It was only last year that the rumours of London's night life sank into the depths of my sensitive ears. At first I put such murmurings aside as psychiatric ravings of visionaries and yearners. Always at the first signs of neurosis—the inevitable result of the simple life—I dashed to Paris, to the golden-haired Reine at the Marigny; or else I cabled to Anna of the Admiral's Palast in Berlin; or, if time permitted, I sought the glittering presence of Bianca Weise at Vienna. (Ah, Bianca! Du süsser Engel!) Never once did it occur to me that youth stalked abroad in the London streets, that gaiety sang among the wine cups in London cafés, that romance went drunk amid the mazes of abandoned dancing. London had always seemed to me essentially senile—grey-haired and sedate. And so I devoted myself to the labours of youth, as did the youthful George Moore; and when the first crocuses of the spring appeared, and the lilacs came forth, and the April primroses got into my blood, and the hawthorn sent forth its pink and white shoots, I sought the Luxembourg or the Tiergarten or the Prater. Why, indeed, I thought, should spring come to London? Why should Henley, an Englishman, have called Spring "the wild, the sweet-blooded, wonderful harlot"? And why should the year's first crocus have brought him luck? Had he indeed lain mouth to mouth with spring in London? Perhaps. But I doubted him. Therefore, before the lavender appeared, I was beyond the channel.
But last spring I met the girl in the flat below me. Her name was Elsie—Winwood, I think. Of one thing, however, I am sure; she had cold grey eyes and auburn hair—an uncanny combination; but she was typical of the English girl, the girl who had been educated abroad. This girl and I came face to face on the stairs one day.
"Why do you always leave London at the best time of the year?" she asked me.
"I am young," I confessed. "In the spring I live by night, and one may only sleep in London at night."
"But you do not know London," she told me.
She smiled intimatingly and disappeared into the gloom of her studio.
That night I thought of Arthur Symons's "London Nights." Nobody in any city in the world had more subtly caught the spirit of youthful buoyancy, the spirit of romantic evanescence, the spirit of midnight abandon. Could it be that he was but a "poseur," a dealer in false words, a concocter of the non-existent? Did the eyes of dancers never gleam in his? Did Renée never issue forth from that dim arch-way where he waited? Did Nora never dance upon the pavement? Was Violet but the figment of a poet's dreams? And was that painted angel, Peppina, a mere psychic snare? Could any man—even a poet—write as he did of Muriel at the Opera if there had been no Muriel? It seemed highly improbable. Finally I decided that, ere departing for Reine or Anna or Bianca, I would sally forth into the night of London and see if, after all, romance did not lurk in the darkened corners.
At first I started without a guide, trusting to my own knowledge of the city, intending to follow up vague rumours to which I had lent but half an ear. Later I equipped myself with a guide—not a professional guide, but a man of means and of easy morals, a young barrister in whose family were R. A.'s, M. P.'s and K. C.'s.
"Shall we see it all?" asked Leonard.
"All," I replied. "From the high to the low."