BUT there was once a month of November, about which I could not so grandly say that I would not like to spend it in London; for something happened which threw me in a great hurly-burly of change into an uncomfortable little flat in Monday Road, which is in South Kensington, but for all the life and gaiety there is in it might just as well be in a scrubby corner of the Sahara on a dusty day. My father had died suddenly, and what little question there was of my ever going into business now dropped away, so I had to make at least a pretence of earning my living, or, rather, of making a career for myself. I was very definite about this, that I mustdo something, be something: for I had learnt this much of the world, that there is no room in it for casual comers, that a man must have a background (any background will do, but the more individual the better); that there is no roomin any part soever of the social scale for a man who is just nothing at all; and as I have never seriously contemplated living exclusively in the company of landladies and their friends, I saw that I must put my back into it and cease being a very insignificantrentier. I couldn't bear the idea of going through life as just a complacent Armenian in a world where millions and millions of others were trying honestly and otherwise to climb up the greasy pole of respectable attainment.
But I cannot resist saying what I think of Monday Road, though I am sure I can do it no harm, because better men than I must have hated it, and more virulently. Monday Road, like all the other roads which sink their mutual differences into the so dreary Fulham Road, consists of large, equal-faced houses stuck together in two opposite rows which are separated by about fifteen yards or so of second-hand Tarmac; a road like another, you will mildly say, but you cannot possibly realise its dismal grimness if you have not lived there. The people who live in the angular-faced houses are artists who believe in art for art's sake—else theywouldn't be forced to live in the dismalest street in the world—amateur intellectuals like myself, and various sorts of women. The tribe of organ-grinders have a great weakness for Monday Road, probably because some tactless ass has stuck up a notice there that "Barrel-organs are prohibited," which is a silly thing to say if you can't enforce it. Altogether it is the sort of road in which a "spinster lady" might at any moment lock her door, close her windows, turn on the gas, and read a novel to death. A woman in the flat next to mine did that a week after I arrived, and I have never viewed death more sympathetically.
When men grow old they are apt to discover pleasant memories attached even to the worst periods, as they thought them at the time, of their lives. I am not very old as yet, but looking back calmly on the eighteen months I spent in South Kensington, I can find here and there, through an exaggerated cloud of depression and wretchedness, a pleasant memory smiling reprovingly at me; as though, perhaps, I should not be treacherous to the good hours God or myluck had given me.... And there was one moment of them all, when, in the first darkness of an early autumn night, a dim slight figure stood mysteriously on my doorstep, and I blinked childishly at it because I did not know who the figure was nor how it had come there—if indeed it had come at all, and I had not dreamed the ring of the bell which had startled me out of my book. Or, perhaps, she had made a mistake, hadn't come for me at all....
But when she spoke, asking for me, I began to remember her, but only her voice, for I could not see her face which was hidden in the high fur collar of an evening cloak. She looked so mysterious that I didn't want to remember where I had seen her.
"I simply can't bear it," she said nervously, "if you don't remember me. I'll go away." And she turned her head quickly to the gates where there stood the thick dark shape of a taxi which I had somehow not seen before, else I would have known for certain that she was not a fairy, a Lilith fairy, but just a woman; a nice woman whotakes life at a venture, I decided, and said abruptly: "Don't go."
When we were upstairs in my sitting-room and I could see her by the light of eight candles, I remembered her perfectly well, though I had only seen her once before. We had met at some tiresome bridge party six months before, but just incidentally, and without enough interest on either side to carry the conversation beyond the tepid limits of our surroundings. And as I had never once thought of her since I had shaken myself free of them, I couldn't imagine how on earth she had known my address or even remembered my name, which she didn't dare try to pronounce, she had told me as we went up the stairs.
She said that she, too, had never thought about me at all since then, "until to-night when I was playing bridge in the same room with the same people, except that you were not there—and I remembered you only suddenly, as something missing from the room. I didn't remember you because of anything you said, but because you had been the worst bridge player in the room, and had the mostunscrupulous brown eyes that ever advised a flapper to inhale her cigarette smoke, as it was no use her smoking if she didn't. And thinking about you among those people who seemed more dreary than ever to-night, I had a silly homesick feeling about you as though we were comrades in distress, whereas I didn't even know your name properly and never shall if you don't somehow make it a presentable one.
"So I turned the conversation to Armenians in general, which is an easy thing to do, because you have only to murmur the word 'massacre' and the connection is obvious, isn't it? Of course that sent that dear old snob, Mrs. ——, off like mad, saying what bad luck it was for you being an Armenian, because you could so nicely have been anything else, and even a Montenegrin would have been a better thing to be; how surprised she had been when she met you, she told us, for she had always had a vague idea that Armenians were funny little old men with long hooked noses and greasy black hair, who hawked carpets about on theirbacks, and invariably cheated people, even Jews and Greeks....
"But you are quite English and civilised really, aren't you? I mean you don't think that, just because I managed to wrangle out your address and came here on impulse, I want to stay with you or anything like that, do you?"
As she said that, I suddenly thought of Lord Dusiote's gallant villainy in Meredith's poem, and I told her quickly how a whole Court had been lovesick for a young princess, but Lord Dusiote had laughed, heart-free, and said:
"I prize her no more than a fling of the dice,But oh, shame to my manhood, a lady of ice,We master her by craft!"
"I prize her no more than a fling of the dice,But oh, shame to my manhood, a lady of ice,We master her by craft!"
"But I seem to remember that my Lord Dusiote came to a bad end," she laughed at me.
"Not so bad an end—it must have been worth it. And at least he died for a mistake, which is better than living on one:
"'All cloaked and masked, with naked blades,That flashed of a judgment done,The lords of the Court, from the palace-door,Came issuing forth, bearers four,And flat on their shoulders one.'"
"'All cloaked and masked, with naked blades,That flashed of a judgment done,The lords of the Court, from the palace-door,Came issuing forth, bearers four,And flat on their shoulders one.'"
But Lord Dusiote's gallant death left her quite cold, for she was suddenly by the bookcase, running caressing fingers over a binding here and there.
"What perfectly divine books you have! I shall read them all, and give up Ethel M. Dell for good—but you are probably one of those stuffy people who 'take care' of their books and never lend them to any one because they are first editions or some such rubbish."
"You can have them all," I said, "and you can turn up the corner of every page if you like, and you can spill tea on every cover or you can use them as table props, because all these books from Chaucer to Pater are absolute nonsense at this moment, for in not one of them is there anything about a dark-haired young woman with blue eyes and a tentative mouth, and the indolent caress of a Latin ancestress somewhere in hervoice, standing on a doorstep in a dingy road, calling on a man who might quite easily be a murderer, for all you know."
But enough of that, for the situation of a young man and a young woman in a third-floor flat miles away from anywhere that mattered, at eleven o'clock on such a warm autumn night as makes all things seem unreal and beautiful, is a situation with a beard on it, so to speak.
When I first knew Phyllis, though always candid, she was inclined to be rather "county," the sort of woman "whose people are all Service people, you know"; she lived with her mother, near Chester Square, who at first disliked me because I was not in the Brigade of Guards, but later grew quite pleasantly used to me since I, unlike the Brigade of Guards, it seems, did at least acknowledge my habitual presence in her house by emptying Solomon's glory into her flower vases; and if there's a better reason than gratitude for getting into debt, tell it to me, please.
But Phyllis, like many another good woman of these Liberal times, turned herbored back on "county," and only remembered what was "done" the better not to do it; fought for, and won a latchkey; asserted her right to come home at night as late as she pleased, andhowshe pleased—for she had come home from a dance one night on a benevolent motor lorry, which she had begged to pick her up on Piccadilly in pity for her "tired bones," and which, in cumbrously dropping her at mother's door, woke up the whole street. And I can so well imagine Phyllis, as she fitted in her latchkey, murmuring, languidly, but without much conviction, "What fun women have...."
But, in the reaction of her type against the preceding age of Victoria, she went to the other extreme; saw life too much through the medium of a couple of absinthe cocktails before each meal, and sex too much as though it were entirely a joke, which it isn't ... quite. She cut her hair short, and took to saying "damn" more often than was strictly necessary. In fact, she would have been quite unbearable if she hadn't been pretty, which she delightfully was. And, unlike her more careless sisters ofChelsea, Hampstead, and Golders' Green, she did not make the terrible mistake of dressing all anyhow, or make a point of being able to "put up with anything"; such as, sleeping on studio floors after a party, in such a way as to collect the maximum amount of candle grease and spilled drink on her skirts, and wearing men's discarded felt hats, cut as no decent man would be seen alive wearing one, and Roger Fry sort of blouses which don't quite make two ends meet at the back, and carrying queer handbags made, perhaps, out of the sole of a Red Indian's threadbare moccasin.... Bohemians indeed, but without so much as a "Bo" anywhere about them!
They can "stand anything," as they have let it be generally known. But, by dressing like freaks and by being able to stand anything, they have detracted considerably from their attraction for men; for freaks are well enough in freak-land but look rather silly in the world as it is—which is the world that matters, after all; and what the devil is the good of being polite and making a fuss of a woman if she tells you repeatedly that shecan "stand anything," and much prefers the feeling of independence fostered by lighting cigarettes with her own matches, and opening doors with her own so unmanicured fingers?
I suddenly realise at this very moment of writing why those months in South Kensington seemed so overpoweringly dismal, and that even now it is only time which lends a real pleasure to the memory of the tall, dim figure (Mr. Charles Garvice would have called her "sylph-like." I wish I were Mr. Garvice) which stood on my doorstep on an autumn night, and so mysteriously asked for me. For that beginning had a dreary end, as indeed all endings are dreary if the silken cord is not swiftly and sharply cut, thus leaving a neat and wonderful surprise, instead of the long-drawn ending of frayed edges and worn-out emotions which drive quite nice young men into a premature cynicism of dotage.
For we very soon tired of each other, and began to slip away into our different lives with a great deal of talk about our "wonderful friendship"; though we both of us knew very well that there is nothing left toeat in an empty oyster, and nothing to talk about on a desert island except how deserted it is, and nothing to look forward to when you have too quickly reachedUltima Thulebut to get as quickly back again and examine your bruises—but he is a coward who hasn't enough kick left in him to begin again and repeat his mistake, for though two wrongs may not make a right, three or four mistakes of this sort do certainly make a man.... So we both set out to get back again, but not as quickly as possible, because Phyllis is a woman, and, perhaps, I am by way of having a few manners left—and, therefore, we had to take the longest way back; and were both very tired and bored with each other when at last I suddenly left her one night after dinner at her house at half-past nine, because I had a headache—"my dear, aspirin isn't any good, really it isn't"—and was sure she had one, too....
Six months ago I had a letter from her, saying that she was going to marry a nice fat baronet, a real, not a Brummagem one, and not so much because of his money, but because of his nice, solid, middle-class ideas,which would help to tone down hers. Phyllis was like that, and I've often wondered very much about that wretched baronet, whether he will tone her down, or whether she will persuade him to open a hat shop off Bond Street in aid of a "bus conductors'" orphanage.
Phyllis, Phyllis, you really can't go through life with half a cold grouse in one hand and a pint of Cliquot '04 in the other. There are other things ... so they say.
IT shames me a little to confess that I have always fitted in my friends to suit my moods; for it may seem superior of me, as though I attached as much importance to my moods as to my friends, and therefore too much to the former; but it is really quite natural and human, for there is no man, be he ever so strong, who does not somehow sway to his moment's mood; as a great liner imperceptibly sways to the lulling roll of the seas—as compared to myself, a rickety, rakish-looking little craft which goes up to the skies and down into the trough to the great swing of those mocking waves—moods!
But I, as I say, unlike that strong man who will pretend to crush his mood as some trifling temptation to relax his hold on life, I am so sociable a person that I must give my friends every side of myself and to each friend his particular side. And, though Ido not wish to seem superior I have so far mastered the art of friendship, of which Whistler made such a grievous mess, that that side of me which such and such a friend may like is the side which I happen to wish to show to him. I keep it for him, labelling it his; when I see him in the distance I say, "Dikran, up and away and be at him"; for I think it incumbent on people who, like myself, are not really significant, to be at least significant in their relations with others, to stand out as something, even as a buffoon, among their acquaintances, and not be just part of the ruck. My ideal is, of course, that splendid person of Henry James', in "The Private Life," who faded away, did not exist, when he was alone, but was wonderfully and variably present when even a chambermaid was watching him. That subtle, ironic creation of Henry James' is the very incarnation of a Divine Sociability, but in actual life there is no artist perfect enough to give himself so wholly to others that he literally does not exist to himself.
I am not selfish, then, with my moods; with a little revision and polishing I canmake them presentable enough to give to my friends as, to say vulgarly, the real article, the real me. And of them all there is one special mood, a neutral-tinted, tired, sceptical thing, which I have come to reserve exclusively for my friend Nikolay, who lives in a studio in Fitzroy Street, and faintly despises people for living anywhere else.
When I had pressed his bell I had to step back and watch for his face at the third-floor window, which, having emerged and grunted at me below, would dwindle into a hand from which would drop the latchkey into my upturned hat. Then very wearily—I had to live up to my mood, you see, else why visit Nikolay?—I would climb the stone steps to his studio.
Once there, I resigned myself to a delicious and conscious indolence. My thoughts drifted up with my cigarette smoke, and faded with it. My special place was on the divan in the corner of the large room, under a long shelf of neatly arranged first editions, from which I would now and again pick one, finger it lazily, mutter just audibly that I had bought that same book half-a-crowncheaper, and relapse into silence. If uncongenial visitors dropped in, I would abuse Nikolay's hospitality by at once turning over on my left side and going to sleep until they had gone. But generally no one came, and we were alone and silent.
From the divan I would watch Nikolay at work at his long table in front of the window, through which could be seen all the chimneys in Fitzroy Street, Charlotte Street, and Tottenham Court Road. How he could do any work at all (and work of colour!) with the drab cosmopolitanism of this view ever before his eyes, I do not know; myself would have to be very drunk before I could ignore those uncongenial backs of houses and chimneys, stuck up in the air like the grimy paws of a gutter-brat humanity. For an hour on end, until he turned to me and said, "Tea, Dikran?" I would watch him through my smoke, as though fascinated by the bent, slight figure as it drew and painted, with so delicate a precision of movement, those unreal and intangible illustrations, which tried at first to impress one by their drawing or colouring, but seemed to me mainly expressionsof the artist's grim and ironic detachment from other men; amacabreobserver, as it were, of their passions, himself passionless, but widely, almost wickedly, tolerant. An erect satyr in topsy-turvydom.
If it were any other man than Nikolay, I would know him well, for I have seen much of him, but one knows men by their "points of view," and I am not sure that Nikolay ever had one. He was, or rather he seemed definitely to be, curiously wise; one never put his wisdom to the test; one never heard him say an overpoweringly wise thing, but there was no doubt that he was wise. People said he was wise. Women said it. A strange man, indeed; queer, and a little sinister. Perhaps six hundred years ago he might have been an alchemist living in a three-storied house in Prague, exiled from his native land of Russia for criticising too openly the size of the Czarina's ears; for Nikolay knows no fear, he can be ruder than any man I know. I have heard him answer a woman that her new hat didn't suit her at all. "I think it is a rotten hat," he said, and the vanity of an admitted thirty years faded from her,she was as a dejectedhouribefore the repelling eyes of a Salhadine.
He had not always been so detached and passionless. Steps of folly must somehow have led up to that philosophic wisdom which so definitely obtruded on the consciousness; so definitely, indeed, that I have watched women, as we perhaps sat round the card-table in his studio, and seen them in their manner defer to him, as though he were a great man in the eyes of the world, which he isn't. But to be treated as a great man, even by women, when you are not a great man, is indeed the essence of greatness! Bravo, Nikolay! I see you, not as I have always seen you, but in Paris, where rumour tells of you; in Paris, where your art was your hobby and life your serious business, and a dress suit the essential of your visibility of an evening.
I feel riot and revelry somewhere in you, Nikolay; the dim green lights of past experiences do very queerly mock the wisdom in your contemplative eye. I am to suppose, then, that you have seen other things than the rehearsals of a ballet, have marvelled atother things than the architecture of Spanish-Gothic cathedrals? Ah, I have the secret of you! You are a mediæval, a knight of old exotic times, a Sir Lancelot without naïveté. Now, as the years take you, it is only in your drawings that your mind runs cynically riot among the indiscretions of literature—what a sinister inner gleam I espied in you when you told me that you were going to illustrate the poems of François Villon! But in Paris, long ago, I see you, Nikolay, standing in the curtained doorway of a cushion-spread studio, where the lights shine faintly through the red arabesques patterned on the black lamp shades. I see you standing there with a half-empty glass of Courvoisier in your hand, sipping, and watching, and smiling.... And women, perhaps—nay! a princess for very certain, it is said—running wild over the immobility of your face, immobile even through those first perfervid years.
But it did not always happen that I found him working at his table by the window. Sometimes he would be pacing restlessly up and down the room, and round the cardtablein the centre (which was also a lunch, tea, and dinner table).
"I have never before been four years in one place," he said. "I have never been six months in one place." He related it as a possibly interesting fact, not as a cavil against circumstances. It shows what little I knew of, or about, him, that I had never before heard of his travels.
"But how have you ever done any work if you never stayed in one place, never settled down?"
"Settled down!" He stopped in his walk and fixed on me with a disapproving eye. "That's a nasty bad word, Dikran. The being-at-home feeling is a sedative to all art and progress. In the end it kills imagination. It is a soporific, a—what you call it?—a dope. There's a feeling of contentment in being at home, and you can't squeeze any creation out of contentment.
"Permanent homes," he said, "were invented because men wanted safety. The safety of expectation! Imagination is a curse to most men; they are not comfortable with it; they think it is unsettling. Life isan experiment until you have a home, and feel that it is a home. Men like that. They like the idea of having a definite pillow on which to lay their heads every night, of having a definite woman, called a wife, beside them.... Bah! Charity begins at home, and inertia stays there. Safety doesn't breed art or progress—and when it does, it miscarries—the Royal Academy....
"Men want homes," he said, "because they want wives. And they generally want wives because they don't want to be worried by the sex-feeling any more. They don't want women left to their own imagination any more. They want the thing over and done with for ever and ever. Safety! Men are not adventurous...."
He turned to me sharply. "Look at you!" he said. "Have you done anything? Since I have known you, you have done nothing but write self-conscious essays which "The New Age" tolerates; you have played about with life as you have with literature, as though it were all a question of commas and semi-colons.... You have tried to idealise love-affairs into a pretty phrase, and in yourspare time you lie on that divan and look up at the ceiling and dream of the luxurious vices of Heliogabalus.... You are horribly lazy, not adventurous at all. What's it matter if your cuffs get dirty as long as your hands get hold of something?"
"One can always change one's shirt, if that is what you suggest, Nikolay. But you are wrong about my not being adventurous—I shall adventure many things. But not sensationally, you know. I mean, I can't look at myself straight, I can only look at myself sideways; and that perhaps is just as well for I overlook many things in myself which it is good to overlook, and I can smile at things which James Joyce would write a book about. And when I write a novel—for of course I will write one, since England expects every young man to write a novel—the quality I shall desire in it will be, well, fastidiousness.... I come from the East; I shall go to the East; I shall try to strike the literary mean between the East and the West in me—between my Eastern mind and Western understanding. It will be a great adventure."
"The East is a shambles," he said shortly. And in that sentence lay my own condemnation of my real self; if any hope of fame ever lay in me, I suddenly realised, it was in that acquired self which had been to a public school and thought it not well bred to have too aggressive a point of view. Oh, but what nonsense it all was! I lazily thought—this striving after fame and notoriety in a despairing world.
I looked at Nikolay, who had done all the talking he would do that day, and was now sitting in an arm-chair and staring thoughtfully at the floor; thoughtfully, I say, but perhaps it was vacantly, for his face was a mask, as weird, in its way, as those fiendish masks which he delighted in making. And, as I watched him like this, I would say to myself that, if I watched long enough, I would be sure to surprise something; but I never surprised anything at all, for he would surprise me looking at him, and his sudden genial smile would bring him back into the world of men, leaving me nothing but the skeleton of a guilty and ludicrous fancy; and of my many ludicrous fancies about myfriend this was indeed the most ludicrous, for I had caught myself thinking that he was not really a man at all, but just part of a drawing by Félicien Rops....
FROM my flat in Monday Road to Piccadilly Circus was a long way, and the first part of it wearisome enough through the Fulham Road, with its cancer and consumption hospitals, its out-of-the-centre dinginess, its thrifty, eager-looking, dowdy women, and its decrepit intellectuals slouching along with their heads twisted over their shoulders looking back for a bus, on the top of which they will sit with an air of grieved and bitter dislike of the people near them. But at Hyde Park Corner I would get off the bus, for I have a conventional fondness for Piccadilly, and like to walk the length of it to the Circus.
I like to walk on the Green Park side; in summer because of the fresh, green, rustling trees, an unhurried pleasaunce in London's chaotic noises, and in winter because I like nothing better than to look at leaf-stripped trees standing nakedly against a grey sky,finger-posts of Nature pointing to the real No-Man's Land, and illustrating the miraculous wonder of being just beautiful, as no man-made thing can be; for all things made by man, a picture, or, if you like, a woman's shoes with heels of stained majolica, have an aim and a purpose. They lack the futility, of which Nature alone has the secret, of being just carelessly beautiful. When I say Nature, I do not see the Dame Nature of Oscar Wilde's crooked vision, a crude, slatternly charwoman, but a spendthrift prodigal, spending for the sheer love of spending; he takes every man by the sleeve, and with delicious good manners he makes it seem that he values your opinion above all others, that he has created the beauty of the world to please in particular your eye, that you will sadly disappoint him if you hint that you hadn't much liked the tinge of vermilion in yestreen's sunset, for he had touched in that vermilion just to give you a pleasant surprise.
Thus it is with Nature and myself; I see him as an old beau, given to leering in cities, but frank and natural in open places. Andhe knows me well, too; knows I am no minor poet, no poet at all, in fact, and, therefore, not to be gulled by insincere sunsets and valleys without shade or colour; that the idea of a fawn skipping about where I don't expect him, far from causing in me a metrical paroxysm after Mr. Robert Nichols, frankly bores me; he has shown me an odd nymph here and there, but I haven't encouraged him.... They are so intangible, I thought, and they faded away. So at last, in desperation, he stuck up a naked tree against a grey sky, and I thought it beautiful. It is a matter entirely between the old beau and myself. For all I care, you may think my stripped tree a stupid old tree, but to me it is beautiful. I see life that way.
But the day I am thinking of, when I got off the bus at Hyde Park Corner, was towards the end of October, when oysters have already become a commonplace; and as I walked up the Green Park side, the path around me was strewn with brown and red and faded green leaves, the last sacrifice of autumn to winter. I wondered why all things did not die as beautifully and as naturallyas autumn dies. If all things died like that, there would be no fear in the world, and a world without fear would be just a splendid adventure, and life would be like chasing a sunset to the Antipodes—it would disappear only to appear again, more wonderfully.
But the fear of the shapeless bogey behind existence has been the peculiar gift of God; for so long He has chosen to be secretive about death, and the secret of it is in the eating of the last remaining apple on the Tree of Knowledge. But, O God, it is all a vain secrecy, this about death. Man was not made to be so easily satisfied. Education may have made him ignorant, but he was born inquisitive. Some day, some day, a more subtle and less solid Conan Doyle will arise, and valiantly catch a too indiscreet ancestral ghost, and holloa to a professor to X-ray his astral vitals, to find out by what means and processes came a living man to be a dead man and then an ancestral ghost. Their discoveries will then be written down in the form of a memoir and made into a fat book, complete with a spiritual prefaceand an astral index, and will cause a great stir in the world. But it will be a great shame on the Tree of Knowledge to have its last apple knocked down from it by a paltry book.
This last week or so of autumn is the time of all times when the fanatic hermit, sitting alone in his desert place, should be tolerant of the world's frailty. If such an one would let me, a worldly enough young man, approach him, I would tell him of the great joys there is in walking with a loved woman on crisp wind-blown leaves, under country trees, with tea soon to be ready before a big fire in the house half-a-mile away. At that my hermit would look at me angrily, for a fleshly young man indeed, but I would go on to tell him of how there is no splendour anywhere like to the splendour of a youth's dreams at that quiet time; dreams that may be of a palace made of dead leaves, with terraced pleasure gardens fashioned out of autumn air, in which he would walk with his mistress, and be a king and she a queen of more than one world....
As though for the first time, I noticedthat afternoon a sheen of livid copper over the scattered leaves, and I said to myself that it was an undefinable addition to their beauty, like the sheen of blue in the dark hair of Shelmerdene, as she sat in the corner of a sofa under a Liberty-shaded lamp.
The passing thought of Shelmerdene fixed my attention through the Park railings on the prostrate figures here and there of men sleeping, for it was a very mild afternoon for late October. Sleep was her foible, the hobby-horse on which she would capriciously ride to heights of unreason whither no man could follow her and remain sane. She admitted that she herself had, occasionally, to sleep; but she apologised for it, resented the necessity. And, as I walked, I saw a sleeping, dejected figure too near the Park railings as though with her eyes, and was as disgusted. But I smiled at the memory of her wild flights of mythical reasoning.
"The mistake Jehovah made," I heard her saying, "was to teach Adam and Eve that it was pleasanter and more comfortable to lie and sleep on the same well-worn spot in Eden every night than to move about theGarden and venture new resting-places. It was a great mistake, for it gave sleep a definite and important value, it became something to be sought for in a special and comfortable place. Sleep ceased to be a careless lapse, as it had been at first when Adam madly chased the shadow of Lilith through the twilight. In the company of Eve sleep was no more a state for the tired body, and only for the body, but it became a thing of the senses; so many hours definitely and defiantly flung as a sop to Time. Sleep became part of the business of life, whereas, in those first careless days of Adam's unending pursuit of Lilith, it had been only part of the hazard of life.
"If Lilith had been allowed to have the handling of Adam," she said, "instead of Eve, who was the comfortable sort of woman 'born to be a mother,' sleep, as we know it, would never have happened; unnecessary, gluttonous sleep, the mind-sleep!
"Lilith was a real woman, and very beautiful. She was the first and greatest and most mysterious of all courtesans—as, indeed, the devil's mistress would have to be,or lose her job. She must have had the eyes of a Phœnix, veiled and secret, but their secret was only the secret of love and danger—Danger! Jehovah never had a chance against Lucifer, who was, after all, a man of the world, in his fight for the soul of Lilith. She never had a soul, and it was of Lilith Swinburne must have been thinking when he wrote 'Faustine,' which silly fools of men have addressed to me.... Of course, she chose Lucifer. Who wouldn't choose a dashing young rebel, a splendid failure if ever there was one, with a name like Lucifer, as compared to a darling, respectable, anxious old man called Jehovah? It's like asking a young woman to choose between Byron and Tolstoi ..."
But Shelmerdene had long since gone, to play at life and make fools of men; to make men, to break men, they said of her, and leave them in the dust, grovelling arabesques on the carpet of their humiliated love. "Let them be, let them be in peace," I had said to her impatiently, but she had turned large, inquiring, serious eyes on me, and answered, "I want to find out." She had, indeed, gone"to find out"—to Persia, they said, on a splendid, despairing chase. And I saw a vision of her there, but not as the proud, beautiful creature who filled and emptied a man's life as though for a caprice; I saw her on her knees in a ruined pagan temple on a deserted river bank, purified, and satisfied, and tired, entreating the spectre of the monstrous goddess, Ishtar, to let her cease from the quest of love ... I am so tired, she is saying to the nebulous goddess who has fashioned the years of her life into a love-tale. But who is Shelmerdene to beg a favour from Ishtar, who, in the guise of Astarte in Syria and Astaroth in Canaan, upset the gods and households of great peoples and debauched their minds, so that in later ages they were fit for nothing but to be conquered and to serve Rome and Byzantium as concubines and eunuchs?
Poor, weak Shelmerdene! Slave of Ishtar! Didn't you know, when, as a young girl, you set yourself, mischievously but seriously, "to find out" about men and life, that you would never be able to stop, that you would go on and on, even from Mayfairto Chorasan? You should have known. You have been so wantonly blind, Shelmerdene. You have idealised to-morrow and forgotten to-day—and now, perhaps, you are on your knees in a ruined temple in the East, begging favours of Ishtar. Not she to grant you a favour! Trouble has always come to the world from such as she, a malignant goddess. It has been said that Semiramis conquered the world, and Ishtar set it on fire....
I asked her once, but long after I had realised that loving Shelmerdene could not be my one business in life, if she did not feel that perhaps—I was tentative—she would some day be punished. "But how young you are!" she said. "You don't really think I am a sort of Zuleika Dobson, do you?—just because one wretched man once thought it worth while to shoot himself because of me, and just because men have that peculiar form of Sadism which makes them torture themselves through their love, when they have ceased to be loved.... It's a horrible sight, my dear—men grovelling in their unreturned emotions so as to get the last twinge of pain out of their humiliation. I've seen them grovelling, and they knew all the time that it would do no good, merely put them farther away from me—or from any woman, for the matter of that. Butthey like grovelling, these six-foot, stolid men."
"But haven'tyouever been on your knees, Shelmerdene?"
"Of course I have. Lots of times. I always begin like that—in fact, I've never had an affair which didn't begin with my being down and under. I am so frightfully impressionable....
"You see," she touched my arm, "I am rather a quick person. I mean I fall in love, or whatever you call my sort of emotion, quickly. While the man is just beginning to think that I've got rather nice eyes, and that I'm perhaps more amusing than the damfool women he's known so far, I'm frantically in love. I do all my grovelling then. And, Dikran! if you could only see me, if you could only be invisible and see me loving a man more than he loves me—you simply wouldn't know me. And I make love awfully well, in my quiet sort of way, much better than any man—and different love-speeches to every different man, too! I say the divinest things to them—and quite seriously, thank God! The day I can't fallin love with a man seriously, and tell him he's the only man I've everreallyloved, andreallybelieve it when I'm saying it—the day I can't do that I shall know I'm an old, old woman, too old to live any more."
"Then, of course, you will die?" I suggested.
"Of course I will die," she said. "But not vulgarly—I mean I won't make a point of it, and feel a fat coroner's eyes on my body as my soul goes up to Gabriel. I shall die in my bed, of a broken heart. My heart will break when I begin to fade. I shall die before I have faded...."
"No, you won't, Shelmerdene," I said. "Many women have sworn that, from Theodosia to La Pompadour, but they have not died of broken hearts because they never realised when they began to fade, and no man ever dared tell them, not even a Roi Soleil."
"Oh, don't be pedantic, Dikran, and don't worry me about what other women will or won't do. You will be quoting the 'Dolly Dialogues' at me next, and saying 'Women will be women all the world over.'
"It is always like that about me and men," she said. "I burn and burn and fizzle out. And all the time the man is wondering if I am playing with him or not, if it is worth his while to fall in love with me or not—poor pathos, as if he could help it in the end! And then, at last, when he realises that he is in love, he begins to say the things I had longed for him to say four weeks before; every Englishman in love is simply bound to say, at one time or another, that he would adore to lie with his beloved in a gondola in Venice, looking at the stars; any Englishman who doesn't say that when he is in love is a suspicious character, and it will probably turn out that he talks French perfectly.
"And when at last he has fallen in love," she said dreamily, "he wants me to run away with him, and he is very hurt and surprised when I refuse, and pathetically says something 'about my having led him to expect that I loved him to death, and would do anything for or with him.' The poor little man doesn't know that he is behind the times, that he could have done anything he likedwith me the first week we met, when I was madly in love with him, that when I was dying for him to ask me to go away with him, and would gladly have made a mess of my life at one word from him—but four weeks later I would rather have died than go away with him.
"Only once," she said, "I was almost beaten. I fell in love with a stone figure. Women are like sea-gulls, they worship stone figures.... I went very mad, Dikran. He told me that he didn't deserve being loved by me—he admired me tremendously, you see—because he hadn't it in his poor soul to love any one. He simply couldn't love, he said ... and he felt such a brute. He said that often, poor boy—he felt such a brute! He passed a hand over his forehead and, with a tragic little English gesture, tried to be articulate, to tell me how intensely he felt that he was missing the best things in life, and yet couldn't rectify it, because .... 'Oh, my dear, I'm a hopeless person!' he said despairingly, and I forgot to pity myself in pitying him.
"But he got cold again. He weighed his words carefully: No, he liked me as much as he could like any one, but he didn'tthinkhe loved me—mark that glorious, arrogantthink, Dikran!... He was very ambitious; with the sort of confident, yet intensive, nerve-racking ambition which makes great men. Very young, very wonderful, brilliantly successful in his career at an age when other men were only beginning theirs—an iron man, with the self-destructive selfishness of ice, which freezes the thing that touches it, but itself melts in the end.... He frozeme. Don't think I'm exaggerating, please, but, as he spoke—it was at lunch, and a coon band was playing—I died away all to myself. I just died, and then came to life again, coldly, and bitterly, and despairingly, but still loving him.... I couldn'tnotlove him, you see. His was the sort of beauty that was strong, and vital, and a little contemptuous, and with an English cleanness about it that was scented.... I am still loyal to my first despairing impression of him. And I knew that I was really in love with him, because I couldn't bear theidea of ever having loved any one else. I was sixteen again, and worshipped a hero, a man who did things.
"I was a fool, of course—to believe him, I mean. But when women lose their heads they lose the self-confidence and pride of a lifetime, too—and, anyway, it's all rubbish about pride; there isn't any pride in absolute love. There's a name to be made out of a brilliant epigram on love and pride—think it over, Dikran.... What an utter fool I was to believe him! As he spoke, over that lunch-table, I watched his grey English eyes, which tried to look straight into mine but couldn't, because he was shy; he was trying to be frightfully honest with me, you see, and being so honest makes decent men shy. He felt such a brute, but he had to warn me that in any love affair with him, he ... yes, he did love me, in his way, he suddenly admitted. But his way wasn't, couldn't ever be, mine. He simply couldn't give himself wholly to any one, as I was doing. And he so frightfully wanted to—to sink into my love for him.... 'Shelmerdene, it's all so damnable,' he said pathetically, and his sinceritybit into me. But I had made up my mind. I was going to do the last foolish thing in a foolish life—I'm a sentimentalist, you know.
"I believed him. But I clung to my pathetic love affair with both hands, so tight—so tight that my nails were white and blue with their pressure against his immobility. I made up my mind not to let go of him, however desperate, however hopeless ... it was an attempt at life. He was all I wanted, I could face life beside him. Other men had been good enough to play with, but my stone figure—why, I had been looking for him all my life! But in my dreams the stone figure was to come wonderfully to life when I began to worship it—in actual life my worshipping could make the stone figure do nothing more vital than crumble up bits of bread in a nervous effort to be honest with me! I took him at that—I told you I was mad, didn't I?—I took him at his own value, for as much as I could get out of him.
"I set out to make myself essential to him, mentally, physically, every way.... If he couldn't love me as man to woman, then hewould have to love me as a tree trunk loves the creepers round it; I was going to cling all round him, but without his knowing. But I hadn't much time—just a month or perhaps six weeks. He was under orders for Africa, where he was going to take up a big administrative job, amazing work for so young a man; but, then, he was amazing. Just a few weeks I had, then, to make him feel that he couldn't bear life, in Africa or anywhere, without me. And, my dear! life didn't hold a more exquisite dream than that which brought a childish flush under my rouge, the very dream of dreams, of how, a few days before he went, he would take me in his arms and tell me that he couldn't bear to go alone, and that I must follow him, and together we would face all the scandal that would come of it.... I passionately wanted the moment to come when he would offer to risk his career for me; I wanted him to offer me his ambition, and then I would consider whether to give it back to him or not. But he didn't. I lost.
"And I had seemed so like winning during that six weeks between that horriblelunch and his going away! London love affairs are always scrappy, hole-in-the-corner things, but we managed to live together now and again. And then,mon Dieu! he suddenly clung to me and said he wasn't seeing enough of me, that London was getting between us, and that we must go away somewhere into the country for at least a week before he left, to breathe and to love.... Wouldn't you have thought I was winning? I thought so, and my dreams were no more dreams, but actual, glorious certainties; he would beg me on his knees to follow him to Africa!
"We went away ten days before he sailed, to a delightful little inn a few miles from Llangollen. Seven days we spent there. Wonderful, intimate days round about that little inn by the Welsh stream; we were children playing under a wilderness of blue sky, more blue than Italy's because of the white and grey puffs of clouds which make an English sky more human than any other; and we played with those toy hills which are called mountains in Wales, and we were often silent because there was too much totalk about.... And as we sat silently facing each other in the train back to London, I knew I had won. There were three days left.
"In London, he dropped me here at my house, and went on to his flat; he was to come in the evening to fetch me out to dinner. But he was back within an hour. I had to receive him in a kimono. I found him pacing up and down this room, at the far end there, by the windows. He came quickly to me, and told me that his orders had been changed—he had to go to Paris first, spend two days there, and then to Africa via Marseilles. 'To Paris?' I said, not understanding. 'Yes, to-night—in two hours,' he said, quickly, shyly. He was embarrassed at the idea of a possible scene. But he was cold. He must go at once, he said. And he looked eager to go, to go and be doing. He shook both my hands—I hadn't a word—and almost forgot to kiss me. It was just as though nothing had ever happened between us, as though we hadn't ever been to Wales, or played, and laughed, and loved; as though he had never begged me to run my fingersthrough his hair, because I had said his hair was a garden where gold and green flowers grew. He was going away; and he was just as when I had first met him, or at that lunch—I hadn't gained anything at all, it was all just a funny, tragic, silly dream ... he had come and now he was going away. He would write to me, he said, and he would be back in sixteen months....
"I'm not a bad loser, you know; I can say such and such a thing isn't for me, and then try and undermine my wretchedness with philosophy. But I simply didn't exist for a few months; I just went into my little shell and stayed there, and was miserable all to myself, and not bitter at all, because I sort of understood him, and knew he had been true to himself. It was I who had failed in trying to make him false to his own nature.... But there's a limit to all things; there comes a time when one can't bear any more gloom, and then there is a reaction. No one with any courage can be wretched for ever—anyway, I can't. So, suddenly, after a few months, I went out into the world again, and played and jumpedabout, and made my body so tired that my mind hadn't a chance to think.
"His first few letters were cold, honest things, a little pompous in their appreciations of me tacked on to literary descriptions of the Nile, and the desert, and the natives. I wrote to him only once, a wonderful letter, but I hadn't the energy to write again—what was the good?
"At the end of a year I was really in the whirl of the great world again. There were a few kicks left in Shelmerdene yet, I told myself hardly, and Maurice became just a tender memory. I never thought of how he would come back to England soon, as he had said, and what we would do then, for I had so dinned it into myself that he wasn't for me that I had entirely given up the quest of the Blue Bird. He was just a tender memory ... and impressionable me fell in love again. But not as with Maurice—I was top-dog this time. He was the sort of man that didn't count except in that I loved him. He was the servant of my reaction against Maurice, and to serve me well he had to help me wipe out all the castlesof sentiment I had built around Maurice. And the most gorgeous castle of all I had built round that little Welsh inn! Something must be done about that, I told myself, but for a long time I was afraid of the ghost of Maurice, which might still haunt the place, and bring him back overpoweringly to me. It was a risk; by going there with some one else I might either succeed in demolishing Maurice's last castle, or I might tragically have to rebuild all the others, and worship him again.
"He had continued to write to me, complaining of my silence. And he had somehow become insistent—he missed me, it seemed. He didn't write that he loved me, but he forgot to describe the Nile, and wrote about love as though it were a real and beautiful thing and not a pastime to be wedged in between fishing and hunting. I wrote to him once again, rather lightly, saying that I had patched up my heart and might never give him a chance to break it again. That was just before I went to demolish the last castle of my love for him. For I did go; one day my young man produced a high-poweredcar which could go fast enough to prevent one sleeping from boredom, and I said 'Us for Llangollen,' and away we went ...
"The divinest thing about that little inn was its miniature dining-room, composed almost entirely of a large bow-window and a long Queen Anne refectory table. There were three tables, of which never more than one was occupied. Maurice and I had sat at the table by the window, and now my reaction and I sat there again; we looked out on to a toy garden sloping down to a brown stream which made much more noise than you could think possible for so narrow a thing. My back was to the door, and I sat facing a large mirror, with the garden and the stream on my right; he sat facing the window, adoring me, the adventure, the stream, and the food. And I was happy too, for now I realised that I had fallen out of love with Maurice, for his ghost didn't haunt the chair beside me, and I could think of him tenderly, without regret. I was happy—until, in the mirror in front of me, I saw the great figure of Maurice, and his face, atthe open door. Our eyes met in the mirror, the eyes of statues, waiting.... I don't know what I felt—I wasn't afraid, I know. Perhaps I wasn't even ashamed. I don't know how long he stood there, filling the doorway. Not more than a few seconds, but all the intimacy of six weeks met in our glance in that mirror. At last he took his eyes off mine and looked at the man beside me, who hadn't seen him. I thought his lips twitched, and his eyes became adorably stern, and then the mirror clouded over.... When I could see again the door was closed, and Maurice was gone. The magic mirror was empty of all but my unbelieving eyes, and the profile of the man beside me, who hadn't seen him and never knew that I had lived six weeks while he ate a potato....
"I stayed my week out in Wales, because I always try to do what is expected of me. When I got home, right on the top of a pile of letters—I had given orders for nothing, not even wires, to be sent on to me—was a wire, which had arrived one hour after I had left for Wales. It was from Southampton, and it said: 'Just arrived. Am going straightup to the little palace in Wales because of memories. Will arrive there dinner-time. Shall we dine together by the window?'
"And so, you see, I had won and lost and won again, but how pathetically.... Am I such a bad woman, d'you think?"