Michael Arlen

“ I was a fool, of course—to believe him, I mean. But when women lose their 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 in absolute love. There's a name to be made out of a brilliant epigram on love and pride—think it over, Dikran.... What an utter fool I was to believe him! As he spoke, over that lunch-table, I watched his grey English eyes, which tried to look straight into mine but couldn't, because he was shy; he was trying to be frightfully honest with me, you see, and being so honest makes decent men shy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life seemed made up of the interferences of old men. I didn't want old men in my life. I wanted young men, and sunshine, and fun. And so, as Raoul and I went up the steps to the massive door, and as I turned to him just below the drawing-room window and gave him my most trustful smile, I was feeling reckless, unrestrained, fiercely independent.... Oh, Dikran! what idiocies we do for the fancied sake of independence! ”

“ This last week or so of autumn is the time of all times when the fanatic hermit, sitting alone in his desert place, should be tolerant of the world's frailty. If such an one would let me, a worldly enough young man, approach him, I would tell him of the great joys there is in walking with a loved woman on crisp wind-blown leaves, under country trees, with tea soon to be ready before a big fire in the house half-a-mile away. ”

“ Of course, she chose Lucifer. Who wouldn't choose a dashing young rebel, a splendid failure if ever there was one, with a name like Lucifer, as compared to a darling, respectable, anxious old man called Jehovah? It's like asking a young woman to choose between Byron and Tolstoi ..."
But Shelmerdene had long since gone, to play at life and make fools of men; to make men, to break men, they said of her, and leave them in the dust, grovelling arabesques on the carpet of their humiliated love. ”

“ But the tragedy of it was, and is, my dear, that indulgence made the monster grow; it was like a drug, for as soon as the off-season came again it was at its old tricks with twice its old virulence and malice, and, of course, I gave way again. And so on, and so on—did you murmur dies iræ, Dikran? Well, perhaps, but who knows? There's a Perfect Fate for every one in this world, and if any one deserves to find it, it's myself who has failed to find it so often.... ”

“ I keep it for him, labelling it his; when I see him in the distance I say, "Dikran, up and away and be at him"; for I think it incumbent on people who, like myself, are not really significant, to be at least significant in their relations with others, to stand out as something, even as a buffoon, among their acquaintances, and not be just part of the ruck. My ideal is, of course, that splendid person of Henry James', in "The Private Life," who faded away, did not exist, when he was alone, but was wonderfully and variably present when even a chambermaid was watching him. ”

“ Nowadays there is a reaction against convention, and such people make life unclean. They talk about being 'natural,' and succeed only in being boorish; they think that the opposite of 'natural' is 'artificial,' but that is absurd, for why was the title 'gentleman' invented if not for the man who could put a presentable gloss on his primitive, 'natural' instincts in polite company? There must always be etiquette in life and in love, and there is no friendship or passion which can justify familiarity trying to break down the barriers which hide every man and every woman from the outside world. ”

“ 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 passed for life at old Versailles. ”

“ While as for being shocked at the way he loved me, I've never been shocked by anything but the vulgarity and the indecencies of respectable people, who seem to think that sex is purely a sort of indoor sport to be indulged in darkness and behind barricaded doors, while it is really a setting for the most beautiful Bacchanal that was ever devised by the fairest and purest of God's children. In spite of bibles and the Bishop of London, Mary knew what she was about, Dikran. Love doesn't grow anywhere, to be picked up by the wayside. Pure beauty grows only where beauty already is.... ”

“ VII I asked her once, but long after I had realised that loving Shelmerdene could not be my one business in life, if she did not feel that perhaps—I was tentative—she would some day be punished. "But how young you are!" she said. "You don't really think I am a sort of Zuleika Dobson, do you?—just because one wretched man once thought it worth while to shoot himself because of me, and just because men have that peculiar form of Sadism which makes them torture themselves through their love, when they have ceased to be loved.... ”

“ In the world of Henry James, for he was more fastidious than Meredith or Mr. Hardy and would have nothing to do with this world as it was, but made one of his own, in this world the men and women are not just men and women, with thoughts and doings bluntly and coarsely expressed as in real life; but he showed them to be subtle creatures, something higher than clever animals, with different shades of meaning in every word—what fool was it who said that a word spoken must be a word meant!—with barriers of reserve and strangeness between each person ”

“ At that my hermit would look at me angrily, for a fleshly young man indeed, but I would go on to tell him of how there is no splendour anywhere like to the splendour of a youth's dreams at that quiet time; dreams that may be of a palace made of dead leaves, with terraced pleasure gardens fashioned out of autumn air, in which he would walk with his mistress, and be a king and she a queen of more than one world.... ”

“ And all the time the man is wondering if I am playing with him or not, if it is worth his while to fall in love with me or not—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 had longed for him to say four weeks before; every Englishman in love is simply bound to say, at one time or another, that he would adore to lie with his beloved in a gondola in Venice, looking at the stars ”

“ They seem to think that the state of love stands at the end of a great striving; they do not realise that it is only the beginning, and that the striving must never cease, for without striving there is no love, but only content. But they do not see that; they insist on spoiling love, breaking the vase with stupid, unconscious hands; and when it breaks they are surprised, and they say that love is a fickle thing and will stand no tests, and that women are the very devil. Always they spoil love ”

“ But to be treated as a great man, even by women, when you are not a great man, is indeed the essence of greatness! Bravo, Nikolay! I see you, not as I have always seen you, but in Paris, where rumour tells of you; in Paris, where your art was your hobby and life your serious business, and a dress suit the essential of your visibility of an evening. ”

“ You have been so wantonly blind, Shelmerdene. You have idealised to-morrow and forgotten to-day—and now, perhaps, you are on your knees in a ruined temple in the East, begging favours of Ishtar. Not she to grant you a favour! Trouble has always come to the world from such as she, a malignant goddess. It has been said that Semiramis conquered the world, and Ishtar set it on fire.... ”

“ I suddenly realise at this very moment of writing why those months in South Kensington seemed so overpoweringly dismal, and that even now it is only time which lends a real pleasure to the memory of the tall, dim figure (Mr. Charles Garvice would have called her "sylph-like." I wish I were Mr. Garvice) which stood on my doorstep on an autumn night, and so mysteriously asked for me. ”

“ I shall die in my bed, of a broken heart. My heart will break when I begin to fade. I shall die before I have faded...."
"No, you won't, Shelmerdene," I said. "Many women have sworn that, from Theodosia to La Pompadour, but they have not died of broken hearts because they never realised when they began to fade, and no man ever dared tell them, not even a Roi Soleil."
"Oh, don't be pedantic, Dikran, and don't worry me about what other women will or won't do. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But at Hyde Park Corner I would get off the bus, for I have a conventional fondness for Piccadilly, 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 chaotic noises, and in winter because I like nothing better than to look at leaf-stripped trees standing nakedly against a grey sky, [pg 090] finger-posts of Nature pointing to the real No-Man's Land, and illustrating the miraculous wonder of being just beautiful, as no man-made thing can be ”

“ 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.... ”

“ My hostess and my guardian were old, old friends, and to watch them in their gentle, courteous intimacy was a lesson on the perfect management of such things. When we are old and white-haired, will you come and stay at my place, Dikran, and will you pretend that you have forgotten that you ever liked me for anything else than my mind? Just like those two old people in the Breton château, who a thousand years ago may have been lovers or may have only loved one another.... ”

“ Unlike most great friendships, mine with Louis began at school; and those, to whom circumstances have not allowed friendships at school, cannot realise the intensity of certain few friendships which, beginning on a basis of tomfoolery and ragging, as the general relations between schoolboys begin, yet survive them all, and steadily ripen with the years into a maturity of companionship, which has such a quality and nobility of its own that no other relation, not even that of passionate love, can ever take its place when it is gone. ”

“ But I would not produce him, "because Louis has never in his life met or dreamt of any one like you, and he will fall in love with you straight away. And as he is more honest than I am, so he will fall in love with you much more seriously, and that will be very bad for him, because you are the sort of woman that you are. It isn't fair to destroy the illusions of a helpless subaltern in the Rifle Brigade.... No, I will not produce him, Shelmerdene." ”

“ Let him sink into earth as deep as he may, he can find and show there more beauty and more truth than in all his arrogant and passionate fumblings in the mire of sex, in all his bitter striving after that, so to speak, sexual millennium, that ultimate psychology of the body and mind, which seems so to obsess him that in his writings he has buried his mind, as, in his own unpleasant phrase, a lover buried his head, in the "terrible softness of a woman's belly." ”

“ He stopped in his walk and fixed on me with a disapproving eye. "That's a nasty bad word, Dikran. The being-at-home feeling is a sedative to all art and progress. In the end it kills imagination. It is a soporific, a—what you call it?—a dope. There's a feeling of contentment in being at home, and you can't squeeze any creation out of contentment.
"Permanent homes," he said, "were invented because men wanted safety. The safety of expectation! Imagination is a curse to most men; they are not comfortable with it; they think it is unsettling. ”