The London Venture

by Michael Arlen

  VII

  I asked her once, but long after I had realised that loving Shelmerdenecould not be my one business in life, if she did not feel thatperhaps--I was tentative--she would some day be punished. "But how youngyou are!" she said. "You don't really think I am a sort of ZuleikaDobson, do you?--just because one wretched man once thought it worthwhile to shoot himself because of me, and just because men have thatpeculiar form of Sadism which makes them torture themselves throughtheir 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 thelast 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 themfarther away from me--or from any woman, for the matter of that. Butthey 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 andunder. I am so frightfully impressionable....

  "You see," she touched my arm, "I am rather a quick person. I mean Ifall in love, or whatever you call my sort of emotion, quickly. Whilethe man is just beginning to think that I've got rather nice eyes, andthat I'm perhaps more amusing than the damfool women he's known so far,I'm frantically in love. I do all my grovelling then. And, Dikran! ifyou could only see me, if you could only be invisible and see me lovinga man more than he loves me--you simply wouldn't know me. And I makelove awfully well, in my quiet sort of way, much better than anyman--and different love-speeches to every different man, too! I say thedivinest things to them--and quite seriously, thank God! The day I can'tfall in love with a man seriously, and tell him he's the only man I'veever _really_ loved, and _really_ believe it when I'm saying it--the dayI can't do that I shall know I'm an old, old woman, too old to live anymore."

  "Then, of course, you will die?" I suggested.

  "Of course I will die," she said. "But not vulgarly--I mean I won't makea point of it, and feel a fat coroner's eyes on my body as my soul goesup to Gabriel. I shall die in my bed, of a broken heart. My heart willbreak when I begin to fade. I shall die before I have faded...."

  "No, you won't, Shelmerdene," I said. "Many women have sworn that, fromTheodosia to La Pompadour, but they have not died of broken heartsbecause they never realised when they began to fade, and no man everdared tell them, not even a Roi Soleil."

  "Oh, don't be pedantic, Dikran, and don't worry me about what otherwomen will or won't do. You will be quoting the 'Dolly Dialogues' at menext, and saying 'Women will be women all the world over.'

  "It is always like that about me and men," she said. "I burn and burnand fizzle out. And all the time the man is wondering if I am playingwith him or not, if it is worth his while to fall in love with me ornot--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 hadlonged for him to say four weeks before; every Englishman in love issimply bound to say, at one time or another, that he would adore to liewith his beloved in a gondola in Venice, looking at the stars; anyEnglishman who doesn't say that when he is in love is a suspiciouscharacter, and it will probably turn out that he talks French perfectly.

  "And when at last he has fallen in love," she said dreamily, "he wantsme to run away with him, and he is very hurt and surprised when Irefuse, and pathetically says something 'about my having led him toexpect that I loved him to death, and would do anything for or withhim.' The poor little man doesn't know that he is behind the times, thathe could have done anything he liked with me the first week we met, whenI was madly in love with him, that when I was dying for him to ask me togo away with him, and would gladly have made a mess of my life at oneword from him--but four weeks later I would rather have died than goaway with him.

  "Only once," she said, "I was almost beaten. I fell in love with a stonefigure. Women are like sea-gulls, they worship stone figures.... I wentvery mad, Dikran. He told me that he didn't deserve being loved byme--he admired me tremendously, you see--because he hadn't it in hispoor soul to love any one. He simply couldn't love, he said ... and hefelt 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 Englishgesture, tried to be articulate, to tell me how intensely he felt thathe was missing the best things in life, and yet couldn't rectify it,because .... 'Oh, my dear, I'm a hopeless person!' he said despairingly,and I forgot to pity myself in pitying him.

  "But he got cold again. He weighed his words carefully: No, he liked meas much as he could like any one, but he didn't _think_ he lovedme--mark that glorious, arrogant _think_, Dikran!... He was veryambitious; with the sort of confident, yet intensive, nerve-rackingambition which makes great men. Very young, very wonderful, brilliantlysuccessful in his career at an age when other men were only beginningtheirs--an iron man, with the self-destructive selfishness of ice, whichfreezes the thing that touches it, but itself melts in the end.... Hefroze _me_. Don't think I'm exaggerating, please, but, as he spoke--itwas at lunch, and a coon band was playing--I died away all to myself. Ijust died, and then came to life again, coldly, and bitterly, anddespairingly, but still loving him.... I couldn't _not_ love him, yousee. His was the sort of beauty that was strong, and vital, and a littlecontemptuous, and with an English cleanness about it that wasscented.... 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 bearthe idea of ever having loved any one else. I was sixteen again, andworshipped a hero, a man who did things.

  "I was a fool, of course--to believe him, I mean. But when women losetheir 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 inabsolute love. There's a name to be made out of a brilliant epigram onlove and pride--think it over, Dikran.... What an utter fool I was tobelieve him! As he spoke, over that lunch-table, I watched his greyEnglish eyes, which tried to look straight into mine but couldn't,because he was shy; he was trying to be frightfully honest with me, yousee, and being so honest makes decent men shy. He felt such a brute, buthe had to warn me that in any love affair with him, he ... yes, he didlove me, in his way, he suddenly admitted. But his way wasn't, couldn'tever be, mine. He simply couldn't give himself wholly to any one, as Iwas doing. And he so frightfully wanted to--to sink into my love forhim.... 'Shelmerdene, it's all so damnable,' he said pathetically, andhis sincerity bit into me. But I had made up my mind. I was going to dothe last foolish thing in a foolish life--I'm a sentimentalist, youknow.

  "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 pressureagainst his immobility. I made up my mind not to let go of him, howeverdesperate, however hopeless ... it was an attempt at life. He was all Iwanted, I could face life beside him. Other men had been good enough toplay with, but my stone figure--why, I had been looking for him all mylife! But in my dreams the stone figure was to come wonderfully to lifewhen I began to worship it--in actual life my worshipping could make thestone figure do nothing more vital than crumble up bits of bread in anervous effort to be honest with me! I took him at that--I told you Iwas mad, didn't I?--I took him at his own value, for as much as I couldget out of him.

  "I set out to make myself essential to him, mentally, physically, everyway.... If he couldn't love me as man to woman, then he would have tolove me as a tree trunk loves the creepers round it; I was going tocling all round him, but without his knowing. But I hadn't muchtime--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 forso 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 thanthat which brought a childish flush under my rouge, the very
dream ofdreams, of how, a few days before he went, he would take me in his armsand tell me that he couldn't bear to go alone, and that I must followhim, and together we would face all the scandal that would come ofit.... I passionately wanted the moment to come when he would offer torisk his career for me; I wanted him to offer me his ambition, and thenI would consider whether to give it back to him or not. But he didn't. Ilost.

  "And I had seemed so like winning during that six weeks between thathorrible lunch and his going away! London love affairs are alwaysscrappy, hole-in-the-corner things, but we managed to live together nowand again. And then, _mon Dieu_! he suddenly clung to me and said hewasn't seeing enough of me, that London was getting between us, and thatwe must go away somewhere into the country for at least a week before heleft, to breathe and to love.... Wouldn't you have thought I waswinning? I thought so, and my dreams were no more dreams, but actual,glorious certainties; he would beg me on his knees to follow him toAfrica!

  "We went away ten days before he sailed, to a delightful little inn afew miles from Llangollen. Seven days we spent there. Wonderful,intimate days round about that little inn by the Welsh stream; we werechildren playing under a wilderness of blue sky, more blue than Italy'sbecause of the white and grey puffs of clouds which make an English skymore human than any other; and we played with those toy hills which arecalled mountains in Wales, and we were often silent because there wastoo much to talk about.... And as we sat silently facing each other inthe 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; hewas to come in the evening to fetch me out to dinner. But he was backwithin an hour. I had to receive him in a kimono. I found him pacing upand down this room, at the far end there, by the windows. He camequickly to me, and told me that his orders had been changed--he had togo to Paris first, spend two days there, and then to Africa viaMarseilles. 'To Paris?' I said, not understanding. 'Yes, to-night--intwo hours,' he said, quickly, shyly. He was embarrassed at the idea of apossible scene. But he was cold. He must go at once, he said. And helooked eager to go, to go and be doing. He shook both my hands--I hadn'ta word--and almost forgot to kiss me. It was just as though nothing hadever happened between us, as though we hadn't ever been to Wales, orplayed, and laughed, and loved; as though he had never begged me to runmy fingers through his hair, because I had said his hair was a gardenwhere gold and green flowers grew. He was going away; and he was just aswhen I had first met him, or at that lunch--I hadn't gained anything atall, it was all just a funny, tragic, silly dream ... he had come andnow he was going away. He would write to me, he said, and he would beback in sixteen months....

  "I'm not a bad loser, you know; I can say such and such a thing isn'tfor me, and then try and undermine my wretchedness with philosophy. ButI simply didn't exist for a few months; I just went into my little shelland stayed there, and was miserable all to myself, and not bitter atall, because I sort of understood him, and knew he had been true tohimself. It was I who had failed in trying to make him false to his ownnature.... But there's a limit to all things; there comes a time whenone can't bear any more gloom, and then there is a reaction. No one withany 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 andjumped about, and made my body so tired that my mind hadn't a chance tothink.

  "His first few letters were cold, honest things, a little pompous intheir appreciations of me tacked on to literary descriptions of theNile, and the desert, and the natives. I wrote to him only once, awonderful letter, but I hadn't the energy to write again--what was thegood?

  "At the end of a year I was really in the whirl of the great worldagain. There were a few kicks left in Shelmerdene yet, I told myselfhardly, and Maurice became just a tender memory. I never thought of howhe would come back to England soon, as he had said, and what we would dothen, for I had so dinned it into myself that he wasn't for me that Ihad entirely given up the quest of the Blue Bird. He was just a tendermemory ... and impressionable me fell in love again. But not as withMaurice--I was top-dog this time. He was the sort of man that didn'tcount except in that I loved him. He was the servant of my reactionagainst Maurice, and to serve me well he had to help me wipe out all thecastles of sentiment I had built around Maurice. And the most gorgeouscastle of all I had built round that little Welsh inn! Something must bedone about that, I told myself, but for a long time I was afraid of theghost of Maurice, which might still haunt the place, and bring him backoverpoweringly to me. It was a risk; by going there with some one else Imight either succeed in demolishing Maurice's last castle, or I mighttragically have to rebuild all the others, and worship him again.

  "He had continued to write to me, complaining of my silence. And he hadsomehow become insistent--he missed me, it seemed. He didn't write thathe loved me, but he forgot to describe the Nile, and wrote about love asthough it were a real and beautiful thing and not a pastime to be wedgedin between fishing and hunting. I wrote to him once again, ratherlightly, saying that I had patched up my heart and might never give hima chance to break it again. That was just before I went to demolish thelast castle of my love for him. For I did go; one day my young manproduced a high-powered car which could go fast enough to prevent onesleeping from boredom, and I said 'Us for Llangollen,' and away wewent....

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

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

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

  _The London Venture_: VIII