If it were any other man than Nikolay, I would know him well, for I have seen much of him, but one knows men by their "points of view," and I am not sure that Nikolay ever had one. He was, or rather he seemed definitely to be, curiously wise; one never put his wisdom to the test; one never heard him say an overpoweringly wise thing, but there was no doubt that he was wise. People said he was wise. Women said it. A strange man, indeed; queer, and a little sinister. Perhaps six hundred years ago he might have been an alchemist living in a three-storied house in Prague, exiled from his native land of Russia for criticising too openly the size of the Czarina's ears; for Nikolay knows no fear, he can be ruder than any man I know. I have heard him answer a woman that her new hat didn't suit her at all. "I think it is a rotten hat," he said, and the vanity of an admitted thirty years faded from her, she was as a dejected houri before the repelling eyes of a Salhadine.
He had not always been so detached and passionless. Steps of folly must somehow have led up to that philosophic wisdom which so definitely obtruded on the consciousness; so definitely, indeed, that I have watched women, as we perhaps sat round the card-table in his studio, and seen them in their manner defer to him, as though he were a great man in the eyes of the world, which he isn't. 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.
I feel riot and revelry somewhere in you, Nikolay; the dim green lights of past experiences do very queerly mock the wisdom in your contemplative eye. I am to suppose, then, that you have seen other things than the rehearsals of a ballet, have marvelled at other things than the architecture of Spanish-Gothic cathedrals? Ah, I have the secret of you! You are a mediæval, a knight of old exotic times, a Sir Lancelot without naïveté. Now, as the years take you, it is only in your drawings that your mind runs cynically riot among the indiscretions of literature—what a sinister inner gleam I espied in you when you told me that you were going to illustrate the poems of François Villon! But in Paris, long ago, I see you, Nikolay, standing in the curtained doorway of a cushion-spread studio, where the lights shine faintly through the red arabesques patterned on the black lamp shades. I see you standing there with a half-empty glass of Courvoisier in your hand, sipping, and watching, and smiling.... And women, perhaps—nay! a princess for very certain, it is said—running wild over the immobility of your face, immobile even through those first perfervid years.
But it did not always happen that I found him working at his table by the window. Sometimes he would be pacing restlessly up and down the room, and round the cardtable in the centre (which was also a lunch, tea, and dinner table).
"I have never before been four years in one place," he said. "I have never been six months in one place." He related it as a possibly interesting fact, not as a cavil against circumstances. It shows what little I knew of, or about, him, that I had never before heard of his travels.
"But how have you ever done any work if you never stayed in one place, never settled down?"
"Settled down!" 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. Life is an experiment until you have a home, and feel that it is a home. Men like that. They like the idea of having a definite pillow on which to lay their heads every night, of having a definite woman, called a wife, beside them.... Bah! Charity begins at home, and inertia stays there. Safety doesn't breed art or progress—and when it does, it miscarries—the Royal Academy....
"Men want homes," he said, "because they want wives. And they generally want wives because they don't want to be worried by the sex-feeling any more. They don't want women left to their own imagination any more. They want the thing over and done with for ever and ever. Safety! Men are not adventurous...."
He turned to me sharply. "Look at you!" he said. "Have you done anything? Since I have known you, you have done nothing but write self-conscious essays which "The New Age" tolerates; you have played about with life as you have with literature, as though it were all a question of commas and semi-colons.... You have tried to idealise love-affairs into a pretty phrase, and in your spare time you lie on that divan and look up at the ceiling and dream of the luxurious vices of Heliogabalus.... You are horribly lazy, not adventurous at all. What's it matter if your cuffs get dirty as long as your hands get hold of something?"