The London Venture Read online

  VI

  From my flat in Monday Road to Piccadilly Circus was a long way, and thefirst part of it wearisome enough through the Fulham Road, with itscancer and consumption hospitals, its out-of-the-centre dinginess, itsthrifty, eager-looking, dowdy women, and its decrepit intellectualsslouching along with their heads twisted over their shoulders lookingback for a bus, on the top of which they will sit with an air of grievedand bitter dislike of the people near them. But at Hyde Park Corner Iwould get off the bus, for I have a conventional fondness forPiccadilly, 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 chaoticnoises, and in winter because I like nothing better than to look atleaf-stripped trees standing nakedly against a grey sky, finger-posts ofNature pointing to the real No-Man's Land, and illustrating themiraculous 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 shoeswith heels of stained majolica, have an aim and a purpose. They lack thefutility, of which Nature alone has the secret, of being just carelesslybeautiful. When I say Nature, I do not see the Dame Nature of OscarWilde's crooked vision, a crude, slatternly charwoman, but a spendthriftprodigal, spending for the sheer love of spending; he takes every man bythe sleeve, and with delicious good manners he makes it seem that hevalues your opinion above all others, that he has created the beauty ofthe world to please in particular your eye, that you will sadlydisappoint him if you hint that you hadn't much liked the tinge ofvermilion in yestreen's sunset, for he had touched in that vermilionjust to give you a pleasant surprise.

  Thus it is with Nature and myself; I see him as an old beau, given toleering in cities, but frank and natural in open places. And he knows mewell, too; knows I am no minor poet, no poet at all, in fact, and,therefore, not to be gulled by insincere sunsets and valleys withoutshade or colour; that the idea of a fawn skipping about where I don'texpect him, far from causing in me a metrical paroxysm after Mr. RobertNichols, frankly bores me; he has shown me an odd nymph here and there,but I haven't encouraged him.... They are so intangible, I thought, andthey faded away. So at last, in desperation, he stuck up a naked treeagainst a grey sky, and I thought it beautiful. It is a matter entirelybetween the old beau and myself. For all I care, you may think mystripped tree a stupid old tree, but to me it is beautiful. I see lifethat way.

  But the day I am thinking of, when I got off the bus at Hyde ParkCorner, was towards the end of October, when oysters have already becomea commonplace; and as I walked up the Green Park side, the path aroundme was strewn with brown and red and faded green leaves, the lastsacrifice of autumn to winter. I wondered why all things did not die asbeautifully and as naturally as autumn dies. If all things died likethat, there would be no fear in the world, and a world without fearwould be just a splendid adventure, and life would be like chasing asunset to the Antipodes--it would disappear only to appear again, morewonderfully.

  But the fear of the shapeless bogey behind existence has been thepeculiar gift of God; for so long He has chosen to be secretive aboutdeath, and the secret of it is in the eating of the last remaining appleon the Tree of Knowledge. But, O God, it is all a vain secrecy, thisabout death. Man was not made to be so easily satisfied. Education mayhave made him ignorant, but he was born inquisitive. Some day, some day,a more subtle and less solid Conan Doyle will arise, and valiantly catcha too indiscreet ancestral ghost, and holloa to a professor to X-ray hisastral vitals, to find out by what means and processes came a living manto be a dead man and then an ancestral ghost. Their discoveries willthen be written down in the form of a memoir and made into a fat book,complete with a spiritual preface and an astral index, and will cause agreat stir in the world. But it will be a great shame on the Tree ofKnowledge 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 fanatichermit, sitting alone in his desert place, should be tolerant of theworld's frailty. If such an one would let me, a worldly enough youngman, approach him, I would tell him of the great joys there is inwalking with a loved woman on crisp wind-blown leaves, under countrytrees, with tea soon to be ready before a big fire in the househalf-a-mile away. At that my hermit would look at me angrily, for afleshly young man indeed, but I would go on to tell him of how there isno splendour anywhere like to the splendour of a youth's dreams at thatquiet time; dreams that may be of a palace made of dead leaves, withterraced pleasure gardens fashioned out of autumn air, in which he wouldwalk with his mistress, and be a king and she a queen of more than oneworld....

  As though for the first time, I noticed that afternoon a sheen of lividcopper over the scattered leaves, and I said to myself that it was anundefinable addition to their beauty, like the sheen of blue in the darkhair of Shelmerdene, as she sat in the corner of a sofa under aLiberty-shaded lamp.

  The passing thought of Shelmerdene fixed my attention through the Parkrailings on the prostrate figures here and there of men sleeping, for itwas a very mild afternoon for late October. Sleep was her foible, thehobby-horse on which she would capriciously ride to heights of unreasonwhither no man could follow her and remain sane. She admitted that sheherself had, occasionally, to sleep; but she apologised for it, resentedthe necessity. And, as I walked, I saw a sleeping, dejected figure toonear the Park railings as though with her eyes, and was as disgusted.But I smiled at the memory of her wild flights of mythical reasoning.

  "The mistake Jehovah made," I heard her saying, "was to teach Adam andEve that it was pleasanter and more comfortable to lie and sleep on thesame well-worn spot in Eden every night than to move about the Gardenand venture new resting-places. It was a great mistake, for it gavesleep a definite and important value, it became something to be soughtfor in a special and comfortable place. Sleep ceased to be a carelesslapse, as it had been at first when Adam madly chased the shadow ofLilith through the twilight. In the company of Eve sleep was no more astate for the tired body, and only for the body, but it became a thingof the senses; so many hours definitely and defiantly flung as a sop toTime. Sleep became part of the business of life, whereas, in those firstcareless days of Adam's unending pursuit of Lilith, it had been onlypart 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 amother,' sleep, as we know it, would never have happened; unnecessary,gluttonous sleep, the mind-sleep!

  "Lilith was a real woman, and very beautiful. She was the first andgreatest and most mysterious of all courtesans--as, indeed, the devil'smistress would have to be, or lose her job. She must have had the eyesof a Phoenix, veiled and secret, but their secret was only the secret oflove and danger--Danger! Jehovah never had a chance against Lucifer, whowas, 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 beenthinking when he wrote 'Faustine,' which silly fools of men haveaddressed to me.... Of course, she chose Lucifer. Who wouldn't choose adashing young rebel, a splendid failure if ever there was one, with aname like Lucifer, as compared to a darling, respectable, anxious oldman called Jehovah? It's like asking a young woman to choose betweenByron and Tolstoi ..."

  But Shelmerdene had long since gone, to play at life and make fools ofmen; to make men, to break men, they said of her, and leave them in thedust, grovelling arabesques on the carpet of their humiliated love. "Letthem be, let them be in peace," I had said to her impatiently, but shehad turned large, inquiring, serious eyes on me, and answered, "I wantto find out." She had, indeed, gone "to find out"--to Persia, they said,on a splendid, despairing chase. And I saw a vision of her there, butnot as the proud, beautiful creature who filled and emptied a man's lifeas though for a caprice; I saw her on her knees in a ruined pagan templeon a deserted river bank, purified, and satisfied, and tired, entreatingthe spectre of t
he monstrous goddess, Ishtar, to let her cease from thequest of love ... I am so tired, she is saying to the nebulous goddesswho has fashioned the years of her life into a love-tale. But who isShelmerdene to beg a favour from Ishtar, who, in the guise of Astarte inSyria and Astaroth in Canaan, upset the gods and households of greatpeoples and debauched their minds, so that in later ages they were fitfor nothing but to be conquered and to serve Rome and Byzantium asconcubines and eunuchs?

  Poor, weak Shelmerdene! Slave of Ishtar! Didn't you know, when, as ayoung girl, you set yourself, mischievously but seriously, "to find out"about men and life, that you would never be able to stop, that you wouldgo on and on, even from Mayfair to Chorasan? You should have known. Youhave been so wantonly blind, Shelmerdene. You have idealised to-morrowand forgotten to-day--and now, perhaps, you are on your knees in aruined temple in the East, begging favours of Ishtar. Not she to grantyou a favour! Trouble has always come to the world from such as she, amalignant goddess. It has been said that Semiramis conquered the world,and Ishtar set it on fire....

  _The London Venture_: VII