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. And he 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 naturally as 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 preface and 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 noticed that 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 the Garden
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 Phoenix, 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 Mayfair to 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....
_The London Venture_: VII
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