As I look back now on the past years, I find that the thing that
penetrated most into my inner self, shocked me to the heart, and gave me
no room and left no desire for any pretence about the will of fate and
destiny, such as sometimes consoles grief, was the death of my friend
Louis. Unlike most great friendships, mine with Louis began at school;
and those, to whom circumstances have not allowed friendships at school,
cannot realise the intensity of certain few friendships which, beginning
on a basis of tomfoolery and ragging, as the general relations between
schoolboys begin, yet survive them all, and steadily ripen with the
years into a maturity of companionship, which has such a quality and
nobility of its own that no other relation, not even that of passionate
love, can ever take its place when it is gone.
I have not happened to mention Louis before in these papers for the
reason that he had actually come very little into my life in London. In
fact, we retained our intimacy against the aggression of our different
lives, which was rather paradoxical for the casual people we believed
ourselves to be. (Without a sincere belief in his own casualness the
modern youth would be the most self-important ass of all generations.)
Our ways of life lead very contrarily; there was nowhere they could
rationally touch; he, a soldier; I, a doctor, lawyer, or pedlar, I did
not know which. But I had the grace, or if you like, the foolishness, to
envy him the definite markings of his career; I envied him his knowledge
of the road he wished to tread, and of the almost certainties which lay
inevitably along that road.
Later, in those very best of days, I used to talk about him to
Shelmerdene. And as I described, she listened and wondered. For, she
said, such a man as I described Louis to be, and myself, could have
nothing in common. But I told her that it isn't necessary for two people
to have anything "in common" but friendship--and as I made that
meaningless remark I put on a superior air, and she did not laugh at me.
She continued to wonder during months, and at last she said, "Produce
this wretched youth." But I would not produce him, "because Louis has
never in his life met or dreamt of any one like you, and he will fall in
love with you straight away. And as he is more honest than I am, so he
will fall in love with you much more seriously, and that will be very
bad for him, because you are the sort of woman that you are. It isn't
fair to destroy the illusions of a helpless subaltern in the Rifle
Brigade.... No, I will not produce him, Shelmerdene." But of course I
did, and of course Louis saw, heard, and succumbed delightedly, and all
through that lunch and for the half-hour after I had to keep a very
stern eye on Shelmerdene and take great care not to let her get within a
yard of him, else she would have asked him to go and see her next time
he was in town, and then there would have been another wild-eyed ghost
wandering about the desert places of Mayfair. As for Louis, he beat even
his own record for dulness during that lunch. He admired her
tremendously and obviously, and too obviously he couldn't understand a
beautiful woman with beauty enough to be as dull as she liked, saying
witty and amusing things every few seconds, always giving the most
trivial remark, the most stereotyped phrase, such a queer twist as would
make it seem delightfully new. For ever after he pestered me to
"produce" him again, and I made myself rather unpopular by putting him
off; and I never did let him see her again. On Shelmerdene's part it was
just cussedness to worry me to see him again, for with a disgusted laugh
at my "heavy father stunt," she forgot all about him; after that lunch
she had found him "rather dull and a dear, and much to be loved by all
women over thirty-five. I am not yet old enough to love your Louis," she
said. And she retained her surprise at our friendship.
It was, perhaps, rather surprising; surprising not so much that we were
friends, but how we ever became friends; for there are many people in
this world, who could be great friends with each other if they could but
once surmount the first barrier, if they could but _wish_ to surmount
that barrier--and between Louis and me there was much more than a simple
barrier to surmount. We became friends in spite of ourselves, then;
though Louis, as you may believe, had nothing at all to do with the
affair; he just sat tight and let things happen, to him, for his was not
the nature consciously to defeat an invisible aim, a tyrannical decree.
As one of England's governing classes, even at the age of fourteen when
I first met him, such a rebellion as that of forcing God's hand about
the smallest trifle would somehow have savoured to him of disloyalty to
the "Morning Post" which, together with the Navy, Louis took as
representing the British Empire.
I had been at school already one term when Louis came; and so it was at
breakfast on the opening day of the winter term that I first noticed his
bewildered face, though as we grew to prefects that same face aired so
absolute a nonchalance that, together with my rather sophisticated
features, we thoroughly deserved the title of the _blasted roués_.
However, at that time, we were not prefects, but "new bugs," though
Louis was by one term a newer "bug" than myself and my friends, and
therefore had to sit at the bottom of the "bug" table and take his food
as he found it. I, of course, took no notice of him at all; I maintained
a, so to speak, official _hauteur_ about our meal-time relations--one
couldn't do anything else, you know, if one wished to keep unimpaired
the dignity of one's seniority. I had, in fact, no use for newer "bugs"
than myself; I was quite happy at my own end of the table with the three
men (ages fourteen to fourteen-and-a-half) with whom I shared a study.
We made a good and gay study, I remember, for they were three stalwart
fellows and I, even at that age not taking my Armenianism very
seriously, gave a quite passable imitation of an English public-school
man.
How, as I looked round at my three friends and said to myself "here are
companions for life," how was I to know of the irruption into my life of
a bewildered face! I despised that face. It was the face of a newer
"bug" than myself. But the wretched man could play soccer, I noticed;
his deft work at "inside right" to my "center forward" warmed my heart;
and, by the time the term was half over, he had gained a certain
distinction for being consistently at the bottom of the lowest form in
the school; one rather liked a man for sticking to his convictions like
that.
Nevertheless we became silently inimical. He ceased to look bewildered;
with an English cunning he had already found that an air of nonchalance
pays best. And his sort of "Oh, d'you think so?" air began to irritate
me; it was no good doing my man of the world on a man who obviously made
a point of not believing what I said. I rather felt in speaking to him
as an irritated and fussy foreign ambassador must feel before the
well-bred imperturbability of Mr. Balfour; I wasn't then old enough to
know I felt like that, but myself and study had reasonable grounds for
deciding that "that sloppy-haired new long bug was a conceited young
swine," and that he was trading rather too much on being at the bottom
of the school.
There was a dark-haired, sallow-faced youth, one Marsden, who had come
the same term as we three; he had at first shared our study, but had
been fired out for being a cub. And, by intimating to the House-Master
that if he was put back in our study, new bugs or no, we wouldn't answer
for his mother's knowing him, we had fired him out in such a way that he
couldn't ever get back. But he didn't try to get back. He just went into
the newest bug's study, and there, when Louis came the next term, made
firm and fast friends with him. Marsden disliked me much more than he
disliked any one else, as I had been the instigator of his ejection from
our study, and so the silent and contemptuous enmity with which Louis
eyed me wasn't very strange. Those two made common cause in their
indifference to anything we three at the head of the table might say;
and soon, things came to such a pass that we had to put lumps of salt
into the potato dish before handing it down to them. And even that
didn't seem to have much effect, for one tea-time I distinctly heard a
murmur resembling "Armenian Jew" escape from Marsden's lips; that, of
course, couldn't be borne, and I couldn't then explain to him that there
was no such person as an Armenian Jew for I wasn't myself quite certain
about it--all I knew was that I wasn't a Jew, and it wasn't Marsden who
was going to call me one in vain. So there and then I upped and threw my
pot of jam at his head, striking him neatly just above the right eye; I
didn't do it in anger, I didn't know why I did it, though now I know it
was done through a base passion for notoriety, which I still have,
though in a less primitive manner. I certainly got notoriety then, and
also six cuts from a very supple cane and a Georgic on which to work off
my ardour.
But I gained Louis for a friend. He had, it seemed, admired the deft and
unassuming way in which I had thrown that pot of jam--he knew even less
than I did about that passion for notoriety--and when he met me in the
passage as I came back from my six cuts in the prefects' room, he said,
"I say, bad luck," and I suggested that if his friend Marsden's ugly
face hadn't got in the way of a perfectly harmless pot of jam I wouldn't
have got a licking. Thus, in a three-minute talk, we became friends; but
when we each went to our own studies we didn't know we were friends--in
fact, I was quite prepared to go on treating him as an enemy until, when
we met again, we both seemed to find that we had something to say to
each other. And throughout those years of school we had always something
to say to each other which we couldn't say quite in the same way to any
one else, and that seems to me to be the basis of all friendship.... I
don't quite know what happened to Marsden, or how Louis told him that he
had decided to discontinue his friendship. I have an idea that Marsden
went on disliking me through four years of school, and that if I met him
on Piccadilly to-morrow would recognise me only to scowl at me, the man
who not only hit him over the eye with a pot of jam, but also deprived
him of his best friend.
Louis and I left school together; he on his inevitable road to
Sandhurst, and I, with a puckered side glance at Oxford, to Edinburgh
University. Even now I don't know why I went to Edinburgh and not to
Oxford; I had always intended going to Oxford, my family had always
intended that I should go to Oxford, up to the last moment I was
actually going to Oxford--when, suddenly, with a bowler hat crammed over
my left ear and a look of vicious obstinacy, I decided that I would go
to Edinburgh instead.
Of course it was a silly mistake. The only thing I have gained by not
going to Oxford is an utter inability to write poetry and a sort of
superior contempt for all pale, interesting-looking young men with dark
eyes and spiritual hair who are tremendously concerned about the utter
worthlessness of Mr. William Watson's poetry. Of course my own superior
attitude may be just as unbearable as their anaemic enthusiasm over,
say, a newly discovered _rondel_ by the youngest son of the local
fishmonger; but I at least do sincerely try to face and appreciate
literature boldly, and frankly, and normally, and not self-consciously
as they do, attacking literature from anywhere but a sane standpoint,
trying to force a breach in any queer spot so that it is unusual and has
not been thought of before; and through this original breach will
suddenly appear an Oxford face with a queer unhallowed grin of
self-conscious cleverness; and all this for a thin book of poems in a
yellow cover, called, as like as not, "Golden Oxygen"!
Louis, down at Sandhurst, was being made into a soldier, and I, up at
Edinburgh, was on the high road to general fecklessness. I only stayed
there a few months; jumbled months of elementary medicine, political
economy, metaphysics, theosophy--I once handed round programs at an
Annie Besant lecture at the Usher Hall--and beer, lots of beer. And
then, one night, I emptied my last mug, and with another side-glance at
Oxford, came down to London; "to take up a literary career" my
biographer will no doubt write of me. I may of course have had a
"literary career" at the back of my mind, but as it was I slacked
outrageously, much to Louis' disgust and envy. I have already written of
those months, how I walked in the Green Park, and sat in picture
galleries, and was lonely.
That first loneliness was lightened only by the occasional visits to
London of Louis. He was by now a subaltern in the Rifle Brigade, with an
indefinite but cultured growth somewhere between his nose and upper lip,
and a negligent way of wearing mufti, as though to say, "God, it's good
to be back in civilised things again!" They were jolly, sudden evenings,
those! London was still careless then. Of an evening, a couple of young
men in dress suits with top hats balanced over their eyebrows and eyes
full of a _blasé_ vacancy, were not as remarkable as they now are. Life
has lost its whilom courtesy to a top hat. Red flags and top hats cannot
exist side by side; the world is not big enough for both. Ah, thou
Bolshevik, thou class-beridden shop-steward! When ye die, how can ye say
that ye have ever lived if, in your aggressive experiences, you have not
known upon your foreheads the elegant weight of a top hat, made
especially to suit your Marxian craniums by one Locke, who has an
ancient shop at the lower end of St. James's Street and did at one time
dictate the headwear of the beaux of White's and Crockford's. I warrant
the life of my top hat, made by that same artist to withstand the impact
of the fattest woman on earth, against all the battering eloquence of
all the orators in all the Albert Halls of all the Red Flag countries.
With it on my head I will finesse any argument whatsoever with you any
night of the week. And at the end of the argument, if you are still
obstinate, I will cram my blessed top hat on your head and, lo and
behold! you are at once a Labour Minister in the Cabinet, and a most
respectable man with a most rectangular house in Portman Square!... But
I must go back to Louis, who never got further in his study of Labour
than an idea that all station-masters were labour leaders because they
took tips so impressively.
Those occasional evenings were very good. I put away from myself writing
and books--Louis hadn't really ever read anything but Kipling,
"Ole-Luk-Oie" and "The Riddle of the Sands"-and I temporarily forgot
Shelmerdene, and we dined right royally. I don't know what we talked
about, perhaps we talked of nothing at all; but we talked all the time,
and we laughed a great deal, and we still had the good old "_blasted
roué_" touch about us. We were very, very old indeed, so old that we
decided that the first act of no play or revue in the world could
compensate one for a hurried dinner; and we were old enough to know that
a confidential manner to _maitres d'hôtels_ is a thing to be cultivated,
else a chicken is apt to be wizened and the sweet an unconscionable long
time in coming. After dinner, a show, and then perhaps a night club, "to
teach those gals how to dance."
We founded a Club for Good Mannered People. I, as the founder, was the
president of the club, and Louis the vice-president; there were no
members because we unanimously black-balled every one whom, in a moment
of weakness, one or other of us might propose. We decided, in the end,
that the Club could never have any members except the president and
vice-president, simply because the men of our own generation were the
worst mannered crew God ever put within lounging distance of a
drawing-room.... There must be something wrong, we said, in a world
where public-school men could be recognised by the muddy footprints they
left on other people's carpets. So it was obviously left to us to supply
the deficiency of our generation, both as regards manners and everything
else. We made a cult of good manners; Louis took to them as a cult where
he had never taken to them as a necessity, and the happiest moments of
his life were when he could work it off on to some helpless woman who
had dropped an umbrella or a handkerchief. The Club, we decided, must
never come to an end, it must go on being a Club until one or other of
us should die ... and now the Club is no more, for suddenly a spring
gave way, the world gave a lurch towards hell, and Louis stopped playing
at soldiers to go away and be a real soldier, to die in his first attack
with a bullet in his chest....
_The London Venture_: IX
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