken from us. Nowadays we are inclined to believe that it is neither pain nor happiness that heightens the value of life; it is rather the sense of danger, common to them both—danger which strips us of our false acquired security and demands of us that we shall take the risk.

William Hollis, before the war, had no particular desire to live, and the agonizing misery of life in the trenches—incredible as it might seem to our aged pastors and masters—did not awaken any new desire in him. But the feeling that any moment might be his last unlocked his lips. He made a friend, a man who came from his part of the country, an artist, who understood his fumbling speech, said for him what he wanted to say—taught him to see clearly what he vaguely glimpsed. The artist died, but page 45 William Hollis went on living not only his new free life, but the life of his dead friend as well. He came home, and a wonderful late-flowering love blossomed for him and his wife. Then he was seriously wounded and the chance offered for him to leave the army and settle down with his woman. But he would not take it. For some unaccountable reason that she never understood, he decided to go back and die among the men with whom he had learned to live. What he had learned out there had been so marvellous to him, it had given such value to life, that he could not, without betraying himself, submit to anything less wonderful.

While this great miracle has been happening to William Hollis lesser changes, but changes no less wonderful, have happened to the others. They, too, have become human beings, but human beings ennobled.

But they are all grouped round the central figure, and upon him the author has brought all his power of understanding to bear. He has created an extraordinarily poignant character.