Michael Arlen

“ Hullo, here’s Hugo with a smile like a rainbow!”
“I should think so!” cried Hugo. “I’ve got a son! What do you know about that!”
“Everything,” gasped Tarlyon wearily. “He’s bald.”
“Bald be blowed, George! All babies are bald. In my time I was the baldest baby in Bognor, and proud of it. He’s a wonder, I tell you.”
“He’s awful!” sighed Tarlyon. “Go away, Hugo, go away! I'll explain later, but at the moment I am so tired of your face! And don’t dare to try to kiss Shirley more than once a day.” ”

“ But every afternoon Fay Avalon would steal to her lover’s studio in a quiet street in Hampstead. Not, of course, in her car, but in a taxi.
And what a relief it was, to enter the dim, bare silence of that studio! The clatter of the voices of the luncheon-party she had just left faded instantly from her mind, a lovely mist came in between the unquiet delight of her heart and the usual labours of her life. She rested on a divan in a corner of that secret studio, while Shuvarov would pace about in his feverish way. ”

“ The grandeur of distress, the lofty silence of disdain—there is the girl’s mother in her shadowed chair and Sir Guy Conduit de Gramercy at his writing-table, the light of the shaded lamp by his elbow laying a rich gloss on his thick white hair. The indifference that masks the depths of emotion, the faint mockery, the deep gravity, and the cunning candour of love——there is Joan de Gramercy coiled in a chair near her mother, a girl with those cool eyes that dare a man to surprise in them any secret that they will not, in their own good time, completely surrender to him. ”

“ 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 intelligence. ”

“ And the Duke whispered: “Don't talk of the stars, Ava Lamb! The stars make me think of all that is impossible.”
And up and down the broad avenue between the trees prowled the beasts of the cosmopolitan night, these with two great yellow eyes, those with one small red eye closely searching the ground. And in the middle distance the Seine shone like a black sword, and the horrible gilt creatures that adorn the Bridge of Alexander III were raised by the pale mercy of the night to the dignity of fallen archangels driving chariots to the sky. ”

“ She had no pride, she said. “There is no pride in love, Ivor. Not really. To be proud in love is the mark of little people. Pride is for women who go to balls or night-clubs every night, and who, because they are always tired, bring the worst out of their men; they need pride. But your great lover is so proud that he takes no thought of pride.” But, on top of that, she had no shame either—and that he shamelessly loved! He adored the honest quality of her shamelessness, its elegance and its clear shades of candour. ”

“ Dear Hugo. Suddenly the glow of Iris’s cigarette stabbed the darkness, and maybe that was her shadow there, and that the one foot in the water....
“Who’s that?” she gasped.
I was anchored to her ankle. My hand could have gone twice round it.
“Take care of them,” she whispered. “Dear, take care of them. Keep your eyes on that Venice child. She’s reckless. Quick, and catch them up. I rely on you somehow——”
“You mustn’t, Iris. I am enemy to Iris Storm.”
“Oh, friends and enemies! One relies on what people are in themselves, no matter what circumstances may make them feel.” ”

“ It had come so naturally to him to worship the pink, gay, careless little man that then was Antony—growing every year pinker and redder until he seemed just like a sunball, the loveliest child that ever a house and a dark brother were blessed with; for Roger, even then dark-haired and pale—anyway, beside that little meteor—used to despise himself very heartily, and inarticulately fumble with a theory that any one who looked as he did could come to no good in the world, whereas Antony—oh, but the world was made for Antony! ”

“ 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! ”

“ The cry cut across the sunlit place, the clear cry that has lit for England the darkest corners of the world, and the huge man in the red shirt stayed his cudgel and looked at us. But the little old woman still moaned, and it was quite dreadful to hear that in the summer silence. Ten yards separated us from that domestic scene, but they were yards of bright sunlight, and we could see every line on that patriarch’s face. For he was a patriarch. He was the most magnificent man I have ever seen; and Tarlyon and I, not small men, felt withered under his straight look. We stood rooted. ”

“ She walked in the broken shadows of the Park railings. A young man on a black horse cantered by, looking as though he had bought the world for tuppence and wanted his money back. Now and then an omnibus rolled by, rolled on, and on, and on, the red-and-white monster born of man’s divine gift for making his life intolerable. A young lady with a bright red hat in a little silver car tore by like a jewel in a hurry. Huge limousines sped, sped swiftly by, like shining insects whispering to Miss Wych of a grander world than the world of Miss Wych. ”

“ The air was chilly with the chill of a Riviera night in February, and Virginia, lying deep in her chair, had wrapped her moleskin coat well about her: for in the year 1919 the moleskin coat was at its ascendant, whence it has since been driven by barbarians, led by one Mr. Kolinsky....
There was no moon, only stars set brilliantly in the soft black onyx of the sky: a black night, and very silent on Cimiez; and a black and silent prospect from the verandah, intensified rather than broken by the distant reflection below of the lights of Nice on the velvet void which was a sea by day. ”

“ One could see that boy, a slim pyjama’d figure by the window, a silhouette of cold fire with the ruin of all mankind in his clean eyes, staring through the meretricious dawn of Deauville towards the goal to which he was exalted beyond reason by his disenchantment. He had loved Iris madly.... But they do not love, those men! They torture, and are tortured. They take love as they might take a flower out of a garden, and they torture it because it does not thrive so well in the water of their tears as in the water of God’s good sense. ”

“ And Iris, for all her pride and looks, for all her tawny hair and sometimes too distant eyes, had really as little to say in the matter as Antony or I; for Roger Poole had a reputation to keep up, not so much with the world as with himself, the reputation of a man who always played in luck! Besides, luck or no luck, Iris had straightway fallen in love with him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That in particular is why, Lord Tarlyon, I was so anxious to see you, and to put the matter before you. Is there, for a man of honour, no way out of a mess like this? Is it utterly impossible for me to shatter her illusions about her late—her extremely late, in his nightly habits—husband? Is there nothing I can do but look sulky every time the man’s name is mentioned? But I have tried that, and I am afraid she takes it as the expression of a sympathy too deep for words. What can I do, Lord Tarlyon? Or perhaps you, Mr. Trevor, can suggest some way out? ”

“ You do not believe I love you, you do not believe I know how to love, you think me the shallow, vain braggart that I have shown to you in the guise of myself until this moment. But I love you, Ava, more than life. I love you, Ava, with all the youthful love I had for your sister increased a thousandfold by the knowledge I now have of myself: for it is by loving that men come to know themselves, and it is by knowing themselves in all humility that men can love with the depths of their hearts. Ava, I do love you terribly! ”

“ NOW it is the way with people who play tennis like grim archangels that when they have ceased playing they instantly look as though they had been thinking of something else all the time. That, anyhow, is how Denys and Madeleine looked as they walked up the gentle slope from the tennis-court to the lawn—where, in the meanwhile, had blossomed a table set with the silver, china and napery of tea. ”

“ Oh, Guy, what a man is that! That latter-day thunder-god of dandies, that warrior of conduct, that man of cold eyes who never could give “gratuitous information” about any one! Oh, Hilary, that friend of childhood!
Hilary and Guy, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. But Gerald had no sooner grown up than, at the impulse of his furious nature, he had turned away from his friends, his people: he had dropped out, had cut away; and no one, it’s not difficult to imagine, would want to intrude on that young man. ”

“ Don’t you see, Ivor? You’ve got a right to begin, but I’m a fool to repeat things. You are searching for an enchantment, but I’m waiting for a repetition. Life is empty at the moment, and I want to fill it again—and the same thing will fill it again in almost the same way. It always does.”
“I know now,” said Trevor, “so much about women that I know no woman has ever loved me, nor can ever love me, as I want to be loved. I say that in no spirit of false modesty, Ivor, but judicially—and the frightfully funny part of it is that it’s not just a remark over a glass of wine, it’s true. ”

“ Look, Charles! Isn’t it beautiful! Charles, let’s walk and walk and walk!”
“Just look at those asses behind!” cried Julian Raphael, shouting with laughter. But now the people at the head of St. James’s Street were very faint, the clear golden air of the sun triumphant was falling between Sir Charles’s eyes and the people grouped round the prostrate figure that looked oddly like a dingy travesty of himself.
“If they only knew,” said Manana gravely, “that living is worth while just because one has to die! Come on, Charles, let’s walk!” ”

“ And then you told me you had come to see Ralph on a point of honour! At last you had summoned up your courage to see Ralph—on a point of honour. And that’s why I wanted you to be silent for a while, for speech sometimes makes a tragedy unbearably idiotic. I wanted peace, Hugo! I wanted just to taste the peace between the old life and the new, the old life in which there was no honour and the new life in which there will anyway be happiness....” And she touched him, but with a blind gesture of his arm he swept her aside, and strode out of the room. ”

“ Ivor said, “and then one hates oneself. It’s beastly....”
“Mockery!” There was a soft and remote meaning in the way it dropped from Virginia’s lips. “Mockery! that soft and sweet mockery of a man in first love—oh, Ivor, it’s the finest thing—at first.” Her wicker chair creaked loudly as she suddenly turned towards him, and his accustomed eyes could see hers through the darkness, wide eyes fashioned out of the mystery of the night, eyes sombre with query. “Have you ever felt that in a woman for you, Ivor?” ”

“ To me there’s something terribly indecent about humanity, all humanity. It’s as though, in the whole lovely universe, humanity was cooped in this musty little house, talking vaguely of dislike, eternally talking of like and dislike, love and unlove, of doings and undoings, purposeless yet striving and savage. The other night I was motoring alone from Paris to Calais, and it seemed to me that no law was strong enough, no crime was big enough, not even disloyalty, to stop us, when we had the chance of rising above the beastly limitation of living as we were born to live. ”

“ She: “Oh, but I can match you one vulgar Restoration gallant against another!
“‘Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts and broken vows;
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
’Tis all that Heaven allows.’”
He sighed: “How I loved you, Leonora! As I had never loved anyone before, as I will never love anyone again!”
“How I loved you, Maximilian! But now!” And she said: “A legal separation is a silly quibble. Besides, you might want to marry again. Or I might.”
“Might, Leonora? But you will, must, can’t help but! With your beauty, youth, wealth.” ”

“ That large room had always awed Ivor: even as a child he had never wanted to play in it, for all that it was so limitless, the parquet floor so vast and shiny and unencumbered, the windows so wide and light with the fairy expanse of Kensington Gardens.
Aunt Moira watched his approach across the parquet floor, an uncomfortable kind of floor to traverse under raking eyes, without remark or sign. Aunt Moira was not given to showing surprise, not even at her nephew coming home alive in term-time. ”

“ Napier, Venice, Iris. They had come together, blindly, desperately. By chance—but it is written in vinegar that there is no such thing as chance. And I, why, I had been appointed, a silly finger of fate, to make “chance” more sure! They had come together, those three, propelled to each other from darkness for darkness’s sake. The weak to the weak, the strong in chains. Always that is the way of things, and for no reason at all except life’s most damnable unfairness, which is for ever saying: the weak shall be made weaker, the strong shall be destroyed. ”

“ Sir Guy, I would wish to marry your granddaughter if she were penniless. Why should I not marry her because she is not penniless? What is this spurious humbug about honour that covers the middle and upper classes of England like verdigris: that a poor man may not with honour marry a rich woman, that a poor girl can only “sell” herself to a rich man? Can a man or woman not be loved, then, because he or she is rich? Is that what our religion means when it says that a rich man shall not enter the kingdom of heaven? Was it for that, then, that the late Charles Garvice devoted his life?” ”

“ One of the greatest mistakes Ivor ever made in his life was not to go to luncheon with Virginia that day, so that he could “think.” It was, in fact, the great mistake of his life. For a man of his impatient temper does not, at certain times, think. He broods. And how far that brooding can take a man from the reality of a thing! How venomously it colours a thing or a woman, so that they would be unrecognisable to a clear eye! What beastliness it unfolds, what lies it verifies, what disloyalties it makes bitterly reasonable!... ”

“ I NOW as I come to that last night of all, a night that was as though set on a stage by a cunning but reckless craftsman of the drama, and as I look every way I may at the happenings that were staged on the platform of that night, I do sincerely thank my stars that it is no novel I have set my hand to, but a faithful chronicle of events. For it would seem that the novelist, so he is an honest man and loves his craft, must work always under a great disadvantage in his earnest wish to tell of life truthfully; since, as the old, old saying is, he never can dare to be so improbable as life. ”

“ To be free may sometimes mean that no one wishes to imprison us; and that, when you come to think of it, is a very terrible thing.
To these grave abstractions must be added the material fact that Ivor Pelham Marlay had only one arm. For of the many things that a man can lose in a proper war, Ivor Marlay had lost only his left arm. His left sleeve, as you saw him at his table at the Mont Agel, hung emptily down into the left pocket of his jacket—adding to his carriage that strange elegance peculiar to tall, one-armed men of a foppish habit. ”

“ All the people in the world who are not madly in love, Miss Wych dear, are in some degree insane, for it is insane not to have a proper perspective of life, and a proper perspective of life is to be quite certain that the world is well lost for the love of one person. It is insane to work from grubby birth{106} to grubby death with never an attempt to chain a star, with never a raid on enchantment, with never a try to kiss a fairy or to live in a dream. Dear, only dreams make life real, all of life that is not touched and troubled by our dreams is not real, does not exist. ”

“ But had Venice had a child I might have shone like Aldebaran and called Napier in vain. And that would have been right and just. We must all give way before children, always, always. Oh, if people had always done that, what miseries wouldn’t the world have been spared! Those whose dreams are clean must give way to children, for babies will carry clean dreams further than the wisest of old men, and slowly the world will rise above the age of smoke and savagery....”
“But it’s absurd, Iris! What chance has the girl had of having a child yet!” ”

“ Philosophers have spun and metaphysicians toiled, yet this stuff of glamour still evades the mortal coils of definition. And whence it comes, no one can tell; nor why it comes—nor whither it goes! though poets do say that they can smell the faint, musty smell of tragedy in its destiny, and historians can never resist ascribing it to luckless men and women of high degree. And sometimes you may love a woman mightily, yet try as you will you cannot find glamour in her, you simply cannot; she is just a woman, yours to love but not to dream about. ”

“ And I am glad that, just then, I said that I was very fond of Gerald.
Then we were on the narrow landing of my old flat, in the darkness. The musty stillness of that little old house brought six years of nights into my mind, and I wondered how people ever regretted their first youth, those intolerable uncertainties and enthusiasms that stare at you from the dead past like condemned gargoyles. The incapability of youth goes on long enough, Heaven knows, if not so long as the savagery of childishness. ”

“ Rodney West turned amiably to Ivor, who was getting rather left behind.
“Mrs. Gray, you must know, has made an art of friendship,” he explained. “The art of friendship consists of defending people you’ve met twice by attacking people you’ve known all your life.”
That light laugh of Magdalen’s! it was like a laugh from a Victorian novel, so gentle and smoothing and right! And, as she laughed, her eyes, so large and thoughtful in the shadow of her black hat, rested with ever so passing an intentness on Ivor, secretly. ”

“ Two people Gerald worshipped in the world, but always he would have sacrificed Iris to Boy, that was always the way of Gerald’s heart. Above all things in this world I love the love that people have for each other, the real, immense, unquestioning, devouring, worshipful love that now and then I have seen in a girl for a boy, that now and then I have seen in a boy for a boy, that playmate love. ”

“ Were they, at this moment, still in the Haymarket bar, would they to-night be in the little flat in the purlieus behind Jermyn Street? If he went thither to-night, would he find them? But Ivor did not go, he was ashamed; he was aware that he was, shamefully, not of them or like them, he had not their honest geniality; he had used them—unconsciously, yes, but he had used them. Such, then, was Ivor.
London is an amazing city—not so much because of the numbers of its population, which it simply cannot help, but because of its hospitality, which it can. ”

“ You have put yourself outside this long ago, you never can be of this again. See, Iris, how happy they are, and young, and clean, and earnest to do right: most earnest to do right, Iris, despite the most damnable enchantments. And as they are so you might have been with Boy Fenwick, but you chose differently. Iris March, the death of Boy Fenwick puts you out of court. See, Iris, and for God’s sake let these children be!”
But that catholic Guy had not seen that beautiful white mask between the tawny formal curls and the two amethysts for eyes. ”

“ Oh, Ivor, how base you and all men are! You suspect the fine phrases of love—yes, you do, Ivor! If a woman looks at you speechless with love, you believe she loves you. But if she puts her love to you in sentences, complete with commas, colons, and full-stops, if she gives you her love dressed in the purple and fine linen of her heart—you can’t help thinking her rather odd, can you, dear?... ”

“ You are a striving person, Ivor, but now you are too happy, you are soaking yourself in happiness. It’s my fault.... This is unnatural for you, this life of ours, you want to work and strive and think things as well as to love—and here you are, being softened and choked! Why don’t I see you miserable, Ivor, why aren’t you wretched at all this waste? You are losing yourself in love, and as you lose yourself I will lose you. ”

“ To the cold eye of the philosopher there is nothing more ridiculous than abandon, except it be restraint: there is nothing more absurd than temptation, except it be the grander temptation not to yield to it. But it is notorious that philosophers never allow for other people’s ideals—which do certainly make the ridiculous even more ridiculous, but rarely fail to make it sublime. And Ivor Pelham Marlay, now fired at last out of the lethargy of two years, was become a very rigid and proper idealist, and very troublesome to himself, which is the way of idealists.... ”