Part 1

_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_

_NEW YORK_ GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

_Copyright, 1920,_ _By George H. Doran Company_

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

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

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.