_The London Venture_
MICHAEL ARLEN
_By_ MICHAEL ARLEN
_These Charming People_
_The Green Hat_
_"Piracy"_
_The London Venture_
_The Romantic Lady_
_The_
_London Venture_
_by_
_Michael Arlen_
_With Drawings by_
_MICHEL SEVIER_
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_NEW YORK_
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
_Copyright, 1920,_
_By George H. Doran Company_
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THE LONDON VENTURE
-- B --
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To_
THE SISTER
of
SHELMERDENE
APOLOGIA PRO NOMINE MEO
Out of consideration (in part) to such readers as may read this book I
have assumed a name by which they may refer to me (if ever he or she may
wish to do so kindly) in the same manner at least twice running--a feat
of pronunciation which few of my English acquaintances have performed
with my natal name. But there is also another reason, considerate of the
author. I have been told that there are writers whose works would have
been famous if only their names could have been familiarly
pronounced--Polish and Russian writers for the most part, I gather.
Since I had already taken every other precaution but this to deserve
their more fortunate fate, in changing my name I have, I hope, robbed my
readers of their last excuse for my obscurity.
_Dikran Kouyoumdjian._
"MICHAEL ARLEN."
_The London Venture_: I
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THE
LONDON VENTURE
I
My watch has needed winding only twice since I left London, and already,
as I sit here in the strange library of a strange house, whose only
purpose in having a library seems to be to keep visitors like myself
quiet and out of harm's way, I find myself looking back to those past
months in which I was for ever complaining of the necessity that kept me
in London. How I would deliver myself to a congenial friend about what
men are pleased to call "the artificial necessity of living"--a
cocktail, that courtesan of drinks, lent some artificiality! With what
sincerity I would agree with another's complaint of the "monotonous
routine of politeness," without indulging which men cannot live
decently; how I would mutter to myself of streets and theatres full of
men and women and ugliness! Even as a cab hurried me through the
Tottenham Court Road to Euston the smile which I turned to the
never-ending windows of furniture shops was at the thought that I should
not see them again for many days, and I could not imagine myself ever
being pleased to come back to this world of plain women and bowler hats
and bawdily coloured cinema posters, whose duty it is to attract and
insult with the crude portrayal of the indecent passions of tiresome
people. If there be a studio in purgatory for indiscreet æsthetics,
Rhadamanthus could do no better than paper its walls with illustrations
of "The Blindness of Love," or "Is Love Lust?" For it is now a London of
coloured drawings of men about to murder or be murdered, women about to
be seduced or divorced. One has to see a crowd of people surging into a
cinema, by whose doors is a poster showing a particularly vapid
servant-girl, a harlot of the "dark-eyed, sinister" type, and a drunken,
fair-haired young man who has not yet realised that discretion is the
better part of an indiscretion, before one can understand "the lure of
the screen."
And even the entrance of Euston, rebuilt and newly painted, gave my eyes
only the pleasure of foreseeing that the new yellow paint would soon be
dingy, and that the eyes of porters would soon no longer be offended
with upstart colours which quarrelled with the greyness of their
experience. And in the carriage I leant back and closed my eyes, and was
glad that I was leaving London.
But the train had scarce left the station, and was whirling through the
northern suburbs which should so fervently have confirmed my gladness,
when I felt suddenly as though some little thing was being born inside
me, as though some little speck of dust had come in through the open
window, and fixed itself upon my pleasure at leaving London; and very
soon I realised that this was the first grain of regret, and that I
should not spend so many months away from London as my late depression
had imagined. Then up will start the strong-minded man, and pish and
pshaw me for not knowing my own mind. And if he does, how right he will
be! For little do I care whether this mood be as the last, so they both
fill up the present moment with fitting thoughts, and pain, and
pleasure!
Now, I was already thinking of how I would return to London next year in
the spring. What I would do then, the things I would write, the men I
would talk to, and the women I would lunch with, so filled my mind, and
pleasantly whirled my thoughts from this to that, that Rugby was long
passed before even I had come to think of the pleasures that London in
early summer has in store for all who care to take. When the days were
growing long, it would be pleasant to take a table by the windows of the
Savoy, and dine there with some woman with whom it would be no effort to
talk or be silent.
Such a woman at once comes to my mind, with dark hair and grey-blue
eyes, the corners of whose mouth I am continually watching because it is
only there I find the meaning of her eyes, for she is a sphinx, and I do
not yet know if what she hides is a secret or a sense of humour. You
will say that that means nothing, and that she is quite invisible to
you; but you do not know her, and I do--at least, I know that much of
her. And with her it seems to me that I could dine only at that table by
the windows where I could turn from her eyes to the slow-moving English
river, and the specks of men and trams, which are all that the leaves of
trees will let me see of the Embankment. Perhaps I would tell her of
that novel which I once began to write, but could never finish nor have
any heart to try again; for it began just here at this table where we
are now sitting, but the man was alone, and if he ever lived outside my
halting pages and had the finishing of my novel, he would put himself
here again at the end, with you sitting in front of him. For that is the
whole purpose of the novel, which I never realised till this moment,
that once a young man was sitting here alone and wondering why that
should be and what he should do, and in the end he was sitting here
again with a woman for whom his passion had died, but whose eyes still
made him talk so that he could not see the slow darkening of the river,
or hear the emptying of the restaurant, until at last she laughed, and
he had to stop because of the waiters who hovered round the table to
relay it for the bored people who would come in from the theatres for
supper. But all this I had never realised till I told you of it, and
perhaps now I shall one day finish it, and call it "Nadine," for that is
your name in the novel.
Thinking of the young man of my unfinished novel who had sat there so
alone sent my thoughts back to the day not many years past when I first
came to live in London. I am bitter about those first months, and will
not easily forgive London for them; and if any young person shall begin
to tell me how splendid were his first lonely days in the wilderness of
people, how much he enjoyed the aimless wandering about the streets, how
he liked to watch the faces of the people as they passed, laughing, or
talking, or hungry, while he could do or be none of these for lack of
company and convenience of means, then I will turn on him and curse him
for a fool or a knave, and rend the affected conceit of his
self-contained pleasure with my own experience and that of many others
whom I know of. But then for a young Englishman--how pleasant it is to
write of "young Englishmen," as though one were really a foreigner!--the
circumstances are a little different, and he need never taste that first
absolute loneliness, which, as the weeks go by and the words are not
spoken, seems to open out a vista of solitude for all the days of life;
nor need he be conscious that it is on himself--how, while it
exaggerates, loneliness stifles self!--he must rely for every
acquaintance, for every word spoken in his life. But for him there are
aunts who live in Chester Square, and cousins who come up to stay a
month or so at the Hyde Park Hotel, and uncles who live somewhere about
Bruton Street, and have such a fund of _risqué_ anecdotes that the
length of Bond Street and Piccadilly will not see the end of them; and,
perhaps, there are age-long friends of the family who have houses in
Kensington and Hampstead, and "nice" parquet floors on which you can
dance to a gramophone; while for an Armenian, who soon realises that his
nationality is considered as something of a _faux pas_, there are none
of these things, and he is entirely lost in the wilderness, for there is
no solid background to his existence in another's country; and, as the
days lengthen out and he grows tired of walking in the Green Park, he
comes to wonder why his fathers ever left Hayastan; for it seems to me
much better to be a murdered prince in Hayastan than a living vagabond
in London. So I wandered about, moved my chambers gradually from Earl's
Court to the heart of St. James's and read "Manon Lescaut," and sat in
front of Gainsborough's "Musidora" until I found that she had three
legs, and could never look at it again.
Then, somehow, came acquaintance, first of the world, then of literature
and its parasites; came teas at Golder's Green and Hampstead, and
queerly serious discussions about sub-consciousness; "rags" at Chelsea,
and "dalliance with grubbiness," and women. Through this early maze of
ribaldry and discussion, the first of which bored me because of its
self-consciousness, and because I do not like lying on the dirty floors
of studios with candle grease dripping on me, and the latter which
affected my years miserably and almost entirely perverted my natural
amiability into a morbid distaste for living (which still breaks out at
odd moments, and has branded me among many people as a depressing and
damnably superior young person); through this maze of smoke and talk I
can only still see the occasional personality of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, as
his clear, grey eyes--there is no equivalent to _spirituel_ in
English--flashed from face to face, smiling sometimes, often but a
vehicle for those bitter thoughts (and thoughts are so often conclusions
with men of arrogant genius like Lawrence) which find such strange and
emphatic expression in his books. I would need the pen of a De Quincey
to describe my impression of that man, and I am candid enough to admit
that I lack the ability, rather than the malice, which caused the little
opium-eater to be so justly hated by such a man as Bob Southey. There is
a bitterness which can find no expression, is inarticulate, and from
that we turn away as from a very pitiful thing; and there is that
bitterness which is as clear-cut as a diamond, shining with definitions,
hardened with the use of a subtle reasoning which is impenetrable but
penetrating, "the outcome of a fecund imagination," as Lawrence himself
might describe it; a bitterness so concisely and philosophically
articulate, that, under the guise of "truth," it will penetrate into the
receptive mind, and leave there some indelible impressions of a strange
and dominating mind. I have found that in the books and person of Mr. D.
H. Lawrence. He seems to lack humility definitely, as a man would lack
bread to eat, and a note of arrogance, as splendid as it is shameless,
runs through his written words; and the very words seem conscious that
they are pearls flung before swine. He will pile them one on top of the
other, as though to impregnate each with his own egotism, to describe
the sexual passions of this man or that woman, words so full of _his_
meaning, so pregnant with _his_ passions, that at the end of such a page
you feel that a much greater and more human Ruskin is hurling his dogmas
at your teeth, that there is nothing you can say or think outside that
pile of feeling which is massed before you, that you must accept and
swallow without cavil and without chewing. With what relief one turns
over a page and finds that here is no touch of the flesh, but that Mr.
Lawrence is writing of earth! Let him sink into earth as deep as he may,
he can find and show there more beauty and more truth than in all his
arrogant and passionate fumblings in the mire of sex, in all his bitter
striving after that, so to speak, sexual millennium, that ultimate
psychology of the body and mind, which seems so to obsess him that in
his writings he has buried his mind, as, in his own unpleasant phrase, a
lover buried his head, in the "terrible softness of a woman's belly."
Who has not read "Sons and Lovers," and laid it down as the work of a
strange and great man, of the company of Coleridge, Stendhal, and
Balzac? And who, as he read it, has not been shocked by a total lack of
that sweetness which must alloy all strength to make it acceptable?
"That strange interfusion of strength and sweetness," which Pater so
admiringly found in Blake and Hugo, cannot be found in Mr. D. H.
Lawrence; there is a mass of passionate strength, that of an angry man
straining with his nerves because he despises his hands; there is a
gentleness in his writing of children which could never be capable of
such melodrama as that in Mr. Hardy's "Jude the Obscure," but in his men
and women, in their day and night, there is no drop of sweetness. And I
do not think he wishes it otherwise.
As the train flew through the Derbyshire countryside, whose hillsides
and vales, covered with the brilliant sheen of the autumn sun, met the
eye pleasantly with a rising and falling of pale yellowish green, with
here and there a dark green patch of woodland, and made me want to stop
the hurrying train and breathe the air of the place, my thoughts slipped
back to the spring and the summer just before the war; and, with my eyes
on the quickly passing sunshine on the low hills, I found that, after
all, those last few months of peace had passed, perhaps, too lightly,
too carelessly; but it was pleasant to think back to those days when
lunches and dinners and week-ends took up so much of one's time. I was
glad now that I had not spent the three summer months in Yorkshire on
the moors, where I should have been uncomfortable; and had to be for
ever sending postcards to Hatchard's to post me this or that book, which
would come when my mood for it had passed.
And how dreadful it is to want to read suddenly "Love in the Valley,"
and have to be content with Tennyson, to long for a chapter of
Dostoieffsky, and be met with complete editions of Trollope and Surtees!
So I see that my middle age will be crabbed and made solitary by my
books, and that I shall never have the heart to leave them and go to the
East to see the land of my father Haik, or to walk about the lake upon
which the great Queen Semiramis (who was the first in the world to
discover that men could be conveniently changed into eunuchs) built the
city Semiramakert, which is now called Van, and where later, when she
was pursued by the swordsmen of her son, she threw a magic bracelet into
the lake and turned herself into a rock, which still stands there
covered with the triumphant script of the Assyrians.
_The London Venture_: II
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