The London Venture Page 4

  IV

  But there was once a month of November, about which I could not sograndly say that I would not like to spend it in London; for somethinghappened which threw me in a great hurly-burly of change into anuncomfortable 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 ina scrubby corner of the Sahara on a dusty day. My father had diedsuddenly, and what little question there was of my ever going intobusiness now dropped away, so I had to make at least a pretence ofearning my living, or, rather, of making a career for myself. I was verydefinite about this, that I must _do something, be something_: for I hadlearnt this much of the world, that there is no room in it for casualcomers, that a man must have a background (any background will do, butthe more individual the better); that there is no room in any partsoever of the social scale for a man who is just nothing at all; and asI have never seriously contemplated living exclusively in the company oflandladies and their friends, I saw that I must put my back into it andcease being a very insignificant _rentier_. I couldn't bear the idea ofgoing through life as just a complacent Armenian in a world wheremillions and millions of others were trying honestly and otherwise toclimb up the greasy pole of respectable attainment.

  But I cannot resist saying what I think of Monday Road, though I am sureI can do it no harm, because better men than I must have hated it, andmore virulently. Monday Road, like all the other roads which sink theirmutual differences into the so dreary Fulham Road, consists of large,equal-faced houses stuck together in two opposite rows which areseparated by about fifteen yards or so of second-hand Tarmac; a roadlike another, you will mildly say, but you cannot possibly realise itsdismal grimness if you have not lived there. The people who live in theangular-faced houses are artists who believe in art for art's sake--elsethey wouldn't be forced to live in the dismalest street in theworld--amateur intellectuals like myself, and various sorts of women.The tribe of organ-grinders have a great weakness for Monday Road,probably because some tactless ass has stuck up a notice there that"Barrel-organs are prohibited," which is a silly thing to say if youcan't enforce it. Altogether it is the sort of road in which a "spinsterlady" might at any moment lock her door, close her windows, turn on thegas, and read a novel to death. A woman in the flat next to mine didthat a week after I arrived, and I have never viewed death moresympathetically.

  When men grow old they are apt to discover pleasant memories attachedeven to the worst periods, as they thought them at the time, of theirlives. I am not very old as yet, but looking back calmly on the eighteenmonths I spent in South Kensington, I can find here and there, throughan exaggerated cloud of depression and wretchedness, a pleasant memorysmiling reprovingly at me; as though, perhaps, I should not betreacherous to the good hours God or my luck had given me.... And therewas one moment of them all, when, in the first darkness of an earlyautumn night, a dim slight figure stood mysteriously on my doorstep, andI blinked childishly at it because I did not know who the figure was norhow it had come there--if indeed it had come at all, and I had notdreamed 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 hervoice, for I could not see her face which was hidden in the high furcollar of an evening cloak. She looked so mysterious that I didn't wantto remember where I had seen her.

  "I simply can't bear it," she said nervously, "if you don't remember me.I'll go away." And she turned her head quickly to the gates where therestood the thick dark shape of a taxi which I had somehow not seenbefore, else I would have known for certain that she was not a fairy, aLilith fairy, but just a woman; a nice woman who takes life at aventure, I decided, and said abruptly: "Don't go."

  When we were upstairs in my sitting-room and I could see her by thelight of eight candles, I remembered her perfectly well, though I hadonly seen her once before. We had met at some tiresome bridge party sixmonths before, but just incidentally, and without enough interest oneither side to carry the conversation beyond the tepid limits of oursurroundings. And as I had never once thought of her since I had shakenmyself free of them, I couldn't imagine how on earth she had known myaddress or even remembered my name, which she didn't dare try topronounce, 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 samepeople, except that you were not there--and I remembered you onlysuddenly, as something missing from the room. I didn't remember youbecause of anything you said, but because you had been the worst bridgeplayer in the room, and had the most unscrupulous brown eyes that everadvised a flapper to inhale her cigarette smoke, as it was no use hersmoking if she didn't. And thinking about you among those people whoseemed more dreary than ever to-night, I had a silly homesick feelingabout you as though we were comrades in distress, whereas I didn't evenknow your name properly and never shall if you don't somehow make it apresentable one.

  "So I turned the conversation to Armenians in general, which is an easything to do, because you have only to murmur the word 'massacre' and theconnection is obvious, isn't it? Of course that sent that dear old snob,Mrs. ----, off like mad, saying what bad luck it was for you being anArmenian, because you could so nicely have been anything else, and evena Montenegrin would have been a better thing to be; how surprised shehad been when she met you, she told us, for she had always had a vagueidea that Armenians were funny little old men with long hooked noses andgreasy black hair, who hawked carpets about on their backs, andinvariably cheated people, even Jews and Greeks....

  "But you are quite English and civilised really, aren't you? I mean youdon't think that, just because I managed to wrangle out your address andcame here on impulse, I want to stay with you or anything like that, doyou?"

  As she said that, I suddenly thought of Lord Dusiote's gallant villainyin Meredith's poem, and I told her quickly how a whole Court had beenlovesick for a young princess, but Lord Dusiote had laughed, heart-free,and said:

  "I prize her no more than a fling of the dice, But oh, shame to my manhood, a lady of ice, We master her by craft!"

  "But I seem to remember that my Lord Dusiote came to a bad end," shelaughed at me.

  "Not so bad an end--it must have been worth it. And at least he died fora mistake, which is better than living on one:

  "'All cloaked and masked, with naked blades, That flashed of a judgment done, The lords of the Court, from the palace-door, Came issuing forth, bearers four, And flat on their shoulders one.'"

  But Lord Dusiote's gallant death left her quite cold, for she wassuddenly by the bookcase, running caressing fingers over a binding hereand there.

  "What perfectly divine books you have! I shall read them all, and giveup Ethel M. Dell for good--but you are probably one of those stuffypeople who 'take care' of their books and never lend them to any onebecause they are first editions or some such rubbish."

  "You can have them all," I said, "and you can turn up the corner ofevery page if you like, and you can spill tea on every cover or you canuse them as table props, because all these books from Chaucer to Paterare absolute nonsense at this moment, for in not one of them is thereanything about a dark-haired young woman with blue eyes and a tentativemouth, and the indolent caress of a Latin ancestress somewhere in hervoice, standing on a doorstep in a dingy road, calling on a man whomight quite easily be a murderer, for all you know."

  But enough of that, for the situation of a young man and a young womanin a third-floor flat miles away from anywhere that mattered, at eleveno'clock on such a warm autumn night as makes all things seem unreal andbeautiful, is a situation with a beard on it, so to speak.

  When I first knew Phyllis, though always candid, she was inclined to berather "county," the sort of woman "whose people are all Service people,you know"; she lived with her mother, near Chester S
quare, who at firstdisliked me because I was not in the Brigade of Guards, but later grewquite pleasantly used to me since I, unlike the Brigade of Guards, itseems, did at least acknowledge my habitual presence in her house byemptying Solomon's glory into her flower vases; and if there's a betterreason than gratitude for getting into debt, tell it to me, please.

  But Phyllis, like many another good woman of these Liberal times, turnedher bored back on "county," and only remembered what was "done" thebetter not to do it; fought for, and won a latchkey; asserted her rightto come home at night as late as she pleased, and _how_ she pleased--forshe 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 "tiredbones," and which, in cumbrously dropping her at mother's door, woke upthe whole street. And I can so well imagine Phyllis, as she fitted inher latchkey, murmuring, languidly, but without much conviction, "Whatfun 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 acouple of absinthe cocktails before each meal, and sex too much asthough it were entirely a joke, which it isn't ... quite. She cut herhair short, and took to saying "damn" more often than was strictlynecessary. In fact, she would have been quite unbearable if she hadn'tbeen pretty, which she delightfully was. And, unlike her more carelesssisters of Chelsea, Hampstead, and Golders' Green, she did not make theterrible mistake of dressing all anyhow, or make a point of being ableto "put up with anything"; such as, sleeping on studio floors after aparty, in such a way as to collect the maximum amount of candle greaseand 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 sortof blouses which don't quite make two ends meet at the back, andcarrying queer handbags made, perhaps, out of the sole of a Red Indian'sthreadbare moccasin.... Bohemians indeed, but without so much as a "Bo"anywhere about them!

  They can "stand anything," as they have let it be generally known. But,by dressing like freaks and by being able to stand anything, they havedetracted considerably from their attraction for men; for freaks arewell enough in freak-land but look rather silly in the world as itis--which is the world that matters, after all; and what the devil isthe good of being polite and making a fuss of a woman if she tells yourepeatedly that she can "stand anything," and much prefers the feelingof 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 inSouth Kensington seemed so overpoweringly dismal, and that even now itis only time which lends a real pleasure to the memory of the tall, dimfigure (Mr. Charles Garvice would have called her "sylph-like." I wish Iwere Mr. Garvice) which stood on my doorstep on an autumn night, and somysteriously asked for me. For that beginning had a dreary end, asindeed all endings are dreary if the silken cord is not swiftly andsharply cut, thus leaving a neat and wonderful surprise, instead of thelong-drawn ending of frayed edges and worn-out emotions which drivequite nice young men into a premature cynicism of dotage.

  For we very soon tired of each other, and began to slip away into ourdifferent lives with a great deal of talk about our "wonderfulfriendship"; though we both of us knew very well that there is nothingleft to eat in an empty oyster, and nothing to talk about on a desertisland except how deserted it is, and nothing to look forward to whenyou have too quickly reached _Ultima Thule_ but to get as quickly backagain and examine your bruises--but he is a coward who hasn't enoughkick left in him to begin again and repeat his mistake, for though twowrongs may not make a right, three or four mistakes of this sort docertainly make a man.... So we both set out to get back again, but notas quickly as possible, because Phyllis is a woman, and, perhaps, I amby way of having a few manners left--and, therefore, we had to take thelongest way back; and were both very tired and bored with each otherwhen at last I suddenly left her one night after dinner at her house athalf-past nine, because I had a headache--"my dear, aspirin isn't anygood, 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 tomarry a nice fat baronet, a real, not a Brummagem one, and not so muchbecause of his money, but because of his nice, solid, middle-classideas, which would help to tone down hers. Phyllis was like that, andI've often wondered very much about that wretched baronet, whether hewill tone her down, or whether she will persuade him to open a hat shopoff Bond Street in aid of a "bus conductors'" orphanage.

  Phyllis, Phyllis, you really can't go through life with half a coldgrouse in one hand and a pint of Cliquot '04 in the other. There areother things ... so they say.

 

  _The London Venture_: V