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 must _do 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 room in 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 insignificant _rentier_. 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
they wouldn'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 my luck 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 who takes 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 most unscrupulous 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 their backs, 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!"
"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.'"
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 her
voice, 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
her bored 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, and _how_ she 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 of Chelsea, 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 she can "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 to eat 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 reached _Ultima Thule_ but 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.
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_The London Venture_: V
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V
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 I do 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 can make 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-crown cheaper, 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 expressions of the artist's grim and ironic detachment from other
men; a _macabre_ observer, 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 dejected _houri_ before 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 at other 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 cardtable in 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 is an
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 your spare 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 my friend 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....
_The London Venture_: VI
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