The London Venture Part 3

"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 G.o.d! 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed 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 c.o.o.n 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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 d.a.m.nable,' 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 wors.h.i.+p it--in actual life my wors.h.i.+pping 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 pa.s.sionately 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 sc.r.a.ppy, 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 Ma.r.s.eilles. 'To Paris?' I said, not understanding. 'Yes, to-night--in two hours,' he said, quickly, shyly. He was embarra.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.l 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?

"At the end of a year I was really in the whirl of the great world again. There were a few kicks left in Shelmerdene yet, I told myself hardly, and Maurice became just a tender memory. I never thought of how he would come back to England soon, as he had said, and what we would do then, for I had so dinned it into myself that he wasn't for me that I had entirely given up the quest of the Blue Bird. He was just a tender memory ... and impressionable me fell in love again. But not as with Maurice--I was top-dog this time. He was the sort of man that didn't count except in that I loved him. He was the servant of my reaction against Maurice, and to serve me well he had to help me wipe out all the castles of sentiment I had built around Maurice. And the most gorgeous castle of all I had built round that little Welsh inn! Something must be done about that, I told myself, but for a long time I was afraid of the ghost of Maurice, which might still haunt the place, and bring him back overpoweringly to me. It was a risk; by going there with some one else I might either succeed in demolis.h.i.+ng Maurice's last castle, or I might tragically have to rebuild all the others, and wors.h.i.+p him again.

"He had continued to write to me, complaining of my silence. And he had somehow become insistent--he missed me, it seemed. He didn't write that he loved me, but he forgot to describe the Nile, and wrote about love as though it were a real and beautiful thing and not a pastime to be wedged in between fis.h.i.+ng and hunting. I wrote to him once again, rather lightly, saying that I had patched up my heart and might never give him a chance to break it again. That was just before I went to demolish the last castle of my love for him. For I did go; one day my young man produced a high-powered car which could go fast enough to prevent one sleeping from boredom, and I said 'Us for Llangollen,' and away we went....

"The divinest thing about that little inn was its miniature dining-room, composed almost entirely of a large bow-window and a long Queen Anne refectory table. There were three tables, of which never more than one was occupied. Maurice and I had sat at the table by the window, and now my reaction and I sat there again; we looked out on to a toy garden sloping down to a brown stream which made much more noise than you could think possible for so narrow a thing. My back was to the door, and I sat facing a large mirror, with the garden and the stream on my right; he sat facing the window, adoring me, the adventure, the stream, and the food. And I was happy too, for now I realised that I had fallen out of love with Maurice, for his ghost didn't haunt the chair beside me, and I could think of him tenderly, without regret. I was happy--until, in the mirror in front of me, I saw the great figure of Maurice, and his face, at the open door. Our eyes met in the mirror, the eyes of statues, waiting.... I don't know what I felt--I wasn't afraid, I know. Perhaps I wasn't even ashamed. I don't know how long he stood there, filling the doorway. Not more than a few seconds, but all the intimacy of six weeks met in our glance in that mirror. At last he took his eyes off mine and looked at the man beside me, who hadn't seen him. I thought his lips twitched, and his eyes became adorably stern, and then the mirror clouded over.... When I could see again the door was closed, and Maurice was gone. The magic mirror was empty of all but my unbelieving eyes, and the profile of the man beside me, who hadn't seen him and never knew that I had lived six weeks while he ate a potato....

"I stayed my week out in Wales, because I always try to do what is expected of me. When I got home, right on the top of a pile of letters--I had given orders for nothing, not even wires, to be sent on to me--was a wire, which had arrived one hour after I had left for Wales. It was from Southampton, and it said: 'Just arrived. Am going straight up to the little palace in Wales because of memories. Will arrive there dinner-time. Shall we dine together by the window?'

"And so, you see, I had won and lost and won again, but how pathetically.... Am I such a bad woman, d'you think?"

_The London Venture_: VIII

[Ill.u.s.tration]

VIII

As I look back now on the past years, I find that the thing that penetrated most into my inner self, shocked me to the heart, and gave me no room and left no desire for any pretence about the will of fate and destiny, such as sometimes consoles grief, was the death of my friend Louis. Unlike most great friends.h.i.+ps, mine with Louis began at school; and those, to whom circ.u.mstances have not allowed friends.h.i.+ps at school, cannot realise the intensity of certain few friends.h.i.+ps which, beginning on a basis of tomfoolery and ragging, as the general relations between schoolboys begin, yet survive them all, and steadily ripen with the years into a maturity of companions.h.i.+p, which has such a quality and n.o.bility of its own that no other relation, not even that of pa.s.sionate love, can ever take its place when it is gone.

I have not happened to mention Louis before in these papers for the reason that he had actually come very little into my life in London. In fact, we retained our intimacy against the aggression of our different lives, which was rather paradoxical for the casual people we believed ourselves to be. (Without a sincere belief in his own casualness the modern youth would be the most self-important a.s.s of all generations.) Our ways of life lead very contrarily; there was nowhere they could rationally touch; he, a soldier; I, a doctor, lawyer, or pedlar, I did not know which. But I had the grace, or if you like, the foolishness, to envy him the definite markings of his career; I envied him his knowledge of the road he wished to tread, and of the almost certainties which lay inevitably along that road.

Later, in those very best of days, I used to talk about him to Shelmerdene. And as I described, she listened and wondered. For, she said, such a man as I described Louis to be, and myself, could have nothing in common. But I told her that it isn't necessary for two people to have anything "in common" but friends.h.i.+p--and as I made that meaningless remark I put on a superior air, and she did not laugh at me.

She continued to wonder during months, and at last she said, "Produce this wretched youth." But I would not produce him, "because Louis has never in his life met or dreamt of any one like you, and he will fall in love with you straight away. And as he is more honest than I am, so he will fall in love with you much more seriously, and that will be very bad for him, because you are the sort of woman that you are. It isn't fair to destroy the illusions of a helpless subaltern in the Rifle Brigade.... No, I will not produce him, Shelmerdene." But of course I did, and of course Louis saw, heard, and succ.u.mbed delightedly, and all through that lunch and for the half-hour after I had to keep a very stern eye on Shelmerdene and take great care not to let her get within a yard of him, else she would have asked him to go and see her next time he was in town, and then there would have been another wild-eyed ghost wandering about the desert places of Mayfair. As for Louis, he beat even his own record for dulness during that lunch. He admired her tremendously and obviously, and too obviously he couldn't understand a beautiful woman with beauty enough to be as dull as she liked, saying witty and amusing things every few seconds, always giving the most trivial remark, the most stereotyped phrase, such a queer twist as would make it seem delightfully new. For ever after he pestered me to "produce" him again, and I made myself rather unpopular by putting him off; and I never did let him see her again. On Shelmerdene's part it was just cussedness to worry me to see him again, for with a disgusted laugh at my "heavy father stunt," she forgot all about him; after that lunch she had found him "rather dull and a dear, and much to be loved by all women over thirty-five. I am not yet old enough to love your Louis," she said. And she retained her surprise at our friends.h.i.+p.

It was, perhaps, rather surprising; surprising not so much that we were friends, but how we ever became friends; for there are many people in this world, who could be great friends with each other if they could but once surmount the first barrier, if they could but _wish_ to surmount that barrier--and between Louis and me there was much more than a simple barrier to surmount. We became friends in spite of ourselves, then; though Louis, as you may believe, had nothing at all to do with the affair; he just sat tight and let things happen, to him, for his was not the nature consciously to defeat an invisible aim, a tyrannical decree.

As one of England's governing cla.s.ses, even at the age of fourteen when I first met him, such a rebellion as that of forcing G.o.d's hand about the smallest trifle would somehow have savoured to him of disloyalty to the "Morning Post" which, together with the Navy, Louis took as representing the British Empire.

I had been at school already one term when Louis came; and so it was at breakfast on the opening day of the winter term that I first noticed his bewildered face, though as we grew to prefects that same face aired so absolute a nonchalance that, together with my rather sophisticated features, we thoroughly deserved the t.i.tle of the _blasted roues_.

However, at that time, we were not prefects, but "new bugs," though Louis was by one term a newer "bug" than myself and my friends, and therefore had to sit at the bottom of the "bug" table and take his food as he found it. I, of course, took no notice of him at all; I maintained a, so to speak, official _hauteur_ about our meal-time relations--one couldn't do anything else, you know, if one wished to keep unimpaired the dignity of one's seniority. I had, in fact, no use for newer "bugs"

than myself; I was quite happy at my own end of the table with the three men (ages fourteen to fourteen-and-a-half) with whom I shared a study.

We made a good and gay study, I remember, for they were three stalwart fellows and I, even at that age not taking my Armenianism very seriously, gave a quite pa.s.sable imitation of an English public-school man.

How, as I looked round at my three friends and said to myself "here are companions for life," how was I to know of the irruption into my life of a bewildered face! I despised that face. It was the face of a newer "bug" than myself. But the wretched man could play soccer, I noticed; his deft work at "inside right" to my "center forward" warmed my heart; and, by the time the term was half over, he had gained a certain distinction for being consistently at the bottom of the lowest form in the school; one rather liked a man for sticking to his convictions like that.

Nevertheless we became silently inimical. He ceased to look bewildered; with an English cunning he had already found that an air of nonchalance pays best. And his sort of "Oh, d'you think so?" air began to irritate me; it was no good doing my man of the world on a man who obviously made a point of not believing what I said. I rather felt in speaking to him as an irritated and fussy foreign amba.s.sador must feel before the well-bred imperturbability of Mr. Balfour; I wasn't then old enough to know I felt like that, but myself and study had reasonable grounds for deciding that "that sloppy-haired new long bug was a conceited young swine," and that he was trading rather too much on being at the bottom of the school.

There was a dark-haired, sallow-faced youth, one Marsden, who had come the same term as we three; he had at first shared our study, but had been fired out for being a cub. And, by intimating to the House-Master that if he was put back in our study, new bugs or no, we wouldn't answer for his mother's knowing him, we had fired him out in such a way that he couldn't ever get back. But he didn't try to get back. He just went into the newest bug's study, and there, when Louis came the next term, made firm and fast friends with him. Marsden disliked me much more than he disliked any one else, as I had been the instigator of his ejection from our study, and so the silent and contemptuous enmity with which Louis eyed me wasn't very strange. Those two made common cause in their indifference to anything we three at the head of the table might say; and soon, things came to such a pa.s.s that we had to put lumps of salt into the potato dish before handing it down to them. And even that didn't seem to have much effect, for one tea-time I distinctly heard a murmur resembling "Armenian Jew" escape from Marsden's lips; that, of course, couldn't be borne, and I couldn't then explain to him that there was no such person as an Armenian Jew for I wasn't myself quite certain about it--all I knew was that I wasn't a Jew, and it wasn't Marsden who was going to call me one in vain. So there and then I upped and threw my pot of jam at his head, striking him neatly just above the right eye; I didn't do it in anger, I didn't know why I did it, though now I know it was done through a base pa.s.sion for notoriety, which I still have, though in a less primitive manner. I certainly got notoriety then, and also six cuts from a very supple cane and a Georgic on which to work off my ardour.

But I gained Louis for a friend. He had, it seemed, admired the deft and una.s.suming way in which I had thrown that pot of jam--he knew even less than I did about that pa.s.sion for notoriety--and when he met me in the pa.s.sage as I came back from my six cuts in the prefects' room, he said, "I say, bad luck," and I suggested that if his friend Marsden's ugly face hadn't got in the way of a perfectly harmless pot of jam I wouldn't have got a licking. Thus, in a three-minute talk, we became friends; but when we each went to our own studies we didn't know we were friends--in fact, I was quite prepared to go on treating him as an enemy until, when we met again, we both seemed to find that we had something to say to each other. And throughout those years of school we had always something to say to each other which we couldn't say quite in the same way to any one else, and that seems to me to be the basis of all friends.h.i.+p.... I don't quite know what happened to Marsden, or how Louis told him that he had decided to discontinue his friends.h.i.+p. I have an idea that Marsden went on disliking me through four years of school, and that if I met him on Piccadilly to-morrow would recognise me only to scowl at me, the man who not only hit him over the eye with a pot of jam, but also deprived him of his best friend.

Louis and I left school together; he on his inevitable road to Sandhurst, and I, with a puckered side glance at Oxford, to Edinburgh University. Even now I don't know why I went to Edinburgh and not to Oxford; I had always intended going to Oxford, my family had always intended that I should go to Oxford, up to the last moment I was actually going to Oxford--when, suddenly, with a bowler hat crammed over my left ear and a look of vicious obstinacy, I decided that I would go to Edinburgh instead.

Of course it was a silly mistake. The only thing I have gained by not going to Oxford is an utter inability to write poetry and a sort of superior contempt for all pale, interesting-looking young men with dark eyes and spiritual hair who are tremendously concerned about the utter worthlessness of Mr. William Watson's poetry. Of course my own superior att.i.tude may be just as unbearable as their anaemic enthusiasm over, say, a newly discovered _rondel_ by the youngest son of the local fishmonger; but I at least do sincerely try to face and appreciate literature boldly, and frankly, and normally, and not self-consciously as they do, attacking literature from anywhere but a sane standpoint, trying to force a breach in any queer spot so that it is unusual and has not been thought of before; and through this original breach will suddenly appear an Oxford face with a queer unhallowed grin of self-conscious cleverness; and all this for a thin book of poems in a yellow cover, called, as like as not, "Golden Oxygen"!

Louis, down at Sandhurst, was being made into a soldier, and I, up at Edinburgh, was on the high road to general f.e.c.klessness. I only stayed there a few months; jumbled months of elementary medicine, political economy, metaphysics, theosophy--I once handed round programs at an Annie Besant lecture at the Usher Hall--and beer, lots of beer. And then, one night, I emptied my last mug, and with another side-glance at Oxford, came down to London; "to take up a literary career" my biographer will no doubt write of me. I may of course have had a "literary career" at the back of my mind, but as it was I slacked outrageously, much to Louis' disgust and envy. I have already written of those months, how I walked in the Green Park, and sat in picture galleries, and was lonely.

That first loneliness was lightened only by the occasional visits to London of Louis. He was by now a subaltern in the Rifle Brigade, with an indefinite but cultured growth somewhere between his nose and upper lip, and a negligent way of wearing mufti, as though to say, "G.o.d, it's good to be back in civilised things again!" They were jolly, sudden evenings, those! London was still careless then. Of an evening, a couple of young men in dress suits with top hats balanced over their eyebrows and eyes full of a _blase_ vacancy, were not as remarkable as they now are. Life has lost its whilom courtesy to a top hat. Red flags and top hats cannot exist side by side; the world is not big enough for both. Ah, thou Bolshevik, thou cla.s.s-beridden shop-steward! When ye die, how can ye say that ye have ever lived if, in your aggressive experiences, you have not known upon your foreheads the elegant weight of a top hat, made especially to suit your Marxian craniums by one Locke, who has an ancient shop at the lower end of St. James's Street and did at one time dictate the headwear of the beaux of White's and Crockford's. I warrant the life of my top hat, made by that same artist to withstand the impact of the fattest woman on earth, against all the battering eloquence of all the orators in all the Albert Halls of all the Red Flag countries.

With it on my head I will finesse any argument whatsoever with you any night of the week. And at the end of the argument, if you are still obstinate, I will cram my blessed top hat on your head and, lo and behold! you are at once a Labour Minister in the Cabinet, and a most respectable man with a most rectangular house in Portman Square!... But I must go back to Louis, who never got further in his study of Labour than an idea that all station-masters were labour leaders because they took tips so impressively.

Those occasional evenings were very good. I put away from myself writing and books--Louis hadn't really ever read anything but Kipling, "Ole-Luk-Oie" and "The Riddle of the Sands"-and I temporarily forgot Shelmerdene, and we dined right royally. I don't know what we talked about, perhaps we talked of nothing at all; but we talked all the time, and we laughed a great deal, and we still had the good old "_blasted roue_" touch about us. We were very, very old indeed, so old that we decided that the first act of no play or revue in the world could compensate one for a hurried dinner; and we were old enough to know that a confidential manner to _maitres d'hotels_ is a thing to be cultivated, else a chicken is apt to be wizened and the sweet an unconscionable long time in coming. After dinner, a show, and then perhaps a night club, "to teach those gals how to dance."

We founded a Club for Good Mannered People. I, as the founder, was the president of the club, and Louis the vice-president; there were no members because we unanimously black-balled every one whom, in a moment of weakness, one or other of us might propose. We decided, in the end, that the Club could never have any members except the president and vice-president, simply because the men of our own generation were the worst mannered crew G.o.d ever put within lounging distance of a drawing-room.... There must be something wrong, we said, in a world where public-school men could be recognised by the muddy footprints they left on other people's carpets. So it was obviously left to us to supply the deficiency of our generation, both as regards manners and everything else. We made a cult of good manners; Louis took to them as a cult where he had never taken to them as a necessity, and the happiest moments of his life were when he could work it off on to some helpless woman who had dropped an umbrella or a handkerchief. The Club, we decided, must never come to an end, it must go on being a Club until one or other of us should die ... and now the Club is no more, for suddenly a spring gave way, the world gave a lurch towards h.e.l.l, and Louis stopped playing at soldiers to go away and be a real soldier, to die in his first attack with a bullet in his chest....