THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 Cr 
 
 /
 
 The London Venture 
 
 MICHAEL ARLEN
 
 <By MICHAEL ARLEN 
 
 These Charming People 
 
 The Qreen Hat 
 
 "Piracy" 
 
 The London Venture 
 
 The Romantic Lady
 
 The 
 London Venture 
 
 by 
 
 Michael Arlen 
 
 With Drawings by 
 MICHEL SEVIER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
 
 Copyright, J 920, 
 By George H. Doran Comfany 
 
 THE LONDON VENTURE 
 
 B 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 Tl 
 
 6<- I 
 
 To 
 
 THE SISTER 
 
 of 
 
 SHELMERDENE
 
 APOLOGIA PRO NOMINE MEO 
 
 Out of consideration (in part) to such 
 readers as may read this book I have assumed 
 a name by which they may refer to me (if 
 ever he or she may wish to do so kindly) in 
 the same manner at least twice running — a 
 feat of pronunciation which few of my 
 English acquaintances have performed with 
 my natal name. But there is also another 
 reason, considerate of the author. I have 
 been told that there are writers whose works 
 would have been famous if only their names 
 could have been familiarly pronounced — 
 Polish and Russian writers for the most part, 
 I gather. Since I had already taken every 
 other precaution but this to deserve their 
 more fortunate fate, in changing my name 
 I have, I hope, robbed my readers of their 
 last excuse for my obscurity. 
 
 Dikran Kouyoumdjian. 
 "Michael Arlen." 
 
 Vll
 
 The London Venture: I
 
 THE 
 LONDON VENTURE 
 
 MY watch has needed winding only 
 twice since I left London, and al- 
 ready, as I sit here in the strange library of 
 a strange house, whose only purpose in hav- 
 ing a library seems to be to keep visitors like 
 myself quiet and out of harm's way, I find 
 myself looking back to those past months in 
 which I was for ever complaining of the 
 necessity that kept me in London. How I 
 would deliver myself to a congenial friend 
 about what men are pleased to call "the 
 artificial necessity of living" — a cocktail, 
 that courtesan of drinks, lent some artificial- 
 ity ! 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 
 
 11
 
 12 The London Venture 
 
 would mutter to myself of streets and 
 theatres full of men and women and ugli- 
 ness ! 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 col- 
 oured cinema posters, whose duty it is to 
 attract and insult with the crude portrayal 
 of the indecent passions of tiresome people. 
 If there be a studio in purgatory for indis- 
 creet aesthetics, Rhadamanthus could do no 
 better than paper its walls with illustrations 
 of "The Blindness of Love," or "Is Love 
 Lust 1 ?" 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 London Venture 13 
 
 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 w r ould 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 con- 
 firmed my gladness, when I felt suddenly as 
 though some little thing was being born in- 
 side 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 Lon- 
 don 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
 
 14 The London Venture 
 
 will be! For little do I care whether this 
 mood be as the last, so they both fill up the 
 present moment with fitting thoughts, and 
 pain, and pleasure ! 
 
 Now, I was already thinking of how I 
 would return to London next year in the 
 spring. What I would do then, the things I 
 would write, the men I would talk to, and 
 the women I would lunch with, so filled my 
 mind, and pleasantly whirled my thoughts 
 from this to that, that Rugby was long passed 
 before even I had come to think of the 
 pleasures that London in early summer has 
 in store for all who care to take. When the 
 days were growing long, it would be pleasant 
 to take a table by the windows of the Savoy, 
 and dine there with some woman with whom 
 it would be no effort to talk or be silent. 
 
 Such a woman at once comes to my mind, 
 with dark hair and grey-blue eyes, the cor- 
 ners of whose mouth I am continually watch- 
 ing because it is only there I find the mean- 
 ing 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
 
 The London Venture 15 
 
 to you ; but you do not know her, and I do — 
 at least, I know that much of her. And with 
 her it seems to me that I could dine only at 
 that table by the windows where I could turn 
 from her eyes to the slow-moving English 
 river, and the specks of men and trams, which 
 are all that the leaves of trees will let me see 
 of the Embankment. Perhaps I would tell 
 her of that novel which I once began to 
 write, but could never finish nor have any 
 heart to try again; for it began just here at 
 this table where we are now sitting, but the 
 man was alone, and if he ever lived outside 
 my halting pages and had the finishing of 
 my novel, he would put himself here again 
 at the end, with you sitting in front of him. 
 For that is the whole purpose of the novel, 
 which I never realised till this moment, that 
 once a young man was sitting here alone and 
 wondering why that should be and what he 
 should do, and in the end he was sitting here 
 again with a woman for whom his passion 
 had died, but whose eyes still made him talk 
 so that he could not see the slow darkening 
 of the river, or hear the emptying of the 
 restaurant, until at last she laughed, and he
 
 16 The London Venture 
 
 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 un- 
 finished 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 Lon- 
 don. 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 en- 
 joyed the. aimless wandering about the 
 streets, how he liked to watch the faces of 
 the people as they passed, laughing, or talk- 
 ing, 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
 
 The London Venture 17 
 
 young Englishman — how pleasant it is to 
 write of "young Englishmen," as though one 
 were really a foreigner! — the circumstances 
 are a little different, and he need never taste 
 that first absolute loneliness, which, as the 
 weeks go by and the words are not spoken, 
 seems to open out a vista of solitude for all 
 the days of life; nor need he be conscious 
 that it is on himself — how, while it ex- 
 aggerates, 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 Ar- 
 menian, who soon realises that his nationality 
 is considered as something of a faux pas, 
 there are none of these things, and he is
 
 18 The London Venture 
 
 entirely lost in the wilderness, for there is 
 no solid background to his existence in an- 
 other'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 para- 
 sites; 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 dis- 
 cussion, 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
 
 The London Venture 19 
 
 almost entirely perverted my natural ami- 
 ability into a morbid distate for living 
 (which still breaks out at odd moments, and 
 has branded me among many people as a 
 depressing and damnably superior young 
 person) ; through this maze of smoke and talk 
 I can only still see the occasional personality 
 of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, as his clear, grey 
 eyes — there is no equivalent to spirituel in 
 English — flashed from face to face, smiling 
 sometimes, often but a vehicle for those bit- 
 ter thoughts (and thoughts are so often con- 
 clusions with men of arrogant genius like 
 Lawrence) which find such strange and 
 emphatic expression in his books. I would 
 need the pen of a De Quincey to describe my 
 impression of that man, and I am candid 
 enough to admit that I lack the ability, rather 
 than the malice, which caused the little 
 opium-eater to be so justly hated by such a 
 man as Bob Southey. There is a bitterness 
 which can find no expression, is inarticulate, 
 and from that we turn away as from a very 
 pitiful thing; and there is that bitterness 
 which is as clear-cut as a diamond, shining 
 with definitions, hardened with the use of
 
 20 The London Venture 
 
 a subtle reasoning which is impenetrable but 
 penetrating, "the outcome of a fecund 
 imagination," as Lawrence himself might de- 
 scribe it; a bitterness so concisely and philo- 
 sophically articulate, that, under the guise of 
 "truth," it will penetrate into the receptive 
 mind, and leave there some indelible impres- 
 sions 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 con- 
 scious that they are pearls flung before swine. 
 He will pile them one on top of the other, 
 as though to impregnate each with his own 
 egotism, to describe the sexual passions of 
 this man or that woman, words so full of his 
 meaning, so pregnant with his passions, that 
 at the end of such a page you feel that a 
 much greater and more human Ruskin is 
 hurling his dogmas at your teeth, that there 
 is nothing you can say or think outside that 
 pile of feeling which is massed before you, 
 that you must accept and swallow without
 
 The London Venture 21 
 
 cavil and without chewing. With what re- 
 lief one turns over a page and finds that here 
 is no touch of the flesh, but that Mr. Law- 
 rence is writing of earth ! Let him sink into 
 earth as deep as he may, he can find and 
 show there more beauty and more truth than 
 in all his arrogant and passionate fumblings 
 in the mire of sex, in all his bitter striving 
 after that, so to speak, sexual millennium, 
 that ultimate psychology of the body and 
 mind, which seems so to obsess him that in 
 his writings he has buried his mind, as, in 
 his own unpleasant phrase, a lover buried 
 his head, in the "terrible softness of a 
 woman's belly." Who has not read "Sons 
 and Lovers," and laid it down as the work of 
 a strange and great man, of the company of 
 Coleridge, Stendhal, and Balzac 4 ? 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 sweet- 
 ness," which Pater so admiringly found in 
 Blake and Hugo, cannot be found in Mr. 
 D. H. Lawrence; there is a mass of pas- 
 sionate strength, that of an angry man strain-
 
 22 The London Venture 
 
 ing with his nerves because he despises his 
 hands ; there is a gentleness in his writing of 
 children which could never be capable of 
 such melodrama as that in Mr. Hardy's 
 "Jude the Obscure," but in his men and 
 women, in their day and night, there is no 
 drop of sweetness. And I do not think he 
 wishes it otherwise. 
 
 As the train flew through the Derbyshire 
 countryside, whose hillsides and vales, cov- 
 ered with the brilliant sheen of the autumn 
 sun, met the eye pleasantly with a rising and 
 falling of pale yellowish green, with here 
 and there a dark green patch of woodland, 
 and made me want to stop the hurrying 
 train and breathe the air of the place, my 
 thoughts slipped back to the spring and the 
 summer just before the war; and, with my 
 eyes on the quickly passing sunshine on the 
 low hills, I found that, after all, those last 
 few months of peace had passed, perhaps, 
 too lightly, too carelessly; but it was pleasant 
 to think back to those days when lunches and 
 dinners and week-ends took up so much of 
 one's time. I was glad now that I had not 
 spent the three summer months in Yorkshire
 
 The London Venture 23 
 
 on the moors, where I should have been un- 
 comfortable; and had to be for ever sending 
 postcards to Hatchard's to post me this or 
 that book, which would come when my mood 
 for it had passed. 
 
 And how dreadful it is to want to read 
 suddenly "Love in the Valley," and have to 
 be content with Tennyson, to long for a 
 chapter of DostoiefTsky, 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 her- 
 self into a rock, which still stands there cov- 
 ered with the triumphant script of the 
 Assyrians.
 
 The London Venture: II
 
 II 
 
 ONCE (in those far-off peaceful days 
 when men still had enough grammati- 
 cal 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 after- 
 noon, 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 
 
 27
 
 28 The London Venture 
 
 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 let- 
 ters 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 talk- 
 ing 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 London Venture 29 
 
 "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 indiscre- 
 tion is the better part of literature, or whether 
 Mr. Chesterton or vegetarianism has had the 
 greatest effect on Mr. Shaw's religion; but 
 then, after all this talk, it turns out that 
 they read "The Times Literary Supplement" 
 every week, and think Epictetus nothing to 
 Mr. Clutton-Brock, or they are steeped in 
 Mr. Clement Shorter's weekly criticism en 
 deshabille in the "Illustrated London News." 
 At last I could stand my depression no 
 longer, and late one night, after a day in 
 which I had spoken to no one but a little 
 old woman who said that she wasn't a beg- 
 gar but that God blessed the charitable, I 
 sat down and wrote a long, conceited letter 
 to Shelmerdene; for to her I can write 
 whether I am gay or depressed, and be sure 
 that she will not be impatient with me. I 
 told her how I had a great fund of ambition,
 
 30 The London Venture 
 
 but had it not in me to satisfy a tenth part 
 of it; for that is in the character of all my 
 people, they promise much greater things in 
 their youth than they can fulfil in their 
 mature age. From twenty onwards they are 
 continually growing stale, and bitter with 
 their staleness; the little enthusiasm of their 
 youth will not stretch through their whole 
 life, but will flicker out shamefully with the 
 conceit of their own precocity, and in trying 
 to fly when other people are just learning to 
 walk ; and as the years pass on and youth be- 
 comes regret, the son of Haik, the faded off- 
 spring of a faded nation whose only call to 
 exist is because it has lived so long and has 
 memories of the sacking of Nineveh and 
 Carchemish, is left without the impetus of 
 development/ with an ambition which is 
 articulate only in bitterness; while the hardy 
 Northerner, descendant of barbarian Druid 
 worshippers whose nakedness was rumoured 
 with horror in the courts and pleasure gar- 
 dens 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
 
 The London Venture 31 
 
 thought that England had given me at least 
 some of her continually growing enthusiasm, 
 that I who had thought I would not, like so 
 many of my countrymen, be too soon stranded 
 on "the ultimate islands" of Oriental decay, 
 was even now in the stage between the dying 
 of enthusiasm and its realisation; for the 
 first impetus of my youthful conceits was 
 vanishing, and there looked to be nothing 
 left to them but an "experience" and a "les- 
 son 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 toi 
 something which should have no end; a fall- 
 ing 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
 
 32 The London Venture 
 
 was the wisest of the brothers, and played 
 upon an oaten flute, which is called a feadan; 
 and men were afraid of the cold, white notes 
 of his barbaric runes, as he played his feadan 
 from rock to rock and on the seashore, but 
 most of all they feared, the playing of the 
 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, Manus MacCodrum, 
 down into the sea, and as he battled madly 
 in the water, and the blood gushed out of 
 his body as the teeth of seals tore the life 
 out of him, he heard from far away the cold, 
 white notes of the 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 

 
 The London Venture 33 
 
 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 shivering 
 white ice of sanity, which tells him a dif- 
 ferent 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 Manus MacCodrum, when he 
 walked into the sea from Cornwall. Charles 
 
 *
 
 34 The London Venture 
 
 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, Shel- 
 merdene, 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 gar- 
 goyles 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 ad- 
 mired your imp of onyx stone very much, 
 telling you that I loved its ravenous mouth 
 and reptile claws, because they looked so 
 helplessly lustful after something unattain- 
 able; 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 
 
 #
 
 The London Venture 35 
 
 because it would bring me luck. For a sec- 
 ond 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 
 lusted after something utterly unattainable. 
 But the second passed, 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-devant s 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 sunshine 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
 
 36 The London Venture 
 
 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 hefore 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 goddess. 
 
 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 inarticu-
 
 The London Venture 37 
 
 late 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 grass, 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.
 
 38 The London Venture 
 
 So far I have not said a word about Shel- 
 merdene, 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 Bos- 
 ton or Kensington that she would, in the 
 searching light of the one or the other, have 
 been acclaimed the shining 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 in- 
 articulate beginning to the inevitable end,/ 
 deliriously happy to be miserable about her. 
 She was a Princess Casassimma without
 
 The London Venture 39 
 
 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 care- 
 lessly 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-passed procession of ci- 
 devants, will thankfully give herself. Dies 
 irtz. dies ilia. . . .
 
 The London Venture: III
 
 Ill 
 
 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 some- 
 thing coarse, some little note which jarred, 
 some movement of the mind and body mal- 
 adroit, 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 con- 
 fident, then they seem to lose delicacy, to 
 think that love breaks down all barriers be- 
 tween man and woman; that love is a vase 
 
 43
 
 44 The London Venture 
 
 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 men- 
 tally, walk about in their shirts." 
 
 "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
 
 The London Venture 45 
 
 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 title 'gentleman' invented 
 if not for the man who could put a present- 
 able gloss on his primitive, 'natural' instincts 
 in polite company? There must always be 
 etiquette in life and in love, and there is no 
 friendship or passion 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
 
 46 The London Venture 
 
 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 ex- 
 cept 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 buf- 
 foon, 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 neces- 
 sary strangeness, of inevitable mystery, and 
 of a rigid mental etiquette, the good man- 
 ners of the mind. And that is why Henry 
 James was a great man, and with a great 
 propaganda. He was subtle with his propa- 
 ganda — an ugly word which can be used for
 
 The London Venture 47 
 
 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 coarsely 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 strange- 
 ness between each person; and their conver- 
 sation 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 differ-
 
 48 The London Venture 
 
 ence 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 coarse 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
 
 The London Venture 49 
 
 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 
 cushion, 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."
 
 50 The London Venture 
 
 "And did you ever tell him why you had 
 ceased to love him 1 ?" 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 Mon- 
 day I loved him and on Tuesday I didn't." 
 
 As we walked through the Park towards 
 the Park Lane gates, it seemed to me won- 
 derful that this day, one among many days, 
 should already be passing, 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 shiver a little and pity
 
 The London Venture 51 
 
 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. 
 
 But the winter she spoke of was not of
 
 52 The London Venture 
 
 the seasons, for it rushed incontinently in 
 upon us between the summer and the au- 
 tumn, and I, too, was delicately added to 
 the sedate statuary of Shelmerdene's "old 
 friends. . . ." 
 
 And now I am in this strange library 
 whose rows of books stare so unfamiliarly 
 at me. The table at which I write is by the 
 big French windows, and I must be careful 
 to keep my elbows from sprawling as they 
 would, for everything is covered with dust, 
 and if I were fussy and wiped it away I 
 should raise a great cloud of it around my 
 head. . . . All is quiet and leisurely this 
 morning. Outside there is no sun or mild- 
 ness to make me restless and self-conscious 
 about my laziness ; it is one of those days on 
 which one need not think of doing anything 
 which will be "good for one," and until 
 about tea-time the outside world will be 
 better to look at than to breathe. For the 
 windows show me a very dark, wet-laden 
 garden, and the steady rain falling among 
 the last leaves of the trees and their myriad 
 dead comrades on the grass and gravel makes 
 that "swish" which comes so coolly and
 
 The London Venture 53 
 
 pleasantly to ears which need not be wet 
 with it. But at about five o'clock, if the 
 rain has stopped by then, I shall go out and 
 walk about the garden for an hour or so; I 
 shall walk to the top of the Divvil Mound, 
 which lies above half the county to the west 
 and, on a fine day, gives your eyes a rugged 
 length of the distant Cheviots, and there I 
 shall look up to the sky and draw in long 
 draughts of the fresh rain-scented air, and 
 feel that I shall never be ill again in all my 
 life; and as I walk back under the trees the 
 wet will drip on to me and I shall splash 
 myself here and there; but I shall not swear, 
 for my clothes are done for the day, and 
 when I get in I shall have a bath and change, 
 and feel all new and clean for whatever the 
 evening may bring. 
 
 Beside me now is an envelope with an 
 American stamp, and the vaguely woebe- 
 gone look which readdressed envelopes have; 
 for it followed me here some ten days ago 
 from London, reaching me the same morning 
 that I sat down to write this (for it has 
 taken me more than a week of long mornings 
 to write these few thousand words) which
 
 54 The London Venture 
 
 was at first to have been an essay on London, 
 but seems now to have fallen into the state 
 of a personal confession. Many times I 
 have taken out this letter and re-read it, for 
 it is a strange letter, such a one as a man 
 may receive only once in his life. This let- 
 ter needs no answer, for it is dead like the 
 person who sent it; and that the sender 
 should not now care if I read it or not gives 
 me a queer feeling of triviality; for in her 
 letter she asks me to write back, not know- 
 ing then that a letter from a dead person is 
 the only sort one need not answer without 
 blame or reproach. 
 
 The day has long passed when, if you 
 felt inclined, you could moralise on death 
 and the frailty of human life to your heart's 
 content and be sure of a hearing. I am 
 sorry that the commonplaces on death find 
 now only impatient readers, for they make 
 pleasant reading in the pioneer essayists 
 from poor Overbury to Steele; for death, 
 with all its embroideries and trappings of 
 destiny and Nemesis, is a pretty way of 
 exercising that philosophy which no one is 
 without. I envy the courage of the man who
 
 The London Venture 55 
 
 could now write an essay "On Death" as 
 Bacon did once, laying down the law of it 
 with no hint of an apology for the monotony 
 of his subject; but there is now no essayist 
 or philosopher with the calm and aloof assur- 
 ance and arrogance of a Bacon, that you 
 might see, after the last written words on 
 the most trivial theme, this last seal, as 
 though he were God, "Thus thought Francis 
 Bacon." But of death there is nothing 
 trivial and pleasant left to be said, and as 
 a subject it has grown monotonous, except 
 for the inevitable slayer and the slain, and 
 that prevalent instinct for fair play ("the 
 essential quality of the looker-on") which 
 interests itself in the manner of the slaying. 
 But this letter has seemed strange to me 
 because, perhaps, I shall never again receive 
 a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when 
 writing it, dreamt of all material things but 
 death. Were I Oscar Wilde I might wonder 
 now if English-women who die in America 
 come back to London; for there is much of 
 London in the letter: "I should like to be 
 in London to-day — Bloomsbury London, 
 Mayfair London, Chelsea London, London
 
 56 The London Venture 
 
 of the small restaurants and large draughts 
 of wine, London of the intellectual half- 
 lights, drone of flippant phrases and racy 
 epigrams, with a thin fog outside; London 
 of a resigned good humour, of modulated 
 debauch moving like her traffic, strips of 
 colour through dusk, and drab, optimistic, 
 noisy solitude, tranquillity of incessant 
 sound: autumn lamplight, busy park, sheep, 
 men, women, prostitutes: doors slamming, 
 people coming in and sitting by the fire, 
 more cigarettes, cakes, shops, myriads of 
 people. . . ." 
 
 But I would not like to be in London 
 this month of November.
 
 The London Venture: IV 

 
 IV 
 
 BUT there was once a month of Novem- 
 ber, about which I could not so 
 grandly say that I would not like to spend 
 it in London ; for something happened which 
 threw me in a great hurly-burly of change 
 into an uncomfortable little flat in Monday 
 Road, which is in South Kensington, but 
 for all the life and gaiety there is in it might 
 just as well be in a scrubby corner of the 
 Sahara on a dusty day. My father had died 
 suddenly, and what little question there was 
 of my ever going into business now dropped 
 away, so I had to make at least a pretence 
 of earning my living, or, rather, of making 
 a career for myself. I was very definite 
 about this, that I must do something, be 
 something; for I had learnt this much of the 
 world, that there is no room in it for casual 
 comers, that a man must have a background 
 (any background will do, but the more 
 
 individual the better) ; that there is no room 
 
 59
 
 60 The London Venture 
 
 in any part soever of the social scale for a 
 man who is just nothing at all ; and as I have 
 never seriously contemplated living exclu- 
 sively in the company of landladies and their 
 friends, I saw that I must put my back into 
 it and cease being a very insignificant rentier. 
 I couldn't bear the idea of going through 
 life as just a complacent Armenian in a 
 world where millions and millions of others 
 were trying honestly and otherwise to climb 
 up the greasy pole of respectable attainment. 
 But I cannot resist saying what I think of 
 Monday Road, though I am sure I can do it 
 no harm, because better men than I must 
 have hated it, and more virulently. Mon- 
 day Road, like all the other roads which sink 
 their mutual differences into the so dreary 
 Fulham Road, consists of large, equal-faced 
 houses stuck together in two opposite rows 
 which are separated by about fifteen yards or 
 so of second-hand Tarmac; a road like an- 
 other, you will mildly say, but you cannot 
 possibly realise its dismal grimness if you 
 have not lived there. The people who live 
 in the angular-faced houses are artists who 
 believe in art for art's sake — else they
 
 The London Venture 61 
 
 wouldn't be forced to live in the dismalest 
 street in the world — amateur intellectuals 
 like myself, and various sorts of women. 
 The tribe of organ-grinders have a great 
 weakness for Monday Road, probably be- 
 cause some tactless ass has stuck up a notice 
 there that "Barrel-organs are prohibited," 
 which is a silly thing to say if you can't 
 enforce it. Altogether it is the sort of road 
 in which a "spinster lady" might at any 
 moment lock her door, close her windows, 
 turn on the gas, and read a novel to death. 
 A woman in the fiat next to mine did that a 
 week after I arrived, and I have never viewed 
 death more sympathetically. 
 
 When men grow old they are apt to dis- 
 cover pleasant memories attached even to 
 the worst periods, as they thought them at 
 the time, of their lives. I am not very old 
 as yet, but looking back calmly on the eigh- 
 teen months I spent in South Kensington, I 
 can find here and there, through an exagger- 
 ated cloud of depression and wretchedness, 
 a pleasant memory smiling reprovingly at 
 me; as though, perhaps, I should not be 
 treacherous to the good hours God or my
 
 62 The London Venture 
 
 luck had given me. . . . And there was one 
 moment of them all, when, in the first dark- 
 ness of an early autumn night, a dim slight 
 figure stood mysteriously on my doorstep, 
 and I blinked childishly at it because I did 
 not know who the figure was nor how it had 
 come there — if indeed it had come at all, 
 and I had not dreamed the ring of the bell 
 which had startled me out of my book. Or, 
 perhaps, she had made a mistake, hadn't 
 come for me at all. . . . 
 
 But when she spoke, asking for me, I 
 began to remember her, but only her voice, 
 for I could not see her face which was hid- 
 den in the high fur collar of an evening 
 cloak. She looked so mysterious that I 
 didn't want to remember where I had seen 
 her. 
 
 "I simply can't bear it," she said nerv- 
 ously, "if you don't remember me. I'll go 
 away." And she turned her head quickly 
 to the gates where there stood the thick dark 
 shape of a taxi which I had somehow not 
 seen before, else I would have known for 
 certain that she was not a fairy, a Lilith 
 fairy, but just a woman; a nice woman who
 
 The London Venture 63 
 
 takes life at a venture, I decided, and said 
 abruptly: "Don't go." 
 
 When we were upstairs in my sitting- 
 room and I could see her by the light of eight 
 candles, I remembered her perfectly well, 
 though I had only seen her once before. We 
 had met at some tiresome bridge party six 
 months before, but just incidentally, and 
 without enough interest on either side to 
 carry the conversation beyond the tepid 
 limits of our surroundings. And as I had 
 never once thought of her since I had shaken 
 myself free of them, I couldn't imagine how 
 on earth she had known my address or even 
 remembered my name, which she didn't dare 
 try to pronounce, she had told me as we 
 went up the stairs. 
 
 She said that she, too, had never thought 
 about me at all since then, "until to-night 
 when I was playing bridge in the same room 
 with the same people, except that you were 
 not there — and I remembered you only sud- 
 denly, as something missing from the room. 
 I didn't remember you because of anything 
 you said, but because you had been the worst 
 bridge player in the room, and had the most
 
 64 The London Venture 
 
 unscrupulous brown eyes that ever advised 
 a flapper to inhale her cigarette smoke, as 
 it was no use her smoking if she didn't. And 
 thinking about you among those people who 
 seemed more dreary than ever to-night, I had 
 a silly homesick feeling about you as though 
 we were comrades in distress, whereas I 
 didn't even know your name properly and 
 never shall if you don't somehow make it a 
 presentable one. 
 
 "So I turned the conversation to Ar- 
 menians in general, which is an easy thing 
 to do, because you have only to murmur the 
 word 'massacre' and the connection is 
 obvious, isn't it? Of course that sent that 
 dear old snob, Mrs. , off like mad, say- 
 ing what bad luck it was for you being an 
 Armenian, because you could so nicely have 
 been anything else, and even a Montenegrin 
 would have been a better thing to be; how 
 surprised she had been when she met you, 
 she told us, for she had always had a vague 
 idea that Armenians were funny little old 
 men with long hooked noses and greasy black 
 hair, who hawked carpets about on their
 
 The London Venture 65 
 
 backs, and invariably cheated people, even 
 Jews and Greeks . . . 
 
 "But you are quite English and civilised 
 really, aren't you 1 ? I mean you don't think 
 that, just because I managed to wrangle out 
 your address and came here on impulse, I 
 want to stay with you or anything like that, 
 do you?" 
 
 As she said that, I suddenly thought of 
 Lord Dusiote's gallant villainy in Meredith's 
 poem, and I told her quickly how a whole 
 Court had been lovesick for a young prin- 
 cess, but Lord Dusiote had laughed, heart- 
 free, and said: 
 
 "I prize her no more than a fling of the dice, 
 But oh, shame to my manhood, a lady of ice, 
 We master her by craft !" 
 
 "But I seem to remember that my Lord 
 Dusiote came to a bad end," she laughed at 
 me. 
 
 "Not so bad an end — it must have been 
 worth it. And at least he died for a mis- 
 take, which is better than living on one:
 
 66 The London Venture 
 
 " 'All cloaked and masked, with naked blades, 
 That flashed of a judgment done, 
 The lords of the Court, from the palace-door, 
 Came issuing forth, bearers four, 
 And flat on their shoulders one.' " 
 
 But Lord Dusiote's gallant death left her 
 quite cold, for she was suddenly by the 
 bookcase, running caressing fingers over a 
 binding here and there. 
 
 "What perfectly divine books you have! 
 I shall read them all, and give up Ethel M. 
 Dell for good — but you are probably one 
 of those stuffy people who 'take care' of 
 their books and never lend them to any one 
 because they are first editions or some such 
 rubbish." 
 
 "You can have them all," I said, "and 
 you can turn up the corner of every page if 
 you like, and you can spill tea on every cover 
 or you can use them as table props, because 
 all these books from Chaucer to Pater are 
 absolute nonsense at this moment, for in 
 not one of them is there anything about a 
 dark-haired young woman with blue eyes 
 and a tentative mouth, and the indolent 
 caress of a Latin ancestress somewhere in her
 
 The London Venture 67 
 
 voice, standing on a doorstep in a dingy 
 road, calling on a man who might quite 
 easily be a murderer, for all you know." 
 
 But enough of that, for the situation of 
 a young man and a young woman in a third- 
 floor flat miles away from anywhere that 
 mattered, at eleven o'clock on such a warm 
 autumn night as makes all things seem un- 
 real and beautiful, is a situation with a beard 
 on it, so to speak. 
 
 When I first knew Phyllis, though al- 
 ways candid, she was inclined to be rather 
 "county," the sort of woman "whose people 
 are all Service people, you know"; she lived 
 with her mother, near Chester Square, who 
 at first disliked me because I was not in the 
 Brigade of Guards, but later grew quite 
 pleasantly used to me since I, unlike the 
 Brigade of Guards, it seems, did at least 
 acknowledge my habitual presence in her 
 house by emptying Solomon's glory into her 
 flower vases; and if there's a better reason 
 than gratitude for getting into debt, tell 
 it to me, please. 
 
 But Phyllis, like many another good 
 woman of these Liberal times, turned her
 
 68 The London Venture 
 
 bored back on "county," and only remem- 
 bered what was "done" the better not to do 
 it; fought for, and won a latchkey; asserted 
 her right to come home at night as late as 
 she pleased, and how she pleased — for she 
 had come home from a dance one night on 
 a benevolent motor lorry, which she had 
 begged to pick her up on Piccadilly in pity 
 for her "tired bones," and which, in cum- 
 brously dropping her at mother's door, woke 
 up the whole street. And I can so well 
 imagine Phyllis, as she fitted in her latchkey, 
 murmuring, languidly, but without much 
 conviction, "What fun women have ..." 
 
 But, in the reaction of her type against 
 the preceding age of Victoria, she went to the 
 other extreme; -saw life too much through 
 the medium of a couple of absinthe cock- 
 tails before each meal, and sex too much as 
 though it were entirely a joke, which it 
 isn't . . . quite. She cut her hair short, 
 and took to saying "damn" more often than 
 was strictly necessary. In fact, she would 
 have been quite unbearable if she hadn't 
 been pretty, which she delightfully was. 
 And, unlike her more careless sisters of
 
 The London Venture 69 
 
 Chelsea, Hampstead, and Golders' Green, 
 she did not make the terrible mistake of 
 dressing all anyhow, or make a point of be- 
 ing able to "put up with anything"; such 
 as, sleeping on studio floors after a party, in 
 such a way as to collect the maximum 
 amount of candle grease and spilled drink 
 on her skirts, and wearing men's discarded 
 felt hats, cut as no decent man would be seen 
 alive wearing one, and Roger Fry sort of 
 blouses which don't quite make two ends 
 meet at the back, and carrying queer hand- 
 bags made, perhaps, out of the sole of a Red 
 Indian's threadbare moccasin . . . Bohe- 
 mians indeed, but without so much as a "Bo" 
 anywhere about them! 
 
 They can "stand anything," as they have 
 let it be generally known. But, by dressing 
 like freaks and by being able to stand any- 
 thing, they have detracted considerably from 
 their attraction for men; for freaks are well 
 enough in freak-land but look rather silly in 
 the world as it is — which is the world that 
 matters, after all; and what the devil is the 
 good of being polite and making a fuss of a 
 woman if she tells you repeatedly that she
 
 70 The London Venture 
 
 can "stand anything," and much prefers the 
 feeling of independence fostered by lighting 
 cigarettes with her own matches, and opening 
 doors with her own so unmanicured fingers'? 
 
 I suddenly realise at this very moment of 
 writing why those months in South Ken- 
 sington seemed so overpoweringly dismal, 
 and that even now it is only time which lends 
 a real pleasure to the memory of the tall, 
 dim figure (Mr. Charles Garvice would 
 have called her "sylph-like." I wish I were 
 Mr. Garvice) which stood on my doorstep 
 on an autumn night, and so mysteriously 
 asked for me. For that beginning had a 
 dreary end, as indeed all endings are dreary 
 if the silken cord is not swiftly and sharply 
 cut, thus leaving a neat and wonderful sur- 
 prise, instead of the long-drawn ending of 
 frayed edges and worn-out emotions which 
 drive quite nice young men into a premature 
 cynicism of dotage. 
 
 For we very soon tired of each other, and 
 began to slip away into our different lives 
 with a great deal of talk about our "won- 
 derful friendship"; though we both of us 
 knew very well that there is nothing left to
 
 The London Venture 71 
 
 eat in an empty oyster, and nothing to talk 
 about on a desert island except how deserted 
 it is, and nothing to look forward to when 
 you have too quickly reached Ultima Thule 
 but to get as quickly back again and examine 
 your bruises — but he is a coward who hasn't 
 enough kick left in him to begin again and 
 repeat his mistake, for though two wrongs 
 may not make a right, three or four mistakes 
 of this sort do certainly make a man. . . . 
 So we both set out to get back again, but 
 not as quickly as possible, because Phyllis is 
 a woman, and, perhaps, I am by way of hav- 
 ing a few manners left — and, therefore, we 
 had to take the longest way back; and were 
 both very tired and bored with each other 
 when at last I suddenly left her one night 
 after dinner at her house at half-past nine, 
 because I had a headache — "my dear, aspirin 
 isn't any good, really it isn't" — and was 
 sure she had one, too . . . 
 
 Six months ago I had a letter from her, 
 saying that she was going to marry a nice 
 fat baronet, a real, not a Brummagem one, 
 and not so much because of his money, but 
 because of his nice, solid, middle-class ideas,
 
 72 The London Venture 
 
 which would help to tone down hers. Phyllis 
 was like that, and I've often wondered very 
 much about that wretched baronet, whether 
 he will tone her down, or whether she will 
 persuade him to open a hat shop off Bond 
 Street in aid of a "bus conductors' " 
 orphanage. 
 
 Phyllis, Phyllis, you really can't go 
 through life with half a cold grouse in one 
 hand and a pint of Cliquot '04 in the other. 
 There are other things ... so they say.
 
 The London Venture: V
 
 IT shames me a little to confess that I 
 have always fitted in my friends to suit 
 my moods; for it may seem superior of me, 
 as though I attached as much importance to 
 my moods as to my friends, and therefore too 
 much to the former; but it is really quite 
 natural and human, for there is no man, be 
 he ever so strong, who does not somehow 
 sway to his moment's mood; as a great liner 
 imperceptibly sways to the lulling roll of 
 the seas — as compared to myself, a rickety, 
 rakish-looking little craft which goes up to 
 the skies and down into the trough to the 
 great swing of those mocking waves — 
 moods ! 
 
 But I, as I say, unlike that strong man 
 who will pretend to crush his mood as some 
 trifling temptation to relax his hold on life, 
 I am so sociable a person that I must give 
 my friends every side of myself and to each 
 
 friend his particular side. And, though I 
 
 75
 
 76 The London Venture 
 
 do not wish to seem superior I have so far 
 mastered the art of friendship, of which 
 Whistler made such a grievous mess, that 
 that side of me which such and such a friend 
 may like is the side which I happen to wish 
 to show to him. I keep it for him, labelling 
 it his; when I see him in the distance I say, 
 "Dikran, up and away and be at him"; for 
 I think it incumbent on people who, like 
 myself, are not really significant, to be at 
 least significant in their relations with others, 
 to stand out as something, even as a buffoon, 
 among their acquaintances, and not be just 
 part of the ruck. My ideal is, of course, that 
 splendid person of Henry James', in "The 
 Private Life," who faded away, did not 
 exist, when he was alone, but was wonder- 
 fully and variably present when even a 
 chambermaid was watching him. That 
 subtle, ironic creation of Henry James' is 
 the very incarnation of a Divine Sociability, 
 but in actual life there is no artist perfect 
 enough to give himself so wholly to others 
 that he literally does not exist to himself. 
 
 I am not selfish, then, with my moods; 
 with a little revision and polishing I can
 
 The London Venture 11 
 
 make them presentable enough to give to my 
 friends as, to say vulgarly, the real article, 
 the real me. And of them all there is one 
 special mood, a neutral-tinted, tired, scepti- 
 cal thing, which I have come to reserve exclu- 
 sively for my friend Nikolay, who lives in a 
 studio in Fitzroy Street, and faintly despises 
 people for living anywhere else. 
 
 When I had pressed his bell I had to step 
 back and watch for his face at the third-floor 
 window, which, having emerged and grunted 
 at me below, would dwindle into a hand 
 from which would drop the latchkey into 
 my upturned hat. Then very wearily — I 
 had to live up to my mood, you see, else why 
 visit Nikolay 1 ? — I would climb the stone 
 steps to his studio. 
 
 Once there, I resigned myself to a delicious 
 and conscious indolence. My thoughts 
 drifted up with my cigarette smoke, and 
 faded with it. My special place was on the 
 divan in the corner of the large room, under 
 a long shelf of neatly arranged first editions, 
 from which I would now and again pick one, 
 finger it lazily, mutter just audibly that I 
 had bought that same book half-a-crown
 
 78 The London Venture 
 
 cheaper, and relapse into silence. If uncon- 
 genial visitors dropped in, I would abuse 
 Nikolay's hospitality by at once turning over 
 on my left side and going to sleep until they 
 had gone. But generally no one came, and 
 we were alone and silent. 
 
 From the divan I would watch Nikolay 
 at work at his long table in front of the win- 
 dow, through which could be seen all the 
 chimneys in Fitzroy Street, Charlotte Street, 
 and Tottenham Court Road. How he could 
 do any work at all (and work of colour!) 
 with the drab cosmopolitanism of this view 
 ever before his eyes, I do not know; myself 
 would have to be very drunk before I could 
 ignore those uncongenial backs of houses and 
 chimneys, stuck up in the air like the grimy 
 paws of a gutter-brat humanity. For an 
 hour on end, until he turned to me and said, 
 "Tea, Dikran 1 ?" I would watch him through 
 my smoke, as though fascinated by the bent, 
 slight figure as it drew and painted, with so 
 delicate a precision of movement, those un- 
 real and intangible illustrations, which tried 
 at first to impress one by their drawing or 
 colouring, but seemed to me mainly expres-
 
 The London Venture 79 
 
 sions of the artist's grim and ironic detach- 
 ment from other men; a macabre observer, 
 as it were, of their passions, himself passion- 
 less, but widely, almost wickedly, tolerant. 
 An erect satyr in topsy-turvydom. 
 
 If it were any other man than Nikolay, 
 I would know him well, for I have seen much 
 of him, but one knows men by their "points 
 of view," and I am not sure that Nikolay 
 ever had one. He was, or rather he seemed 
 definitely to be, curiously wise; one never put 
 his wisdom to the test; one never heard him 
 say an overpoweringly wise thing, but there 
 was no doubt that he was wise. People said 
 he was wise. Women said it. A strange 
 man, indeed; queer, and a little sinister. 
 Perhaps six hundred years ago he might have 
 been an alchemist living in a three-storied 
 house in Prague, exiled from his native land 
 of Russia for criticising too openly the size 
 of the Czarina's ears; for Nikolay knows no 
 fear, he can be ruder than any man I know. 
 I have heard him answer a woman that her 
 new hat didn't suit her at all. "I think it 
 is a rotten hat," he said, and the vanity of 
 an admitted thirty years faded from her,
 
 80 The London Venture 
 
 she was as a dejected houri before the re- 
 pelling eyes of a Salhadine. 
 
 He had not always been so detached and 
 passionless. Steps of folly must somehow 
 have led up to that philosophic wisdom 
 which so definitely obtruded on the con- 
 sciousness; so definitely, indeed, that I have 
 watched women, as we perhaps sat round the 
 card-table in his studio, and seen them in 
 their manner defer to him, as though he were 
 a great man in the eyes of the world, which 
 he isn't. But to be treated as a great man, 
 even by women, when you are not a great 
 man, is indeed the essence of greatness! 
 Bravo, Nikolay! I see you, not as I have 
 always seen you, but in Paris, where rumour 
 tells of you; in Paris, where your art was 
 your hobby and life your serious business, 
 and a dress suit the essential of your visibil- 
 ity of an evening. 
 
 I feel riot and revelry somewhere in you, 
 Nikolay; the dim green lights of past experi- 
 ences do very queerly mock the wisdom in 
 your contemplative eye. I am to suppose, 
 then, that you have seen other things than 
 the rehearsals of a ballet, have marvelled at
 
 The London Venture 81 
 
 other things than the architecture of Spanish- 
 Gothic cathedrals'? Ah, I have the secret 
 of you! You are a mediaeval, a knight of 
 old exotic times, a Sir Lancelot without 
 naivete. Now, as the years take you, it is 
 only in your drawings that your mind runs 
 cynically riot among the indiscretions of 
 literature — what a sinister inner gleam I 
 espied in you when you told me that you 
 were going to illustrate the poems of Fran- 
 cois Villon! But in Paris, long ago, I see 
 you, Nikolay, standing in the curtained door- 
 way of a cushion-spread studio, where the 
 lights shine faintly through the red ara- 
 besques patterned on the black lamp shades. 
 I see you standing there with a half-empty 
 glass of Courvoisier in your hand, sip- 
 ping, and watching, and smiling . . . And 
 women, perhaps — nay! a princess for very 
 certain, it is said — running wild over the 
 immobility of your face, immobile even 
 through those first perfervid years. 
 
 But it did not always happen that I found 
 him working at his table by the window. 
 Sometimes he would be pacing restlessly up 
 and down the room, and round the card-
 
 82 The London Venture 
 
 table in the centre (which was also a lunch, 
 tea, and dinner table). 
 
 "I have never before been four years in 
 one place," he said. "I have never been six 
 months in one place." He related it as a 
 possibly interesting fact, not as a cavil 
 against circumstances. It shows what little 
 I knew of, or about, him, that I had never 
 before heard of his travels. 
 
 "But how have you ever done any work 
 if you never stayed in one place, never settled 
 down?' 
 
 "Settled down!" He stopped in his walk 
 and fixed on me with a disapproving eye. 
 "That's a nasty bad word, Dikran. The 
 being-at-home feeling is a sedative to all art 
 and progress.- In the end it kills imagina- 
 tion. It is a soporific, a — what you call it? 
 — a dope. There's a feeling of contentment 
 in being at home, and you can't squeeze any 
 creation out of contentment. 
 
 "Permanent homes," he said, "were in- 
 vented because men wanted safety. The 
 safety of expectation! Imagination is a 
 curse to most men ; they are not comfortable 
 with it; they think it is unsettling. Life is
 
 The London Venture 83 
 
 an experiment until you have a home, and 
 feel that it is a home. Men like that. They 
 like the idea of having a definite pillow on 
 which to lay their heads every night, of hav- 
 ing a definite woman, called a wife, beside 
 them. . . . Bah! Charity begins at home, 
 and inertia stays there. Safety doesn't 
 breed art or progress — and when it does, it 
 miscarries — the Royal Academy . . . 
 
 "Men want homes," he said, "because 
 they want wives. And they generally want 
 wives because they don't want to be worried 
 by the sex-feeling any more. They don't 
 want women left to their own imagination 
 any more. They want the thing over and 
 done with for ever and ever. Safety ! Men 
 are not adventurous. . . ." 
 
 He turned to me sharply. "Look at 
 you!" he said. "Have you done anything? 
 Since I have known you, you have done noth- 
 ing but write self-conscious essays which 
 "The New Age" tolerates; you have played 
 about with life as you have with literature, as 
 though it were all a question of commas and 
 semi-colons . . . You have tried to idealise 
 love-affairs into a pretty phrase, and in your
 
 84 The London Venture 
 
 spare time you lie on that divan and look up 
 at the ceiling and dream of the luxurious 
 vices of Heliogabalus. . . . You are hor- 
 ribly lazy, not adventurous at all. What's 
 it matter if your cuffs get dirty as long as 
 your hands get hold of something*?" 
 
 "One can always change one's shirt, if 
 that is what you suggest, Nikolay. But you 
 are wrong about my not being adventurous — 
 I shall adventure many things. But not 
 sensationally, you know. I mean, I can't 
 look at myself straight, I can only look at 
 myself sideways; and that perhaps is just 
 as well for I overlook many things in myself 
 which it is good to overlook, and I can smile 
 at things which James Joyce would write a 
 book about. -And when I write a novel — 
 for of course I will write one, since England 
 expects every young man to write a novel — 
 the quality I shall desire in it will be, well, 
 fastidiousness. ... I come from the East; 
 I shall go to the East; I shall try to strike 
 the literary mean between the East and the 
 West in me — between my Eastern mind and 
 Western understanding. It will be a great 
 adventure."
 
 The London Venture 85 
 
 "The East is a shambles," he said shortly. 
 And in that sentence lay my own condemna- 
 tion of my real self; if any hope of fame 
 ever lay in me, I suddenly realised, it was 
 in that acquired self which had been to a 
 public school and thought it not well bred 
 to have too aggressive a point of view. Oh, 
 but what nonsense it all was! I lazily 
 thought — this striving after fame and no- 
 toriety in a despairing world. 
 
 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
 
 86 The London Venture 
 
 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 Felicien Rops. . . .
 
 The London Venture: VI
 
 VI 
 
 FROM my flat in Monday Road to Pic- 
 cadilly Circus was a long way, -and the 
 first part of it wearisome enough through the 
 Fulham Road, with its cancer and consump- 
 tion 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 Pic- 
 cadilly, 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, 
 
 89
 
 90 The London Venture 
 
 finger-posts of Nature pointing to the real 
 No-Man's Land, and illustrating the miracu- 
 lous 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 be- 
 ing just carelessly beautiful. When I say 
 Nature, I do not see the Dame Nature of 
 Oscar Wilde's crooked vision, a crude, slat- 
 ternly charwoman, but a spendthrift prodi- 
 gal, 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 ver- 
 milion 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
 
 The London Venture 91 
 
 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 metri- 
 cal paroxysm after Mr. Robert Nichols, 
 frankly bores me; he has shown me an odd 
 nymph here and there, but I haven't en- 
 couraged 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 beauti- 
 ful. 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 al- 
 ready 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 nat-
 
 92 The London Venture 
 
 urally 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 dis- 
 appear only to appear again, more wonder- 
 fully. 
 
 But the fear of the shapeless bogey be- 
 hind 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. Edu- 
 cation 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 indis- 
 creet ancestral ghost, and holloa to a pro- 
 fessor 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
 
 The London Venture 93 
 
 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 be- 
 fore 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
 
 94 The London Venture 
 
 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 ad- 
 mitted that she herself had, occasionally, to 
 sleep; but she apologised for it, resented the 
 necessity. And, as I walked, I saw a sleep- 
 ing, dejected figure too near the Park rail- 
 ings 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
 
 The London Venture 95 
 
 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 ma<dly 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 unend- 
 ing 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 beau- 
 tiful. She was the first and greatest and 
 most mysterious of all courtesans — as, in- 
 deed, the devil's mistress would have to be,
 
 96 The London Venture 
 
 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 think- 
 ing 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, re- 
 spectable, 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
 
 The London Venture 97 
 
 "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 satis- 
 fied, 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 peo- 
 ples and debauched their minds, so that in 
 later ages they were fit for nothing but to 
 be conquered and to serve Rome and Byzan- 
 tium 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 May-
 
 98 The London Venture 
 
 fair to Chorasan 6 ? You should have known. 
 You have been so wantonly blind, Shelmer- 
 dene. 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 be- 
 cause 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 
 
 101
 
 102 The London Venture 
 
 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 fran- 
 tically 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 lov- 
 ing 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
 
 The London Venture 103 
 
 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 4 ?" I sug- 
 gested. 
 
 "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 Theo- 
 dosia 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.'
 
 104 The London Venture 
 
 "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 English- 
 man 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 some- 
 thing '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
 
 The London Venture 105 
 
 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 my- 
 self in pitying him.
 
 106 The London Venture 
 
 "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 ambi- 
 tious; with the sort of confident, yet inten- 
 sive, 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 selfish- 
 ness of ice, which freezes the thing that 
 touches it, but itself melts in the end. . . . 
 He froze me. Don't think I'm exaggerat- 
 ing, 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 despair- 
 ingly, 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 clean- 
 ness 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
 
 The London Venture 107 
 
 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 sin-
 
 108 The London Venture 
 
 cerity 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 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
 
 The London Venture 109 
 
 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 dur- 
 ing that six weeks between that horrible
 
 110 The London Venture 
 
 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 Dieul he sud- 
 denly clung to me and said he wasn't seeing 
 enough of me, that London was getting be- 
 tween us, and that we must go away some- 
 where 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
 
 The London Venture 111 
 
 talk about. . . . And as we sat silently fac- 
 ing 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 Mar- 
 seilles. 'To Paris'?' I said, not understand- 
 ing. '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 al- 
 most 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
 
 112 The London Venture 
 
 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
 
 The London Venture 113 
 
 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 4 ? 
 
 "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 re- 
 action against Maurice, and to serve me well 
 he had to help me wipe out all the castles
 
 114 The London Venture 
 
 of sentiment I had built around Maurice. 
 And the most gorgeous castle of all I had 
 built round that little Welsh inn! Some- 
 thing must be done about that, I told my- 
 self, but for a long time I was afraid of the 
 ghost of Maurice, which might still haunt 
 the place, and bring him back overpower- 
 ingly to me. It was a risk; by going there 
 with some one else I might either succeed 
 in demolishing Maurice's last castle, or I 
 might tragically have to rebuild all the 
 others, and worship him again. 
 
 "He had continued to write to me, com- 
 plaining of my silence. And he had some- 
 how 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 beau- 
 tiful thing and not a pastime to be wedged 
 in between fishing 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-
 
 The London Venture 115 
 
 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 al- 
 most 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
 
 116 The London Venture 
 
 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
 
 The London Venture 117 
 
 up to the little palace in Wales because of 
 memories. Will arrive there dinner-time. 
 Shall we dine together by the window 1 ?' 
 
 "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
 
 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 de- 
 sire 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 friendships, mine with Louis be- 
 gan at school; and those, to whom circum- 
 stances have not allowed friendships at 
 school, cannot realise the intensity of certain 
 few friendships which, beginning on a basis 
 of tomfoolery and ragging, as the general 
 relations between schoolboys begin, yet sur- 
 vive them all, and steadily ripen with the 
 years into a maturity of companionship, 
 which has such a quality and nobility of its 
 own that no other relation, not even that of 
 passionate love, can ever take its place when 
 it is gone. 
 
 I have not happened to mention Louis be- 
 fore in these papers for the reason that he 
 
 121
 
 122 The London Venture 
 
 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. (With- 
 out a sincere belief in his own casualness the 
 modern youth would be the most self- 
 important ass 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 in- 
 evitably 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 com- 
 mon. But I told her that it isn't necessary 
 for two people to have anything "in com- 
 mon" but friendship — and as I made that 
 meaningless remark I put on a superior air,
 
 The London Venture 123 
 
 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 suc- 
 cumbed 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
 
 124 The London Venture 
 
 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 un- 
 popular 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 
 friendship. 
 
 It was, perhaps, rather surprising; sur- 
 prising 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
 
 The London Venture 125 
 
 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 classes, even at 
 the age of fourteen when I first met him, such 
 a rebellion as that of forcing God'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 break- 
 fast 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 fea- 
 tures, we thoroughly deserved the title of 
 the blasted roues. However, at that time,
 
 126 The London Venture 
 
 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 passable 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
 
 The London Venture 127 
 
 work at "inside right" to my "center for- 
 ward" 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 Eng- 
 lish 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 ambassador 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
 
 128 The London Venture 
 
 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 contemp- 
 tuous enmity with which Louis eyed me 
 wasn't very strange. Those two made com- 
 mon cause in their indifference to anything 
 we three at the head of the table might say; 
 and soon, things came to such a pass 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
 
 The London Venture 129 
 
 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 passion for notoriety, which I still have, 
 though in a less primitive manner. I cer- 
 tainly 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 unassuming 
 way in which I had thrown that pot of jam — 
 he knew even less than I did about that pas- 
 sion for notoriety — and when he met me in 
 the passage 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
 
 130 The London Venture 
 
 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 friendship. ... I don't quite 
 know what happened to Marsden, or how 
 Louis told him that he had decided to dis- 
 continue his friendship. 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 Edin- 
 burgh 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
 
 The London Venture 131 
 
 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, inter- 
 esting-looking young men with dark eyes and 
 spiritual hair who are tremendously con- 
 cerned about the utter worthlessness of Mr. 
 William Watson's poetry. Of course my 
 own superior attitude may be just as unbear- 
 able 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 litera- 
 ture boldly, and frankly, and normally, and 
 not self-consciously as they do, attacking 
 literature from anywhere but a sane stand- 
 point, 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-con-
 
 132 The London Venture 
 
 scious 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 fecklessness. 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 pic- 
 ture 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
 
 The London Venture 133 
 
 growth somewhere between his nose and 
 upper lip, and a negligent way of wearing 
 mufti, as though to say, "God, it's good to 
 be back in civilised things again!" They 
 were jolly, sudden evenings, those! Lon- 
 don 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 remark- 
 able 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 class-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 with- 
 stand the impact of the fattest woman on 
 earth, against all the battering eloquence of
 
 134 The London Venture 
 
 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 respect- 
 able 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-mas- 
 ters 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 Shel- 
 merdene, 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
 
 The London Venture 135 
 
 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 confiden- 
 tial 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 unani- 
 mously 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 ex- 
 cept the president and vice-president, simply 
 because the men of our own generation were 
 the worst mannered crew God 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
 
 136 The London Venture 
 
 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 neces- 
 sity, and the happiest moments of his life 
 were when he could work it off on to some 
 helpless woman who had dropped an um- 
 brella 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 hell, 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. . . .
 
 The London Venture: IX
 
 s 
 
 IX 
 
 OMEWHERE in these papers I have 
 said that Shelmerdene left England, but 
 I touched on it very lightly, for I am only 
 half-heartedly a realist, and may yet live to 
 be accused of shuffling humanity behind a 
 phrase. . . . Youth must endure its periods 
 of loneliness with what grace it can; and 
 youth could endure them as resignedly as its 
 preceptors, if it were not for its grotesque 
 self-importance, which inflates loneliness to 
 such a size that it envelopes a young man's 
 whole being, leaving him at the end a sorry 
 wreck of what was once a happy mortal. 
 Anyway, that is what happened to me; I 
 took the whole affair in the worst possible 
 spirit, and, during that probation time to 
 wisdom, thought and wrote and did so many 
 silly things, smashed ideals and cursed idols 
 with such morbid thoroughness and convic- 
 tion (after the fashion of all the bitterest 
 
 young men), that I must have been as detest- 
 
 139
 
 140 The London Venture 
 
 able a person as ever trickled wheezily from 
 the, well, pessimistic pen of a Mr. Wyndham 
 Lewis. . . . But it takes very little effort 
 to forget that time entirely, to let it bury 
 itself with what mourning it can muster from 
 the Shades which sent it to plague me. 
 Enough that it passed, but not before it had, 
 as they say, "put me wise" about the world 
 and its ways. 
 
 For Shelmerdene had left behind her much 
 more than just loneliness; much that was 
 more precious and, thankfully, more lasting; 
 for she had found a young man shaped 
 entirely of acute angles and sharp corners, 
 and had rubbed and polished them over with 
 such delicate tact that it was only months, 
 after she had .gone that I suddenly realised 
 how much more fit I was to cope with a com- 
 plicated world since I had known her. But, 
 more importantly, Shelmerdene to me was 
 England. Before I met her I did not know 
 England ; I knew English, but England only 
 as a man knows the landmarks about him 
 in a strange country. But when she had 
 come and gone England was a discovered 
 country, a vast and ever-increasing pano-
 
 The London Venture 141 
 
 Tama in which discoveries were continually 
 made, leaving yet more hidden valleys of 
 discoveries still to be made — and to be en- 
 joyed! So much and much more, O un- 
 believer, I learnt from Shelmerdene, and in 
 the learning of it lay the best and gladdest 
 lesson of all. 
 
 Time, they say, can efface all things, but 
 in truth it can efface nothing but its own 
 inability to smooth out the real problems of 
 life; so at least I have found in the one in- 
 stance in which I have challenged time to 
 do its best for me, a slave bound down by an 
 unholy wizardry; or else, perhaps, it was 
 that Shelmerdene was not made of the stuff 
 which fades into the years and becomes 
 musty and haggard in their increasing com- 
 pany. I do not know. But, take it as I will, 
 all the service time has been able to do for me 
 has been negative, for without disarranging 
 one hair of her head it has only emphasised 
 in me the profound and subtle influence of 
 that gracefully licentious woman whom I 
 once called Shelmerdene, because, I told her, 
 "it is the name of an American girl which I 
 found in a very bad American novel about
 
 142 The London Venture 
 
 the fanatical Puritans of New England, and 
 the name seems to suit you because in New 
 England they would have treated you ex- 
 actly as they treated Shelmerdene Gray, the 
 heroine of this book, whom they branded 
 and burnt as a shameless woman, but loved 
 in their withered hearts for her gaiety, and 
 elegance, and wit, which they couldn't under- 
 stand, but vaguely felt was as much an ex- 
 pression of Christ as their own wizened 
 virtue." 
 
 Out of the silence of two years at last 
 came a letter from her. I found it when I 
 came in very late one night, and for a long 
 time I stood in my little hall and examined 
 the Eastern stamp and postmark; and the 
 writing on the envelope was so exactly the 
 same as on the last note she had sent me 
 before leaving England that I had to smile 
 at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of 
 her last pursuit of her perfect fate, laying in 
 a sufficient store of her own special nibs to 
 last her for the lifetime she intended to spend 
 abroad; for when I opened the letter I found 
 that, as I had guessed, she would never come 
 back to England, saying, "I am a fugitive
 
 The London Venture 143 
 
 branch which has at last found its parent 
 tree. ... I have run my perfect fate to 
 earth, Dikran ! more perfect than any dream, 
 more lasting than the most perfect dream. 
 And life is so beautiful that I can scarcely 
 bear your not being here to share it, for, you 
 see, I am quite sure that you are still the 
 dear you were two years ago. But it is so 
 tiresome of you to be so young, and to have 
 to experience so many things before you can 
 qualify for my sort of happiness; and on top 
 of being young you are so restless and fussy, 
 too, with your ideas of what you are going 
 to do, and your ambitions — how it must tire 
 the mind to be ambitious! It would cer- 
 tainly tire mine in this climate, so will you 
 please make a note of the fact that I simply 
 forbid you to come out here to join me ! You 
 are too young to be happy, and you aren't 
 wise enough to be contented; and you can't 
 hope to be wise enough until you begin to 
 lose a bit of that mane of hair of yours, 
 which I hope you never will, for I remember 
 how I loved one particular wave in it in the 
 far-off age when I thought I was in love 
 with you. ... It is terrible, but I am for-
 
 144 The London Venture 
 
 getting England. Terrible, because it must 
 be wrong to forget one's country, seeing how 
 you oppressed nationalities go on remember- 
 ing your wretched countries for centuries of 
 years, and throwing bombs and murdering 
 policemen for all the world as though you 
 weren't just as happy as every one else, while 
 I, with a country, which is after all worth 
 remembering, go and forget it after a paltry 
 two years ! Of course it will always be my 
 country, and I shall always love it for the 
 good things it has given me, but as a fact in 
 my life it has faded into something more 
 dim than a memory. A spell has been put 
 upon me, Dikran, to prevent a possible ache 
 in my heart for the things I was born among, 
 a spell which has made me forget Europe and 
 all my friends in it except just you, and 
 you because, in spite of all your English airs, 
 you will always be a pathetic little stranger 
 in a very strange. land, fumbling for the key. 
 . . . Ah, this wise old East of mine ! so old 
 and so wise, my dear, that it knows for cer- 
 tain that nothing is worth doing ; and as you 
 happen, perhaps, on the ruins of a long-dead 
 city by the desert, you can almost hear it
 
 The London Venture 145 
 
 chuckling to itself in its hard-earned wisdom, 
 as though to say that since God Himself is 
 that very same Law which creates men, and 
 cities, and religions only to level them into 
 the dust of the roads and the sands of the 
 desert, why fight against God! It is a cor- 
 rupt and deadening creed, this of the East, 
 but it has a weight of ancestral will behind 
 it which forces you to believe in it; and belief 
 in it leaves you without your Western de- 
 fences, and open to be charmed into non- 
 resistance, as I and my Blue Bird have been 
 charmed, else perhaps I would not now be 
 so happy, and might even be dining with 
 you on the terrace of the Hyde Park Hotel. 
 . . . Rather bitterly you have often called 
 me the slave of Ishtar, though at the time I 
 did not know who the lady was, for I was 
 always rather weak about goddesses and such 
 like; but I guessed she had something to do 
 with love because of the context, for you 
 were developing your pleasant theory about 
 how I would come to a bad end, someday. 
 . . . Well, Dikran, that 'someday' of your 
 prophecy has come. I've never belonged so 
 wholly to Ishtar as I do now that I am per-
 
 146 The London Venture 
 
 haps in the very same country in which she 
 once haunted the imagination of the myriad 
 East. I've made a mess of life, I've come to 
 my bad end, and, as I tell you, I have never 
 known such perfect happiness. The world 
 couldn't wish me a worse fate, and I couldn't 
 wish myself a better. . . . Don't write to 
 me, please. I can always imagine you much 
 more clearly than your letters can express 
 you, and if I think of you as doing big things, 
 as I pray you may, it will be better for me 
 than knowing that you are doing nothing at 
 all, which might easily happen, seeing how 
 lazy you are. ... In the dim ages I was 
 all wrong about life. For I know now that 
 restraint in itself is the most perfect emo- 
 tion. . . ." 
 
 I laid the letter down, and as the windows 
 were already greying with the March dawn 
 it did not seem worth while going to a sleep- 
 less bed; and so I sat on in my chair, draw- 
 ing my overcoat round me for warmth, and 
 smoked many cigarettes. I felt very old in- 
 deed, for was not that letter the echo of a 
 long-dead experience, and are not long-dead 
 experiences the peculiar property of old men*?
 
 The London Venture 
 
 147 
 
 No visions of the Shelmerdene of that letter 
 came up to disturb my peace, for she did not 
 fit in with my ideas of the East, she had 
 never appealed to that Eastern side which 
 must be somewhere in me, but had always 
 been to me a perfect symbol of the grace 
 
 <««MM 
 
 A 
 
 and kindliness and devilry of the arrogant 
 West. I could not see her as she described 
 herself, happy, meditative, wise in content- 
 ment. . . . Her contentment is too much 
 like an emotion, and therefore spurious, I 
 thought, and so she will still dine with me 
 on the terrace of the Hyde Park Hotel, and 
 will wonder why I look so differently at her, 
 for I will still be young while she will be
 
 148 The London Venture 
 
 middle-aged. . . . No, that letter conjured 
 up no perfect vision of her in the East, ex- 
 cept that I saw her, melodramatically per- 
 haps, pleading on her knees for release from 
 the bonds of Ishtar, for I knew that not even 
 a Shelmerdene among women can evade the 
 penalty of so many unsuccessful love-affairs 
 just by the success of one. 
 
 The grey of the March dawn became 
 paler, and the furniture and books in my 
 room seemed so wan and unreal that I 
 thought drowsily that they were a dream of 
 last night and were fading before the com- 
 ing daylight; and later, when my thoughts 
 had mellowed into a security of retrospect, 
 I may have slept, for I realised with a start 
 that the maid had come in to tidy up the 
 room for breakfast, but had got no further 
 than the door, perhaps wondering whether I 
 had been very drunk the night before, or 
 only just "gay." 
 
 Retrospect came naturally after that let- 
 ter, for she had written at the end how she 
 had found the true worth of "restraint"; it 
 would have been just a phrase in a letter if 
 I had not remembered, as she must have
 
 The London Venture 149 
 
 when she wrote it, that the word had a con- 
 text, and that the context lay in a long 
 summer afternoon on a silent reach of the 
 river many miles from Maidenhead. . . . 
 One day that summer I had suggested to her 
 that, as the world was becoming a nuisance 
 with its heat and dust, we might go and 
 stay on the river for a few days, but she 
 had said, quite firmly, "No, I can't do that. 
 I am not yet old enough to put my name 
 down for the divorce stakes, so if you don't 
 mind, Dikran, we will call that bet off and 
 think of something else. For if that same 
 husband heard of my staying on the river 
 with a young man of uncelibate eye and 
 uncertain occupation, he would at once take 
 steps about it, and although I like you well 
 enough as a man, I couldn't bear you as a 
 co-respondent. . . . But if you really do 
 want to stay on the river, I will get the 
 Hartshorns to ask us both down, for they 
 have a delightful house on a little hill, from 
 which you can see the twilight creeping 
 over the Berkshire downs across the 
 river. 
 
 "Oh, we can't do that," I said; "Guy
 
 150 The London Venture 
 
 Hartshorn is such a stiffnecked ass and his 
 wife is dull enough to spoil any river — " 
 
 "Tolerance, my dear, is what you lack," 
 she said; "tolerance and a proper under- 
 standing of the relation between a stiff- 
 necked ass and a possible host. And Guy, 
 poor dear, always does his duty by his guests. 
 . . . Please don't be silly about it, Dikran. 
 The Hartshorns distinctly need encourage- 
 ment as hosts, so you and I will go down and 
 encourage them. And if you can manage to 
 cloak your evil thoughts behind a hearty 
 manner and watch Guy as he swings a rac- 
 ing punt down the river, you will learn more 
 about punting and the reason why English- 
 men are generally considered to be superior 
 to foreigners than I could teach you in a 
 lifetime." 
 
 We had been two days at the house on 
 the little hill by the river (for, of course, 
 we went there) before, on the third after- 
 noon, after lunch, our chance came, and Shel- 
 merdene and I were at last alone on the river; 
 I had not the energy to do more than paddle 
 very leisurely and look from here to there, 
 but always in the end to come back to the
 
 The London Venture 151 
 
 woman who lay facing me against the pale 
 green cushions of the Hartshorn punt, 
 steeped in the happy sunshine of one of those 
 few really warm days which England now 
 and again manages to steal from the molten 
 South, and exhibits in a new green and 
 golden loveliness. From round a bend of 
 the river we could quite clearly see the ivy- 
 covered Georgian house of our host, perched 
 imperiously up on the top of its little hill, 
 but not imperiously enough to prevent the 
 outlet of two days' impatience in the curse 
 I vented on it. 
 
 "Little man with little toy wants big toy 
 of the same pattern and cries when he can't 
 have it," she mocked me, and smiled away 
 my bad temper, which had only a shallow 
 root in impatience. But I would not let it go 
 all at once, for man is allowed licence on 
 summer afternoons on the river, and I chal- 
 lenged her to say if she did not know of bet- 
 ter ways of spending the whole glorious time 
 between dinner and midnight than by play- 
 ing bridge, "as we tiresomely do at the house 
 on the hill, much to the delight of that 
 sombre weeping elm which looks in at the
 
 152 The London Venture 
 
 window and can then share the burden of its 
 complaining leaves with my pessimistic 
 soul." 
 
 "We will leave your soul severely alone 
 for the moment, but as for playing bridge, I 
 think it is very good for you," she said. "It 
 is very good for you to call three No Trumps, 
 and be doubled by some one who won't stand 
 any nonsense, and go down four hundred or 
 so. It teaches you restraint." 
 
 "Restraint," I said, "is the Englishman's 
 art of concealing his emotions in such a way 
 that every one can guess exactly what they 
 are. And I have acquired it so perfectly 
 that you know very well that only the other 
 day you told me how you admired my re- 
 straint, and how I would never say to a man's 
 face what I couldn't say just as well behind 
 his back." But she did not answer, and in 
 silence I pulled into a little aimless back- 
 water, and moored by a willow which let 
 through just enough sun to speck Shelmer- 
 dene's dress with bright arabesques. 
 
 I changed my seat for the cushions and lay 
 full length in front of Shelmerdene, but it 
 was as though she had become part of the
 
 The London Venture 153 
 
 river, she was so silent. I said something, 
 I can't remember what it was, but it must 
 have suited the day and my mood. I could 
 not see her face because she had turned it 
 towards the bank and it was hidden under 
 the brim of her pale blue hat, but when my 
 words had broken the quietness and she 
 turned it towards me, I was surprised at the 
 firm set of her lips and the sadness of her 
 smile. 
 
 "You are making love to me, and that is 
 quite as it should be," she said. "But on 
 the most beautiful of all days I have the 
 saddest thoughts, for though you laughed at 
 me when I talked about restraint, I was 
 really very serious indeed. I know a lot 
 about restraint, my dear, and how the lack 
 of it can make life suddenly very horrible 
 . . . for once upon a time I killed an old 
 man because I didn't know the line between 
 my desires and his endurance." She shook 
 her head at me gently. "No, that won't do, 
 Dikran. You were going to say something 
 pretty about my good manners, but that is 
 all so much play-acting, and, besides, good 
 manners are my trade and profession, and
 
 154 The London Venture 
 
 without them I should long ago have been 
 down and under, as I deserve to be much 
 more than Emma Hamilton ever did. . . . 
 The tragedy about people like me is that we 
 step into life at the deep end and find only 
 the shallow people there, and when we meet 
 some one really deep and very sincere, like 
 that old man, we rather resent it, for we 
 can't gauge him by the standards we use for 
 each other. Men like that bring a sudden 
 reality into life, but the reality is unaccept- 
 able and always ugly because it is forced 
 upon one, while the only realities that are 
 beautiful are those that were born in your 
 heart when you were born; just like your 
 country for you, which you have never seen 
 and may never see, and yet has been your 
 main reality in life since you were born; a 
 reality as sad and beautiful as the ancestral 
 memories which must lurk somewhere in you> 
 but which you can't express because you have 
 not learnt yet how to be really natural with 
 yourself. And when you have learnt that 
 you will have learnt the secret of great writ- 
 ing, for literature is the natural raw material 
 which every man secretes within himself, but
 
 The London Venture 155 
 
 only a few can express it to the world. But 
 I may be wrong about all that, and anyway 
 you must know a great deal more about great 
 thinking and great writing than I do, for 
 you have read about it in dull books while I 
 have only sensed it in my trivial way. . . ." 
 
 "Shelmerdene, I want to hear about your 
 old man," I said, "whom you say you killed. 
 But that is only your way of saying that he 
 was in love with you, and that you hurt him 
 so much that he died of it." 
 
 "Ah, if it had been only that I would not 
 be so sad this afternoon! In fact, I would 
 not be sad at all, for he was old and had 
 to die, and all that about love and being 
 hurt is fair and open warfare. But it was 
 something much beastlier than that, some- 
 thing animal in me, which will make me 
 ashamed whenever I think of that day when 
 we three gave our horses rein down to the 
 Breton coast, and I turned on the old man, 
 a very spitfire of a girl broken loose from 
 the restraint of English generations, forget- 
 ting for one fierce moment that her saddle 
 was not covered with the purple of a Roman 
 Augusta, and that she couldn't do as she
 
 156 The London Venture 
 
 liked in a world of old men. . . . Have you 
 ever seen a quarrel, a real quarrel, Dikran'^ 
 When some one is so bitterly and intensely 
 angry that he loses all hold on everything 
 but his wretched desire to hurt, and unchains 
 a beast which in a second maims him as 
 deeply as his enemy — no, it maims him 
 more. 
 
 "The old Frenchman was my guardian," 
 she said, "and the last of a name which you 
 can find here and there in Court Memoirs, 
 in the thick of that riot of gallantry and 
 intrigue which passed for life at old Ver- 
 sailles. But the world has grown out of that 
 and does things much better now, for gal- 
 lantry has been scattered to the four winds 
 of democracy and is the navvy's part as much 
 as the gentleman's, while intrigue has become 
 the monopoly of the few darling old men 
 who lead governments, more as a way of 
 amusing their daughters than for any special 
 purpose of their own. But if the world has 
 grown old since then so had my old man, for 
 he was none of your rigid-minded cidevant 
 aristos whom you can see any day at the 
 Ritz keeping up appearances on an occa-
 
 The London Venture 157 
 
 sional cocktail and the use of the hotel note- 
 paper; but the air of the grand seigneur 
 hadn't weathered proscriptions and revolu- 
 tions for nothing, and so still clung rather 
 finely to him in spite of himself, and made 
 him seem as old and faded as his ancestors 
 in the world in which he had to live, poor 
 old dear! It was cruel of that other nice 
 old gentleman above him to put him through 
 the ordeal, for he did so bitterly and genu- 
 inely resent a world in which honour was sec- 
 ond to most things and above nothing. He 
 couldn't forgive, you see. He couldn't for- 
 give himself, nor France, nor God, but espe- 
 cially he couldn't forgive France. Sedan, 
 revolution, republic — and no Turenne or 
 Bonaparte to thrash a Moltke with the flat 
 of his sword, for he wasn't worth more! 
 And all a France could muster were the trink- 
 ets of her monde and demimonde, and a 
 threatening murmur of 'revanche' and 'Al- 
 sace-Lorraine' — as though threats and hatred 
 could wipe out the memory of that day of 
 surrender at Sedan, when he stood not ten 
 yards away among only too polite Prussian 
 aides-de-camp while Napoleon put the seal
 
 158 The London Venture 
 
 on his last mistake, and signed away an em- 
 pire. . . . And allowing for exaggeration, 
 and the white-hot excitement to which folk 
 who fuss about honour, etc., are liable, there 
 may have been something in his point of 
 view about it all, for I once heard a man 
 with a lot of letters behind his name say that 
 when a country gives up a limb it also gives 
 up its body; but he may have been wrong, 
 for after all France is still France! 
 
 "But you would have adored my old man, 
 Dikran, just as I did. He treated life, and 
 men, and women with all that etiquette 
 which you so admire, he was simply bris- 
 tling with etiquette — a deal too much of it 
 for my taste, for I was only seventeen then 
 and liked my freedom like any other Eng- 
 lander. . . . But I'm finding it very diffi- 
 cult to describe the man he was, my dear, 
 for in our slovenly sort of English we've got 
 used to describing a person by saying he is 
 like another person, and I can't do that in 
 this case because he belongs as much to a 
 past age as Hannibal, and there isn't any 
 one like him now. And even when he was 
 alive there were very few — two or three old
 
 The London Venture 159 
 
 men as fierce and unyielding and vital as 
 himself, who used to come and dine, and 
 say pretty things to little me who sat at 
 the end of the table with very large eyes 
 and fast-beating heart, wondering why they 
 weren't all leading Cabinets and squashing 
 revolutions, for they seemed to know the 
 secrets of every secret cabal and camarilla 
 in Europe. 
 
 "Yes, my old guardian was a remnant of 
 an empire — but what a remnant! Such a 
 fierce-looking little man he was, with pale, 
 steel-blue eyes which pierced into you from 
 under a precipice of a forehead, a bristling 
 Second Empire moustache, and thin blood- 
 less lips which parted before the most ex- 
 quisite French I've ever heard; I can 
 scarcely bear it when you say I talk French 
 divinely, for I know how pitiful mine is com- 
 pared to the real thing, as done by that old 
 man and Sarah Bernhardt, for they were 
 very old friends and she used often to come 
 and lunch with us. 
 
 "He talked well, too, and all the better 
 for having something to say, as well he 
 might have since he had been everything and
 
 ,160 The London Venture 
 
 known every one worth knowing of his time 
 — ministers, and rebels, and artists, and all 
 the best-known prostitutes of the day; but 
 they did those things better then, Dikran. 
 In fact, more as an excuse for getting away 
 from a parvenu Paris than from any Bona- 
 partist feelings, for he was always an Or- 
 leanist, I think he had represented Louis 
 Napoleon at every city which could run to 
 an Embassy from London to Pekin; from 
 where he brought back that ivory Buddha 
 which is on my writing-table, and which has 
 an inscription in ancient Chinese saying that 
 every man is his own god, but that Buddha 
 is every man's God, which goes a long way 
 to prove that the wisdom of the East wasn't 
 as wise as all that, after all. 
 
 "But you are getting restless," she said 
 suddenly. "You probably want to open the 
 tea-basket to see what's inside, or you've just 
 seen a water rat " 
 
 "No, it's a little more subtle than that, 
 Shelmerdene, although as a fact I do see a 
 water rat not a yard from you on the bank. 
 ... I merely wanted to know how it was 
 that, since you had a perfectly good father 

 
 The London Venture 161 
 
 alive in England, you were allowed to go 
 gadding about in France with a guardian, 
 
 soi-disant " 
 
 "We will ignore your soi-disant, young 
 man. But I'll allow your interruption, for 
 it may seem a bit complicated. ... It was 
 like this : as the fortunes of our family had 
 run rather to seed through generations of 
 fast women and slow horses, my father who 
 was utterly a pet, succumbed to politics for 
 an honest living, or, if you pull a face like 
 that about it, for a dishonest living. For up 
 to that time, in spite of having exactly the 
 figure for it, he had always refused to enter 
 Parliament, because his idea was that the 
 House was just a club, and one already be- 
 longed to so many better clubs. But once 
 there nothing could stop him, and when he 
 entered for the Cabinet stakes he simply 
 romped home with a soft job and a fat in- 
 come. . . . But all that is really beside the 
 point, for between politics and guineas father 
 and I had had a slight disagreement about 
 a certain young man whom I was inclined to 
 marry offhand, being only sixteen, you know, 
 and liking the young man — and, of course,
 
 162 The London Venture 
 
 my father did the correct thing, as he always 
 did, gave the young man a glass of port and 
 told him not to be an ass, and shipped me 
 off to Paris to his very old friend. You 
 see, he knew about that old Marquis, and 
 how I'd be quite safe in his care, for any 
 young man who as much as looked at me 
 would have a pair of gimlet eyes asking him 
 who the devil he might be and why he chose 
 to desecrate a young lady's virginal beauty 
 by his so fatuous gaze. 
 
 "I've been saying a lot of nice things about 
 that old man to you, but I didn't feel quite 
 like that about him at the time. I liked 
 him, of course, because he was a man; but 
 all that French business about the sanctity 
 of a young maid's innocence got badly on 
 my nerves, for innocence was never my long 
 suit even from childhood, having ears to hear 
 and eyes to see; and I soon began to get 
 very bored with life as my old Frenchman 
 saw it. So it wasn't surprising that I broke 
 out now and again just to shock him, he was 
 so rigid, but I was always sorry for it after- 
 wards because he just looked at me and said 
 not a word for a minute or so, and then went
 
 The London Venture 163 
 
 on talking as though I hadn't hurt him — 
 but I had, Dikran ! I had hurt him so much 
 that for the rest of the day he often couldn't 
 bear to see me. . . . But though I was 
 ashamed of myself for hurting him, I 
 couldn't stop; life with him was interesting 
 enough in a way, of course, but it left out 
 so much, you see; it entirely left out the 
 stupendous fact that I was almost a woman, 
 and a very feminine one at that, who liked 
 an odd young man about now and again just 
 to play about with. But I wasn't allowed 
 any young men, except a twenty-five-year- 
 old over-manicured Vicomte who was so un- 
 bearably worldly and useless that I wanted 
 to hit him on the head with my guardian's 
 sword-stick, which he always carried about 
 with him, as a sort of mental solace, I think. 
 No, there weren't any young men, nor any 
 restaurants, for the old man simply ignored 
 them ; my dear, there wasn't anything at all 
 in my young life except a few old dukes and 
 dowagers, and the aforesaid young Vicomte, 
 who had manicured himself out of existence 
 and was considered harmless. And so Paris 
 was a dead city to me who lived in the heart
 
 164 The London Venture 
 
 of it, and all the more dead for the faded 
 old people who moved about in my life, and 
 tried to change my heart into a Louis-Quinze 
 drawing-room hung with just enough beauti- 
 ful and musty tapestries to keep out the bour- 
 geois sunshine and carelessness, which I so 
 longed for. 
 
 "So I had to amuse myself somehow. . . . 
 I was a bad young woman then, as I am a 
 bad woman now, Dikran; for I've always 
 had a particular sort of vanity which, though 
 it doesn't show on the surface like most silly 
 women's, is deep down in me and has never 
 left me alone ; a sort of vanity which makes 
 itself felt in me only in the off-seasons when 
 no one happens to be in love with me and I 
 in love with jio one, and tells me that I must 
 be dull and unattractive, utterly insignifi- 
 cant and non-existent; it is a weakness in 
 me, but much stronger than I am, for I've 
 never resisted it, but been only too glad to 
 fall in love again as soon as I could; and 
 that is why I've never made a stand against 
 my impressionableness, why I've never run 
 away from or scotched a love-affair which I 
 knew wouldn't last two weeks, however much
 
 The London Venture 165 
 
 I loved the wretched man at the time ; it was 
 so much the line of least resistance, it 
 drowned that infernal whisper in me that I 
 was of no account at all in the world. But 
 the tragedy of it was, and is, my dear, that 
 indulgence made the monster grow; it was 
 like a drug, for as soon as the off-season came 
 again it was at its old tricks with twice its 
 old virulence and malice, and, of course, I 
 gave way again. And so on, and so on — 
 did you murmur dies ir&, Dikran? Well, 
 perhaps, but who knows? There's a Per- 
 fect Fate for every one in this world, and 
 if any one deserves to find it, it's myself who 
 has failed to find it so often. . . . 
 
 "At that time that wretched vanity of 
 mine was only a faint whisper, but there it 
 was, and it had to be satisfied, or else I should 
 have become a good woman, which never did 
 attract me very much. I simply had to amuse 
 myself somehow — and so I formed la grande 
 idee of my young life, just as Napoleon III 
 had long ago formed his equally grande idee 
 about Mexico and Maximilian, and with the 
 same disastrous results. True, there was no 
 young man about, but there was a man, any-
 
 166 The London Venture 
 
 way, and a Marquis to boot, even though he 
 was a bit old and rigid. But it was exactly 
 that rigidity of his which I wanted to see 
 about; I wanted to find out things, and in 
 my own way, don't you see 1 ? And so, de- 
 liberately and with all the malice in me, I 
 set out to subdue the old man. Not child- 
 ishly and gushingly, although I was so 
 young, but with all the finesse of the eternal 
 game, for clever women are born with rouge 
 on their cheeks. 
 
 "But it was a disappointing business; I 
 didn't seem to make the impression I wanted 
 to make; all my finesse went for nothing, 
 except as signs of the affection of a ward. 
 Obviously, I thought hopelessly, I don't 
 know all there is to be known about subdu- 
 ing old French marquises, and I had almost 
 decided to try some other amusement when 
 one May morning, a few months after my 
 father had died and appointed him as my 
 guardian and executor, he came into my lit- 
 tle boudoir, looking more stern and adorable 
 than ever. And as he came in I knew some- 
 how that big things were coming into my 
 little life; I don't know how, but I knew it
 
 The London Venture 167 
 
 as surely as I knew that for all his grand 
 air of calmness he was as shy as any school- 
 boy. 
 
 " 'My child,' he said very gently, 'I am 
 intruding on you only because I have some- 
 thing to say to you of the utmost importance 
 and delicacy. I am too old and too much of 
 the world to do things by impulse, and so 
 if I seem to offend against your unworldli- 
 ness now it is not because I have not thought 
 very carefully about what I am going to say. 
 . . . And I beg you not to count it as any 
 more than the suggestion of an old man who 
 thinks only of your good, and to tell me 
 quite frankly at the end what you think of 
 it. 
 
 " 'My old friend, your father/ he said, 
 'honoured me by placing you entirely in my 
 charge as guardian and executor ; but on look- 
 ing into matters I find that he has left very 
 little for me to do in the latter capacity — 
 very little, in fact, besides that small estate 
 in Shropshire which is entailed on you and 
 your children, as with all its associations of 
 that beautiful girl — scarcely older than you 
 are now, your mother — your father could not
 
 168 The London Venture 
 
 bear the thought of it ever passing to 
 strangers. And so. my child, without any 
 reflection on my friend, when you leave my 
 care you enter the world with an old enough 
 name to ensure your position, but without 
 the income to maintain it, and, if you will 
 forgive me, a quite insignificant dot; though 
 in your case, as in your beautiful mother's,' 
 he added, with his little gallant smile, the 
 first and last of the morning, 'a dot would 
 be the requirement of a blind man. 
 
 " 'All this preamble must seem very aim- 
 less and tiresome to you, but I wish to put 
 all the facts before you, my dear, before 
 asking you to take the responsibility, as in- 
 deed it is, of weighing the suggestion I am 
 going to make. . . . You must have seen 
 that I am out of sympathy with this modern 
 world of yours, that I belong to some other 
 period, better or worse, what does it matter? 
 And this world, my child, has little use for 
 those hard-headed persons who cannot change 
 the bent of their minds according to its pass- 
 ing whims, and so it has little use for me 
 who cannot and will not change. . . . Do 
 you understand? I mean that I am an old
 
 The London Venture 169 
 
 man who is every day losing touch with life, 
 and that I know here, quite certainly, that 
 I have only a very few more years to live. 
 Do not look sad, child,' he said, almost im- 
 patiently, 'it is not that I am complaining, 
 but that I wish you to understand my 
 thoughts. . . . Into an old life you have 
 come like a ray of sunshine which is even 
 now making light of your little puzzled 
 frown; and I have a debt of gratitude to 
 pay to you, my child, which I wish to pay 
 at the expense even of your young peace of 
 mind this morning. Although this new 
 world has passed out of my grasp, and will 
 soon pass out of my understanding, I know 
 that it is the proper setting for you, the only 
 subtle and beautiful thing that I have found 
 in it, and my greatest wish is to leave you 
 in a position worthy of your beauty and in- 
 telligence. It is not that I am afraid for 
 you, for you are no trivial chit of a girl, but 
 merely that I wish to leave you both happy 
 and independent. . . . And, as it is, I can 
 do nothing, nothing at all ! For it has been 
 a fixed rule of our family that we may not 
 leave our fortune and property to any one
 
 170 The London Venture 
 
 who does not bear our name, and thus, though 
 my nephew and I have had no occasion to 
 meet for some fifteen years, I must leave him 
 such money as I have and all this not unap- 
 preciated furniture. . . . And that is why, 
 my child, because of my wish to leave you 
 all I have, I have been forced to suggest the 
 only alternative, for I would not have even 
 considered it otherwise, that you should con- 
 sent to bear my name with me for the few 
 years I have to live, and then, as a young 
 and beautiful widow of means, and bearing 
 an old French name which may still be worth 
 a little consideration, you can take your fit 
 position in the world in which you, and not 
 I, were born to be happy. . . .' 
 
 "There it is, Dikran, or as much of it as 
 I can remember. And do you need a setting 
 for it? Oh, yes, you do, for you are a lit- 
 tle lost. Imagine then, sitting by a window 
 of a large house in the Rue Colbert, a young 
 girl with a battered copy of Madame Bovary 
 skilfully hidden beside her, and a little erect 
 old man, very stiff but soigne, and cruelly 
 aged by the sunlight which poured blessedly 
 into the room, standing by the arm of her
 
 The London Venture 171 
 
 chair, asking her to marry him. Oh ! but you 
 can't imagine it, you will think of him as 
 pleading, and of me as surprised. He didn't 
 plead, he couldn't and I, my dear, by the 
 time he had finished, wasn't surprised. ... I 
 knew, you see. Why, I knew everything! 
 Lexicons and encyclopaedias had toppled off 
 their dusty shelves, and the Sibylline books 
 had come running to my feet, and the whole 
 world had come trotting out with its wis- 
 dom, wisdom as clear and cold as any Dan- 
 nan-Ron that your friend Gloom ever played 
 on his feadan, and all in the few minutes that 
 an old man was speaking to me ! Of course, 
 it should all have happened differently; I 
 should have been just a 'trivial chit of a 
 girl,' and then I would have accepted all 
 the old darling said, and gaped, and cried, 
 and said 'thank you.' But as it was I did 
 none of those things ; I'm not quite sure what 
 I did, unless it was nothing at all. ... It 
 all seems rather mixed now, but on that May 
 morning it was as clear as the sunlight in 
 my cruel young mind — how young and how 
 cruel, Dikran! 
 
 "You see, as he spoke, he opened out the
 
 172 The London Venture 
 
 world which he so despised to me; page by 
 page he showed me life, how beastly and 
 how beautiful; he showed me both sides, 
 because he himself was both beastly and 
 beautiful. . . . And I gloried in it all ! At 
 my knowledge and the power it gave me 
 over life. After a while the old man didn't 
 seem to matter — there he was, talking away ! 
 I knew about him, and just how beastly and 
 beautiful he was. For he was beautiful in 
 his sincerity; I knew that he wished for my 
 good, that to leave me well provided was 
 the only condition he made with death; but 
 I knew too that there was a beastly little 
 imp somewhere in him, as in other men, 
 which turned his finest thoughts into so much 
 bluff, which told him through the locked 
 and bolted doors of his honour that he wanted 
 me for my own sake, and just for that, be- 
 cause I was young and because he loved me, 
 and, stripped of all his honour and guard- 
 ianship, because he loved me just as Solomon 
 loved his wives, and Lucifer loved Lilith, 
 and as you love me now. . . . 
 
 "There it was, then, the whole damnable 
 world, and I, only eighteen, in the middle
 
 The London Venture 173 
 
 of it ! And there he was, my dear old man, 
 more rigid and more adorable than ever ; for, 
 cruel as I was in seeing through him, I loved 
 him all the more for his sweet naivete and 
 for his old, so old illusions about his mo- 
 tives. While as for being shocked at the 
 way he loved me, I've never been shocked by 
 anything but the vulgarity and the inde- 
 cencies of respectable people, who seem to 
 think that sex is purely a sort of indoor sport 
 to be indulged in darkness and behind barri- 
 caded doors, while it is really a setting for 
 the most beautiful Bacchanal that was ever 
 devised by the fairest and purest of God's 
 children. In spite of bibles and the Bishop 
 of London, Mary knew what she was about, 
 Dikran. Love doesn't grow anywhere, to be 
 picked up by the wayside. Pure beauty 
 grows only where beauty already is. . . . 
 
 "But, wise as I was, I didn't know what 
 to say; what could I say? He was waiting; 
 I had to say, do something. I did — flung 
 my arms round his neck and told him he was 
 a pet to be so nice to me, and that I must 
 think about it. For the first time that he 
 had wanted me to behave like a woman
 
 174 The London Venture 
 
 I behaved consciously like a child — it 
 seemed the easiest way out. And I think he 
 saw that I was acting ; he had expected some- 
 thing else, for he smiled very sadly down at 
 me, and patted my hair, saying I was a sweet 
 child not to be angry with him for making 
 life so suddenly serious, and then, very 
 gently, he went away, leaving me in the sun- 
 shine, a playmate of the gods. . . . And yet 
 I was so sorry for him that I almost cried 
 when I thought of him sitting alone and 
 lonely in his library. 
 
 "We never spoke of it again. At first it 
 was as though he was waiting for me to say 
 yes, or no, or something, but I didn't say 
 anything, and, later, he seemed to forget. 
 I didn't do ,it out of cruelty, my dear; I 
 simply couldn't say anything, that's all. 
 After sunshine, rain, you know; I was dis- 
 mal, frightened of him a little. The ro- 
 mance of that May morning when he had 
 come to me in my room had become a ridicu- 
 lous fantasy, so that it seemed to me that 
 any reference to it would rather tarnish the 
 very splendid dignity which he had kept, and 
 sort of increased, through it all. Besides,
 
 The London Venture 175 
 
 anyway, what was there to say? I had made 
 up my mind as he spoke that morning, 
 through all the clearness of my new-found 
 knowledge. I had never a doubt as to what 
 I was going to do. It wasn't in me to do 
 as he asked, or rather, as he advised, the old 
 dear! I wish it had been in me, for to be 
 a rich French marquise without a marquis is 
 no bad fate for any girl, and it might have 
 helped me to steer clear of many complica- 
 tions. But I couldn't, because all my life, 
 Dikran, I've been cursed by an utter inabil- 
 ity to make any money out of love. And 
 that is why I would never be a success in my 
 mother's country of America, where men 
 throw pearls and beauty roses about as a 
 matter of course and are very offended if 
 one suggests an economical flirtation on a 
 gross of diamonds and a hundredweight of 
 Russian sables. ... It isn't that I am 
 mean-minded, but I cannot take presents 
 from men who love me, for, after all, the old 
 Marquis' offer was a present. When I see 
 other women with relays of fur coats, and 
 pearl necklaces, and no visible means of 
 support, I am thoroughly sorry for myself,
 
 176 The London Venture 
 
 for it isn't through any excess of morals that 
 I haven't just as many furs and pearls; it is 
 simply because I don't see life that way, as, 
 ten years ago, I didn't see life as the wife of 
 an old man, whom I adored but didn't love, 
 and couldn't have thought of marrying him 
 even if he had promised to arrange for his 
 death an hour after the wedding. . . . Do 
 you understand, Dikran? For all this while 
 I've been trying to tell you that whatever 
 else I am not, I am an honest woman ; a very 
 upright gentleman in my way, which is more 
 than you can say for most really nice women. 
 "The reason why realistic tragedies are im- 
 possible, or at best only melodramatic, on the 
 stage is that the Person who arranges life has 
 no sense of drama at all. Imagine how Sar- 
 dou, the wretched man who turned Sarah 
 Bernhardt into an exhibition, would have 
 worked it out : the young girl would have run 
 away from the lustful old man to Nice; the 
 old man would have followed her to her 
 boarding-house and made faces at the land- 
 lady's fair-haired son, who was the girl's des- 
 tiny; a duel, tears, another duel, more tears, 
 and Sarah falling about the stage in ex-
 
 The London Venture 117 
 
 hausted attitudes, as well she might. . . . 
 And then imagine how life worked out the 
 tragedy of that girl and old man ; it let them 
 be, or it seemed to let them be! No, God 
 can have no dramatic sense, as we know it, 
 because all the tragedies He arranges for us 
 are slow-moving, so slow and moving none of 
 the actors know whither; perhaps this trag- 
 edy we are acting will fade away, they say 
 hopefully to themselves, and leave us again 
 happy and careless; a little later they are 
 happily sure that their tragedy is fading, 
 there is no possible climax in sight, and then 
 suddenly, out of the inmost earth, from some 
 really foul spot of their animal natures, come 
 the sudden ingredients for the tragical cli- 
 max; the climax lasts only a second, but 
 after it no blessed curtain falls ; God has in- 
 terfered again, Life is more cruel than Art, 
 He says, so away with your tricks, your cur- 
 tains and your finales. And I suppose He is 
 right, you know ; it must be right that shame- 
 ful memories live beside the beautiful ones, 
 as twenty years from now the memory of that 
 old man and myself will live beside this very 
 moment of you and I under this willow ; for
 
 178 The London Venture 
 
 my abundant confession of it all seems to 
 make it as much yours as mine, Dikran. 
 
 "My guardian and I lived on smoothly 
 enough, then ; as before I broke out now and 
 again when he stepped too sternly between 
 myself and an amusing indiscretion, but re- 
 bellions always ended in my smiling at some 
 cutting remark of his, and in his always sweet 
 dismissal of the subject; there was nothing 
 to show that we were different with each 
 other. But we were, indeed we were. I did 
 not know it then, but I knew it very clearly 
 later ; how we two people, really loving each 
 other, though in our different ways, had 
 found a deep, subtle antagonism in each 
 other, a very real antagonism, which it would 
 have shamed us to realise at the time, and 
 with a very real and inevitable climax; but 
 like God's creatures, mummers in yet another 
 of His cruelly monstrous plays, we thought 
 the tragedy was fading, had faded, and were 
 forgetting it, for what climax could there 
 possibly be 1 ? 
 
 "Four or five months after that May morn- 
 ing he took me to stay at a chateau in 
 Brittany; a very beautiful, tumble-down,
 
 The London Venture 179 
 
 draughty place, my dear, standing proudly at 
 the head of a valley like a dissipated actor 
 who feels that he must have done great things 
 in the past to be what he now is, and with 
 nothing to show for its draughty arrogance 
 but a few rakish stones which were once the 
 embattlement from which the Huguenot 
 seigneur of the day defied the old Medici; 
 and the slim, white-haired old woman who 
 charmingly met me at the door, the chatelaine 
 of only one castle, but with the dignity of an 
 empire in her kind, calm elegance. My host- 
 ess and my guardian were old, old friends, 
 and to watch them in their gentle, courteous 
 intimacy was a lesson on the perfect manage- 
 ment of such things. When we are old and 
 white-haired, will you come and stay at my 
 place, Dikran, and will you pretend that you 
 have forgotten that you ever liked me for 
 anything else than my mind? Just like those 
 two old people in the Breton chateau, who a 
 thousand years ago may have been lovers or 
 may have only loved one another. . . . Who 
 knows"? and does it matter? 
 
 "The idea of this visit, on my guardian's 
 part, to the solitary chateau from whose high-
 
 180 The London Venture 
 
 est windows one could just see the sea curl- 
 ing round the Breton coast, was of course ex- 
 cellent. He wanted me to be out of harm's 
 way and entirely his own, and was there any 
 better way of achieving that than by putting 
 me in a lonely chateau with only my hostess 
 as an alternative to himself? But, poor old 
 dear, it didn't fal 1 out like that; for we had 
 only been there two days when the alterna- 
 tive presented himself in the person of the 
 young man of the house, my hostess's son, 
 the young lord of Tumbledown Castle. . . . 
 He went and spoilt it all, good and proper, 
 did that young man. His mother hadn't ex- 
 pected him, my guardian didn't want him, 
 and I didn't mind him — there he was, all the 
 way from England on a sudden desire to see 
 his mother, the only woman whom Raoul 
 had ever a decent thought about, I suppose. 
 (His name wasn't really Raoul, you know, 
 but it is a sort of convention that all young 
 Frenchmen with the title of Vicomte and 
 with languid eyes and fragile natures are 
 called Raoul.) For he wasn't by any means 
 a nice young man, except facially, but how 
 was I to know that! And besides, the man
 
 The London Venture 181 
 
 could sit a horse as gallantly as any young 
 prince who ever went crusading, and I 
 strained my eyes in prolonging the little thrill 
 I had when, the morning after he came, I 
 saw him from a window riding out of the 
 gates and down into the valley, very much 
 the young lord of the manor, on the huge 
 white stallion which, with such a master, de- 
 fied a Republic and still proclaimed him as 
 the Sieur du Chateau-Mauvrai to the dour 
 and morose-minded peasants of the Breton 
 villages. . . . 
 
 "When I say that Raoul was not a nice 
 young man, I mean that he was a very agree- 
 able companion; but, like little Billee, in 
 'Trilby,' and Maurice, the stone-image of my 
 dreams, that poor young man couldn't love, 
 it wasn't in him to love ; but unlike the other 
 two, who were sweet about it and made up 
 for it as much as they could, Raoul had taken 
 it into his head that love was all stuff and 
 nonsense, anyway, and that he could do a 
 deal better with the very frequent and not 
 very fastidious pretences of it; and, accord- 
 ing to his little-minded lights, he seems to 
 have been right, for he had already done
 
 182 The London Venture 
 
 fairly well for himself in London — this I 
 found much later, of course — with a flat in 
 Mayfair which was much more consistent 
 with the various middle-aged ladies who 
 came to tea with him than with the extent of 
 his income. 
 
 "No reasonable person could expect that 
 a young man like that and I could stay in 
 the same house and no trouble come of it. 
 But my guardian wasn't reasonable. He 
 seemed still to expect me to go riding with 
 him, and let a perfectly good young man run 
 to waste for want of a companion to say 
 pretty things to. Raoul and I, in that beau- 
 tiful spot, were scarcely ever allowed to be 
 alone, and only twice did we manage to ride 
 away together to the sea for a delicious, ex- 
 citing few hours; only twice, I said, for the 
 second time was very definitely the last. . . . 
 Somehow the Marquis was always there. 
 Not in any unpleasant way, but he would 
 just happen to come into the room or the 
 particular corner of the large garden where 
 we also happened to be ; he didn't rebuke or 
 look sulky, he was just the same, except, 
 perhaps, for a little irony to Raoul, whom
 
 The London Venture 183 
 
 he refused to take seriously as a young man 
 of the world. And there is where the old 
 man made his mistake with me, for I, too, 
 didn't take Raoul seriously; I took him for 
 just what he was, more knave than fool, a 
 charming companion, and a very personable 
 young man, as far as being just 'personable' 
 counts, and only so far. If I had been al- 
 lowed to deal with the matter in my own 
 way, without let or hindrance, it would only 
 have been very pleasant trifling, and certainly 
 no more; even as it was, the 'no more' part 
 of it was still safe in my keeping, thanks en- 
 tirely to my having brought myself up prop- 
 erly; but for the rest a simple amusement 
 became a rather sordid tragedy, for God and 
 guardian had combined to use a common- 
 place young man as the climax to a faded 
 and forgotten little fantasy, once sun-kissed 
 by a May morning, now to be shivered and 
 scattered by the shrieking sea wind, discord- 
 ant chorus enough for the unmingled des- 
 tinies of any Tristans and Isoldas, which 
 kept forcing our horses apart on that last 
 morning of all, when we three rode by the 
 sea, and made a world of anger for our-
 
 184 The London Venture 
 
 selves because some one, something, had sud- 
 denly pushed us out of the other world where 
 we had been so careless and happy. . . . 
 
 "Once things happened, they happened 
 quickly. For all my not taking him at all 
 seriously, I suppose I liked him quite a lot, 
 really — I must have done, else I would not 
 have been such a fool. He was my first ex- 
 perience of dishonesty in man, and I sup- 
 pose I wanted to plumb this dishonesty of 
 his to the depths, which was very stupid of 
 me because he was much more likely to find 
 out about me than I about him. . . . Raoul 
 had been at the chateau two weeks, and our 
 little affair had taken the important and un- 
 pleasant air of a conspiracy. Our own stay 
 was to last another month, and if it hadn't 
 been that my guardian would not for the 
 world have offended his old friend by cutting 
 short this long-looked-for visit, he would very 
 soon have taken me away from the so dese- 
 crating gaze of young Raoul. 
 
 "On that day, towards evening, he and I 
 had managed to steal out walking for an 
 hour. Agreeable enough as he was, he would 
 have bored me if I had let him. But I
 
 The London Venture 185 
 
 wanted him, I intended to keep him in my 
 mind ; I wanted him as an assertion of my in- 
 dependence from the old man. As we went 
 back up the drive to the chateau I carefully 
 became as animated and smiling as I could, 
 for I knew that he would be watching us 
 from the drawing-room windows, and I 
 wanted to irritate him as much as his inces- 
 sant care was irritating me, though that 
 would have been impossible, for that eve- 
 ning I was absurdly, fiercely angry with 
 him. Life seemed made up of the interfer- 
 ences of old men. I didn't want old men 
 in my life. I wanted young men, and sun- 
 shine, and fun. And so, as Raoul and I 
 went up the steps to the massive door, and 
 as I turned to him just below the drawing- 
 room window and gave him my most trust- 
 ful smile, I was feeling reckless, unrestrained, 
 fiercely independent. . . . Oh, Dikran! 
 what idiocies we do for the fancied sake of 
 independence ! 
 
 "It was time to dress for dinner, so I left 
 Raoul and went straight to my room. A 
 minute later came a knock on the door, and 
 as I turned sharply from the mirror, it
 
 186 The London Venture 
 
 opened and Raoul stood there, rather shy, 
 smiling. I wasn't old enough to know the 
 proper way of dealing with young men in 
 one's bedroom, even if I had overpoweringly 
 wanted to. 
 
 " 'I had an impulse,' he said, but he still 
 stood in the doorway, a little question some- 
 where about him. I didn't answer it; just 
 watched him, rather interested in his meth- 
 ods. 
 
 " 'Because,' he went on, 'I used to sleep in 
 this room once, and remember it as a dreary 
 little place, and I wanted to see what it 
 looked like with you in it.' Poor silly fool, 
 I thought, but rather loved him. I have 
 found since then, though, that his fatuous 
 speech was quite the proper one to make, for 
 the established way of entering a woman's 
 room is by expressing an interest in the fur- 
 niture, thus making the lady self-conscious 
 and not so sure about her dignity; seduc- 
 tions are successful through women fearing 
 to look fools if they refuse to be seduced. 
 
 "But this time, as he spoke, he closed the 
 door behind him and came into the room to-
 
 The London Venture 187 
 
 wards me. 'This isn't playing fair, Raoul,' 
 I only said ; 'you will get me into a row.' 
 
 " 'Fair !' he said, lifting his eyebrows, the 
 gallant ass. 'My sweet, do you think any- 
 thing real is fair in this world 4 ? And don't 
 you trust me? That isn't fair of you, you 
 know — haven't I made love to you for two 
 weeks, haven't I loved you for two weeks, 
 haven't I loved you all my life — and 
 now ?' And with that he had me in his arms, 
 not for the first time, mind you, but this time 
 very differently; and, over his shoulder, as 
 he held me, I saw the door open, and the 
 Marquis stood there, outraged. Raoul didn't 
 seem to know, still held me, and I, for a 
 paralysed moment, couldn't move, just stared 
 at the old man standing very stiffly in the 
 doorway, a hand outstretched on the door- 
 knob — hell seemed to have opened for him 
 through that door, and he could move as 
 little as I. At last I jumped away from 
 Raoul with a sort of cry, and he turned 
 quickly round to the door. He didn't go 
 pale, or look a fool; he must have made a 
 study of such contretemps ; nothing was said,
 
 188 The London Venture 
 
 the old man waiting in the doorway, with 
 words terribly smothered; he moved aside a 
 little from the door as though to let a dog 
 slink through. But Raoul wasn't going to 
 slink; he was rather pink, negligent, re- 
 signed; and as, without the least hurry, he 
 bent over my fingers and his eyes smiled 
 gently at me, I found myself admiring him, 
 really loving him for the first time. Women 
 are like that. . . . All this, of course, had 
 happened in less than a minute; from point 
 of time my guardian came into my room 
 and Raoul left it — but in point of fact a 
 great deal happened. For, as Raoul left me 
 and walked across the room to the door, and 
 through it without taking the least notice of 
 the old man, and as I heard his even steps 
 receding down the parquet corridor, my first 
 paralysed fear simmered in me and boiled up 
 into a fierce, vixen anger. I simply trem- 
 bled now with anger at the old man as I 
 had first trembled with fear of him. What 
 right had he to be standing there, ordering 
 about my life and my young men? What 
 right had he to be closing the door, as he was 
 doing now 1 ? What right, what right? The
 
 The London Venture 189 
 
 words were throbbing inside me, just those 
 words, fixed unrestrainedly on the old man, 
 who had made a step towards me, and 
 stopped again. . . . 
 
 " 'Child!' the pain in that one word, the 
 lack of anger in it, an utter, absolute pain 
 accusing me, did not soothe. Accuse me? 
 By what right? 
 
 "The scene was dreadful, Dikran. I can't 
 tell you what we said, what I said, for I did 
 most of the scene-making. He just forbade 
 me to talk again alone with Raoul or to go 
 out with him; said he would take me away 
 to-morrow if it weren't that explanations 
 would then be necessary to our hostess, who 
 was in feeble health and might be killed by 
 such a disgrace as this in her own house. As 
 for Monsieur le Vicomte, he himself would 
 arrange that I did not see him for longer 
 time than could be helped. That's all he 
 said, but my white heat took little notice of 
 his commands. I said I don't know what — 
 it must all have been terrible, for it ended 
 on a terrible note. Dikran, how could I 
 have done it? I pointed at the door and 
 asked him how he could think he had more
 
 190 The London Venture 
 
 right in my room than Raoul, for though he 
 was my guardian our relations had been 
 changed by a certain proposal, which per- 
 haps he remembered. ... A look at me, in 
 which was the first and last contempt that's 
 ever been given me, and the door closed on 
 the wonderful old man. 
 
 "Dinner that night passed off quite well 
 considering the unsettled climatic conditions 
 aforesaid. Myself didn't contribute much, 
 but my guardian and Raoul talked smoothly 
 away about anything that came, while 
 Madame, our hostess, smiled sweetly at us 
 all, on brooding me in particular. . . . Quite 
 early I made for bed; the old man and I 
 hadn't exchanged a word all evening, and his 
 'good night' was a little bow, and mine cold. 
 As I passed Raoul he cleverly put a small 
 piece of paper into my hand. Upstairs in 
 my room, that piece of paper said that he 
 would be going away in a day or two, and 
 would I ride with him to-morrow morning 
 before breakfast, at seven o'clock. Of course 
 I would. 
 
 "It was all a silly business, Dikran. If I 
 had ever been in love with Raoul, I certainly
 
 The London Venture 191 
 
 wasn't that morning when we rode away 
 from the gloomy, silent chateau, a little 
 frightened by our own bravado; for that is 
 all it was. But later, as we reached the 
 sands, I forgot that, I forgot Raoul, though 
 of course he always talked; I was enjoying 
 the horse under me, the summer morning, 
 the high sea wind dashing its salt air against 
 my cheeks; I was enjoying every one of those 
 things more than the company of the young 
 man, but, tragically, my guardian could not 
 know that. 
 
 "We had been out about half an hour 
 when Raoul, looking back over his shoulder, 
 murmured, 'Ah!' 'What is it 4 ?' I asked. I 
 could barely force my little voice through 
 the wind. 'That old man,' Raoul said indif- 
 ferently. 'It seems that he too is out to take 
 the salt air.' Yes, there was a figure on 
 horseback, perhaps half a mile behind us 
 but rapidly gaining on our slow canter. I 
 had forgotten my anger, but now again it 
 thrust itself viciously on me. 
 
 " 'Come on, let's give him a run,' I said, 
 a little excitedly. 
 
 " 'Oh, no ! I am not a baby to be chased
 
 192 The London Venture 
 
 about by my own guests or other people's 
 grandfathers !' 
 
 "Affected idiot, I thought, and we rode 
 on in silence. So really silly it all was, my 
 dear; for if it hadn't been for my anger, the 
 natural reaction, in a way, of the muffled 
 life I had led with him, I had much sooner 
 been riding with the old man than with the 
 young one. But that feeling didn't last long 
 — no one gave it a chance to last. For at 
 last, after what seemed an age, his horse 
 drew beside mine, and I heard his voice dis- 
 tantly through the wind, saying, 'Sandra! 
 You must come back.' I didn't answer, but 
 worse, I looked sideways at him and laughed. 
 It was the first time that I had ever seen him 
 in the least bit ridiculous, and my laugh took 
 advantage of it. Raoul was a yard or so 
 ahead of us and was giving his horse rein, 
 and so I put mine to the gallop — and 
 heigh-ho! there were the three of us racing 
 away on the Breton sands — until, with won- 
 derful and dangerous horsemanship, my 
 guardian's horse leapt a yard or so ahead and 
 swung broadside round in front of our 
 startled horses. Near as anything there were
 
 The London Venture 193 
 
 broken collar-bones. Our horses reared high 
 up, almost fell backwards, nearly braining 
 the old man with their frantic hoofs, and 
 then at last took the ground, startled and 
 panting. My guardian didn't wait. He 
 pointed his whip at Raoul and said sternly, 
 'If I were not a guest at your mother's house 
 I would thrash you, for that is what you 
 need' ; and then to me, harshly, 'Come, San- 
 dra. Enough of this nonsense. Home/ 
 
 " 'Not 1/ I cried against the wind. 'I'm 
 enjoying my ride.' And round his horse I 
 went, towards the sea, leaving them to their 
 argument. I almost wanted him to follow 
 me, I was so bitterly angry. I don't know 
 what I thought I would do — but I suppose 
 I didn't think. 
 
 "I must have galloped two hundred yards 
 or so when he was beside me again. I took 
 no notice; we rode on, almost knee to knee. 
 And then I saw his hand stretch out, clutch 
 my rein, and pull ; I saw red, I saw nothing, 
 or just his old, lined face bending over . . . 
 and, my dear, I swung my riding-whip as 
 hard as I could across it. The hand left my 
 rein, but my horse had already been pulled
 
 194 The London Venture 
 
 up. I don't remember what happened. I 
 stared at him as unbelievingly as he stared at 
 me. I seemed to see a weal across his face, 
 where my whip had struck him — had I done 
 that? And then he smiled. Dikran, that 
 dear old man smiled after that horrible in- 
 sult, so sweetly and sadly. 
 
 " 'That then is the end, my child/ he said 
 very gently; and then he left me, and for a 
 long time I watched him as he rode slowly 
 away. Frightfully ashamed. 
 
 "It was done, irretrievably; such things 
 can't be forgiven, except in words; and as 
 far as words went he, of course, forgave me. 
 A few hours later I saw him in the hall; he 
 was going to pass me, but suddenly I flung 
 my arms about him, begging him . . . very 
 pitiful, dreadful thing I was. He was splen- 
 did. He said very softly into my ear that of 
 course he forgave me, but that he was too 
 old to have a proper control over his mem- 
 ory, and so couldn't forget, and that he was 
 too old to be hurt any more, and so this 
 would be the very last time, for he didn't 
 think it would be wise for me to live with
 
 The London Venture 195* 
 
 him any more. 'Sandra, m}' child, you must 
 not think me too unkind for sending you 
 away, but I think it is the best plan. You 
 have lived with an old man long enough — 
 it was a mistake. I see now that it was a 
 mistake. You must forgive me, child. I 
 was wrong to keep you so long. I thought, 
 perhaps, it might have been different. . . .' 
 He was inexorable about that, and it wasn't 
 my place to, I couldn't, beg him to keep me. 
 I, who had hurt him so much ! 
 
 "He must have made some excuse to our 
 hostess, for the next day saw us in Paris. 
 Raoul*? Oh, I never noticed him any more. 
 And two days later I was with a stodgy uncle 
 in Portman Square, hating London but 
 hating myself more. I have been miserable 
 many times, but never so shamefacedly as 
 then, during the two weeks which passed be- 
 tween my arrival in London and the coming 
 of that note from the old man's valet, saying 
 that Monsieur le Marquis was very ill, and 
 the doctor said he would die; and so he had 
 taken the liberty of writing to me, without 
 permission, in case I should like to go and
 
 196 The London Venture 
 
 see him; would I be so kind as not to tell 
 Monsieur le Marquis that he had written to 
 me? 
 
 "Like a young woman to a dying lover, I 
 went to Paris, and with a terrible flutter in 
 my heart stood on the doorstep of the stern- 
 looking house in the R ue Colbert. . . . They 
 hadn't told him I was coming, but he must 
 have expected me, for there was no surprise 
 in the smile with which he met the timid 
 little figure which came into his room. He 
 seemed to me not ill, but just dying; he 
 looked the same, only very tired. And then 
 I realised that he was dying because he 
 wanted to die. An angry girl had shown 
 him that life was indeed not worth living, 
 and so he was stopping his heart with his 
 own hand. ... It was terrible to realise 
 that as I stood by his bed and he smiled quite 
 gaily up at me. The weakness was too 
 strong inside him, and he couldn't speak, just 
 patted my hand and held it very tightly. 
 ... I was very glad when I was out of that 
 room, and I did not see him again before he 
 died early the next morning. 
 
 "And so you see, Dikran, for all your talk
 
 The London Venture 197 
 
 of dies ir<z in the future, I've already had 
 my dies ir<z^ and very sadly, too — and been 
 the wiser for it in restraint." 
 
 • « • • • 
 
 Then it was that I realised with a start 
 that my housemaid was staring at me from 
 the door in the grey March morning, and 
 that I was not listening to Shelmerdene in 
 a backwater of the Thames, but was in Lon- 
 don, where there is less time for cherishing 
 one's ideals than for enquiring into other 
 people's. . . . 
 
 THE END
 
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