The London Venture

by Michael Arlen

"But you would have adored my old man, Dikran, just as I did. He treated life, and men, and women with all that etiquette which you so admire, he was simply bristling with etiquette—a deal too much of it for my taste, for I was only seventeen then and liked my freedom like any other Englander.... But I'm finding it very difficult to describe the man he was, my dear, for in our slovenly sort of English we've got used to describing a person by saying he is like another person, and I can't do that in this case because he belongs as much to a past age as Hannibal, and there isn't any one like him now. And even when he was alive there were very few—two or three old men as fierce and unyielding and vital as himself, who used to come and dine, and say pretty things to little me who sat at the end of the table with very large eyes and fast-beating heart, wondering why they weren't all leading Cabinets and squashing revolutions, for they seemed to know the secrets of every secret cabal and camarilla in Europe.

"Yes, my old guardian was a remnant of an empire—but what a remnant! Such a fierce-looking little man he was, with pale, steel-blue eyes which pierced into you from under a precipice of a forehead, a bristling Second Empire moustache, and thin bloodless lips which parted before the most exquisite French I've ever heard; I can scarcely bear it when you say I talk French divinely, for I know how pitiful mine is compared to the real thing, as done by that old man and Sarah Bernhardt, for they were very old friends and she used often to come and lunch with us.

"He talked well, too, and all the better for having something to say, as well he might have since he had been everything and known every one worth knowing of his time—ministers, and rebels, and artists, and all the best-known prostitutes of the day; but they did those things better then, Dikran. In fact, more as an excuse for getting away from a parvenu Paris than from any Bonapartist feelings, for he was always an Orleanist, I think he had represented Louis Napoleon at every city which could run to an Embassy from London to Pekin; from where he brought back that ivory Buddha which is on my writing-table, and which has an inscription in ancient Chinese saying that every man is his own god, but that Buddha is every man's God, which goes a long way to prove that the wisdom of the East wasn't as wise as all that, after all.

"But you are getting restless," she said suddenly. "You probably want to open the tea-basket to see what's inside, or you've just seen a water rat——"

"No, it's a little more subtle than that, Shelmerdene, although as a fact I do see a water rat not a yard from you on the bank.... I merely wanted to know how it was that, since you had a perfectly good father alive in England, you were allowed to go gadding about in France with a guardian, soi-disant——"

"We will ignore your soi-disant, young man. But I'll allow your interruption, for it may seem a bit complicated.... It was like this: as the fortunes of our family had run rather to seed through generations of fast women and slow horses, my father who was utterly a pet, succumbed to politics for an honest living, or, if you pull a face like that about it, for a dishonest living. For up to that time, in spite of having exactly the figure for it, he had always refused to enter Parliament, because his idea was that the House was just a club, and one already belonged to so many better clubs. But once there nothing could stop him, and when he entered for the Cabinet stakes he simply romped home with a soft job and a fat income.... But all that is really beside the point, for between politics and guineas father and I had had a slight disagreement about a certain young man whom I was inclined to marry offhand, being only sixteen, you know, and liking the young man—and, of course, my father did the correct thing, as he always did, gave the young man a glass of port and told him not to be an ass, and shipped me off to Paris to his very old friend. You see, he knew about that old Marquis, and how I'd be quite safe in his care, for any young man who as much as looked at me would have a pair of gimlet eyes asking him who the devil he might be and why he chose to desecrate a young lady's virginal beauty by his so fatuous gaze.

"I've been saying a lot of nice things about that old man to you, but I didn't feel quite like that about him at the time. I liked him, of course, because he was a man; but all that French business about the sanctity of a young maid's innocence got badly on my nerves, for innocence was never my long suit even from childhood, having ears to hear and eyes to see; and I soon began to get very bored with life as my old Frenchman saw it. So it wasn't surprising that I broke out now and again just to shock him, he was so rigid, but I was always sorry for it afterwards because he just looked at me and said not a word for a minute or so, and then went on talking as though I hadn't hurt him—but I had, Dikran! I had hurt him so much that for the rest of the day he often couldn't bear to see me.... But though I was ashamed of myself for hurting him, I couldn't stop; life with him was interesting enough in a way, of course, but it left out so much, you see; it entirely left out the stupendous fact that I was almost a woman, and a very feminine one at that, who liked an odd young man about now and again just to play about with. But I wasn't allowed any young men, except a twenty-five-year-old over-manicured Vicomte who was so unbearably worldly and useless that I wanted to hit him on the head with my guardian's sword-stick, which he always carried about with him, as a sort of mental solace, I think. No, there weren't any young men, nor any restaurants, for the old man simply ignored them; my dear, there wasn't anything at all in my young life except a few old dukes and dowagers, and the aforesaid young Vicomte, who had manicured himself out of existence and was considered harmless. And so Paris was a dead city to me who lived in the heart of it, and all the more dead for the faded old people who moved about in my life, and tried to change my heart into a Louis-Quinze drawing-room hung with just enough beautiful and musty tapestries to keep out the bourgeois sunshine and carelessness, which I so longed for.

"So I had to amuse myself somehow.... I was a bad young woman then, as I am a bad woman now, Dikran; for I've always had a particular sort of vanity which, though it doesn't show on the surface like most silly women's, is deep down in me and has never left me alone; a sort of vanity which makes itself felt in me only in the off-seasons when no one happens to be in love with me and I in love with no one, and tells me that I must be dull and unattractive, utterly insignificant and non-existent; it is a weakness in me, but much stronger than I am, for I've never resisted it, but been only too glad to fall in love again as soon as I could; and that is why I've never made a stand against my impressionableness, why I've never run away from or scotched a love-affair which I knew wouldn't last two weeks, however much I loved the wretched man at the time; it was so much the line of least resistance, it drowned that infernal whisper in me that I was of no account at all in the world. 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....

"At that time that wretched vanity of mine was only a faint whisper, but there it was, and it had to be satisfied, or else I should have become a good woman, which never did attract me very much. I simply had to amuse myself somehow—and so I formed la grande idée of my young life, just as Napoleon III had long ago formed his equally grande idée about Mexico and Maximilian, and with the same disastrous results. True, there was no young man about, but there was a man, anyway, and a Marquis to boot, even though he was a bit old and rigid. But it was exactly that rigidity of his which I wanted to see about; I wanted to find out things, and in my own way, don't you see? And so, deliberately and with all the malice in me, I set out to subdue the old man. Not childishly and gushingly, although I was so young, but with all the finesse of the eternal game, for clever women are born with rouge on their cheeks.

"But it was a disappointing business; I didn't seem to make the impression I wanted to make; all my finesse went for nothing, except as signs of the affection of a ward. Obviously, I thought hopelessly, I don't know all there is to be known about subduing old French marquises, and I had almost decided to try some other amusement when one May morning, a few months after my father had died and appointed him as my guardian and executor, he came into my little boudoir, looking more stern and adorable than ever. And as he came in I knew somehow that big things were coming into my little life; I don't know how, but I knew it as surely as I knew that for all his grand air of calmness he was as shy as any schoolboy.