The London Venture Part 1

The London Venture.

by Michael Arlen.

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 c.o.c.ktail, 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 pa.s.sions of tiresome people. If there be a studio in purgatory for indiscreet aesthetics, Rhadamanthus could do no better than paper its walls with ill.u.s.trations of "The Blindness of Love," or "Is Love l.u.s.t?" 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 pa.s.sed 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 _risque_ 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 d.a.m.nably 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 s.e.xual pa.s.sions of this man or that woman, words so full of _his_ meaning, so pregnant with _his_ pa.s.sions, 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 ma.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate fumblings in the mire of s.e.x, in all his bitter striving after that, so to speak, s.e.xual 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 ma.s.s of pa.s.sionate 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 Derbys.h.i.+re 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 pa.s.sing suns.h.i.+ne on the low hills, I found that, after all, those last few months of peace had pa.s.sed, 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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 pa.s.sed.

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 a.s.syrians.

_The London Venture_: II

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 "Ill.u.s.trated 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 wors.h.i.+ppers 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 vanis.h.i.+ng, 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 Dan-nan-Ron, 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 seash.o.r.e, but most of all they feared the playing of the Dan-nan-Ron, 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 Dan-nan-Ron 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, Ma.n.u.s 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 Dan-nan-Ron.

This tale always brings to me that many men, in some sudden moment which even M. Maeterlinck would hesitate to define as "a treasure of the humble," hear the playing of a tune such as that, which tells them of some ending, unknown and indefinite, just as, in the moments of greatest love, a man will feel for a terrible second the s.h.i.+vering white ice of sanity, which tells him a different tale to that which he is murmuring to the woman in his arms. Men who have heard it must have become morose with the fear this distant dirge brought upon them; but of that foreboding nothing certain can be known, and it is only in such a mood as this, and to a Shelmerdene of women, that a fool will loosen his foolishness to inquire into such things. Clarence Mangan must have heard the tune as he lay drunk and wretched in his Dublin garret, for there is more than Celtic gloom in the dirge of his lines. John Davidson, whose poetry you so love, and who wrote in a moment of madness "that Death has loaded dice," must have heard it, perhaps when first he came to venture his genius in London, a young man with a strange, bad-tempered look in his eyes; and he must have heard the exulting notes, as clearly as did Ma.n.u.s MacCodrum, when he walked into the sea from Cornwall. Charles Meryon must have heard it as he walked hungrily about the streets of Paris, and wondered why those gargoyles--strange things to beautify!--on Notre Dame, into which he had put so much life, could not scream aloud to the people of Paris that a genius was dying among them for lack of food and praise. Do you remember, Shelmerdene, how you and I, when first I began to know you, stood before a little imp of wonderfully carved onyx stone which leered at us from the centre of your mantelpiece, and I said that it was like one of those gargoyles of Meryon's; and that afternoon I told you about his life and death, and when I had finished you said that I told the tale as though I enjoyed it, instead of being frightened by the tragedy of it. But I admired your imp of onyx stone very much, telling you that I loved its ravenous mouth and reptile claws, because they looked so helplessly l.u.s.tful after something unattainable; and that same night I found a little black-and-gold box awaiting me in my rooms, in which was the imp of onyx stone, and a note saying that I must put it on my table because it would bring me luck.

For a second I did not believe your words, but thought that you had given it to me to be a symbol for my helplessness, for I had said that it l.u.s.ted after something utterly unattainable. But the second pa.s.sed, and I found later that you had forgotten those words, and had sent it to me because I liked it.... I would like to spend these glorious spring days away from London with you, in quietness, perhaps in Galway somewhere; but if you cannot come away with me to-morrow, I will take you out to dinner instead, and we will talk about yourself and the _ci-devants_ who have loved you; and though I have no money at all now, I am quite sure that to-morrow will bring some.

Sure enough a few hours later I awoke to a bright spring morning, which brought happiness in itself, even without the help of a cheque which a recreant editor had at last thought fit to send me. As I walked out into the blaze of suns.h.i.+ne on the King's Road, I felt that I must surely be a miserable fellow to let my ill-nature so often oppress me that only very seldom I was allowed to enjoy such mornings as this; mornings which seem to spring suddenly out at you from a night of ordinary sleep, when, as you walk through streets which perhaps only the day before you hated bitterly, the spring sun wholly envelops your mind and comes between yourself and your pretty dislikes, and the faces of men and women look brown, and red, and happy as the light and shadow play on them; such a day was this, a pearl dropped at my feet from the tiara of some Olympian G.o.ddess.

Later I telephoned to Shelmerdene to ask her to lunch with me instead of dine, as the day was so beautiful; but she said that she had already promised to lunch with some one, a man who had loved her faithfully for more than ten years, and as all he wanted from her was her company over lunch on this particular day of the week, she could not play him false, even though the day was so beautiful. But I told her that I would not be loving her faithfully for ten years, and that she must take the best of me while she could, and that on such a day as this it would be a shame to lunch with an inarticulate lover; for a man who had loved her faithfully for more than ten years, and wanted only her company over lunch once a week, must be inarticulate, or perhaps a knave whose subtle cunning her innocence had failed to unveil. So in the end we lunched together in Knightsbridge, and then walked slowly through the Park.

The first covering of spring lay on every thing. The trees, so ashamed--or was it coyness?--were they of their bareness in face of all the greenness around them, were doing their best to hurry out that clothing of leaves which, in a few weeks' time, would baffle the rays of the sun which had helped their birth; and there was such a greenness and clearness in the air and on the gra.s.s, and about the flowers which seemed surprised at the new warmth of the world, hesitating as yet to show their full beauty for they were afraid that the dark winter was playing them a trick and would suddenly lurch clumsily upon them again, that the Park has never seemed to me so beautiful as on that spring afternoon when a careless happiness lay about everything.

So far I have not said a word about Shelmerdene, except that she had found a man--or, rather, he had tiresomely found her--to love her faithfully for ten years, and she had so affected him that he thought a weekly lunch or dinner was the limit of his destiny with her. And yet, had he searched himself and raked out the least bit of gumption, he would have found he was tremendously wrong about her--for there were pinnacles to be reached with Shelmerdene unattainable within the material limits of a mere lunch or dinner. She was just such a delightful adventuress as only a well-bred mixture of American and English can sometimes make; such a subtle negation of the morals of Boston or Kensington that she would, in the searching light of the one or the other, have been acclaimed the s.h.i.+ning light of their William Morris drawing-rooms. She drew men with a tentative, all-powerful little finger, and mocked them a little, but never so cruelly that they weren't, from the inarticulate beginning to the inevitable end, deliriously happy to be miserable about her. She was a Princess Casa.s.simma without anarchical affectations; and like her she was almost too good to be true.

So much then, for Shelmerdene; for if to cap it all, I should go on to say that she was beautiful I would be held to have been an infatuated fool. Which, perhaps, I carelessly was, since I can't even now exactly fix upon the colour of her hair, doubting now in memory as I must have done actually in those past days with her, whether it was brown or black or, as sometimes on a sofa under a Liberty-shaded lamp, a silver-tinted blue, so wonderfully deep.... Perhaps destined, in that future when Shelmerdene is at last tired of playing at life, to be the "blue silver"

of the besotted madman to whom she, at the weary end, with but a look back at the long-pa.s.sed procession of _ci-devants_, will thankfully give herself. _Dies irae, dies illa...._

_The London Venture_: III

[Ill.u.s.tration]

III

We sat on chairs in the sun, and after we had been silent a long while, she began to do what women will never cease doing, so wise men say, as long as men say they love them, to define what the love of a man meant to a woman, and to explain the love of a man. She said that that man was wise who had said that love was like religion, and must be done well or not at all, but that she had never yet found in any man sincere love and delicacy, for there was always something coa.r.s.e, some little note which jarred, some movement of the mind and body maladroit, in a man who is shown a woman's love. "When men love and are not loved," she said, "often they kept their grace and pride, and women are proud to be loved by such men--even faithfully for more than ten years; but when men are loved and are confident, then they seem to lose delicacy, to think that love breaks down all barriers between man and woman; that love is a vase of iron, unbreakable, and not, as it is, a vase of the most delicate and brittle pottery, to be broken to pieces by the least touch of a careless hand. They seem to think that the state of love stands at the end of a great striving; they do not realise that it is only the beginning, and that the striving must never cease, for without striving there is no love, but only content. But they do not see that; they insist on spoiling love, breaking the vase with stupid, unconscious hands; and when it breaks they are surprised, and they say that love is a fickle thing and will stand no tests, and that women are the very devil. Always they spoil love; it comes and finds them helpless, puzzling whether to clothe themselves entirely in reserve or whether to be entirely naked in brutality; and generally they compromise, and, physically and mentally, walk about in their s.h.i.+rts."

"As you say that," I said, "you remind me of that woman, Mrs. Millamant, in Congreve's play, 'The Way of the World.' Do you remember that scene between her and Mirabell, when she attaches 'provisos' to her consent to marry him? She says, 'We must be as strange as though we had been married a long time, and as well bred as though we had never been married at all.' And it seems to me that she was right, and that you are right, Shelmerdene. Nowadays there is a reaction against convention, and such people make life unclean. They talk about being 'natural,' and succeed only in being boorish; they think that the opposite of 'natural'

is 'artificial,' but that is absurd, for why was the t.i.tle 'gentleman'

invented if not for the man who could put a presentable gloss on his primitive, 'natural' instincts in polite company? There must always be etiquette in life and in love, and there is no friends.h.i.+p or pa.s.sion which can justify familiarity trying to break down the barriers which hide every man and every woman from the outside world. Men grow mentally limp with their careless way of living; and life is like walking on the Embankment at three o'clock in the morning, when London is very silent: and if you lounge along as your feet take you, your hands deep in your pockets, being 'natural,' you will see very little but the general darkness of the night and the patch of pavement on which your eyes are glued: but if you walk upright, your mind taut and rigid as it always must be except when asleep, then you will see many things, how the river looks strange beneath the stars, the mystery of Battersea Park which might, in the darkness, be an endless forest of distantly murmuring trees, the figure of a policeman by the bridge, a light here and there in the windows of the houses in Cheyne Walk, which might mean birth or death or nothing, but is food for your mind because you are living and interested in all living things. It was probably some wise philosopher, an Epicurean, and not a buffoon, as is supposed, who first uttered that saying which is now become farcical, that 'distance lends enchantment.'

For he did not mean the material distance of yards and furlongs and miles, but the distance of necessary strangeness, of inevitable mystery, and of a rigid mental etiquette, the good manners of the mind. And that is why Henry James was a great man, and with a great propaganda. He was subtle with his propaganda--an ugly word which can be used for other things than the bawling of tiresome men in this Park on Sunday afternoons--for he could do nothing without an almost obvious subtlety; but it is there in all his work, a teaching for all who care to be taught. In the world of Henry James, for he was more fastidious than Meredith or Mr. Hardy and would have nothing to do with this world as it was, but made one of his own, in this world the men and women are not just men and women, with thoughts and doings bluntly and coa.r.s.ely expressed as in real life; but he showed them to be subtle creatures, something higher than clever animals, with different shades of meaning in every word--what fool was it who said that a word spoken must be a word meant!--with barriers of reserve and strangeness between each person; and their conversation is not just a string of words, but a thing of different values, in which the mind of the speaker and the listener is alive and rigid to every current of refined thought which is often unexpressed but understood. I think 'thin' is the right epithet for the minds of James' characters; and the difference between them and ordinary people is that within us there is a sort of sieve between the mind and the mouth, or in whatever way we choose to be articulate, which, unlike ordinary sieves, allows only the coa.r.s.e grains to drop through and be given out, but keeps the subtleties and the refinement to itself; but between the minds and the articulation of James' people there are no sieves, and the inner subtleties and shades are given expression. There is a strangeness, a kind of mental tautness, a never-ceasing etiquette, about them all."

But then I laughed, and when she asked me why I did not go on, I said that I had suddenly realised that I had strayed from the subject, and that whereas she had begun to talk of love I had ended by talking of Henry James. "It is all about the same thing," she said, "for we are both grumbling at that mental limpness which makes people think that they need make no effort, but that life will go on around them just the same. And that is why I think one of the most dreadful sights is a man asleep. No one should see another person asleep; it seems to me the most private thing in the world, and if I were a man and a woman had watched me as I lay asleep, I should want to kill her so that she should not go about and tell people how I had looked as I lay stupidly unconscious of everything around me. Only once I have seen a man asleep, and that was the end of a perfect love affair. I had suddenly gone to see him in his chambers, and when his man showed me into his room I found him lying there on the sofa, with his head thrown back on a cus.h.i.+on, sleeping. His man said that he must be very tired as he had been working all night, and that it would be kind of me not to wake him. I waited in the room for an hour, trying not to look at him but to read a book, but his breathing filled the room and I could not take my eyes away from him; and at the end of an hour I felt that my love had gone from me minute by minute as I had looked at him, and that now I might just as well get up and go away, for I did not care any longer if he was asleep or awake. So I went away, but I do not know if he woke up as the door closed behind me."

"And did you ever tell him why you had ceased to love him?" I asked.

"I couldn't do that," she said, "because if he had not understood me I should have hated him, and I do not like hating people whom I have loved. But now I dine with him from time to time, and I can see that he is still wondering how it was that on Monday I loved him and on Tuesday I didn't."

As we walked through the Park towards the Park Lane gates, it seemed to me wonderful that this day, one among many days, should already be pa.s.sing, irrevocably, and that what we had said and what we had felt as we sat on chairs in the sun would never be repeated, would never come again except perhaps in a different way and with different surprises.

And when I asked her if she felt the happiness of the afternoon, she laughed slightly and said that she liked the Park this spring afternoon.

"It is perfect now," she said, "but when we come here in a month's or two months' time it will be too warm to sit in the sun and talk about love and Henry James, and in the autumn we will sit down for a moment and s.h.i.+ver a little and pity the brown leaves falling, and in the winter we will walk quickly through because it will be too cold; and then in Park Lane you will put me into a taxi and stand by the door with your hat in your hand, and say good-bye. For the seasons will have gone round, and we shall each have given what the other will take, and when I look at you you will be different, and when you look at me you will not see, as you see now, my eyes looking far away over your shoulder, and you will not wonder what it is that I am looking at. For then, as you stand by the door of the taxi and smile your good-bye at me, the end will have come, and there will be nothing to look at in the distance over your shoulders. And next year you will be an 'old friend,' and I shall ring you up and say that I am very sorry I can't lunch and walk in the Park with you that day because an Oxfordish young man has fallen in love with me, and it will be amusing to see what sort of lunch he will order when he is in love.

"But is a rose less beautiful because it is sure to die?" she said.