The London Venture

The London Venture: II

II

ONCE (in those far-off peaceful days when men still had enough grammatical sense to know that the word "pacifist" does not exist, but that the less convenient "pacificist" does) I had been very depressed for a week, and had scarcely spoken to any one, but had just walked about in my rooms and on the Embankment, for I suddenly found myself without any money at all; and it is thus with me that when I am without money I am also without ideas, but when I have the first I do not necessarily have the last. I wondered if I had not done a very silly thing in being independent, and in not doing as my brothers had done, reading "The Times" in an office every morning from ten to twelve, and playing dominoes in the afternoon, and auction bridge in the evening, and having several thousands a year when I was forty, and a Wolseley car to take my wife for a holiday to Windermere, because she looked pale, or because we were bored with each other. I smiled to think of the look on my brothers' faces if I suddenly appeared at their office one morning, and said that it was no good, and that I couldn't write, and was very hungry. I could not make up my mind whether they would laugh at me and turn me out, or whether they would teach me how to play auction and set me to answer letters about what had happened on such and such a day inst., and why the firm of -- thought it unnecessary that it should happen again, while they would sit in the next room, marked "Private," signing cheques and talking to visitors about the weather and the cotton markets. Perhaps I will do that some day, for, from what I have heard, it seems to me the easiest thing in the world to talk about rises and falls and margins without knowing anything about them at all.

The same thing happens with regard to books, for one often meets people who seem to have read every modern novel, and can discuss quite prettily whether Mr. Wells is a man or a machine, or whether Mr. Arnold Bennett, ever since he wrote the last lines to "The Old Wives' Tales," has not decided that it is better to be a merchant than a writer, or whether Mr. E. V. Lucas thinks he is the second Charles Lamb, and what other grounds than his splendid edition has he for thinking so, or whether Mr. George Moore does or does not think that indiscretion is the better part of literature, or whether Mr. Chesterton or vegetarianism has had the greatest effect on Mr. Shaw's religion; but then, after all this talk, it turns out that they read "The Times Literary Supplement" every week, and think Epictetus nothing to Mr. Clutton-Brock, or they are steeped in Mr. Clement Shorter's weekly criticism en deshabille in the "Illustrated London News."

At last I could stand my depression no longer, and late one night, after a day in which I had spoken to no one but a little old woman who said that she wasn't a beggar but that God blessed the charitable, I sat down and wrote a long, conceited letter to Shelmerdene; for to her I can write whether I am gay or depressed, and be sure that she will not be impatient with me. I told her how I had a great fund of ambition, but had it not in me to satisfy a tenth part of it; for that is in the character of all my people, they promise much greater things in their youth than they can fulfil in their mature age. From twenty onwards they are continually growing stale, and bitter with their staleness; the little enthusiasm of their youth will not stretch through their whole life, but will flicker out shamefully with the conceit of their own precocity, and in trying to fly when other people are just learning to walk; and as the years pass on and youth becomes regret, the son of Haik, the faded offspring of a faded nation whose only call to exist is because it has lived so long and has memories of the sacking of Nineveh and Carchemish, is left without the impetus of development, with an ambition which is articulate only in bitterness; while the hardy Northerner, descendant of barbarian Druid worshippers whose nakedness was rumoured with horror in the courts and pleasure gardens of Hayastan and Persia, slowly grows in mind as in body, and soon outstrips the petty outbursts of the other's stationary genius. I told Shelmerdene that I, who had thought that England had given me at least some of her continually growing enthusiasm, that I who had thought I would not, like so many of my countrymen, be too soon stranded on "the ultimate islands" of Oriental decay, was even now in the stage between the dying of enthusiasm and its realisation; for the first impetus of my youthful conceits was vanishing, and there looked to be nothing left to them but an "experience" and a "lesson of life" without which I would have been much happier. In moods such as these one can hear in the far distance the wailing of a dirge, a knell, indefinitely yet distinctly, and the foreboding it brings is of an end to something which should have no end; a falling away, a premature decay which is like a growing cloud soon to cover the whole mind.... Shelmerdene, do you know the story of the Dán-nan-Rón, which Fiona Macleod tells? How there lived three brothers on the isle of Eilanmore: Marcus, who was "the Eilanmore," and Gloom, whose voice "was low and clear, but cold as pale green water running under ice," and Sheumais, on whose brow lay "the dusk of the shadow." Gloom was the wisest of the brothers, and played upon an oaten flute, which is called a feadan; and men were afraid of the cold, white notes of his barbaric runes, as he played his feadan from rock to rock and on the seashore, but most of all they feared the playing of the Dán-nan-Rón, which is the Song of the Seal and calls men to their death in the sea. And when the eldest brother Marcus was killed with the throwing of a knife, the murderer heard the woods of Gloom, which said that he would hear the Dán-nan-Rón the night before he died, and lest he should doubt those words, he would hear it again in the very hour of his death. It happened as Gloom said: for one night the playing of the feadan drove the slayer, Manus MacCodrum, down into the sea, and as he battled madly in the water, and the blood gushed out of his body as the teeth of seals tore the life out of him, he heard from far away the cold, white notes of the Dán-nan-Rón.

This tale always brings to me that many men, in some sudden moment which even M. Maeterlinck would hesitate to define as "a treasure of the humble," hear the playing of a tune such as that, which tells them of some ending, unknown and indefinite, just as, in the moments of greatest love, a man will feel for a terrible second the shivering white ice of sanity, which tells him a different tale to that which he is murmuring to the woman in his arms. Men who have heard it must have become morose with the fear this distant dirge brought upon them; but of that foreboding nothing certain can be known, and it is only in such a mood as this, and to a Shelmerdene of women, that a fool will loosen his foolishness to inquire into such things. Clarence Mangan must have heard the tune as he lay drunk and wretched in his Dublin garret, for there is more than Celtic gloom in the dirge of his lines. John Davidson, whose poetry you so love, and who wrote in a moment of madness "that Death has loaded dice," must have heard it, perhaps when first he came to venture his genius in London, a young man with a strange, bad-tempered look in his eyes; and he must have heard the exulting notes, as clearly as did Manus MacCodrum, when he walked into the sea from Cornwall. Charles Meryon must have heard it as he walked hungrily about the streets of Paris, and wondered why those gargoyles-strange things to beautify!-on Notre Dame, into which he had put so much life, could not scream aloud to the people of Paris that a genius was dying among them for lack of food and praise. Do you remember, Shelmerdene, how you and I, when first I began to know you, stood before a little imp of wonderfully carved onyx stone which leered at us from the centre of your mantelpiece, and I said that it was like one of those gargoyles of Meryon's; and that afternoon I told you about his life and death, and when I had finished you said that I told the tale as though I enjoyed it, instead of being frightened by the tragedy of it. But I admired your imp of onyx stone very much, telling you that I loved its ravenous mouth and reptile claws, because they looked so helplessly lustful after something unattainable; and that same night I found a little black-and-gold box awaiting me in my rooms, in which was the imp of onyx stone, and a note saying that I must put it on my table because it would bring me luck. For a second I did not believe your words, but thought that you had given it to me to be a symbol for my helplessness, for I had said that it lusted after something utterly unattainable. But the second passed, and I found later that you had forgotten those words, and had sent it to me because I liked it.... I would like to spend these glorious spring days away from London with you, in quietness, perhaps in Galway somewhere; but if you cannot come away with me to-morrow, I will take you out to dinner instead, and we will talk about yourself and the ci-devants who have loved you; and though I have no money at all now, I am quite sure that to-morrow will bring some.

Sure enough a few hours later I awoke to a bright spring morning, which brought happiness in itself, even without the help of a cheque which a recreant editor had at last thought fit to send me. As I walked out into the blaze of sunshine on the King's Road, I felt that I must surely be a miserable fellow to let my ill-nature so often oppress me that only very seldom I was allowed to...