II

Once (in those far-off peaceful days when men still had enough

grammatical sense to know that the word "pacifist" does not exist, but

that the less convenient "pacificist" does) I had been very depressed

for a week, and had scarcely spoken to any one, but had just walked

about in my rooms and on the Embankment, for I suddenly found myself

without any money at all; and it is thus with me that when I am without

money I am also without ideas, but when I have the first I do not

necessarily have the last. I wondered if I had not done a very silly

thing in being independent, and in not doing as my brothers had done,

reading "The Times" in an office every morning from ten to twelve, and

playing dominoes in the afternoon, and auction bridge in the evening,

and having several thousands a year when I was forty, and a Wolseley car

to take my wife for a holiday to Windermere, because she looked pale, or

because we were bored with each other. I smiled to think of the look on

my brothers' faces if I suddenly appeared at their office one morning,

and said that it was no good, and that I couldn't write, and was very

hungry. I could not make up my mind whether they would laugh at me and

turn me out, or whether they would teach me how to play auction and set

me to answer letters about what had happened on such and such a day

inst., and why the firm of ---- thought it unnecessary that it should

happen again, while they would sit in the next room, marked "Private,"

signing cheques and talking to visitors about the weather and the cotton

markets. Perhaps I will do that some day, for, from what I have heard,

it seems to me the easiest thing in the world to talk about rises and

falls and margins without knowing anything about them at all.

The same thing happens with regard to books, for one often meets people

who seem to have read every modern novel, and can discuss quite prettily

whether Mr. Wells is a man or a machine, or whether Mr. Arnold Bennett,

ever since he wrote the last lines to "The Old Wives' Tales," has not

decided that it is better to be a merchant than a writer, or whether Mr.

E. V. Lucas thinks he is the second Charles Lamb, and what other grounds

than his splendid edition has he for thinking so, or whether Mr. George

Moore does or does not think that indiscretion is the better part of

literature, or whether Mr. Chesterton or vegetarianism has had the

greatest effect on Mr. Shaw's religion; but then, after all this talk,

it turns out that they read "The Times Literary Supplement" every week,

and think Epictetus nothing to Mr. Clutton-Brock, or they are steeped in

Mr. Clement Shorter's weekly criticism _en deshabille_ in the

"Illustrated London News."

At last I could stand my depression no longer, and late one night, after

a day in which I had spoken to no one but a little old woman who said

that she wasn't a beggar but that God blessed the charitable, I sat down

and wrote a long, conceited letter to Shelmerdene; for to her I can

write whether I am gay or depressed, and be sure that she will not be

impatient with me. I told her how I had a great fund of ambition, but

had it not in me to satisfy a tenth part of it; for that is in the

character of all my people, they promise much greater things in their

youth than they can fulfil in their mature age. From twenty onwards they

are continually growing stale, and bitter with their staleness; the

little enthusiasm of their youth will not stretch through their whole

life, but will flicker out shamefully with the conceit of their own

precocity, and in trying to fly when other people are just learning to

walk; and as the years pass on and youth becomes regret, the son of

Haik, the faded offspring of a faded nation whose only call to exist is

because it has lived so long and has memories of the sacking of Nineveh

and Carchemish, is left without the impetus of development, with an

ambition which is articulate only in bitterness; while the hardy

Northerner, descendant of barbarian Druid worshippers whose nakedness

was rumoured with horror in the courts and pleasure gardens of Hayastan

and Persia, slowly grows in mind as in body, and soon outstrips the

petty outbursts of the other's stationary genius. I told Shelmerdene

that I, who had thought that England had given me at least some of her

continually growing enthusiasm, that _I_ who had thought I would not,

like so many of my countrymen, be too soon stranded on "the ultimate

islands" of Oriental decay, was even now in the stage between the dying

of enthusiasm and its realisation; for the first impetus of my youthful

conceits was vanishing, and there looked to be nothing left to them but

an "experience" and a "lesson of life" without which I would have been

much happier. In moods such as these one can hear in the far distance

the wailing of a dirge, a knell, indefinitely yet distinctly, and the

foreboding it brings is of an end to something which should have no end;

a falling away, a premature decay which is like a growing cloud soon to

cover the whole mind.... Shelmerdene, do you know the story of the

Dán-nan-Rón, which Fiona Macleod tells? How there lived three brothers

on the isle of Eilanmore: Marcus, who was "the Eilanmore," and Gloom,

whose voice "was low and clear, but cold as pale green water running

under ice," and Sheumais, on whose brow lay "the dusk of the shadow."

Gloom was the wisest of the brothers, and played upon an oaten flute,

which is called a _feadan_; and men were afraid of the cold, white notes

of his barbaric runes, as he played his _feadan_ from rock to rock and

on the seashore, but most of all they feared the playing of the

Dán-nan-Rón, which is the Song of the Seal and calls men to their death

in the sea. And when the eldest brother Marcus was killed with the

throwing of a knife, the murderer heard the woods of Gloom, which said

that he would hear the Dán-nan-Rón the night before he died, and lest he

should doubt those words, he would hear it again in the very hour of his

death. It happened as Gloom said: for one night the playing of the

_feadan_ drove the slayer, Manus MacCodrum, down into the sea, and as he

battled madly in the water, and the blood gushed out of his body as the

teeth of seals tore the life out of him, he heard from far away the

cold, white notes of the Dán-nan-Rón.

This tale always brings to me that many men, in some sudden moment which

even M. Maeterlinck would hesitate to define as "a treasure of the

humble," hear the playing of a tune such as that, which tells them of

some ending, unknown and indefinite, just as, in the moments of greatest

love, a man will feel for a terrible second the shivering white ice of

sanity, which tells him a different tale to that which he is murmuring

to the woman in his arms. Men who have heard it must have become morose

with the fear this distant dirge brought upon them; but of that

foreboding nothing certain can be known, and it is only in such a mood

as this, and to a Shelmerdene of women, that a fool will loosen his

foolishness to inquire into such things. Clarence Mangan must have heard

the tune as he lay drunk and wretched in his Dublin garret, for there is

more than Celtic gloom in the dirge of his lines. John Davidson, whose

poetry you so love, and who wrote in a moment of madness "that Death has

loaded dice," must have heard it, perhaps when first he came to venture

his genius in London, a young man with a strange, bad-tempered look in

his eyes; and he must have heard the exulting notes, as clearly as did

Manus MacCodrum, when he walked into the sea from Cornwall. Charles

Meryon must have heard it as he walked hungrily about the streets of

Paris, and wondered why those gargoyles--strange things to beautify!--on

Notre Dame, into which he had put so much life, could not scream aloud

to the people of Paris that a genius was dying among them for lack of

food and praise. Do you remember, Shelmerdene, how you and I, when first

I began to know you, stood before a little imp of wonderfully carved

onyx stone which leered at us from the centre of your mantelpiece, and I

said that it was like one of those gargoyles of Meryon's; and that

afternoon I told you about his life and death, and when I had finished

you said that I told the tale as though I enjoyed it, instead of being

frightened by the tragedy of it. But I admired your imp of onyx stone

very much, telling you that I loved its ravenous mouth and reptile

claws, because they looked so helplessly lustful after something

unattainable; and that same night I found a little black-and-gold box

awaiting me in my rooms, in which was the imp of onyx stone, and a note

saying that I must put it on my table because it would bring me luck.

For a second I did not believe your words, but thought that you had

given it to me to be a symbol for my helplessness, for I had said that

it lusted after something utterly unattainable. But the second passed,

and I found later that you had forgotten those words, and had sent it to

me because I liked it.... I would like to spend these glorious spring

days away from London with you, in quietness, perhaps in Galway

somewhere; but if you cannot come away with me to-morrow, I will take

you out to dinner instead, and we will talk about yourself and the

_ci-devants_ who have loved you; and though I have no money at all now,

I am quite sure that to-morrow will bring some.

Sure enough a few hours later I awoke to a bright spring morning, which

brought happiness in itself, even without the help of a cheque which a

recreant editor had at last thought fit to send me. As I walked out into

the blaze of sunshine on the King's Road, I felt that I must surely be a

miserable fellow to let my ill-nature so often oppress me that only very

seldom I was allowed to enjoy such mornings as this; mornings which seem

to spring suddenly out at you from a night of ordinary sleep, when, as

you walk through streets which perhaps only the day before you hated

bitterly, the spring sun wholly envelops your mind and comes between

yourself and your pretty dislikes, and the faces of men and women look

brown, and red, and happy as the light and shadow play on them; such a

day was this, a pearl dropped at my feet from the tiara of some Olympian

goddess.

Later I telephoned to Shelmerdene to ask her to lunch with me instead of

dine, as the day was so beautiful; but she said that she had already

promised to lunch with some one, a man who had loved her faithfully for

more than ten years, and as all he wanted from her was her company over

lunch on this particular day of the week, she could not play him false,

even though the day was so beautiful. But I told her that I would not be

loving her faithfully for ten years, and that she must take the best of

me while she could, and that on such a day as this it would be a shame

to lunch with an inarticulate lover; for a man who had loved her

faithfully for more than ten years, and wanted only her company over

lunch once a week, must be inarticulate, or perhaps a knave whose subtle

cunning her innocence had failed to unveil. So in the end we lunched

together in Knightsbridge, and then walked slowly through the Park.

The first covering of spring lay on every thing. The trees, so

ashamed--or was it coyness?--were they of their bareness in face of all

the greenness around them, were doing their best to hurry out that

clothing of leaves which, in a few weeks' time, would baffle the rays of

the sun which had helped their birth; and there was such a greenness and

clearness in the air and on the grass, and about the flowers which

seemed surprised at the new warmth of the world, hesitating as yet to

show their full beauty for they were afraid that the dark winter was

playing them a trick and would suddenly lurch clumsily upon them again,

that the Park has never seemed to me so beautiful as on that spring

afternoon when a careless happiness lay about everything.

So far I have not said a word about Shelmerdene, except that she had

found a man--or, rather, he had tiresomely found her--to love her

faithfully for ten years, and she had so affected him that he thought a

weekly lunch or dinner was the limit of his destiny with her. And yet,

had he searched himself and raked out the least bit of gumption, he

would have found he was tremendously wrong about her--for there were

pinnacles to be reached with Shelmerdene unattainable within the

material limits of a mere lunch or dinner. She was just such a

delightful adventuress as only a well-bred mixture of American and

English can sometimes make; such a subtle negation of the morals of

Boston or Kensington that she would, in the searching light of the one

or the other, have been acclaimed the shining light of their William

Morris drawing-rooms. She drew men with a tentative, all-powerful little

finger, and mocked them a little, but never so cruelly that they

weren't, from the inarticulate beginning to the inevitable end,

deliriously happy to be miserable about her. She was a Princess

Casassimma without anarchical affectations; and like her she was almost

too good to be true.

So much then, for Shelmerdene; for if to cap it all, I should go on to

say that she was beautiful I would be held to have been an infatuated

fool. Which, perhaps, I carelessly was, since I can't even now exactly

fix upon the colour of her hair, doubting now in memory as I must have

done actually in those past days with her, whether it was brown or black

or, as sometimes on a sofa under a Liberty-shaded lamp, a silver-tinted

blue, so wonderfully deep.... Perhaps destined, in that future when

Shelmerdene is at last tired of playing at life, to be the "blue silver"

of the besotted madman to whom she, at the weary end, with but a look

back at the long-passed procession of _ci-devants_, will thankfully give

herself. _Dies iræ, dies illa...._

_The London Venture_: III

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