Part 3

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.

_The London Venture_: V

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.