Part 4

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

VI

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

VII

I asked her once, but long after I had realised that loving Shelmerdene could not be my one business in life, if she did not feel that perhaps--I was tentative--she would some day be punished. "But how young you are!" she said. "You don't really think I am a sort of Zuleika Dobson, do you?--just because one wretched man once thought it worth while to shoot himself because of me, and just because men have that peculiar form of Sadism which makes them torture themselves through their love, when they have ceased to be loved.... It's a horrible sight, my dear--men grovelling in their unreturned emotions so as to get the last twinge of pain out of their humiliation. I've seen them grovelling, and they knew all the time that it would do no good, merely put them farther away from me--or from any woman, for the matter of that. But they like grovelling, these six-foot, stolid men."

"But haven't _you_ ever been on your knees, Shelmerdene?"

"Of course I have. Lots of times. I always begin like that--in fact, I've never had an affair which didn't begin with my being down and under. I am so frightfully impressionable....

"You see," she touched my arm, "I am rather a quick person. I mean I fall in love, or whatever you call my sort of emotion, quickly. While the man is just beginning to think that I've got rather nice eyes, and that I'm perhaps more amusing than the damfool women he's known so far, I'm frantically in love. I do all my grovelling then. And, Dikran! if you could only see me, if you could only be invisible and see me loving a man more than he loves me--you simply wouldn't know me. And I make love awfully well, in my quiet sort of way, much better than any man--and different love-speeches to every different man, too! I say the divinest things to them--and quite seriously, thank God! The day I can't fall in love with a man seriously, and tell him he's the only man I've ever _really_ loved, and _really_ believe it when I'm saying it--the day I can't do that I shall know I'm an old, old woman, too old to live any more."

"Then, of course, you will die?" I suggested.

"Of course I will die," she said. "But not vulgarly--I mean I won't make a point of it, and feel a fat coroner's eyes on my body as my soul goes up to Gabriel. I shall die in my bed, of a broken heart. My heart will break when I begin to fade. I shall die before I have faded...."

"No, you won't, Shelmerdene," I said. "Many women have sworn that, from Theodosia to La Pompadour, but they have not died of broken hearts because they never realised when they began to fade, and no man ever dared tell them, not even a Roi Soleil."

"Oh, don't be pedantic, Dikran, and don't worry me about what other women will or won't do. You will be quoting the 'Dolly Dialogues' at me next, and saying 'Women will be women all the world over.'

"It is always like that about me and men," she said. "I burn and burn and fizzle out. And all the time the man is wondering if I am playing with him or not, if it is worth his while to fall in love with me or not--poor pathos, as if he could help it in the end! And then, at last, when he realises that he is in love, he begins to say the things I had longed for him to say four weeks before; every Englishman in love is simply bound to say, at one time or another, that he would adore to lie with his beloved in a gondola in Venice, looking at the stars; any Englishman who doesn't say that when he is in love is a suspicious character, and it will probably turn out that he talks French perfectly.

"And when at last he has fallen in love," she said dreamily, "he wants me to run away with him, and he is very hurt and surprised when I refuse, and pathetically says something 'about my having led him to expect that I loved him to death, and would do anything for or with him.' The poor little man doesn't know that he is behind the times, that he could have done anything he liked with me the first week we met, when I was madly in love with him, that when I was dying for him to ask me to go away with him, and would gladly have made a mess of my life at one word from him--but four weeks later I would rather have died than go away with him.

"Only once," she said, "I was almost beaten. I fell in love with a stone figure. Women are like sea-gulls, they worship stone figures.... I went very mad, Dikran. He told me that he didn't deserve being loved by me--he admired me tremendously, you see--because he hadn't it in his poor soul to love any one. He simply couldn't love, he said ... and he felt such a brute. He said that often, poor boy--he felt such a brute! He passed a hand over his forehead and, with a tragic little English gesture, tried to be articulate, to tell me how intensely he felt that he was missing the best things in life, and yet couldn't rectify it, because .... 'Oh, my dear, I'm a hopeless person!' he said despairingly, and I forgot to pity myself in pitying him.

"But he got cold again. He weighed his words carefully: No, he liked me as much as he could like any one, but he didn't _think_ he loved me--mark that glorious, arrogant _think_, Dikran!... He was very ambitious; with the sort of confident, yet intensive, nerve-racking ambition which makes great men. Very young, very wonderful, brilliantly successful in his career at an age when other men were only beginning theirs--an iron man, with the self-destructive selfishness of ice, which freezes the thing that touches it, but itself melts in the end.... He froze _me_. Don't think I'm exaggerating, please, but, as he spoke--it was at lunch, and a coon band was playing--I died away all to myself. I just died, and then came to life again, coldly, and bitterly, and despairingly, but still loving him.... I couldn't _not_ love him, you see. His was the sort of beauty that was strong, and vital, and a little contemptuous, and with an English cleanness about it that was scented.... I am still loyal to my first despairing impression of him. And I knew that I was really in love with him, because I couldn't bear the idea of ever having loved any one else. I was sixteen again, and worshipped a hero, a man who did things.

"I was a fool, of course--to believe him, I mean. But when women lose their heads they lose the self-confidence and pride of a lifetime, too--and, anyway, it's all rubbish about pride; there isn't any pride in absolute love. There's a name to be made out of a brilliant epigram on love and pride--think it over, Dikran.... What an utter fool I was to believe him! As he spoke, over that lunch-table, I watched his grey English eyes, which tried to look straight into mine but couldn't, because he was shy; he was trying to be frightfully honest with me, you see, and being so honest makes decent men shy. He felt such a brute, but he had to warn me that in any love affair with him, he ... yes, he did love me, in his way, he suddenly admitted. But his way wasn't, couldn't ever be, mine. He simply couldn't give himself wholly to any one, as I was doing. And he so frightfully wanted to--to sink into my love for him.... 'Shelmerdene, it's all so damnable,' he said pathetically, and his sincerity bit into me. But I had made up my mind. I was going to do the last foolish thing in a foolish life--I'm a sentimentalist, you know.

"I believed him. But I clung to my pathetic love affair with both hands, so tight--so tight that my nails were white and blue with their pressure against his immobility. I made up my mind not to let go of him, however desperate, however hopeless ... it was an attempt at life. He was all I wanted, I could face life beside him. Other men had been good enough to play with, but my stone figure--why, I had been looking for him all my life! But in my dreams the stone figure was to come wonderfully to life when I began to worship it--in actual life my worshipping could make the stone figure do nothing more vital than crumble up bits of bread in a nervous effort to be honest with me! I took him at that--I told you I was mad, didn't I?--I took him at his own value, for as much as I could get out of him.

"I set out to make myself essential to him, mentally, physically, every way.... If he couldn't love me as man to woman, then he would have to love me as a tree trunk loves the creepers round it; I was going to cling all round him, but without his knowing. But I hadn't much time--just a month or perhaps six weeks. He was under orders for Africa, where he was going to take up a big administrative job, amazing work for so young a man; but, then, he was amazing. Just a few weeks I had, then, to make him feel that he couldn't bear life, in Africa or anywhere, without me. And, my dear! life didn't hold a more exquisite dream than that which brought a childish flush under my rouge, the very dream of dreams, of how, a few days before he went, he would take me in his arms and tell me that he couldn't bear to go alone, and that I must follow him, and together we would face all the scandal that would come of it.... I passionately wanted the moment to come when he would offer to risk his career for me; I wanted him to offer me his ambition, and then I would consider whether to give it back to him or not. But he didn't. I lost.

"And I had seemed so like winning during that six weeks between that horrible lunch and his going away! London love affairs are always scrappy, hole-in-the-corner things, but we managed to live together now and again. And then, _mon Dieu_! he suddenly clung to me and said he wasn't seeing enough of me, that London was getting between us, and that we must go away somewhere into the country for at least a week before he left, to breathe and to love.... Wouldn't you have thought I was winning? I thought so, and my dreams were no more dreams, but actual, glorious certainties; he would beg me on his knees to follow him to Africa!

"We went away ten days before he sailed, to a delightful little inn a few miles from Llangollen. Seven days we spent there. Wonderful, intimate days round about that little inn by the Welsh stream; we were children playing under a wilderness of blue sky, more blue than Italy's because of the white and grey puffs of clouds which make an English sky more human than any other; and we played with those toy hills which are called mountains in Wales, and we were often silent because there was too much to talk about.... And as we sat silently facing each other in the train back to London, I knew I had won. There were three days left.

"In London, he dropped me here at my house, and went on to his flat; he was to come in the evening to fetch me out to dinner. But he was back within an hour. I had to receive him in a kimono. I found him pacing up and down this room, at the far end there, by the windows. He came quickly to me, and told me that his orders had been changed--he had to go to Paris first, spend two days there, and then to Africa via Marseilles. 'To Paris?' I said, not understanding. 'Yes, to-night--in two hours,' he said, quickly, shyly. He was embarrassed at the idea of a possible scene. But he was cold. He must go at once, he said. And he looked eager to go, to go and be doing. He shook both my hands--I hadn't a word--and almost forgot to kiss me. It was just as though nothing had ever happened between us, as though we hadn't ever been to Wales, or played, and laughed, and loved; as though he had never begged me to run my fingers through his hair, because I had said his hair was a garden where gold and green flowers grew. He was going away; and he was just as when I had first met him, or at that lunch--I hadn't gained anything at all, it was all just a funny, tragic, silly dream ... he had come and now he was going away. He would write to me, he said, and he would be back in sixteen months....

"I'm not a bad loser, you know; I can say such and such a thing isn't for me, and then try and undermine my wretchedness with philosophy. But I simply didn't exist for a few months; I just went into my little shell and stayed there, and was miserable all to myself, and not bitter at all, because I sort of understood him, and knew he had been true to himself. It was I who had failed in trying to make him false to his own nature.... But there's a limit to all things; there comes a time when one can't bear any more gloom, and then there is a reaction. No one with any courage can be wretched for ever--anyway, I can't. So, suddenly, after a few months, I went out into the world again, and played and jumped about, and made my body so tired that my mind hadn't a chance to think.

"His first few letters were cold, honest things, a little pompous in their appreciations of me tacked on to literary descriptions of the Nile, and the desert, and the natives. I wrote to him only once, a wonderful letter, but I hadn't the energy to write again--what was the good?