Part 4 (1/2)
_The London Venture_: IX
[Ill.u.s.tration]
IX
Somewhere 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 conviction (after the fas.h.i.+on of all the bitterest young men), that I must have been as detestable 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 pa.s.sed, 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 complicated 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 panorama in which discoveries were continually made, leaving yet more hidden valleys of discoveries still to be made--and to be enjoyed! So much and much more, O unbeliever, 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 instance 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 company. 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 the fanatical Puritans of New England, and the name seems to suit you because in New England they would have treated you exactly 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 understand, but vaguely felt was as much an expression 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 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 certainly 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 forgetting England. Terrible, because it must be wrong to forget one's country, seeing how you oppressed nationalities go on remembering 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 certain 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 chuckling to itself in its hard-earned wisdom, as though to say that since G.o.d 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 G.o.d! It is a corrupt 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 defences, 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 G.o.ddesses 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 perhaps 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 emotion....”
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 sleepless bed; and so I sat on in my chair, drawing my overcoat round me for warmth, and smoked many cigarettes. I felt very old indeed, for was not that letter the echo of a long-dead experience, and are not long-dead experiences the peculiar property of old men?
[Ill.u.s.tration]
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 and kindliness and devilry of the arrogant West. I could not see her as she described herself, happy, meditative, wise in contentment.... 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 middle-aged.... No, that letter conjured up no perfect vision of her in the East, except that I saw her, melodramatically perhaps, 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 coming 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 letter, 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 when she wrote it, that the word had a context, 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 Berks.h.i.+re downs across the river.”
”Oh, we can't do that,” I said; ”Guy Hartshorn is such a stiffnecked a.s.s and his wife is dull enough to spoil any river--”
”Tolerance, my dear, is what you lack,” she said; ”tolerance and a proper understanding of the relation between a stiffnecked a.s.s 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 encouragement 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 racing punt down the river, you will learn more about punting and the reason why Englishmen 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 afternoon, after lunch, our chance came, and Shelmerdene 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 woman who lay facing me against the pale green cus.h.i.+ons of the Hartshorn punt, steeped in the happy suns.h.i.+ne 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 challenged her to say if she did not know of better ways of spending the whole glorious time between dinner and midnight than by playing 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 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 restraint, 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 backwater, and moored by a willow which let through just enough sun to speck Shelmerdene's dress with bright arabesques.
I changed my seat for the cus.h.i.+ons and lay full length in front of Shelmerdene, but it was as though she had become part of the 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 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 unacceptable 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 writing, for literature is the natural raw material which every man secretes within himself, but 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, something 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, forgetting 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 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 pa.s.sed for life at old Versailles.
But the world has grown out of that and does things much better now, for gallantry 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.